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https://youtu.be/eb3pmifEZ44

I almost creaking it's seven o'clock in the morning and Elon Musk anxiously waits for his golden payoff his prize for paying his dues in the valley I expect to receive a call that I've just bought which is called McLaren upon its a million dollars record it's it's a it's decadent there are 62 McLaren's in the world and I will learn wonderful back in 95 they weren't very many people on the internet and suddenly nobody was making any money at all most people thought the internet was gonna be a fad not this South African entrepreneur musk sold his first computer program at the age of 12 and he hasn't stopped selling since Wow company it's actually here that's pretty wild man just three years ago I was showering in that the Y and sleeping on the office floor and now Oh see I've got a million our car and quite a few creature comforts it's just some moments in my life okay my values may have changed but I'm not consciously aware of my values having changed my fear is that we become spoiled brats that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective a year ago musk sold his software company zip to which enabled newspapers to publish online for 400 million dollars cash receiving cash is cash I mean those are just a large number of Ben Franklin's it's the perfect car for Silicon Valley it really is there is Jonah in the fastest car in the world I could go and buy one the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my your personal fiefdom how much more interested in trying to build and create a new company so this is an ATM what we're gonna do is transform the traditional banking industry I do not fit the picture of a banker economist is Jimmy raising 50 million dollars is a matter of making a series of phone calls and the money is there I've sunk the great majority of my net worth in draxe.com which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the internet that I've started yes exactly excellent home I think XCOM could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza because if you look at the industry that X is pursuing it's the biggest sector of the world economy is that I McLaren f1 yes oh my god that's a light series of poker games and now I've gone on to a more high stakes game and just carry those chips with me and I haven't gone and taken my winnings with spinnerbait right but I've really put almost all of it back into the new game no I'd say the real payoff is the sense of satisfaction having created the company that I sold yes yes yes for the cards but the car sure the cars sure especially honest I'm sure is gonna make the car we talked any these people who have hit the jackpot early they don't even have a conceptualization of about the money it's funny money it's something you need to think about the amazing thing is it almost none of them quit even when they could it's not a vesting thing it's not that there's some secret clause in there that keeps them from doing it they want to do what they're doing they think that to stop doing that is death I'd like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone that'll be cool

https://youtu.be/afZTrfvB2AQ

I'll try to make this as interesting as possible if you like space you'll like this talk so my background in brief I'll talk a little bit about zip - and us and PayPal and then mostly about space and what we're doing in space so I originally came out to California to do energy physics at Stanford actually and ended up putting in US is in 95 and ended up putting that on a hold to start a zip - and so - I'll tell you a little bit about the full process of exactly what happened there in 95 but it wasn't at all clear that the internet was gonna be a big commercial thing in fact most of the venture capitalists that I told you hadn't even heard of the internet which sounds bizarre up on Sand Hill Road so but but I wanted to do something and if in the end I thought it would be a pretty huge thing and I thought it's one of those things that only came along once in a very long while so I got a deferment at Stanford and and thought I'd give it a couple quarters and if it didn't work out which I thought it probably wouldn't then I'd come back to school and actually might talk to my professor and I told him this he said well I don't think you'll be coming back and that was the last conversation I'm having but they weren't a lot of waste and the only way to get involved the Internet in 95 that I could think of was to start a company because they weren't a lot of companies to go and work for apart from Netscape that maybe you've one or two others so and then have any money so I thought well we've got to make something that's going to return it's going to return money at very very quickly so we thought well that the media industry would need help converting its content from from a print media to electronic and they clearly had money so if we could find a way to help them move their media to the Internet that would be an obvious way of generating revenue there was no advertising revenue on the at the time so and that that was really the basis of zip two and four we ended up building quite a bit of software for for the media industry primarily the print media industry so we had as investors and customers Hearst Corporation my tritter but most of the major US foreign publishers we built that up and then we had the opportunity to sell to compact in in early 99 and basically took that offer quiz for a little over three hundred million dollars in cash and that's that's a currency I highly recommend so so we had that and and but but I wanted to do something something more after was a - so host the sale in fact immediately post a sale I don't really take any time off I think of where where there were the opportunities in this is early 99 where the opportunities remained in the internet and it seems to me that they hadn't been a lot of innovation in the financial services sector so and and when you think about it money as is low bandwidth you don't need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to to do interested to do things with it it's really just an entry in the database the the paper form of money is is really only a small percentage of all the money that that's out there so it should land itself to innovation on the internet and so we thought of a couple of different things we could do one one of the things was to combine all of somebody's financial services needs into one website so you could have banking brokerage insurance and all sorts of things in one place and that was actually quite a difficult problem to solve but we suite we could we sold most of the issues associated with that and then we had a little feature which took us about a day that was devoted to email money from one customer to another so you could type in an email address or actually any unique identifier and transfer funds or conceivably stocks or mutual funds or whatever from from one account holder to another and if you try to transfer money to somebody who didn't have an account in the system it would then forward an email to them saying hey why don't you sign up and open an account so and whenever we demonstrate these two sets of features which say well this this is a picture that took us a lot of effort to do and look how you can see your bank statement in your mutual funds and and insurance and all that it's all in one page and look how convenient that isn't people were definitely home and they would say and by the way we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds they go WOW so so we you're like okay so we focused the company's business on on email payments and the only game going companies called XCOM and then there was a there was another company called can finish which had actually also started out from it from a different area they started off with the Palm Pilot cryptography and then they had as a demo application the ability to beam token payments from one Palm Pilot to another by the infrared port and then they had a website which is called PayPal where you would reconcile the beamed payments and and what they found was that the the website portion was actually far more interesting to people than the Palm Pilot cryptography was so they started leading their business in that direction and then in basically early 2000 XCOM acquired con finiti and then about a year later we we ended up changing the company's name to PayPal and that's this kind of have the approximate evolution of the company and but PayPal was really a case of of where the whole viral marketing it's really a perfect case example of viral marketing like hotmail was where one one one customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you for all the for bringing and other customers so they would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network and so you had this exponential growth the more customers you had the faster it grew so you if there was like bacteria in a petri dish there just goes like does this S curve and in fact I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence and we launched after year one and by the end of year two we had a million customers so gives you an example you could just sense for how fast things grow in that scenario and we didn't have a Salesforce right we actually didn't have VP of Sales we didn't have a VP of Marketing and we didn't spend any money on advertising in about February of last year for those of you probably following it in February last year PayPal went public and we're I think we're the only internet company to go public in the first part of last year it went off reasonably well although I think we had more SEC rewrites than any company I can imagine like we set a record on SEC rewrites this was right around the Enron time and when there was also it's a corporate scandal so they put us through the wringer and then shortly thereafter in about June July we struck a deal with eBay to sell a company to eBay and over for about four and a half billion dollars but that was when eBay stock price was about 55 dollars and they hadn't split so I guess in today's dollars we've got three billion dollars that worked out pretty well it happened coincidentally that I in the first part of last year I've been doing just some background research on on space and let me talk a bit about that essentially what I was trying to figure out why we have not made more progress since since Apollo in nineteen in the 60s we went from basically nothing nothing I'll put anyone into space to putting people on the moon and developing all the technology from scratch to do that and yet in the 70s in the 80s and the 90s we've kind of gone sideways and we're currently in a situation where we can't even put a person into into low-earth orbit and that doesn't really gel with all of the other technology sectors out there the computer that you could have bought in the early 70s you know would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone and so just about every sector of technologies improve why is this not improved so I started looking into that initially I thought well perhaps it's a question of funding and that funding can be garnered by by really marshalling public support so the one way to get the public excited that space would be to do maybe a privately funded robotics paid mission to Mars and so we figured out a mission that would cost about 15 to 20 million dollars which isn't a lot of money but it's about a tenth of what a low-cost NASA mission would be and and the idea was was called Mars oasis where we put a small robotic Lander on the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated nutrient Jail they would hydrate upon landing and you'd have plants growing in a Martian radiation and gravity conditions and you'd also be maintaining essentially a life-support system on the surface of Mars and this would be interesting to the public because they tend to respond to precedents and superlatives and this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled and the first life on Mars so pretty significant and then when I start looking at launch vehicles that the lowest cost vehicle in u.s. is Boeing's Delta 2 which costs about 50 million dollars and and that's a but that's but steep what we were trying to do so I made three visits to to Moscow to Russia to look at buying a Russian launch and it's it's actually pretty interesting going to Moscow to negotiate for a refurbished ICBM if you know on the range of interesting experiences that's pretty pretty far out there but but we actually did get to to a deal but there were so many complications associated with the deal that it didn't I wasn't comfortable with the risk associated with it so when I got back from the third trip I thought well you know why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles because it's not like we we drive Russian cars fly Russian planes or have Russian kitchen appliances and you know when's lastly avoid something Russian that wasn't vodka so I think us is pretty competitive place and and we should be able to to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle so I put together a feasibility study which consisted of of engineers that have been involved with all major launch vehicle developments over the last three decades and we iterated over a number of Saturdays at the beginning of last year to figure out well what would be will be the smartest way to approach this problem of not just launch cost but also launch reliability and we came up with a default design and and that actually is a fortunate timing that feasibility study finished up right around the time that we agreed to sell PayPal to eBay so coincident with that sale I moved down to to LA where there's actually the biggest concentration of aerospace industry in the world it's actually the biggest industry in in Southern California much bigger than entertainment or anything else I was living in pop in Palo Alto for about nine years before that anyway so just took it a little broad broadly about space and where things are today obviously US government manned exploration is not in a great place we've got the three remaining shuttles are grounded it looks like first flight might only be a year from now if that and we've got a vehicle that is incredibly expensive and and really quite dangerous it's a you know for reasons mentioned there it's got a side mounted crew compartment so if there's an explosion that's basically instant death the you've got solid rocket boosters which once you ignite em you can't turn them off and there's something fundamentally dangerous about pre mixing your fuel and oxidizer I think and then it's you've got wink wings and control surfaces when you cut when you we enter you've got to maintain a precise angle of attack even a momentary variance and that can break the whole vehicle apart so and then of course it's got no escape system so if anything does go wrong you're toast and and that you've got a cost that is is really pretty hard to fathom the the the shuttle program when you add up all the pieces is about four billion a year and so you can divide a four billion by the number of flights and it'll tell you what the cost is and if there's say four flights a year which they haven't been for a while then you're talking about that billion dollars a flight the plans to meet at future obviously we've got to continue building the space station so we're going to keep flying the shuttle but but I think it's probably gonna be the minimum number of shuttle flights that we need to launch the long term plans out will it's we called orbital space plane a safe plane in quotes because one of the options is a capsule so should we call maybe overall space thing but the basic idea is to have something that's hopefully a little cheaper and a lot safer than the space shuttle so in particular it's going to have an escape system so if something does go wrong you can abort to safety the the downside is that it's still it while it might be a little cheaper it's still going to be pretty darn expensive fist the estimated cost per flight of orbital space plane is somewhere in the region of 300 to 400 million dollars flight and of that that amount 200 200 million dollars alone is goes to Boeing for the delta 4 heavy expandable booster and and the it's a 15 billion dollar development effort and expected to be completed in nine years now typically typically things have have not been under budget and under time so it's unlikely I think given historical precedent that that it will say within 15 billion dollars and the 2012 timeline and a bit about what's going to ask on it elsewhere in the world in Russia that this is really the Soyuz is our only access to space station it's considerably cheaper considerably safer the Soyuz has a very good track record its crew is top manner there has an escape system there are no wings or control surfaces to go wrong overall it's a pretty good system and the estimated costs are about 60 million dollars a flight which is order bank more than order bank to be less than than the Space Shuttle the thing that constrains them obviously is the weakness of the Russian economy it's very hard for them to embark on ambitious programs with an economy the size of Belgium so China is it's probably the most interesting thing that's that's going on in space the this month China is expected to be only the third cut is expected to launch their first person into space they'll make them only the third country ever to put someone in orbit and that they put a lot of money and effort into this program if anything serves as a spur for human space exploration it is likely to be the China's ambitions in space and and hopefully a sense in America that we want to at least keep up with with China and they have grand ambitions beyond just low-earth orbit they're planning on setting up a Space Station putting a base on laws and eventually sending humans to Mars so what's happening in the u.s. that I think might ultimately surpass all of that stuff is entrepreneurial space activities where things are led by the spirit of free enterprise and I think there's perhaps an analogy here we're just as DARPA served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the Internet in the beginning when it may be the case that NASA has has essentially done the same thing by spending the money developed some of the fundamental technologies in the beginning and then once we can bring so the commercial free enterprise sector into it then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we did that we saw in the Internet so there are several serious Lawrence McClay efforts underway talk about each one there's this burt rutan of Scaled Composites burt rutan is one of the world's foremost aircraft designers and he's developed a suborbital vehicle that they're actually flying out of Mojave and this is an X PRIZE class vehicle there's John Carmack who wrote a quake and doom probably one of the best software engineers in the world one of the best engineers that I know period and he's developing a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle Jeff Bezos who I understand was here last week is it's a huge space advocate and it's my understanding that he intends to spend something in order of a billion dollars over the next 20 years on space exploration and and then space then my company SpaceX and I think within the next several years these entrepreneurial efforts will actually be what drives space exploration so a little bit about each one that's a picture of the Burt Rutan effort it's called white knight is the carrier plane and then spaceship one is the thing that's held in the belly there and the this project is supposedly funded by Fall Allen so there's quite a lot of capital also should make that point quite a lot of capital that's entering this entrepreneurial space sector as well the only drawback I think of this architecture is that it's not really scalable for for something that would get to orbit this is pretty good for a suborbital but I think the architecture would need to change for an orbital vehicle and there's John Carmack 7 he's a little irreverent this is from his website his his vehicle is a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle he's made he's made really incredible progress somebody who has no background in aerospace engineering and is also kind of doing it all himself with him and like three buddies so and I think they will make something that works actually if you can check out their website on which all the aerospace it's pretty interesting stuff but in order to get to orbit this would require a substantial improvement in the mass efficiency in the engine efficiency and probably be a two-stage vehicle Jeff Bezos who sure almost everyone here is aware of he is a pretty huge fan of space in fact his high school valedictorian speech was about the necessity of humanity expanding to other planets so it's pretty important to him from what I understand this is our effort we're spending quite a bit more than the three prior entities that I mentioned in some cases probably an order of magnitude more because what we're doing is really an order of magnitude more difficult we're building an orbital launch vehicle at a two stage very high efficiency engines we're having a sufficiency launch vehicle and it's targeted to the satellite delivery markets so our approach is really to make this a solid sound business and so I've predicated that the strategic plan on a known market something that I we know for a fact exists which is the need to put small to medium sized satellites into orbit and and so that's what we're going after initially and then with that as a kind of a revenue base we will move into the human transportation market it's the long term answer the company are definitely human transportation I think this the smart strategy is to first go for cargo delivery essentially satellite delivery and our eventual a great path is twofold the successor to saturn v bull the super heavy lift vehicle that could you know be used for setting up a moon base or doing a Mars mission that would be the Holy Grail objective on the upper right there you can see a test firing of our engine and on the lower right you can see the alpha stage tank this is an engine test of our main engine which is called Merlin and that that generates about roughly 75,000 pounds of thrust at sea level this is our upper stage engine it's about it it's about 7,500 pounds of thrust in vacuum and this is the a accelerated version of our launch sequence our first launch will be from the SpaceX launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base and approximately March of next year basically early next year and we will be flying a navy satellite maybe communication satellite so it's it's notable because often launch vehicle companies are not able to get somebody they could get a paying customer on their first flight but we've we've been able to do that this is also the Falcon development at SpaceX is the fastest launch vehicle development in history including wartime so that's actually been a burger for space which is about two hours away from Santa Barbara common themes between zip2 and paypal well I guess both of them involved had had software at the as the heart of the technology even though zip to was in was servicing the media sector and also the PayPal was servicing the financial sector the the heart of it was really software and Internet related stuff so certainly that's a huge commonality they were both in Palo Alto where I lived I think we you know took a similar approach to building both companies which was to have a small group of very talented people and and keep it small you know I think PayPal had at at its high probably 30 engineers for a system that I would say is more sophisticated than the federal reserve clearing clearing system I'm pretty sure it is actually because the federal was the clearing system sucks so what else is there it generally you know I think the way both septa and PayPal operate was was really you there was your canonical Silicon Valley startup you know pretty flat a hierarchy you know everybody had a roughly similar cube and anyone could talk to anyone we had a philosophy of best idea wins as opposed to you know the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way it go and obviously you know everyone was was an equity stake holder was anything if there were two paths that you know let's say we had to choose through one thing or the other and then one wasn't obviously better than the other then rather than spend a lot of time trying to which one was slightly better we were just pick one and do it and sometimes we'd be wrong and and and we'd pick this South off a little path but up and it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on on a choice we didn't worry too much about intellectual property paperwork legal stuff we really were very focused on building the best product that we possibly could both up to PayPal with very product focused companies you know that's was incredibly obsessive about how do we build something that is really gonna be the you know the best possible customer experience and and that that that was a far more effective selling tool then and having a giant sales force or thinking of you know marketing gimmicks or there are 12 step processes or whatever I'm not super familiar with Friendster certainly I mean the essence of viral marketing is do you have something that one customer is going where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything and there are there lots of instances of that Princeton might be one obviously hotmail was one PayPal was born eBay was one and and in a situation like that going back to what I said about product product matters incredibly because if you're gonna recommend something to somebody if you've got to really love the product experience otherwise you're not gonna recommend it because you don't want to burn your friend hurdles in the space industry entering the space industry well you know it is a very complicated regulatory structure as you might imagine when somebody tries to build an open a launch vehicle which is not really all that distinguishable from an ICBM there's a lot of regulation and they probably should be because you know you don't want to launch something and end up hitting LA so probably the regulatory staff was very difficult the environmental approvals certainly proven very difficult much more so than we expected I mean here in Silicon Valley you look you know what I came to appreciate in Silicon Valley you live in a libertarian paradise there's almost no regulation and what can be very frustrating is that regulation is often irrational it doesn't make any sense but you've got somebody there who is simply executing a set of rules in a pair of where those rules make sense and you can try to convince them that rules don't make sense and they won't listen to you so probably regulation is the most annoying thing I would say overall though I'm very pleased because I think we've had a very smooth development process and on the whole I can't complain at all yeah why is it so expensive to send something into space well let me tell you what makes a rocket hard the the energy and the velocity required to get into orbit it is is so substantial that compared to say a car or even a plane the you have almost no margin to play with typically a launch vehicle will get about two percent of its liftoff mass to orbit so and that's the case for for Falcon and so if you can only get two percent of what you will rocket ways to begin with to two orbit you could all you if you're wrong by two percent you're gonna get anything to orbit you know come crashing down on the Pacific know it so that means all of your calculations have to be right if you miss if you must calculate something you get an answer wrong it blows up and it's very expensive trying to get all your answers right and then double-checking up there right and testing them all and doing as much as you can on the ground I think that's a lot of what makes rockets expensive the low launch rate typically is also what makes rocket Explorer it's expensive if you had you know thousands of flights a year then it would be a lot cheaper although it's a bit of a chicken and egg because it needs to be cheaper in order to have thousands of flights a year but at the end of the day when you in the final analysis I would say that Rockets really should be a lot cheaper than they are today and and I think the way they're both the way they're operated is just very inefficiently and I think with with SpaceX and Falcon we're gonna we're gonna show that that's that's the case our vehicle will sell for about six billion dollars a flight that our nearest competitor is the Pegasus from orbital sciences which is about twenty five million dollars flight and that has less capability than our rocket so Falcon we represent a pretty substantial breakthrough on the cost of access to space yeah the customer base with SpaceX is just dramatic ly different cups different PayPal PayPal is a consumer product where as SpaceX we're selling rockets and the number of people who want to buy rockets is quite small if anyone here has six billion dollars of once a rocket I mean I'd be glad to sell it to them but so it's much more of an individual selling process it there's a great deal more thought that goes into any purchase of a launch much more so than signing up for PayPal account which doesn't really cost you much so yeah and there's not a lot of viral marketing that's gonna happen with the rocket I suspect I'm hoping that you know my counting on it I think successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes shapes and flavors how much does anyone one particular thing for me you know some of the things I've described already I think are very important I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product it is very important so you know being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing and this context really really liking what you do whatever area that you get into given that you know even if you if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short you know I'd say if and also if you if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working I mean it'll just it's something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work I think SpaceX is about 30 people and and what we do internally at SpaceX is we do all of the design analysis integration of hardware testing and then launch operations but a lot of the heavy manpower stuff like welding together our primary structure the heavy machining and so forth that we outsource so we'd be a much larger company for that all of that internally and so you had up another party question oh yeah actually we don't have any lawyers the the regulatory stuff that we deal with is very technical it's it's really a lot like trying to get an aeroplane certified with the FAA we're just getting a rocket certified so so our documentation is it's very I wish we could offload it to some large they wouldn't know what they had to do so you know how did the Whorton degree help I think it a business degree teaches your a lot of the terminology it introduces you to concepts that you would otherwise you know this terminology is something to be said for that you're introduces you to concepts you would otherwise have to learn empirically I mean I think I think you can you can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business either in school or out of school school and you know in theory should help accelerate that process and I think it you know that often times it does it can be an efficient learning process perhaps more efficient than and empirically learning lessons but really I think you there are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school and there are those that have PhDs so I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know whether that is in school or imperfectly well I should point out that Falcon our first vehicle doesn't really have the same capability as either the Chinese the Russian or the Space Shuttle vehicles that I mentioned Falcon would be in the in the light class of launch vehicles whereas the space shuttle would be a heavy class launch vehicle so it's not it's not quite an apples to apples comparison however the the right comparison would be Falcon compared to the Pegasus from orbital sciences Falcon is six million the Pegasus is 25 million and the way we've gotten our prices low our cost low is we've really focused on every element of the launch vehicle there's really no one silver bullet that has been responsible for a substantial portion of the car savings it's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements and so we've done improvements in the propulsion system the structure the avionics and the launch operations as well as maintain a very low overhead organization and when you add up all the things we've done in those areas that allows us to produce a launch vehicle at six million dollars the as far as PayPal there were a lot of back office relationships that we needed to establish and too attached to various heterogeneous data sources we needed to attach to the credit card system for processing credit cards we needed to attach to the Federal Reserve System for doing electronic funds transfers we needed to attach the various fraud databases to run fraud checks that there was a lot that we had to with interface with and and that that took that took a while but it all came together I think roughly simultaneously I mean developing the software and having it ready full for the general public reasonably coincided with us being able to conclude those deals and interface with the outside vendors and all that took about a year I think one thing that's important is to try not to serialize dependencies so if you put as many elements in parallel as possible that a lot of things have a gestation period and there's really nothing you can do to accelerate I mean it is it's very hard to accelerate that just a gestation period so if you can sort of have all those things just aiding in parallel then that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline I think people tend to sterilize things too much we did do a few patents on paper on the PayPal system although nothing that ever actually mattered so our patents are mostly useful in a defensive situation rather than offensive it can be very difficult to actually prosecute a patent so I'm I think I think in certain industries like pharmaceuticals and so forth patents can be incredibly important in software particularly when you've got a very rapid life cycle where you know you made sure you got a patent but now it's we're done it so who cares it's less relevant in when you've got a rapid life cycle well I don't you know I've looked at the various there are a couple things that I think are pretty bogus one is space mining another is space solar power I mean if you if you calculate how much it costs to bring either the the photons from space full of power you know back to earth or the raw material back to earth it the economics don't make sense they just can't close the economic case not even buy it it's probably off by three orders of magnitude so I think the probably the biggest thing that can happen is if we if we decide to establish a base on the moon or base on Mars and particularly if we if we attempt to make a self-sustaining self-sustaining based self-sustaining civilization on on the Moon or Mars that that is enormous opportunity on probably the trillion dollar level because then you're basically into planetary commerce going on I think that that's pretty huge but but it's it's it's you know it's not going to be space or power it's not going to be space mining I think so let's see the government I'm here who knows maybe we're being spied upon I don't know but but certainly we are there are some restrictions which are really annoying such as that we're only allowed to employ people who have at least a green card or our citizen of the US we're not allowed employ anyone who is does not have permanent residency in the u.s. basically if I can't throw you in jail they wouldn't let you we'll work on rocket stuff and we have if we talk to any foreign nationals we need a technology transfer agreement or something like that from the State Department so our second launch is is actually a non-us government to launch and it's taken us six months to get the state upon approval just to engage in a contract discussion with them so that is problem we had several office actually from a number of different entities for for PayPal and in fact the closer we got to I PR the more more office we got but we always felt that those undervalued the company and subsequently when we were in public I think the public Moloch has kind of indicated the value of the company so I think that that's one of the good things about the public markets is that there are objective value of companies when you're a private company it's very hard to say how much you're worth because you have to basically think of some metric you know are you gonna go for multiple of future earnings are you gonna go of some something of revenue what are your comparables going to be there are all sorts of questions it's really up for debate what sort of value of your company is when you're public it's it's you know it's whatever the market says your your worth that's what you're worth so so yeah so I think a ebay made a number of office prior to going public that were substantially below our that the value of once made Post public and that kind of cleared up the disagreement and then we resolved and what else it was actually got a second part of the equation yeah eBay had a I think there was initially bill point and there was evade payment and and it was really a pretty tough long-running battle of PayPal vs vs eBay's payment system and it was certainly a very challenging I mean I think it was you know there were times where it felt like we're trying to win a land war in Asia and you know they kind of set the ground rules or trying to beat Microsoft in there or an operating system it's really really pretty hard that took a lot of our effort to to actually beat eBay on their own system and that one of the long-term risks certainly for the company was that eBay would one day prevail and one way to retire that risk obviously was to South eBay writing software during the summer of 95 trying to make useful things happen on the internet and I wrote something that allowed you to keep maps and directions on the internet and then something that allowed you to do online manipulation of content kind of a really advanced blogging system and and then we started talking to us to small newspapers and media companies and so forth and we started getting some interest I mean have fun be like what's the internet even in Silicon Valley but then occasionally somebody would bike and they would get a little bit of money from them and then there was basically only about six of us they were myself my brother who I convinced to come down from Canada and a friend of my mom's so and then and then three salespeople we hired on contingency by putting an ad in the newspaper but things were pretty tough and they're really going I didn't have any money in fact I had negative money a huge student debt so Oh in fact I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office so I rented an office instead because that was I was actually I got a cheaper office than I could get a get a place to stay and then we just slept on the futon and shower at the YMCA on pageboy and El Camino I was in the best shape I've been shower workout and you get to go and there wasn't there was an isp on the floor below us just a like little tiny isp and we drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable that gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month so I mean we had just an absurdly tiny burn rate and and we also had you know a really tiny revenue stream but we actually had more revenue than we had expenses so so when we went to talk to these C's we could actually well like I said it's there's no silver bullet that I can point to as to why the vehicle is a lot cheaper we've really focused on reducing the cost across the board I mean one thing our overhead in a 30 person company is you know in order magnitude less than it is in Lockheed or Boeing I just just for starters so even if we did everything the same and both the same launch vehicle we'd be conservative cheaper and then every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity and the reason for simplicity is because that both improves the reliability as well as reduces your cost if you've got fewer components that's for your components to go wrong and if your components turbine I think there's there's I think a fairly significant innovation in our air frame which is semi pressure stabilized monocoque with variable skin thickness and a common bulkhead you know what that means need a diagram to explain it'll but the net result is that it's very cheap and it's a very massive ficient and I think easy to test and quite reliable our avionics system would give you an example our avionics system we use an Ethernet on the vehicle to communicate they've made that may not sound like a great innovation but it is an orange vehicles all the other launch vehicles communicate from the vehicle by these serial cables that run the entire length of the vehicle and so you've got these these giant copper bundles because your arm running up and down the vehicle it makes it heavy it makes it expensive and there's so this these things like that which when you add them all up it makes a huge difference no that's that's a good question that's a good question no I would not I think SpaceX is not this is advanced auto engineering and it may also you know I can't tell you how many people have said that you know the fastest way to turn it the fast way to make a small portion in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one so you know hopefully that doesn't doesn't work out but I would definitely I think space is a tough one for first-time entrepreneurs you're better off starting with something that requires low capital and space is a high capital effort alright last question

https://youtu.be/ao5OdiwKp5k

- I think the government makes a good customer, but not a good venture capitalist. - Stay tuned for cnn.com. (typewriter bell ringing) - [Interviewer] When you dream about space businesses, what do you see as possible five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, as viable space businesses that it's hard for us to see 'cause they're not there? - You have the obvious existing business of satellites of one kind or another, which I think with an improvement in space transportation costs will enjoy an increase in the business, but modest. And then I think you've got space tourism or space adventure, whatever you want to call it. That, I think, is likely to be the biggest driver. And then long-term, I think you've got, assuming that we fulfill the president's vision and we establish a moon base and then go on and establish a Mars base, I think supplying those bases is a huge, huge business. - [Interviewer] How does what you're doing help NASA accomplish its goals? Because NASA wants to set bigger goals. - I think, fundamentally, the way we help NASA is by lowering the cost of access to space, allowing us to do more interesting things for a given budget. In fact, I think what we're doing is critical to the future of NASA. At the current prices that NASA pays for space transportation, I don't think we'll be able to achieve anything interesting in space. As far as business-- - [Interviewer] You would occasionally do a job for them. - Yeah, well I certainly-- - [Interviewer] But you're not going into business with them. Well actually, I view all of the government agencies with an interest in space as customers. So, I view NASA as a customer, certainly. The Air Force, Naval Research Lab, National Crisis Organization. Although, NASA certainly is somebody we would like to be a customer of ours. - [Interviewer] When you say space transportation, we think of transportation, we always think of moving people. You're thinking of moving people, moving satellites, moving cargo? - Well, we're starting off with transportation of satellites to orbit. Or cargo, you could call it cargo. We're starting off with unmanned transportation, and as we prove out the reliability, our intention is to move to human transportation as well. - [Interviewer] Where do you think we are in the life of our space exploration? - We're definitely in a lull, with respect to human space exploration on the government's side. However, what I think we're beginning to see is the dawn of a new era of space exploration. But one that is driven by commercial companies as much if not more than by government.

https://youtu.be/8vBqtKQx7jg

this is now the the third great meal we've had i want to thank the staff here at the sheridan national these just been great meals we've been having here with them several years ago i held i i chaired a couple of other conferences for another association with this this hotel and so when they they came up as the uh the winner of the sweepstakes to have this conference uh i was i was actually pleasantly surprised to see them come at the top of this list that knew that we would have we would have good meals here they just they just never cease to amaze me what they're able to produce and just the vista here i mean looking out i know that we've had the rain had the clouds last night hopefully these clouds will go away so that when we come back for dinner tonight or for lunch on saturday and sunday you'll be able to see the washington view that you just will not get any other location in the washington area it's just amazing the view that you get from this from this room here we want to go ahead into our our program here for lunch because we just have another outstanding speaker it just never stops the speakers that we have on our program here this weekend uh first of all though we have uh an individual who's who's uh coming here today to make a presentation of an award so at this time i'd like to call upon introduce to you an individual dr sam dinkin is the chief economist of optimal auctions a weekly communist at the space review and a space investor he was there at the start of the b2b internet explosion at ge in 1995. he's conducted research at gerne r d and at ibm research at lecg assisting qualcomm with bid strategy and rollout plans he had 100 patents approved for in one year at ibm research including a patent for all externally adjustable implants he gained his spectrum auction clients 200 million dollars he has claimed he has saved his uh electricity auction clients 2.3 billion dollars he is here to present the space journalism prize he sponsored which he can tell you all about [Applause] the space journalism prize is a one thousand dollar prize to the author with the best article promoting sp human space faring that appeared in print uh or on the web during 2004 and i'll do another one next year and on after that the criteria for the prize were impact originality quality of writing and research the entries were difficult for us to judge because they all had excellent quality of writing where all the entries could use a little work is impact in order to become a space-faring race people need to be taught what to hope for the space journalism prize and the space journalism association are about focusing on that duty of the race with that duty comes tremendous power the space journalists are the main influencers on public opinion about space the people are the bosses of congress and the president so journalists influence whether the space budget is 16 billion or 32 billion dollars space journalists influence whether companies succeed in their fundraising space journalists will help determine how the public proceeds perceives the first fatal crash of a private space vehicle will the dead be canonized as martyred heroes or duped victims space journalists have the power to set the human species on the road to becoming eternal next year the space journalism prize will be happy to accept sponsorship we will also be recruiting celebrity judges and including this year's winner the winner this year wrote an amazing series for the st louis post dispatch that included 50 interviews dramatic writing and dense coverage of the epic story of the x prize the prize was a wonderful way to spark the human imagination the story captured the courage hope and tenacity of the sponsors and the winners eli kentish well i'd just like to say that when i was um when i discussed this story with my editors in st louis they said oh no not the x prize not again guys wearing you know aluminum foil under their clothing and i found that it's not all guys wearing aluminum foil under their cone although there may be some of them here but actually i was not interested in space at all and i have to say talking to many of you actually in writing the story and working with you i really developed a true appreciation for people who are out there doing as opposed to just saying something about it so elon and pete diamandis and obviously bert rutan deserve the major credit but really all of you trying to make your dreams happen are a real inspiration for me and i hope to write about people like you for the rest of my career thanks [Music] so i just wanted to say thank you to clark lindsay and jeff baus for being the two judges on the prize in addition to me and thanks to george whitesides for letting me present thanks thank you all okay into the main part of our program to introduce our guest speaker for today i'd like to present to you one of the leaders of booz allen hamilton's aerospace and defense practice and a director of the national space society and a good friend eric fisher thanks bob good afternoon i'd like to add my personal welcome to everybody uh here in this room and not in this room was attending attending the isdc this year this is really an encouraging turnout and a wonderful turnout and i'm pleased and and hope you have all been enjoying the sessions to date and hope you i wish you a good next two or three days as well i'm sure they'll be tremendously exciting i have to admit that i feel a little extraneous introducing the speaker for lunch today because there can't be a person in this room who perhaps doesn't have a shrine to him or to him uh at his or her house these days um elon musk and it's it is my my honor and and pleasure to introduce our speaker today elon musk uh has insight and drive and experience that way outstrip his years after university of pennsylvania and wharton he went on to found what really probably were two of the most interesting and critical and successful internet and enterprise software related businesses uh that were ever founded paypal and zip2 he both founded them as well as random once he got tired with that he sold them off and turned his attention to space where he'd always had a strong interest and certainly in the last short few years elon has become if not the main symbol than one of the main symbols but in my mind probably the main symbol galvanizing and driving force for the entrepreneurial space industry so without further ado since you all know of him well i'd like to invite and welcome elon musk wow that was really kind all right so what i thought i'd do is is kind of look through a presentation on spacex some of you are probably aware of the details of what we're doing and some are probably less familiar so i'll go through it fairly quickly and then try to leave as much time as possible for any questions and you're welcome to ask me you know anything about the rocket or the business i think i can probably answer just about everything maybe a few confidential items um okay first time so basically spacex i started spacex because uh it seemed to me that we weren't making the kind of progress we really needed to make in the cost of access to space um and uh if we don't make cost i mean sort of this is i'm preaching to converted here normally the room is not quite as converted as this room is um but uh so i'm telling you things you already know but you know as long as it costs us hundreds of millions of dollars to put a few people in space not even you know far away space just three or four miles above the source of the earth uh we're never going to get anywhere we're not we're not going to become a space faring civilization i think probably i mean what i what i really think is is the overriding goal and what i suspect most people in the room think is is certainly a is a is an extremely important goal is becoming a space bearing civilization ultimately uh becoming a multi-planetary species um and if we're not on that on that path then we really need to get on that path so given that the fundamental obstacle to that is really the cost of getting there they weren't making progress in that direction that's really why i started spacex and before actually formally starting the company i put together a group of engineers that have been involved with most the major rock developments in the u.s and had some familiarity with the way the russians did it and in fact the current nasa administrator mike griffin was on that feasibility study group so i'm very glad to see he's the new administrator um and we thought we sort of sat around over a series of saturdays in early 2002 and try to figure out is there anything fundamental because i don't really know anything about rockets at that time is there some sort of really difficult physical thing that that makes it fundamentally as expensive as it is and you can't make improvements and um it quickly became obvious that there really isn't anything fundamental that prevents uh chemical rockets from being much cheaper than they are right now um you know giving example um the the propellant cost of the falcon one what it costs to fill the the gas tank essentially is about thirty thousand dollars on and that's on a six and a half million dollar launch initially we want to keep driving that that launch cost down um but you know in airlines that is a dominating factor often the predominant factor in in cost whereas for for rockets it's it's an accounting error um and we need to get to the point where that actually makes or it's not an accounting error and actually unless you have really bad accounting um and you know it's it's actually where propellant cost actually matters um so anyway so the way i usually describe it to people is that the goal is to be kind of like the southwest airlines of this space business when southwest airlines came in airfares were really expensive and and southwest came in affairs they were often you know 15 20 of what he say united or delta was was charging and people at the time said well this this is really impossible they must be compromising reliability or um there must be something messing with this picture they won't be able to sustain those prices uh they've got a business and you know the fact the matter is southwest airlines today is the most profitable airline in the industry has a market cap greater than the sum of all of all of its competitors um and it still offers those prices and and reliability is good on-time performance is good so you know they went and they really rethought the whole space business uh every ass open that's right the whole airline business and and so with that sort of you know a good kind of model to think of what we're trying to do is rethink the business of space transportation now we have i think we've got actually a greater ability to improve in our case because we're actually driving the fundamentals of the technology whereas uh southwest airlines can only improve on the service and have to work with an existing technology base of this you know the 737 um but anyway that's the basic idea and i believe in setting objective benchmarks so because if you can't measure it it's very difficult to figure out if you're improving um and so the benchmark objective is a factor of ten and to put an actual number on that it's less than five hundred dollars a pound to to orbit is is the goal i think we can actually get there before the end of this decade so um it's structured like a silicon valley technology company because that's how i know how to structure companies uh work work well the first two times so hopefully third time as well um and uh you know a few common things there's very flat hierarchy it's you know we're sold in fairly densely packed cubes we have a fairly small engineering team but they're really really the top engineers in their field and uh we have what i call it a high signal to noise ratio where signal is engineering and management is noise and i think there's a lot of big aerospace companies have a very bad signal noise ratio so um and then the the big driver in terms of both reliability and cost improvements is simplicity so that's really our manager at spacex if we can figure out a simpler easier way to do something uh we'll do it we're gonna care about whether it's new technology old technology you know doesn't matter we just want to get the job done um our headquarters are in el segundo which is about a mile south of lax and we have about 75 000 square feet of uh engineering and manufacturing space we actually build manufactured the rocket right there in la which sounds kind of weird to build a rock in l.a but we do and then we do our propulsion and structural testing in texas we have a 300 acre propulsion test facility out there and i'll show you some pictures of that later in the presentation some of the slides brother i'm going to go through pretty quickly thanksgiving uh so we made pretty good progress uh our third birthday will be next month in june and so approximately three years we've designed the entire rocket from scratch gone through design design built and tested the entire rocket both stages the fairing uh two new engines including a pump bed engine and our engine is actually going to be only the second american orbital booster engine developed in the past 25 years the other one being boeing's delta engine and before that the shuttle the space shuttle main engine okay um we've managed to get a few launch contracts um uh two uh with the dod and one with the malaysian space agency and one with a u.s commercial entity which is bigelow airspace and the last one being the falcon 5 launch with bigger airspace being a subscale launch of his space station so that should be doubly cool and then we also you may have seen the announcement that we were awarded a 100 million dollar air force idiq contract uh which hopefully will be used to the fullest extent um and i would expect sort of one to two launches a year uh starting next year on that contract uh i don't know if you saw the the last if you head back one slide sort of the contrast is that just looks black to me but essentially that prior slide was the facility when we moved in this is it one year later we're assembling a prototype on the floor and next slide and then when you're after that uh the coil vehicle is on the launch pad and the flight vehicle is actually currently on the launch pad and uh we expect to do a a hot fire on the pad uh tomorrow so uh because delta iv finally finally odell ii finally launched this morning to 5 a.m or whenever it was and uh so we're cleared to do the the pad hot fire and then the actual launch should take place as soon as the titan 4 defies vandenberg which is uh in approximately the august time frame or july always time right let's see if this works um if it's not showing up then the video is not going to play anyway it's just a launch simulation video if you want to see that video you can actually just go to our website spacex.com and the videos that video along with a number of other video segments is available we post things regularly there uh i'll skip over this sort of reliability stuff um we think it's very important but it's very important but uh not really trying to sell anyone here at launch i think but basically uh yeah simplicity is the key to both um there's uh you know on the cost side there are several key technical innovations and propulsion system structures avionics guidance control launch processes and we're a fairly vertically integrated business we actually literally machine the metal then the metal weld all that sort of stuff in-house because what i've discovered is that the aerospace supply chain is is so bad that as soon as you as soon as you subcontract any significant portion of that work to somebody it becomes very expensive so we've generally found it's more efficient to be vertically integrated than outsourced and uh so falcon 1 uh capability is uh just over a thousand like 1500 pounds to low earth orbit um the falcon 5 capabilities about six tons actually we'll get to that later it's uh the optimization in the case of falcon 1 was really in terms of a cost per flight to orbit so it wasn't a cost per unit mass optimization it was what is the smallest useful vehicle that we can build and deliver satellites on and we concluded that was yet to be at least sort of a thousand pounds to leo and uh we ended up exceeding that uh going to about 1500 pounds um total cost per launch is about six and a half million dollars all in both stages lux kerosene uh what one note where the element actually next slide is the first stage is intend to be reusable it comes back by a parachute to a water landing the pricing does not include any assumptions for usability um i'm actually fairly confident that reusability will work provided the parachute opens i mean i think if the parachute opens and i i i don't think the sea water is going to hurt the rocket um if you see what it goes through on on the test stand and on the launch pad uh where it gets deluged with water high pressure water and you know in a test stand in texas i mean we've had sleet snow rain that's hitting you sideways at 35 miles an hour extremely high winds so i i don't i think if it's uh provided we get get it back i think it'll actually be require very little refurbishment in order to launch a game uh the first stage engine which we call merlin is most of the approximate specifications of it a lot of this is on the website but basically it's a roughly seventy five thousand pound thrust sea level engine and of of modest performance i mean one of the things that we haven't tried to do is try to achieve the highest possible performance our goal has been to create something which is a reliable truck essentially rather than a ferrari so we haven't produced for instance a you know stage combustion super high isp engine this is you need to be pretty good but to get to orbit at all but you don't have to be you don't really have to push the envelope any further than we pushed it here looks like our upper stage engine also locks kerosene and similar in architecture to the first stage engine except that it doesn't have a turbo pump and it's a low pressure engine so falcon 5 which is the falcon 1 development has really um been winding down now for the past several months and essentially it's almost complete at this point so the development focus for about the past year has been more on the falcon 5 which is our medium lift vehicle the falcon 5 is approximately in the class of a delta ii heavy um it's also intended to at least from our standpoint be safe enough to carry people um it has engine out capability so you can lose any one of the main engines and still make it to orbit i think that's actually a very important principle given that airline transportation almost all airliners have multiple engines so if you lose an engine or you don't go down and jet turbines are far more reliable than rocket engines so if that principle makes sense for jet turbines it really makes sense for rocket engines and we expect to be able to accommodate up to five meter fairing as well so it'll have really put some pretty big stuff up there and uh here's some pictures of our test site that's a the our propulsion test type at night next one uh that's our main structural test and falcon one so we actually have a a large steel brace which surrounds the vehicle and the vehicle is hydraulically bent and crushed at various points to simulate flight loads that's a horizontal test stand that's a picture of a merlin engine at full thrust that's our small vertical test stand where we test the upper stage engine and that black pipe there is a diffuser which helps simulate vacuum conditions it's a vertical test stand two which is another picture of merlin in the vertical configuration and that's our really big test and that's capable of testing basically thrust levels up to about 3 million pounds so that that test end runs about 100 feet into the air 70 feet underground and we hope to use that to its fullest capacity and maybe beyond so that'll be exciting and the r in it stands for rocket so is there uh so any questions i can answer oh um you know that's a good question um i think the what what is the throw weight of falcon 5 to mars um well it depends on which trajectory i mean the zero three the zero c3 number as i recall is about uh 1200 1200 kilograms something like that uh yeah it's like about a ton a little over a ton i mean basically it's about as capable as the delta ii heavy is that since the mars exploration rove is there so anything that delta ii could throw to mars uh falcon fight for 30 miles um could you know couldn't really certain people if they were alive um i need something much bigger than that but you could certainly do robotic missions sure we don't like to disclose too much ahead of time because well frankly we'd like to it's more a question of sounding credible anything else because uh we'd like to get some things accomplished before we claim we're going to do other things but the plan is to do a vehicle which is in the class of delta iv uh after falcon 5 and you could you could apply sort of a common booster core approach to that and you know encompassed the entire range of the the elv capabilities so up to about 60 000 pounds to orbit maybe a little beyond that um i i can say that we'll we'll be announcing something fairly significant later this year as far as much more of capability than than is currently represented but we'd like to i ideally i'd like to have falcon 1 launch before we make any big announcement in that direction but you can expect that from a strategy standpoint we're you know called the 7-eleven strategy you know we're going small medium large and extra-large um or big gulf water it's super big um so if alpha one's obviously small falcon 5's medium we'll have it a lodge at an extra large sure actually how much has the range impacted the ranges impacted your cost of development in your future business plan i think um range-related stuff is probably i mean all regulatory staff combined i'd say at most 25 percent of the cost i mean still it's 20 to 25 of the total cost associated with both development and launch um the ablative portion is actually really cheap i mean it's it's uh it costs less than one of our main valves on the engine um so i don't give away some really detailed proprietary numbers but i can say it's really de minimis i mean it costs us more to hire the tugboat to go out there than it does to replace the ablative can you um uh sure um and by the way you know we put out a i put i write a little update every three or four months i've been waiting to get the hot fire done before doing the next update um the the hot fire that we're planning to do which hopefully will take place tomorrow um it was originally supposed to take place on may 3rd and then we had an igniter sensor failure which we lost that day and then we have to go behind the delta ii and so it goes on anyway but it's supposed to happen tomorrow around around one o'clock um pacific time and it's going to be a complete launch simulation including about five seconds of flame on the ground five seconds feels like a long time if you're there by the way then as far as the actual launch date we think we'll be ready to go as soon as uh the titan iv departs which is currently scheduled to be around mid july so and and that's there's a contingency there both on the on the titanfall rocket as well as the payload which is a classified payload um and so we only have limited visibility into that because they won't they won't give you specifics when there's classified stuff involved um but uh we expect assuming that they launch in mid-july we expect the range would give us um a launch because the lane the range has to assign a launch day to us we assume the range would assign a launch day that is within within two or three weeks of the titanfall departure so therefore titanfall left you know i'd say basically august would be a good bet and then as far as kwajalein that's actually going uh very well we have our own little island there called amalek um and uh it's um the concrete is all you know i think the last bit of concrete is getting poured next week so all the concrete for the pads and the propellant storage and the vehicle hanger and all that sort of stuff is almost all done uh we expect to have that launch site active and ready to do something with uh in the in the late august time frame so if time four gets significantly delayed uh then we'll go out of kwajalein and we expect to actually have two rockets one at one at vandenberg one and kwajalein possibly on the pad at the same time my question to you is i presume you are reaching out to a lot of suppliers who are really not part of the space industry what kind of reaction do you get from the holders of these businesses uh that's a good actually we try not to tell anyone outside of space business that's for a rocket because they assume rockets are made of magic so so you know if you tell them for a rocket they go like well you know i don't think i'm quite good enough to do something for a rocket they're like i'll be fine so we generally uh i mean there are some uh suppliers that are airspace suppliers that do do a good job i'd say like uh maratha valves does a good job for example um spin craft does a good job of spinning domes you know there's there's a few i started always sort of paint old aerospace supplies with with the same negative brush i think there are definitely some good ones out there but generally we find as a principle that regular industrial suppliers if you want something cheap fast and it's probably going to work then you should use a regular commercial supplier if you want something that's expensive takes a long time it might work use the aerospace supplier just to follow on his question are there any test facilities in nasa like wind tunnels or rock test stands that you anticipate needing for your future work uh so on there are there any nasa test facilities that we anticipate needing for our work um it's possible uh you know when we get to the really big propulsion stuff that we want to use some of the nasa test facilities you know as general rule you know we don't want to be the ones begging to use facilities so if if if if we're going to use nash facility then that that nasa facility has to behave like we're the customer if they don't have like we're the customer we're not going to we're not going to work work there um and uh you know if we have to sort of justify why we want to work there we're definitely not going to work there um so uh you know i think just for pace of execution reasons um because there's also a lot of paperwork involved using nasa facilities uh we've chosen to use our own facilities um but i think like i said for big stuff or where you know where that's you know it's like one-of-a-kind sort of test facilities uh that's uh that's probably where it makes sense to work work with nasa as far as using test facilities uh sure it's actually on the website uh it's uh basically it's about 50 15.8 million plus about a million in range related fees so you can say 17 all in and that's for a delta ii heavy class vehicle a little more than that yeah about 13 000 pounds so it's a little more capability than adult two heading uh no i mean we've signed falcon 5 to be it's actually consistent with the nasa man standards for uh uh you know as far as safety margins and all that are concerned actually exceeds them most cases um and i think the fact that it's this engine out redundancy is uh you know is good as well um the g loading is certainly uh fine it's you know maxes out at five g's approximately um so uh yeah i don't think there's any any issue with putting people on it elon on behalf of the conference in the national space site we really want to thank you for your talk and being here with us today and accept this memento on our on our behalf thank you very much you

https://youtu.be/U3Y32ADCjLo

Chris okay so this is the space every year we have the panel and every year it all gets a bit less science fiction and a bit more so I'm very pleased that of the representatives of the new space industry the two we have here Elon Musk and Chris Farrell Mehta have actually done things they've actually flown things they've actually built things and there's a lot of talk in the new space sector and here's the people who've actually delivered things Lidl and actually has to get away because he has to talk to NASA at 28 minutes past the hour so we've got to start with you on and so I've got many of you familiar with there with Elon Musk and with space adventures so with SpaceX but if perhaps you could give us the the elevator pitch just to bring people who aren't familiar with with where you're coming from up to speed certainly so hey we have some videos as well if if you're already placed from the videos that might be a good way to start all the SpaceX videos right well while we're waiting for the video I will describe SpaceX so anyway since we last saw you you've flown a rocket yes yes so here in fact okay so we're gonna see that this is a video from our island we launched from a small island in the in the middle of the Pacific it's the closer still I switch to the next video that's the Falcon 1 rocket you see that so far so good yeah and the next clip rocket business desert is a tough well no new world no new designs yeah Space Shuttle Space Shuttle arguably Falcon one is airborne at this time so that video is taken from a nearby island this is the onboard video camera we're about to cycle which goes a little bit which is the round trip actually so this camera is on the second stage of the rocket looking down a wanted to skip portal a few seconds that's the water deluge system some insulating flume still clinging to the rocket okay so we can see there's a bit of a problem there actually no you can't that's not really the nature of the problem the poem occurred right here the entrance shut down all right right so so SpaceX SpaceX I found it approximately four years ago with the goal of revolutionising access to space the it's a simple three-step plan which is both launch vehicles to put satellites into low-earth orbit then step two is build a launch vehicle and spacecraft to provide humans to orbit services to the government and to private sector and then step three would be to provide humans to another planet services to the private sector and in the government we started with a small launch vehicle of Falcon one and the idea behind Falcon one is to be able to test out all the technologies at a relatively smaller scale and prove that out well before we put any people on board yeah the the Falcon 1 launch vehicle is a little over six million dollars alone chits the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any rocket in the world of any production rocket and the if you were close yeah if you want something with the domestic provider like orbital sciences the cost per equivalent rocket would be about 25 to 30 million there are lower cost rockets available from from Russia and Ukraine which are refurbished ICBMs but those are not really currently in production or taken off the shelf and and those much more competitive they're more in that 10 to 12 million dollar range but that's not a realistic price okay so when the rocket hit the hit a dead reef about 200 feet away from the launch pad the satellite planted like a cannibal it flew about 500 feet and landed back on the island went through the roof of the machine shop split a two by six wooden beam and landed on the floor more or less intact well this was a pretty robust satellite and it actually landed about 50 feet away from a shipping container and so I think it was trying to get home one way or another but you know at least we can say we never lost a satellite okay so when are you going to fly the Falcon one again yeah the next digital flight is September October and what the information about the first flight is it was fundamentally a demo or beta flight it was not about the satellite the satellite was there as an afterthought it was a student built satellite and our customer our beta customer which is DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency what they paid for was a response from this launch demonstration and in fact they've bought another launch demonstration which is in September October time frame and then we've got launches scheduled every two to three months thereafter now I see from your website that you have a Falcon 9 which is the big rocket yeah it's either end of next year or possibly early 2008 the Falcon 9 unlike the Falcon 1 is a man rated vehicle it's designed with higher factors of safety and it's much bigger it's much bigger yes it's 25 tons a little bit kind of stuff it's up to up to 25 tons to over yes in fact we have another version on the drawing board that's not on the website that's capable of putting 50 tons to orbit and that vehicle would be capable of if you did two launches of doing moon missions or Mars missions man muslem not quite it's about the the heavier version will be about a third the scale of a Saturn 5 but it's warmer it's more efficient right so its capabilities proportionate to its size or better well the other big thing that's changed since last year aside from the fact that you've flown something is the well I wonder I want to hear from you how important you think it is that NASA has has put up this contract called cots which does not stand for commercial off-the-shelf but kind of does yeah so what is it actually stand for commercial that's commercial orbital transportation services basically they're saying here's half a billion dollars could somebody build us something it can get to the space station please and bright and they've now got six companies and you're on the short list of six provide that service they're gonna make the decision in August you're going to speak to them in about 13 minutes about this do you think that's a big shift is that kind of Lancer saying okay there is something to this new space business after all yeah it's a huge shift NASA essentially has put forward a as you say a half billion dollar program for a replacement to the Space Shuttle is what it amounts to so SpaceX is in the shortlist to build the replacements the Space Shuttle I think we're the lead candidate this would be a falcon 9 based yes would essentially be doing what the Soyuz is doing now exactly in fact the Falcon 9 in its smallest version is a Soyuz class launch vehicle right and I suppose the question for those of you in this business is historically NASA and the incumbent builders of stuff have been the bad guys and you were sort of all never I doubt then we'll go to Mars on our own and all this kind of stuff and now here they are saying well actually we'd like to buy some services from you and I mean is there but there is a big change that was a philosophical change for you as well but collaborate with them or do you do you not care who buys your Rockets sort of someone does I'm agnostic okay I you know we don't make value judgments about our customers they can put a wheel of cheese and spin that money's as good as anyone elses is the point absolutely if they were if they weren't if somebody cuts us they want to put a wheel of cheese in space we'll do that okay we've just had this conference earlier in the month the you know where all the new space guys get together in LA and what was the mood like that was it a big change from last year as this is this changed the landscape I wasn't at the conference last year but I can see the the mood was buoyant I think there's there's a there's a lot of new investment coming into the space sector you have guys like obviously Jeff Bezos Paul Allen John Carmack who did you know doom and quake and it's all these dot-com guys who are using the money well technology guys really yeah so you've made your money in technology and now this isn't you the new frontier okay well I'd like to I'd like to talk to Krista then maybe we can have a bit of discussion about something so so Chris you're a couple of centuries and you are the go-to guy if you actually want to go into space now and you've got your 20 million dollars is that the price yes yeah so you've sent three people to the space station already correct and you've got a queue of others coming three and you also do vomit comet flights that you and that well we don't like to call it that okay sorry we only the reason they called the vomit Konica is they do about sixty parabolas right so they start for the party you start feeling sick after about 15 and that's okay that's enough for me and you also do make flights to the edge of space and now you're starting to get into the business of actually well you're not building any spacecraft are you but you have a outsource or a space probe and you have you have a Russian firm that designed the Buran Russian shuttle all the people who did that tell us about that because you actually have it we use it we're using the Missy Missy Chev design bureau which designed the airframe for the boron program but really we're using the whole Russian space program because well there's a whole cadre of subcontractors that will be involved so this vehicle the Explorer am what right what sort of thing will it let you do well it's a suborbital vehicle it'll go up above 100 kilometres 62 miles and it's reusable its reusable rocket plane carried by it's very similar to spaceship one and I should add that we had that design before birds right but ours is on top Burt's is a drop when do you hope to be able to actually 2008/2009 so basically in the next three to five years we're going to see competition not we're not just going to see the first four sub or I mean we have we have an operational orbital program right now and that's that's what I work on and we're actually developing a circumlunar program where we're taking we use the Soyuz spacecraft to go to the International Space Station and and I actually have a clip oh you've got a clip as well in this scenario but the idea is that the Soyuz few people know that the Soyuz was originally built to go to the moon and this is sort of a thing that was forgotten and we came up with the idea of the circumlunar mission because you know in the unlikely event that the space station isn't available we could still use the Soyuz to go somewhere and so we we began development on this circumlunar mission and we have just a how would that work because there are already flights going backwards and forwards to the space do that I mean the point is that those flights are running already and they were like empty seats that you're putting people in in effect well for the space station okay so this is the this is a Soyuz FG launch vehicle this is a standard launch vehicle and operation right now I guess the beauty of this mission is that we're using a lot of existing technology and you know a nice thing about the Soyuz launcher is that it has a launch escape system so if anything goes wrong with a rocket you can get the crew off and they've actually had to use it on several occasions so that's this is a launch escape system just being jettisoned fairing and here's the Soyuz spacecraft it's solar powered sole battery-powered and so essentially it's it's deployed this is a modified vehicle there we would have to make some modifications to this vehicle in order for it to do the lunar mission we'd have to beef up the life-support system we'd have to thicken the heat shield on it so we'll be able to survive reentry coming back from the moon we come back faster we come back about 24,000 miles per hour so first phase of the mission would be to go to the space station you'd spend about 16 days there with the crew and then an upper stage another stage is launched on another launch vehicle and we could probably going to use a launcher called approach now this upper stage it's very interesting it was originally developed to carry manned crews to the moon and the Russians took that from their lunar program when they cancelled it and they used it they're now using it for commercial launches of communication satellites so that upper stage is is essentially put into the same orbit as the space station the crew undocked with their Soyuz and and then would rendezvous and dock with the upper stage which essentially would be trailing behind the the space station and I apologize for the sort of low-grade CGI here and the reason for that is that this is a mathematical model of the actual ballistics of the mission and the animation is kind of an afterthought we were just interested in in the orbital mechanics of this and so the Soyuz docks to the upper stage the upper stage fires and puts it into a highly elliptical orbit which would then orbit the the Soyuz spacecraft around the the illuminated far side of the moon and we would get within about 60 miles of the lunar surface and it's about two and a half days there and and then two and a half days back and another one of the beauties of this mission is that we don't have to bear the expense of man rating that big rocket to carry a crew on it it's launched unmanned and so we don't really have to do anything new to the rocket to make it safer the the rendezvous with the upper stage takes place in stick in space and so we save a lot of money there and this is uh this is a $200,000,000 with development and the test flight this is an unmanned test flight this is a 200 million dollar mission 100 million dollars a seat there's two seats available coming so the price tag is a hundred million dollars that for anyway come and see me after the sex works out everyone okay so that makes the twenty million to the UPD back this on the prize and you get you get the free holiday on the space station thrown in there that's right and so if anything happens to the upper stage let's say there the launch is delayed or there's a problem with the stage you still get to go the space station that's great Don's gonna have to go in a sec I just wanted to ask because I'm not going to get the chance to ask you right at the end but where do you see actually you have to win this this contract and hope to fly Rockets where do you see this where do you see your company in in three to five years time well I hope that we're the the primary mechanism of getting people to orbit in the world I think that's that's a realistic possibility so that's where we want to be in three to five years and frankly by 2020 I'd like to see us take somebody to another planet and do you feel that the space policy is in is sort of up for grabs at the moment I mean there seems to be no one seems to be very happy with the status quo everyone seems to think it's pretty stupid do you think there's a chance to completely start over and and to have private enterprises a big component why I think the only way that we're gonna become a multi-planet species is through private enterprise it's certainly not going to be through the government and not the government's are terrible at cost optimization and you know so you know I think really to the point at which becoming a multiplanetary species can happen I think you know point at which it becomes an exothermic reaction is if you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars which is I think the only realistic possibility to somewhere in the order of the cost of the you know the the price of median house in California now that's one analogy the yet other price is growing so I think you know that target is is getting easier to achieve every year it gets closer you just know my favorite example of this is if you look at the missions to Amtel Antarctica a hundred years ago the privately funded ones were much cheaper and lost far fewer people than the government-funded ones which tended to go wrong so there's a number of interesting analogies here but okay well that's that's great go back to you Chris what do you think about the the current state of play in the industry I mean obviously the NASA seems to be changing his position does that affect you or does that just mean you have problems well shall be what really affects us and this also affects you on is technology transfer of barriers the US government seems to think that it has this proprietary space technology and it doesn't want it to proliferate around the world while India has a very vibrant man not man but space program they're building satellites they own satellites a geostationary orbit China has a manned space program and a very vibrant communication satellite program and so this technology is pretty much already proliferated so it's it's a very frustrating that you know to a certain degree we have to be very careful that we don't transfer any technology to to the Russians and and really the only thing that they can learn from me is what not to do you know when we learn we learn all kinds of stuff about operations from them and it's been very beneficial and but for Elon it's it's it's a huge barrier and you know it's no I wouldn't say it's a huge barrier it's a pain in the butt yeah but it is I mean our technology is a high percent American so there's there's no technology issues there it's just that if we have a non-us customer it takes us six months to get a State Department permit to talk to them on annex and integrate their satellite you know and I think the the biggest single issue is that we can't hire people who do not have a green card or or not a US citizen so I couldn't have hired myself five years ago ridiculous so that's the biggest single regulatory problem you face I mean you have all these other you have to fight going on with well we have a we have a titanic struggle underway with Boeing and Lockheed about the right to use the spaceport of Vandenberg oh no that's that's minor what we're trying to unseat them for as the primary provider of launch services to the Defense Department right one of the things they're doing is playing dirty on these things but you have to launch from Vandenberg next year actually probably 2008 all of our launches through through 2008 are going to be from our small tropical island in the middle of the Pacific the bills that I should have a white cat or something it is it is unbelievable isn't it but the thing is every year you come back and it's there's more and there's no evidence and there's more more going on but it's less fictitious and do you regard this 500 million dollar contract as a prize by the way yeah well it's not a prize my sense that it's all awarded at the end only after you achieved everything it is awarded at at milestone points right so it is but it said devices the industry of the sense yes it's it's not a cost-plus contract like the standard development contract in fact there's really there's really two contracts going on one is the crew exploration vehicle contract which is what NASA is developing to return to the moon that that is about a 15 to 20 billion dollar contract right then there's a little itty bitty contract which is the half billion dollar cots program okay although it's possible it that because programa altima Trump the the correction vehicle because you might get your foot in the door and you can then start to do other things yeah it's hot past I'm very aware that you need to call someone yeah I need apart if anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer them and we've got six we've got three minutes now so if anyone would like to come to us Chris anything he's gonna stay out here all right make your phone call thank you two questions one what are your plans on the circumlunar project for dealing with solar flares and killing the crew while there can't get back any faster than Newton's laws which was the problem during Apollo they just were lucky basically and then the second question is who do you think is actually going to land on the moon next the u.s. the Chinese or private industry well the answer the second question first will be space adventures and regarding solar flares that NASA they they weren't lucky they actually developed the science of solar flare forecasting and there were space probes in orbit and there is a whole essentially fleet of space probes right now that monitor the Sun and there there's a hardened section in the Soyuz which can can be used as a radiation shield in the re-entry capsule is fairly thick they're actually testing radiation shielding plastic radiation shielding on the space station and so any thick material ideal material would be lets say a some form of plastic water is a good radiation insulators I think we have that problem well under control well we we've identified and exist another existing launch vehicle the lander is essentially under development and we we believe that we can go back to the moon for under two billion dollars that's an even bigger price tag how many people would you imagine taking there would be you could get do people back there would be similar to Apollo type mission I mean clearly there's demand there's demand of at least ten people also for the space station round trips but the number of people who have the kind of money you're talking about for these other things must be even smaller is there and there even to people we developed we developed the the market for orbital and so we've we have at least a dozen people in line for that and we we get more credible enquiries every day we've identified about 1,500 people worldwide that are financially qualified to do a lunar mission and we have some solid leads that must be that a lot of them made their money in the tech industry so they kind of climbed to think of this kind of stuff think about yeah it it has and and there are there are government's that are also interested and we don't necessarily have to use a private individual and but you know go during a break go out here and look at the Pacific Ocean and the the components for most of your computers are made on the other side of the Pacific Ocean at one time that was you know crossing that ocean was a lot like it's probably a lot harder than maybe sending a crew to tomorrow and you know the moon is only 250,000 miles away and it's this huge untapped piece of real estate and you know there we have a few ideas of what it could be used for but I won't even pretend to try and justify it I mean the future will will prove out the moon's utility okay well I think we'll leave it that thank you very much indeed

https://youtu.be/XmKodBNV9RM

please give a warm texas welcome to elon musk [Applause] all right thank you for having me here i appreciate the invitation and i suspect i'll be visiting houston quite frequently in the future uh given the uh classic contract so we've got a great city uh and i always support visiting so we'll talk about spacex give you a little bit better background tell you about the the last launch that we had and uh i'm gonna tell you about where things are going long term and uh at least i leave some time for questions because i find that's often the best part of any uh presentation allows me to interact and really address anything you're curious about so spacex was founded about five years ago the long-term goal was to provide to really dramatically improve the content and the reliability of space transportation uh it doesn't help if you just improve the cost that the liability suffers so reliability is in fact has been a privately focused um and cost secondary uh the initial market was uh small government commercial satellites with the falcon one and the idea behind the falcon was that one was that it would serve as a scale model as uh something where we could test out the technologies and when we make mistakes they're made at a smaller scale rather than jump to immediately to a large rocket and make mistakes which cost 10 times as much so that's really that's the strategy we've been executing and i think it's worked out reasonably well so far but it's worth noting that the plan for spacex from the very beginning was always human transportation so can we really make some progress in in helping humanity become a true space-bearing civilization where a large number of people can afford to go to space uh and uh where it's not limited to just a really small number of people of the year so if we can help set space transportation on a path of continuous improvement in cost reliability as we saw with aviation the early days of aviation were extremely risky extremely expensive but over time that improved and uh you know to the point where today you can buy a non-stop uh flight from from houston to london for the return ticket for 500 uh i think that didn't even used to be possible and then even when it was possible initially used to cost 10 times that amount um and now now it's very affordable so that was brought about by there being constant improvement in aviation over time and so if we can help make that happen then i would consider spacex to be successful if we if all we do is you know be yet another satellite launcher or something like that or or ultimately our only uh you know about as good as soyuz and cost per person to orbit i mean that would be okay but but really not not a success in my book so the long term holy grail is if your account spacex help establish a permanent presence beyond earth personally i think if we can if humanity can uh help establish life on another planet and extend life to make it multi-planetary i think that really would be one of the most important things that we could possibly achieve uh if you think about the important milestones in the history of life itself um and that means going beyond the protocol concerns of humanity uh you know initially there was single cell blacks and then there was multicellular life and then things required skeletons and then some of those things transitioned from the ocean to land uh you get the development of mammals and it's probably that 10 or 12 really big uh milestones in the history of life itself and i think on that same scale would fit uh life becoming multi-planetary and it could be at least as important as life going from the oceans to land and arguably more important uh to invest for knowledge life exists only on earth so if we don't at some point uh propagate beyond that then you know with some calamity that falls alive here that will extinguish it and before we know that maybe the extinguishment of life itself so i think it's really important that we try to do this and if there are if humanity is one able to do this it will require really orders of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transportation and much more reliable space transportation as well so spacex operates on a silicon valley type of mode of operation it's a flat hierarchy close pack cubes uh high internet to manager ratio lots of prototype iterations and cut update on the best idea one type of velocity where what matters is the notes of the argument not the argument the status of the argument uh so we started with three people five years ago now over 300 and i think we'll probably be you know over 400 within 12 months so we're going pretty quickly we're currently a hundred thousand square feet of office in manufacturing space in uh near lax about two miles south of lax and we're expanding to half a million square feet later later this year uh we have a big propulsion structural test facility here in texas uh just uh halfway between austin and dallas um if you everyone know here there's a little town called mcgregor that's where our test facility is and then we've got launch complexes in clarksville and currently our primary launch facility we have a dormant facility at vandenberg and you may have read that we recently were awarded launch pad 40 at cape canaveral which is a great launch paddock so it was used to launch the titanfall heavy lift vehicle until about a year ago so this is what our first building looked like five years ago uh this is what the building looks like that we're moving to later this year that gigantic thing there the ceiling height is about 60 feet it was used to build 747 fuse lodges until last year there's some pictures of our texas test facilities so we have a number of propulsion test stands and structural test stands uh these these are stock nine test stands so the uh one on the left is where we'll be doing the stage hold down firings of falcon 9 so you can see a very very big stand and the fan the top of the concrete is about 130 feet and then the what we call the stability heaven which is this narrow narrow stairwell it goes up about another hundred feet it's the tallest thing for i know 20 or 30 miles uh so we have to put an faa beacon on top so planes don't fly into it and there's a construction elevator along the one leg and then the plumbing uh goes up the other leg and on the right hand side is the structural stand for the pelvic thrust frame so that it's what takes the nine engines of the falcon 9 um and that those hydraulics are capable of pushing down with about a million and a half pounds of force so it's very very staff structure uh just thinking about the you know the spacex track record today which is i think is a good predictor of a future performance the uh the token one was really developed from a clean sheet uh being on the launch pad in three years uh and that includes entire vehicles so the traffic was designed and uh and tested at spacex almost i mean there were a few pieces that will procure it outside but uh we have a very high mass production first stage so ninety four and a half percent uh uh propellant national action first stage uh there's about a about 0.2 residuals included in that uh which i think may be the highest mass fractional uh host stage in the world currently um i think the previous record was helped by the patented first stage uh and that includes um a recovery system so there's a parachute system included there the upper stage is pressure fed uh both the pairing stage synthetic separation systems it's worth noting that the mowing 1a engine made this the main engine on falcon 1 is only the second american content booster engine to see flanking about 25 years the the other one was the rs-68 or delta 4 and before that was the space shuttle main engine it's actually the first new american uh hydrocarbon engine to see flights in i think since the 60s so um and then there's also kestrel uh which is the upstate engine that we developed and that's a pressure pad engine rechargeable pretty good isp um and what other class avionics system which has the advantage of since this was designed in the 21st century as being a 21st century uh uh using 21st century electronics so the guidance control um the the falcon 1 is the first non-explosive orbital flat termination system approved by range safety uh so we actually don't the rocket when the release at the opposite presses the stop button it just shuts off the engine for action it doesn't explode the locking and uh we initially set up at vandenberg and then we're forced to move to kwajalein uh so we did two launch sites and control centers um and sort of looking at the price we started at a price of roughly seven million dollars four years ago and we've kept that price constant which is actually a decline when you take inflation into account so this is two years after starting a company we have the qualification article of falcon 1 on the launch pad at vandenberg and then about six months later we did a static fire all right we have sounds but i guess that's not what i think for some reason so unfortunately we're forced to move from uh vandenberg to quietly uh and so we yeah from may of 2005 to november 2005 we were able to uh set up a launch facility at kwajalein which is quite difficult because we the island we were given in the quarterly answer always just we had nothing on it which was jungle so we're bringing our water uh rt uh kerosene uh all the pressuring offices you know that sort of thing uh and bit definitely had some challenges with uh liquid auction in particular since the quartz one is five thousand miles away from california and about over two thousand miles away from hawaii which is the nearest source of liquid oxygen but we managed to get our first countdown of right on thanksgiving 2005 at tokyo to get to the first uh test flight which was in march of 2006. i need to edit this video because like 60 seconds worth of precursor but um yeah so i think it's worth seeing this this uh timeline because a lot of people don't realize that we actually have the vehicle designed for ready to go three years off starting company um and unfortunately the launch site issues caused us to delay by another year uh effectively uh the this this like i'll talk hopefully it'll thing will take off anymore um but the unfortunately the sad thing is that the issue that caused the problem with the first flight was a collision issue uh due to the quad's climate so there's some probably that would have occurred if they've launched out of vanderbilt what's up later so the planetary basically showed that there was a kerosene leak at the top pump inlet pressure transducer which started about 400 seconds prior to liftoff uh you couldn't see it because the wind was blowing and kerosene is actually vertical to sea simply if it's uh when the wind's blowing you can't actually see that it's leaking the failure review board which was actually co-chaired by p warden once aimed um i concluded that it was due to corrosion's first portion cracking of aluminum bnf on the engine uh that leak ignited a few seconds prior to start and uh the power basically learned during the entire uh powered flight and about 25 seconds into the flight the is going through a healing pneumatic line resulting in loss of helium pressuring and that caused the apparent pre-valve to shut and essentially turning off the engine and other than that everything would look good the vehicle was proceeding along its design trajectory within 0.2 degrees or first stage system is phenomenal and all avionics so we take a bunch of corrective actions uh we include they call robustness by eliminating uh as many settings as possible and going to orbital tube welds uh by replacing aluminum fittings with stainless steel that's a slight match penalty actually the stainless settings cost less than the aluminum settings so this was a cost savings i suppose um and there are a number of changes we also added more detailed procedures it's more personnel for the process so a triple sign-off is required by all uh one more work both the technician will be technically responsible engineer and uh an independent keyway but some work i applied sign up for all working online hardware and then closed our photos and we also went through iphone 9001 certification last year the biggest single change is we massively improved the software help monitoring and launch automation we were monitoring approximately 30 variables we went to monitoring 800 including both the vehicle and the grounds ford equipment and we would have caught the fuel leak if we have the system in place and the countdown is also now fully automated which reduces the potential for human error and allows initiatives focusing the data it also allows us to take some number of personnel out of the countdown process people that were just basically doing the job that the computer was doing so although we added people on the qa side of things we were able to reduce people on the launch upside by having increased automation so iso certificate so as far as gamma flight 2 which took place in march uh we just finished the first flight review with our customer uh that shows that the only over critical issue was lack of slash baffles in the second stage the lux tank and of course the coupling of the control and flash modes uh we did obtain full symmetry and video while passing nominal integration uh there were actually three dishes following the vehicle and although some some dishes fortunately uh at any given point there was one dish uh with a good signal so we were able to splice together telemetry and video to get a full uh formation duration um so all systems and fighters tested demonstrated highly responsive launch if you were following it closely to reel to light the engine uh they bought the tranquility tank and launched in 70 minutes i was considered a successful test flight by adoption and by spacex um and we will be launching our first two operational satellites later this year the first will be uh catch that for navy research lab and the second will be in october and then uh second will be a malaysian space agency satellite in december uh we have a total of five pokemon missions and six five and nine missions on our upcoming schedule and uh we expect to close probably four more falcon one or two more falcon 9 missions in the next through the balance of this year and that should that will bring us to 20 launch contracts in total including the two that have taken place so you talking and there's information on our website if anyone's curious as well but it's designed to nasa safety margins veterinarians and margins of daily tolerance it's roughly 840 pounds of plus 840 thousand pounds of plastic liquid with a mass maximum mass of about 700 000 pounds so so on the order of the soyuz inside uh 12 with the main body diameter ryzen 10k put with the large fairing i actually don't have a picture of the vehicle with a large variant but it's kind of a big fairing you'd see on uh saying atlas 5 or duffel it tickles 150 put with dragon 180 with the launch bearing the nine engines on the first stage are being carefully designed to provide engine out capabilities so if we lose managing you can still complete your mission successfully and depending on the phase of flight you can actually lose multiple engines and slow complete the mission and um basically it's a sort of a 10 controlled type of vehicle so as people are worried about the number of engines that i think it's worth seeing pictures of what the sawyers looks like on the base end there's quite a few flush chambers there uh but the russians have a definition of engine which would only count things by the number of turbo pumps but that's kind of a silly definition because uh by that definition uh the falcon one doesn't have enough stage engine so i think you're going to count by the number of thrust chambers so uh and each flex chamber is mansion uh so australia has 32 engines on the base seven one has uh or had uh eight uh engines on the base so those each have an individual turbo pump so falcon 9 is really quite comparable to saturn 1b you got one extra engine basically so the basic concept of operations for falcon 9 with the dragon spacecraft is real simple it's two stage vehicles so the falcon 9 drops the dragon open over and uh the dragon goes from that parking little bit uh maneuvers are going to turn power to the space station where it's captured by the arm and earth to the station and then re-enters uh you know same way that the apollo capsules 300 floods body re-entry uh lands in the ocean although we have the ability to have a land on land as well we're just starting off with the ocean because it's easy to get the regulatory approvals and that there's mostly ocean so if you need to get down in a hurry you better be prepared around the ocean as far as arcanine itself uh we finished serial number one of the first stage primary structure uh which just to that i think much of this we're shooting after texas uh texas testing science in a few weeks um we'll be starting to push flight units roll number two in three weeks uh it's made of aluminum lithium in the barrel sections and 2219 sort of a standard standard aluminum in the in the domes this year we'll probably produce probably i think two flight units and next year we'll be producing probably six year after that as much as 12 it really depends on what the demand is we have uh achieved our low inc development goals and actually exceeds them slightly the goals were 92 000 pounds of sea level trust and 299 vacuum icp um we've gotten to 94 000 pounds of trust at sea level and clear to maximize fee uh full full mission duty cycle and um we'll expect to finish qualification of the normal one c in july here we have trillion material in place for 25 of the engines this year at 40 or so next year uh we'll start doing integrated stage and engine testing in august most likely um and this could be a progression of multi-engine firings done with one three five and then probably nine but and we will do a full stage hold down the acceptance test of the first flight stage uh before we defend the launch pad actually so this is the only one see just a recent recent firing of the 101c [Applause] goes on for a while [Applause] so you can get actually supported here so uh there you can see the the whole engines on the stand there the the chamber is a mold coupler liner with a nickel cobalt electrical plate at the nickel carbon closeout and the nozzle is a braze tubal nozzle it's actually an architecture it's similar to ssme that's way way less expensive it's interesting so the mother one is isn't designed for a man rating so it's got a few percent margin above flight loads uh and um it's actually more than what's new for nominating uh it's also qualified against foreign object ingestion and we'll be doing uh our objects and have done actually inadvertently uh some foreign object tests and so far it's held up quite well but we'll be doing a formal set of uh fine injection tests to verify that if you if it reflects on a piece of aluminum or steel or some organic or something like that that it doesn't cause the ancient become applied um we want to try to reach 25 or more cycles before any refurbishment and uh ideally it's only an order of 100 cycles before the primary elements need to be replaced the total pump assembly is about as simple as you can have a turbo pump system it's a single shaft with two pumps on it and um sort of installed at the same time by definition i'd use a pimple injector which is in terms of contamination no known combustion instability issues and let me talk a little bit about the chamber nozzle we will be having kevlar slap jacketing between the engines of the falcon 9 so even if you mentioned this compound explosively or in a fire um it would protect it against uh damaging any of its neighbors oh it's worth noting that spacex will produce more booster engines this year than any country except russia so we'll be producing about a total of 30 engines um roughly five castrol engines and 25 million engines um and i think that's more than a country in life except russia certainly more than the rest of us production to mine this picture of the off nine first stage primary structure we're a little cramped in that kind of building and only this gets out by a few inches as far as the second stage um one of the ways in which we've designed self line to be fundamentally lower cost is that the second stage is simply a shortened version of the first stage so it's the same dome same material same tooling uh in a passion line uh and uh which may seem like a pretty obvious move but as far as i know there's no rocket out there that takes this approach each stage is designed like a unique uh spacecraft um so it really it takes us almost no time to make the second stage uh because it's really just two bowel sections and if we don't uh we should finish the first unit in five months and uh no problem things of one every two months by next year uh it will have a a more than one c uh vacuum version as the engine so same engine that you fill there but with a vacuum skirt extension it's a very big bell nozzle uh the avionics guidance control there's quite a lot heritage from falcon 1. interior we could fly the falcon 1 avionics and apart from some changes to the software it would work but we'll be upgrading this to the triple redundant uh voting to the national mandating standards uh we're also going to add multi-engine controls the first stage obviously and then we'll be upgrading the economics to higher radiation tolerance for missions at a long duration will pass beyond the battle and balance and then the preparing all my tooling is done we should have our first production quarter section in a few months and have the pool party in about six months so as far as dragging is concerned looks like all things are good for demo and cdr in august the basic structure is an isolated aluminum pressure vessel with aluminum lithium for the primary load path elements the nose cone and heat shield support structure of carbon fiber composite we finished a structural flash manufacturing test unit earlier this year which was made in the same using the same methods the same materials as the as the flight unit and all materials are ordered for the plant unit the propulsion system of dragon will use 18 uh spacex draco engines uh dracula means little dragon they're roughly 90 pounds of thrust each using nitrogen nitrogen oxide and body methyl hydrazine and it will be used in continuous mode for all the changes and 10 millisecond pulse mode for attitude control so this was a a fairly unique engine um and that pretty advanced uses a face shuttle pencil to achieve extremely fine fault nerd capability and then from a thermal standpoint it's designed to run continuously and continuously so let's see we'll be using titanium propellant tanks uh with the propellant management device and it composition tanks from rda and we'll start testing the engines this summer the heat shield will change to pica as the primer in the trail which is to switch to that because uh it is fully octet tested so it's qualified for an object standpoint um and we have uh it's like uh updated version of sla 561 as backup there's very technical stuff so a lot of people don't know what that means but basically this the brake pad um so uh we will actually be using the sla material on the top nine second stage so the falcon 9 uh recommendation that the falcon 9 is designed to be reusable as well as as well as dragon so the first line second stage needs a heat shield in order to be able to re-enter um and survive and the heat shield we will be using on that is uh is actually an sla e shield but we do not plan on object testing that because recovery of the falcon 92 is an optional thing it's not required so we feel confident enough to actually fly the second stage uh re-entry with the sla that hasn't been off dead tested if it works great it doesn't work well nothing at all um and then parachutes we're working with the urban uh there'll be three main ring sales and two drugs so you can lose either remain using losing lane and you can look at those and pay this to locate very low normal percent later 20 feet per second which is about what a parachutist would come down at and that allows us to transition from the ocean to land pretty pretty easily so on the left there is the structural test unit that i mentioned you can see the machined eye secret door and although the first missions for dragon are cargo we're designing everything for manned loads so it's it's designed to take loads of uh an escape rocket uh and to take high g of bullets and all that stuff and it's also got windows which carver does not need and then on the right you can see what it looks like with the engines when the engines are on so left is like kind of cargo configuration on the basic dragon that the sleeve that connects drag into the booster we use that to carry unpressurized cargo and also it'll contain the solar and the radiator and on the right you can see in the crew configuration uh so we're designing it to have a maximum of seven through uh with two with a w small c from the big c so four small seats and three big seats and then you can see the converting mechanism that interface at the top is where it will go to the space station so the nose cone gets tossed away and that there's space station on that a interface more pictures of it and you can see it stuck on a little section of the space station and that's it and there's actually uh also more videos and pictures and whatnot that you can see on the spacex website um yeah i should also say you know where do i see the future of commercial spaceflight well i think it's gonna i think really entering a new era that's very exciting for commercial spaceflight there's a lot of things happening on the suburban front with jeff bezos and blue arjun he's got some obviously blood retardant scale composites virgin galactic and we've got john carmack who's here in texas with armadillo air states um i think john's gonna do really well uh and and then on the orbital front we've got ourselves some rocket flanking um i think we'll see some of the companies that are doing several work transition at some point to overall activity so i think it's pretty exciting and if all goes well spacex will be flying and supporting the space station for for many years to come and uh you know also potentially supporting things like the bigelow uh space station and uh as you know all sorts of other things that will develop so i'm really really bullish uh on the future of the space flight um and uh yeah so i'm really excited about it are they uh is the question is it possible to put orion on top of the falcon 9 to get it forward uh well it sort of depends on what the mass of the line is considered to be so i think if it was um the capability of the basics of 9 is 10 tons to leo so but there is a heavy version of alkaline that will be developing with the side bleachers which are similar to the double full heavy the conversible approach i believe that you may be able to put a line into a little bit because that's capabilities on the order of 25 megatons so it's just i think within enough possibility well i actually did i didn't do any market research so maybe that's my that's why i did it if i had that market research that would probably got done so no i i i i do think there's a market uh for what we're building i don't think i didn't do any of my research i certainly you know read about what what rockets exist in the world what are they launching and that kind of thing um so you know i knew that at a minimum we should be able to go and compete in the existing market and have some kind of a business even if it wasn't you know really feel anything like that so yeah i mean there's you know i don't think there's any kind of market research you could do that would say okay if you really believe it if you can reduce the cost by this amount then there will be you know this extra number of launchers that occur as yourself that reduced price i think you just have to do it and i hope it turns out to be true um and then make sure that there's a backup plan that's used at least of some value even if you don't achieve the full potential that you've useful that's some bodybuilding process capability the existing market and that's really the strategy that spacex has had um it would at least serve the existing satellite launch market and and hopefully the space station and even if that's all that happens well it's not a terrible thing um but hopefully um by lowering the costs uh improving the liabilities we can we can expand the market substantially um and uh and then i think we do it all the others that enter the market and compete for that business in order to sell the current airline business you know there's a time where no one could possibly uh consider aircraft as a transportation mechanism i mean the things that you maybe got a little joyride in or you know and they're very dangerous and much people die all the time and then you know if you sit in 19 1920 well probably any time before lindbergh even asked your average person on the street you think you'll be able to fly you know from your city to europe non-stop in an aircraft they would have said no way that's ridiculous so if i think you have to go on your purchase with some degree of you know open space yes dragon will be grabbed by the shuttle flight mother station on with the basic standard example picture yeah i can talk to any cv import so well i know how it's going to be any cd import i think there's one in particular that we're supposed to talk about but in theory look at any cdmp oh well there's there's multiple videos we're probably we've got 18 cameras various places on board cameras uh ground cameras tracking cameras uh so what i showed is just a tiny sampling there's a lot more on the website actually the cost of sound to the space station uh well um i guess probably i mean initially initially i think it's probably like ten thousand dollars a pound am i thinking correctly yeah about that that's about ten thousand dollars a pound um and that's called it to the space station as opposed to cognition as far as first in master orbit um the master orbit of falcon line is about thirteen hundred dollars a pound but but that's so that's that's if you're a satellite or something so the thing to get stuff to uh that's to be a space station you need to add dragging to the equation and then you need to basically say well that eats up a ton of useful cargo as well i think that yeah so it's roughly you know approaching three and a half tons for roughly 70 million dollars ish we have to see how the i mean we're not pricing estimates but we have to see what the final pricing turns out to be now to point out the data seems to zero reusability so if we are able to make it reusable to economics work that price could be substantially lower [Music] well we expected probably a lot of commercial fights to geosynchronous solid um you know hopefully some you know launching some planetary missions uh you know stuff to mars or the moon or you know that sort of thing okay um it's your failures okay more questions um so it actually is getting harder and harder for me to write blog pieces i used to like this quite frequently and now uh i've got a pretty big family and uh business things that take up a lot of time so the blog stuff tends to pull to the bottom of the priority list and a lot of times that i feel really guilty about not updating the blog so i would like to try to continue to make a short blog pieces and also try to get a few other people at spacex to light bulk pieces and it has where a lot of people like bug pieces so i don't know i only like them occasionally um that's why tesla is concerned the first production car of the roadster should be out at the end of summer so end of september maybe maybe october and then we'll tesla is working hard on a model 2 which is a 50 000 luxury sports event uh and that's the four-door five passenger public finances by chase bmw and with a targeted debut at the end of 2009 [Music] oh yeah um pogo um uh we have power suppressors on uh each of the nine engines the individual plug this lectures uh so yeah that that should hopefully do the trick uh we have um a couple of outside experts that are uh looking at our pogo uh suppression devices and helping us design them uh you guys showers and you may know him a few familiar other stuff uh and uh there's a few other people bringing on board as well to look at that but probably certainly something we take seriously well thank you [Applause] biggest risks i don't know what the biggest risk is actually uh there are lots of lots of risks but i'm not sure how to order them um exactly to say which one is the biggest one uh you know the last uh demo by two uh this watch mode coupling with the uh with the control frequency of the second stage was number 11 on the on the dynamics control risk list number 11. if you were to merge all the results i don't know would have been number 120 and that's the one that went wrong so how do you know it's a very subjective thing to figure out what the what the real risk is that's going to bite you in the bus fortunately with the knowledge that we'll gain from falcon 1 and we're not going to make uh in retrospect in elementary that are like not having slash battles on the stage so i think we'll be faded from that sort of stuff yeah it's possible we could have some challenges getting to the through the birthing process i don't know that much about it the type of area where i'm all that familiar with uh some uh we're learning a lot at spacex and we have some uh outside companies that are very familiar with the process uh helping out so i think dave over there from odyssey so um and harold is helping us with the safety stuff uh so uh well i wish i could give you a really good i can't i don't know i don't know what the biggest risk is they're just they're all really big and we'll take a lot of attention sorry uh actually i didn't even know it was the 100th anniversary uh good news you've written some good books the i like the the new english mistress that's a good one um we've certainly made some use of existing hardware uh such as quick just impact many other things you mentioned quick disconnects regulators uh uh certainly control valves um most of our control valves are from mirada which is you know provide control valves for the shuttle um we you know we use continual event relief valves uh we use a standard new legs and a lot of your existing satellite componentry in dragon um the big stuff has been developed from scratch we kind of have to do that because if we were to buy if we would cover together stuff from existing uh you know quasi off the shelf uh components then you will be unable to reduce the cost because typically that you inherit legacy components you also while you may inherit their heritage course you'll find out that cost and so we're i'm necessarily forced to make the major items like the engines and the stages and the avionics and the launch apps and all that do that from scratch uh well i think that's at 100 million approximately uh a little more than that uh we've spent more than that so that's the capital uh but we spent more than that because we received our payments for launch we got the first 2001 launches uh we received advanced payments on a number of the other launches uh we passed some quite smile things so i'm not sure exactly i'd have to think about it to i'd probably probably consider that proprietary but we've certainly spent well in excess of a well in excess of 100 billion dollars thus far although i've only invested 100 roughly 100 million dollars yeah i thought i think it would be functioning to ride mcdonald at some point uh some people sometimes think that uh yeah this is a roundabout way of getting me personally to space but uh it would be a lot cheaper to buy right on the toys but that'll definitely make you fly at some point it'll be great yeah cost has been really helpful in speeding things up uh i mean we wanted to go in that direction one time uh anyways that we were taking us a long time would have uh you know we'd have to sort of earn our way there and uh and also we won't be able to take advantage of the expertise that nasa has uh which has been quite helpful uh in designing a reliable vehicle so i think the cost program has been really super helpful um yeah it's been great dealing with everyone there and you know a lot of people sort of say well you know isn't necessarily going to smother you of course you deal with something efficient things and really that hasn't been the case i mean it's with no complaints this bottle it's been great the vanderbilt story is a long and fast way but uh yeah we uh i don't know it's always been unfair but these things happen uh yeah actually the spacex manifest is on the website so if you're curious about the upcoming you know which satellites are being launched and who's the customer and when they're being launched uh there's actually an updated launch manifest on our website i think probably uh well for falcon one be under 12 months maybe nine months uh the what we're doing is we're actually uh buying long lead items ahead of time so we have an inventory of the long read stuff uh and so once you have longer stuff in hand it can take us for as little as nine months to get going and get getting launched off um well falcon 9 well it's probably a little premature to make claims at this point but for the booster at least we will we do plan on having a continuous production line of the booster so here it should take very little time to uh get that going you know go from a contract to a launch you know hopefully six months could be hopefully nine months it couldn't be six months but it really depends on how the manifest is falling out uh there may be other constraints which are not related to spacex directly such as can cape canaveral handle that launch or the other stuff scheduled for that time frame um they really like to see that's when you schedule 12 months or even 24 months in advance so uh so we already need to have a really short time ideally between the contract and launch and if we're able to make reusability work then and we have a constant stream of vehicles coming back and getting refrigeration flying and we're flying every month or even more frequently than that then it's going to be relatively easy to somebody in uh actually our schedule matches pretty well to the planned uh end of the shuttle in 2010 uh we have our first female flight of falcon 9 and woods dragon at the end of next year uh and then we got two more demonstration flights one in uh summer of 2009 and another at the end of 2009. uh and that that third flight will actually culminate in the transfer of i guess demonstration cargo and the return of demonstration cargo back to earth and probably cannot at this point so the real cause there has to be demonstration card there uh because otherwise it would violate some sort of law based acquisition or something like that effect but uh so if that schedule remains true or doesn't slip too much then in 2010 we should be able to start delivering cargo and uh and then depending upon when the constant option b gets exercised which is what adds the escape to the escape tower the life support system the seats uh all the crew related stuff plus the ability for the crew to take over an event of emergency uh so depending on when class 3 gets activated we should be able to i think do uh you know take people to the space station well probably yeah early 2011 something like that it really depends on where things get going well uh if if bigelow has just you know puts up a workable private space station absolutely we'd love to take people down back so i think that will be super synergistic uh we do have a regular launch on the falcon line manifest for launching i think it's a two-thirds scale version or something that approximately that size of is one of the inflatable uh space stations so uh yeah so irrespective of what happens with the full scale version or how well that does and you know whether it's able to sell uh you know uh tell people space station or lease it or whatever we do have one launch on falcon 9 with big globe all right so how many launches can falcon 9 take before it has to be currently retired i think uh it's really hard to make an exact prediction we really have to look at the how what condition it is and when it comes back you know the engines were aiming for at least 25 um full emission dirty cycles before any refurbishment is required of significance uh and ideally upwards of 100 cycles so we'd like to get something like that out of the rest of the falcon 9 as well so it's going to target 20 at least 25 hopefully as many as a hundred but it really it's gonna really depend you know on how much condition things come back in and i think like the jet you know we'll have a maintenance schedule so there'll be some things that need to be replaced every flight some things that need to be replaced every five flights some every 10 flights some that really are just never going to wear out you know any in any kind of reasonable time frame uh and then we'll have an inspection schedule so just like if you a jet engine has a hot section inspection every certain number of hours and you replace this component every certain number of hours will have something similar for the market so we want to try to overall just sort of drive things in the direction of the way that get aircraft cooperated so i don't think a lot of you get as good at that but we just want to try to push in that direction well um yeah i actually yeah i mean i always lived in front of space but um well first of all i grew up in south africa so you know there's not really much space stuff happening here uh and then i only got my citizenship like last year uh and that was five years after i got my green card so i've only actually been allowed illegally to look in space for five and a half years i apologize for not getting that last six months um but that's yeah that's literally i could only legally look in space for the last five and a half years uh yeah it was just general theoretical experimental physics i was undergrad only you know i actually originally was in adoption and did a phd standpoint in the material science symphonics of pioneer genocide capacitors so actually very applied almost really engineering um and that was for use in electric vehicles so i think there's potential to do some very interesting things with if you can drive the energy density of the capacitor uh up high enough then it's really the ideal solution for electric vehicles it's another quality influence causes cycling calendar life uh and extremely high charge discharge rate uh really would you be able to you know recharge your car faster you can vote with gasoline so that would be i think it's if somebody can pick up the capacitors enough good enough energy density and that will really be the optimal solution for electric cars [Music] right [Applause] you

https://youtu.be/tqoLRlpROG8

elon musk is a dropout and a billionaire after receiving an undergraduate degree from the university of pennsylvania he dropped out of the stanford phd program in physics he wound up ceo of paypal which ebay bought for 1.5 billion dollars in 2002 with his fortune made in the virtual world he's created tesla motors and spacex in the real world named for nikola tesla the eccentric serbian-born inventor of alternating current tesla motors will roll their first 100 all-electric cars out factory doors this summer spacex one of many new ventures aimed at commercializing outer space was recently awarded a 278 million dollar nasa contract to build and operate launch vehicles and crew capsules to service the international space station and take america back to the moon elon thank you so much for being with us here at wired science well thank you for having me uh i need to first lay a little bit of a foundation here two days into your physics program at stanford university you quit school to start a company called zip to a media company right uh which is sold a few years later for a paltry 307 million dollars then four years later um ebay buys paypal is that correct a company that you established or helped to establish as well and now you've taken those two enormous successes and you've set your ambition on space how did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship essentially well uh when i graduated from college there were three areas that i thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity the three were the internet space exploration and uh and then changing the economy from a mine and burned hydrocarbon based economy to one which is solar electric which i think is going to be the primary but not exclusive means of energy and transportation have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there no not at all actually i'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity on earth you are yeah absolutely so what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit mars which is really what is an ambition of yours well i think if you consider two paths one where we're forever confined to earth and the other where we're space frank civilization uh out exploring the stars i think the latter is far more exciting and will result in a richer and more diverse uh human experience how can you do that better uh than nasa well uh you know nasa is a customer of ours so there's a confusion in the public mind that that perhaps a company like spacex is competing with nasa but in fact nasa is a customer of ours so we're actually uh providing services to nasa launch services uh and when when the shuttle retires in 2010 so starting in 2011 uh spacex's uh rocket will replace the space shuttle in servicing the space station with astronauts and uh and cargo transportation the name of your rocket ship is called the falcon explorer is that it well the falcon 9 the falcon 9 yes the rocket and then the space the spaceship is dragon dragon yeah so the falcon 9 rocket lifts the dragon spaceship and this dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to earth so it transports the falcon as almost cargo then so yeah the falcon 9 is kind of like the uh the semi okay or something like that um and it trans it the falcon 9 booster rocket takes the dragon spaceship to space and drops it off then it goes to the space station that ducks with the space station uh transfers astronauts or resupply you know cargo whatever the case may be and then the dragon spacecraft uh returns to earth reading some of the speeches that you have given in your your career and how old are you you're like you're practically 23 years you're 23 years old i'm actually 12. you're 12. i was going to say you look terrific but you have said that we got lost along the way with our space program what did you mean by that right i think i think i there was a in some of my congressional testimony i gave a few speeches to to congress well what i mean by that is in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and here we are over three decades later and we can barely get to low earth orbit and i think by any measure that is a step backwards is that for a lack of leadership or technology i think we made the wrong technological choices and i think there was also a lack of uh will at the at the highest levels of government to take the next step and and uh go go well at least go at least stay on the moon and patch build a base there and then go beyond the moon to mars and if you look at the the news articles in the late 60s early 70s the expectation uh was that that by now in the 21st century we would have a moon base and probably even a mars base and i think if you'd asked anyone at that point in time whether we would be unable to go to the moon and have no and not have been to to mars i think they would they would think you're crazy do we need a leadership in that realm do we need a john f kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said one one day a man will walk on the moon do we need that kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step i do think it's very important the president set the the priority and and and determine the the goal uh you know that that we as nation will aspire to and uh you know george bush has his pluses and minuses um but at least one plus is that he he has helped to to steer the space program in a direction that that more or less makes sense um you know the only thing i would i would sort of argue with is that i don't think we should be going back to the moon i think we should be focused on mars i think we saw the you think that's a mistake focusing on the moon i do think i do think we should rather go i think we should rather be focused on on mars you know the moon is kind of like it's kind of like the arctic it's just it's just a very barren place and very very little resources it's small it's not it's not really a place that we can establish uh another human civilization there's a there's a there's a feeling of been there done that too with the moon yeah we saw that movie in the 60s you know the remake's never as good did we really go to the moon uh yes we did we definitely just wanted to check the government is incapable of of suppressing uh a conspiracy of that major of that nature okay good this ambition to explore space absolutely that's an entrepreneur there's there's quite a bit of competition out there there's jeff bezos with blue origin there's richard branson with his virgin galactic right uh and i'm not talking about nasa either there's paul allen uh there's the european space agency in boeing and lockheed martin the chinese the russians let's just throw all of them into this everyone's doing a competitive field how is spacex different how do you think you'll sort of uh surpass them well you know you've you've listed a wide range of of entities there and i think the differences are uh really different depending upon which one you're referring to the uh well let me ask you this question who is your competition we have no serious competition none not presently who's chasing you well uh if you mean chasing and have and has a serious chance of catching then i i think none that i'm aware of uh and and by the way is kind of a hack then well what what uh branson is doing by the way i'm a great admirer of branson uh is really a much smaller technological challenge so their craft would be suborbital so it would go to about mach 3. our craft is orbital it goes to mach 25 so 25 times the speed of sound but that doesn't describe the whole scale difficulty because the the energy required to get those velocities scales as the square of the velocity so to do what branson is doing you need say about nine units of energy due to what we're doing you need 625 units of energy the difference is monumental and then when you re-enter you have to you have to burn off all that energy so uh so that doubles the problem really so i mean what branson is doing from a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the english channel what we're building is something that can circumnavigate the globe it's a very different scale of of of technological difficulty i still think what he's doing is great and by the way i bought a ticket on on his effort yeah yeah so i still think it's great but it's not it's not in the same league technologically so you're not particularly worried certainly not about no certainly not about that no the things that worry me are are we going to make a mistake are we the the the things that can really hurt spacex are i mean our own foolishness uh our own errors can hurt us but not none of the competition that i'm aware of so generally you're worried about what's in front of you not not the other guy in fact you probably don't think about them in terms of how they criticize you or what they think about you i i don't think actually i don't think uh there's much criticism i mean boeing and lockheed of course they would criticize but i don't think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what we're doing um and certainly possibly i think you know what what jeff bezos is working on could ultimately i mean he does have aspirations to get to overton beyond it's just that what they're doing right now is suborbital and at the sort of lower technology level what i think about at spacex is really entirely what are we doing to ensure that our rocket is is going to be successful and that we are truly uh optimizing the the cost and ensuring higher reliability i mean that's just a very very difficult problem there's a reason why there's an idiomatic expression about rocket science being hard it it really is really hard so rocket science really is rocket science yeah it looks hard and it's harder than it looks what's the big goal here what's the long-term plan well the long-term ultimate objective the the holy grail is we would like to help make life multi-planetary that's really what we'd like to do so establish societies on as many planets as possible uh well yeah i think there's only one possibility but yeah i mean even if we can just go from one planet to two i think that's a pretty big step and you'll start with will mars mars is the only viable viable planet so multi-planetary life yeah it's helped make life multi-planetary i think that's an important thing i don't think your goal is big enough ha yeah it's ambitious well like i said we're not don't expect to do it single-handedly but we certainly would like to help make it happen it's fair to say you've made a fortune yeah i think so by any reasonable standard yeah and you know those who work in science probably understand your trajectory but there are those who are watching who would think if i made that money i'd sit on a beach i'd drink beer and i would just watch the sunset kind of like a corona beer commercial have you ever thought about that as a career option you know i find that really pretty boring so that would be torture if i had to do that every day that would really be pretty awful for me is there something about startup businesses that that that really fuels your desire to work well i guess i i i really need to be preoccupied with something uh and i if if i'm just sort of sitting there relaxing i can only do that for a very short period of time and then it becomes unbearable although startups definitely have their highs and lows and there's a friend of mine who has a good phrase uh you know a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss what is the criteria that you establish for yourself for a startup i mean why one business over another yeah well i for me it's always about does this does what i'm doing matter if if we are successful uh does it matter to the world and uh so there are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket company or say a car company or even when i started an internet company because when i started the first internet company nobody had made any money and it wasn't clear that anyone would make any money it was simply from the perspective of the internet being a very important thing and something that needed to be built and so i wanted to help build it well you touch upon something that's interesting is that there is a that benefiting humanity is a very integral part of your criteria no matter what you're starting up yes absolutely really not everybody has that as a prime interest now i think that's that's probably relatively unusual although there are many people that i know in silicon valley for whom that is a significant motivation you said in your endeavor here to explore space that we are committed to failing in a new way if nothing else what did you mean by that just just just how it sounds well i mean we're i mean we're committed to succeed really but if we do fail uh i would hope that we at least add to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make fewer mistakes uh now if mars were not enough uh you you are busy here on earth the world is not enough that's right for you we're aware of what have you no limits my friend uh here on earth you are establishing uh a presence certainly uh with tesla motors tell us a little bit about that this is your electric car company correct right and this is no this is no hybrid car you could buy on a car lot this thing goes from zero to 60 in four seconds isn't that right yes absolutely zero to 16 under four seconds it's faster a better acceleration than any uh porsche currently in production and any ferrari except the enzo and it's twice the energy efficiency of a prius so it's uh you really have the moral high ground and uh you get to you know leave uh the ferrari guy in your dust so well let me start to beat let me ask the obvious well and you don't look like one of those guys who's trying too hard in a ferrari absolutely yeah um you don't look like a jerk you know you know bright banana yellow uh lamborghini or or absolutely i know there's something to point out about tesla which is uh we didn't you know tesla is first car is is a sports car not because we think the world lacks for a sports car but because it is the right entry point for the market if you have a new technology the right place to enter is high unit cost low unit volume uh just as you know when if when a new cell phone come out comes out or a new uh a new laptop or or some new thing uh tends to be expensive at first uh because they're figuring out all the issues and it takes time to optimize and then over time that that technology will become uh cheaper and cheaper and so the model two of tesla uh and maybe i'm leaping ahead here but model two of tesla is a forty nine thousand dollar four door five passenger sedan and that's that's going to be obviously a much broader market segment that that can make use of that car and the model 3 is intended to be around a 30 000 price point and so that's that's really affordable by by almost everyone uh who's who who can buy a new car so the idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible uh but at only at the pace at which the technology uh matures so is henry ford and uh someone you admire well i think henry ford made some very important contributions to uh to business and obviously you know moving moving manufacturing line and that sort of thing uh so i think he's certainly worthy of admiration uh he was a bit of an art duck but you know uh certainly noteworthy but the interest in tesla is is not from the perspective of you know the world needs another car company it's more from uh the perspective of we have a very important environmental problem that needs to be addressed which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere and global climate change which i think is going to be one of the most significant issues of the 21st century and the only way to to really get around that in my view is is really with an electric vehicle and then you need to pair that up with a a zero emission power generation method such as solar power i think is solar power is going to be a really big deal tesla is not a hybrid car tesla tesla's pure electric pure electric so help connect the dots for me why aren't we seeing tesla cars on the car lots then what's keeping them we haven't made them yet uh so the it's we're just finishing up the development right now and anybody can buy this yes how will you actually almost sold out of 2007 production so if somebody does want to buy next year's model they better act quickly one of the primary complaints about hybrid vehicles is they're not fast enough you seem to overcome it you won't have any trouble with this but in fact really uh it's there's something uh uniquely better about uh electric vehicles which is that the talk response is immediate so if you want to pass someone you i mean you just the the the the response of the car is is very immediate it's just it's more fun to drive an electric car uh than it is to drive a gasoline car you know i was going to say that tesla the car the name of the car company is no coincidence is it explain a little bit about that right the company's named after nikola tesla who is an inventor uh he was originally from uh the sort of the area of of yugoslavia in europe but he moved to america when he was young and uh and and was an inventor of the the ac induction motor invented a lot of the principles of magnetism so he was a great man a great great inventor and so the company is named in honor of him so these cars the tesla roadster the first the first issue of the tesla roadster available in 2007 yes in the spring the summer how do you get on the waiting list well you you buy the car you you basically put down a deposit and and we've actually can you do that through the web uh yeah we'll have by the way customer centers all around the country so we'll have one in la one in the the bearish chicago miami new york and eventually nationwide customer centers where somebody does want to see the car in person take a test drive or see the car being worked on i mean we have this idea for the way that the cars are serviced that it should be a really uh really pleasant experience so we have you know some some somewhere between like a starbucks and apple store so you'd go in and you'd see the car being cars being worked on behind a glass partition that would be your car you're watching yeah or somebody else's okay and but it's really clean it's really clean present bright it'll be sort of a uh you know coffee bar available you know just uh we really want to have a very pleasant experience that you don't typically get if you go into a dealership have you heard from toyota have you heard from general motors in ford saying uh he's the company for sale nobody's actually made a formal offer but the interest you know i think one of the one of the biggest values that tesla can can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto interest industry because right now the order interest you know the big car companies believe that a a a viable electric vehicle is not possible and b if even if it was people wouldn't buy it so we need to show that that neither of those are true that the technology works that people want to buy it and that will be the most effective way of of of really driving change in the in the order industries by serving as an example in that matter and if we were to sell the company to one of one of the big car companies i think it would really slow things down you think so absolutely you're very busy enterprising the part of your company that will explore space you're very busy with this car company where do you find time to be ceo of two companies that size well i should correct you that i'm ceo of spacex uh and i'm chairman cf of spacex and that is really my day job so i spent 80 of my time on spacex okay i am the chairman and the principal owner of tesla motors but i do not run it on a daily basis you don't run that on a daily basis no well that was really the question was how do you do how do you run those two large enterprises on a daily basis i is it a couple of phone calls for the tesla folks how's it going i'm busy with outer space right now you guys got that covered i spent about i spent about two two to three days a month on tesla related business and almost all the rest of time is on spacex so spacex is very much my my day-to-day job and then i provide uh product guidance strategic guidance and and obviously funding for for tesla like steve jobs right so he runs apple on a daily basis but he also you know has uh oversight over pixar it's kind of like that and in your day-to-day and and this is this is one of those silly lifestyle questions but how early do you get up in the morning and where do you go to work physically is it an office yeah i go to work at spacex how early do you get up in the morning you know i'm not an early morning person uh so so for young like for young engineers and for inventors and creators they can sleep in until 10 or 11. we have no fixed hours at spacex and i mean my personally i i would i tend to get up around 7 30 or 8 and be in the office around you know 9 9 30. uh but then i tend to stay at about until about 8 pm okay college students across america are saying oh dratz i thought he was going to say like noon but then you go into an office and you you sit with uh in a separate office away from those who are working or do you sit with them no i just have a cubicle at spacex you have a cubicle yeah and are you surrounded by your colleagues there absolutely what is your hope in terms of the impact you will leave on culture this civilization this world global civilization what is it that you you hope to leave here well i think what i'd like to do is help solve some important problems so i think in a small way i helped build the internet and then with respect to the the global warming problem that the transition from from away from oil and other hydrocarbons to to something which is clean and sustainable i hope to have an impact there and then with respect to space i hope to have an impact in uh helping make humanity a multi-planet species elon musk thank you so much for being with us at wireless science to see let me get it straight ceo of spacex and chairman of tesla motors yeah i got other titles but that's about that's about right i think that you're doing pretty good i think you've done very well

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t-minus thirty-six tank's pressing deck one is triggered ten nine eight seven plus eight plus a year ago carp blanche brought you an interview with wiz kid and rocket scientist elon musk an ex-south african unknown to the general public more than anything elon was a visionary with big dreams if we can build something that's capable of taking people and equipment to mars such that it can serve as a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi-planet species which i think is a very very important uh objective then then i would consider the mission of spacex successful on the 20th of march this year elon came that much closer to achieving that dream elon how are you feeling right now uh great uh we had a very successful test launch uh learned everything we need to know to get our upcoming satellite launch to orbit which was the goal of this mission so we're very excited there was a lot of champagne consumed here at spacex last week spacex is elon's los angeles-based company but how did he make the money to fund his vision elon started a software company called zip2 and began to build his fortune by selling his software he then co-founded paypal one of the world's leading electronic payment systems we sold that to ebay for about one and a half billion dollars and then the ebay share price subsequently rose by a factor of three in that case in that case it was a sale for stock how is having uh a lot of money changed your lifestyle if you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle and anyway it says differently is just but elon wasn't prepared to sit on his bank balance he wanted to reach for the stars his primary aim to take on the big boys like lockheed bowing and aryan space shooting satellites into orbit but at a quarter of the price since the founding of spacex here in the aerospace hub of southern california elon and his team of rockets scientists have worked towards a clear mission make space travel as affordable as an air ticket his capital allowed him to pick the best brains in the business although i am new to the business my team is not his critics warned that he would join a long list of billionaires who've tried and failed the space industry has its movers and shakers rich nations funding government space programs like nasa and then in the private game gifted billionaires who are revolutionizing the industry it all spells big money and big business inside the nose cone of this rocket is the cargo an expensive satellite that has to be exactly positioned to orbit the earth spacex is challenging the industry by building rockets and main engines from scratch we're starting off with a small rocket delivering sort of smallish satellites to orbit and then we're going from that to a medium-lift rocket that's that's designed from the beginning to be capable of taking people to orbit you have to pay the big guns of the industry up to 60 million dollars to get your precious satellite afloat he says that's the result of bureaucracy and inefficiency even when elon gets his way this will change i think cost really matters with this month's launch spacex challenges the likes of virgin galactic and space adventures who took fellow billionaire mark shuttleworth to space in the soyuz built nearly 50 years ago the vehicle is archaic and should be upgraded fast says elon it's a bit of a clunker i mean the thing was designed in the 60s elon has its own views on mark's venture it doesn't do a great deal to advance the goal of humanity becoming space-faring civilization which is what my objective is with spacex an incredible vision and brave plans but were they going to fly now elon had enough finance for three failed launches but a tremendous amount was resting on the first test launch of falcon 1. the reason we started with a small launch vehicle is to be able to survive a problem on launch you know if we i want to be able to make sure we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures elon knew it wasn't going to be easy through a series of trials and attempts he did everything he could to get the first launch of falcon 1 off the ground november the 26th 2005 the very first launch of falcon 1 abandoned due to bad weather so that that's the really hard thing about rockets it's impossible to simulate the the flight path from from standing on the pad to going 25 times the speed of sound in a vacuum december the 19th 2005 the second attempt to launch falcon 1 scrapped due to a faulty valve it's like trying to balance a pencil and end of your finger in a hurricane it's humanly impossible human could not steer the rocket to to orbit for example so it was back to the drawing board february the 10th 2006 the third attempt confronted with a technical delay [Music] there's a hundred things that can happen one of them is success but success was proving to be elusive more tests to validate the rocket hardware launch day was drawing closer and tension was growing yeah definitely i think there's going to be you know a serious pucker factor on launch day then on the 25th of march the first launch of falcon 1 finally took place after just 29 seconds of flight the main engine failed leading to lots of the vehicle the first launch of falcon 1 was a failure for nearly a year no news came from spacex headquarters but behind the scenes the team was working day and night one down and the stakes were really high when elon and his team headed for the launch pad on the remote island of omalek was the second test launch of falcon 1 going to leave elon a hero of private commercial space flight or was he going to be the laughing stock of his well-heeled competitors five first station d-day the 20th of march this year and finally liftoff for elon and spacex we have liftoff falcon has cleared the tower velocity 128 meters per second altitude 2.6 kilometers vehicles passing through max q velocity 450 meters per second altitude 13. the first stage succeeded in going through the earth's atmosphere and into vacuum the second stage achieved rocket separation and then finally deployment stages are second stage ignition confirmed coming up on fairing separation feeling the pacific ocean far below and the curvature of the earth coming into focus as the spacecraft headed out fearing separation is confirmed this marked a near perfect flight just short to full orbital velocity vehicle velocity is 26 34 meters per second altitude 117 kilometers second stage engine performance nominal now you got to an altitude of what about 200 miles about 300 kilometers actually uh which is only it's less than 100 kilometers below this the international space station with this feat spacex has convinced key stakeholders that they have what it takes the vehicle has basically proven itself uh that's our view and that's also the view of our customers which is uh critical we've all of our customers very excited by the results of the test launch and ultimately this is all about business elon has put a lot of his own money on the line to follow his space dreams but he now has serious backers like the united states air force nasa also presented spacex with a contract with 278 million us dollars aimed at trips to the international space station in only a few days since the launch we've had four requests for proposal for additional missions some of your critics said that you didn't understand the whole space business you didn't understand the terms and the dangers what do you think they're saying now from these sort of independent observers out there they're pretty jaded because they've seen a lot of companies come and try to do this no one's been successful so why should we be any different and we have to you know prove it prove that we're going to be different how does this affect the countdown to this wonderful idea of space tourism i call it private space flight versus government space flight and you know falcon 1 is our test vehicle it's what we're using to really figure out all the technologies because falcon 1 is not designed to carry people but our falcon 9 big vehicle is now that the rich are clamoring for a trip to space when choosing to be taken for a ride costing millions it's important to know the difference between sub-orbital and orbital private space flight it's it's a huge huge difference a sub-orbital flight is basically like a cannonball shot they sort of punt you high in the air and then you fall back down that's really what's being sold by richard branson virgin galactic and you know some of the other people out there elon is proposing to deliver full orbital space travel within the next five years it's really i mean perhaps the difference between having a boat that can cross the english channel is sort of sub-orbital and a boat that can circumnavigate the globe is orbital do you think people like boeing and orion space are getting worried yeah i think boeing and ariane are to some degree concerned about spacex because i think they they would have a great deal of difficulty competing with us on on price are there other contenders that can still beat you to the finish line here i'm not really worried about any any of the competitors it's we're either going to do it or if we fail it'll be our fault

https://youtu.be/gVwmNaPsxLc

why don't we just bring up Elon Musk and we'll have a conversation about it welcome to web - Elon so I think I just want to start with with sort of the ultimate gadget like the the dream gadget the six-figure gadget with lots of scarcity so can we bring that picture up we queue the red sort of gadget porn there it is that's a Tesla Road roadster it costs a hundred and four thousand dollars 109 oh yeah although there is a tax credit that will take effect next year bring it down to about a hundred all right so we're still in the six-figure range you're making how many of them will make about twelve hundred a year maybe fifteen hundred year and and when you do make fifteen hundred a year you're going to make a profit on that yeah absolutely so tell me a little bit about this car give me the sort of gadget rundown like the the specs the stats how many cylinders does it have has no cylinders so the car John I mean really so the car is is really I could the elevator phrase is it's faster than a Ferrari more efficient than a Prius it's the zero to 60 time is three point nine seconds and we actually are working on a powerpack upgrade that'll take that down to about three point six to three point seven next year the energy efficiency in terms of miles per gallon equivalent is is about 130 so that's if you took a gallon of oil and you refined that to gasoline and transported to a gas station and how many miles do you get in a car versus you talk about gallon of oil electricity took the the transmission losses into account and then said how many miles do you get out of the car that's how you get the equivalency so it's about twice the energy efficiency of a Prius and and faster than any Ferrari except the Enzo so it's it's really pretty unique proposition but but we can't really get one I mean not only because it's a hundred grand which not everybody's got but you can only make so many of them yeah absolutely in fact one thing the important thing I forgot to mention is that the range is almost 250 miles and that's a combined highway city with the air conditioning on so and you and the charges built into the car so you can just plug it into any outlet like it's a hairdryer it's a hell of it yeah hairdryer or laptop you know it's a laptop with wheels and seats does it happen to have it does like I'm in you know cuz otherwise so yeah yeah so you know common thing we're here is well jeez this is available to a very small number of people it's clearly not going to change the climate and you know so what if a few rich people get energy-efficient to cars you just took my next question away right it's and it's important to emphasize that the point of Tesla the reason I funded it and put so much time and effort into it is is really to get to mass-market electric cars but to get to get there you need to start with something and if you look at any new technology development I think in almost any sphere you start with something which is expensive because its first the first thing is about making making with technology work and then you work that then you go from there to optimize the new technology I'm sure everybody remembers the early days of cell phones or laptops or even more directly and if people are aware of the history of internal combustion engine cars you would know that in the early days of gasoline cars they were considered toys for rich people because everybody else was driving it was riding a horse and and so you need to go through this phase of having an expensive car that is available to appear in order to get to the low cost car that's available to many so if you look at our next the next product we're coming out with which is the sedan and it's a five passenger luxury sports fan it's half the price of this of the Roadster it's called the Model S will be unveiling it in first quarter next year and that you know that cause are gonna be produced at more than ten times the volume of the Roadster so ramon's make about fifteen to twenty thousand cars a year and and it doesn't stop there our third model will be a low cost car that will be I think under $30,000 and and and that call be in the hundreds of thousands of units per year so let's talk a little bit about that because you've had some news in the last couple of weeks and it has been news consistent with pretty much all the rest of the news in the last couple of weeks some layoffs some delays in the S model yeah you you've sort of taken officially the title of CEO you've had a number of CEOs over last couple of years I imagine not easy to birth an entirely new car company it's been tried many times before and most times it doesn't work and they weren't trying to necessarily invent this at the same time so talk to me about why it was that you needed to raise more funds and why it is that you had to delay the ass yeah absolutely and it's true that the last time there was a successful mainstream car startup was was Jeep in 1941 so it's been a while but it's definitely it's a hard task and certainly III didn't actually I didn't think that this would be easy or anything like that but it seems as though if if action wasn't taken then if it was simply left up to Detroit I mean it would be waiting for a very long time well Detroit was in the offices of Nancy last night or yesterday with their tin cups out I mean they were really big cups right because apparently it's about 25 billion dollars that they want well they already have that but they want another 25 billion just so they can keep in business to get the 25 billion that they're gonna get next year I'm curious I mean you just had a round of layoffs see the way you did it was interesting you know sort of as I understand it a special forces approach like you sort of only the seals get through but the Marines and the Green Berets don't in terms of the staff that you kept but you've had a discussion over the last two days that certainly included the discussion of entrepreneurs and startups and the Sequoia memo and you know how do we cut but still go forward and so on how did you get through that is what you know and and and tell us a little bit about that process and what again why did you have to do it yeah well before the market Armageddon occurred the plan for Tesla was to raise about 100 million dollars and go full force into the Model S development we really into the expensive part of the Model S fell if you look at the development costs for something like like a like a car where you've got a lot of capital equipment it sort of looks like a like a hill you know you've got a long sort of tail and then when it comes time to buy all the factory equipment all that stuff you that's where you got to spend you know a couple hundred million dollars and so we intended to sort of get going with that at full force prior prior to the market collapse and then market collapsed and clearly that was that that would have been a very difficult strategy to execute and and so my gut tells me you could have probably raised the money yeah didn't want to give away the equity I think the pricing was too bad I think we the the I think we could have raised the money at very difficult terms essentially giving up control of company and and just with you know very difficult ratchets and all sorts of things involved you did pretty well before you started Tesla maybe you got it looked in the mirror and written yourself a check well I actually have done that so there's a certain point where your tolerance Achatz yeah it's but it's tough to carry it all your up the picture now cuz we got other things to talk about Thanks you can go to I mag Johnny cuz I know you like yeah sorry yeah well in effect that's what what we've done is rather than raise a hundred million we're raising what we have have reached have commitments for forty million from the existing set of investors which is a bunch of people apart from me man you know I'll be providing about you know sort of half that but the other half is coming from from the other investors so and that that's that's enough to certainly get the roads through business and our powertrain supply business when you say you have an outsourced or your your supplying supply to others right yes absolutely in fact that powertrain supply business is part of what will allow us to get to mass market affordable because that business is profitable right it is yes and we expect the rostral business to be profitable in the second quarter next year right so did you ever consider if they can afford a hundred and nine grand why not just price it at two hundred because anyone can I mean you have a waiting list of how long 1200 yeah no it's it's always tough figuring out pricing some people are relatively insensitive to pricing some people extremely sensitive to pricing we wanted the price of our car to be something that was comparable to the gasoline sports car like a Ferrari well it's we're actually cheaper than a Ferrari but but comparable to say of course you know if you look at a Porsche Turbo it's about a 125 thousand dollars so or Porsche 911s is you know high 90s so if we wanted to be something where it's in in the realm of good comparable price to it to other sort of normal sports cause apart from the super exotics I want to move on because we got a lot to talk about very quickly may just ask you again about inside of your philosophy around you couldn't raise that money you needed to lay off staff what was your approach to that so there are two parts to it one was sort of a reduction in force for people that were on them working on the Model S because we just can't afford to sustain you're a large group working in the white lace so we're not that down to about ten percent of the company working on the Model S and then we did an overall review of the company and I said look that let's just let's approach this from a standpoint of I wanted to accentuate the plus key that I have with companies in the startup phase which is which is a sort of Special Forces approach you know it's the the minimum passing grade is excellent and that's best you know it's just that's the way I believe sort of companies need to be if they're ultimately going to be large and successful companies and you know I think we would adhere to that to some degree but would straight from that path in in a few places and that that doesn't mean the people that we let go on that basis were would be considered bad you know just it's just a difference between sort of Special Forces and regular army if you're going to get through a really tough environment and can ultimately grow the company to something significant you have to have a very high level of dedication and talent throughout the organization let's I want to move on because we've got a lot to cover I want to talk a bit about solar Solar City so give us the sort of elevator pitch as to what what what that company does yeah absolutely and I do that it's worth noting you know from a business standpoint my time is split roughly evenly between Tesla and SpaceX right so Solar City I spend hardly any time on and deserve really hardly any credit for like the guys there are just phenomenally good I actually blow my mind so Solar City the value proposition that they have that they're the most efficient provider of solar powered systems for at the residential and small business level by a longshot and they also have a unique financing product which allows people to sign up the Scylla with no money down and your cost of electricity decreases so it's a no-brainer how do you say no to something like that in fact we're expecting similar city sales to actually accelerate within the recession because you saved money so how you know the Seoul city just did a financing round that was about 3x the round it did a year ago that makes it unusual yeah and we're expecting business to at least double in 2009 over 2008 so you say to that yeah so that sounds great too it sounds like if you could merge Solar City and Tesla you could have raised that so actually I had one last question about Tesla that I didn't get to which is maybe unfair but what's how did we get here not not the Tesla piece but how did the automobile industry and uh where it is like help help us understand what happened in Detroit such that we got to the point where the industry literally is not viable you know I I don't think I have a really great answer for that I think there's this issues with with organized labor and there are issues with entrenched management that still wants to run company like it's 1955 so you know there's too many country club memberships and and then and I think that in the manual management sort of focused on the wrong things but GM has this Volt project how is it you could get the Tesla up and running and and the transmission and the drive train done and they've been working on the Volt project seemingly for well at least for five years or something and actually that the both is real relatively new I think so the both is actually inspired by Tesla and Bob Lutz has gone on record as well that's right yeah that's yeah yeah so if that was one of the positive effects that I'd hoped Tesla why not just buy Tesla I'm not sure they could afford Tesla their market you guys get that because the market cap of GM right now is less than Burger King right its 2.8 billion that live well actually Michael Pollan this morning I probably that's probably a good thing that Burger King is market cap has been hammered as well but um yeah they're not they're a 2.8 billion or something like that so everyone's madly doing calculations right now on Tesla's value but yeah so the do you think the bolts going to work do you hope it's going to work if you hope it's gonna work absolutely yeah yeah my motive for project I'm a volunteer at this point there's nothing I want to buy personally that I can't buy and I don't really like yachts or anything like that and so my interest is is really from an environmental standpoint to some degree from a national security standpoint and then and then longer-term from an overall economic situation standpoint which is if you've got a non renewable fuel you better find our noble source or the economics gonna collapse down the road so my interest is like yeah what can we do to get as many you know renewable energy cars on the road as possible you know my personal belief in the in the right solution is electric cars and primarily solar power although windage if them were also good good options and and so one of the things I was hoping would occur would be that the logical companies would look at what Tess has done and and established electric car programs sooner than they might otherwise do so mm-hmm I mean they would eventually do so but if we could sort of show them that the technology is possible to make the technology work and that and that people want to buy electric cars when you do when you make him because previously the car industry had thought you can't make the technology work and even if you did people wouldn't buy it right so if we can prove those those Atlas the premises pulse then that would get the car industry moving in the direction of electric and that hasn't had some positive effect with with Duvall program which directly credits Tesla yeah you know so now what last question on the cars and we're gonna go to space Shay Agassi has coming later and and he's got another sort of an alternative approach to this particular sea simmering which is he you know the the battery pack per se is distinct from the car and there's service stations and a whole grid network and what do you make of that model and and you know do you think the two can coexist or is it one's gonna win and the other is not well I think you know what he's doing is somewhat orthogonal to us or perhaps of this rather in terms of being a competitor it's I think it's more of a sort of symbiotic thing that you know we're making electric cars he's not making electric cars he's helping wants to help build the infrastructure to swap out battery packs and have fast charge stations and that sort of thing we just have a model though right doesn't know just make cars no he's working with some of the other car makers to encourage them to make electric cars but but he's not himself an electric car maker so do you think it's going to work his model yeah I think yes eventually the question is one of timing you know you know we don't have the cart before the horse and so I think what he's doing is right really it's just time will tell whether this is it's a thing to do now or think to you later so let's swap to another really big or potentially really big industry I mean it is a very big industry but it's a mostly government industry which is using lots and lots and lots of gas to hurdle things into space right Rockets right so why did you decide that this was an interesting industry to try to reinvent well so you're winners in college they were sort of I try think of what one of the things that would most change the future of humanity and that the three things I came up with were the internet transitioning to a sustainable energy economy a space exploration in particular the extension of life to multiple planets I didn't really think I'd be involved in the third one I wasn't even sure about the second one but the first one fortunately the Internet you get something started with very little capital so you did a couple of internet companies and that that give me a capital to to work on the clean energy stuff which is where the Solar City and Tesla come in and then the third element was space and yeah I just think it's important that we we make progress in space and that we're you know ultimately that we're on a path so if you sort of put sort of project outwards and extrapolate forward you can see that one day we would be a spacefaring civilization and that there would be life on one many planets life as we know it at least on many planets I think that's just a very exciting future compared to one where life never gets beyond Earth and and they were all the defense of arguments for that of course of like well you know his life going to end on earth and maybe we should sort of back up the biosphere like like sometimes call it you know if you back up your hard drive maybe you should back up life too so I think those defensive arguments are good I mean they're they're valid and and all that but I I'm much more the thing that sort of gets gets me excited is really the the positive side of it of the much greater richness in the scope and scale of life and you know by by being out there and being as making life multiple planets space very gonna be a little stymied here but I mean usually when we imagine what you're talking about we then write a series like Star Trek or we you know we have you know almost every popular culture projection of what you're discussing has men and women in government uniforms right you know out there exploring on behind a civilization back home but you're a matte you're trying to do this as a private enterprise well we have got we have lots of government customers all that we have both your commercial and government customers so tell me practically you know get us to space through Spacek slike how does this happen you're in the early phase I understand and you just had your first launch right well actually with our fourth launch but I first time to orbit so SpaceX is about six years old started from scratch never I never built any physical hardware myself and you know just although I do have a physics background and grew up in a very engineering centric household so you know more an engineer than anything else I guess but you know starting sewing SpaceX I didn't really know no know that much about its space engineering or rocket engineering but I learned quite a lot and as it turns out I wasn't able to hire anyone to be the chief designer of the rocket so I ended up being that myself so like a kid in the backyard products yeah we probably would've gotten to a little bit sooner if I'd been able to hire someone but I wasn't able to so we got to overt enough fourth attempt or would you say it's but it's hard to get to orbit by the way this is the first well I haven't tried but at least not in a rocket I'm a little bit speechless the idea that you know I mean it's rather audacious and I asked Lance Armstrong this question but I'll ask you as well and how much of this is ego I mean it's probably some some meaningful amount of the ego I suppose but yeah it's not go to college and the years smoke and join it like midnight and you're like I think I'll reinvent space first the Internet then then I'll do the energy economy then I'll deal with interplanetary travel haha I'm pretty sure all of us had that moment in college but the only guy actually trying to do it well yes well actually when I thought about it in college it wasn't from a standpoint of I'm gonna go get these things done it was it was really these are just these are what I think are the most important things it's almost certain I will not be involved in at least the space part of it probably not the renewable energy part of it and hopefully the Internet and if I do the internet thing hope they can make enough money to pay the rent that was actually I was not my favorite of mine to be clear wasn't the internet thing worked out pretty well it did but you know I started in 95 and and nobody made any money on the internet and even in Silicon Valley you know we went to bench capitalists in 95 and that sort of heard of the internet most of them weren't even using it and and even if the internet did become widespread or nobody make any money on it and the Netscape went public and that kind of changed people's mindset and I figured at least from Stanford the greater fool theory like even if there's internet scam Internet companies can make money at least some fools willing to pay a lot you know if they go public and so that that good things more and more should but really my perspective was starting my first company it was hopefully I can make enough money to pay the rent and buy food otherwise I would have to go and go to my graduate program at Stanford we're just fine that's sort of my final option graduate program at Stanford seems to be the launchpad for an awful lot of things yeah somewhere cliche at this point yeah you know we're actually we're running out of time but and and you still haven't told us exactly how we're gonna get to space but I know that well at least somebody's gonna be able to get that tour of SpaceX factory which is part of the often auction thank you very much for that I I know I'm being told but it's my show so let's have a couple questions and then and and then we'll let Elon go over here why aren't they I'm sure you'd love to do deal with all of them right so yeah sure absolutely what why aren't well are they in there sort of it and I know invented here I don't know we actually I should say we do have a deal with a major car company it's not a u.s. car company I I can't say who it is but it's pretty if you google around you'll just easy to figure it out haha no Monda wrong hemisphere you know but I'm very excited by that that relationship because it has potential to provide a viable electric car for around $8,000 smart okay I'm gonna stop we have a question over here but essentially for being a pumpkin kind of skiing operation but the article is actually pretty cool too of the hole that they're part of mystery for not following these guys out so my question to you is will you call that out well yeah I mean is that is is it does not have a track record of delivering what they say you know yeah I mean I would you on must to do I guess that is a call out in this guy's book yeah I mean good good I mean if anyone's curious and I think the wired article is reasonably accurate so yeah it's unfortunate we did face the problem with Tesla in the beginning of having to deal with the fact that that many prior electric car companies had been sort of scams or a lot of vaporware and stuff and and the you know with with Tesla having had a bunch of delays and and let it did hurt us perceptually but fortunately we're now in production at ten cars a week and that'll be ramping up to 30 cars a week by early next year and so you're gonna start seeing a lot of these cars on the road yeah so at least it's you know it's real and that I think the people that know me know that you know I might be a little optimistic on schedules but I always deliver right I'm sorry we can't take any more questions but I'm I'm kittens are being threatened to be killed back there I don't if I don't wrap this up so thank you very much Elon for coming you

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we have two all-star panels ahead of us the next one is going to talk about a kind of futurology and potential that seems weirdly underappreciated at the moment but I think therefore is due for a revival this is the potential of space to deal with the issues we've been discussing which we all have to confront this was the excitement of my childhood era and I think it has potential to be exciting again we have three three wonderful panelists one of them is Elon Musk who's known in this business as the co-founder of PayPal he also has been a leader in electric vehicles with Tesla and for our purposes he is a serious entrepreneur in the space trap his SpaceX company has won the competition to design and build the successor to this space shuttle when it retires the other is Peter Dieppe - excuse me the amanda's who's been for 20 years a leader and pioneer in the business of personal spaceflight he arranged among others the recent trip of Charles Simonyi to the space station he's the chairman of the XPrize Foundation which offers cash prizes for breakthrough innovation the moderator is the universally known and admired John Doerr of kleiner perkins so please join me in welcoming our three panelists good afternoon and it's great to see all of you especially in an intimate setting like this it's gonna be fun we're talking with two amazing entrepreneurs two rocket scientists two visionaries and a struggling venture capitalist who's always looking for great entrepreneurs like I'm seated next to you today Peter Diamandis is the head of the XPrize organization he's a an adventure capitalist in his own right and will hear in a moment about the innovation that he's been able to inspire with a very innovative way of getting corporations not just individuals to go after great Grand Challenges now besides the XPrize he's also the founder of zero gravity company and another firm called space adventures we'll hear from him in just a second and then we have Elan musk who is a founder of PayPal and now the chairman of Tesla and of Solar City but has come with us today to talk about Mars and why we why we would go to Mars so as we begin these conversations I understand you can text questions you can start doing that right now so we cover them in our conversation and I've asked both Peter and Elon to kick things off by telling us one thing about themselves that almost no one knows great I guess at the age of eight or nine years old I probably had about 20 pounds of potassium perchlorate sodium magnesium potassium nitrate I was probably a teenager or a sub teenage terrorist I'd be arrested on the spot right now I used to build my own rockets and and you know and we I get I get you know five pound box is a potassium perchlorate which has a great you know it generates its own oxygen it's so you can blow it up underwater it's really cool and what was the most explosive event my friend blew up is his hand he was fine he's fine haha second-degree burns he was its hydrophilic so he was crushing it up and did you provide him the Gunpowder we were sort of building our Rockets together no rocket boys you know on Wow I had almost exactly the same experience and a friend of mine will also burn his hand well but tell us something else about you so I been to Burning Man 9 times and I have an electric rocket art car Burning Man 9 times yeah electric rocket art car yeah did you take that to Burning Man yeah after you did come back I think so did it win the next prize while it was yeah a matter of speaking yeah very cool so there's a common theme in here they're crazy and they're both interested in space why space well I think that everything we hold a value on this planet metals minerals energy real estate is in near infinite quantities in space the first trillionaires be made in space and I think I want to steal ilana thunder but I think it's a moral obligation for the human race some small percentage of us to be thinking about where humanity needs to go next I have two halves of my life if I can just speak for that before entering this video one is the XPrize foundation in which we look at what are the biggest challenges we have in humanity what are the problems and how can we incentivize those with a large cash prize that says I don't care where you're from where you went to school what you've ever done if you solve this problem you win the money and we did that first with the Ansari XPrize for Space Flight that no one believed it could be done in fact we funded with a hole in one insurance policy because insurance company believed it was impossible it would ever be won and we have four areas exploration we are doing space with the Google Lunar XPrize Google's the sponsor of that as Sylvia knows where we're going down to oceans and she's chairing our oceans XPrize steering committee Thank You Sylvia in life sciences we have an active prize called the archon XPrize for genomics first-person sequence 100 genomes in ten days and Craig Venters are heading that up and then energy the environment and global development and my other half of my life is trying to create the markets in space taking people there so we fly people in zero-gravity flights and in orbital flights to the space station and do you give miles not yet not yet so there's a video you want to show I'd love to show a short video to punctuate some of those and give you a visuals so if we could run the first video some Ansari X PRIZE footage from four years ago so this is a spaceship one flying on second time 200 kilometers built by a Burt Rutan funded by Paul Allen we had a hundred million dollars spent to win a ten million dollar prize and there's been arguably over a million dollars invested we have our lunar lander challenge john carmack you might know is going after this this is a launching capabilities equivalent to landing on the lunar surface and of course the 30 million dollar Google Lunar XPrize we have at this point 13 registered teams we've had over 1200 teams from 70 countries around the world and this is you have to all you have to do is go to the moon land send back the moon cast row for a half a kilometer and send back another moon cast mention zero-g here we are we operate we flew Stephen Hawking last year out of the Kennedy Space Center some images of him yet an amazing time we plan to do one parabola we ended up doing eight somebody you know who's been flying with us before and on the orbital side we've flown five people to orbit to the space station with the Russian Soyuz here it is our sixth customer is going up next month and this is really can we create the marketplace and get it out of the hands of the government into the commercial markets can't we absolutely no question about it it's just a matter of grading the marketplace that brings capital like yours into it it's it's creating the gold rush and the land rush again there is huge value an average half kilometer asteroid is worth something like 20 trillion dollars but we'll get to that later we'll come back to that we'll come back to that Elon why space sure so I think space is extremely important but first you have to go the definition of importance and say why is anything important and if you usually that the lens of history and you zoom out far I think you can distinguish the less important from the more important if you zoom out really far and look at the four billion year history of Earth and the evolution of life itself and say what are the major milestones in the evolution of life itself I mean obviously there's single-celled life multicellular life there's a differentiation of plants and animals this life going from the oceans to land there's mammals and consciousness so maybe a half a dozen or so really big milestones in the history of life and I think on that scale would also fit the expansion of life to multiple planets it'd be at least as important as life going from the oceans to land and arguably more important because you could easily you know if you're going from oceans to land and got a lot comfortable on the land you could jump back in the water but that's not something you could do with going to another planet in fact I think going to extending life the mobile planet really requires consciousness as a precursor so if we've got something that's that's so important that would fit on it be one of the half dozen or so most important milestones in the history of life itself that's pretty darn important and it goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity it's something that is of importance to life in general so that's why I think it's an it's important to do and this is the first time in the four billion year history of Earth that has been possible so and how long will it will it remain possible I mean if if things go well obviously it will be possible for a long time but if things if something unfortunate were to happen it could that tiny tiny window that just just opened for the first time in four billion years could close so your notion of space and time is we got to get there now and be able to stay there yes because we may not be able to go there again yes it's exactly if it's I mean I'm actually an optimist so I actually think that the the things will go fairly well on earth I don't and this is not to suggest complacency because there are very important issues with the climate being probably number one in terms of earthly issues yeah but I you know but I think if this is the first time four billion years that life has had the possibility of doing that yeah we should take advantage of that of that little window and just in case of disclose because exchange multiple planets is the surest gives us the surest chance of life lasting for a very long time because there's always the possibility certainly life as we know it of of some either natural disaster or potentially man-made disaster that that extinguishes life and and that would be bad probably probably so yeah video you mine shows yeah absolutely roll the this is a SpaceX video which is it was actually done by SpaceX in collaboration with NASA and so we buy it we roll video to from space thank you yes so this is courtesy of NASA who paid for the video the launch pad you see there is launch pad 40 at Cape Canaveral so that's where we'll be launching our big rocket the Falcon 9 next year will be the of the maiden launch here of doing stage separation second stage ignition and then separation of the Dragon spacecraft from the second stage now approaching the International Space Station this is a real physics simulation so and this is not an artist's impression or something like that this is all the real engineering solid models of the station and of the rockets and with a you know real physics involved what does it cost to make one of these Rockets sell well of the the price high volume well it could be much lower cost in high volume but the price for Falcon Lion the booster is about forty million dollars and it's actually about the same for the Dragon spacecraft because there's a lot of complex avionics and ducting systems and so forth even though it's relatively small which is not too bad I mean it's comparable to a corporate jet right so and and actually in the world of rocketry those is a bargain that that's a really elastic you pay for a Lockheed or Boeing booster of the same capability about 160 million pretty good so we're about a fourfold difference from 75% off yeah absolutely and this is a for-profit business it is in fact we've been profitable for the last geez two years so yeah so that's good that may be the very the neatest trick in rocketry let's go to this original question why space from the following lens we have a we're gonna hear in a little bit from Al Gore we have a planet that is in peril yeah you connect the climate crisis to space or are they really separate well it's agendas in your life definitely if if we are able to establish life on another planet which is like Mars is the only realistic possibility and it's very difficult it requires us to learn a lot about climate and and maintaining the climate equilibrium so there's a huge a huge amount of that would learn in trying to establish life in a hostile environment right that we could translate back to earth so I think there is there is that connection and then of course if things do really go to hell in a handbasket here at least a few of those life is or not it would backed up the biosphere you know so you know you're not more concerned about the primary store here well I think the the most important earthly problem is is climate but if forced to choose I would say establishment of multiple planets is is is more important but this is sort of like saying do you like your mom your dad more you know I mean somewhat of a you know awful choice to make correct the two of you disagree on one thing and you're very excited about Mars and you're very excited about getting out of the gravity well of Earth I think zero gravity well basically getting out of the gravity well of Earth and being able to build the biospheres the facilities if you would is a line of work by Gerard K O'Neill talking about building civilizations and such how the asteroids and asteroid belts in getting instead of getting back into the biosphere or the gravity well of another planet but once you can do one you can do pretty much the other I think if you're trying to solve all of our problems within the constraints that we have you're limiting yourself where you don't need to we don't have the resources we need to bring everybody in a planet up to the standards of living that we have here in America and I think that being able to look at space the same way that we look at Alaska we purchased Alaska in 1800s Seward's folly as this distant desolate wasteland and then we build the roads to get there and now we extract energy bridges you know we're and to Russia it's very close by but on a serious point when we build the infrastructure to get there we now extract resources that benefit the rest and we'll do the same in space we'll bring resources from Mars back to bat or not not from ours Mars do you offer miles maybe okay questions you can text those to 9 0 8 2 2 and so I have an announcement to make here today is do we have any news yeah yeah III do as you know we are in the business of getting people to the space station we offer a seat and we offer a back up position and somebody here in the audience is going to be training in Moscow very shortly to go to eventually fly and if that person would please stand up so we are looking forward to offering Esther frequent flyer miles that she goes to Moscow to train Esther what what were you thinking when you decided to buy that can we have a microphone here please thank you very much oh right there excellent well when I was growing up I fully expected to go to the moon but I didn't think I need to do anything in particular to do it and then I got distracted by some other interesting things and now I have the chance to not get to go up but you know the old joke about God please let me win the lottery and God says so did you buy a ticket and I'm buying a lottery ticket it's only a backup cuz I can't afford the 40 million Peter maybe it will go down with but you should remember than anusha I'm sorry was the backup I know before Japanese and he got ill and she went orbit I'm remembering one out of four and one out of five chance it's pretty good is is the backup deposit applicable to a full flight the backup deposit that vehicle it should be the vehicle is going with or without and we'll cut Esther a good deal all right it depends on the timing okay very very cool any other news that's late-breaking news yeah well actually one thing I forgot to mention is like the naming of Falcon 9 and dragon you know what house-wide name i boosted Falcon 1 and 1 dragon so Falcons named after the Millennium Falcon you know Star Wars because Falcon do do the castle on 7 parsecs mookee yeah and then dragon was actually named after a Puff the Magic Dragon because so many people thought I'm a smoking weed so and that the next name will be yeah good question I don't know if it's something like that suggestion nominations for the name of spacecraft just put your hand in the air shout it out yep Bristol Bristol why Bristol Palin Palin there's a good name back there Larry brilliant lucy x okay so we have some questions yes actually sorry and there's a news item which is that we're the next falcon one launch is on the launch pad at a tower on our island and quadrant the Kwajalein on the pad now yeah on the pad right now there was one that went up that didn't go with it we've had three test launches so far the flight 2 & 3 made it to space but not to full orbital velocity so we're hoping flight four makes it to full orbital velocity and we've not yet put out a press release or anything but we'll publish something on the website probably later today that the next Falcon 1 flight is on the launch pad on our honor island in the quad in the at all and that it will be launching in about a week excellent well you heard it here first let's go to some questions here's to Elon when will there be life on Mars oh when I think I think it's possible we could send the first people to Mars within 15 to 20 years and what do you think it will cost them when people are buying tickets to Mars it's heavily dependent on the launch rate and whether we're able to make a fully reusable Launch System in fact the fundamental breakthrough that's necessary to extend life beyond Earth is a reusable large system and that that's never been achieved even for low Earth orbit no one has ever made a reusable system Jeff Bezos building a reusable Launch System blue I think yes I mean Jeff and I have almost exactly the same philosophy as far as the importance of extending life beyond Earth so but but what Jeff's doing is suborbital and subbable is much much easier than an orbital in fact to just to put a to give some sense for this to get to do a suborbital flight you need to get to about Mach 3 to do an orbital flight and this was full o earth o bikini to get Mach 25 and the but the energy required goes is the square of the velocity so you only need 9 units of energy in one case at 625 leave and in the right yeah it's it's a basically you know any less than 2% of the energy to get to do some vocal flight and and then of course if you want to reenter and be alive you need to shield yourself against that energy because you come in like a like an meteor like a meteor or an asteroid which actually goes to the next topic Peter you said something about an asteroid is worth a trillion dollars which got my attention these things regularly come in and burn up don't they we're basically bombarded by small small rocks that burn up in the atmosphere but there's millions of asteroids of various sized sudden become very close to the earth and they come in different shapes flavors and sizes some are carbonaceous chondrites which are dirty ice balls others are nickel ma and nickel iron and some of them are basically past planetary cores that have on the order of a 50,000 time enrichment and platinum group metals over our our platinum lines here and an average half kilometer size asteroid of that type is worth somewhere between 20 to 30 trillion dollars now my plan is do we have that much demand for platinum well my plan is actually to buy puts on the market announce the mission and then finance it and go but it half kilometer asteroid of that type represents all the platinum that's been mined to date are your transactions gonna be federally insured so do you guys believe in life on other planets doing dude rugby but there is life yeah I think there's a there's a high probability of some kind of primitive life form somewhere on a somewhere in other planets but it's most likely the bacterial you know the if you look at the history of life on Earth there was really pretty much simple single-celled primitive bacteria for the vast majority of the time and then then there was an explosion into multicellular and more complex life forms but do I believe there's intelligent life out there that that's perhaps within reasonable or any kind of possible reach of Earth it's not no I'm okay anywhere in the entire universe that's right you know it's probably more likely than not but that's a complete guess yes sorry yes I I hope there is but this we have no evidence right now of any life whatsoever other than on earth I think life's ubiquitous the universe I think it is a force and force of nature if you look at the that the elements required to form life like human life we had that two billion years into the evolution of our stars our planets started basically ten billion years ago is five billion years we have intelligent life four and a half billion years into our process so life could have had an eight billion year head start in other parts of the universe so I think it's ubiquitous I think we're that's a long conversation good where are they where we don't talk about a little bacteria in there let me come back to paral paral imperiled planet Earth what can we learn from what you're doing it's directly applicable to the climate crisis right now on the space stuff no well it's definitely space has been very helpful in assessing the state of the climate on earth I mean there's if you the satellites up there that measure the oceans and atmosphere have been critical to our understanding of the changes that are taking place on earth and so I mean it's SpaceX we will be launching some of those satellites in the future so I think that's perhaps in the more in the near term directly particular stuff the conversation we just had with Vice President Gore in the green room talking about the fact that being able to visualize Earth and do the energy balance you can't fix what you can't measure and so when the very first things is to get his satellite Triana or some other commercial satellites up there ASAP so we have that the data set to understand where as Andy Grove said an Intel behaved if you don't measure it it doesn't matter and it's true absolutely let's close with the following how about a 20 second update on Tesla uh-huh Wow okay Tesla in production at tank cars a week with the Roadster just announced at 90-acre headquarters in San Jose and I'm an EVA Bensel Oh 1212 hundreds wrote Susie and the prices 109,000 and if I ordered the 12 hundredths and one how long would it take to get about 10 months 10 months and if I multiply those numbers I get the revenue yeah plate 200 million next year Samantha yeah Tero million 200 million or so yeah experience Peter the most exciting 2x prizes the goal right now is to do something significant in the in the energy environment space we have were looking at in life sciences cancer in healthcare will be announcing something big there shortly and so it's it's exciting to say what do people care about where can we launch in the in the future very large cash prizes that changed the way people view problems well let the games begin let the prizes be awarded and friends join me in thanking both Elon and Peter

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it's my pleasure to be here with you on Musk Jane provided I thought a great introduction but I just wanted to add one more thing before we get to questions when he one was 23 he he got out of college he went to San Francisco the Bay Area with a car a computer and $2,000 yes right and he started a company called zip - it was sort of like what the early Yahoo was it was an online directory four years later when he was about my age he sold the company for just over 300 million dollars to Compaq and I bring this up not because it was the largest Internet company acquisition at the time but because he's done so much stuff since then that nobody even remembers this this initial success screw zip - doesn't get much play so I'm gonna ask him some questions we're gonna go through he's got you know as Jane said three mind-blowing companies and then hopefully we'll have some time for you all to ask him some questions so start thinking and we'll get to those so I'm gonna put up something that probably looks familiar to most people here this is the home page of PayPal in 2000 even was a co-founder and the company was sold to eBay in OH - for 1.5 billion dollars and we all know what PayPal is today but I was hoping you could sort of share with us kind of what your vision was from the beginning well it certainly evolved over time initially the I well after signs up - I want to do something more in the Internet and it seemed to me that they hadn't been all that much innovation in the financial sector and given that money is kind of a just an entry in a database and it was low bandwidth he said it wouldn't didn't require some big infrastructure upgrades the internet it seemed it should lend itself to innovation so try to think of what could be you know what were something compelling it could be done and I thought well if we can combine all all types of financial services in one so you have like the mortgages and like basically all your your tire financial relationship seamlessly integrated together in one place online that would be cool and then there was a little feature that just seems like an obvious feature which was ability to transfer money from one person to another but by entering unique identifiers like a email address there was like this is sort of a little feature but then whenever we demonstrate the product people wouldn't get excited about the consolidated financial services but they would get excited about emailing money so he's sort of focusing on all right energy on that and that really ended up being the big driver of growth right so it sort of went from a super bank like a super financial services thing yeah to to really narrowly focusing on email payments so although I should point out that actually a lot of people aren't aware that a lot of success of PayPal is due to the underlying financial services that are there such as the money market fund which is one of the highest yielding in fact I think the highest yielding in the country and the fact that there's a PayPal debit card that's which operates off the MasterCard system so you can you can buy things you know buy things in the real world and get cash from an ATM that directly taps into your into your PayPal account those are actually very important to the PayPal business model right so you were CEO of a company for most of 2000 I think yeah you went and 99 and 99 years PayPal merged or sorry Ewan's company merged with another company go Korea it became PayPal he was running the company he went on an investment raising trip and when he got back uh-huh what happened well yeah so [Laughter] you know I think it's not a good idea to leave the office when there are like a lot of major things underway which are causing people a great deal of stress yeah but it was a combination of needing to raise money and I had not I've gotten married earlier that year and not had any vacation or honeymoon or anything so it was kind of a combined financing trip through honeymoon yeah and anyway but away for two weeks and there was just so much that there was just a lot of worry and that that caused the management team to decide that I wasn't the right guy to run the company and and so the board was like you know geez what do we do so basically I could I could afford it really hard but instead I took you know rather than fight it at this critical time best to sort of concede it's amazing to me how you managed when I first asked you about this you said you buried their hatchet um and you know one of the basically the person who replaced you just put I think 20 million dollars or so into your company and yeah how did you get past that kind of betrayal I mean how did you how did you guys patch it up yeah that's actually an interesting story well well I didn't agree with their conclusion I understood why they took the action they did and they're not you know Peter and Max and David and the other guys not I mean they're smart people with generally the right motivations they did what they thought was was right and I think for the right reasons I mean except that the reasons what word valid in my opinion but it's hard to argue with the ultimate outcome which is which is positive you know I just thought you know it's just easy to be better and and and have I just hate them forever but you know it's best that the right better course of action is to any other cheek and and sort of you know may make the relationship good and and it was you know but I put a lot of effort into sort of making things good and yeah and then yeah actually recently the Founders Fund which is comprised primarily of X PayPal people including Peter who replaced me a CEO invested in SpaceX yeah and I invested in Peter's things before that so I want to put up something about what this you know PayPal sale to eBay helped make possible tell us tell us what we're looking at that's the Tesla Roadster which is the world's first production electric sports car and how much does it cost give us the sales pitch okay they just opened a dealership so he should be good at this yeah actually I've sold a lot of cars so the Tesla Roadster is the the nut that then nut shell that you know the elevator speech thing is that the roadster is faster than a Ferrari and more efficient than a Prius so it actually has better acceleration than any Ferrari except the Enzo and it's about 3.9 seconds zero to 60 and that that actually understates the true acceleration because 0-60 for gasoline cars measured from when the wheels start moving but the wheels only stop moving when you engage the clutch and it typically takes about a quarter second or more to engage the clutch but there's no clutch it for our car it's direct drive so you don't have a clutch engagement delay so it's it's like again call with a 0-60 of about 3.6 seconds and it's good incredibly good handling and then the the energy efficiency of the car is the most amazing thing it only costs four dollars at current California rates to go to about 250 miles so the range the current EPA rated range which is a combination of highway and city with the ekend ition agon is 244 miles so it's amazing so this is I mean it's so cool it cost one hundred nine thousand dollars yeah anybody's interested it's expensive but it's comparable to like a Porsche 911 you know so we want to have something which was in the price range of a comparable gasoline car that it could you know probably beat and you know so that's that's key because it's one thing to have a compelling product but it has to be compelling product a compelling price right you uh in in the press obviously this this has gotten a lot of attention and you ons taking a lot of flack for various redesigns you've sort of been you've been portrayed as a micromanager you know redesigning the headlights or whatever throws an a no manager I've improved service attitude so why why does the car need to be perfect I mean why did you need to redesign you know the doors for instance well first of all the car is definitely not perfect okay in fact I one of the things that that troubles me personally is like when I see a product I sort of immediately see a readout of all the floors I need to reprogram myself or remind myself like a look at the good things as well so it's certainly far from perfect but the the acceptance I mean fundamentally if you don't have a compelling product at a compelling price you don't have a great company and that's that was really my gate the gate that the product at the car had to pass through and so there were things like the dorsals because we used a a chassis that was inherited from Lotus Elise in retrospect we should have completely redesigned the car and not and not use any Elise that componentry because we really it sort of like you go into a house and you think you'll just change this that and it'll be okay and then you end up changing everything in the house it would've been better just level the house and start and you do something new because the car al cars 30% heavier the load points are all different so we had to really redesign a chassis and one of the things I said we've got to do is to lower the door sills and as it is that dorsals still too high but if I'd say imagine if they're two inches higher because that's what they were made it made it almost unusable in my view yeah I mean the what-what do you want I think you were quoted saying something like DeLorean failed because yeah they built a bad car yes and you need to the car needs to be worth one hundred nine thousand dollars absolutely absolutely exactly if you don't exactly we did not want to create another DeLorean and the DeLorean kind of looked kind of cool but it was really weak on it on performance yeah it was unreliable and there were lots of little issues with the car and we just didn't want to be in that situation and it's not like I mean we could have built a worst car and still sold a bunch of them but if you don't sell enough to make it make the business look attractive to future investors you're not gonna attract the capital to take it to the next level or even to sustain where it is how many orders have you taken it's 1200 1200 deposits Wow so we only take orders when so he puts down at A+ at least $5,000 yeah so I'm gonna move to another company but you told me that the last successful car startup was Jeep in 1941 yeah in the u.s. yeah in the u.s. so doesn't that kind of say something bad about going to the car business I mean why why go for this well it certainly I would not have done this if it were a gasoline car so this is not about it's not because I thought the world had a shortage of sports cars that we started sort of Tesla it's because it's very important that we accelerate the transition away from gasoline you know for environmental reasons for economic reasons for national security reasons it's very very fundamental and frankly yeah so you know even even if you don't think leaving the environmental reasons should I believe in the national security issues reasons it's obviously gasoline oil is not a renewable resource and sooner or later the economic issues are going to cause a collapse of the economy literally a collapse of the economy if if we don't find find an alternative because you'll be paying 20 30 $40 gas gas thing if stuffs going to get you know it's going to start approaching the price of gold I mean it's gonna be crazy so we got to find a renewable alternative and the the good that Tesla's doing is not just Tesla's what worked has does itself it's the example that Tesla sets for the rest the industry in fact people have probably seen the announcement for the Chevy Volt well Bob lights the Bob let's is the champion of the Chevy Volt and he credits Tesla with the twist was starting that the getting a Chevy Volt started because when we unveiled our Tesla Roadster a couple years ago he saw the press release he took the Tesla press release went to his developing guys and said if a little company in California can do this why can't we and that's what prompted the Chevy Volt yeah well let's talk about how we power these things oh that's it that's a picture of the workshop in or just south of San Francisco right and then this is another company that you on it's probably one that you're maybe least involved with on a day-to-day basis yeah but it's it's Solar City and sort of the elevator pitch for this one as you've told it to me before is you know you're gonna do for solar power what Dell did for computers which is such a nice way of putting it and I was hoping you could just unpack that for us a little bit certainly well Dell doesn't make the CPU or the hard drive or the memory but they put it all together and they manage the relationship with the end customer and they manage the service and and and all that and it that's a very important element because if you had to go to Intel and buy your CPU and somewhere else and buy your you know harddrive and put that all together very few people would have computers yeah so Solar studies about packaging that all making it really easy to use oh just basically make one call it's just seamless and painless and then they also have a lot of innovation on the financing front so they did a three hundred million dollar debt facility with Morgan Stanley that allows the the end consumer to to sign up for solar power put no money down and your utility bill decreases so it's a complete no-brainer now it doesn't work for every house because your house has to be you know South Face you know have us have a south-facing roof and be of sufficient size and and you have to be in an area where electricity is not super cheap yeah but it works for a lot a lot of houses and you know maybe a third third of the house in California something like that and so they've just enjoyed phenomenal growth I mean they're literally growing as fast as they can hire good people and I mean the numbers for the month of August came in and solar cities as big as the next five solar power providers combined in California so and all credit to them I mean really phenomenal job I mean III was sort of weigh in every now and again like yeah what a how about this so how about that but really I deserve very little critter you know managing there no not at all yeah thank goodness so Jane brought up Mars in our introduction and uh you know you got out of PayPal with and zip to you know with a lot of money and I think I'm sure people in this room have had this happen to them and and many people will have it happen sometime in the future I hope and instead of buying mutual funds or I don't know doing whatever one does with several hundred million dollars you decided to I'm expect securities whether they're great you you decided to start a rocket company with the express purpose of well making it cheaper to get stuff in outer space and then eventually going to Mars or helping humanity go to Mars and I just wanted to know you know why why do that it isn't obvious well when I was in college there was sort of three areas that I sort of what's really going to affect the future humanity in a significant way the three things that seem to be most significant to me were the Internet the transition to a sustainable energy economy and the third was the extension of life beyond Earth becoming multiplanetary I didn't think I'd be involved in at all in option three but the reason I think it's important is it is it goes to how we decide that anything is important and the lens of history is a good way to distinguish what seems important in the moment from what is truly important over the long term and if you zoom out and look at a long enough period of time I said a four billion year history of Earth and the evolution of life itself then there's only about half dozen or so major of milestones in the you know history of life there's obviously single-celled life all facility life differentiation to plants and animals the transition from oceans to land mammals consciousness and so and then also on that scale would fit life becoming multiplanetary it would be I think at least as important as life going from the oceans to land and probably more important or more significant because at least that that was a gradual transition if you didn't if you if if land was if things got a little uncomfortable on land you could just hop back in the ocean and that's not really feasible on interplanetary journeys so you know here we are it's sort of the first time in the four billion year history of Earth that life has been able to go beyond Earth and that that window may be open for a long time and I'm optimistic that I hope it will and I'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth but something may happen that that closes that window and prevents us prevents life from extending beyond Earth and that risks the extension of life or at least consciousness as we know it and that would be a terrible thing life is a terrible thing to waste you know I want to give people a sense of of what kind of we're talking about so we just have a short oh this is you know building the rocket and this should give people a sense [Music] so so that's your rocket and and that launched yeah that that launched what about three three weeks ago or four weeks ago yeah and we'll get to what happened but I just want to ask you I mean watching that in and and when you watch that for the first time the first your first rocket went in oh five I believe or right I mean how did that how did you feel you know a hundred million dollars years of work and you know you're shooting something you know in the air I mean it must have been amazing yeah it's pretty nerve-wracking that's for sure the the pucker factor on launch day is very high so you know something well yeah I mean you know I'm actually should be said I'm actually kind of like a physics guy I mean I'm good engineer really and I do kind of the business stuff because you know you kind of have to do the business stuff or if you don't do the business stuff somebody else can't do it for you and then then you could be in trouble and I actually the chief designer of the rocket I mean I could tell you I could redraw that rocket without without benefit of blueprints for the most part yeah so it's like seeing my baby go up there you know and it's it's pretty scary so so there been three flights so far and and each one is has obviously the goal is to get into orbit each one is sort of not made it how did you deal with the get to space okay you got to space but it didn't you didn't get where you want it to go not all the way sorry well you know necessarily go all the way on the first few days SpaceX has [Laughter] get a worker way up there so but it certainly flights two and three got to well into well beyond the boundaries of space didn't get to full a little velocity though yeah but I mean you've got sex has several hundred employees and and obviously you said it was like your baby I mean how did you deal with it personally and then how did you deal with the company as a manager sort of helping them get past it and helping your customers get past it obviously to to keep their money because nobody's taking their money out of a sex they've sold twelve flights and none of the customers have asked for their money but that's true so how did you do that what's a therapy what's the hand-holding or just I think the customers that are that of sign up for SpaceX are pretty sophisticated and they understand that in the early in early attempts at flights you know weren't in the development phase essentially the called the beta phase if it was software there will be crashes and things from things weren't initially Gauhar percent or they obviously do expect that once we get out of the development phase that there will be good reliability and that really is a function of eliminating design related issues yeah you know the last launch had a problem because we had a brand new engine on it that had a thrust transient that was longer than the last one and so there was an issue following stage separation right but generally they're quite sophisticated customers and they understand what's going on and and actually the first three flights were paid for by it well first two were paid for by DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the third one was paid for by the Air Force operation response for space office and their outcomes the outcomes they were looking for were not really the the delivery of a satellite to orbit they were actually looking for demonstration of rapid launch right and so they actually felt that that we will fully paid for three flights right so I'm gonna ask one more question and then we'll have some time for a quick Q&A you know there's there's another rocket that looks just like this right now in the Marshall Islands where SpaceX launches from and it's I think you told me it's gonna go on this coming week hopefully hopefully this end and you know you told me and I think you've written this elsewhere that starting a rocket company is it's so risky it's like playing Russian roulette and well each launch is a bit like Russian roulette yeah okay and but you know less Russian let you know it's worth pointing out that you're probably gonna win but but I wanted to ask you you know Russian Roulette you know how do you know that you're dead I mean when do you when do you stop when do you say you know what I've I'm not gonna make it or how I think if we run out of money but we actually I know it sounds crazy but we were profitable last year we're gonna be profitable this year I'm not a big profits refill a small profit and we have enough funding on hand and with existing contracts that independent of Falcon one to last through the end of next year okay so I was just told I guess we don't have time for questions and I'll let that be my last question and but Ilan thank you so much for being here and just sharing your story with us it's it's so inspiring and perfect thank you

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welcome to take on life my name is Matthias ayat we have the pleasure welcoming Elon Musk he is the chairman of not one but three companies SpaceX Solar City and of course Tesla Motors and in his earlier life not very long ago in the 90s he started and sold to companies zip2 and the company that changed the very nature of how we transact online PayPal and for a young man this amazing feat he's gonna return only 37 next month alone welcome thank you so off the band let's talk about Tesla Motors and the car you drove today everybody's talking about it 220 miles in one charge 0 to 16 4 seconds under 4 seconds I'm the poster and 2 cents a mile things you'd love to have that car it's gonna cost us a bit over 100 grand yes and it's a long line because the celebrities have already signed up yes so you have a thousand already pre booked yeah you went into production in March the CIA general production that's correct why the money why the wait well the the reason it costs over hundred thousand dollars right now is because the technology is new and it's installed at small scale and small scale of production so the idea is that we start off with the sports car and it's initially expensive but then we were working on model to model three model for and with each subsequent model we bring the price down and we make the functionality of the car better so model 2 is a is a large four-door sedan with lots of cargo space you can see as many as 5 adults maybe even a scenario where there's 6 adults that can sit in the car and it's going to have a price which is you know on 59 thousand dollars before any tax incentive so it's possible tax incentives could bring that price down to 55 and then model 3 will be even lower cost and so we want to really drive the cost of the vehicles to mass market as soon as possible because at the point of which the price of the car is comparable with that of other gasoline cause and and you still have the two cents a mile you know where you can spend maybe $4 or $5 and travel over 200 miles the equivalent of one gas price of one gallon of gas then that at that point even if you don't care about the environment you would want to buy this car and that's really our goal is to get there as soon as possible you want to talk a little bit about SpaceX hmm you know you're making it economical for a lot of us people who want to travel to space hopefully one day you had to one thousand one thousand two can you shed some more light on it sure well we have two rockets and one spacecraft the Falcon one Falcon nine and then three rockets and then dragon is the spacecraft and initially we're launching satellites and and work then we'll be taking cargo to the space station and and then there will be upgrading that capability to carry people to orbit and eventually beyond orbit the great breakthrough that we're hoping to achieve is to build the first fully reusable rocket and that's never been achieved in rocketry before and there will be one of the great historic milestones if we're able to do that and that's really what will allow the cost of space travel to become much much less than it is right now because you can imagine if if this was air travel or really any mode of transport most cars horses and anything if you could only use it once then people would not use that mode of transportation if you could because it's like a 747 cost hundreds of millions of dollars and yet you can buy a round-trip ticket from LA to London for five hundred dollars and that's because that that plane can be used tens of thousands of times and so the capital cost the plane is a small component of your ticket cost but if each if it took a 747 can only make one flight then suddenly you'd have hundreds of hundred dollars of capital that has to be paid for by the passengers and that would make it completely unaffordable and that's a situation in rocketry today to go back to your days of PayPal being a successful entrepreneur twice what made you come to Green Tech and at such a huge well I think the transition to a sustainable energy economy is one of the most important problems facing humanity the you know even if you even if you take the environment out of the equation the fact that there are limited supplies of oil and coal and natural gas mean that we have to find alternatives and as we're seeing with the price of oil which is incredibly expensive and it's going to get worse because we've got growing economies like India like China which are growing like gangbusters and everybody wants a car and everybody wants to you know have appliances and all those things and that's a reasonable expectation I think they should have those things but it's gonna it places a huge burden of increase burden on the demand for energy worldwide and so we must find renewable sources or the economies will grind to a halt even if the environment doesn't get destroyed and so it's just very very important the most important problem we face in the 21st century really when people talk about things like poverty and disease and yes these things are certainly important but how we solve them if we have no energy you know after unicity Pennsylvania came to Stanford so if you know just talking to you didn't even get to attend the class and you started as if to in Silicon Valley there's probably not an exception so among the trades we have dropouts right what other trades do you think you personally have that propels you to be such a successful entrepreneur it's varied industries we could have a better at than other entrepreneurs it's very important for the audience to understand well sure the traits well it's dependent upon me giving an accurate self analysis it's always difficult to do self analysis you know what's you're too close to yourself by definition but I think well people do not do not think critically enough I mean there's critical thinking is a skill in short supply where people you people take too many things as they assume too many things to be true without sufficient and in that belief so it's very important that people closely analyze what what is supposed to be true and and and try to build up try to say it let's let's analyze things from first principles not by now not not by analogy or not by convention if you if you assume things are true by convention which is actually what most people do then it's difficult to gain insight into what could how things can be bettered so you know in any argument or any sort of train of thinking you want to make sure that you know the underlying premises are valid and applicable and and you know and and then in reaching a conclusion that the conclusion you're reaching is necessarily driven by the underlying premises and the interconnection between those premises that may seem like a really simple thing to say but most people don't do that my third so it's really the foundation of rational thought and let's see what else I think also people tend to overweight risk on a personal level it's one thing if you've got you know a mortgage to pay and give support and that if you were to deviate from your job that well how you're gonna feed your family and pay the rent and okay that's understandable but let's say you're young and you're just coming out of college or coming out of high school or whatever the what are you what are you risk you know you're not gonna stop I mean - it's really certainly not in any kind of modern economy it's so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food you could you know that's that's I mean very easy to do Sophie I don't know what you know what are they feeling afraid of there it was mostly afraid of failure I think or Mew but people should be less risk-averse when there's not much at risk you know you're a young father five kids three dogs how do you find time on the new do find time how do you spend quality time with your family I mean five kids it's not easy well it's tends to be different things with different parts the family with my wife we like to go out to movies go to you know if there's try any restaurants I love live food love food too much I love Indian food by the way I look at is great yeah I mean I like the clap I mean I know it's it's a little cliche but III you know I like it all you know was in the India actually last year because India hosted the International Astronautical Congress so I was in Hyderabad and at the Golden Triangle and all that yeah so it's a great Center for space actually India had a great time it's really really enjoyed it a lot actually good fantastic for it well well you're truly an inspiration for many of us it's a pleasure having you all right thank you thank you thank you all right well we have had the pleasure of listening to Elon Musk you have been watching this on take on life do not forget to watch many more interviews coming up on might a corn dog thank you you

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Elon Musk is here he is chief executive of two startup companies with bold missions he leads Tesla Motors the electric car company does attracted attention from both car enthusiast and environmentalist as well the company's powerful roadster which can travel from zero to 60 in less than four seconds is entirely powered by batteries the company plans to break into the mainstream auto market with an electric sedan as early as 2011 musk has also found a sea of space exploration technologies a company trying to slash the cost of space travel last year the company signed an agreement with NASA to send cargo to the International Space Station and if that is not enough he's also chairman of a growing company called solar city that installs solar panels on homes and businesses he has thrived in Silicon Valley one of the cofounders of PayPal the online payments company that eBay bought for 1.5 billion dollars in 2002 I am pleased to have him here at this table for the first time welcome thank you thanks for having me I've been a big family show for a long time let's just talk about you first so that if the audience does not know growing up in South Africa yeah yeah and why how did you end up in Canada well I guess growing up in South Africa I was actually it was very technology oriented and I tore self how to program computers but mostly cuz I wanted program games and I went when I was about 12 I programmed my first game and whenever I'd read about technology and great innovation it's it was coming from from the United States and so it was that's where I wanted to be and I try to convince my parents to move move there and neither with me would they would have washed I tried my mother trying to fund neither would do it my mother later moved back to initially Canada and then and in the US and so when I was 17 as soon as I got my Canadian passport three weeks later I was in Canada so here you are and you come together and make it to the United States and then you and and several other guys come together and create PayPal right and you sell at eBay for one point whatever it was five billion dollars yeah so after PayPal that gave me you know a fair bit of capital and there were three areas when I was in college there were three areas that I thought would most affect the future of humanity and and those were the internet the transition to a sustainable energy and transportation sector and the third was space exploration in particular the extension of life to multiple planets now I didn't ever expect to be involved in the third one but I but it just that seemed to me that something that was to be very important for the future and with the the capital I got from sale PayPal I was able to go into both those those areas and and so hence SpaceX and and in in the space and then in energy in the sustainable energy and transportation you've got Solar City and and and Tesla let me talk about space exploration just for a moment going in terms of creating the systems that will engage us in space exploration not just for governments and not just for NASA but for private citizens as well well you have to divide the efforts that are going on into what isn't an orbit class effort versus a suborbital grants effort and there's really a very big difference but the general public doesn't understand the difference between getting to space and getting to getting to orbit and so it's it's important to make that distinction to do a suborbital flight you need a terminal velocity of about Mach 3 right not to do to get to orbit you need a terminal velocity of Mach 25 it's it's a huge huge difference and because the energy required to do that scales with the square of the velocity so suborbital might be nine units of energy orbit is 625 units of energy so it's only about one and a half percent of the energy of orbit is required to get to suborbit so so that there's there a number of efforts in a suborbital category that certainly could grow one day or two to two orbital there's Jeff Bezos right has an effort and I know that that's something that Branson involved in this Branson absolutely no not so much directly from the technology standpoint but from the he's he's funding that development at Scaled Composites in inc in california what are you doing so we're and we're in the in the in the orbit class and that's it's a lot more capital and and and that's really where you're pushing the the ragged edge of what's what's physically possible and last year we got to orbit with for the first time with with our rocket and that was certainly a huge release and a milestone you know and so what's the next step um you're gonna rock it into orbit yeah so next month we we were putting a satellite for Malaysia into orbit and then Malaysia form a formulation formulation yes of Malaysian satellite and but been in the rocket business the rocket company does the launch it's not like the airline business so you don't sell the rocket you sell the launch right and and then later this year we'll be launching our big rocket from Cape Canaveral now that's the Falcon 9 and that's the one that's gonna be servicing the space station among other things is there philosophy here that somehow the private sector can do a lot more than then it has done in in areas that seemed because of them because of the size relating a reserve for government yeah definitely the private sector is very good at at optimization and innovation I mean private sector is generally better doing things than the government I think that's that's that's fair to say but you know there are certain things that the government that that are stated to the govern like basic research and that sort of thing but yeah so as far as SpaceX the the reason that there hasn't been a huge number of big improvement in in the space industry yeah I think it's because of its very difficult portion but is creative destruction process to to go into effect because it is such a significant amount of capital that's needed to start a rocket company and and it's a very difficult technical challenge and the number of people that really understand rocketry in the world is a very small number so it's just it's really huge barriers to entry and and that's why we haven't seen the forcing function of improvement that they should have been over the years and your understanding came from sort of for me this was not what you studied in college well I studied physics studying physics and studying rocket science right ya know say six gives me the basics good framework good analytical framework yeah so but now I picked it up along the way yeah what is your core competence you think you I think it's a technology technology yeah yeah technology yeah if it's something has to be designed and invented and the and you have to figure out how to ensure that the the value of yeah of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs then that's that's probably my core skill now bring me to the car and I drove a car this afternoon which was terrific it's the Roadster yeah where does that stand you obviously I've been I've been in the Google parking lot yeah that's a you've seen a few they've seen a few there yeah I'm sure that's true in other places in Silicon Valley yeah I don't know whether it's particularly a car that appeals to people in salt in Silicon Valley because of interest in technology and high performance and lots of other things or what whether there a lot of rich people and who willing to spend that kind of money for something they think is on the cutting edge of causes they believe in sustainable energy right right you tell me about how where you are in this development of this electric car which has most of all this extraordinary sort of power yeah you know yes zero to sixty times three point nine inches and and and the race is extraordinary when you think about the sports cars and anything else that's out on the road today yeah in fact on the Top Gear test track our standard roads - beats of Porsche gt3 exactly and I wrote the sport will be even better yeah you've also said in terms of where you want to go that that developing a high-performance sports car is not what this is about absolutely is it about something else and you want to develop a sedan yeah the whole purpose behind has the reason I put so much of my time and money is helping create the business is is is we want to serve as a catalyst for accelerating the electric car revolution the big the price of gas at the does not reflect the true cost of gasoline because you have a consumption of a public good it's one of the most it's really a common problem ecommerce you have the same thing in fishing where because there's no cost to fishing stocks people just over fish and then you have disaster that ensues and and here we're not paying for the cost of the co2 concentration in the oceans and atmospheres we're not paying for all these the ancillary effects the wars and all the other things at the at the gas pump so you effectively have a subsidy taking place at the gas pump because of that so the only way to bridge that is with innovation is to try to try to make electric cars better sooner than they would otherwise be and this supposed this this is a hypothetical which it may or may not speak to the point but supposed 15 years ago right let's say Bill Clinton as president who talked about the road to the 21st century and all of that suppose he had said I by I believe so much in sustainable energy that I want to make a commitment and the federal government using all of its resources will develop an electric car with appropriate battery power that will change the face of automobile the automobile industry in the world was that very doable then Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 17 years ago yeah you could have made a reasonably good electric car around that time for for a lot of investment and should that I've been done should the US government have made that kind of otherwise you will not be able to change the driving habits of Americans was it a worthwhile expenditure at probably would have been a worthwhile expenditure but the thing that really that helps electric cars is lithium-ion right and when did that come around I mean let explain why batteries has always been the great dilemma for developing an electric car sure well the energy contained when their battery is is so much less than then can that is contained in gasoline that I mean it's really almost it's hard to quite describe innate the way put it is that the Tesla battery pack in the Roadster which is the most advanced battery pack in the world right that the common reference is to call what is actually a cell a battery right so a cell is the little single can of chemically chemicals and then but if you have multiple cells that's that's what actually battery does that's literally what about creamy right multiple cell the muscle cells right on and then as the batteries get bigger and bigger they get harder and harder to deal with so there's the cell that we use as a commodity cell inside anywhere pretty much and it's the same sort of thing that's in in any wonderful number of laptops right the challenge is combining those cells into and having thousands of them keep making sure they're safe making sure they'll last for two hundred thousand miles 100,000 over bumps and potholes and extremes of temperature and safe in a crash and and that compounds the problem massively and you've got to make sure the charge is and temperatures balanced across the whole thing so that the the difficulty is really at the pack level much more than it is at the cell level and and that's really where the single biggest area of Tesla's expertise although I should point out the Tesla also has we designed a bold motor and and the power electronics and the software that manages the whole thing so that those were important too but the battery is the single most important thing and the Tesla battery pack to reference it to gasoline it weighs about a thousand pounds and it has the energy content of two and a half gallons gasoline so the so that means you gotta have a lot of charges well what that means is that but but there's there's an advantage that that that's because the the consumption of that energy is much more efficient in an electric car and this then this is I'll get to you know why is the Tesla Roadster twice as efficient as as two Toyota Prius which is obviously not not a sports car right and the reason is because an electric motor is fundamentally if super efficient at turning energy into motion so a good electric motor such as the one that we have in the deserts is about ninety percent efficient at turning the electricity into motion whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine is somewhere in the range of around seventeen or eighteen percent most of what it does is generate heat so so even though it's only two and a half gallons gasoline that two and a half gallons of energy content goes really far compared with you know if you had a gift that if that was okay compared to the priests but also compared to the new GM bolt right how does it do in comparison with the Volt well the Volt is a different architecture it uses a it's a plug-in hybrid architecture so it's I think got about a forty mile or so battery that's what they say and then there's an engine with a generator that allows you to go beyond the 40 minds act right and where's I was pure electric and the strategy that we've decided to hew to is is a pure electric strategy and I mean I've been criticized sometimes for responding to questions like yours just to explain why we've gone pure electric and then people are taking that to be an attack on the vault which is it's not the case I I hope the vote succeeds and I think it can be a pretty good car it's it's it's not pathetic it's but I just wanted to - you know what I hope to do in this conversation with you is figure out what it is you've done because you've got a fair amount of attention so figure out why you're not further along than you are or figure out why you are and what your expectations are yeah to do when where is the game for you I think it's taken a while for the industry to come around to it to this point but I think it's it's largely at this point it's it's it's almost become conventional wisdom that the future is electric cars the only question is this interim period of this transitional period but but if you look at the pace of battery improvement it's clear that this one I mean it's inevitable the future will be entirely electric and the irony of all this conversation is that in the last year a year before it's bankruptcy General Motors had announced that they'd bolt and it was the key to their future right as an automobile company right yeah exactly I mean when they're at but Chris is Imai think that it is is valid providing Jim is really come to that conclusion by the way well they should have that probably on a Prius or something like that but I think if you knew they had the ev1 right right exactly didn't work didn't work but didn't make it for reasons I'm not clear right and you know there's a marketing success yeah Chris painted a movie who killed the electric car right exactly and every summer Nabisco that issue but I think it's it's notable that in in that movie it shows that the customers who had the ev1 the cars had to be taken away from them and crushed and they held a candlelight vigil right if you have people that really love a product to the degree that they're willing to hold a candlelight vigil for it that that says hey maybe you should make an Eevee - it certainly does say that you know so the the car that I drove today the roadster - I think I mean I think it was a road trip before this is right right second iteration of it yeah I came came through production what year the first roadster number one the first first production roster which was fully you know developing a transport legal and all that sort of stuff that standard yeah yeah it was February of last year and that was my car that was the car your car meaning what the one who died at one okay yeah and so then you decided immediately to make improvements on that yeah yeah absolutely yeah it was it was a little rough going in the beginning and we had some issues with some of the powertrain components in fact not that but the hard stuff that the stuff that's sort of theoretically easier and you know we were able to fix those and get get production wrapped up and now we're at the point where we're delivering about twenty to twenty-five cause a week you know that Tata Motors obviously you know in I know - thought I'd take for a moment what he's doing in India yeah developing a little sedan for 2,300 all turned on right right where do you put that in the whole equation of where the future of cars are well I think it's a good idea to have affordable cause you know I think I think we're with the problem with with with something something like like the Nano which I think by I'm sorry problem I think it's a great idea and Russia there's a gentleman it's hard not to yeah exactly it's I think where it works gonna become challenging the futures as the price of gasoline Rises the cost of acquiring the car is a much less of an issue than the cost of operating a car and and I think oil it's over everything back up and you yeah do you have some assumptions in your own calculations as to where world will level off I think it will exceed that the numbers we've seen last year 144 oh yeah sure absolutely I think we'll see it sorta approach $200 and Beyond bid by twenty ten eleven twelve somewhere I'd say whatever the next boom is so if as I say the next boom is is four years from now it'll be around that around that point of all your businesses which one do you care the most about well right now my time is but roughly evenly between Tesla and SpaceX so it's I guess it would be pretty pretty even between the two and then Solar City is doing great on its own and the two co-founders they lived in a pewter ride we've done a phenomenal job and thankfully it requires very little my attention right now the reason to create a sports car a roadster as the first stage of this is because it attracts attention or what oh that's a great great question so because I feel often misinterpret why we have created a sports car because they will say you know the implication will be stars cars for rich guys right right exactly and it would serve like that I feel that there was somehow a shortage of sports cars and rich guys or something like that if you're if any new technology is expensive when it starts out and you can point pretty much anything and and then because the first thing but that you the engineers are trying to do is make it work and then when you made a work make it work then you optimize me optimize and you optimize and you look at the early days of computers or cell phones or almost anything even the early days of gasoline cars they used to be toys for rich people until they were made affordable and for long yeah and and then you combine that with the car yeah and then you combine that with the fact that we were just a little startup and that you know there's just no way that we could afford a billion dollars to make a giant car plant that would make you know hundreds of thousands of cars a year because that's the kind of volume you have to get to you to make to make cheap cars and and then and it's also the first iteration of technology so we have both a volume problem and a new technology problem and so that naturally the that you have to reach scale you have to reach scale and you have to work the bugs out of the system and and so you got to make it and you want to make your mistakes at a small scale okay so how's that going reaching scale and and and being able to to create a marketing a business plan that will enable you to reach a large audience you know and write and create and continue the development the technology that will make it even more attractive it's a it's going really well actually so it was a we had a few bumpy hump years in the beginning but at this point we're producing at a steady state of about an annualized production rate of about a thousand rows this boards cause a year we unveiled our sedan a few months ago which is a much more functional car and it's a $50,000 car so it's basically it's about half the price that the roads and the production run say and for the year 2010 for the Roadster will be about a thousand and for the sedan so then the stern end is only coming out in two years so into 2011 will be the first year right and what's the woodsy projection for that we're expecting to do 20,000 units a year for this event it's always difficult to predict these things exactly but but our target is is is will produce a total of about a hundred thousand of them in about 20,000 a year and they're going to be many variations on that we'll do an SUV and we'll do you know other things and then we'll do a third generation platform beyond the the sedan Model S sedan will be a sub $30,000 car so we're trying to get to mass production as soon as we possibly can and and by that that's both from the cars that we make ourselves as well as the cause we do in partnership with others like the Daimler deal you may have heard about and so how do you measure the odds of success personally I would say success for me for Tesla is that we've accelerated the advent of electric cars by at least five years so that the goal just to accelerate the advent of electric cars or to breed a great electric car company well I think the tourists I mean that you do want you do the other okay yeah and why is it that it's it's happening by a guy created a start-up in 2003 rather than a whole range of sort of industrial automobile companies around the world not just here Fiat is a successful car coming in in their own Chrysler right well it's disruptive technology like to where you really have a big technology discontinuity it tends to come from new companies you know you could ask the same question of why does Google come from what a Google car and Larry and Larry Sergey I've known Larry since before he got venture funding for good for Google man is he is good is he an investor and Tesla yes Larry and Sergey are investors and Tesla and they drive them or don't grow yeah the driver absolutely it because some of the criticism that comes at you and the company now is that that you went out to seek a lot of external financing and did not reach your goals well will which taking us longer to reach our goals but what was it raised a hundred men you raised 40 or what was it what was the goal well I think you know some of the some of the the stumbles were we're selling mistakes we made ourselves some of them work we're marking externalities and we were getting ready to raise or we're in fastest raising about a hundred million dollar round that began in instead of the summer of last year and then ran into you know force 5 hurricane an economic circumstance that took everything on right yeah and so we so that with that forced us to scale back our plans a little bit we had to do a layoff and we had to raise the money internally from existing investors I had to put up a lot of the money personally and we good things there was no money and so it that that was it was sort of hair-raising time for for the company but at this point we're actually in good shape we expect to be profitable in the third quarter and that comes from the success of the Roadster yeah and then the roads then we also have a powertrain supply business to Daimler as well for the for electric smart that we're doing with them make smart car an electric car yeah you know the smart car was always intended to be an electric carpet than anything that they can never get the battery right so a year and a half ago met with Daimler and that I strike mince them to work with us we actually I mean we've really tried hard to work with a lot of different car companies and and what happened well I guess they they think well this took the attitude of what you know what are some little start-up in Silicon Valley know that that we don't know who couldn't do and would you say to them well we drive our car and look at that technology and I don't know it just never seemed to sort of sink in but they don't dime the def word I'm late did actually so III went went through stood guard went down the way to India actually and met with dr. Webber the head of global R&D and and we had conversation so what does it take for us to work together we'd love to do something we'd love to do something with you know an affordable mass-market car that you know we ourselves couldn't do right now cuz we don't have the camera line most of it yeah and and and so I said what about you know what about electric smart and because the smart was always intended to be an electric car and and and would would take for us to work together and he said well if you could do a prototype that would have you that would really go a long way so we did we worked really hard the powertrain team live by JB Straubel did an awesome job and if forty days later when went when they came out to visit we said here's the car take a drive and they really liked what they saw and so what did they do then then they said okay well let's let's take him sort of another step further and and they gave us a little little R&D contract and and eventually got to the point where we got a contract for that to supply a thousand cars for them and then if we do well in that will potentially go into you know tens of thousands of cars so so that but this is a car that everyone could afford and and and could hopefully kept to come quite soon do you have a profile of the people who you think will want to buy these roadsters yeah absolutely it's the kind of person who who likes a performance car maybe they own a Porsche or you know you know bikini or something you know this car is actually faster than a Lamborghini 0-60 yeah it's it's it's fine I think fast they don't almost study anything for anything I know of yeah yeah I mean like things the really sort of million-dollar supercar obviously with those will be Enzo but but it's it's pretty much faster than it than any normal snore Mille sports car and and it's really easy to drive if you want a high-performance car with a clean conscience this is the only option the sedan is gonna be for someone that wants a great sedan and and also you know a clean conscience and Angeles is gonna be cheaper to operate than yeah you are as you well know a controversial guy as well I try not to be it finds you because you think big you're a software guy who has been successful in the private sector yeah you know there's see no reason you can't do things that other people have not been able to no matter how large the corporate enterprise create the best electric car or be put privately astronauts in space right what you say you will do in two years well yeah sort of depends on where NASA asks us to do that so if NASA turns on the access to be that this year which we're hopeful they will the White House has a convene a panel on the future of human space flight that that panel is going to make the recommendations in a few months I hope those some of those recommendations will be favorable to to SpaceX because the alternative is if if SpaceX doesn't do it we will be entirely dependent on the Russians to carry our astronauts to the space station after 2010 and with billions of dollars will be spent on essentially a sole source situation to the Russians which i think is outrageous and you haven't taken advantage of the opportunity to go in space yourself happy no I've not have you wanted to if it was it was purely a matter a matter of personal interest I would I would have done it for Eddie yeah I mean I know Sergei is a trust I'm interested in some interest yes yeah I would like to go at some point but it's I'm also in the point where I it's difficult for me to take personal risks I used to take a lot of personal children I've got my you know kids and and and responsibilities with companies as well and and so if I if I do things for the have personal risk at this point I risk more than they're my own mind my own way yeah you've had how many trips they get one set of drifters once one set of twins yeah they have the twin Smith in New York actually so they like they like the car yeah yeah never they can't drive and I can't go in the Roadster because it doesn't you know it's not very kid-friendly but you know it's not very kid-friendly you're right the sedan will be ideal for them so much success to you thank you for coming thank you for joining us see you next time

https://youtu.be/MxB7uNgS6J4

my next guess I'm going to give you a little bit of a heads up in terms of who this next gentleman is and also admit that I am coming to in this interview I think with the freshest eyes that he's probably faced in a while and that is to say I was an instant fan when I found out about what this man has done but I I wanted to have him on so that I could ask the the real straightforward simple questions which is one of the reasons I want to do this show which is to not only meet people that I admired as well as have people on that I've worked with but when I meet people and they know me from movies that would have you they all want to know really the hardships and how you got from there to here and then they want to hear about your projects so I think that's where we're going to start today and I'm going to now welcome the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors as well as SpaceX I hope I pronounced those correctly yes absolutely and Elon Musk is also yeah okay good yeah so thank you very much first of all you're welcome for for joining us here and I also have to thank you profusely for not bolting out the door after watching the last four minutes of my show it was difficult you must have been yeah yeah because it is very different world and I'm sure that there was a moment at least a moment one in your mind that said oh my god what am I doing here what have I got myself into well here's the thing these these interviews have you been on Charlie Rose yet I know but I will be I think later this month early next yeah yeah well actually watch the show yeah as a viewer you understand that one of the wonderful things about his show that I'm trying so desperately to emulate blatantly is actual conversations yeah throughout my career I've been fortunate enough to do almost every talk show that's existed for the last 20 years starting with Johnny Carson and Larry King and all of them and they're all about little soundbites and they're all about little quick anecdotes with my case with punchlines and characters rarely these are an opportunity to have an actual conversation and to find out more details about what it is that drives you to do what you do so and going to the place that you're at today so thank you very much for for everything you're about to share we've got Twitter comm asking questions live we've got folks actually very excited to ask questions I'm going to start pretty much with you know reading a lot about you in preparation all that stuff is you know Wikipedia and in various sites to find out one's history how old reaso hit-or-miss I know it's I find it to be that way yeah how old were you if I may let's just start here when the first vision popped into your head about working and bringing an electric car to the consumer well I've been interested in electric cars for a long time actually I used to think about it quite a bit in college so it's been probably 17 17 18 years that I've been thinking about the area in fact I used to talk to my dates in college about the importance of electric cars and how did that work out for you not well it's not a great date conversation no no in fact I ran into someone who I briefly dated in college and she brought this up and she's she's a writer for Scientific American these days and it come to do an interview with me and actually mentioned that it was a memorable date not necessarily a good way right one she would never forget yeah absolutely but I'm kind of a you know science and engineering guy so for me it's been obvious for a while that the future we have to figure out a way to get off oil and that the solution is electric cars right the advantage of an electric car is that you can generate that electricity by renewable means right and so if you consume the electricity if you're running cars and then you're generating a power solar wind right geothermal which is increasing dramatically by the way sure it and if you're doing that then you have a sustainable solution for the future yeah and obviously if you're if you're burning oil that's that's something that's going to end sooner or later and and so it's better to do it sooner and avoid the environmental damage than later and have the environmental damage plus a massive wealth transfer from the United States to to other countries yeah well that's a big part of it too is how do we take back control of our destiny quite frankly right and so what this idea came to you 1718 years ago I think it was around that time that for the most part those who were starting to hear rumblings of an electric car myself included we're thinking whoever puts out a gorgeous as well as functional electric car wins so in terms of exciting first a few and then the masses eventually with as the prices become more affordable to all consumers initially what people are are praising and also damning you know there's both sides of it initially you started with the Roadster right the Tesla Roadster which huge success it has been very successful you how just walk us soo if you wouldn't mind the chronological pieces of business here because I this really is fascinating to a great many of us from conception to rolling out that first model just in terms of a brief history of the I can't imagine the hardships that took place in trying to get this thing to come to fruition yeah it's certainly been technically quite difficult right from a business standpoint quite difficult and then it's been overlaid with with a bit of a sort of soap opera from a personnel standpoint so please feel free to share all of that yeah whatever you're comfortable sharing we'd love it whatever whatever you can legally share yeah absolutely well I'll kind of actually for up folks on on the non-personnel elegance fair enough and because I think that that's more for the future so in terms of you know where do we come from where we headed and that kind of thing so right in starting a car company it's obviously a high capital endeavor yeah and and particularly when you're talking about something which is a brand new technology and and no one had really gotten all the pieces to work together quite right for you know to create a compelling product as far as electric car is concerned it's a couple people who tried and yeah that's what the companies that came and went well in some of those companies are sort of still here today like you know General Motors had the the ev1 right and actually if they'd continued and produced the ev2 ev3 and continued that that development they probably wouldn't have been a need for Tesla mm-hmm but they didn't unfortunately that they took those cars away from people of forcibly and and crushed them and it literally crushed them yeah and if people have seen Chris Payne's movie who killed the electric car which which I recommend yeah if you can see some of that you know it's it's it's amazing that the people who Jim gave those eveyone's to held a candlelight vigil for the cause getting crushed I mean yeah you imagine anyone holding a candlelit vigil for a young car I really can or any product or any product is is the point I know why would you just why would you discontinue a product line with that level of customer interest yeah that's that's pretty amazing yeah so pretty well documented in that film okay so but I'll give you the chronology and the reasoning why why did we start with the car that we started with because and you get asked the question what why do you why are you making this expensive sports car you know it implying that we somehow think there's a shortage of sports cars in the world or or rich people really need a break or something like that yeah I mean it's absurd if you think of it but nonetheless people feel confused like why can't you make an affordable car I wanted to give you the opportunity to explain yeah absolutely so a little bit and they're two reasons one is that when you have a brand new technology it tends to be expensive and it's almost always an expensive in fact because the first thing you're trying to do is to make it work yeah and and if you just try to make it work you don't have an opportunity to optimize the cost okay and if you think about any anything new when cell phones first came out there were very expensive personal computers were very expensive even even gasoline engine cars in the beginning we're very very expensive can only be afforded by a few people absolutely so doesn't remember the $1400 VCR right absolutely part of our in fact you can point at almost any anything near innovation it starts off expensive him because the first thing you're trying to do is make it work yeah and cell phones the size of a shoebox lutely $1,800 remember Wall Street with the guy walking around with that shoebox phone basically so it's so a new technology is expensive right and then and the other factor is economies of scale so in order to make something inexpensive you have to make a lot of it but to make too particular a factory that can make hundreds of thousands of cars costs you know a billion dollars or more so and who's going to take a chance right and the thing is it would still be silly to try to do that economies of scale thing on the first iteration of the technology because still going to be expensive yeah and this is a problem that GM is starting to to see with with the Volt right as they're having trouble bringing the cost that car below $40,000 and that's that's as problematic when you're talking about a car that is essentially intended to compete against gasoline cars that are in the twenty five to thirty thousand dollar range right it's very important that electric car be of comparable price to to call other cause of its type so the Tesla Roadster is actually about the same price as a Porsche so it's many cases less yeah in fact less than a Porsche server right so anyway so that's basically the reason it was a the first generation of technology and and we were necessarily at low volume because we didn't have the capital to go to a high-volume manufacturing and you weren't making a inexpensive sports car you were making a brand-new state-of-the-art sports car that was some of the negativity that I didn't understand because it didn't seem to come from naive people it seemed to come from people who seemed very scholar din their particular areas of expertise who completely missed the obvious justification in terms of what kind of vehicle you are actually making from the ground up and it being the first of its kind yeah I'm astounded by well a common misperception is that because we've for the road so we worked with Lotus right and we did initially intend to use a modified Lotus II at least chassis for our car people think oh it's just it's just a modified Lotus but actually we have to redesign almost every part of the car sure and our initial thought of what we can just use a Lotus Elise chassis turned out not to be true because the weight distribution is all different glow points will different a car ended up being thirty percent heavier wear to redesign almost everything in fact there's only seven percent parts commonality between our corn and Elise seven percent seven percent but in fact look at the letters first of all as five letters and Lotus so that's that's a bit of the seven percent right there then we'll this note Lotus actually outside there's something any Lotus logos like but question uh um but nonetheless it is it is each so seven percent parts commonality is actually that that means if when somebody like general Ford announces an all-new car that on your car has more than seven percent commonality with prior cars excellent so in other words this is a newer new car than most new cars yeah almost all new cars and it yeah so it it's was tricky to bring it in for for the for the price that we did bring in in fact there was some some pretty big mistakes made initially on on the estimates of cost and that forced us to raise the price later in order not to be shipping product at a loss what's the timeframe from the first sort of breaking ground on the space where you're going to manufacture this car obviously a prototype to the sedan or the other of the rotors in production right but you know how long did it take yeah but I mean they're on the road now yes yes in fact we've delivered over three hundred cars and so approaching 400 cars and when was the first one delivered the road the will the first production car was delivered in February of last year and that was that was my carpet it was I mean the initial production rate was about one every three three or four weeks Wow and then it's it's you know got up to two every three to four weeks by four and then and now we're at the point where we're about 20 to 25 per week okay and Wow and now at one point during the Roadster a building process does the S model begin its drawing board almost immediately well we've been working on the Model S for about two years if you take the sort of early conceptual stuff into account so you really obviously have to focus everything on the Roadster first get it up and running and then but in the back of your mind the master plan is there the Model S yeah the basic plan of action the mass planning is it was and is to produce an expensive car and low volume then a lower cost car and kind of medium cost card medium volume right and then a low cost car and high volume right and that's that's the plan that was my plan from the beginning and that remains the plan today and we've been able to accelerate that the low cost car a little bit by working with Dan let the maker of Mercedes and smart to create an electric smart car oh really yeah that's the third phase after well I think we'll probably still do a third generation platform of our own right but it but as a means of accelerating the low glow cost vehicle access we're working with companies like Daimler to to get there sooner so my understanding is Daimler is planning to to have the beginning of that thousand car test fleet on the roads towards the end of this year so you're already focusing on working with an existing manufacturer in terms of yeah bringing the electric car to a larger consumer base yeah the really the the overarching of point of Tesla is to accelerate the electric car revolution and that's going to be a combination of cars reproduce and cars that we help other companies produce in fact we've been trying to sell our technology to Detroit into other car companies in other parts of the world for a couple years now and it's ceramic that the really the the first company to do that is not an American company but it's it's a German company Daimler but in fact Daimler was the one that invented the internal combustion engine car so you know that they're the oldest company in the world and they're actually being here they are jumping in with the electric car every little force as we move into you're describing the Model S and its conception we have some photos that we can throw up and let people look at while you're talking about it because I got to be honest when I saw the Roadster I was wildly impressed but I was waiting I was waiting for a non sports car more of a sedan right which is what most people weren't yeah and I do feel like the larger audience is already chomping at the bit and when I saw this car I flipped out I just could not believe something like this had been achieved when I wasn't looking because you did an awfully good job keeping it under wraps all these months if not oh how well first prototype was completed yeah well the postponed flight was just completed last month when we and that's when we did at the unveiling of the both Model S the first drivable prototype we've been working on the Model S in earnest for about a little over a year a little over a year yeah so you're saying only a week or so before you unveiled it March 26 was it Mar 24 2016 1 and ready to be driven uh yes that's fantastic yes is that sort of thing hasn't really no I wasn't yeah you mode not fantastic for you I can't imagine I don't understand how you have any hair left after that sort of a nail-biter in my business that sort of thing happens all the time people rushing to get their film ready for the Sundance Film Festival I've seen big studio that are still polishing and doing last-minute special effects adjustments sort of way after they've announced the release date and rushing it into theaters and oh my goodness I can't even imagine the sort of pressure involved so we've been looking at some pictures yet wonderful we're still looking at them great because this car is so gorgeous ok I'm going to I'm going to get a little selfish here sir and also lean this towards people like myself who want to who have the next series of questions which are when will this car be available to me and what is the process for me to sign up and get one now well well look at the call will be available in two years which is that that's when we'll be finished with all the the crash testing and all the regulatory stuff and have built out the factory because this is a true mass production car in fact the Model S will be the first mass production electric vehicle in order true know that highway capable what numbers are not at all hard type of thing but numbers of mass production we're talking we're doing about 20,000 a year mmm and so when you unveil you want to have 20,000 ready well will still be very good yeah yeah it on the mound it'll take a little bit of time to spoil at the production line but this will be these will be mass manufactured cars worth you know we're robots are doing things as opposed to hand-built cars to the Roadster is really a hand-built car that you rank and you got robots billing their mom a lot of it yeah now I've heard everything from a third quarter of 2010 to the beginning of 2012 what's realistic for the Model S well our aspiration is to have the first production cars available in the third quarter of 2011 mm-hmm so just just over two years from now right and I think it's achievable and I think we've there's a lot there's much less technology risk and uncertainty than there was with the Roadster right so I do feel reasonably confident that we can meet that date of course it is dependent on when the Department of Energy disperses funds for the loan program that they have that there's something called the advanced technology vehicle manufacturing program yes which which was actually put into effect by Congress last year and then that do do is just on the verge of awarding those those loan loan programs its intended to provide a lower cost of capital to companies that are developing energy-efficient cars well it couldn't make more sense to those of us have been waiting for this to happen so right glad that they're going to pitch in there's also going to be a $7,500 rebate there is there is already a $7,500 rebate that was that's as of January 1st right so it's a tax rebate applies to any debt to anyone it regardless your tax situation and the first base price is 49 nine and it goes up from there depending on the size of the battery yes the base price of the Model S is forty nine thousand nine hundred right and that's for the basic version which has one hundred and sixty mile range but you can get a battery pack that goes up to three hundred miles and range right in fact one of the things we think we'll probably do is have the threaded mile packs available for for rent so if you're if you're just you know using your car about tot please do that yeah yeah so please do that because it this car is unbelievably exciting and I think the the instinct is much like other forms of technology there's going to be the I want the everything package and then there's going to be a lot of people who can't really afford the everything package they can barely get into the car as it is but they're dying to get into this car sure so that sure would be fantastic if they could rent that larger battery with if and when they ever needed it because for a lot of people over sixty miles around town as their everyday car is fantastic right it's 160 month your average person drives 30 miles today so 160 miles is five times what the average person drives in a day are all three batteries this quick charge of 45 minutes capability yeah yeah the cold have a standard 45 minute at the all cars will come with the ability to charge in 45 minutes now I should point out that the 45 minutes does require and off-board charger so you won't be able to use the onboard charger to do the 45 minutes charge the onboard charger you have to pull over and will you take the battery out we know you just need you need to just go to a charging station that's that's a kind of an industrial-strength power charging station because that's that's a lot of power more than most houses are capable of delivering but it onboard charge that's built into the car will be capable of recharging the car in about three to four hours so overnight you plug the car in yeah no problem and is it going to be like my computer where I can overcharge it and then it's bad for the computer now I want to leave it in plugged in over there's a lot of intelligence in the battery pack it won't allow itself to be charged incorrectly excellent well I get better service than AT&T that I do with my iPhone is a real question here the computer onboard yeah but before I get to that there's one thing that Wired magazine wrote a very I thought supportive article about the Model S and then there is all sorts of debates going on in the comment section of that article right and a lot of naysayers as always they line up like idiots we seem to Tesla seems to generate a bipolar response well yes I mean if anything it challenges you to rise above all questions and inquiries and be able to answer them all and be able to attribute the the genius and expertise of your you know design people and yourself because I do understand also that you've as an engineer yourself and at the forefront of the design yeah I your certificate the right title bits are probably a good description of your product architect so would we at Tesla we do have a chief technology officer JB Straubel who's been with the company from the beginning and really is the person was responsible for for leading the the technology of Tesla he's not you know a great great guy and all selected credit you know phones for the whole thousand in terms of the design of the Model S right and you know the way I look at it is I sort of work with with them and the other members of the Tesla team to create a great product because I think great companies are built on great products yeah well yes hell yes I forgive me for reading this but I don't want to miss this and I want to I was hoping put this to you to dress the wires the model s still so expensive question a wonderful article in Wired magazine written by um Chuck squat Wrigley on once I'm sure I'm destroying his name I'm sorry very supportive of design not only the carpet the master plan in general of Tesla Motors to roll out the so called more expensive models first with the hundred and nine thousand dollar roadster and then now the forty nine thousand up to fifty four thousand I think it is Model S a tons of comments posted one reader obviously an Eevee driver hit on some wonderful points sure I wanted your feedback on that really sort of drove a point home that I don't think a lot of people are considering and that is wildly ignored I think when you know these people are considering the sticker price only as opposed to the fuel inmates yeah and when you own a car you pay for more than just the initial purchase price you also pay for fuel and maintenance and these two very important unavoidable truths that evey costs a miniscule of what the icy II or internal combustion engine costs the e V motor has only one moving part on the Roadster and presumably the Model S the only regular this is true well it technically there there's some gears but yeah right regular maintenance items really your brakes and tires not even the brakes actually because regenerative braking means that your brake pads see very little wear I love this the Eevee's actual fuel cost they've narrowed it down to two to three cents per mile yes sounds familiar that's alright so if you keep your Model S for the average of 10 year 100,000 mile lifespan you replace your tires brakes which is not the case for say a thousand dollars each time again these numbers it can vary and pay up three thousand dollars for the fuel over this hundred thousand miles your forty nine thousand nine hundred purchase price only increases to around fifty four thousand nine hundred the IRS says driving a IC e internal combustion engine car costs fifty point five cents per mile inclusive of fuel maintenance at that rate or the lifespan the same life span Ford Taurus with a sticker price of $25,000 increases over that lifespan to $75,000 75 and 507 5500 theoretically therefore the IC car with a sticker price of zero would still cost more than the Model S that for those hundred thousand miles I don't think people have done that math and term ROI is the initial investment oh my god it's so much more than a Taurus yeah it will actually I think perhaps the best way to address that question is not even to have people do the math because we will have alcohol for lease and so if you take our lease cost right and and you in the least cost of gasoline car and you're adding that across it ridiculous the cost of fuel fuel and maintenance on the gasoline car and the cost of electricity and maintenance on the electrical electric car then you have the savings from the beginning there's no need to add this up over five seven years or whatever you can simply say how much is transportation costing me every month and you will have the savings from day one but I will shove people out of the way who want to leave so that I can get one well so buying one if you do that in fact we're going to put a calculator on our website hopefully the next week or two so you can plug in and you can say okay what do you think the price of gasoline is going to be you can put in the price of gasoline and what's your electricity cost and the cost electricity and then we'll say what the profits the probable operating cost per month and then and then how does that compare and compare that to two cars of different types and it becomes pretty clear doesn't it yeah and and then it's it's pretty obvious that if you assume that gasoline is going to get back up above $4 a gallon which I think that's a certainty in factoring is going to go way way beyond that and then you put in the cost of electricity particularly if you have time of use meters like in places like California where you can get you know seven cents a kilowatt hour that then our car is is comparable to a Ford Taurus well let's talk about what you need in your home to keep this car charged on a regular basis what sort of setup do you need immediately you really don't need much of anything you can if you are only driving said you know 30 miles a day or something like that you can actually plug it charge it at a regular 110 volt socket series simply plug it in like a like a hair dryer for overnight in terms of your range your range is going to lower though well 110 volts a supply will generate will recharge about five or six miles an hour so if you're say driving 30 miles day and you're charged it for just for six hours you've topped it off essentially so that's certainly possible when we unplug the toaster and plug in the car you know yeah okay so it is working we actually have many roads to customers that operate the car on that basis and that's fantastic yeah and and and that that comes along with the base price and then if you want to do a faster charge right then the next step up would be a 240 volt 40 amp circuit which is comparable to a dryer so it's like a dryer plug Wow it doesn't customer yep it cost a couple hundred bucks to install a dryer outlet in your garage and again that just operates off the onboard charge from the car so you just plug plug it in like like it's a dryer or more a range or something like that and and that will charge a lot faster they'll charge you look at the car in seven or eight hours full charge full charge and the quick charge will be only available at these charging stations yeah the quick charge is is is it you know we're talking about something which is it's a lot of power I mean yes you know it for forty five minutes you talk about something which is on the order of a 60 kilowatt power source there's very few houses that you break the master circuit on most it's a bad idea yeah and it's it's overkill and unnecessary at four for a house but I do think a lot of businesses may choose to install that for their employees and that where this will really come in handy is when you're going between cities mm-hmm so that there's there's three ways that we've addressed the the range issue on one less one is by offering a range up to 300 miles right and like I said we're also hoping to be able to say offer allow people to buy the 160 mile range car and then ran and rent the 300-mile range pack as needed you'll give them a map of where these charging stations are along the route so they want to drive across country a let them know where yeah in fact you know the will you mentioned that the touchscreen the call will be 3G connected to yes three 3G wireless connected all the time so you won't need a map you can just ask the call to take me to the next charge next charging station and I'll give you a selection of locations if you could if there's any way you could put in a phrasing that just at some point the cursor stop busting my balls I just I just want to put that out there let's go to actually the code that we all like we all can off you know what asking you shall receive okay we are going to offer themes so you can actually theme your because because it's all just a big screen right every 17-inch center console screen and you've got a smaller sort of display screen on the front you can you can theme your car so if you you know just like you sort of theme your your desktop you'll remember your cell phone get a little cynicism give it a little sigh yeah you can you can yeah absolutely phone nope you know and the we're people that probably want to write applications like that you know do various things and this your center console is a full-fledged computer running Linux so it's it's something way it'll have a browser if you want to browse and search the way up do you know do your email while not driving well not drive it while charging if you want to go city you know we could do things like read out your email for you you know ya know it did you show any pictures of this monitor when we ran through okay if you want to throw them back up another we're talking about if you have that one isolated because it is pretty astounding that that holds the part of it and people go to the website Tesla Motors they can do a little more research in terms of what you're offering in that monitor because it is wildly extensive if there's anything else in it that you do want to address well we all taking advantage of economies of scale from the computer business which is a lot bigger than the car business and unit volume you know you've got clearly hundreds of millions of computers shipping every year whereas you've got a much more number of cars shipping every year and so now less than ever right absolutely so by putting in a 17 or 17 inch monitors in the computer business these days are dirt cheap and and so it's it's really not that expensive for us to do this right well what it is is cutting-edge and that's one of the things that makes the car so unbelievably desirable what about their asking here twitter.com for the next generation road vehicles what will they be when the electric car have become obsolete wow people are going on to the next generation beyond the electric car I'm not sure that's for this discussion the little car is a long term solution yeah you know those as you were pointing out in terms of how to power the electricity that's what we can diversify be it water be it solar power be it wind yeah I'm not sure wind is the correct word there may be I mean the only thing I could see is being best potentially being a change is is and this is the speculative is a switch from from batteries to high energy density capacitors in fact I originally came originally came out to California to do PhD at Stanford in the material science and physics of high-intensity capacitors for using electric cars that's what initially brought me to Silicon Valley and then ended up putting down on hold start a couple internet companies but it was so I think that that's a possibility I'm not sure where the success is one of the possible outcomes but but it's a possibility any chance for a flux capacitor Oh Madhuri well Madhuri where's the flux capacitor sorry I did that on a dare um I suppose you could call it a flux capacitor flux just means sort of flow right yeah of anything you know you flex it energy flux anything so ask Elon how we can help Tesla Motors get the federal loan and also where the fact would be the factor be here in Los Angeles I don't know if you want to get specifics about where in Los Angeles is it that the SpaceX where you have the yeah the Tesla design studio is inside the SpaceX rocket Factory right the design centers in Southern California because the world's best automotive design challenge is actually right here in Southern California you're welcome it's true yeah and in front in front on house house and a designer hitters on is based here when he worked at master before joining us and and is just a really big town pool so and rather than think you know go rent a whole separate space it was just easier to allocate some space in this the SpaceX rocket factory for details in design also made off super convenient for me to work with with bronze yeah whose great guy to work with we're very much in the same wavelength it's great actually so as far as helping in the da front I actually think we're okay definitely any any voice of support is is great you know mentioning it to your congressman or senator that does help right yeah absolutely absolutely if they feel a groundswell they feel that the public there's a public demand yeah I think it's helpful to to let your congressman senator know that you think companies like Tesla should get a portion of the ATVM program in animation what we're asking for is really a tiny we're only asking for about one and a half percent of the ATVM program that the vast majority of it will go to GM Ford Chrysler you know they'll get 98 percent one and a half percent your yeah you were asking for and a half Center I think it's not not a big ask and and I think we get Barack on the phone people Tyler crude what are you laughing about um yeah it doesn't seem unreasonable at all to be asking for the one and a half percent um I think we can probably put its better use than Jim yes well you know what I would love to have them in this room and and and watch that debate quite frankly SpaceX came first and yeah it is a thriving industry that only recently actually stepped up its game or so it seems from what I'm reading you want to share some of the latest news well SpaceX we got to orbit last year right which is a fairly big deal our rocket is arguably the first completely privately developed rocket to to reach orbit although there's some dispute on that front but it's unequivocally the the first liquid-fueled privately developed rocket to reach orbit and then that's a tough thing in most countries can't do that so it's it's like how many years did that take that that was six years yeah from yeah from start to reaching over yeah yes and so when the money is just evaporating as you're pouring all the time and energy in your life into this vision how often people want to hear about the struggle how often does the thought enter your mind I you know it's just it's too much there's other things I want to do with my life because I have to assume this is all-consuming for you um well this I mean I spend a lot of time with my kids I mean it's really just throw things that I do there's a SpaceX and Tesla which take a bet for roughly half of my business time each then there's my kids and then I sleep I mean there's like four things I do right and up and sleep doesn't this doesn't get a lot of speech becomes the commodity doesn't yeah it was definitely difficult on the fourth quarter of last year was was very difficult and yeah it was well it was very boring for everyone yeah for everyone until we found out of course that Britney Spears is back and then it all sort of lightened our load a little bit absolutely it's this glimmer of hope right well but that's what I would have called it as well a glimmer so six years yeah from from from the design and from the vision and then last year your first complete orbit yeah absolutely we came close on on a second and third fly we did reach space but we do not reach orbital velocity and in our second or third flights and then I fourth flight we reach orbital velocity and then we've gotten up we've got another flight coming up and about towards me of this month and that's going to deliver a satellite for Malaysia you have to take on some commercial cargo yeah yeah absolutely we have a wide variety customers actually NASA is our biggest customer right by far and we have many other customers as well Sweden is a customer Malaysia as I mentioned Canada and and we also have some purely commercial customers we'll be launching a satellite for Avanti which is a European broadcast satellite company and yeah so I sound a little bit if you can with your relationship with NASA because I think this is pretty fascinating quite frankly yeah um well I love NASA I want to say that NASA is awesome ok well they believe in you so I like nothing I tend to agree with people who agree with me so I understand where you're coming from yeah NASA has actually been really supportive and SpaceX would not have gotten as far as it did without NASA's help so I want to acknowledge that and in December of last year NASA actually gave us the the contract to be the replacement for the space shuttle as far as cargo is concerned so the Space Shuttle retires at the end of next year and and the NASA does have a long term plan for developing a launch vehicle and a spacecraft called the Aries Orion project and that but that's intended to go back to the moon so and that's you that's only going to see flight probably around the 2016 timeframe Wow so there's this kind of a gap of five or six years and and so but we still have a space station up there that we've got a service right so what do we do during that gap and and that's why NASA took the unprecedented step of saying okay let's see what the private sector can do and that's you stepped up yeah yeah we did and so Annette nassos felt confident enough to award your they said they would exit a competition and they there are 20 missions and we got twelve to twenty eight of them were awarded to another company overall sciences and then there was there was a third competitor which was a joint venture of Boeing Lockheed and align text align text systems which actually did not get any of the missions so that was a big upset huge upset yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't blame any of your engineers when that moment happen if they sort of rally together and said suck it to those people right and so it was a CEO says I knew I could brah Boeing lucky to find company of course play they're doing just fine without my little cynicism yeah um so so you're well-established now with your relationship with NASA they're generally depending on you you've won this competition that there really are depending on us and so it's actually quite a big responsibility which we take very seriously and so we're working very hard to make sure we don't let them down yeah and you just you were just in Washington or just before the Model S announcement right about the will tell us what what you were actually you were I'm in Washington quite a lot was it this there's a lot interests there both for for SpaceX and Tesla Lam and there was a bit of an announcement right before the March 26 you were there I was reading something where you had to address a group I was I said it was the side like there's a big satellite conference and in DC yeah every year yeah so yeah I I gave it a keynote there right yeah and it was just basically giving people an update on on where SpaceX is and what what progress are making and that's what every bring about yeah yeah so yeah just basically telling people where we are and and we're expecting to to launch our big rock at the Falcon 9 and with it the Dragon spacecraft later this year right I think you were discussion the Falcon 9 right the Biggles have launched today - the Falcon one which is a much smaller vehicle yeah so if lt9 is uh quite as very big if in fact it's going to be the most powerful single core vehicle in the US fleet by single core I mean without using side boosters and then then the Falcon 9 heavy which is the felt and I with side boosters will actually be the most highest payload capable vehicle in the world and when did you share that piece of news was that something that was actually that's been on our website for a while though I'm not sure people believed would actually do it yeah I'm sure there were people waiting for that announcement and also now waiting for the failure you must have a lot of the surrounding people I mean people who are competitive with you I speak of who part of them wants you to succeed because it opens up opportunities for them right but at the same time if it's anything at all like the business of show there's such competition that even those who succeed feel the sense of there isn't enough to go around and if you succeed it means I won't is there more of a camaraderie from your standpoint well it's it depends on who huge format so that there's some companies where we are a great enabler because we're fundamentally SpaceX's in the transportation business and the if transportation improves then those who who use transportation will find that their business is improved you know just as when they finished the Transcontinental railway in the you know in the early days of early history the United States it was a huge boon to businesses and East Coast businesses and you know people could travel back and forth Goods could transfer a lot easier so it was really helpful to everyone except probably the stagecoach companies and so right they didn't like it that well they didn't so if you know but so I think I think there's probably there's more of the space business that that wants us to succeed then doesn't want us to succeed in it yeah yeah and so you're are you feeling more scrutiny about the Model S in terms of competitiveness because here's you know just based on the documentary the killing of the electric cars this has happened before the name itself Tesla comes from someone who is all squashed by the bigger electric companies you know Nikola Tesla that did pretty well for most of his life although he went kind of bonkers at the end hopefully that doesn't happen to me you know yes we're all pulling but I made in terms of who got credit for what that seemed to be the the struggle in terms of the memory if you ask your average American on the street what they know about Nikola it says you're not going to get a lot of yeah Edison and I think in the popular yes mindset you know Tesla get gets less notice than Edison in in science in scientific world Tesla gets more attention and more credit than absent yeah and they they both I think they're both really great man and amazing things and you know the little bit of rivalry is probably a good thing it's a great thing so so it's I think that they're both great we thought would recognize Tesla in naming the company better than naming it the Elan car company or something like that I'm proud of her letting that go here across your mind at some point all right how many people have signed up already officially signed up and are waiting delivery on the Model S uh I don't know the exact number today but we're well over 500 over fine and how do I begin on the next one I would just go to the website time you can just click but I've got you right here out there forms that we could fill out right now it literally you can how easy is it so you go to the website and you follow the simple instructions calling yes me I want one as someone who did PayPal you can imagine that I'm a big focus on making things really easy yeah I started online thanks yeah especially so we spent a lot of time PayPal trying to make things super easy and actually if somebody goes to the Tesla Motors just go to just go to Tesla Motors calm right click on the buy tab you should be able to put down a reservation for Model S in under five minutes I like that alone and it's a five thousand dollar reservation which is refundable and I'm you know personally standing behind the reservation payments so if any is concerned about us going out of business the only thing you should worry about is is if I get hit by a bus I'm probably cover that one as well by you haven't getting some key man insurance in place so if I do get it by a bus just really there's the bus factor that's still it or something you know I would just think no la fortunately I'm safe another people times $5,000 you should be able to cover that fairly easy yeah it's not gonna I don't think it's going to be I think people's department well there is a we can't call it a pause for legal reasons but it people's reservation my payment is I think is safe but I'm glad we were able to uncover the bus factor this is very important I think to a lot of customers they need to know yeah not not only that mean that they're still it I mean there's a tiny bit of risk your kryptonite apparently is the bus right well so there's always a tiny bit of risk and high risk would be if Tesla goes out of business and I lose all of my assets mhm and and don't die don't die and don't die urge the rub in that so and and and for the rest of my life I'm never able to repay to build up my assets the point where people can be repaid that would be the circumstance under which people would lose out them you know what I'm glad you did the math on that because I'm sure a lot of people have also and and well it's if the bus does hit me it needs to kill me not partially paralyzed me or something does encourage a call bus driving your profession do us all a favor and stay the hell away from this man if at all possible hit the dog if I may mr. musk I I cannot thank you enough for sharing as much as you have I would love to to have you on again in terms of watching the progress of SpaceX as well as Tesla because I am wildly curious and I know an awful lot of people are as well that are just starting to discover what's been going on now in your life for the last six years in the case of SpaceX and last Roadster rather and and now the last couple years with Model S and yeah waiting with bated breath to see where this company is going and and and praying with you and for you that it succeeds beyond your dream thanks actually you know what you haven't touched on any personal stuff which is which is fine but you know I didn't want to but I'm happy to go there what would you like to talk about well it there there is a common misperception which which does sort of driving crazy a little bit ok you know I I sort of well what my wife and I getting Mike's wife and I are getting getting divorced and we why I'm in there yeah yeah so sorry the divorce filing took place into the June of June of last year and so it takes a while for these things to get done boy desert yeah and although Mike's wife to your credit made it clear in a blog that that the marriage was over for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone else in fact she wanted to get divorce at least as much as I did if not more that takes a little stress and guilt away sure right there there there been a few articles which have have have said that I left my wife and five kids for for someone else I'm glad you brought this up I wasn't about to go there but for God's sakes let's clear a little air here it's I mean yeah you know that would be very frustrating to me as well if that was the if that was in press releases and articles written about me when I was trying to change the face of the automobile business but yeah let's talk about it well it's it whatever you'd like to share if I read that about someone I think what a dick alright and and and that would be true I mean if it were true but but actually it's not because I would never leave my kids in fact I see them five days a week they keep you from sleeping we talked about that before yeah yeah so what are the age range of these five children of yours I well the twins are turning five and that the triplets are turning are two and a half Wow twins and triplet yeah that makes the five Wow Wow ah well this so anyway it just it's a support point of clarification there was an article I think you know open if there been a few articles where that sort of been mentioned as an offhand comment in fact they weren't even there were positive articles they just mentioned it sort of of the kind of but it and and they were corrected in the online version but it but you know it's difficult sometimes correct these perceptions con the surface of it may seem that that that that's you know that I left my wife for someone else but I didn't and well this is the problem that comes with the limelight you see you've gotten beyond your profession and your expertise and your business life and you're now being scrutinized for your personal life and I do know a great deal about that from of course the business that I chose many years ago and it's never fair it's never balanced and it's always about selling an article or a paper or a magazine and whatever it takes to throw you under that bus if we may go back to that unfortunate spot they will do it and I am more than happy to offer you this form to clear any air in regards to this at any time because a lot of times quite frankly people in showbiz they're sort of taught to stay away from it you know what don't just leave it they're gonna write whatever they want to write and I think that it's pretty damn courageous to sit here and say you know what this is what's being said about me and I don't appreciate it yeah I commend you why I think I just thank you correct I mean I'm certainly you know that's one who is I mean I I'm no saint but I'll say say but but I generally try to do the right thing and and you know so and that's a like like said if people actually were to say go look at my ex-wife's blog or something that's that no okay but the marriage came to an end because do literally stir true apart and yeah it just wasn't working and I'm making each other unhappy so but there people don't always know to do that and now and so anyway yeah well thank you thank you very much for sharing all of that I really genuinely appreciate and I think the people watching appreciate it as much the whole idea of the show was to not just be an infomercial about a film or a project or the design of an electric car it was really about getting to know the people behind their work and their lives and what it takes in some cases to make history and so on that level I thank you very much all right well thanks I agree yeah thank you mister Elon Musk and I want to not only thank him but my first guest Jason and tuned this has been a day and evening for me and for this show on many levels and I want to take the opportunity this time unlike the previous times of thanking my crew because for some reason we're wrapping up all the equipment after the show and I the first thing that crosses my mind is I didn't thank everyone so Jason Calacanis thanks for nothing let's start there ah then we go over to Tyler and crude and Jamie and Jason McEntire and Kate shorter and Professor Chadd I like to call him and worse Jacob is he out there crawling around somewhere you're not getting any credit I'm not thanking and and gypsy Kinnear from across the country lines into Canada and Josh will be sent here today to help out and I want to thank all of you who are insisted on watching us live and contributed I did not put you on the spot to play the Larry King game I'm not sure I should let you slide did you contemplate that at all I'm not Thompson show how in plays there Larry change ok well I'll tell you what um yeah I'm going to insist that you come back with a Larry King game prepared I'm going to let you off the hook on this one because I feel like I've more than pressed my luck with your appearance here and I thank you for your time I sincerely do all right welcome ok so thanks to everyone involved and thank you for watching and please join us again my guest next week on Easter Sunday he's called yet vicious the pitbull of stand-up comedy Bobby Slayton I got myself a funny Jew for Easter that's what I did I also got the star of an amazing documentary called super high me a great great talent mr. Doug Benson we just lined up a few other new guests I'm very excited if you're a fan of the runaway hit Mad Men the golden globe-winning star of that show Jon Hamm has agreed to join us allowed to be the 19th of 26 but on the 19th for certain the Academy award-winning writer of the usual suspects not a bad film so I've been told Felicia Day the beginning of May those of you who enjoy the guild online and everything that it's becoming there beyond a lot of great other people who have said yes and I'll be making more announcements thank you for all your involvement and help don't forget our contests we skipped three degrees of Kevin Pollak we'll get back to that next week and don't forget your suggestions for the Larry King game and thank you for all your questions I'm sorry we didn't get to them and I'll see you next week okay you you

https://youtu.be/n1j0yHOxcL0

hello everyone welcome my name is karen tucker i'm ceo and board member of the churchill club and tonight we present an evening with elon musk in conversation with michael malone elon and mike thank you very much for being here with us tonight and i would also like to thank microsoft for hosting this program this evening before we get started let me mention some of our upcoming events first on tuesday april 21st it's virtualization what's next six leading experts will talk about trends and the next generation of this hot technology area and then next on thursday april 23rd we present a woman a women tech executive roundtable what's top of mind in 2009 with an all-star cast including cheryl sandberg from facebook from facebook and on april 27th we have a program about executive leadership style and its effect on business performance the panel will include bill campbell chairman of intuit and others you can look for that on churchill club.org this week and on may 7 it's our 2009 cio agenda including the cios of home depot baxter among others of an incredible group should be an interesting program this too will post on the website this week and last but not least it is our uh most anticipated program of the year the top 10 tech trends event on wednesday may 20 and this year we have vinod khosla rahm shahram steve jervidson and joe schoendorff will be making their predictions with high audience participation and so if you haven't yet made your reservation please be sure to do that just a note about the club for over 23 years the churchill club has been the leading forum for the bay area business and technology community presenting what's new what's next what matters most we are a non-profit member supported group and so if you are not a member and you enjoy tonight's program we hope that you will consider joining us and we make it easy for you to do so simply just visit churchillclub.org and go through the steps now i'm pleased to introduce our moderator michael malone mike has had a most impressive career having covered silicon valley and high tech for more than 25 years he has written for the wall street journal the economist fortune the new york times forbes asap and earlier the san jose mercury news he wrote or co-wrote a dozen books he hosted three public television interview programs a series and most recently he co-pro he co-produced a pbs mini series called the new heroes about social entrepreneurs when i asked mike for something about him that doesn't appear in his bio he admitted that he was nearly expelled from santa clara university because he he used a certain obscenity i believe he said it contained 12 letters in his school paper column i'm sure that wasn't the the first time that mike stirred things up and i trust that it will not be the last either so let's give a warm welcome to respected journalist and author mike malone good evening everybody looks like we have a pretty full house i recognize a lot of faces and i promise not to try not to use that uh that 12-letter word tonight elon might but i'll try not to i hope all of you had a chance to take a look at the the tesla roadster sitting out there in the parking lot it was the one behind the orange cones that look very different from all the rest of the cars out there if you didn't get a chance try to beat elon out of here tonight and go take a look at or at least watch them tear out of the parking lot silently so allow me to do an introduction sir we've known each other a long time yeah you know churchill club has 12 letters oh yes it is oh my goodness i was just thinking it was 20 it's hard to leave it was 28 years ago that rich carl garden tony perkins showed me a plan for this and it was about this just a few years before i was shown the plan for ebay and in both cases i said i just don't think it's going to work it's crazy no it's just crazy so let me introduce you 37 year old elon musk was born and raised in south africa but left home at age 17 to make his way in the world living on as little as one dollar per day he eventually made his way to the wharton school at the university of pennsylvania where he earned bachelor's degrees in economics and physics musk then attended stanford's graduate program in high energy physics where he lasted exactly two days before dropping out to form a company with his brother that company zip2 was sold for 300 million dollars musk then founded x.com an online financial services company it eventually became paypal of which elon was the largest shareholder paypal as we all know was purchased by ebay for 1.5 billion dollars in 2002. when he graduated from wharton elon determined the three important areas where he wanted to make a contribution was the internet clean energy and space and with paypal tesla motors spacex and solar city he has done just that and in the process made himself one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs on the planet ladies and gentlemen elon musk thanks so let's begin with the topic of greatest interest to the audience here tonight i assume uh tesla motors okay where's the company at right now where do orders stand oh mike i don't know what to tell you it's it's been rough uh no i'm just kidding it's it's actually um it's actually been it's been pretty good um in fact it really quite a contrast to the rest of the water business we're sold out first of all for the tesla roads to the sports car we're sold out through the end of october um and within it i think probably within two or three months will be actually sold out of all 2009 production for the roadster um so is this for the standard roadster or the or the advanced version well we are we do have a roadster sport coming out which is a you know for those for whom the road says the roast isn't fast enough right um there's the roadster sport yeah how fast is that one now uh that that'll do zero to 16 3.7 seconds so it's faster than almost any any it's like an icbm laid over on its side uh yeah it's it's it's ridiculously fast now how are the orders for that uh good actually i you know i haven't looked at the latest orders for roadster sport and people actually have an opportunity to upgrade their car through it's the sport that are getting their car after i think uh late june or july and what we're finding is a lot of people are choosing to upgrade their car to the sport uh package um so i actually don't have an exact number for you but anecdotally it seems to be doing very well now the roaster is 109 000. is that right yeah and then there's actually sports 139 000. yeah right um well the the price to to customers is actually uh in terms of a comparison price that that's relevant for comparing it to a porsche or something like that is actually about 98 000 and and the reason for that is if you buy an electric car you get a 7500 federal tax rebate even if you're even if you're an amt it applies to everyone okay and then uh you don't pay the gas guzzler uh tax which is somewhere in the order of three thousand dollars um so effectively you know your thousand dollar discount yeah you're roughly 10 and depends on which car you compare it against because the guest cause of text does vary uh but it's somewhere between a a nine to twelve thousand dollar discount and uh relative to a gasoline sports car so in effect you're talking about a car that's just under a hundred thousand dollars as a base price and then um the sport package is another twenty thousand dollars on top of that um and that's equivalent to like going from like a you know a 911 to a 911 turbo or something you know that that kind of thing now if i were to order one right now if anybody in the audience wants to order one right now raise your hands i will take orders if somebody out here were to order one right now what would it take what's the deposit and what's the delivery date um so we're actually reducing our uh our deposit requirements on the roadster and previously uh we'd use the the deposits to provide funding for for the company and that was an acknowledged thing we said look we car companies are very capital intensive so in order to make this uh you know doable or more doable we're we're gonna take deposits they'll be at risk people should recognize that and then the the advantages that they get one of the postcards uh and we actually got a lot of people who signed up to that um but we don't really need that anymore um so we're actually gonna reduce the the deposit down to make ninety nine hundred dollars and then you pay the balance uh just at start of production which is a couple months prior to delivery now did you find any impact on the orders because with the falling gas prices and we saw what happened with the prius i mean you can go to slimevale and entire supermarket parking lots are filled with unsold priuses did that affect you guys at all you know i don't think that was a huge impact um because most people aren't buying the 100 000 sports car because of right you know to save money on gas um it's it's more geek love than it is uh cheap gas yeah i was more worried about what how that would affect sales for our sedan um you know which we just unveiled a few weeks ago we'll talk about that in a moment but yeah yeah um and uh but it i don't think that's been a key impact on on roadster sales i think certainly the economy as a whole and the um the implosion of people's net worth has had an effect on on new roads to sales and we're fortunate that we do have a significant backlog you know going out six months but um i wouldn't say gas prices have had a big effect on the roadster now being in the car business you have to be asked are you taking any federal money you know um and are you worried about your job security if you are uh well you know i i don't have to worry about my compensation my compensation currently is a dollar so i'd be happy to cut that in half for the federal government uh if they do uh give us a loan but actually we've taken no no government money at all thus far um if some people out there think we we have and we haven't now we do aspire to get a a government loan for under the what's called the atvm program it's the advanced technology vehicle manufacturing program that's from the doa that's from the voe it's not bailout money and and it was this was this program was done before there was uh in the need for valve money that the legislation was written about about 18 started started writing it about 18 months ago and it got it finally got approved by congress um last year sometime i think like late last year so uh and this is before a vomit so this isn't stimulus money this isn't bailout money this is actually um something that originated in the senate uh energy uh committee because they they felt was a matter of national security for uh and environmental obviously environmentally important for the united states to to accelerate its transition away from from from oil uh for all the obvious reasons that uh the you know it's it's damaging yeah it's obviously very damaging to the environment um and uh as gas prices rise if you know because as they will dramatically uh when we come back to another boom there's going to be a massive wealth transfer out of the united states right uh to to other countries and it's just it's just it's just kind of silly you know for that why why it's cheaper for us to just accelerate the move with oil now i'm not going to ask you how much you plan to get from the government or when because i think you said that publicly once and got in trouble didn't you i did get in trouble um i just said what they told me and they didn't say keep it quiet so um but i suffice to say we are highly optimistic that we will receive um approval loan approval um in in the near term okay let's talk about the factory that was uh there was an awful lot of news a few months ago groundbreaking ceremonies a big assembly plant going to be out there on 237 in san jose yeah now it seems to be on hold and something about financing delayed or you couldn't you didn't qualify for it or what happened yeah so the san jose um uh the idea of using the sort of the the undeveloped land of the 237 in san jose uh occurred before the the section 136 or the atvm loan program was approved by congress so um and one of the clauses in that atvm loan program is that you have to uh it gives preference to um manufacturing facilities older than 20 years which was actually so it's sort of a quasi buy american clause because the the the foreign car companies that are factories here almost all their factories are younger than 20 years um so it's it's it's essentially to buy us the cash towards american companies that that that clause has put in but nonetheless it's there which means we can't do green field so um well i assume there's going to be a lot of empty buildings in dearborn soon does that where you plan on going um no we'll most likely be in southern california we actually have term sheets from two locations in southern california um we looked first in the bay area um i'd love to take over newmie that'd be awesome yeah um uh i don't know if there's maybe at some point we'll we'll have an opportunity to acquire nume um uh that would be that'd be great um i'll take that in a second um but but that isn't available right now and i don't think we we can't afford it really unless they give it to us um which maybe they will i don't know so where are the cars being manufactured right now uk and lotus uh actually the roadsters uh it's considered a us manufactured car the final assembly occurs in in the bay area and menlo park of all places well-known auto center right uh well bear in mind we're talking low production for the roadster so this is a production rate of around about 25 a week um that might rise to 30 a week in the summer so it's not it's not i mean when you sort of add that up that's five cars a day i mean that's like your average service center can do a lot more than that uh and and uh so we install the powertrain in in menlo park we do final vehicle verification we do the high tests uh out at moffett airfield um and um yeah and that's and then we may picture the power that the battery pack in st carlos so it's by value talking about something mostly done here where do you do the tests at moffitt on the airfield on the runway yeah has any have you ever seen a a tesla racing down the runway in moffett field do you guys like to do it three o'clock in the morning no there's hardly any traffic on market nowadays true um let's talk about the new car the the s tell me about it all right um this is this is a this really is a great car i mean the roadster is a good car i think the s is a great car um and and i think it's something that will um it's really quite historic or at least it aspires to be um in that this will be the first mass-produced highway cable uh electric car and that's nev there's never this may sound strange but there's actually never been a mass-produced electric car outside of golf carts um and uh is it the first non-internal combustion mass-produced car since the stanley steemer yeah it might be wow okay um so yeah i mean there's been hand built things and conversions of gasoline cars and stuff like that but but not an actual mass-produced electric car so you know of course we have to mass produce it for that to be true um uh so that's why i say it aspires to be this is this aspiration is that um and but if we fulfill that aspiration then it will be very historic and this is a car really designed to take full advantage of an electric powertrain so the packaging is very optimized for that the battery pack is in the floor pan between the two axles so it's this big sort of flat battery pack looks a lot like a giant laptop battery pack um in fact user's laptop sells i was going to say is it is is it still a just a ton of laptop batteries well it's half a ton of leftovers half a ton of laptop batteries strapped together yeah now that's tricky by the way so really so advanced strapping is tricky yeah i bet yeah so so you need a lot of micro you need a lot of processors right to manage all that yeah uh i think they're like 30 or 32 processors or something on board a lot of them are like little tiny ones so you must go to every night praying for breakthroughs and battery technology so you don't have to deal with this um no you know it's not too bad actually having a lot lots of little cells i mean we keep believing what that that is the the highest energy density pack that you can make is to use a large number of laptop cells and we we keep um pushing on the cell manufacturers and technically by the way a battery is a collection of cells and and the cell if it's just one it's a cell and if it's two it's a battery um so uh so so the cell produ and the cell is a chemical engineering problem the battery the pack the battery is uh is actually a mechanical engineering electrical engineering and software engineering problem um so there are different types of you know expertise needed to do to do that and in fact there are many makers of cells but there's only one maker of large lithium ion battery packs and that's tesla um so uh of course there will be others in the future and that's why daimler came to us uh to make the the battery pack for the new electric smart right now you know something i've never asked you my laptop just about sets my pants on fire how do you keep all of those from just cooking that car are you are you sitting on your laptop i don't even watch but that's part of the problem i think about a half a ton of laptop batteries um yeah um well look what's the worst that could happen i mean we do extensive safety testing um i mean i shouldn't laugh this is a serious subject um the uh so i'll break it down okay so we start off at the cell level we use only the finest cells corinthians currently finest cells each one gently observed and carefully prepared um we use we we do actually use the ice quality cells which which come from japan um they're um they're they're carefully verified by the manufacturer then when we receive them we we check each cell um we uh in addition to the fuse that's that's built into the cell from the manufacturer we we double fuse the cell so it's triple fused in total at the cell level um then the cells incorporate into modules the modules um are designed to ensure that there's passive propagation resistance between the cells so that what that means is um even if uh all active safety systems fail and a cell goes into what's called thermal thermal runaway it it that energy is contained and it does not spread to any neighboring cells so this involves insulating the cells making sure you've got a thermal conduction path to get rid of the heat so it you so you don't essentially have a chain reaction so that that's quite tricky um and and then uh but but we also never want to get that to to even losing a single cell right so we have an active cooling system uh which is so the battery pack is liquid cooled um and and that that also is a tricky problem because you need to be thermally conductive but electrically isolated yeah um and moreover you need that needs to be true over a hundred thousand plus miles of bumpy bumpy problems in real life cars yeah real life cars real life cars are it is a hard it's hard to make things last for a hundred thousand miles and you know ten years and that kind of thing so you you if you hit potholes and you get so you got you know it's getting sharp you know road shocks from the road uh it's getting vibrations going through extremes of temperature it gets into an accident and all these circumstances you cannot have uh the pack uh catch on fire right um very hard problem and and then also it it must be you must be able to make the pack inexpensively uh it's got to be password regulatory uh requirements um you've got to preserve the pack uh so that you maximize the calendar and cycle life of the the chemistry within the cells um charging to deal with the dot and the doe yeah any branches a lot of departments yeah tell me more i don't want to go into too much my new shape tell me more about the car yeah sorry you know i shouldn't i should i should have said talk yeah i'll give you a sales pitch on the model s okay so um this is a car that has a range of up to 300 miles um it seats uh up to seven people that's five adults plus two kids and the way we get the two kids is it's kind of like the old station wagons we have two rear-facing kit seats in the back um that's an option that you can you can order i remember those days yeah i mean you know it's not great being in the back being in the back but i guess it could be kind of fun if you're a kid and you can sort of watch all the other cars and stuff um and and most people you know when you put seven people in a car it's almost never seven adults and it's only occasionally rarely is it seven people um so we're trying to make something that could substitute for your suv uh so you don't have to have cart this gigantic seven passenger suv all over the place it will be five star crash rated and that that's a very hard thing to achieve in fact today's five star will will reduce to a three star in two years right they keep moving the bar yeah they keep raising the bar on on to what's necessary to achieve a five star some people might think oh i've got a five star day it'll be like a five star in two years no that's like a three star in two years i mean you basically have to be you know a sherman tank uh level safety to get to five stars we will be at five stars i'll have my own kids in the car we're not going to make something that's legitimate yeah we fully occupied in the car um and um and and so the the challenge then is to make it make it super safe but not super heavy um so it is quite a difficult mechanical engineering problem and mass optimization problem um and uh and actually arguably it will be safer than an suv because it'll have such a low center of gravity uh because the battery pack is in the floor pan um that you're not going to have the tip over risk it's going to stay on the ground yeah so i mean if you because if you're going on like some mountain path or something and you go off the side i mean it doesn't matter how many airbags you got you know right um your your toast so you want to make sure you don't have tip over risk and then that that certain on tip overs you'd actually win against an suv and uh tell me about the ergonomics i hear you have some innovations on the dashboard absolutely so for the interior uh approach um you can think of it like like a giant iphone okay that's the center console imagine a 17 inch diameter iphone um and that's the basic thought there and 3g wireless connected uh yeah absolutely in fact so it'll have your controls your standard controls for uh stereo hvac but it's also going to be able to do connect to the internet so you want to do pandora radio if you want to do youtube whatever you want to do it'll have a browser this is just linux linux running up running running a browser so if you want to look at your email not while you're not driving and in fact there's some sort of interesting ideas who thought about well like maybe you could have it uh read out your email to you while you're driving um and um you know do voice commands on on the computer and so and nice to allow people to develop applications uh that that could run on on the computer because it's a full-fledged computer it's not some sort of dumbed-down car car thing um and um and also you should be able to theme the the display so it's a 17-inch display in front and it's about inch display in front of you so it's user modified display yeah yeah so there's a read-only display right in front of you and then a big 17-inch touchscreen on in the center console and uh you know you can theme your cell phone you know and and customize it to your interests and and uh and needs well why can't you do that with a car you should be able to you know it seems like a reasonable thing so if you want to see different instruments on the front like you care about seeing this readout that readout you want it to sort of look have a heavy metal look you want to you know want it to look like country and western whatever you know make it more feel like it's more your car not just something that rolled off an assembly line so you could have the dashboard of a 67 gto yeah if you look like steam gauges if you want yeah yeah absolutely uh so this is your this is your five series killer you know we're not going to kill we're 20 we're looking at 20 000 units a year so we're not going to kill anything right and and we'll we'll impinge on the market share on of several cars out there lexus mercedes bmw uh you know audi um but but really it'll be a small i mean a highly noticeable impact on on total i mean you know this well at least there were 17 million dollars 17 million cars sold in the u.s a year i think it's not about you know not much like 99 million cars a year kind of run rate so uh if we even even at nine even at my nine million costs yeah yeah and that twenty thousand is ten thousand domestic ten thousand international so we're talking you know 0.01 percent of the car market okay so give me some performance give me some performance specs on this thing price starting price forty nine thousand nine hundred forty nine thousand nine hundred um well yeah okay and uh gosh that's less than 50. yes that's right it is that's right only 50 grand that that's half the price it is it is selling the price yes that's quite impressive thanks and now that is after there's a 7500 we have that federal tax debate that's after the 7500 although i haven't taken into account the gas guzzle attack so in effect for an apples to apples comparison would be a little bit less than that maybe 47 000 or something like that and you said distance was on a charge um it can go up to 300 miles but now the the the 49 901 will do 160 miles okay um it's but that there will be a 300 mile range pack available um and uh one of the things you're thinking of doing is is perhaps making that's something you can rent so if you can if you can't afford the more expensive 300 mile range pack or don't want it then that's fine get the 160 ml pack rent the bigger one when you need it some other ways we've addressed the range issue is a 45 minute fast charge capability which is about the limit of the battery chemistry and then designing the battery pack such that it can be switched out faster than you can fill a gas tank um which in principle you think about it i mean this is this is basically a big laptop on wheels and if you can switch out your your laptop battery you know in 30 seconds well why can't you do that with a big one you just need something that can simulate a head scale two little clips and that 500 pound battery pack falls out yes that's something you can do by hand right but you so you need you do need special equipment at sort of a battery pack swap station um uh and there's you know companies out there that are looking to to to to do swap stations and i want you to talk about one of your your solar company weren't you talking about having solar panels that people could put on like the roof of their house yeah and do home charging for a quick 75 miles or whatever it was well um the the most efficient thing to do is to actually put solar panels on the roof your house and and just have them try basically power your house uh particularly during the day because during the day is when you you encounter peak load right and they have to put the least efficient power stations online uh during the day um and uh and then at night that at night it's actually better to charge your car at night um so it's better to like decouple it effectively so if you wanna if you wanna be um truly green then you just need to say okay well i'm gonna generate more uh energy by a solar that i consume in my car um although the model s will have so as a solar panel option so you can put solar panels on the on the roof of the car itself on the car itself okay um yeah and and there's some interesting ideas to potentially have solar solar car ports um and um if you want to get some some really sort of crazier ideas are like try to coat the whole car uh with some sort of amorphous uh photovoltaic coating and and you know have the whole thing be a big solar panel yeah yeah now there was talk for a while and i guess you've abandoned it of even putting a gasoline engine in yes is that is that gone it is gone we looked closely at the whole plug-in hybrid thing and um you know i guess about a a week ago or so there was a guy who who um asked me some asked me send me an email he's like he he runs like a bolt side or gm bolt side or something he's not he's not working for jim but um he just said you know so why didn't why isn't tesla doing doing the range extended electric vehicle approach the plug-in hybrid thing um and i just sort of gave him kind of a matter of fact this is why we chose the strategy of one another and then you know it's all over the place like i'm trashing the vault i'm not trashing the ball i hope the vault is successful um and i've said so many times but i have to i'm just explaining why why did we not do that so i'll explain here i mean basically um uh what it comes down to is uh it's a technical point um because we had to sort of drill into it to quite deeply to appreciate why why it wouldn't be ideal in our opinion to have a plug-in hybrid if you go from say if you consider a 200-mile range pack versus say a 40-mile range pack it sounds like you've got you you have a pack that is one-fifth the size right for the 40-mile pack but that's actually not true so because what happens is the 40-mile pack has to generate particularly if it's a range extended electric so you're not you know it's a the 40 mile pack has to generate five times the power right um well technically you could have the the motor running and so it might maybe it only has to generate two and a half times the power but then you're you're running both simultaneously and that you're not really being electric if you're doing that so if you just consider the pure electric case you've got to generate five times the power but the way it works in battery chemistry is that power and energy work work at work at opposites you can either have a high power pack or a high energy pack energy is total mileage power is the rate of which you can take uh you know the rate which you can consume that energy and uh so in effect you then push to a low energy density chemistry in a plug-in hybrid case um and because you're hitting the pack so hard so it's doing it's working so much harder than the bigger the bigger pack um that you have to de-rate the pack derate the energy content so so you end up with something which is close to half the size maybe eight maybe 40 40 to 50 percent of the size of the 200 mile pack so so yeah so and then you've got to add in the cost the cost and weight of the uh the engine the generator all the cross connects between the two uh you've got a factory in the that there's servicing of two complete drivetrains you still have to deal with all the epa stuff for emissions um and and then when you when you've consumed your 40 miles um which we'll do reasonably for not every day but maybe every set every may call every third day um you you're then gonna have something which is massive an engine which is super really underpowered right um it's going to stop this heavy car down yeah it's going like it's going to feel like i've got a lawn mower engine trying to power my sedan um and it's so it's going to be running at very high rpm it's going to be working really really hard uh it's not gonna make that hundred thousand miles it's gonna be tough yeah um and so so you really it's gonna feel very anemic um on the highway and uh uh so it's just it's it's it's problematic um you're neither fish nor foul and a sense reason that if you've got a given mass and cost and you say to an engineer make the best electric car for for a fixed massive cost or you say engineer make the best gasoline car big smashing cost it's going to be a better gasoline car or a better electric car than if you split the baby so you're not trashing hybrids but you just did a pretty good job of trashing hybrids well i i i could be wrong you know um i'm just saying that's the reasoning that that caused us to right to focus uh on electrics and continue the focus on electrics um let me ask you a silicon valley question yeah uh you're vice chairman and for a long time the ceo of the firm is a name out of silicon the silicon valley past zev drury a guy that we haven't seen around here for 30 years who ran monolithic memories right way back when uh kind of a legendary figure kind of a swashbuckling guy i seem to remember he ran he was running monolithic memories and the yom kippur war broke out and he literally called into the office and said i'll be in israel until the war is over and volunteered and went off to battle uh unique guy but he's been missing from action right here for a long long time where did you find him and why would you get a chip guy in a battery business in a car business sure um how do we find him um actually it was through one of the investors um at tesla one zev is a car guy i mean he went into sort of racing did a lot of racing um and he was very very competitive obviously you know great entrepreneur strong track record and i think very importantly he was someone who was he was not afraid of of danger as evidenced by his running off to the umpqua war uh um so you know towards the end of 2007 uh we needed to find a ceo for tesla and we didn't have a lot of takers um because it was a it was a very difficult situation um and there weren't there weren't very many people with the the guts of of zev um and anyway so so you know i thought was somebody who who could help get us out of a pickle and uh and who wasn't afraid to try to do that um and i mean i it's hard to describe tesla was in a really dire situation at the end of 2007. um it had come to light that uh the cars cost was a hundred and forty thousand dollars we've been selling it for ninety two thousand dollars um you can make it up in volume right yeah um and and not only that we we couldn't i mean there were several things broken about the car technically uh transmission being the most notable item but there were a lot of other issues um and uh you know so so we it really wasn't a car that could even even even if we said okay we'll we'll we'll accept the 480 000 this isn't a car that would have passed safety and reliability and endurance tests um and so it was just wow and we're sort of out of money or close to being out of money um so this is eight you know yeah like 18 months ago um you know in your situation like that you got to be pretty bold if you want to come in and run you know help run the company so um and he he was willing to do that and and he'd sort of like said he'd taken taken things from very tough situations uh before and so he yeah you joined as ceo and i in fact he and i were kind of the co-ceos of the company um because he he was coming in cold and didn't know any of the any other background and although i'd been at sort of a fairly high level up to that point um and not in the nitty-gritty at least i had the contextual background so he and i basically ran the company together for about 18 months um and then when the financial crisis hit uh i guess it was about well when the peninsula crisis hit and i was like oh man okay so i got to up my time and the company and and go from being kind of the the half ceo to the full ceo um because i also had to up up the ante in terms of my investment in the company financially um so it's like all right i'm gonna do that then i i gotta um you know be the full the full ceo not the half ceo well now bold is you know the ultimate entrepreneurial trait and you obviously have it i want to go back let's talk about your upbringing but before we do that real quick uh 40 how much for the for the yes 49 44 900 okay how fast uh it's zero to 60 in about five and a half seconds and uh top speed uh 130 miles per hour electronically limited we will have sport versions of the s that will go have a zero sixty of under five seconds um so but five five and a half seconds in the sedan is plenty far plenty fast oh yeah i'll think about those kids in the back seat facing backwards yes it's not 3.9 seconds like the roadster but it's pretty fast yeah real fast all right let's talk about your upbringing you leave home at 17 and you want to get to the states right was that your dream yeah first of all you want to be in the army that didn't seem like a good use of time being in the city yeah being serving as a yeah being constructed in south african army just didn't seem like a great way to spend time so without your parents approval you take off and you end up in canada first well so i'm trying to figure out how to get to the u.s so try to convince my parents to move there or my parents were divorced at least one of them could move there and i could move there with them and uh but i wasn't successful in convincing them and um but but then i found out my mother had been born in canada so i kind of walked it through the process of getting a canadian getting her canadian citizenship which allowed me to get my canadian citizenship which meant i could go to canada and my grandfather was american actually but because my mother hadn't gotten her american citizenship before he died and before certain age restrictions i wasn't able to get american citizenship unfortunately directly so i went to canada initially canada's a great country uh i was there for for about three years and um and then uh came down to to the states to go to to continue going to school at upan uh with wharton and you live on a book a day how did you live yeah but how do you do that i mean there's several times in your life when you're basically well below the poverty line right and this is one of them but it was that was 20 years ago yeah so that's like two bucks two bucks a day well there's there's all the difference that does make a big difference um yeah well i i wasn't quite sure how much money you know uh how uh how hard it would be to get a job or anything like that so i hadn't really had a real job um because i was only 17 so i've done like paper routes and stuff like that so i thought well just in case it takes me a long time to get a job i better make sure that my tiny stash of money lasts a long time so uh i only had a few thousand dollars uh so um so i thought well wait let me see if i can live for under a buck a day and you can do it i mean just buy like hot dogs in bulk and oranges and bulk and you know scurvy is bad so you could have an orange throw an orange in there that's right when the blisters start forming on your tongue it's right here an orange every couple of days will you know keep scoby away and uh hot dogs are you know like it's just sort of like pasta and pasta sauce you know just buy the stuff in bulk and and uh you can get at least the time you can get to under a bucket a day so now you pick up two different stick a little monotonous after a while yeah i can imagine the 14th day in a row of spaghetti right a lot of people pick up econ degrees a lot of people pick up physics degrees but not many people pick up both of those those are two different worlds i thought it was relatively unique and then i found it actually somebody else did it but uh uh but yeah i was it was um yeah just i i i um i mean i'm more an engineer than anything else you know uh engineering and design is my interest um but i figured if i don't learn the business stuff then somebody else is gonna make me do things i don't wanna do um so i better learn you know the secrets of business uh and so that's why i did the uh the physics degree as well as the fight of the foreign finance degree now now this is the most fine stuff was easy by the way that was really like and i say all my business courses like in the final year all my business courses together were not as hard as quantum mechanics okay i'll buy that so now this is the mythical moment in your career you get accepted to grad school at stanford that alone is a pretty big deal you're in physics well to be precise um actually my initial department was the material science department um and and you use the word high energy physics and and that's actually defined term in physics technically um i would have actually been in in kind of uh the quant quantum mechanics more than high energy physics uh because the area i was going to be researching was a sort of intersection of applied physics and material science and basically trying to figure out can you create a a capacitor with enough that enough energy density to replace battery now capacitor is are very common components in circuit boards um and and they're occasionally used to store limited amounts of energy but the problem is that they that the energy density does not compare to what a battery can do but if you if you could get a capacitor to approach the interchangeable battery then things like charging could be done in minutes or seconds technically so you wouldn't have a recharge time issue and then also cycle life and calendar life are would be measured in decades but elon you were there for two days you're there for 48 hours i've been in meetings that lasted longer than 48 hours right i've been drunk longer than 48 hours me too two days how do you do two days i mean that's not even long enough to like get the books well it was a it was a tough decision actually i was trying to figure out okay should i do grad studies or start a company uh doing some internet stuff and this was in 95 it was before um for the bubble just before an escape you were in public yeah um so in fact when i started zip2 it was not with the expectation that i would make a large sum of money it was like okay can i make enough money to live um and uh buy food and stuff that's that was really the threshold was very very low threshold and netscape had not gone public um or somebody wrote something about me that said oh i saw an etsy go public and that's why i decided to start zip2 i started zip two in the summer of 95 um and uh before escape have gone public i try to get a job at escape actually and and my didn't hear back from them so yeah now so you're really reading your biography i would have thought you were the wild man the black sheep of the family but now i've come to conclusion it has to be your brother because you come out planning to get a phd and 48 hours later your brother has convinced you to drop out of school and join his new company not quite no actually um i convinced my brother to come from canada oh yeah um my brother's convincing guy or maybe it was well he was in canada at the time um and and uh uh but you know i always wanted to do something with my brother and he wanted to do something with me and um and so a 300 million dollar shared gift is a pretty good gift for you yeah but i mean i really it at the time it was the expectations were really tiny now is this when you were sleeping on the floor in your office um actually i was sleeping on a futon uh which turned into a couch during the day that was like where you held your meetings yes right exactly that are true so you were you were you hadn't you were renting an office but you didn't have a place to live right so your apartment cost more than the office so we so then my brother and i just got two few times um which turned into couches you know and then during the day and then we'd have our meeting we'd have a table and have meetings there and then it might be unbeknownst to people that would have meetings with that before we slipped um and then we shouted the ymca on page mill and el camino uh so uh and then you could work out as well so i was in great shape and um yeah it was it was it was actually fine um so all you guys sitting in pete's with your business plans you think you guys think you have it tough uh any questions from the audience right now we're gonna get into space in a minute here but i want to as long as we're on cars let's take car questions first yes sir congratulations on your success thank you i'm very interested in your idea about email being built into your next car now the question i have for you is say i'm sending you an email with this voice is that what you're going to hear while you're driving my voice reading my email to you and when you respond to me i'll hear your voice responding to me it's just an idea so you got it from me just keep it in mind you don't have to respond right now yes or no thank you okay everybody sign an nda on the way in why did you name the car tesla uh so well the the company is named after nikola tesla who's uh actually very well known in the in physics because units of magnetism are actually units of tesla um and uh and we came up with a number of innovations also went crazy but uh so hopefully that that's no indication of the future of tesla but but he was a great man and and and didn't get i think the popular uh side of things hasn't gotten quite the recognition that he deserves um so uh it was a choice between tesla or maybe my faraday after michael faraday so um so capacitance is measured in far rights by the way in paradise so could you give us your perspective on the future of detroit uh future of detroit wow um well they clearly the companies are going to be smaller than they used to be uh i mean i don't think i can actually i'm not sure i could share any light that people don't already know about detroit and that it's going to be a much smaller industry than before there's i think there's a good chance it will emerge uh healthier from this this process than it then it's been in recent years um i mean gm and chrysler in particular and to some degree ford this was inevitable it was only a question of when um and so this the financial crisis kind of accelerated the inevitable but it it it didn't it would have happened anyway um so uh you know there need to be substantial reforms in the management side and on the labor side and you know i think really they need to get back to they need to focus on producing great products um that's what it really comes down to you know if you say who makes great cars how many people in this room would say gm um like it's kind of unusual um people say that if you said tell me who makes the best cars in the world it might be a toyota or a daimler or a bmw or an audi or something like that uh so i mean that's really what great companies are both great products hopefully but now once you prove mass production of electric car why wouldn't the m a guys from general motors and ford come knocking on your door well i should point out that if you there needs to be some currency for that acquisition um you know and the stock isn't worth a lot and right and they don't have any cash give you you're not going to take equity in general motors well so i mean i made this comment actually several months ago um i mean i was a little more a little more flippant when i say well what if general motors calls up and if what if bob let's see along with the board calls up and says he'd like to acquire it tesla what would your response be i said well you can't afford it because and that's just true i don't think they can afford much of anything they just don't have the cash and equity is not worth anything one more one more car question out there and then we'll go to space uh yeah how would you compare a tesla with fisker automotive uh so well frisco is producing a plug-in hybrid um so frisk is producing a plug-in hybrid it's not as we're talking about earlier it's we're pursuing a different strategy for the reasons articulated um and um you know if biscuits stay i think they're producing a four-door sedan but it's a sportier uh sedan than ours um you know our sedan is intended to to really be very functional and have a lot of cargo space carry five adults in comfort plus potentially two kids and still have room for luggage um and we're we're sort of the roughly 50 000 price point there i think at around 80 000 starting price after tax rebates i think that's probably a fair characterization of the differences let's talk about space we literally don't have enough time interviewing you to cover everything you do uh we could do three different events on three different activities let's do a space real quick where does spacex stand right now what's the status of things and where's what's that's the x prize too let's get into that okay um well spacex is doing really well thankfully otherwise it would be in real trouble um i mean it does particularly in terms of the time that that it takes you know the time that i have dedicated to the companies i'm on average sort of roughly 50 50 between spacex and tesla although as there are issues that crop up that need to be addressed that may that could swing into as much as 80 spacex or 80 tesla in a given week um but spacex is profitable it's been cash flow positive for the cash flow positive and profitable for the last two and a half years um uh we got to orbit last year uh we in december just before christmas uh nasa awarded spacex a 1.6 billion dollar contract uh to um resupply the space station with cargo when does that begin that begins the end of next year okay it's the first mission first the first operational mission after the demonstration missions is december of next year and at what point do you take over completely don't you have exclusivity for a while as as the space shuttle retires well fashionable is supposed to retire at the end of next year so then and then we'd follow our cargo missions immediately thereafter although if the space shuttle ends up running a little longer then there may be some overlap um are you gonna hit those milestones i think we have a decent chance of doing it it's not entirely something there's gonna be guys you have guys waiting up there for simple well nasa isn't nasa isn't i don't think nasa's counting on us being there exactly on time uh they do have some contingencies um um we're still going to do our best to meet those timelines i think i think we can we don't have it's not fully within our power because you know there's there's nasa as well we've got to meet all the nasa uh safety requirements and if they levy requirements on us that we don't yet understand or appreciate all their new requirements uh then that could push out the the effective date of the first operational mission um but i don't think it's going to be much much beyond the end of next year so i'm curious i've always wondered about this about you you know space exploration rockets are the stuff of governments large countries did you have an epiphany one day where you just said to hell with it i'm going to actually do this myself i'm going to have to create a commercial space company yeah i mean who sort of comes up with that idea you know you're in the shower yeah yeah um well like you know you mentioned uh the areas of interest that i had in college you know one of them was was uh space travel in in particular the extension of life beyond earth uh to like making life multi-planetary i mean now i actually when i was in college i didn't think i would actually be a part of i was going to say you're the only guy who had who thought of this stuff that actually did it i mean there are millions of people that think oh i'm going to do this i'm going to you know be an astronaut when i grow up not many people actually build rockets yeah they're 35 years old right and actually when i was in college um it wasn't it wasn't these are the three areas i want to be involved in it's these are these are the three areas that i think will most affect the future of humanity um i didn't if you'd ask me in college do it do you think i'd be involved in space the answer would have been almost certainly not um i thought it would be highly unlikely because you need billions of dollars you know you need to be a government and actually there's only like a handful of governments that can even do that so um so it wasn't what the expectation that i don't expect to be involved in space um but but as a result of paypal the capital i got from that i could do something in space and um it actually uh the the the space stuff uh well it actually came from a conversation with deo and i was there yeah there he is so i we're coming back from rodeo's parents place in long island and they're asking me like what do i do after paypal and i said well you know i i thought maybe there'd be something philanthropic that could be done in space that would get the public more excited about space travel and in particular uh sending people to mars um and and i said but i'm sure nasa's got that covered and uh you know so um i'll go look on the nasa website for for when are we going to march because of course it should be on the website like we're going to mars in this year and this is how we're going to do it um but there was nothing nothing at all um about about people going to mars i was like this is i just don't understand why there's nothing about people going to mars because if you look at the literature in the 70s um it was all about well we went to the moon now we're going to go to mars right um and so what happened and well there was a space shuttle and space shuttles turned out to be a really big mistake um and um it could barely get to lower orbit um forget about moon or mars or anything like that and uh so well geez maybe i can do something that's gonna get the public excited about about mars and and and that will generate congressional support which will turn into funding for nasa to go do this um and i looked looked at a few different options actually there and i did a couple of trips to russia to look at buying some russian refurbished russian icvms right um that's just change that's exciting a little bit yeah yeah make sure you you shift the payload like which one which button do we press i mean while nasa lost the blueprints for the saturn v rocket right so you couldn't rebuild that right um the saturn v was a great rocket it's it's just too bad that that we you know we should just rebuild that rocket and make it better like just improve on that rocket it was it was a good it was a good design um it's so much better than than the space shuttle it's so are you going to put them in your comparable are you going to put a man on mars you and i have a bet i haven't forgotten the bet right we were in a plane flying over the north pole under the aurora borealis right as a matter of fact and we made a bet you but you believe that man would walk you would put a man on the moon by 20 not on the moon i'm sorry on mars yeah by 20 20 20 maybe i think it was 20 20 at 2025. okay you gonna make it we'll try what's the next milestone for spacex well um there's the next big milestone we'll be launching falcon 9 our big rocket which hopefully will occur towards the end around the end of summer um and that's the rocket that will be used to carry our dragon spacecraft to orbit and dragon spacecraft as well will serve as the space station so falcon 9's pretty good sized rocket that's actually the most powerful single core rocket in the us fleet um more powerful than what boeing and lockheed make um before considering side boosters how much each one of these cost on a per flight to falcon 9 about 40 million dollars those are big bets yeah although and then if you add a dragon spacecraft on top of that is about the same and then there's various nasa overhead so you're like 100 million dollar bet when you yeah like the fuse on that thing yeah that's a deal in the rocket world by the way um for only a hundred million dollars um we will carry some cargo over um so yeah um so that launching falcon i will be the next big one there's a sort of smaller milestone which is an upcoming falcon one flight maybe as soon as the end of this month uh that'll deliver our first operational satellite orbit uh which is the malaysian satellite um it's intended to do earth observation you know for like natural disasters and stuff like that and um yeah and and then let's see then at the end of this year hopefully we'll do it launch our first dragon spacecraft from falcon 9. um we'll go to the space station we'll do some basic orbital maneuvering and re-entry uh and then uh next year we go to the space station for the first time okay how long is the contract for the space station how long how large how long or long um it runs through approximately 2015 okay and although i think it'll be extended beyond that because right um it's just the operational plan for the space station kind of only goes to 2015 so uh frankly in theory if you get this right do we need nasa anymore well absolutely well nasa um we aren't a customer to nasa right or right nasa is our customer i should say um so they're our biggest customer and and in fact um when when nasa does developments although in in all circumstances prior to this nasa has been has had these sort of made the design decisions the implementation of those design decisions has been done by um aerospace contractors so so the the novel thing here is that for the first time nasa isn't isn't dictating the design they're simply saying we need cargo delivered we're willing to pay given you a performance contract and yeah the rest right yeah right it's sort of more like fedex you know yeah for spacex we deliver yeah yeah absolutely any questions about space guys there one down here we have a homestead high school junior asking a question uh is this on okay uh so for your uh falcon series you decided to use the merlin engine right um right we developed the middle of engineering yes my question for you is why did you go for the single or one type of engine and then using nine of them on the falcon nine how many yep because i've seen a lot of other in history of space it's like but everyone you know like above five you're like oh my god the turbo pumps are all going to blow up or something and then so why'd you choose that instead of developing a larger engine well i should put up like the saturn v although it had five engines on the first stage i also had five engines in the second stage and then one engine on the third stage there was actually 11 engine rocket falcon 9 is got nine engines in the first stage one on the second stage so it's actually one total of ten so one less than a certain five um and the the advantage of the nine engines is that you can lose an engine at any point including immediately after liftoff and still complete your mission which was not true of saturn v the thrust away the saturn v was about 1.15 so you actually had a very dangerous point immediately after liftoff uh where you could potentially subside uh if you had an engine failure within the first few seconds um with with uh with rockets because you're taking it vertically um you it actually point for the first stage it actually for the initial blue stage uh points you towards having more engines um because if you want true engine out uh capability um because you always have to have a thruster weight greater than one otherwise you're coming back whereas an aircraft you you can have a thrust rate of much less than one and still be okay because you you can sort of glide and reduce your your climb rate and that kind of thing and still be okay so so it actually it does it does push you to have more than than say like you know 747's got four engines but uh the equivalent for a rocket would be some number greater than four and so and maybe it's not as high as nine but we kind of we needed nine to achieve the pa the payload requirements that our customers wanted and as long as you're very careful about ensuring that the problem with one engine cannot cascade into problems with another engine more is actually better um and uh you know google operates with tens of thousands of computers rather than a few giant mainframes um so it also fits with the tesla model of having right you know eight thousand little batteries i think nine engines is bad uh 6831 cells next question so uh elon with the dragon spaceship uh spacecraft is that going to also be a man's craft and if so are you going to be shuttling the astronauts back and forth to the space station uh yeah a dragon is designed to meet the nasa demand rating requirements um there's a few key documents there regarding structural safety margins and redundancy signed to meet those those requirements there's uh um you know g loading mxg loading and dealing with worst-case abort conditions and that kind of thing it says all those things were designed to meet there's one key development item that we need to finish which is the escape tower so that um we have a launch escape system um in case something goes wrong with the core booster it can take it can carry the the capsule to safety um it's also something they had during the apollo europe but didn't have that they don't have that for this the space shuttle um and if so i mean in that really the two uh weak areas of the space shuttle and then the two most dangerous uh periods for uh you know a manned vehicle are during this of the sand phase and the descent phase there are two there are there are fundamental architectural flaws with with the shuttle approach um one is on the ascent phase there is no escape system they decided they didn't need an escape system because the shuttle would would never would never fail um really we're like wow okay um so so there's no escape system if anything goes wrong on the ascent it's curtains and then on reentry particularly the initial part of re-entry which is the high heating point the because it's a it's really it's not a naturally stable vehicle you've got to have control surfaces and wings um you know or so it has it has control surface and wings so if anything happens with the control system so any electronics that don't work malfunction or or there's a hinge that that you know isn't working properly in one of the control surfaces that that's at your toes it's not naturally stable it has to be controlled and and then the heating rate goes with the square of the radius of whatever you're doing so if you've got a wing leading edge that's got a very you know effectively a sharp radius you have a very concentrated heat which limits the material choice to some very brittle materials in fact it will only work for for earth orbit re-entry if you come in at a higher velocity than low earth orbit velocity there's no material known to man that can withstand it so actually for like the moon you could you couldn't use a winged vehicle it just it's impossible um so um i mean it's not like if you think of polar era okay they had airplanes back then it's not like oh wow wings what are those things um you know the the designers of apollo von braun and and the others were very familiar with aircraft um if they thought wings made sense they would have said let's put wings in this thing they don't um when it comes to space wings are dumb just as you don't make an airplane look like a boat um so if so so if when they retire the space shuttle how are they going to bring the astronauts back until you and get them up until you're able to do that the soyuz okay the russians are good yeah so the soyuz is a good i mean if i would definitely prefer to ride on the soyuz than the space shuttle you have an escape system on the soyuz oh and then of course on re-entry um a capsule a blunt body or entry capsule you can be designed to be naturally stable so that even if all the control systems fail that it you know you're just lights out dark everything's you know you're it's it's naturally it's like a shuttle it's naturally stable on reentry um and you don't have to you know um do anything there and you can just manually pull the shoots or something like that so in fact that's happened on a couple of soyuz flights where they've had control system failures if that had been the shuttle it would have been curtains um but because it's because it's naturally stable you don't have to worry about that and then because you've got that blunt body reentry um the heat shield is much more robust uh because you've got this really big radius heat shield instead of these sharp radius wings so it's really much safer design and i believe there's never been a fatality on the soyuz which has been going much longer than this than the shuttle man many many more flights so elon how do you keep these two different things separate in your mind i mean you're dealing with two massive industries very distinct worlds i mean do you have to like literally say oh wait a minute i'm doing rockets right now no i'm doing cars right now and how do you man how do you segregate those two things because they're they're both competing for your attention 24 hours a day right and i've kid my kids actually spend a lot of time with my kids by the way four kids five kids five kids yeah right how do you manage that yeah that is tricky uh yeah okay yeah uh well actually it's okay most of the time but you know if it's when when a crisis flares up in either kids or one of the businesses then then it gets can be quite a little bit overwhelming so it's like triage all the time it is it is kind of like triage um i mean and i mean the rocket business and the car business are pretty hard in the best of times and these are not the best of times next question you don't like wings i don't like wings for things that go to space where there is no air i think i mean my understanding of the reason the wings were on the space shuttle was so they could land where they wanted to oh okay so let me let me correct the misconception then uh a a a blunt body sort of a capsule you know gumdrop style thing uh is a controlled uh landing um in fact uh because you have you still have a lift vector so you you use offset center of mass to to create a sort of a tilt in in the capsule and that actually creates a lift vector um and that lift vector you typically be a lift of a drag of 0.2 to 0.3 but that's plenty plenty enough just to steer you where you want to go and in fact even in apollo when they didn't have gps and they uh you know they were really dealing with fairly very primitive electronics the their landing accuracy was a one mile radius and of course if you can get much better than that with gps and all that other stuff in fact the only error is uh the wind drift um that's the only that's really the only meaningful error and if you um if you have if you do a steerable shoots or put some like little like a little propeller that popped out or something like that um you could you could drop the capsule on the numbers on the runway uh just like you could drop just like a parachutist can can steer their their flagged down to a very accurate uh location um and then you could you know i think you sort of like flare it uh just before you go to the bottom just like a parachutist and there you are next question in the back i was there uh i was there several years ago uh in the mojave desert when space flight one took off for the maiden voyage i was wondering first of all what was spacex's involvement in that program and do you guys have any plans for taking up civilians into space um we didn't have any involvement uh with with the um vertebrate 10 spaceship one except that i'm a trustee of the x prize foundation and i i provided a little bit of the funding to um to that to the ansari x prize that they won and i was there for um one of the flights um so and it's actually you know it's it's great that it was one um but it is worth pointing out that there's a significant difference between a sub-orbital flight and an orbital flight because space kind of seems like well space is all the same thing but if you if you look at the energy required to get to space versus the energy required to get to orbit it's the very different orders of magnitude um you need a ideal velocity of roughly mach 25 to get to orbit mach 3 to get to space if you define spaces say 50 miles up and so it's pretty that's pretty big differential but but it's bigger than that because the kinetic energy goes with the square of the velocity so you need 625 units of energy to get to orbit nine units of energy to get to space um so about one and a half percent of the energy one versus the other so the requirements are really way way different um the uh yeah so you need in fact it's only just barely possible to escape this gravity well just just barely um if you look at the size of saturn v uh for example that that and that ultimately took two people to surface the moon one plus one who was orbiting the moon um that was a really gigantic vehicle i mean it's like the size of an office building and it got two people to search the moon next question um why do you think uh multi-planetary existence is important um excellent question um so okay so you have to say how do you decide that anything is important um so there's um i think the lens of history is a helpful way to distinguish more from less important things and the further out you you zoom the more you can distinguish the less important from the more important and if you take a look at the whole 4 billion year history of earth and evolution of life itself and say well what are the what are the really big uh milestones in the evolution of life itself and you can point to obviously you know single-celled life and multicellular life differentiation into plants and animals uh movement of life from the oceans to land um the uh mammals consciousness you know sort of those the big the biggies um and uh and those stand above the i think the parochial things uh concerns of of humanity um but i think on that scale would also fit life becoming multi-planetary i think it would be at least comparable to life going from the oceans to land arguably more so uh because at least ocean's land could be a gradual affair um if we've got uncomfortable you hop back in the ocean um it's that's it's it's a lot harder to go over you know to travel a billion miles over you know irradiated space um and then land on a hostile environment and create a self-sustaining and growing um you know life ecology that's really really hard and in fact this is the first time in the four billion year history of life itself that it is even within the realm of possibility so so i think therefore if something is important to be important enough to figure on the scale of the evolution of life itself it should be at least considered say worth is about as much money as we spend on lipstick um you know maybe not as much money as we spend on healthcare with that's a lot um but but enough on you know maybe north of cosmetics or something um and uh yeah so you know i think we should spend a little bit of of our resources doing that and and that's just a a wise bet for life as we know it um and um yeah so just it just seems like that that should make it important enough to for a little bit of a little bit of money like maybe a half percent half a percent of our gdp or something like that um and that'll be enough to do it anything you want to say on solar city uh solar city is doing great uh thank goodness uh it is you tell the audience what it is sure uh solar city is the country's largest provider of solar power systems to homes and small businesses so outside of the utility scale solar activity and it was co-founded and run by peter and lyndon rive who are my cousins and you're so full disclosure so i serve as the chairman there and i provide some advice strategically and on the product side and um but thankfully it requires almost none of my effort and those guys are just awesome in terms of their execution of solar city um having grown into a leadership position in the course of three years so um if anyone's thinking of getting solar call like 1-800 solar city something like that well 88 i'm sure any questions nice question so here so how does that work i mean you've convinced the nasa to give you like a huge contract um how can you imagine that what story is behind that can you tell us or can you share us that story a little bit that's the one question that i have and the other is you've been working on solo you've been working on cleantech or on cars you've been working on space so you're transforming society and all those projects and then there's paypal um so how does that fit that's the two questions um well definitely paypal i mean i was completely out of paypal well almost completely out of paypal when i started spacex and uh and then you know with i mean i from from a business standpoint my time is really split between spacex and tesla almost no time i spent almost no time on solar city because it's it's just running so well by itself um and the guys they're just doing a great job and there's really not much i can i can add to what they're doing um so um so but going to the nasa question it took us a long time to and a lot of effort to convince nasa to to rely on us um and when we when we won that cargo resupply services contract um you know basically value ranging from 1.6 to 3.1 billion dollars we competed against uh boeing lockheed and aligned tax systems we're actually there all three of them together against us so um this is sort of a partnership called planet space which is basically was just a it was flowing lockheed and line tech systems against spacex and we want so um and or at least nassau felt confident enough to give us that that that deal so and and um preceding that it had been sort of six years of of working to gain their confidence and we'd want a preceding contract which was a called the cots contract commercial overall transportation services to demonstrate uh progress in that direction but i have to give nasa a lot of credit here because without that cost contract it would have been very difficult for us to compete for the cargo resupply services contract they've been helpful in advisory capacity and enter financial capacity so i think we're very grateful to nasa and appreciative of everything that they've done because we we wouldn't be in a position to one that that calgary spy contract without their help during that microsecond each day that you actually have to contemplate other activities what are you dreaming of now i i yeah i mean i really i'm you know my mind is full um just dealing with with spacex and tesla and then family matters but i mean there are a few areas i mean i have some this i think at some point in future if you're interested take a look at fusion um that's a tough problem and it's something that i think we could solve but it would you know i'd say me i mean i think so humanity could solve that problem but it is a very tough one um and maybe there's something i could where i could be helpful there um and uh that's just completely speculative i'm not i mean it could be totally wrong success may not be one of the possible outcomes hey if you can get me to sit on 3 000 laptop batteries you can get me to sit on a fusion reactor uh yeah well fusion yeah fusion this i think some scale is needed for fusion pro probably um although some ideas for having smaller scale fusion um i'm not talking about cold fusion but sort of i kind of fusion at sort of a nano scale like basically very small amounts of fusion in a little container um but it is a very hard problem and then um i have an idea for uh great double deckering highways um which i think i thought i thought a lot about on when i'm driving to work in la um uh the highways i mean it would just be i think if you create prefabricated sections of highway and did a very efficient kind of a metallic uh structure that could withstand the worst earthquakes and um the trick would be making it light and it's very strong and um and inexpensive but i think i know how to do that um and it's that sort of relatively mundane but we have a big effect on people's lives and i have this some sort of idea for an electric plane which i think could be pretty cool um yeah yeah electric supersonic plane that's a lot of batteries it is that's a lot of batteries it is it is a lot of batteries next question by the way i haven't heard any of this stuff before this may be in print tomorrow yes so nobody says that's what i'm doing you asked me what i'd what nano say a split second of like i'm like okay i've been thinking a lot about the plain one more than i should actually i try to ban that from my mind i'll talk to you about it um yeah i i got to stop myself from thinking about that one because i that that's sort of that's a very exciting one um i don't think you covered the x prize um the status of the x prize and two-part question what do you think about a bigger x prize for battery technology in the us sorry a bigger x price for what a battery battery um yeah i think x-rays for battery technology would be great if there's you know a sponsor like the federal government or anyone um i think it's it's great to incent outcomes rather than that um as you know it's it's great to make beth bets on approaches but it's also good to incent outcomes um and ultimately you care about the outcome not the approach and that's the good thing about prizes is they they don't try to um rely on some panel of experts to figure out what the the approach is that's going to work because often those panels of experts are not the people who are going to figure out the innovations that result in the outcome you want and that's basically why you have prizes um so uh and as far as the expo is concerned there's um on automotive x price there's a genomics x prize for low-cost sequencing of genes there's the google lunar x prize um which spacex is trying to help with a little bit by offering the the only discounted launches we offer are for the google lunar x prize actually and uh yeah so this is you know there's a bunch of stuff happening there and um i think i think it's a good model it should be emulated more uh darpa did a great you know did a great example of a prize thing with the dolphin grand challenge um that was um there's the grand challenge darpa urban challenge for autonomous vehicles that's got to be one of the highest bank for buck items that darpa's ever done because i guarantee if you made that like a dod contractor and had like you know lockheed and raytheon and all the usual suspects put on it it would have been like two billion dollars and they'd still be working on it um you know so so anyway i'm i think there's a lot of room for prizes i should be more of them one more question then i have one given the range of technologies and areas you've touched i'm curious what your take on robotics is it almost seems like on robotics exactly it seems close enough to what you've done but i haven't heard you talk about it well um you know tesla does use robotics to a limited extent in um in its production today particularly on the battery pack side because you've got so many cells almost 7000 cells that um so some robotic assistance is is important making the the battery pack um and we'll certainly see a lot more of that as tesla scales up so robotics makes makes a big it's great for mass manufacturing for space exploration obviously we've seen great dividends played by robotics as well with the mars exploration rovers um and uh there's a really big rover uh going called um mars science laboratory and that was supposed to launch soon but it's going to be a couple years before that goes that's about the size of like a volkswagen um so so i think there's a a lot of room for robotics in a lot of fields and um that'll increase and continue in both automotive and space and other areas but at the end of the day you know i think we still need to make life multi-planetary i can't just be sort of saying droids out there um yeah i'm pro-life uh in that sense so um so i think robotic aspiration robotic preparation um but but uh but we also need life going beyond earth as well i haven't really thought about robotics uh personally um but just not say that i don't think there are there are lots of things that could be automated and where there could be robots that help people in their daily lives you know uh some i'm sure there'll be a continued expansion of the whole irobot type type thing beyond vacuum cleaning um so um yeah yeah i think it's i think it's a great area so i have one last question for you i've followed your career for a long time known you for a long time yeah um you know for many many years you were very you were very successful but largely anonymous yeah you know i i've been here for a long time right i was underground you could walk the streets of oxford and nobody knew who you were i think i could still do that by the way i don't know but less and less um in the last couple years you become increasingly a public figure a celebrity and your name starts popping up now in gossip pages and websites and that sort of thing how are you dealing with that i don't love it is it is it interfering with your ability to do what you do um it i think i i don't like i don't like it when people think wrong things i mean i i'm not far from flawless so i'm like but i don't like when people think wrong things about me um and i guess the the the um yeah i i must say i don't i don't really like the the sort of celebrity element uh i or i i don't like when people sort of try to write things that are sort of trivialities that don't actually it's like why i write about that you know obviously people find that kind of interesting or some people do hopefully not many um and um i don't know sometimes people say like wrong things that i get you know concerned that well what if my kids read that you know because they're five and they're starting to read um and and that's that i mean that's probably the most concerning thing i'm not too worried about it from a business standpoint because most people that i interact with particularly if they've known me for a while they know what's true and what's not true and and um and in a lot of cases they don't care anyway even if it was true they don't care um but but i do i do it does concern me if my kids were to read something that was just not true i mean you understand if as tesla continues to be successful and as spacex begins to assume the role of the space shuttle you begin to become something like henry ford and werner von braun combined and that's a level of celebrity few people ever know and are you ready for that i'm probably not ready for that i'm not a naturally extroverted person in fact i i would i used to be horrendous at public i mean i'm not that great as it is but i used to be really horrendous and just sort of shake and be unable to speak uh but um i kind of learned not to do that um so i mean i'd much rather just be you know doing engineering and stuff uh and design so that's really what i like to do um maybe you know and i'm happy to and i like doing things like this which are which are fun fine and um but uh and you you know if you're in the car business you gotta sell cars and stuff so i gotta i gotta go out there and be promotional but there are other people at tesla that actually are much better speakers and sellers of the car than i am i think so that's hard to believe anything else you want to tell these folks out here uh she's talked about a lot um i thought there's some really good questions from the audience actually uh i'm not superstitious but uh you never know i mean there could be some uh divine entity that sort of uh there is uh then i uh i hope uh hope that that entity is favorable and worst comes to worst you already know how to live on a dollar a day yeah yeah absolutely ladies and gentlemen the uber entrepreneur elon musk elon mike thank you so much for being here we know that you have very busy schedules both of you we very much appreciate you taking time to speak with us this evening it is a very small gesture of thanks we have a wonderful churchill club t-shirt for you please wear it in very good health and thank you all for coming look forward to seeing you at the next churchill club program and by the way there are 13 letters in churchill club good night all right thank you

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sure it's a pretty car but should your taxpayer dollars go towards producing it we asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about one of the company's biggest controversies New York Times did this piece that everyone in Silicon Valley got very up in arms about saying that you know the government money going to Tesla would be this you know huge risk of capital that would only benefit the wealthy and venture capital backers who'd put money in the company and called the Roadster basically a hundred and nine thousand dollar concept car what do you say to the power Randi's Frost is a huge douchebag an idiot okay first of all what is he doing picking on an electric car company I mean it what why would he pick on the little guy who's trying to do good when you've got egregious waste of money in the tens of billions occurring and in Detroit what why and he actually he knew that we told him we're working on an electric smart okay this technology is going into a mass-market car we're developing the the sedan which is half the price and even you know that's equivalent to a Ford Taurus to $35,000 car we're getting there as fast as humanly possible he should understand what's the idiot part you should understand that when you have new technology it takes time to optimize that new technology new technology starts out at a high price point until you can get to economies of scale and to design optimizations so effectively what you would be saying is like if you can't immediately make some new technology mass-market affordable by anyone you shouldn't do it right and it shouldn't be supported that's ridiculous and how can somebody from Silicon Valley say that yeah well a lot of people agree with you it was it was there was a huge outpouring of letters the editor actually I should point out the new client printed a retraction oh yeah of course I mean when they print retractions it's like on page 27 like micro-fine they actually printed or textual yeah what will let's get to the issue of what exactly you guys do want from the government because you vaulted the word bailout No okay so there's two things that there's the bailout money which was actually that that was what what GM and Chrysler needed to fund their ongoing operations otherwise they would go bankrupt okay that's what a bailout is so quiz well Tesla has gotten no money whatsoever from the government thus far and the money that was given to GM and Chrysler the bailout money who came from the tarp funds okay there's a separate polar capital which Congress actually that this legislation was written about was they start writing this legislation two years ago it was finally passed into law by the House and Senate I think in November of last year October or November of last year and that's twenty five billion dollars in low-interest loans for advanced technology vehicle manufacturing is intended to subsidize the cost of capital of the transition from gasoline to to high-efficiency particulate electric cars it's got nothing to do with the financial crisis it was this was something that was conceived and written before the financial crisis it's it's something that was considered to be important for the environment and important for national security there's been these reports that you guys tried to go out and raise another 100 million in capital and you couldn't do it in this market your competitor just raised 85 million I mean isn't that you can't raise the capital or is it that you just rather have the government money cuz it's a better deal for the company sir 100 million or 20 raise was summer of last year so we're talking almost a year ago and that's what we put on hold and basically raised 40 million of internal capital from existing investors which was what was necessary to get the Roadster business to reach cash flow positive and to still continue to spend 10 percent of our resources on Model S development also you know the 85 million order of it was that postcard since they've raised that's that's not enough to complete what they're developing I would suspect and and just as if we raised 100 million that that wouldn't be enough to complete our development the Model S program is is really close to a four hundred million dollar programs of which 350 would come from from ADEA we learned and the thing is that the sources of capital that would normally provide that such as the public markets the debt markets they're in shambles so the thing is Tesla could raise that money I believe we could raise that money down the road but it would have to be after the public must recover after the debt must recover how long is that that's anyone's guess it's at least for two years but I'm still confident we tweet we could do that and when when starting Tesla and funny Tesla it was never with the expectation or intent of using government loans but in this environment there's just not a lot of capital available right and you said you're 99% sure you think you're gonna you're going to get it yeah well if you look at the criteria for the HTM program we all owe you if you substituted Tesla for company company it would be like a perfect fits I mean there there we are the leader in energy efficient vehicles and it's a twenty five billion dollar program we're asking for three or fifteen million dollars of that which is one and a half percent one and a half percent of this amount it's a game like why the hell is Randy's trust bugging us for one and a half percent loan on a twenty five billion gold program I'm like how about what is he bugging the guy instead of getting the 98 percent so I mean the vast majority that's going to go to Ford GM Chrysler maybe it'll go to a Nissan or a master in part as well of all the people that money will go to any well it will be released it was appropriated by Congress it was Congress's decision to do this not some loving ethic by us it will go out you have to say who will make the most efficient use to capital who is going to be the best steward of the taxpayer dollars in that loan program who is most likely to repay it is it General Motors well price low or ten or is a Tesla who is demonstrated a better a more efficient use of capital I think it's unequivocally us I mean subjectively us but we will only the all existing investors in Tesla me or all common stockholders the employees will only get paid back if we repay that entire loan to the government so you have a huge incentive to do it out so what if you don't get that money do you have financial backups are the people who are you know here at this event who's put deposits down on the Model S what are the odds they're ever gonna see that car in their driveway I would say that the odds of us getting that money are 99 percent I'm extremely confident damn close to 100 percent you know we can't say exactly what was transpired in the private meetings with the BOE but suffice to say I am extremely confident that we will get that and we will get it soon

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[Music] Elon Musk was born in South Africa at 12 years old he sold his first piece of commercial software he programmed years later he went on to make his fortune during the Internet boom making just under two hundred million dollars as PayPal and just over 20 million dollars with zip to now 39 years later Elon is building rocket ships and making electric cars as a CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors zealand's dream is to make living on Mars a reality may be an affordable reality during his lifetime here's my interview with Elon Musk one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs today so clearly you have many aspirations and an overwhelming drive to innovate take us back to when you were young what were you like what did you do and how was motivation and drive manifested and cultivated so I definitely was very driven as a kid and very willful one of the things that I remember most from my childhood is I was I think six or something maybe around that age I was just learning to read basically and I was grounded one afternoon and prevented from going to play with my cousins who lived on the other side of town and I disagreed with this so I escaped from mine my nanny and walked across town six yeah and I could really barely read the road signs so I mean expect this I mean this was obviously a very foolish thing to do because something terrible could have happened to make it have been kidnapped to run over or something like that right but I was so determined to go there with my my cuz I basically walked clear across the city the capital city as years old oh yeah and then you made it there so you're successful so you figured I can do anything I want uh when's there's quite like that I did my mom got really freaked out because she saw me just as I was getting to my cousin's house she saw me walking along the sidewalk and flipped out because she didn't like how I got there then I saw her and I ran and climbed up a tree and and I wouldn't come down and so they promised they wouldn't punish me and that I could play with my cousin's they never punished you I didn't get punished actually but they'd let me play with my cousin's either well that's good so your parents were influential in some ways they took care of you even though they let you you know find your way across town by yourself but how did they influence you did they do they make you read did they courage your education did they do they make you go to science camp do they make you build things I I was always sort of really interested in reading when I was a kid and I read everything that I could get my hands on I read the Encyclopedia I read every age um let's see probably age 9 or 10 okay um well enough that I actually wanted to read the encyclopedia but I ran out of things to read so in desperation I read the encyclopedia I just really wanted to learn so in early stage you had that and you had that inner drive yourself yeah well I just I just sort of got bored easily and so unless I was doing something like reading or playing a video game watching TV and we had like terrible TV in South Africa was really bad TV so there was only at best you know I like what your TV and there wasn't that much of it so but a Bourdon leads to great thing for them yes the boredom it's a lot of reading so now now fast forward Tesla started in 2003 yeah start in 2003 well that is a big passport yeah yeah yeah well well well we could talk about your twenties in the glue yeah okay yeah so talk about the concept the idea what what inspired you who was around you to help make this an idea to reality yeah actually if I can go back a little bit to that you know a little bit further and say the origins of what why electric vehicles and well when I was in college that I thought about what are the things that most going to affect the future of humanity and the three things I came up with were the internet transitioning to a sustainable energy economy and that means both production and consumption of energy a sustainable way and the third was space exploration so my interest in electric cars goes back 20 years 20 hours in college and in fact the original reason I came out to Silicon Valley was to go to Stanford to work on a PhD in applied physics material science to develop advanced energy storage technologies for electric vehicles so this is this is a really long standing interest of mine goes back to wait way before 2003 and but the thing that kind of spurred things in 2003 was a lunch that I had with Harold Rosen and JB Straubel and and that I got the sort of call out of the blue from Harold Rosen he's a famous guy in space and electric cars so he did he had something called Rosen motors but he also worked for Hughes Hughes aerospace and that's kind of how the other connection kind of bridged over and and at the lunch we're just talking about a bunch of things in general and I mentioned that I originally come out to California to work on electric vehicle technologies and then Harold mentioned you know told me his bit about his past with rose and motors and and the JB mentioned that the hey was this company called AC propulsion that that has this kind of very rough prototype electric sports car running on lithium-ion batteries and it's getting a really good performance so that's not such thing you know and I thought with the with the advent of lithium-ion that really is a sort of key enabler for electric cars right so JB arranged for a test-drive of the AC propulsion t0 in 2003 how many miles did it go back then well actually the the performance specs of the teaser are very very similar to the Roadster yeah although but it's a much more primitive car it's like it's basically like a kid car sort of just a tank or something there's a little bit of a golf cart but it's not something you could have a sell to people like it didn't have a roof it didn't have any safety systems it was very expensive hand hand-built so I tried to convince the AC propulsion guys to commercialize the teaser and said hey you know I'm willing to find you if you want to commercialize the teaser but it just wasn't of interest to them right they were very sort of small outfit they like to sort of take her an experiment but they weren't really interested at least at the time in creating a production sports car electric sports cars so but I keep pushing them on this and eventually I said look if you're not going to do it then I'm going to do it and and they said well if you're going to do it there's some other people we should introduce you to maybe you guys should team up and go and do it and that's how I met Martin Eberhard mocked happening and Ian Wright and then then JB also joined I was actually able to convince JB to join Tesla and so that's sort of like the founding team of Tesla was that was the five of us so when you started thinking about this idea and building it out and there's different entry strategies to do to get into the electric car industry and your goal is to help make mass-market cars that you created a very expensive not mass-market car $100,000 roadster high expensive low volume why that entry strategy it's actually I think it's the only entry strategy that I thought had any chance of success and the reason for that is as a small start-up we don't have the economies of scale of the big car companies plus if we're really working with the first generation of technology and there are two things that are really important in making technology available to the mass market and making it affordable and those two things are economies of scale and being able to optimize the design it usually takes usually by the third version of something that's when it kind of starts to reach mass market potential what um so using that sort of basic rule of thumb the strategy I had was to start off with a high price low volume car being the sports car good and there's only a few types of cars that people are willing to pay a high price for sports cars being one of them really premium sedans being another but the easiest way for us to coach market where the long range car was with us with a sort of smaller sports car and then phase two which we're seeing now is the Model S and that's mid price mid-volume and then phase three is the high volume low price car or lower price right now you raise 260 million dollars from your IPO about three hundred and twenty five million or so from in the private capital and almost half a billion dollars in federal loans to get your cars to market yes um I'd have to check on the number for the private capital I'm not sure that's three hundred okay I think it's a I think it's less than that um but several well a couple hundred here there okay pull it a couple hundred million in private capital rates the money a couple hundred million in IPO and then half of the four hundred sixty almost half a billion in Cup and lunch well this point point out we've actually only exercised fifty million of the government loans okay yeah so it's only a small portion of it and that only started this year February okay one of the common misperceptions out there is that we got bailed out by the government last year because that's very common isn't it everybody's going about it but actually the first government cash we received was only only this year in February okay and we did make an announcement last year that we received a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy but it was it was not I wouldn't actually receive any cash so if we needed cash next or if we needed cash last year from the government we'd be dead so you but you have sort of a credit line from the government yeah essentially a credit line do you think you'll draw on that and do you think that you will need okay so you will draw on that but you have sufficient funds and it just what's the probability that you will not have to raise additional money before you get the Model S out in 2012 well I think we have really it's very unlikely that we will need to raise additional money for the Model S program I feel very confident being able to complete the Model S program for something very close to what we have budgeted which is on the order of half a billion in total you know it's possible that we could decide that in order to fund developments beyond the Model S that we want to sell some additional equity or something like that right or you know it could be that some of our business want some additional liquidity or something like that but but we said I feel very confident saying that we will not need to raise additional capital for the Model S program let's talk about the Model S you have them the base price is forty nine thousand nine hundred dollars it goes about a hundred and sixty miles then you have it goes all the way up to a hundred thousand as you said and maybe three hundred miles or so but in the next year actually in the next six months you're going to have a number of hybrid cards the GM car vault Chevrolet Volts Yeah right different markets yes I mean thirty three thousand forty one thousand but the car your Model S is forty nine thousand dollars it you know that's sort of similar markets I mean if you I would say the similar markets really yeah well then okay because you could well wouldn't you want to get in the market for a $41,000 card to upgrade and buy a $49,000 car well I think best way to think the Model S is that it's comparable to say a BMW 5 or 7 Series or an Audi a6 AAA yeah so it's really kind of it's a premium sedan and I think anyone who can afford the Model S is not going to be buying the Volt or the leaf or anything else it's really this will be the cause that they would prefer so I think affordability is the only thing that's going to stop people from buying the the Model S so no Tesla benefited from the zero emission vehicle program yeah you made about eight million dollars or not so to what extent did that factor into the decision to make pure play electric cars versus hybrid cars it didn't factor into it at all eight million isn't a lot of money um no it's obviously it's it's desirable I think it's a good thing but it wasn't it wasn't something that drove our decision I mean we really wanted to make as your emission vehicles and the Zev credit thing was helpful in in us succeeding and doing that I mean we could succeed I think without the Zev credits but I didn't he wouldn't have done it if it you would have done it if the credits weren't there correct but nonetheless we're so grateful for the credits and they're certainly helpful but I mean the car would be profitable even without this inference is the car is the company profitable today one is it's going to be profitable well if if Tesla was it was just if all tested it was make nature wars makes me exports cars if we were just initially sports car maker and sold power trains to other car companies we would be profitable today so we running right now around twenty to twenty-two percent gross margin so you know a company that's running sort of an order twenty percent gross margin can be profitable if their business if as long as they don't try to grow their business too fast but in our case we all growing up business very fast we're talking about increasing our production volume from roughly 500 cozia to 20,000 cars a year that's a factor of 40 increase in three years yeah so in three years do you think are you going to be fries are you telling Wall Street you're not going to be profitable for the next three years or correct yeah we have yeah and it's not really possible to be profitable because essentially what we're saying is we're going to take half a billion dollars and in R&D and tooling and that kind of thing and spend that over the next say roughly ten quarters so that's an average of art you know already and tooling expensive 50 million dollars a quarter okay let's talk about your your strategy or distribution strategy that's it that's a that's something that you're innovating there as well you hire the the head of a veteran at the Apple and gap doors that says a lot about your strategy it's supposed to hiring someone that's a veteran and dealerships sure what's your strategy there well I think for a lot of people the car buying experience is quite negative they don't look forward to buying a car and you know I think that's that's we want to try to have a fundamentally superior consumer experience from the moment you think about buying a car - yeah the actual acquisition the ownership the service we're really trying to achieve something that is substantially superior to what people have experienced in the past yeah so we don't want that's why we don't sort of inherit you know what was done in the past because it's it's really it's not good I mean I think if you were to ask most people what's the worst retail experience you had I mean for a lot of people that's buying a car yeah so not something you want to emulate no that's a penny on the other side of the spectrum you have like you know sort of I think Apple is arguably the best on the retail front where people are really drawn to an Apple store GAF is also excellent in that regard and so let's no better to emulate the their approach than to try to copy the the old way of doing business so in theater we have a limit many entrepreneurs watching this program and they're always interested in how how someone fund raises and you raised money for a car and you never had any experience building a car you had the passion yeah so it was it was it difficult to raise the money for for test lowers it because you already put one hundred million dollars in the SpaceX and had enough money did did that make it easier to bring new investors into your venture um well I think I had the advantage initially of having the capital from PayPal and so I was able to do all of the initial funding myself for Tesla yeah almost watch and say well but like 90 percent of it and then there were some other investors there was some of some minor venture investors in the beginning but essentially I did almost all the initial investment myself okay and and with that initial investment the first thing we we did was to try to get a working prototype how much was that did you put in for the working prototype an initial I think it took us why did most of like most the series and series B I think I've put in probably bout 15 million or something like that okay

https://youtu.be/B1OPxitgvmw

the theme we're going to explore the next two plus days involves confluence of various kinds of science of pure science and technology and commerce and innovation and public policy and the human condition and culture and and all the rest and we have a gentleman to lead this off who epitomizes in the spectacular and so far brief career he's had a variety of different interests that he's been able to meld and maybe what maybe we'll hear this unified field theory behind it at least will will have different ones I'm going to take a minute to read a few of Elon Musk's achievements just as background for the kind of variety and breadth that he brings to this conversation he's now the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and also the CEO CTO of Space Exploration Technologies SpaceX which had of course it's it's wonderful launch a little more when was that two years ago when was a year in the Falcon nine with Hawking nine is one book nine we did two launches last year yeah and it was it was a recognition of the Falcon nine that I served as mr. musk mini biographer a year ago we had our annual brave thinkers issue for the Atlantic so I got to do a brief Q&A with you about all the various things you're also the the non-executive chairman and principal shareholder of Solar City which is now the leading provider of solar power systems in the US and of course among other things in your spare time you could where the co-founder of PayPal there are I will just give one or two other accolades and then get onto the the convert conversation that in 2009 the National Space Society awarded our guest mr. musk their von Braun trophy given for leadership of the most significant achievement in space and in 2010 he was the youngest recipient of the Otto executive of the Year innovator award for his work at Tesla Motors and so and and we'll have we'll have one more and then we'll get to two actual questions which is there are other publications in the universe apart from the Atlantic Monthly one of them is is time it's a younger publication that we are they're about 80 years old we're 154 and Counting but the the time 100 for 2010 you were a member of that so with that background we have a few minutes to explore a whole variety of topics about the business history so the various enterprises you've been involved in about the frontiers of energy and transportation and the sky and the land about the process of innovation in the US environment for for making these discoveries but let me just start most of us are wondering how you could possibly have been involved in so many different fields and be pushing the frontiers of all of them how did you end up being in PayPal and space exploration and solar power and all the right how did you get here sure well some of that was cereal so I did a Internet company that most people haven't heard of coax of - which helped bring the newspapers online use newspapers weren't always online but my company helped bring that help help with the New York Times and Hearst and that wrote a few other things and and then with the capital from that I started it PayPal which was originally called XCOM and and then from the capital of that it allowed me to start SpaceX Tesla and SolarCity so and I didn't I didn't actually I couldn't expect to be running SpaceX and Tesla but I kind of had the Detroit choice either let Tessa die or or run it personally and so I I don't want to let it die so I stepped in a run personally but I have to say it's quite difficult writing to companies at the same time I don't want to make it sound like this is easy really difficult and was it planned all along that you would get into all this whole range of fields it was that opportunistic is it true no it was actually well planned maybe aspirational so when I when I was in college there were three areas that I thought would would most affect the future of humanity in a positive way and a bit but I thought I was though I thought of these in the abstract not not from the same point I would actually be able to be involved in those three areas but those were the Internet sustainable energy both production and consumption tells us about production sorry soulless theories about production Tesla's about consumption of energy in a sustainable way and then the third is making life multiplanetary and I really didn't think I'd be involved in the third one better but it did seem to me that's one of the really important things that should happen if we're to have an exciting and inspiring future and let me you said something which caught my attention that when you were in college developing these skills you want to do some things that were of benefit to humanity that why why did you think that well because not everyone does yeah no I guess it was sort of a existential crisis of like what does it all mean and what's the mini you know what's the meaning of life and there's 3 a.m. over a beer or probably goes back to high school I guess I don't to give a lavoris the long answer but I was yeah I had sort of a dark childhood it wasn't good probably partially brought on but by reading some of the philosophies like don't ever read Schopenhauer Nietzsche if you're 14 yes it's not good or Iran either yeah yeah so I was just trying to find figure out what you know what as well mean and actually when I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy which I think it's a great work philosophy that sort of highlight at the point that very often the issue is understanding what questions to ask and if you can properly frame the question then the answer is the easy part so I thought things that expand the scope and scale of human consciousness and allow us to better ask questions and you know and and achieve greater enlightenment those were good things and that's what what can we do that's gonna most likely lead to that outcome and so obviously we have this you know the Internet is an important element to that because the internet it's like it's like the world acquiring a nervous system all of a sudden you can be anywhere if you have an internet connection you have access to the cumulative knowledge of humanity it's pretty incredible I mean you have more access to more information than the Library of Congress through your iPhone I want to be part of you know both put a small brick in the construction of that that edifice and and and that's that's why the internet and then sustainable energy because well tautologically huh if it's not sustainable we're gonna hit a wall and even if one considers the environmental issues to be non-existent in fact you could say for the sake of argument that co2 is beneficial but let's assume it's beneficial I probably I think every a bad assumption or respect to Chevron the and then even if you assume that the United States has every drop of oil in the world well we still need to get off oil eventually because what will happen is that's guessed they will drive the price up leading to economic collapse and so my interest in electric vehicles goes back to to college before global warming became a real issue and so and and but I think I think the environmental issues to add additional urgency to the matter it simply unwise to run an experiment on how much co2 the oceans atmosphere can absorb yes yes let me ask one other question about again you and how you got to this point life one reason people read biographies of accomplished people is to get more clues more data points on how it happened what what the the the steps were along along the road many people kind of college and can't find a job you've been invented several entire new new industries or or companies what do you think may you the way you are and what can be extrapolated it could other people learn from your example today you know I thought I thought I think I need to sort of put some thought into that and say what what lessons can be drawn because I'm so usually in the thick of things that that it's they don't I don't I really put a lot of time into abstracting what what lessons can be most helpful but in the way I tend to view problems this is from a from a physics standpoint and I think I think physics is a good analytical framework and one of the key things in physics is to reason from first principles this is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place which is by analogy reasoning from first principles just means that you figure out what are the fundamentals what are the fundamental truths or or things that are pretty people are pretty sure of fundamental truths and and can you build up to a conclusion from from that or you know from those principles and and then certainly if you come up with some idea and it appears to violate one of those fundamental truths then you're probably wrong or you should get a really big prize or something like that so this may seem like I don't know maybe it may seem sort of obvious when it's explained but it's actually not what people do you reasoning my analogies is helpful because it's a shortcut yeah and and it's and it's mostly correct but but it tends to be most incorrect when you're dealing with new things because it's hard to analogize to something really new let me now shift to the areas where your businesses are now operating you have a solar solar power company obviously you have the electric cars and you have space and so let's talk about each of each of those areas give us if you would what you think the potential of solar power is and your general you are making your point about the importance of addressing a sustainability energy what how you think people should think about energy now about solar and energy and more broadly sure well I I think I think solar solar power will be the single biggest source of electricity at least in the United States by the midpoint of the century and that that may seem like a bold statement given the tiny percentage that it generates right now which is on the order of sort of 1% or less less than 1% really but if you look at the growth rate of solar that that's where it's gonna it's gonna go this compound growth is incredibly powerful and but I think anything we can do to accelerate that that growth is a good thing because it means we will have power as long as the Sun shines and if the Sun doesn't shine we have larger issues so so I think that that's a good way to go and actually the earth is almost entirely solar powered today the only reason we're not a frozen ice ball at around 4 Kelvin maybe 3 Kelvin is is because of the Sun and that so all the precipitation the weather system almost everything is so bad that the ecosystem is is solar-powered and you know so it's really just about taking a little bit of it that that's total power and turning that ain't electricity which people could use and is there a way to explain concisely in terms I might understand the concept of solar cities is applying that will make it successful in a way that previous solar projects have not been yeah so well firstly I should say that most people don't realize how much the cost of solar panels has dropped that they used to be about four dollars a watt five years ago they're now about a buck 20 so that that's a huge drop and and and there's obviously this sort of threshold where when when solar power is cheaper than conventional electricity that that's a massive inflection point and and and now electricity costs vary across the country so you'll see it's it's a slush to be better in some places then smaller places than a medium then eventually most most places I know which i think is what will occur and I don't think so how will be the everything but it'll just I think you'll probably be at least a plurality maybe a majority by the midpoint of the century and most of what solar city specifically is focused on is actually balance of system souls to see that so it does not make the panel so let's say it's it's kind of like say Apollo Dell where they they design the system appropriate to a particular house or office and they'll do the installation wiring the inverter permitting and after-sales service which is about 70% of the cost and since I've come from DC only today where any discussion of solar involves Solyndra scheduled government policy etc etc what what should the government be doing if anything about solar now yeah well I think that the Solyndra thing is somewhat overblown it's also becoming political football but not not a very good one I think I think we're holding should pick up and I'm sort of moderate sort of half half from all they can have Democrat if you will but I'm somewhere in the middle I guess I'm sort of socially liberal and fiscally conservative I think a lot of the country is actually but you know so but but the thing is that if you look at Solyndra it's pacification Solyndra private investors lost twice as much as the government and and the the investors the venture capitalists that were involved in Solyndra are some of the smallest venture capitalist out there they don't they're not fools so it's simple to say the government was a fool if if you've got some of the best venture capitalists in their investing it at all it's just startups are it's a bit of a numbers game you know typically in an insulting Valley venture capitalists if they invest in 20 companies one or two will be a big hit maybe three or four will be okay and there and the rest will not make it but but that's the way it works it's it's it's it's I don't think it makes sense to take to vote for the media to be so focused on Solyndra and there will be other failures too but yes yeah and and yet and is there anything briefly that the government is doing right now that is either helping or hindering your work at Solar City well probably both I suppose but but I think probably on balance more helpful than than hurtful and certainly in case of SpaceX a lot of credit goes NASA where I mean SpaceX would have been able to get started and would have gotten to where it is today without the help of NASA right so this is very much a sort of a partnership on that on that front and then what's with solar Solar City this whole city actually doesn't get it gets gets a little bit on the federal side a little bit and on the in certain states in terms of subsidies for for solar but those subsidies are actually actually relatively small these days they're not not very big but they used to be big but then they've been declining every year and then the big challenge for Solar City is of course to provide unsubsidized power at better than good grid costs that's that's sort of the Holy Grail there and then of course it's re at Tesla has received a loan from yet on the government as far away I get these Solyndra questions it but actually Seoul City ever saw Tesla is also raised about twice as much from the private sector is from the government and you know if Tesla's should compete effectively against GM Ford Chrysler and and others and those guys are getting massive amounts of money from the government and and at near zero cost of capital and and and we don't participate in that game it makes a very difficult job even hotter and so it just wouldn't it would be sort of really unwise if we didn't do that and let's talk now about the electric car business itself what should people expect in terms of the technological improvements that that are ahead of how much of a difference this will make in energy consumption environmental impact in patterns of life how should we think about this well actually no electric cars I actually think that that electric vehicles will be a majority of all new cars manufactured in about 20 years will be pure electric and twenty years after that I expect the vast majority of cars in the road to pure electric it takes sort of at least sort of 15 years to replace the existing fleet and so that's another prediction like hopefully I live to see the truth or or you know pulsus event but in terms of how I think it'll fix things I I think I think the transportation experience will become better and and most people haven't driven an electric car or use one day to day but but it's actually really nice not having to go to a gas station it's how are you say sorry Chevron I don't mean to they are diversifying - yeah absolutely I know Chevron's doing doing a lot of good things so I I don't mean to be negative on that one so I think with the Model S in particular that's coming out in July of next year the that's where we hope to show that an electric car can actually be superior to a gasoline car in terms of of how how much usable space you get in the car hmm so the Model S is about the same external dimensions as say Mercedes e-class or BMW 5-series but it has twice the luggage capacity and it can actually seat up to up to five adults plus to two kids in a rear-facing seat kinda like the old station wagons and it'll have a range of over 300 miles you can charge charge charge in about 45 minutes you can swap the battery pack off the best then you can pull a gas tank and it will have the highest safety rating of any car in the world every five star in every category and in fact it'll be the only car that's five star in every credit category by 2012 standard so it'll be the safest car you could buy and his cost would be order of magnitude what well look it's one to two million dollars that's a great deal but for you no no it's it's it's it's it's actually priced at the at the same same prices as other premium sedans it's but fifty fifty thousand dollars starting price and then you guys having about a hundred thousand dollars for the high-performance version with all the options and and actually when you factor in the that gasoline is much more expensive than electricity per mile it's about ten times more expensive when you factor in those cost savings it's it's almost like a anywhere from a 10 to 20 thousand dollar discount off the price and so one other question on electric cars is the challenge between now and the future describing mainly an engineering challenge or is there a science challenge that's still left it's mostly an engineering challenge there's some there there is a science challenge potentially in the high energy density capacitors and in fact what originally brought me out to California was that's going to do grass tyson stanford to try to develop a high energy density capacitor that could serve as an electric and an energy storage mechanism electric vehicles I think all right now I wasn't sure that success was one of the possible outcomes but but now I'm I'm increasingly convinced that that it could work and and there's definitely some interesting science there good yeah so I'm gonna ask you a question about space and then a question about American policy before I invite a few questions from from the crowd question on space for Americans of my vintage which is tragically older than than your vintage space was very romantic in the time when I was a kid and we were having a you know the race to the moon and it has become routine and you don't find children see me excited in space why are you fascinated with space why should people care about it right well I think part of the problem with the reason people aren't as excited about space is that we haven't been pushing the frontier as much and so you can only you can only watch the same movie so many times in it before it gets a little boring and you know in this in the 60s and early 70s we're really pushing the front human spaceflight and and and obviously that those land landing on the moon is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of humanity of arguably of life itself and even though only a handful of people went to the moon vicariously we all went there well at least I wasn't alive at the time so but retrospectively and you know and it was it was just one of those really inspiring things that I think made everyone glad to be you know human you know it's like the things that we were we don't they're bad things humanity is and they're they're good things and it's one of the good things and I do think it's important that that we have these inspiring things that you make you glad to get up in the morning and and that that's and glad to be a member of human race and and we need we need to push that that that frontier so and I think the great goal we should be trying to pursue is trying to make life human make make life multiplanetary so to establish a self-sustaining and growing civilization on another planet Mars being the only realistic possibility and and I think that would just be one of the greatest things humanity could ever try to do you know life's been on earth for four billion years and it's been confined to earth before for four billion years and and so it I think I think most people want a future where we're headed towards being a spacefaring civilization we're going out there exploring the Stars and and and and we want to be on the path to making true the things that we read and in science fiction books and see in the movies and that that's it that's that's an exciting future but if a future where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event is less inspiring you should be a journalist how our stories turn out and how much of this if if the space part of your visions and collective visions goes as well as you expect how much do you expect actually to see yourself setting aside any life extension experiments you may come up with but right what do you think is feasible in the next half-century in the next century well I think I actually think it's I think well I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with SpaceX but but I I think we could potentially send someone to Mars as soon as 10 years and I'd be disappointed if it took us longer than 20 but then then going beyond that what what's important is not to sort of have a flags and footprints mission but to develop the technologies that that could allow people to move to Mars if they wanted to and I think that that threshold number for where people where you would become kind of a self-sustaining reaction is around half a million dollars so it's okay that's the really the key question can you get it down to where the cost of moving to Mars plus enough to get going it is equivalent to a middle class house in California you can like sell your stuff and move that's how people came here to start right yeah right my parents came here oh I think that's possible I wasn't sure it was possible I wouldn't affect I'm still not harvesting sure as possible but I but I now think I think it is possible basically I have a basic architecture and design in mind that I think could accomplish that yeah in that timeframe I have one more question to ask you and then I'll turn it over for questions from the crowd you've given us now almost half an hour of really inspiring and encouraging things to think about that most of our power will come and these from these solar installations the most of the cars will be running for 1/10 the mile cost per mile they'll be going to Mars in 10 or 20 years yeah you must have have noted that the prevailing mood in the u.s. right now is not quite that bad negative yeah and it's like let's lighten up a little lightning honestly and so I mean one but but it's my it's my duty of course to press on the scab of optimism or pessimism which is that that that for example by the festering sore of testes and I can say that that many of the fundamentals that have made Americans successful in research over the years seem to be less invested in now than in the future we still have people coming from around the world like you to make this the arena for their their talents which is America's greatest asset in my view but universities are having troubles etc etc do you think on the objective merits how do you think about America's position right now as an arena for all the kind of innovation you're discussing sure well actually you know submission like my grandfather was American and I was named after my great grandfather was from Minnesota that's where my name comes was learn to roll exotic so I'm really returning to my ancestral homeland by recovering back to the US yeah I mean IIIi think that I think there are actually lots of reasons to be optimistic and and that life is actually pretty good you know but and if I'm if I may criticize the media a little bit here actually not so much the magazine meaning vacuum magazine me is actually pretty pretty good but a choice yeah the daily news media tends to focus on the worst thing occurring in the world at any given point it is like if you know you know the world this there's almost 7 billion people or something like that on earth you can imagine that the 7 billion thing is pretty awful okay it's really bad and and if you put a fuse look at your Google News page or whatever it is you'll see a spotlight on the worst thing on earth it's so it's it should be called what is the worst thing on earth today that's it is terrible no I think it's it's I mean Daily News me just probably blame but I mean also there's something in the psyche of the human psyche which tends to place a weight on negative stuff more than positive I mean you want to react faster to the lion that's gonna eat you rather than dinners on the table yeah you know being dinner is what its gonna get a worse than having dinner so even though that the news that you're reading is you know probably doesn't affect you directly and it's somewhere else the world it's it's still it still has that sort of negative visceral reaction I know I'm not sure quite sure how that the problem gets solved but III do think the mood or to improve because it's it's not it's out of sync with what the reality life life is really pretty good you you've made a good case for that now we have time for a couple questions I'm going to turn to to Mary for the responsibility to choose questioners yeah yeah you got to choose yes among your friends and colleagues here Elan if I might ask you you know you guys are talking pretty lightheartedly about things are actually pretty good but I think it's fair to say everyone in the room is aware that a lot of people many of those billions of people they don't have proper food they don't proper shelter they don't have proper clothing they don't get educated around the world and you know we're talking rather glibly about perhaps making interplanetary journeys to the moon or the Mars I'm just wondering well how about taking some of this you know effort and really trying to devote it to solving these very intractable problems here on earth before we worry about going to the moon or going to Mars well I don't think it's neither oh thing and I should maybe clarify that you know in terms of making life multiplanetary which you can sort of view as as kind of life insurance for life collectively I think you know we should spend a lot say a much much less than we'd spent on health care but more than we spend on lipstick you know that's kind of like maybe a good way to bracket it and so maybe and I like lipstick but but but maybe a quarter of a percent of the GDP so it's not you know it's it's I think that's maybe a good number now I mean as far as the the rest of world's concerned I think I mean fact there was a good if I think five fire knew well actually I III read an article recently I remember who wrote it but it was called a history of violence and and that you know we're actually at this incredibly non-violent period in history so if one of the metrics were you'll use is like how much violence is there in the world we're at this ridiculously low violence period the probability of somewhere in the world dying dying from war or social environment is extremely low and the lowest has ever been in history that's the reason to be positive and if you look at most countries in the world that that we used to consider to be I guess poor I mean like say in India or China they've made massive strides and that this so it's a good and a bad thing it's it's good obviously primarily good but it also means that there's a lot more resources that get used you know China is now putting more new cars in the road then then the u.s. is first of all it's good thing overall so I wouldn't think of the rest of what is not improving I think I think it actually it is improving one may be unhappy with the rate of improvement but it certainly is it is improving and yeah this distal issues in less parts the world but but they're going in the right direction they're not getting worse except in a few exceptional cases and and and where those are exceptional cases they tend to be more driven by corrupt government or civil war that then technology problems so but you know it's sort of unfashionable these days so so we're going to take out some well I guess maybe it's not that unfashionable to take out dictators in other countries and so I'm not sure what I could do you know in that in that thing I just like I don't think these are technology problems you know and and to clarify one thing you said that I think should be clarified you're a person with great success in life and you're not saying oh life is good for me you're arguing that life is better for most people then what we usually appreciate better for the vast majority of people in the world I mean it's difficult about a thousand on it you know everywhere all the time but but the vast majority of you from the world of life life is is good exactly our life is great for me Mary yes yes hi Yvonne so I had the opportunity to your factory which is brand new and and amazing and I noticed that while your cars are battery driven and that's great it's also that the entire frame of the car is made of aluminium correct right and I was wondering how you made that choice and maybe we should should we build all cars with a limp and aluminum frame yeah I think is the best choice of material because with a Model S we wanted to achieve it extremely high safety rating but not make the car super heavy because then if it's so sort of home with with if you use steel is that it ends up being you either you can either make it heavy and safe or light and unsafe and like either of those alternatives and and so hence the use of aluminum it is it is a little harder to work with aluminum is harder to join and so forth but it's in the aerospace industry like you know people would would not make a plane out of steel I mean that that would you know be of it but it's a bit silly not a plane it would fly right and and steel would also not be the first choice for for a rocket although I should point out the early appleís tanks were steel balloons but but but for the most part you were not making a rocket out of out of out of steel so I do think moving to aluminium would be generally be a good idea [Music] I was actually presenting some work I did it's at a conference at Stanford and NASA actually saw what I was doing they asked me to come over to the Ames Center they brought me over there and they tasked me on a project to build a genome synthesizer for Mars which is kind of a crazy crazy story so I just moved here to La Jolla and actually started a company called Cambrian genomics okay well actually a couple days ago I met with craig Venter and the entire team there originally they were they contacted me in Korea and it's part of why I dropped out of school to come come here and start this company and work with Craig all right all right so Craig you know he started be made the first synthetic cell right from completely synthetic DNA right so the company I started is called Cambrian was started with George charge at Harvard both of us came up with these light based devices to get DNA off the next-gen sequencer right so the synthesis that we do is massively parallel the sequencing we do is massively parallel and then we use laser as a serial capture process we can capture about a hundred base pairs every second two seconds you steer this towards the question towards him yeah anyway so my thinking was basically that people weren't very interested in going to Mars for the simple reason that it's a bunch of red rocks it doesn't look very interesting and they've seen lots of pictures of it on the telly well it's definitely a fixer-upper of a planet right so if we could if we could go there potentially do something interesting and have people do you know make interesting things on for the planet and Tara for maybe small parts of it we could we could do something maybe a little bit more interesting have you do you have any plans I know your original plans were to do with the greenhouses but maybe we could do without the greenhouses right well I think I think long term it's possible to terraform Mars and make it much like Earth but but that that's sort of a long-term project that that may take a few centuries but in the meantime we need to to have established cities on Mars and I think that would require sort of domes and and and and that kind of thing but that's the only way to go I think and then and then over time you you know we can terraform it and and then I think they could there could be a role for especially designed microbes in that scenario it it's tough right now for Mars because it's it's quite cold and you know well it's sort of it's not super calming that there are times in Mars where it gets above freezing but but you know you don't have the same UV protection that you have on earth or the same cosmic ray protection so you kind of need to fix a few things about the planet I think before it's really gonna be feasible to have microbes that that could you know live outdoors and laws so the kindly Mary has said that we could have a few more questions from her yes so if you are willing sure absolutely and Amory Lovins right up here in the front I'm just curious if either of them wants to enter into this conversation I want to pay tribute to something that haslin a Tesla that I think has some important implications your chief engineer JB Straubel is an old dear friend of mine yeah and the original roadster had a problem that the gearbox blew up when it tried to meet the acceleration and speed specs simultaneously so JB had the neat idea of getting rid of the gearbox getting more power out of the motor and his colleagues said well and the motor will overheat we'll have to ban date on this baroque cooling system so he said no we'll figure out what's getting hot and we'll give it a bigger cross-section or a higher conductivity it will tweak the software and power electronics to match and correct me on this but I think the result was something like no gearbox ten miles longer range fourteen pounds lighter weight less noise less maintenance much lower manufacturing cost everything got better so the moral of that story was that there's a lot more flexibility in the software and power electronics design space than in the Baroque Victorian mechanical arts and that the ability to exploit that flexibility probably goes more to the small agile company than the big rich company now you may like to know that when I told this story to the chief engineer of one of the big automakers who had been saying electric traction will never make it in the market internal combustion engines will rule for another half century within a few weeks he gave an interview in the trade press saying he changed his mind and now he thought the future of traction was electric ok great and I think this is a very interesting example of the kind of mind bending that that goes on in the kinds of small entrepreneurial outfits that that you have started and you know the the search for intelligent life on Earth continues but some really promising specimens are turning up just when and where we need them thank you so I think we have a microphone way in the back so you've had a remarkable entrepreneurial journey and my question is just where do you draw the bounds on your entrepreneurial vision do you for instance see yourself as if you get someone to Mars are you going to be its first real estate developer for instance SpaceX is gonna be focused on trying on the problem of being able to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars at an affordable you know at Alette look at low-cost very reliably kind of like the you know the Union Pacific sort of you know but but then I think that will enable a lot of opportunities for full entrepreneurs on Mars but we're certainly you know if we can enable also opportunities there then I count that very successful so we'll just do the things that other people don't don't want to do but but I think you know step one is getting there and if you can't get there then it doesn't matter and I mean if if people couldn't get across the Atlantic there would be no United States before we thank Ella musk which we all will do enthusiastically we'll have a minute of stage we want to thank Merrill Lynch we want to thank Chevron also for its patience and big heartedness and in this session and in particular we want to thank we want to thank UCSD we want to thank the Atlantic's event staff so now please join me in thanking your luck

https://youtu.be/bg06ojAR_lE

so um we're gonna just talk for about 20 minutes and then uh just open it up for uh for for questions because i know uh a lot of people have have uh a bunch of them um so i was a little bit i was interested by your background um you uh you finished your bachelor's degree at wharton and then you stayed on an additional year and got a physics degree uh when i imagine almost all of your classmates went to wall street um so that must have must have been a pretty tough year um did you have a vision at this point for what you ultimately wanted to achieve well um i uh yeah there were three things in college that i thought i would most affect the world um and that there were internet uh sustainable energy and space exploration um i didn't think i'd be involved in all three of those but as it turns out as a result of some success in the internet arena i was able to get involved in rockets and cars which are pretty capital intensive um and uh but yeah after sort of finishing the wharton undergrad um i uh i decided i didn't want to work on wall street or work for mckenzie or something like that which everybody else wouldn't talk do do and uh i'd taken enough um sort of physics electives so that i could just spend another year in financial physics degree and then um and then head to california to do grad studies at stanford and material science and applied physics working on uh high-energy density capacitors for electric vehicles um and then i ended up putting that on hold to horse really dropping out uh you're going back technically dean says i can come back any time um but that's unlikely so you know with that stanford degree you might really do something about your life exactly um yeah so a couple internet companies and then kind of circled back to electric cars and um and then rockets yeah it's a typical story right so um you know it seems like a long time ago now but uh you know i i think probably you know your entire background is very interesting you know for us you know we're we're you know we're an internet company at our at our core as well and we came up really during the same period of time as paypal uh to me um one of the really interesting things about you and that is very similar to some of the history of our company is that you have been very willing to put your own capital and your own money into into your business and one of the most intriguing times for me for you was 2008 with tesla and you went in and you were not originally the ceo you were the you were the funding you know you were the the funder and the chairman but then you're also just you were a developer so talk a little bit about that time and you know what it was like to have basically everything on the line uh yeah that was that was super unpleasant uh that's for sure yeah basically 2007 2008 and 2009 sucked they were really horrible it was awesome here in washington um so yeah uh so my you know my thought with what i had originally hoped with tesla i mean was that i wouldn't um that i could just dedicate enough time to uh do product development but then not actually run the company um so that turned out to be a false assumption uh and i was sort of faced with the choice of um in 2008 to either run the company and just work a lot more or uh or it would die mostly you know so um yeah in 2008 it was particularly tough on a number of a number of fronts uh because the the third launch of the falcon 1 rocket for spacex failed um the tesla financing round fell apart because well we kept people kept telling us that the term sheet was just around the corner they just want to see what the market's going to do like it was great yeah um we were doing the same thing right absolutely so um so tesla desperately needed money um and then solar city had a deal with morgan stanley um solar lease finance deal that morgan stanley themselves could not honor because they just didn't have money and then i was also getting divorced so that was like just on every level utter misery and then fortunately things perked up towards the end of the year uh the fourth launch of falcon 1 did work um solar city was able to get through that period by just selling solar systems instead of leasing them was very tough uh tesla tesla was probably the most difficult in that time because you know obviously general motors and chrysler were busy getting bankrupt and trying to raise money can you imagine trying to raise money for a car company in late 2008 while jerome was in crisis are going bankrupt and they're like asking for examples of prior successful car companies um in the last you know the last examples are at least you know but they're not delivering memory you know so there's that tucker guy yeah yeah i mean they think of tucker and delorean you know it's like you've had a buck for every time somebody mentioned lauren i wouldn't need to have an ipo so uh yeah that was very difficult in fact the only way we could raise money was internally so from existing investors and uh and then i had to commit all of all of my available capital uh to to tesla um in order to get the other investors to do the other half of the round uh and that was enough to get get tesla through that point and then a lot of people um assume that the doe saved our butt but actually it was daimler um so that in in early 2009 daimler invested uh 50 million dollars into tesla which was extremely important tesla didn't actually get any doa money until 2010. so if um that was a loan correct is that correct the structure alone and it's it's uh a staggered loan it's actually what it is is as we incur expenses um those expenses and then audited by pwc and the portion that is applicable to the model s and to um powertrain deals or powertrain supply to other companies like the powertrain supply deal we have to download toyota uh that that portion is then reimbursed about a month or two later um because we also get got some press about like oh the deal is you know giving us money for the for the roadster and it's like no it's like literally impossible for them to do that um so um yeah i made the mistake of calling some the new york times reporter who falsely reported that knowingly falsely reported that a douchebag now if somebody knowingly falsely reports something like the truth are they not a douchebag [Laughter] well i'm going to ask you a uh i'll we'll go from dark to light uh here's a question i've i really never thought that i'd ask with someone what was it like to have a rocket fail i mean i mean that sucks it's really terrible it was it was but it looked kind of cool i mean it did look kind of cool just between you and me um well so the first one but i mean i guess a serious question i mean you had to expect that there was a very high likelihood that that the rocket was you know that there were kind of a lot of things that could go wrong yes yes at the beginning at the start of spacex i thought the chance of success of the company was less than 50 percent how we doing now oh i'd say well 90 99 at this point because uh well spacex has been profitable for four years and will be profitable this year as three billion dollars of contracts under revenue uh contra three billion dollars in revenue under contract um like even if we didn't sell any more launches we would be profitable for the next several years you have an existing the nasa contract correct yeah the nasa is the biggest contract but uh spacex has over 30 launches 13 of those are for nasa it's about 40 of our businesses with nasa but you know if you look at the government spending as a percentage of the economy it's about 40 so even if you sold pencils about 40 of your business would be with the government i've lost my and then what was like to when you when that when the uh when the fourth rocket went up and it was a successful launch that that had to be kind of cool too yeah that was awesome it was it was actually more just relief i didn't feel elation i just felt like uh extreme stress relief yeah yeah i actually was disappointed that i didn't feel happier uh but i just felt like slightly less stressed just on to the next thing yeah um well that the fourth launch just meant that we uh wouldn't die quite then um but well that's good news right um but then uh we were awarded a big nasa contract at the end of literally i think it was december 23rd um in fact the absolute low point was for me was i think december 22nd or 21st of 2008 um because even though it had the that falcon success the um i mean we we didn't we still had very few contracts and we didn't have enough money to keep the company going we really needed a um a big contract win and then uh nasa called and said that uh um they'd awarded us the the main contract for uh replacing cargo transport function of the space shuttle um and it was 1.6 billion so i was like i said i love you guys i don't know if that's you're supposed to say that but yeah that was billion with a b right right right i love you yes lost all decorum yeah the um i i think one of the interesting things you know taking quotes from you is that your cost is about one-third you know i believe that's right of of of the competitors for uh for for for rocket launches or yeah are you um are there things that you think that nasa could learn from private companies that are that are coming into the market now uh yeah you know i think in general it's tough for government to do things um um you know so i mean generally i think that that government should do [Music] um try to minimize the number of things that government does um so i'm generally a proponent of of smaller government not bigger government um just because gov government as a as a system is not uh an efficient system so you want to minimize the government participation in the economy that doesn't mean getting rid of it but just saying you have to think really carefully before the government does something versus free enterprise or something free enterprise is always going to be more efficient um so now there are things like like basic physics research and obviously i think we'd rather have a a government army than a private army and um i think probably a government justice system then a private justice system you know there's sort of things that are that the government should do and and also kind of doing things like the hubble and the mars rovers you know something like the hubble is a small amount of good for everyone like it's like oh we learned more about the universe got some really cool pictures um and um and and that that's that's that's a value to all of america and all of humanity really um but it's hard to say like who's going to pay for it if you try to raise private funds for it but you might be able to get it but it's it's it's harder uh so you got your money back from the last thing right so the which one you got your money back from you know having uh invested in tesla and you just got the contract from nasa so uh yeah actually as it turns out uh tesla and spacex and solar city um are doing really well in you know at the you know the i think it's if you look at say the tesla stock price it's actually been remarkably stable it's been sort of in the 20s for a year despite massive gyrations in the market and there was a there was a momentary short squeeze in december of last year which there's a bunch of articles that reference oh tesla had this high of like 36 dollars that's only because there was a short squeeze at the end of december um it was because at the end of the that was when the six-month lock-up period for the ipo expired and i think people in the market expected that there would be a lot of people selling stock at that point and actually they weren't just didn't happen right so this big short squeeze took place um i think there's probably going to be another short squeeze on tesla because like i apparently get these google alerts that were like the third most shorted stock on the nasdaq 21 million shares short now i mean somebody's got a lot of bulls yeah well so what all right what do they have wrong what okay so that guy he's short your shares so talk to dave meyer you tell him why he's wrong dude it's going to sting that's all i can tell you it's like um yeah i think um well i i mean i don't know if you're actually awesome okay but but uh i think generally when i talk to people who showed the shows that they're not shorting it because of anything they know about tesla they're just shorting it because of historical precedent um it's like oh there's never there hasn't been a successful car company in ages so tesla is going to be is not going to succeed like uh how about looking at the fundamentals you know um so uh the the the thing is that whenever there's a big change in technology whenever there's a big technology discontinuity that's when opportunity arises in in industry and if you look at say like the computer industry we had ibm was extremely dominant in mainframes um and everyone thought oh you know they'll just be extremely dominant in pcs and everything and they they weren't they just they have a hard time with the technology you know when there's a sharp change in technology gradual changes they can deal with but but uh sharp changes that they tend to not do well with um and and you can look at the internet and say well why wasn't microsoft the leader in in search why didn't they beat google um why didn't google beat facebook and you know it's just tough uh to deal with big technology change and what we're seeing in the automotive industry is the biggest technology change since the moving production line the entire powertrain is changing so and and that and and then um people say well how could you possibly compete with like uh the big car companies like toyota oh like you i mean our partner the one that we're providing electric power trains to that would that be the toyota you're referring to um you know it it you know you have to say well why why is toyota having tesla supply electric powertrains it can't be that easy if if um if we're doing that why is daimler the company that invented internal combustion engines having a supply components to them um and uh it's because it's it's it's really hard technology taylor is really a it's a we're a hardcore technology and design company um you know there's i think there's other companies out there like that that are not that are sort of different and you know like i think fiscal is pretty different from us like they're not a hardcore engineering company but but but we are and so i think come what made this this this huge value and tesla in terms of the intellectual property that that we've developed and if you look at um you know some of our strategic investors like daimler and uh and like toyota and like panasonic um who have not sold a share in fact daimler at the last time we did a secondary earlier this year daimler participated for priority in that uh secondary um you know it's difficult to ask for a better endorsement than that yeah i think that the uh the the powertrain contract that you all signed with uh with toyota was very interesting for for one reason it's it seems to me i couldn't think of another another instance where a company a car company had outsourced such a central component like usually they do a lot of manufacturing but that's a central component so that feels like not just a game changer for you but a game changer for the industry um yeah um yeah you're right it is unusual for that to occur and um we are part of what akio toyota is trying to do with his his company is is try to push it to be more entrepreneurial um he remembers the days of his grandfather when it was very entrepreneurial you know toyota would made sewing machines in the in the 30s and and then they just decided one day they're going to make cars and people like ha they can possibly make a car that anyone would want to buy and they then they made a great car um but they were very entrepreneurial and uh akioto is concerned that they're they've become too set in their ways they've become too convinced um in their own rightness yeah and and that's part of what led to some of the issues that that that he came in to to fix uh and aikido isn't a really great guy by the way toyota is really fortunate to have him at the helm there um but but but he you know he he he wants to push push his team to to try new things because when he went to his team and said hey what about electric vehicles they said it couldn't be done right and so it's like okay so let's see if this little company toyota tesla can can do it and so and we're doing it and i'm like oh okay i guess it can't be done why don't you think they could do it i mean they tried for they tried on a number for a long time they put millions of dollars into into developing the technology what's what's different well no i i think they will be able to do it over time um but it just it's just not very quick um and um you know they they didn't uh the the mindset of trying something new and radical was just not there um that there it's you know if there's people have written books about this like crossing the chasm and you know innovators dilemma and all that um about how it's difficult to do radical innovation at a big company because if you try to do radical innovation and you fail you get a huge ding yeah um and and then and especially if you have something to protect to start with yeah right exactly you've got to decide that you're trying to you decide that you're going to cannibalize your existing business and take a big risk and deal with all the issues that inevitably arise when you're trying to push a new technology um and and and then and not get fired along the way it's pretty hard yeah one of your uh one of your passions has been uh been clean energy and you know this is you know this has been something that uh that you've done i guess on the side of the other you know these other very small projects um do you believe that uh the developing markets like india and china how are they going to develop in a way that sustainable and clean energy is possible well china is actually already moving to um towards clean energy very aggressively um you know people there's a lot of press about solyndra and you know the doe giving flundrek 400 million dollars and and slyndra failed and should should the government really have given them 400 million dollars and um well it's worth pointing out that they got about 800 million dollars from from private investors primarily silicon valley venture capitalists including some very big names so they weren't suckers who got that money um and uh the fundamental issue with solyndra was they would have been okay at about two dollars a watt for for solar but it the chinese pushed it down to a right so what yeah the price is collapsed right yeah and the chinese government invested 40 billion in their solar industry and so we were like like slender you suck for failing like i'm like yeah they they had literally one percent the resources of of their competitors who would win in that situation it's pretty hard you did well okay yeah yeah but you know in the case of solar city um uh so i mean i did i i i thought this would occur um i you know i thought there would be a rabbit competition in uh the cost per watt of solar they're somewhat inevitable with you know korea japan china germany or competing like mad on on cost per watt and it's a very much a commodity uh that you do not want to be in that in in that business and then so solar city's focus is on balance of system they're kind of like uh dell or apple you know the dollar apple they don't make the the memory chips or the cpu or the hard drive but they design the overall system they put it together they handle the customer relationship they own the customer brand they're in the relationship i mean if you've got solar city installation of your house you have no idea what panels you got i mean it's like panel panel something it's all the city panels you might as well know like people know about as much about what panels are on the roof as they know about what dram chips are in their computer um like who made your dram chips on your mac apple no it wasn't apple um so in fact i think i think that the there's a lot of parallels between the the dram business and uh and the solar panel business um i think it's going to go through the same sort of boom bust microscopic margin situation um but the more competition there is in panel cost for what the better solar city it is so they're kicking butt i mean they're growing at 50 100 a year uh and positive cash flow uh you have a you have a pretty tight time frame so i want to make sure that we open it up to uh to questions from uh from the audit sure if that's if that's okay so alan thank you very much for visiting us today um just a couple questions the first is why are there so many fewer ipos now than have been the case in years past and the second question is having never had the pleasure of working with you or for you this might actually be a better question for your associates but you know i always think of ceos and leaders as creating cultures around them bill's um interview very much was focused on exploits achievements and forward looking things for your businesses what's it like to work with you on a daily basis what kind of a culture do you typically create around yourself are there catch phrases you use or express how do you roll well i don't normally wear a suit the reason i'm wearing a suit is because i'm in dc and you know when in rome although you guys aren't wearing suits but um we roll a little differently right you're not normal for dc yeah um welcome to virginia right um i just gave a talk at the national press club and i'm headed to the pentagon right after this that's why i need to leave on time because they're quite functional over there um so uh i you know i don't know i'm not sure exactly how to describe the culture of of spacex or tesla um but um i i do try to think of it in kind of like signal to noise you know where signal is getting useful things done noise is everything else and so we want to get have people do you know be focused on doing useful things um and not involved in sort of internecine politics um and uh you know i i think yeah the role of the manager is like basically to make sure people are well you need to be able to decide what is the right strategy what's the direction to go and then and then make sure people are are doing things that are pointed in that direction and that that that the their talents their other opportunities are maximized and just sort of like iterate on that loop that that's that's kind of how i think um and then i think in terms of of recruiting and motivating the the best people um having um you got to make sure it's a reasonably fun work environment so if you were looking forward to coming in the work to work in the morning um it's a lot easier to be productive and and focused about if you if you're interested in what you're doing um and and and you're looking forward to it then if your mind's trying to escape and and it feels like prison where you leave at 5 p.m or something like that and then the others that is financial reward needs to be commensurate with uh the effort uh expended um so if they work really hard they're gonna think okay that that will the reward will be proportionate to my effort you know uh obviously if you have a situation where where you see somebody is highly rewarded for doing much less effort than you then that's demotivating um so you want to avoid situations like that uh and then the third thing uh is i think if people think that what they're working at on it there's a greater cause you know that there's something uh that could change the world then i think that that's also a motivating factor now not everything changes the world i mean or changes to various degrees but but i think um for the most talented and driven people it's very it's important that there be a larger purpose how do you view uh well-conceived failures in your company uh well i think it's important like nobody bats a thousand obviously um and no matter how smart you are you'll make some number of mistakes everyone makes mistakes it's just a question of how many and how often and do you have a good whether a rocket blows up right um i didn't fire anyone responsible for the particular failures associated with the first three three flights actually um and uh because they i mean they could have made better decisions but they're they're smart hard-working and it's sort of like you know it just wouldn't be fair in that situation so um it's all it's only if somebody is uh uh either like they can't that they're like they can't get themselves motivated around the core mission or um they're really not giving it everything they can um in some cases they may be not the right fit for a particular role or um there was an error in the hiring process but other than that it's it's pretty forgiving i think who's next okay so hi i've got a question it's a nice segue to your next appointment at the pentagon um so i'm interested in what the us military is doing with green energy how they're going to use it in the future for them it's probably a matter of national security um i'm that's very important but i also care a lot about our planet and i know you do too so any comments on upcoming opportunity for either solar or electronic vehicles or anything green with the military uh yeah absolutely well you know the military does does so military does have a mandate to move towards uh sustainable energy and it does have the dual advantage of being good for the environment and good for national security um i think certainly solar is is very important because a lot of the military bases out there they operate on generators and and so it's they're pretty inefficient from an electricity generation standpoint they're just importing a lot of oil um and uh it actually takes a lot of oil oil to get the oil there so it's really inefficient um so going big on solar is pretty important for the military and solar city is actually trying to do that uh with it with a a big um solar installation at military bases it was announced recently it was actually going to be funded by in part by the doe but then the solyndra thing kind of threw everything for a loop and so uh it doesn't look like that's going to happen unfortunately but on the on the positive news side um the solar city thinks they could they might be they can probably get done without the doe so i think i'm going to jump the gun here but um but i think it i think they'll be able to move forward even without the doe the cost is going to be a little higher um because the cost of solar is so dependent on the capital cost of the thing because it doesn't cost anything to run it really it's just capital cost so so yeah i think things are moving in a good direction there um and then and then over time i think we'll see military vehicles going increasingly electric um but um you know the military can be relatively slow adopter you know unless there's like a pressing need uh it it can be a pretty slow adopter of technology i mean some of the planes that are up there flying pretty ancient um so i think uh it'll probably take a while for the the military will not be the probably not be the first uh here yeah more of a whimsical question and a dream of mine um chances of uh passenger flights how soon sure well i think we could do passenger flights i think maybe best case three three years but probably worst case five years um and these will be orbital flights and depending upon what level of reusability we're able to achieve with the vehicle that that will that will drive the cost um on on a completely expendable basis um i think that the cost proceed would be on the order of 20 million dollars which is obviously pretty expensive um but but that's because you're throwing the rocket away you know it's sort of like you know imagine how much an air ticket would cost if you had to throw the plane away every time you're really expensive you know 747 is about 300 million dollars you need two for a round trip but nobody's playing half a billion dollars for a plane ticket um or even you know whatever it is 400 passengers times that so like one and a half billion dollars a ticket um so they do it if they could get away with it well that's beauty of competition and everything um but you can use that 747 over and over again like 10 000 times or more so the capital cost of the uh you know in your ticket price the capital cost has to be counted somehow but it's a pretty small portion so we have time i think for maybe two more questions oh uh right here in in keeping with the what do you see in the future uh discussion we've got going with tesla it seems like the odd industry is you know right for a disruption as well how how long do you think it'll be until we're uh we're all driving tesla's to work you know will be a generation what would be ten years um when do you think the technology will really be commercially viable for the everyday consumer um well so we're trying to get to mass market electric cars as fast as possible and if um that's really been my goal with tesla from the beginning is to make mass market electric cars but but as a small company we didn't have economies of scale and the technology wasn't refined enough to to go to mass market right away so the master plan has always been to start with expensive vehicles in low volume go to mid price mid volume and then low price high volume um and so we're about to do step two in that strategy which is mid price mood volume with the model s which i'm highly confident will will hit the market and get delivered to customers uh middle of next year um in fact we've got a big event this weekend uh which is the the first uh customer drive or the first first time anyone will will drive the uh model s beta which is um essentially indistinguishable from the production car except for but you know slight bugs and things and that's a car that starts at 50 000 so it's comparable to your mercedes bmw lexus type of thing and then hopefully in about four years or so we can get to the kind of the sub 30 000 or maybe around 30 000 car and and we have the factory to do it the great thing about the factory that we acquired from gm and toyota is that it has about a half million vehicle your capacity we're just using a little tiny portion of it in fact we've literally turned the lights out and cut off the the main breakers in the rest of the building so not to use base load um but we have this huge asset which is the uh that this factory that that we can leverage and scale up at a relatively low capital cost and you're uh you're a bull on manufacturing domestically i i really like manufacturing um and i think sometimes manufacturing is looked at as kind of a boring like you're just making copies or something like that but there's a huge amount of innovation that occurs in manufacturing and i think it's it's actually a really interesting problem um so i i'm i'm very pro manufacturing and a very very much in favor of thinking manufacturing like a technology problem and not just like you're just going to make copies bending iron and yeah you this you're thinking about like this if you're trying to take raw materials and get them into the desired shape um if if as efficiently as possible and it's a really interesting puzzle as to how you do that um and there's a huge amount of innovation that can be applied there toyota showed this with the toyota production system and i think i think there's actually there's more even more that can be done in that in that regard and um but i think you have to have a tight iteration loop between engineering and production in order to to experience that in order to apply that innovation that's why we've got engineering and production closely physically located in silicon valley uh i think jeff yeah jlo hey actually i was curious what you thought of the future of the vasimir rocket and uh does spacex have any plans on working with that astro at all uh so the the vashmir is um it's basically an in-space propulsion and it's basically a an ion drive um and uh it's it you can't use it to depart from earth you can only use it in space because the actual thrust is quite low that is true for all ion drives and um i think it's okay as far as ion drives go i mean it's it's i think there's some question marks around how much energy is required to operate the the vasmir um and i think they generally pre sort of presupposes a nuclear reactor and and all that sort of stuff so i i think that's that's a bit tricky um and it's not clear to me that the vasamira wins when when you're looking at uh um you know basically watts of input energy per newton of thrust which is sort of a key figure of merit um i do i do believe in ion drives i'm saying it's that something spacex will get into but but i think we'll probably be more in the in favor of sort of things like hall effect thrusters and um and and you know maybe maybe maybe laser accelerated particles or something like that so elon i think you can get a sense from you know from our audience that we are enormous fans of purpose-driven entrepreneurship and you know you're one of the embodiments of of that and we you know we really appreciate that you took the time to come and speak with us today all right thank you thank you [Applause]

https://youtu.be/xrVD3tcVWTY

good afternoon and welcome to the National Press Club I'm mark Hamrick of Associated Press where I'm a broadcast and online journalist covering business and financial news and in this capacity on the 104th president of the National Press Club we are the world's leading professional organization for journalists committed to our professions future through our programming events such as this while fostering a free press worldwide for more information about the National Press Club we'd invite you to visit our website at www.archives.gov/calendar general public are attending today so it's not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalistic objectivity we'd also like to welcome our c-span and public radio audiences our luncheons are also featured are a member produced weekly podcasts from the National Press Club which is available for free download on iTunes you can also follow the action on twitter using the hashtag pound NBC lunch after our guest speech concludes we'll have Q&A and we'll ask as many questions as time permits now it's time to introduce our head table guests and please note that a journalist presence at any head table particularly during this political season does not imply or signify an endorsement of the speaker so would ask each of you here at the head table to please stand up briefly as your name is announcing we'll begin from your right we begin with Paul schenkman who's a reporter with WTOP news and we might note a third-generation Press Club member which is a special thing Heather force Green Weaver is a freelancer and she is with our book and author committee leadership on bagans of the Kuwait news agency by the way he hails from the US south he is a chair of our newsmakers committing and doing a great job there as well Kristin Grantham is communications director with SpaceX and a guest of our speaker welcome Tim Angela growlin King is a transportation reporter with Bloomberg News and our membership secretary on our board of governors Tim Hughes is general counsel with SpaceX and guest of our speaker skip over the podium for a moment Melissa Charbonneau with news folk media is our fantastic speakers committee chair really doing a wonderful job for us there this year thank you so much Melissa will skip over our speaker for just a moment Lee Perryman is director with en PS with Associated Press he's the speaker's committee member who organized today's event thank you very much Lee George Dewey is senior vice president marketing and communications with SpaceX the guests of our speaker welcome Frank mooring is deputy managing editor for space Aviation Week and space technology magazine Robert Schlesinger is opinion editor US News and World Report Adam Cano is vice president client strategy with TMP government vice chair of our broadcast committee here at the National Press Club please give them all a warm round of applause one might be inclined to call our guest speaker today a Renaissance man but to do that would to be set him back several hundred years so that wouldn't be fair but with South African and Canadian heritage he is an engineer whose passion for solving problems necessitated that he become an entrepreneur and inventor we're told that he multitasks that he's a workaholic we're told he got in at 3 a.m. this morning here he probably drives fast we're told but with a preference for energy-efficient vehicles and he thinks a lot about life in space from software businesses to the internet let's not forget about electric cars solar energy and space rockets his friends say that our speaker today does everything with absolute conviction even when he believes in something when he believes in something he is unstoppable he is said that if he thinks the stakes are important enough he'll do it whether the odds of success are high or low in February Forbes magazine ranked him as one of the nation's 20 most powerful CEOs 40 and under last year time listed him as one of the 100 people who most affect the world Esquire said that he's one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century and there been many other awards and recognitions along the way he bought his first computer at the age of 10 he taught himself how to program that and by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software a space game for the Commodore 64 platform for about $500 at age 17 in 1988 he left his native South Africa for Western Canada to live and work with his mother's family in 1992 he won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania where he received an undergraduate degree in business from the Wharton School he got a second bachelor's degree in physics he headed to Stanford in a graduate program in applied physics and material science a goal was to create ultra capacitors with enough energy to power electric cars but after two days he left to start a company with his brother which provided online content publishing software for news organizations and kucing in 1999 Alta Vista acquired that for about 341 million dollars next our guest co-founded an online financial services an email payment company you probably have heard of it in 2001 that became PayPal which was acquired by eBay for 2,000 in 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars in stock so we used the proceeds to help start Space Exploration Technologies in 2002 where he is CEO and CTO in 2008 SpaceX when a NASA contract to replace the cargo transport function of the Space Shuttle to support the International Space Station with astronaut transport in mind and a 2009 SpaceX's Falcon one rocket became the first privately funded liquid fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit he is known as an original investor chairman of the board and eventual head of product design at Tesla Motors where he led design of the all-electric Tesla Roadster today Tesla also sells electric powertrain systems to Daimler and Toyota he is the primary investor and non-executive chairman of Solar City our guest speaker has been compared to Henry Ford Howard Hughes and even the fictional Tony Stark Iron Man he has been described as the inspiration for Robert Downey jr. zhh interpretation of the character and he had a cameo in Iron Man 2 appropriately enough the SpaceX Factory was used in the film we hope he got some money from that as well he's not without critics and skeptics however including some who doubted SpaceX's economies of scale can sustain the low cost business model but he insists that he is proving them wrong today so the founder of PayPal the world's largest internet payment system CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors manufacturer of the all-electric Tesla Roadster automobile and Model S sedan a non-executive chairman of Solar City a leading provider of solar power systems in the u.s. is here today and we're grateful for that to talk about the future of human spaceflight as head of SpaceX developer of rockers and rockets and vehicles for missions to or Thor ''but and beyond our guest view space exploration as a key next step in preserving expanding human life and he's promoted making life multiplanetary starting with Mars it is an appropriate follow-up to our luncheon this summer that featured NASA administer charles bolden and astronaut Mark Kelly all of this serving as proof that you do not need to be a rocket scientist to be a National Press Club luncheon speaker but it helps please give a warm National Press Club welcome to one of the most interesting personalities and entrepreneurs of our day mr. Elon Musk I will thank you for having me it's really an honor to speak for the National Press Club so I have an exciting announcement with respect to space and I think one which should be provides some inspiration and some belief that the innovation is alive and well in America and going in really interesting directions but before I I'm gonna get to that but I'm gonna preface that with the logic that explains why such thing as important because it may not be immediately obvious so first of all the going back to why am i in space and electric cars and and solar power and internet stuff it really it goes back to what when I was in college and I was trying to I think of what were the most important things that would affect the future of humanity what could have a significant positive effect in the future of humanity and and the three things that I came up with were the Internet sustainable energy both production and consumption and and then space exploration but but specifically making life multiplanetary and I didn't expect when I was in college to actually be involved in all three of those areas but as a result of some success in the internet arena that gave me the capital to get involved in very high capital endeavors like cars and rockets which really are high capital so the the reason for I'm mostly gonna talk about space so I want to explain why do I think the space is really important and and what about space and and because I believe in sort of building things up from from you know from from a rational sort of framework of logic and so you saw it was sort of well how do you decide that anything is important and I think the lens of history is a helpful guide here in that things that are that may seem important in the moment but actually aren't that important in the grand scheme you know over time if you if you look at look at things over approached at a time the things that that are less important kind of fall away and if you look at things from the broadest possible span of time as it relates to life itself and the the evolution of life has been primitive life I think started around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago and what are what are the important steps in the evolution of life and obviously there was the advent of single celled life there was a differentiation to plants and animals there was life going from the oceans to land there was mammals consciousness and I would argue also on that scale should fit life becoming multiplanetary and in fact I think it consciousness it is it's the next step actually because you really kind of need consciousness to design vehicles that can transport life over hundreds of millions of miles of irradiated space to an environment that they did not evolve to exist in there it would be very convenient of course if there was another planet just like Earth nearby but but that's that's unlikely and and as it turns out not the case so so I think you you couldn't really there's no way for life to sort of just by dint of natural selection just sort of getting get over to Mars and survive he said so you need consciousness you've got you gotta design so I think I think it is the natural next natural step so I think if one could make a reasonable argument that that something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution then it's it's it's important and and may be worth a little bit of our resources and one can also think of it from the standpoint of of life insurance there's there's a there's some chance either as a result of something humanity biz or as a result of something natural like a giant asteroid hitting us or something and that's that civilization life as we know it could could be destroyed there's clear evidence for life being destroyed multiple times in the fossil record so we don't need to guess that this is something that can occur it has occurred and the Permian extinction being a pigley interesting one because I think that that that destroyed some between 90 and 95% of all species on earth which doesn't tell the full story because most of remaining species were fungi so unless you're a mushroom you're out of luck so so you know this this if we think it's it's worth buying life insurance on an individual level or perhaps it's worth spending more than suspending something on life insurance for life as we know it and and and and arguably that that expenditure should be greater than zero so then we can just get to the question of what or what is an appropriate expenditure for for life insurance and you know I think it probably if it if it's something like a quarter of a percent of the GDP that would be that would be okay I think most people would say okay that's that's not too bad you know it's but you know you don't want it you want you want it to be some sort of number that is much less than we spend on health care but maybe more than we spend on lipstick you know something like that and I like lipstick it's not like I've got anything against it so yeah I can't wait for that comment to go out there so so that that's that's kind of the thing that I think it's important that we we give a little bit of our our mind space towards and I think it's also what one of the most inspiring and interesting things that we could try to do it's it's one of the greatest adventures that humanity could ever embarked upon and you know like the life has to be more than about solving problems you know if all that life is about is solving problems why bother getting up in the morning there have to be things that inspire you to you know that that make you proud to be a member of humanity and you know the Apollo program certainly an example of that it's only a handful of people went to the moon and and yet actually we all went to the moon we went with them like if I carry ously we shared in that adventure I don't think anyone would say that that was a bad idea that that was great so you know we need we need more of those things or at least we need some of those things and you know even if someone's in a completely different industry and in a different completely different walk of life it's still something that's gonna make you feel good about the world and that that's why that's another reason why I think we should try to do to do these great things so now then let's get to the question of well how do you do how do you make life multiplanetary what is the what are the fundamental obstacles to that because well well and good if we're not everyone agrees that that's that's worth worth doing but if we can't do it well doesn't matter so so the pivotal breakthrough but that's necessary that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary is a fully and rapidly reusable or word class rocket this is a very difficult thing to do because we live on a planet where it that is just early possible if gravity were a little lower it would be easy if it was a little higher it would be impossible so even for an expendable launch vehicle you know where you don't attempt any recovery after a lot of smart people have done their best to optimize the weight of the vehicle and the efficiency of the engines and the guidance system everything you get maybe two to three percent of your liftoff weight to all to orbit but that's not a lot of room for error so if your rocket ends up being it's just a little little bit heavier you get nothing to orbit and this is why only a few countries have ever reached orbit now I say okay well let's make it reusable which means you've got to strengthen the stages you're going to add a lot of weight a lot of thermal protection you've got to do do a lot of things that that add weight to to that vehicle and still have a useful payload to orbit this is the icing of that meteor two to three percent and maybe if you're really good get it to fall you've got to add all that all that's necessary to bring that the rocket stages back to the launch pad and be able to reflow them and still have useful payload to orbit so a very difficult thing that this has been attempted many times in the past and generally what's happened is when people have concluded that success was not one of the possible outcomes then the project's been abandoned well in some some government projects kept going even even when success was not one of the possible outcomes unfortunately but then the vege today get cancelled so so it's it's a ver just a very tough engineering problem and it wasn't something that I thought I wasn't sure it could be solved for for a while but then I think just just so relatively recently progress in the last twelve months or so I've come to conclusion that better can be solved and and I think SpaceX is going to try to do it now we could fail I'm not saying we we're certain of success here but but we're going to try to do it and and we have a design that on paper doing the calculations doing the simulations it does work and now we need to make sure that the simulations and reality agree because generally when when they don't reality wins so that that's a best fit to to be to be determined and and the simulation that you may have seen in the lobby coming in I wish will be posted to our website right around now is it will show you a simulation of what we what we've planned to do now that simulation is is mostly accurate but there are a few areas which are inaccurate in some cases just due to timing constraints we weren't able to work with the simulation people to get it completely accurate in some cases we're keeping a few technical things under our hat but it gives you a pretty good idea of what what we intend to do which is to land with basically for the first stage after stage separation turn the stage around relight the engines boost back to the launch pad and land for possibly on on landing legs and then with the upper stage after dropping off the satellite or Dragon spacecraft then do a deorbit burn reenter you need a quite a powerful heat shield steer aerodynamically back to the launch pad you don't actually need wings by the way the coin misperception hysterically just need a some left over drag number and lift lift vector and and steer back to most pad then land propulsively with the upper stage also with landing gear and so we'll see if this works but it's going to be certainly an exciting journey and if it does work it'll be pretty huge because if you look at say the cost of Falcon 9 rocket which is quite a big rocket it's about a million pounds of thrust the and it is the lowest cost rocket in the world but in even so it's it's about 50 to 60 million dollars and and but the cost of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only about two hundred thousand dollars so it's obviously if we can reuse the rocket say a thousand times then that that would make the capital cost of the rocket for launch only about fifty thousand dollars you know there'd be maintenance and other things that would factor in there and fixed costs and some overhead allocation or whatnot but it would allow for about a hundred fold reduction in energy costs and and this this is a pretty obvious thing if you think about it as applied to any other mode of transport you can imagine that if planes were not reusable very few people would fly you know 747 is about three hundred million dollars you need two of them for a roundtrip and yet I don't think anyone care has paid half a billion dollars to fly and the reason is because those planes can be used tens of thousands of times and so all you're really paying for is fuel and pilot costs and you know just my sort of incidentals and the capital cost is relatively small so that that's why it's such a giant difference I thought of another way I mentioned that you know we could probably afford a quarter of a percent of our GDP for making life multiplanetary that that's the cost if you have a fully reusable rocket the the cost if you don't have a fully reasonable rocket on the same barometer would be a hundred percent of the GDP and that would mean no money for food health care or anything else and obviously that's impossible so that's why I think a fully erupted Leary usable system is fundamentally required for life become multiplanetary for us to establish life on on Mars Mars is the only realistic option for another planet Venus being too hot mercury being way too hot Jupiter being a gas giant and the droop the moons of Jupiter ability but it's much further out and it's harder in a lot of different ways and moon is sort of too small and resource poor to have to make life multiplanetary emphasized not just to have a little base a little base is not that interesting but it's self sustaining human civilization is that that's on multiple planets that we're where life could continue even in the event of a calamity on earth that is the real thing yeah so I think this is this is pretty exciting and I think everyone in everyone in American and arguably impressed the world should be pretty fired up about what what we're doing and hopefully wish us well and we'll do our best to to succeed in this regard and yeah it's as if they're definitely gonna be an adventure and I'll say one final thing which is that sometimes people say well what is the business model for Mars and sometimes they think whoa can we can you mine Mars and bring things back and like that is not a realistic business model for Mars because that it's always gonna be far cheaper to mine things can Earth and Mars but I do think that there's a business model where if you can reduce the cost of a flight to Mars or moving to Mars to around the cost of middle class home in California which what these just seem to be rising over time maybe not recently but certainly pretty expensive so maybe to around half a million dollars then then I think you would have enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars to be part of creating a new planet and be part of kind of the founding team of a new civilization you don't have to have to have your obviously you have to be willing to you know we have a quite an appetite for risk and an adventure but I there's seven billion people on earth now there will be 48 billion by the midpoint of the century so even if one in a million people decided to do that that's still 8,000 people and and I think probably more than 1 million people will decide to do that so that that's what I think is sort of the Mars business model if you will and then ultimately Mars can probably export intellectual property like software and inventions and things like that if you can sort of beam it back with photons that's sort of the better way to go all right so I'm happy to answer any questions well thank you very much obviously given the diverse nature of your own interest and pursuits we'll ask you to stay here as soon as you grab a drink of water which is required on earth if you what to the moon that might be more difficult so we're gonna start with the space piece and if you'll just stand up here right by my side and we'll just sort of wing it one by one talk about how you see the practical application of this technology that you just described sort of in the knee or an intermediate term if it's if it's successful well in the in the near term the technology will be applied to launching satellites and to resupplying the space station taking cargo and crew up there that's that's the near-term thing and that's that's what SpaceX is current business is predicated on we're doing okay in that regard we've got about three billion dollars of revenue under contract and that's better than okay yeah it's just a billion dollars yeah I mean it's spread out over the next five years but it's not all at once unfortunately and we do have to do lots of things to get that money but but but it's but that's not bad and so we have been profitable for over the last four years not usually profit moderately possible and we expect to be the same this year so and I think that's not necessary because obviously if the amount of money going out exceeds the amount of money coming in then sooner or later we'll die so we have to make sure that that we have a more money coming in than going out but that seems to be going with me well and you described to me earlier that right now you're the leading essentially vendor for launching satellites into space right now well if measured by launch contracts awarded that is correct and it's so the United States has been uncompetitive in the international launch market for a long time and Russia has actually been leader in that regard followed by Europe and then to a lesser degree India and China although China's obviously China's growing rapidly and except in the last few years where where the United States has done done the best and that's your entirely to SpaceX so obviously you're a person very interested and performing in innovation and that's something it seems the United States does well in the space business specifically how can we maintain that competitive edge and are we maintaining it in the sector generally within our nation right now well as far as launch is concerned I think I think it's fair to say that the United States has by far the most competitive launch capability with SpaceX as a result of SpaceX and the only realistic potential competitor is China it is but the easiest thing competing with national governments which are heavily subsidized and and they certainly have set their sights on us and told us that but but that's okay I think we won the but we have actually with respect to China we have a conscious strategy of filing the absolute minimum number of patents we filed very few patents and the Rockets we were very careful about cybersecurity and we're very careful about physical security because there's obviously a history of absconded with intellectual property in China and the affordability of patents against Chinese government is zero so that that's that's different rise that to Tesla which has the files a lot of patents because competitors are commercial companies and there was enforceability so not to worry about launch will take care of that let me come back around a little bit to the maintaining the national standard as you know there's been an active debate in Congress we're in Washington about you know what is the appropriate role for government of course there was a different approach to that in times where cash was more flush right and it seems to some degree or a great degree you're a beneficiary of that and the sense that we're out sourcing some of this within our own country now it is the inability of the apparent inability of the federal government to spend on this going to be an inherent problem for our country well we do spend a fair bit on space I mean much more than any other country for it from a government standpoint so I think it's what will continue to be the biggest spender on space the United States but but I personally I think the budgets in absolute terms will will decrease just because of overall compression on the federal budget and we have a with a huge budget crisis and largely have our head in the sand or ignoring the the reality that we're spending far more than were bringing in and that chicken will come home to roost so so I think we can expect massive compression of all budgets including space from a government standpoint just because we were simply going the other choice well I want to get more to the SpaceX piece but since you just now talked about sort of the way that you should do business as a government there's obviously a political issue right now that's out there about how what is the appropriate role of government in encouraging job creation you have 1500 employees at SpaceX you're having those jobs in the United States I guess you have a launch facility in the Marshall Islands yeah well actually our primary ownership facility is Cape Canaveral and then we're building a motorcycle gear Force Base in California we're not currently using the Marshall Islands launch site we did use it initially but the logistics are just too difficult getting out there because it's like Waterworld out there it's zillion miles from anywhere so it's convenient in some ways but but then inconvenient from logistic standpoint so so our primary site is Cape Canaveral and then Fanta Burke and then we're also planning on establishing a commercial launch launch site which would because I may have made sense because banovic and the Cape actually air force bases and it makes sense to sort of concentrate air for and perhaps NASA business at those two facilities and then concentrate commercial activity at a commercial loan site just as that as occurs with aviation so what's your sense as in the political debate here in Washington do you have trouble creating jobs within your company because of the way the federal government is operating currently or what you envision as the way the policy is managed generally well there are III should first of all say that you know SpaceX would not be where it is without the help of NASA both historically the great things that NASA has done and and currently with the the business that NASA gives us so and and the expert advice and everything so I should make sure they're very strongly credit NASA in this in this arena in terms of how helpful they've been we do have a bit of a challenge with with the Air Force and that this is something where I'm sort of surprised that there's not more journalistic interest because the Air Force is currently proposing to extend the sole source monopoly of Boeing and Lockheed until 2018 and the the reasoning given for that is preservation of the industrial base although for some reason are they enough we're not included in the industrial base and and this is doubly odd because the main rocket used by Boeing and Lockheed is the Atmos 5 which has a Russian main engine and a center airframe the interstage and a forward airframe the fairing which made in Switzerland so which industrial base are we talking about preserving the one in Russia that doesn't make much sense so you sense that's a political problem you know we have 1% of the lobbying power going in Lockheed that's a political problem if this decision is made as a function of lobbying power we are screwed I think you just a realistic attention well let's get a little bit more to this face business here because we do have a lot of questions and I want to make sure they're to our audience to get in as many of those questions as time permits and obviously these are some far-flung questions literally as well as figuratively someone asks what will today's announcement how will today's announcement divert resources from sending humans to the International Space Station and I would probably add if at all no I wouldn't consider this to be in any way a diversion this is a parallel effort and so it's not really impacting our standing of cargo to the space station nor is it affecting how human spaceflight development activities that we're doing in partnership with NASA which which is going really well so think of this as sort of a parallel thing it doesn't really affect the ascent phase of the vehicle but we're really trying to have the the descent phase not be his atmosphere and explodes you know that's actually what happens to all rockets otherwise that's a good goal to keep given the grounding of Russia's rocket fleet are you in discussions with NASA to accelerate launch dates for the International Space Station missions and what happens happens with your scheduled November launch with the possibility that the ISS may need to be evacuated yeah with the Soyuz failure that could recently it actually will likely result in a delay in our launch to the space station because it sort of pushes out the other missions and NASA rightly wants to have the appropriate level of astronaut the right astronauts a number of astronauts and with the right training everything onboard the space station when we arrived so the it looks like things will be more like January for the launch to the space station and that that that is contingent upon the rush Russians meeting the schedule that they're currently stated so how do you evaluate the fact that we're using Russia as an important partner in our space program right now how do you feel about that what are the risks and what are the benefits well I think I think just despite the recent failure of the Soyuz it is actually a good vehicle there's a good track record I think there may be some concerns going going to future long-term with Russia and that a lot of their expert rocket engineers that have retired because it's much more compelling financially to go into the oil and gas industry in Russia than it is to go into the rocket industry so yeah so you sort of that expertise is tailing off and I I think that may lead to decreased reliability for for Russian rockets in the future hopefully it doesn't but does that give the advantage to China then well I think I think long-term like you said I think I think China is is you know is is the serious competitor along to there if you look at Russia and rocketry since the fall of the Soviet Union there's really been no significant developments the technology is it has barely progressed no no new rockets or constants for the Soviet Union so so so see what that means is as soon as that technology levels exceed it then they're rendered redundant and they have no ability to compete and I think that's that's likely what will occur with the Russian launch industry so how much longer they have unless they start doing some serious work as being a viable space program they're 5 to 10 years and how soon does that mean then at that point China moves in I mean essentially in that space that they're occupying I'm quite confident we can take on China yes let's get it to another maybe I'm confident but I I'd rather bet on us than China well you're on the record and I think you have a lot of people cheering for you so obviously we'll see what happens we'll invite you back could be famous last words given the failed progress launch and the risks of trusting the very survival of the International Space Station entirely to saw use for years to come there's a something of a state of emergency until us crews begin can you fast track development and human rating to result in crude launches beginning in about two years and if not can you speed up the process by any amount could you want launching an emergency yeah I think here it's important to clarify what what can the system do that we've done the the Falcon Iron Dragon system that we're launching today what what what can I do if the degree of safety required was equivalent to that of the shuttle we could actually launch astronauts on the next flight on the one going up in which will likely go up in January the the system is fully capable of carrying biological cargo you know which is you know people so however what it doesn't have is a launch escape system and this is shuttle also does not have a motion scape system right and both NASA and we agree that a launch escape system is is a wise move so we are it'll take us about two years maybe at the outside 3 to develop and qualify the launch escape system and in the way the way we're doing more to escape system is I think a significant innovation beyond what's done in the past with the escape thrusters or both into the sidewall of the spacecraft so you can actually use those same thrusters for propulsive landing which is cool and we're actually talking with NASA about potentially doing missions to Mars and other places using dragon as kind of a general test at a general science delivery platform to various places in the in the solar system so so that that's an important distinction we could all exit motions we could launch satellites next flight if-if-if requirements name is shuttle but for if we want to add or just cave system two or three years questioner ask NASA has a legacy of openness and transparency unlike private companies would while you're flying private payloads a private model will continue to work for you however once the American taxpayer starts footing the bill I guess the supposition is here more aggressively what assurances can you give that SpaceX will be as open and transparent as NASA and uh and other aerospace systems or need you be well you know we're relatively speaking a pretty open transparent company now there are some restrictions here which are ITAR restrictions and they're not restrictions that you know that we have any choice of because advanced rocket technology is considered to practice protective technology so you can do harm with those all rights right you know we can't give we can't sort of just publish to the general public detailed a detailed analysis of failure investigations that that contain secrets on how to make rockets that's actually a violation of the law but we all that information is available to NASA and to the FAA so our you know for missions that we do for NASA nASA has quite a detailed oversight role and then the FAA as well has as an oversight role so if you're comfortable flying commercial aircraft I think you then you should be pretty comfortable with what we're doing in commercial rocketry and yet with NASA there's obviously any number of tragic events that occurred where human life was lost and in the sense that obviously they're using private companies as partners but essentially it was under the NASA and government brand essentially flying the American flag can a company like yours sustain a loss like that as a private enterprise would people be willing to give you as much dare I say space in the event of a tragedy that they would be their own government yeah I think I think I think that'll be okay I mean if you look at all other modes of transport aircraft boats cars familiar with cars the there are this last of life in in every mode of transport and if one set a standard that they you know you couldn't have loss of life and there would be no transport you wouldn't even be allowed to walk so you have to allow for some some amount of risk it needs to be reasonable and measured but you have to love that and I but I don't think that a commercial company I think commercial company arguably would be better able to deal with that then then a government entity because you know the government then you have the congressional hearings and this that tends to become sometimes political football so this has a willingness to investigate private companies as well oh sure yeah yeah but I think that certainly occurs where it seems like there's been sort of a in a violation of the rules or something like that but slowly something's within the rules I mean they're obviously they're fatal car accidents every day that but you don't get a congressional hearing on it I'm trying to think I think let me let me follow up then someone asked if you took NASA out of the equation in the sense of being responsible or important for your future business is there enough private satellite and other government payload business to keep you going if for some reason NASA wasn't in the picture or is that a concern at all yeah well certainly NASA is our largest customer and I'm most important customer but if you look at our launch manifest we have over thirty thousand nine missions on the contract thirteen of those are with NASA so so effectively we've got maybe about forty percent or so about of our business with the government but then if you consider let's say you made pencils well about forty percent of your business would be with the government so it's not that's not an unreasonable number fair enough fair enough here we're getting to the work force issue someone writes in the audience today my son not me as a mission controller at Houston's Johnson Space Center which obviously is relevant to the future your business as well many of his friends with the show program have been let go and are interviewing via video for jobs with your company any suggestions on what you're looking for sure well you know if you look at the amount of money that is allocated to commercial space relative to the overall NASA budget you'll see it's a it's a pretty small number the you know the sort of last fiscal year was about three hundred million dollars but that was split over four companies so we we got about 75 I think or something like that so that's I guess about half a percent of the national budget so it's important to bear in mind that we'd love to hire a lot of people that were currently hired but we can't also can't run out of money and dying so so we can only hire a few people in terms of what what characteristics we look forward early we're quite you know engineering centric so we're big fans of what our people done from a hard core engineering problem in a standpoint you know yeah what what tough engineering problems have they solved how they solve them and we you know we're sort of less interested if if it's sort of been a more of a paper oriented role that they've had because you know we try to try to minimize that at SpaceX so are you more demanding an employer than NASA would have been well that's a tough question to answer I think I think we're probably more demanding I mean I guess you know NASA is a large organization so I think the level of demand that people face in different parts of NASA varies considerably and I'm sure that they're parts of NASA were which are just as demanding maybe more demanding that SpaceX but but it's basics it is an extremely demanding organization and expect people to work super hard and and be very good at their job given the Tesla and SolarCity are your response in a sense among the things to climate change how do you answer politicians who say that they're not sure it's actually happening huh okay well I think you know I think skip wait like the climate debate is is interesting one so if you ask any scientist are you sure that human activity is causing global warming any any scientist should say no because you can't be sure so on the other hand if you said do you think we should put an arbitrary number of trillions of tons of co2 into the atmosphere and just keep doing it until something bad happens I'd probably say no to we essentially are running an experiment and that experiment is to test the carbon capacity of the oceans and atmosphere that experiment may turn out to be fine it may also turn out to be really bad and and it's just I just don't understand why we'd run that experiment particularly when you consider that at some point we have to get to something that is sustainable we have to have sustainable production of energy and consumption of energy because tautologically if it's unsustainable you will run out of it and you can simply say well let's say let's say hypothetically co2 was good for the environment and let's say hypothetically the United States possessed all the oil in the world well you'd still have to get off oil because it's a finite resource and as you start to run out of it the scarcity would drive the cost up and cause economic collapse so why not do it sooner and I'm not saying that that it needs to be a radical or immediate change other people you know need to now inject a great deal of misery into their lives to to you know avoid co2 but but we should lean in that direction which we should lean in the direction of supporting technologies that are sustainable and in slightly against technologies that are unsustainable that just seems pretty sensible even if even if environment isn't a factor and in fact my interest in electric vehicles predates that the current climate issue I mean I was interested in electric vehicles over 20 years ago where nobody was really talking about global warming because I just thought it was the obvious means of transport so but I do think you know the climate thing that there's add urgency to things and I do think we will see a quite a significant increase in the cost of oil just from a demographic standpoint you've got China in India and a few other countries that represent almost half the world's population and have very few cars in the road but a rapidly adding cost to the road and so you can expect a doubling of demand and I think it's going to be difficult to see to achieve a doubling of supply have you changed anything in the wake of the federal cylinder investigation and do you have any concerns about an inquiry into government loans and contracts will Tesla's do a loan application stand up under such scrutiny yeah I mean so in the case of Solyndra you know senators obviously become somewhat of a political football here being a footballs oh yeah you know the deal we programs they're necessarily our portfolio of programs where some number of the things that have funded there are going to fail that should be assumed should not assume that a 100 percent success and in the case of Solyndra people forget that private investors lost twice as much as the government did so it's not and there was some really first-rate venture capitalists and cylindre it's not as though these were suckers so if you've got first-rate venture capitalists who've lost twice as much money as the federal government you have to say okay you know I mean they it was a bet the bet didn't work but that doesn't mean it's you know it's something something really terrible happened I mean the most you could say is that Solyndra executives were too optimistic you know they presented a better face to the situation than should have been presented in the in the final few months but then if they didn't do that it would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy of you know CEO says I'm not sure where they will survive you're dead so you know I think people are making too much of the Solyndra thing and I mean and do I think there parallels with with his own I mean we gotta learn from the deal we from a different program I should point out but in in our case we have significant capital reserves and we have more money that at Tesla then we need to complete the program in question and we don't face the same issue that Solyndra faced which is extreme competition from China on a commodity product that drove the cost per watt of solar panels from $4 or what down to one that that's the fundamental reason why Solyndra went down is sort of would have been okay at $2 what but not one and that's it so that the and and his little thing which is not getting enough rest which is how much money do you think the Chinese government's putting to Sola estimates are about 40 billion okay so when our team with operating on a pittance you got China operating on 40 billion and our team lost that's that should be no surprise do you worry that that's tarnished the the view of them by the American public of the solar industry in the United States you know there's probably a little bit of tarnish but you know it's it's so you know it's unwarranted tarnish it Isola City now the this is no sorry that occurred with the cost per watt of solar was something that I thought I expected would occur so if somebody to ask me do you think Solyndra is going to best but I would've said no it's you're gonna get your ass kicked but so Solar City works on balance system where they do everything except the panel and they own the end customer relationship they kind of like Dell or Apple you know Dell or Apple don't make this the CPU or the memory or the hard drives but they design the overall system and they provided to customers through the sales and marketing service and that's that's what Solar City did Sol so he's doing super well and that they're growing at 50 to 100 percent a year with positive cash flow which is pretty incredible and yeah I I just show up at board meetings to gather good news it's really great all credit to those guys so and in that for them that the more rapacious the competition on solar panels the better it helps you yeah well if you wouldn't mind we'll do some finishing business here so if I can justify her for a second then we'll get a couple more questions in if you'll just stand by so as many of you know we're almost out of time and before asking the last question the day a couple of house keeping matters to take care of and first among those is just reminding about some immediately upcoming luncheons Ken Burns the documentarian filmmaker will be here on Monday to talk about his new film prohibition on October 5th Ron Paul a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination that's the 5th of October and that event is sold out we just announced October 24th TMZ's harvey levin will talk about the changing landscape and entertainment use so before I get to the last question if you'll just come right over here we present our speakers on a routine basis with our token of our appreciation and thank you very much our national team ugh thank you thank you so we'll see if we have time for more than one question here at the end but these are on the lighter side as many of you know in the audience let me ask you first of all what's what's the one great idea that you've seen from somebody else and as the slogan goes I could have had a v-8 why didn't I think of that there probably been more than one but which of those loom largest in your mind and please don't send up to the microphone so it was a great idea that you saw someone else had and you wished you'd had it yourself or expressed that idea well there's there's lots of great ideas that people come up with all the time I don't necessarily wish I'd had them myself but but but certainly you know what Larry and Sergey came up with with Google was was really smart you know with the backward links to pages obviously what Facebook has done Twitter or I mean they're great examples in the internet and yeah those were American companies yeah ii-i've had a you know it was the iPhone yeah I think a political Facebook means there's examples where it's like you know you're sort of like who's their competition like not even sure okay how is it that America is able to innovate so well given all the challenges when we have great companies like that performing so well other words in many ways the nation continues to be a great innovator yeah absolutely how do you explain that what how does that continue to happen why is that well you know it's kind of like the statement about democracy you know it's sort of it's a bad system but it's the least bad well the United States is the least bad at encouraging innovation and and and in Silicon Valley actually I'd say is particularly good at encouraging innovation which Silicon Valley is just you know orders of magnitude better than any other place in the world for creating new companies and fostering innovation it's quite remarkable so I don't think we need initial need to worry about this is some other country out there out innovating us I don't have been theorised like almost all innovation in the world comes from America it's like yeah it's true I mean a ridiculous percentage and but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better and I think we need to be concerned about you know excess regulation but a tax structure that doesn't you know potentially doesn't promote innovation because you think to remember is like when companies a little they're like tadpoles I mean they there's they just die very easily that and so you need to have an environment which tries to protect little companies and help them get bigger and Silicon Valley does that very well in America you know in general does that very well relative to other countries but most of the countries tend to foster and protect or other where they tend to protect the big companies big companies don't need protection how about a round of applause for our guest speaker thank you to all you for coming today we would like to thank the National Press Club staff including our library and broadcast Center for organizing today's event and you can find more information about the National Press Club on our website you can get a copy of the program please check that out at WWF thank you and we're adjourned what's great me

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what questions can I answer it is not practical to carry an extra battery pack in an electric vehicle so for the battery pack swap there would be there have to be some sort of swap station however if you have a 300 mile range car you're really not talking about a lot of swap stations I mean you just need to say one between LA and San Francisco and and then there's a question as to whether people will even want to swap a battery pack rather than simply Park a car at a highway rest stop where stop grab a meal or a coffee at the restroom come back 20 30 minutes and you've recharged enough to complete the journey I think most people probably do that but we wanted to preserve the optionality of fast pack swap just in case though people in a hurry right so better place actually got the idea of battery pack swapping from Tesla winch I guess he came in visited and we told him that we were going to incorporate battery pack swapping I was like oh good idea yeah well yeah but not that I think it's a genius move I mean you know you have cell phones and laptops tough to have battery packs as well but but we're not currently working with with better place yeah yeah we did we don't like them or anything it's just we don't see any sort of technical advantage or anything to working with them that we there's no obvious to happen to us how we make the consumer experience better with better place so yeah well it's sort of on the order of about a thousand pounds of amount that you need to expand to landfill possibly well the the brew so the rocket booster is what delivers you to parking overt then you use a little bit of propellant to maneuver over to the space station then then Department space station initiate a deal with burn control your reentry during the descent phase in total is about 3,000 pounds propellant so use maybe a thousand in terms of getting to the space station and departing indeed the orbiting about a thousand on landing and you'd have probably a thousand spare roughly speaking it now if you if there was something unusual happened like you had to temporarily abort approach to the space station that you might use another five hundred pounds of propellant or something like that but we will actually have still have parachutes as an emergency on Dragon so so you test the engines at say a couple miles of altitude make sure they're working if they're not then you deploy the emergency parachute kinda like the Saurus aircraft well it's not yet in production but but on a good on a go-forward basis well the most the engineering is done world sort of the 90% engineering complete stage right now the the factory we were fortunate in being able to purchase the the new me factory in Northern California which was jointly owned by Toyota and GM well there was in recent years has only been making to her parts where they made that the Corolla and the Tacoma so we were able to buy at a very good price of a great factory and and let's minimize the incremental tooling cost to produce the film of the Model S so existing paint shops you only have to modify a paint shop instead of fully one from scratch there's stamping machines and all sorts of things there that are helpful the two biggest milestones this year I think are probably getting a stamping line operational but to stamp a little body to the party panels the Model S is actually going to be the only aluminum car made in North America the Audi a8 and open a few of the advanced German cause are limited but currently there are no aluminum passenger vehicles made I'm States or making from the sort of space arena it's like obviously make familiar and what else would you make like steel is really heavy and not great so and then the second thing is the paint shop painting a car is actually really difficult if you want to get get a spectacular paint job and we're aiming for something called up which we call it a can of a finish like a what kind of things you see on a grand pianos okay something that's noticeably better than any other car and so that's up that's a high bar and if you wish to do so without adding a lot of cost to the person so we're optimistic that we'll get all the way there but most of the way there those are the two big production mass knives this year got all their hands I saw your way in the bathroom huh yeah well I mean there will certainly be issues that we have to deal with but but but this sort of less than 1% chance of by listen or person I mean less than 1% chance of annihilation of humanity and I mean even if even if we do massively increase the the co2 concentration in the atmosphere it is unlikely to result the annihilation of humanity it could could kill a few hundred people or a few hundred million people due to you know rising sea levels and that kind of thing which is obviously not good but but it but it is not an annihilation event but if you look at the fossil history there have been several annihilation events you know mostly due to meteors one kind or another possibly some due to super volcanoes and some duty you know who knows why but so we have obviously suffer from some risk of a similar annihilation event and also potentially a man-made thing like a super virus or you know you know it could be something like it with with the Sun Large Hadron Collider you know we potentially could see it could see a press release where the the good news is we've discovered a new law of physics the bad news is there's a small black hole that's rapidly growing I think that's extremely unlikely there but you know we've discovered new laws of physics before well I'm not a a venture capitalist so people sometimes think I'm I'm a venture capitalist but actually I am I'm an engineer so when I apply capital it is to my own companies and to occasion to the companies of close friends of mine where I do zero due diligence and I just basically invest in the basis that the I bet I think they're good and likely to succeed so I so I'm not the guy to pitch on on ideas to be funded because that's that's I'm not a venture capitalist it's better to put your venture capitalists in here on that well I suppose if we were to help this Facebook help space program I mean you know that that would that would be quite surprised that were the case but but it's possible yeah I mean so surprisingly good it would look a little bit different but not that much different but my view unreasonable 'ti is you have to take the the first stage has to basically turn around relight its engines boost back to the launch pad and land for possibly tricky it's very doable and then the second stage the sixth age is harder because second stage you're a pound for pound trade-off on payload so any any mass that you add it's a heat shield or reentry systems it's directly subtracted from the amount that you can put into orbit where's the first stage is anywhere from a five to one to ten to one ratio so you got ten pounds and only takes away one pound of payload and there's also a lot more unity with the second stage you have to a much more significant heat shield if you had you have to deal with the stage control it during reentry that's got to have some left over drag so you can steer it back to the launch site and then you've got to either compulsively land or perhaps he's a power pole or something like that all those things cost mass but that's kind of how I think it should be it can and should be done this is where we could so that basic architecture is what we're going to try to do the trick is to do it with just very mass efficiently because you've only got that three maybe three-and-a-half percent of mass to play with you know you want to try to get at least say two percent really feel faster orbit so that only leaves like one and a half percent protein yet I think long-term you you'd see that sort of thing and maybe even in initial in the in the initial phase it kind of depends on whether the country both you know United States both a super heavy lift or not like a seven five class vehicle if you have a seven five class vehicle you don't need to do on or what assembly if you have something smaller than that then you do if you wanna go to Mars so so it kind of depends on which how things unfold in that direction I think it'd be great to have a super heavy lift launch vehicle if it's a if it's a if it's done in a typical govern driven way I I think will will not come to fruition because of massive schedule overruns and massive cost overruns so it really depends on whether NASA decides to take a commercial approach to super heavy lift if there will be super lift & obviate the need for on-orbit construction and then you know when there's a lot of traffic between Earth and Mars I would expect this probably some you know large kind of space cruiser that's circulating between Earth and Mars and then you just basically take a small shuttlecraft up to the space cruiser if you will and the space cruiser gets refueled from Earth or from Mars but that that's a long-term optimization and it would be driven by by a lot of traffic occurring between the two to two planets well I think it's generally good well NASA's our biggest customer for support SpaceX so there certainly are huge in the customer front they about 40% of our launches are for NASA they haven't I mean it did it pay for demonstration flights so there's sort of a quasi fonder but we specifically for their needs so wasn't just sort of kissing money do what you want it's like we have the specific need we'll pay you as you demonstrate milestones in that direction in a case of Tesla we were fortunate enough to receive a government loan last year which was unrelated to the bailout unfortunately it was announced right around this time the bailouts but people sort of assumed it was somehow bailout but the loan that we received was actually part of a program was initiated in 2007 in boom times and one of the requirements of that loan program was that you had to be viable in your own right and provide twenty to thirty percent of private capital as matching as a matching contribution which therefore excluded for example GM and Chrysler who are Bangkok so Ford Nissan and Tesla receipted receive line essentially lines the credit that and which were specifically rated in our case it specifically related to the engineering and production costs of the Model S so it's certainly helpful from from a capital dilution standpoint and then if we if you repay the loan early then there's no there's no capital tuition if we're agree if we but if we don't repay the loan early then the US government gets a bunch of stock warrants contested so I think it's a pretty sort of smart I mean in the grand scheme of things with the various government deals that are done this is I think one of the smaller ones yeah I think I mean there will be many sources of electricity that are sustainable there's the wind geothermal hydro and but my personal view is that solar power will be we will generate more power more electricity from solar than from any other single source and it may not be a majority but I expect release plurality from from solar power and that there will be a combination of photovoltaics at the point of views you know roofs of houses and businesses which is also good for the Sanford of not requiring additional power lines and then at the power plant level you I think we'll see a lot of Silla thermal power generation where we essentially just using the Sun to heat a working fluid and and then generate steam powered turbine they're a bunch of those projects that are gonna come online in California and a few other place in the United States soon and if you think of soul power I'm sure beyond beyond humanity's need for electricity the earth isn't almost entirely solar-powered the whole weather system is solar powered or almost the entire weather system is a little bit of is from the earth rotation but you know low precipitation sort of solar-powered the only reason we're not a frozen dog ice ball at four degrees Kelvin because the curse of the Sun and you're the whole ecosystem is solar-powered I mean plants are essentially a solar-powered chemical reaction so we really were just talking about replacing this itty-bitty thing called electricity and having that also be so about Thanks but there was the intent that was the holdup that was my idea no I don't think so it like I said the the whole purpose of Tesla was to to draw the rest of the car industry into electric cars so I'm the more electric car programs I see being announced that happier I am then the success of Tesla as a company naturally is going to be a function of the quality of parts that reproduce so you know we have to make better cars than say GM and Chrysler I don't see that as a huge challenge I mean you know but the sad thing is that generally in the United States if people can afford an expensive car they do not buy an American car and I think it's I think in the sixties the us make great cars and before that made great cars but then something happened in the seventies no what happened was a lot of bad things architecture went out fashion was questionable and our cars tarnish it so I think it actually is a friend of mine I said summarize the insular strategies to in long term is to make cars that don't stock so so I think I think we'll be okay and and there's some vindication in that yet Toyota which is the largest car company in the world and leader in hybrids is an investor and partner with with Tesla if if it was easy they would simply do it themselves and not bother to to partner with us i Daimler is the was the inventor of the internal combustion engine car maker of Mercedes and smart and again they would not ask us to be a supplier to them or nor would they be an investor in Tesla if they thought it was a simple matter to replicate what we're doing no no this this aluminum is great and the Audi a8 for example is an aluminum car or all the airplanes that that you fly are mostly aluminum and it's it's a little it's a little hot its luminaries little it's harder to work with in terms of bonding and joining it's harder to weld and then that's deal for example so it is technologically more difficult to work with but it is superior superior metal for anything where weight is important that's why planes are not made of steel so in fact the Model S our design target is is to meet five-star crash rating by 2012 standards which are higher than the a car that's five-star in by 2010 standards is only a three-star by 2012 standards so we have a very high bar waiting for from a safety standpoint obviously you know I'll be driving the car my friends will be driving the car beloved shareholders will be driving the car so we it safety is extremely important if that they would I don't think they'll be a safer car on the road oh sorry that's sort of the price it's it's kinda like a 5 Series BMW so depending upon configuration it would bury for about $50,000 to $100,000 well I generally think that that there's been a bit too much outsourcing in general both outsourcing out of California outsourcing of the United States business sometimes tends to be a little fatty you know it's sort of like what's this room because there was for a very long time very strongly outsourcing fad and but but I don't think people really looked at the fundamentals in a lot of cases when they when they outsource to particularly when the technology is evolving rapidly I think it's important to have a tight iteration loop between engineering and production so if you so what as soon as you've designed something you can bring it to production right away and you can get the engineers can go on the on the floor and see the mistakes that they've made the production people can talk to the engineers and say here's some good ideas and so you can you can evolve the product and achieve get get to a better design solution faster I think this is an important thing that's often overlooked you know it's basics our Rockets are lower cost than the Chinese Indians or anyone anyone else and that's before usability is taken into account oh and I think I think it's like it's because that tight iteration and in the case of Tesla you know you know the Fremont plant the enemy plant that they until April 1st of last year they made the corolla there which is a $17,000 car so who was fundamentally an expense if it was fundamentally too expensive to operate in California how could they make a 17-4 huh so I you know weed weed in California I think we do need to be cautious about adding normal costs to to living here you know the I do think we're close to sort of we're in a cusp of a tipping point if you if the taxes start getting you know much higher than they are you know if they can take California the marginal tax rate is 11 percent if you go to say to Washington and pay 0% so there's an expensive place to live I like living in California it's on here but I know many people have moved out because the taxes are too high or the first workmen's comp and other costs are too high California does I think tend to over-regulate a little bit so so I think generally California's gonna have a really tough thing to do which is it's gotta cut the cut the cost of what it spends at the state level and and and maybe even reduce the taxes a little bit to be competitive with other states and deregulate those are the things that can be done to increase employment in California politically these are difficult things to do and I'm not entirely sure how California gets out of this bind it might they have to be a proposition or something because the legislature seems unable to arrive at anything sensible sorry I'd know those limitations in space siliconate don't worry about silicon from a limitations that where there's lots of silicon copper is probably okay too there's quite a lot of copper in the world for battery packs one of the challenges we had was cobalt actually cobalt cobalt is only available in a few places in the world but it's quite expensive and the biggest source is the Congo which tends to vary as political stability so that's why I'm going to go into the Model S we changed the chemistry to require only about a quarter as much cobalt and let's reduce the cost the battery pack an actual increase that the energy of the pack if you're going to worry about any material storage shortages maybe some rare earth elements are maybe a concern China has a huge concentration of rare earth elements which are using permanent magnet motors to avoid that issue well actually there are other reasons for it as well but the Tesla that uses a has a electric motor design that doesn't use any rare earth elements I think well I think we're generally okay on the other commodities mind I wouldn't worry too much about it again except for that the non-reusable commodities like oil and well the old prices are gonna go way way way up I was wondering make sure some really back there you know I'm not too worried about recharging stations everything about electricity is really ubiquitous I mean they're more power outlets than I think there's the more pilots than access to any other kind of energy by Porter's 92 in the indicate you know in case Tesla and and most of the new electric cars are coming out the charge is built into the car so you can plug it in almost anywhere if you want to charge fast you're gonna need a high power outlet but what we're seeing with the use of the Tesla Roadster is almost all charging occurs in foam 90% plus now it is important that you have a range that is reasonable if you've got sort of a really low range like say 50 miles in 30 miles range then well you can't you can't do a lot of round trips I mean you really you know 25 miles is your max and you're being pretty sporting if you do that so so as you reduce the range you start to require a lot of charging stations but as you increase the range the number of charging stations you need tends to drop with the square of the range you know a circle that you can travel in and so the bigger that circle is the fewer recharging stations you need and you know so so for something like the Tesla Roadster you only need one charging station between LA and San Francisco it's a quarter mile trip till you get tuna five to 50 miles of range so here's the one in charge station but if you had a 50-mile range you'd be probably 10 charging stations yeah eight to ten gestation so IIIi I think you'll really only see a lot of use of charging stations place as far as Tesla cars are concerned on the interstates so when you're making it really long-distance trips that kind of thing but otherwise no no yes sure so in the case of SpaceX unfortunately the supply chain in the rocket business is very shallow very often there is only one supplier and it's a very expensive supplier and they're really not designed for reusability so screwed if you don't make it yourself basically but for the most part you know and so that's led to SpaceX being sort of maybe 70 to 80% of the rocket being built in-house from literally from raw material and I guess but another way to look at it is to the degree that you you you inherit the legacy components you inherit inherit the legacy cost structure and limitations so it is up from any sort of religious bias towards in sourcing but rather because on the fundamentals we were trying to do that in Tesla haze Tesla the automotive supply chain is much better much more competitive there are many suppliers for any given component and so you know maybe forty to fifty percent of the Tesla Model S is insourced you mean you use use parts that are in our rocket in something else that they're doing not yet there's a bit of a few inquiries about using our engines in some other programs which we've responded to and it could it could happen that our engines are are used in some other government programs we do yeah but we'll just use two fingers 20 heavy liftin super heavy left because there are rockets that like it we've felt a nine heavy and there's the delta 4 heavy and these these were sort of on the order of indicates delta 4 heavy its but maybe 25 tons to orbit in case of Falcon 9 heavy it's maybe 30 35 tons to orbit but compared to the Saturn 5 which was over a hundred tons to orbit it's you know there's a pretty big difference there so I generally we call that sort of super heavy and 110 class class and yeah SpaceX would really like to vote was super heavy and and I think we could do it for a small fraction of what now you know people what they think you'll think it would cost actually but I've got a record of saying I think we could do a super-heavy for 1204 on the order of two and a half million you know prior other estimates sort of are about ten times that and and the super-heavy that I'm alluding to would have about 160 tons over capability so way more than her Saturn fine in fact I've even gone as far as to say that I will guarantee that personally and stake everything on SpaceX that it will happen so I mean we'll see that there are strong political forces that that third was that that don't want us to do that so I'm trying to eliminate any argument that they could have for not for not not at least allocating a small portion of the super heavily funding to give us a shot at making it work you know they can take all the rest of the superhero funding and apply it into the traditional way we will take the sort of 10 10 to 20% of that number on a fixed milestone basis so if we don't achieve the milestones we don't get paid and and and I will personally guarantee it so like if we don't achieve the milestones then that then that money can then be applied to the other programs so it is a no lose proposition but logic does not always prevail right I think I think tails will be okay you know I actually unbalanced that the program has been helpful to Tesla and yes in a space arena you know well man there's a complicated situation but but the out of necessity NASA as has your product out of budget necessity nASA has gone commercial as far as cargo transport is concern and and then last year President Obama had said well we should also outsource astronaut transport to commercial entities if we can fly in Boeing airliners and Airbus airliners.net spacecraft be both by commercial entities - and but there was a battle royale last year against that which won by a 3% margin and now it was hairy battle but but it is moving that direction it's somewhat unavoidable I mean it's it's gonna be that or nothing so so I think it's gonna be that okay sir Brian I mean I'm pretty optimistic about it I probably worry slightly more about in the space arena about some of the big government contractors they would definitely like to see SpaceX die I'm sure I'm being tortured in effigy right now you know how we see a movie and like this but the bad corporation in the movie that's like the big defense contract is that those that those are a competition in a lot of cases okay I'll take a couple more questions and great I'm a huge fan of NASA yep yeah that's happened many times actually you know we didn't start out in sourcing you know 70 80 percent about our hardware the initially we thought will work what tried to do as little as possible but then over time we just had in source more and more out of necessity and we found many times that we were to sign a deal for supply of a component and then the bet supplier would find a reason to triple the price and so basically since they thought we didn't have any way out then they would start with the conclusion which is triple the price and insert reasoning that's happened several times and and then and then we they were again supposed to point to this price but often with a lot of motor grease so yeah I'm very pleased with how things are now but it was very very hairy for a couple years there and to late 2017 say there's half a 2009 we came close to not making it all right last last question is there somebody who I've been ignoring for a long time okay all right go ahead you up Richard who yeah actually I mean Richard Branson print is a friend of mine I mean so it means a very affable guy he's he's not a technologist so he's sort of he's his strength is brand and marketing and that kind of thing it's very good at that you know I think going into the rocket game is tricky because it is a very much technology poly and so I think he's gonna he's giving Cara some challenges there also what Virgin Galactic is doing is this is a suborbital flight which is only about one and a half percent of the energy that you need to get to orbit so it is a much simpler problem it's basically you shoot up to about sort of 60 60 60 or 70 miles and then you pull down that that's that's issue of the day but it's just like the the best world's best roller coaster ride so it's like a really fun trip but it's it's not it's not a technology path that would ultimately take us off of to to other planets and that kind of thing but I think for a lot of people it's there's this it's not like there's not a clear distinction between getting to space and getting to orbit and space is somewhat of a loose definition it's kind of where does the atmosphere get thin and and you can sort of define how thinness then I mean it's pretty darn thin at 60 miles altitude but you can't have a satellite up there because it's satellite would decay very quickly in a creator but and then going up and staying up is actually about how fast you're zooming around the earth takes much more energy to to do that sort of zooming around the earth but then it is to get the altitude in fact the only reason need altitude at all is to get out of atmospheric drag if earth had no atmosphere you could be orbiting earth an inch above the ground so yeah it's a to get to over to need at least to go about 25 times the speed of sound audio 4/4 and the energy required scales with the square of the velocity so let's say 625 you expenditure to do a suborbital flight such as what perfect like it's one about need maybe about Mach 3 which is 9 units of energy so it's a pretty huge difference and then if you want to re-enter you have to burn off 625 units of energy or burn off lightnings that's a giant difference all right well thank you

https://youtu.be/pWjPLY3uLtk

Thanks for coming. We're super excited at SpaceX to announce some of the details around the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is our large rocket development - our really large rocket development, and this is something we've alluded to in the past but I've only just recently completed the design and I've been able to increase the thrust and payload capability of the rocket considerably over our previous estimations. With Falcon Heavy we'll be able to put well over 100,000 pounds into orbit. In fact, it's looking like at least on the order of 117,000 pounds, maybe even above 120,000 pounds, depending upon what the final performance numbers look like. This is a rocket of truly huge scale. As we mentioned in the press release, this is - the 117,000 pounds is more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 with 136 passengers, luggage and fuel - in orbit. So that is, really really humungous. It's more payload capability than any vehicle in history apart from the Saturn V, and so opens up a range of possibilities, for government and commercial customers, that simply aren't present with the current launch capacity. If you compare our lifting capacity to, say, the space shuttle or the Delta IV Heavy, which are the two most capable vehicles in the world today, we're twice - more than twice - the capability of either of those vehicles. Although the space shuttle is obviously retiring this year - I think - this is something America can be really proud of - the fact that there's actually going to be a vehicle with twice the capability of the space shuttle, that going to be ready to launch at the end of next year. The initial launch will take place from Vandenburg air force base in California, where we have space launch complex 4 and shortly thereafter expect to be launching from Cape Canaveral as well. So we'll certainly have that capability on both coasts. We expect to be launching Falcon Heavy a lot, actually. Whereas Falcon 9 can address about half the market, Falcon Heavy can address the other half of the market which is the largest government and commercial satellites, as well as - as I mentioned - as well as opening up new market opportunities for satellites and spacecraft that simply cannot be carried to space by the currently available rockets. So I expect to see, potentially new opportunities arising because of Falcon Heavy. Also, from a cost standpoint - which is critically important in space, because launch costs have been steadily rising over the years, Falcon Heavy represents a huge economic advantage. Falcon Heavy costs about a third as much per flight as Delta IV Heavy, but carries twice as much payload to orbit, so it's effectively a six-fold improvement in the cost per pound to orbit. In fact, Falcon Heavy sets a new world record for the cost per pound to orbit of around about $1000. So that's a pretty huge leap in capability. Let's show the video. In addition to representing a new world record in cost per pound to orbit, the Falcon Heavy is also designed to meet the NASA human rating standards. For example, it is designed with structural safety margins that are 40% above the actual flight loads that it expects to encounter, as opposed to normal satellite launchers which are designed to only 25% above the flight loads. It also has engine-out capability, so you can lose multiple engines on the vehicle and still complete the mission. It has cross-feed between the cores which is the first time any rocket has been able to cross-feed propellant between the cores. Triple-redundant avionics. All of this is such that it can launch people if need be and do so safely. Also, it has so much capability, so much more than any other vehicle, that we can start to realistically contemplate missions like a Mars sample return - which requires quite a lot of lift capability because you've gotta send a lander to Mars that still has enough propellant to return to Earth. If you try to do a mission like that with a smaller vehicle you have to do several launches and either do orbital rendezvous or do some sort of much more complex mission whereas with Falcon Heavy you could potentially do it with a single flight. Let me turn it over to questions. The payload to Mars would be about a quarter of its payload to LEO. So we're talking about, something like, 30,000 pounds to trans-Mars injection. To the Moon it would be about, maybe, 35,000 pounds. The Falcon 9 is suitable for transporting people to low Earth orbit, like to the space station and back, but Falcon 9 doesn't quite have the lifting power to go beyond the space station, whereas Falcon Heavy go, really, much further than low Earth orbit. Falcon Heavy is about half the lifting capability of a Saturn V, so, in principle you could do another mission to the Moon, just by doing two launches of a Falcon Heavy. Perhaps one that delivered the return vehicle to the surface of the Moon and one that delivered the lander to the surface of the Moon. As far as human standards are concerned, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are designed to meet all of the published NASA human rating standards. So it would only be if there's some unpublished standard or some new standard that's about to be published - that it would not be in compliance. Falcon 9, we've always said it would be about 3 years from when we received NASA funding to conduct a demonstration, and the gating fact on that isn't actually the rocket, it's the launch escape system on the spacecraft. Falcon Heavy would be, really, capable of launching people as soon as we've proven it out with a few launches, really. There's no changes, that we are aware of, that we would make to the Falcon Heavy that would be required to launch people. There may be changes to the spacecraft that it carries, but not to the launch vehicle itself - or if there are, they're very minor. So yeah, it certainly opens up a wide range of possibilities, such as returning to the Moon and conceivably even going to Mars, although it would require probably twice as many launches as a Moon mission. We have an upgrade in the works for our Merlin engine. Going from 95,000 pounds of sea-level thrust to 140,000 pounds of sea-level thrust. So, pretty substantial upgrade. We're also doing some design improvements to improve the manufacturability, so we can go to a high rate of engine production. We're anticipating, if launch demand ends up being like we think it is, we'll have a production rate of about 400 booster engines per year. Which, I think, would be more engines than the rest of the world production combined. As it is, we're already more than the rest of US production combined. Although that's not saying much. Unfortunately. We do not have - so we're expecting to do an initial demonstration flight of Falcon Heavy, that doesn't have a primary customer, although that could change. It'll probably have some smaller secondary satellites on-board. However, we are highly confident of announcing customers for Falcon Heavy for the second and subsequent flights, and we're in liaison discussions with government and commercial customers in that regard. Even on Falcon 9 we have been launching secondary satellites, we launched some secondary satellites on the last flight of Falcon 9. With the upcoming flight of Falcon 9, the first one that's going to the space station, that will carry a couple of ORBCOMM satellites. With every, with most missions we expect to be launching secondary satellites. It's not always with the same dispenser, although that would make it a lot more convenient, but I think it's likely that most of our flights will carry secondary satellites. I think you should definitely count on Falcon Heavy being there for the long term. When it succeeds, and certainly that is right from the initial launch as it was with Falcon 9. We're starting off at Vandenburg but we'll then be transitioning to the cape. We'll be upgrading our launch pad at Cape Canaveral so that we can process both a Falcon 9 and a Falcon Heavy simultaneously and they can both roll out to the pad. We're also investigating the possibility at the cape of using one of the old shuttle pads for the Falcon Heavy. That's a possibility but our default plan is to use our existing launch pad but upgrade it such that there's a hanger where you can process Falcon 9 and that rolls to the pad, and another hanger - kinda at 90 degrees - where you can process Falcon Heavy and either one of them can roll to the pad, so you can have dual processing take place. In terms of the number of jobs, it really depends on the launch rate, so I'd expect that number to grow over time, but I think once it really gets going - and we do expect more launches to occur from the cape than from Vandenburg in the long haul, with Falcon Heavy, because most of our commercial customers want to go to GTO which, obviously, is cape launches. So we're expecting probably a couple of hundred jobs. It depends on customer demand, so I'd say, it's probably 2 to 3 years, but it really depends on what the customer adoption rate is. I'm confident of a couple of hundred jobs when the customer adoption is high, when we're doing several launches a year. I think we'll probably do as many Falcon Heavy launches as we do Falcon 9 launches. Our rough ballpark estimate is something on the order of 20 launches per year of which roughly half are Falcon Heavy, roughly half are Falcon 9 and of those, probably 60%, 70%, are [inaudible]. I think there's a lot of wishful thinking on the part of our competitors that our prices must be higher, but they are not. In fact, I think that we're unique in the launch business of publishing our prices on our website. Whereas other launch providers sort of treat it like a rug bazaar - they'll charge you what they think you can afford. We believe in every day low prices, you know, and we've stuck to our guns on that. The Falcon 9 costs $50 million, and it's been that way for a while, and the Falcon Heavy is, on average, about $100 million, so we're very very confident of being able to maintain those prices, and I say let history be the judge. Here I am saying it, we'll see if that remains true, but you have it on camera. [Question about getting to the Moon.] If you had a small enough spacecraft, you could conceivably do it with one Falcon Heavy. It kinda depends on how big of a spacecraft and how many people you want to send, but I think you could slim it down to just do it on one Falcon Heavy. [Question about getting to an asteroid.] I'm sure you could do it with two Falcon Heavy launches. If your spacecraft had a little bit of propellant on-board, presumably it would because it has to get back from the asteroid too, then I think you could do it with two Falcon Heavy launches. I think we've thought a lot about going public but before we do so we want to make sure that we have a very predictable revenue stream because the markets don't like surprises, but I think that there's a decent chance we'll look at going public towards the end of next year. Not saying we will, but it's a possibility. It's possible that we could see acquisition interest, but I have no interest in selling and I am the controlling shareholder in the company. We've had some inquiries, but then I'm pretty clear with them that I would not give up a controlling stake in the company because SpaceX has some philosophical goals, or philanthropic goals, which may not be coincidental with the goals of a large government contractor. I think end of next year meaning November, December, is when we expect to have Falcon Heavy at the launch pad at Vandenburg. The launch itself is a little more difficult to predict, because we have to go through final regulatory approvals, there could be things that we have to debug about the rocket and the launch site interaction, so I think, most likely what you'll see is a rocket at the pad towards the end of next year and a launch sometime in 2013. I don't want to speak for specific customers, but I can say that there is strong interest from both the US government and large commercial operators in Falcon Heavy and that we are at an advanced stage of discussions with both, and part of what's needed to get them to sign up to a launch is to not be the first. It's always possible that a customer may jump in at the last minute and say, okay, they'll do it, but it's a lot easier to get deals done if customers know that they don't have to be the first flight. It's a bit of a, I guess, a slight risk on our part to be doing the first launch on our own funds, and of course, it does cost us some money, but it's an important thing to do in order to get customers to sign up. We had to do something similar with Falcon 9. Ramping up production is our number one focus. That's what I have the whole company focused on. We're bringing in people both from the rocket industry, as well as from other industries, like automotive and high volume aircraft production. We'll be making more rocket engines than any company - actually, more than any country, I think - has every made. At 400 booster engines per year, I guess, at 500 booster engines per year it is more than the rest of the world's production combined. So that's pretty serious scale in the rocket business. In terms of the number of cores, we're talking about 40 cores. So it's very high volume but that's what's needed in order to do 10 Falcon 9s and 10 Falcon Heavys in a given year. As it is, if you look at our launch manifest, just based on existing contracts that we have, if you go out 3 or 4 years, we already have on the order of 10 launches booked of Falcon 9 and we've only done two Falcon 9 launches, and we're only just putting a stake in the ground with Falcon Heavy. Twenty launches a year, is not a crazy number at all. We expect that to occur without any miracles. So we must make sure that we are building our production capability and our launch capability to meet that demand. Right now our engine production rate is around 50 to 60 per year. That's what we're doing with the Merlin 1C. Merlin 1D, in addition to being a thrust upgrade, and some performance upgrade, is really a design for manufacturability as well. It's helpful that I have experience from the automotive world as well because, in automotive, 400 engines per year is nothing. There are a lot of techniques which the car industry has developed to be able to do high volume production but also be very reliable and consistent in doing so. I'm very confident that with the Merlin 1D design we'll be able to build 400 engines per year or frankly even 600 or 700 engines per year if we need to, and then the same with the cores. So we are making a significant investment in tooling and production process efficiency, honing our software systems within the company that manage the procurement, assembly, and launch, trying to automate as much as possible. None-the-less, we are expecting to hire a lot more people and last year we grew quite dramatically - over 50% employment count growth last year - we went from 800 to 1200 in 2010. This year, I think we'll probably grow 15 to 20% and I am intentionally slowing growth down a little bit just because I want to make sure we're building the company on the right foundation, and then next year I expect the growth rate to continue to increase up to the 30 to 40% level in personnel growth. We actually have been steadily acquiring the buildings around us in California. So we're sort of growing like the Borg. Actually, almost all the buildings around us have been acquired and that's increased our capacity in California by about 50% in terms of real estate, but I think we'll actually do a lot more with the existing physical locations we have. Actually, I really like density. I like a beehive of activity and people fairly close together. I think it creates a much better esprit de corps. You may have seen the announcement in Texas that we've more than doubled the size of our rocket development facility in Texas which is where we do development and acceptance testing of the rocket engines and stages and that's in anticipation of a lot more growth. So we're now at over 600 acres in Texas. We're building up a launch site at Vandenburg and we'll be enhancing our launch site at the cape. So it's a lot of growth across the board. [A thousand dollars per pound,] it's the mythical number. Not so mythical anymore. [Comparison to shuttle and volume.] Good question. I think we'll need to launch, maybe, on the order of four per year to maintain those cost numbers, but I'm very confident that we'll be able to do that. That is not, I think, a tall order, and I think it's going to be a lot closer to 10 than 4. Also, because of the commonality between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy we're able to spread the overhead across both vehicles. Because really, Falcon Heavy is essentially the upgraded Falcon 9 with two additional first stages as side boosters. So it's able to use the same tooling, be made in the same line, and I think therefore significantly improves the probability of being able to hold to our cost numbers on Falcon Heavy. You're hearing it from me directly, you know, it's being recorded that we will stick to those prices, and not go above them, except for, you know, inflation and stuff like that. So, in current year dollars, we'll stick to what we have said. The first mission is really a demonstration flight. It's there to prove that Falcon Heavy will work. That it will deliver the payload that we say it can, and we don't have a primary customer for it, but we are likely to have several smaller secondary satellites on-board that will do a variety of things, and if we get lucky, maybe there will be a big satellite at the last minute that wants to buy the flight at a reduced price. Dragon is capable of reentering from even Mars velocities including lunar velocities, etc. It's a very capable vehicle and is not limited to simply low Earth orbit operations. It's certainly possible to do a lunar fly-by mission with Falcon Heavy and Dragon. Where you sort of send a Dragon spacecraft on a loop around the back side of the Moon. In order to land on the Moon, there would need to be a propulsive landing system developed which we do not currently have planned. Certainly it is something we could potentially do, but there's no question that with Falcon Heavy and Dragon you could do a really cool mission which would be a lunar flyby, so you could go past the back of the Moon, you could even go a little further than they went in Apollo. That'd be kinda cool I think. [Question about price changes since 2002.] Well, first of all, in 2002 we didn't even have any pricing because I only started the company in, basically, July of 2002. We didn't even know what rocket we were making in 2002. So it's not possible to have doubled from a question mark. But I think if you look at the pricing for Falcon 9, ever since we rolled out the final specifications for Falcon 9, we've kept our pricing consistent at around the $50 million level. I think we've been very solid in keeping our prices steady and we do not expect to make price increases in the future except for inflation related adjustments. In fact, over time we really want to reduce the cost per pound to orbit because that is the fundamental gating factor that prevents humanity from becoming a truly spacefaring civilization. It has just been far too expensive to do space travel in the past and in order for the country and for humanity to have an exciting future in space, it is critical that we are constantly improving the cost per pound to orbit and with Falcon Heavy we're demonstrating that we are. Falcon Heavy is a significant improvement over Falcon 9 in the cost per pound to orbit, and it's right around the, not so mythical anymore, $1000 per pound capability, and as we improve the performance of Falcon Heavy over time we want to get it below $1000. We have an idea for a super heavy lift capability that would be sorta on the order of 150 metric tons to orbit, about three times the capability of Falcon Heavy and that's something that we're working. That's 50% bigger than a Saturn V. That's something that we're iterating with NASA on right now as part of - NASA issued an RFP for design ideas on a super heavy. We're one of the companies that NASA awarded. It's a small contract, a few hundred thousand dollars, but we're exploring with NASA how to do a 150 metric ton to orbit capability but complete that development rapidly and with an end result that is well under $1000 per pound to orbit. We're already slated to replace the shuttle as far as cargo delivery capability to the station, which is the main functionality of the shuttle. Most of what the shuttle does is carry cargo to and from the space station. It does carry astronauts as well, and if things go as we hope, [inaudible] replace both the cargo and astronaut transport capabilities of the space shuttle. So we do expect that will occur. Now that's slated to occur with Falcon 9 and Dragon, Falcon Heavy has potential to do a lot more than that. Texas is where we do all of our engine development and stage testing. As I mentioned a moment ago, we've more than doubled the size of our property in Texas, now 600 acres. So we are expecting a significant workforce increase at our McGreggor test site. I expect it to more than double over the next few years. Alright, thank you.

https://youtu.be/c1HZIQliuoA

my name's andrew hamilton i'm the vice chancellor of oxford university it is an enormous pleasure to welcome you all to this oxford martin school lecture to see the sheldonian packed to the rafters for a very distinguished guest it's an enormous pleasure for us to welcome elon musk who will be talking about the future of energy and transport this is a lecture in the series of the oxford martin school the oxford martin school as all of you know is a very dynamic a very important interdisciplinary research school here in oxford focused on many of the challenges of the 21st century and of course one of them is transport and so to hear from elon musk today very much fits in with the priority of the martin school it's my pleasure now to introduce the director of the martin school professor ian golden ian has been director since september 2006 he is a south african you'll hear in a few moments there's a south african lincoln connection tonight which which we're all very pleased and proud of ian came to the martin school uh as i said uh six years ago from the world bank where he was vice president and prior to that he was director of the development policy of the world bank so it's a pleasure ian to introduce our speaker this evening thank you very much vice chancellor uh welcome elon it's an enormous pleasure to bring great minds together and that's why my job as director of the oxford martin school is so fun and meaningful because we are dealing with the greatest challenges of the 21st century in elon musk we have someone who is focusing on two key areas transport and energy he's an extraordinary intellect but he combines his science with the business acumen and a commitment to society which is unusual it's the combination of not only business but also with science and knowing what to apply it for that makes him a really special visitor tonight an extraordinary talent with the right commitment to deal with the challenges of the 21st century he's the engineer and entrepreneur who build and operates companies to solve global environmental economic and social challenges he's the ceo and chief designer of tesla motors you'll see the car outside and ceo and chief technology officer of spacex at spacex elon is the chief designer and has overseen the development of the rockets which have taken it now twice to the space station they've received the 1.6 billion nasa contract to provide commercial replacement for the cargo and as he will tell us no doubt they have now got a commitment as well to take astronauts it's most extraordinary thing visiting the factory as i was privileged to do and to see not only the energy and commitment of elon and his team but also the originality just how much of what they are doing is original how much they are taking away it has taken governments before four governments have achieved what elon has achieved never before has a private individual done so much so quickly for space in addition to his work on spacex as if that wasn't enough his worker tesla is developing a car which has now won this year the automobile and the auto trends automobile of the year now for those of us that don't follow cars this is the equivalent of winning the emma the grannies and the oscars in the same year all for us academics two nobel prizes it is an achievement which is quite remarkable and having driven he was kind enough to trust his roadster to me having driven one of his cars i felt like i was in a space rocket it had this g-force which i've never before experienced this car i believe will revolutionize transport because it will enable people to see that you can do things without carbon which were unimaginable before in addition to this he started and run solarcity which is developing and now the biggest producer of solar power systems in the us he began at paypal which he co-founded and all of you will know about paypal he became its ceo and then moved on to these other things the vice chancellor mentioned that we have a south african connection we went to the same high school and and we both escaped he went from there to do his degrees at pennsylvania and at wharton and in many ways has moved on from that but the work that he was doing including on super capacitors has continued to drive a lot of what he does today it is this incredible combination of vision bravery and ability which has had him likened by many to a 21st century version of what brunel was in the 19th century and henry ford in the 20th century i have no doubt that he will benefit us in ways that we still do not imagine he exemplifies the ambition of the oxford martian school and its interest in solving the problems of the 21st century and it's a huge pleasure to invite him to address us [Applause] well um i think thank you very much for the kind kind of production um it's an honor to be here this is an incredibly beautiful theater um and uh it's amazing to be in a place designed by christopher ram um and uh and speaking of of brunel actually i'm a big fan of brunel um and i have i have five boys and i really wanted to name one of them brunel um or ice and bard i like them no like um hopefully one in the future um so i i guess i'd i'll just tell you the kind of the the the story of um kind of how i came to be here or you know the various things that i did and maybe why i did them and hopefully that's that's um a bit helpful um and and then we're gonna have quite a long a question and an answer session so look forward to you know feel feel free to ask me any any question no matter what how for what we're doing um i'm actually always always interested in negative feedback actually so um so the way i started out was um i just started out in south africa went to winter pretoria voice high and uh and and then left actually by myself initially to to go to to canada and then and then the u.s to college and graduating from from undergrad i um i had to sort of make it make a decision um and uh uh one path would have sort of led to wall street and and i guess quite a big salary and then the other would have was was to do do grad studies and try to figure out a technical problem and uh i i i don't much like the first one so i i went to i decided to go to go out to silicon valley and and and go to stanford and try to work on ultra capacitors for use in electric vehicles and i do actually think there's potential for a significant breakthrough in that area and actually to have an energy storage mechanism that's that's better than that than batteries it's not necessary for transport to go electric but i think it is um it's something that would accelerate that um so um so i was sort of about to get into in get into grad studies and then then the internet it was clear the internet was going to be something that was would be very important to the future so i um i i thought well i could either sort of spend five years in a graduate program and discover that the answer is that there is no no way to make a capacitor work and and get perhaps get some some nice um papers published and that kind of thing and uh uh but that would be that way most unfortunate situation i thought um you know because you can come to what one of the possible things is is to determine that success is not one of the possible outcomes uh i i i couldn't actually bracket the uncertainty on that so so i thought i can either do that or i can uh work on uh on on building elements of the internet and this was in 95 so nobody had actually made any money on it that was but i thought the internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity where would it was like um humanity gaining a nervous system where all of a sudden any parts of humanity would know what the collective would have access to the collective knowledge and and that's that's true it's really quite a remarkable um in the past you'd have to and if you wanted access to a lot of information how to be near a big library or something um like the great boatland ivory nearby and then that that'll be the only only way to gain access to information um and now with the internet with everything online you could be somewhere in the jungles of south america and if you've got access to an internet connection you have access to essentially all the world's information with a tremendous amount of analytical power behind that so it i think it literally has gone from a situation where where people would communicate almost like um by osmosis um if you can imagine sort of a a creature a simple melted multicellular creature that would communicate by quite slow chemical signals now um we any part of humanity knows what every other part of humanity does immediately it's it's pretty incredible so anyway i want to be part of building that so i decided to to do a couple of internet companies um and that actually worked out reasonably well so the the the first one helped bring the the media companies online and then we sold that and then started another company which you may have used called paypal um and that that that we sold for actually a large amount of money to to ebay um and and that left me in the fortunate position of of having the capital to pursue uh the the two other things that i thought would most affect the future of humanity being um sustainable energy both the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner which i think is arguably the most pressing problem of the 21st century and then the other one which is is the extension of life beyond earth and so so um the one i did first was was the space company and um the genesis of that is is is kind of interesting because at first i didn't think that it would be possible to to create a rocket company um and i thought the the what would really make a difference is to have a mission to to mars a small sort of a small paleo to the surface of mars that that would get the public excited about to reignite the passion for space exploration such that we could go beyond what we did with the apollo program and i thought it was quite sad that the apollo program represented the the high water mark of human space exploration and it was not something like that i was able to to witness in real time because i was -2 when they landed um so uh it it's it's it just seemed as though that if i thought about the future um one where we were true space bearing civilization out there exploring the stars and making the things real that we read in science fiction books and and movies that that that seems like a really really exciting future that that that sort of made me feel good about the future um and one where we were forever confined to earth made me feel a bit sad so um yeah so so that that's that's really uh what i was trying to figure is how do we how do we reverse that um and then like i said at first i didn't think it would be possible to create a space company because it seemed like the province of governments but so my first thought was well let's let's see if we can if we do a philanthropic mission to mars and get the public excited about the idea of going there and then that would lead to an increased budget for nasa and then um then we could go there that would hopefully work so i i figured out how to compress the cost of the of the spacecraft and the communication systems and the the the payload and so forth and and then the um it would have been a small greenhouse about a meter across with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel that would land you'd hydrate the gel upon landing and you'd have this great shot of um of green plants against uh against a red background in the u.s that's called the money shot and um so and the the public tends to respond to um precedence and superlatives so this will be the first life on another planet the furthest that life's ever traveled and i thought okay well that would get people pretty excited and maybe they could envision people being there we would certainly be able to figure out a lot of engineering and scientific data about what it took to maintain plant life on the surface of mars so so i got through um most of that and the thing i i got hung up on was the rocket um so getting there in the first place um and there were the u.s options from boeing and lockheed were simply too expensive i couldn't afford them and so i went to russia three times to negotiate purchasing a an icbm um of course i mean desperate times call for desperate measures um and and i i i i went to so i did i did three visits there and um [Music] at the end of it i i was able to get to negotiate a price actually um to buy three of these these things a lot through the largest icbms in the russian fleet um but but but they uh they were still pretty expensive and by the third trip i actually came to conclusion that i would i was operating under the wrong premise that i was i was actually mistaken about the willingness to to send people to mars to expand the space frontier um and it actually in retrospect was quite silly of me just to think that that people were not interested in such a thing or at last lost the world to to do this uh in fact people had really thought that it's it's not possible or not or not possible for an amount of money that wouldn't materially affect their standard of living um so so i came to conclusion that even if we succeeded in doing this mission that wouldn't that wouldn't be enough that would that would perhaps add a little bit more to the world to do it but it wouldn't it wouldn't make it clear to people that there was a way um and and and this is a case of sort of almost the opposite i think if if if you can show people that there is a way then there is there is plenty of will um so so after that third trip i i i learned a lot more about rockets at that point and i held a series of meetings um just just sort of brainstorming sessions with people from the space industry to try to understand if there was if i was missing something fundamental about the ability to improve rocketry um and this is where i think it's helpful to use the approach the the analytical approach in physics which is to try to boil things down to first principles and reason from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy um so and and the way this applied to derogatory was to say okay well um what are the what are the materials that that go into a rocket um how you know how much does each payroll constituent weigh uh what's the cost of that raw material and and that and that's going to set some floor um as to the cost of the rocket and that actually turns out to be a relatively small number um certainly um well under five percent of the cost of a rocket and in some cases closer to one or two percent um and so i call it sort of maybe the the magic wand number so if you if you had a pile of of of raw material raw materials on the floor and you could just wave magic wand and rearrange them then that would be the the best case scenario for a rocket and so i was able to see okay well there's clearly a great deal of room for improvement even if you consider rockets to be expendable um and and so i think that's that's sort of that's what i mean by sort of thinking about things from a first principle standpoint if on the other hand i sort of analyzed it by analogy and said okay well analogy would be what are all other rocket companies what what do their rockets cost what historically have have other rockets cost and that would be sort of an analogy thing but it really doesn't illustrate what the true potential is um and and so i i think it's sort of a first principle first principles approach is is a good way to um to understand what new things are possible that so this is a good framework um and it doesn't mean you'll be successful but you you know at least you can determine if success is one of the possibilities that is important uh i think so uh started spacex and initially i had a um decided to make a small rocket called the falcon one that was capable of putting about half a ton into orbit um and this did not go smoothly and it was quite difficult to attract the the key technical talent and um and of course i was quite ignorant of of many things and made lots of mistakes along the way and the uh the the first three flights of the falcon one failed or rather they certainly didn't get to orbit the second and third flights arguably got to space but but they did not reach full orbital velocity um and unfortunately the fourth flight worked um and if it hadn't spacex wouldn't be around because i'd basically run out of money so that would that was a bit of a nail-biter and um thank goodness uh it's a and in fact uh this all happened in in 2008 so um yeah there was really no ability to to raise outside money in a meaningful way in 2008 which is a financial crisis so you can imagine trying to go to raise money saying well yes we just had four failures and the world is in financial ruin but would you like to give us some money that would be a definite no um so fortunately that that that succeeded um and um and we were able to go from falcon 1 to begin designing the falcon 9 which is an order of magnitude larger vehicle and in fact um has more than 20 times the payload so it's got a payload to orbit of over over 10 tons um and uh and and that actually has gone a lot a lot better uh because we had the experience of falcon one to go by um and and part of the research we started with falcon 1 was because i i i i thought we would make a lot of mistakes and if if we're going to make a lot of mistakes then it's it's best to make those mistakes at a small scale rather than at a large scale um and that seems to have worked because going to falcon 9 we've had four flights of elk nine and they've all been all four of them have been successful um so i think that that principle seems to have worked reasonably well you know touch word life lives coming up soon um but um and i think and then we also developed the dragon spacecraft because um somewhat opportunistically nasa announced that they were going to retire the space the space shuttle and they needed they didn't have the budget to develop a cargo transport capability to the space station by the normal large government way and uh and so they put it out to bid to to a commercial industry for the first time in nasa history it's quite it was quite a big step and we were lucky enough to to win one of those contracts um and then the other company wasn't able to execute and so they got cut and and so we ended up being the primary means of um transporting cargo to and from the space station um so we we just did the first two missions um uh for the first two space station resupply missions uh this year um and so then thankfully both of those worked uh and then going from there nasa then said well what about astronaut transport and um and so they um they put out a big competition and um and awarded two contracts for uh for ashmore transport one of which went to boeing they got a slightly larger contract and then one to us and so hopefully in about three years we will have dragon version 2 and the the next generation falcon 9 rockets transporting astronauts to from the space station then we've got falcon heavy which is about three times the capability of falcon 9 and that that will hopefully launch in about a year or two that will actually be the most powerful rocket in the world by a factor of two um so we're making some steady progress um falcon falcon heavy to put that into perspective uh has about um sixty percent of the capability of of the saturn v moon rocket so if you were to combine two flights of falcon heavy with orbital uh rendezvous and darking you could actually send people back to the surface of the moon so i think now now we're really sort of talking about you know advancing the frontier which i think is quite important um and then um the the the really major breakthrough that's needed in in rocketry the the pivotal one uh which we're aspiring to make is to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket this is this has not been achieved before the space shuttle was an attempt to achieve that but it was not a successful attempt unfortunately um the the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time which was also the primary ascent error frame and even the parts that were reusable were so difficult to reuse for the space shuttle that it ended up costing four times more than an expandable rocket of equivalent payload capability um so so but it was it was the right goal but but it didn't hit the target um and and i think this this is actually incredibly important i think it may not be completely intuitive but i think perhaps if one refers to other modes of transport it makes more sense because all other modes of transport are fully and rapidly reusable and that applies to a bicycle a horse plane ships in fact in all in sort of normal life you'll be quite silly to you know discard your horse after every ride you know or dump the plane after you flew it um the cost of a 747 is about 300 million dollars and you'd need two of those to do a round trip from uh los angeles to london but nobody's i don't think anyone has paid half a billion dollars to do that so and nor would one want to i mean there'd be a lot of travel by boat and train and that sort of thing if if if that was the true cost so it's extremely important in rocketry to achieve full and rapid reusability this is not an easy thing to do because of earth's gravity well um and just the basic physics of things um uh so there have been many attempts to create a reusable rocket but they've generally um well they've all they've also been canceled along the way once people realized that they would they would not succeed in fact usually they got cancelled quite so quite some time after it was obvious they wouldn't succeed so with the essence of the problem is that if you design a an expandable rocket and do quite a good job of it you'll get two to three percent of your lift-off mass to orbit um then if you uh if you say well how much mass is needed to return that rocket and be able to fly it again quickly well about two to three percent um so and so you can basically get nothing to orbit is is the way it's been in the past so in order to do something useful what what has what you have to figure out is how do you get a much larger percentage toward it let's say ideally on the order of four percent of your liftoff mass to orbit in an expandable configuration and then compress the reusable elements down to about two percent so you have a net payload to orbit of two percent um and then you could you could really have something that's that's quite useful um and the the cost of the propellant is only about let's say point three percent of the cost of the vehicle if you take falcon 9 for example which uses quite expensive fuel relatively speaking i think there's there are lower cost options um the cost of of of refueling a reloading propellant on on falcon 9 is about two hundred thousand dollars and the cost of the rocket is 60 million so that's it's just like a plane i mean it's just if you were to refuel a plane not very expensive you want to buy a new plane very expensive um so um at this point i'm really reasonably confident that it can be done and now it's a question of executing to to make that design work um and seeing if there are any gotchas and they'll probably be a few craters along the way so i'm not expecting this to be a smooth journey as long as the rocket doesn't land on anyone it'll be fine so that's really what spacex is focused on right now is kind of scaling up the size of the rockets and trying to achieve this full and rapid reusability um so if you're curious you can just we're fairly public about things and you can just follow it on the spacex website so that's what we're doing on on spacex side then in parallel we've got tesla which is developing electric vehicles and some sort of a whole step for separate storyline and tell me if i'm going on too long and stop me at any point um feel free to leave it's getting boring um so uh with with with tesla the the goal is to um to try to create electric vehicles that are more compelling than gasoline vehicles as a product um i mean the fundamental issue we have in um in energy and transport is is is the tragedy of the commons you know we've got the co2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere that is unpriced or mostly unpriced um and so it's um it's almost like we're sort of dumping garbage in the atmosphere and nobody's paying for garbage collection um so it's um it's the most unfortunate situation because the uh there are quite significant vested interests in um in oil gas and coal um with enormous amounts of money [Music] it's quite a difficult battle to fight and you can't expect them to simply roll over and commit suicide or something there that they will fight it hard and then they have been um and so unfortunately so it requires fighting hard back and um and and creating uh products in the absence of there being attacks on co2 creating products that don't rely on the relative economics of of using hydrocarbon fuels versus versus electric cars and so that that was our goal for from tesla from the beginning [Music] and i'm really um i'm excited to to see that we've um we've achieved that goal actually with with the model s which was as was mentioned model s was recently uh awarded um top honors by um it was awarded some car of the year in automobile of the year and and that was against a very difficult field of of gasoline cause um and so i'm hopeful this will be seen as a pivotal moment in transport where where people where people you know finally appreciated that an electric car could be better than a gasoline car um and then going into the future our goal with tesla is to keep refining the technology increasing the scale of production um and um and and make a mass-market electric car uh that that that almost anyone can afford um that's that's step three on the strategy so step one was was a high price low volume step two mid price mid volume step three low price high volume so we sort of at step two and now we we want to progress to step three as as soon as possible um and we don't get quite a bit of criticism at tesla for for creating the the roadster which we did in collaboration with lotus um and uh if people were complaining why are you making this expensive sports car um and with the implication that we felt there was a shortage of sports cars for rich people and and when we're racing to meet that that unmet need you know so the the the real reason is that any car that we make at at low volume which is the first version of technology is going to be expensive it didn't matter what that car looked like so we could make something that looked like a very standard you know sort of toyota corolla or you know ford fusion or something like that and it would have cost say seventy thousand dollars um but nobody will pay that for for what looks like a mid-size economy sedan they just they just won't or very few people would but people are willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a fast sports car and so that that that's why we started off with that at that level um and then with another big design iteration and an increase in the volume so we had economies of scale we were able to create the model s and then with another order of magnitude increase in volume and another big design revision um that's what will allow us to cut the price in half again and and then tesla also supplies power trains to mercedes and toyota and perhaps other will do that do that for other car companies in an effort to help them accelerate the transition to electric vehicles um so that's uh that's that's has been spacex and i should i should should mention certainly solar city um because one must generate electricity in a sustainable way as well as consume in a sustainable way and people say well what don't electric cars create pollution at the power power plant level um and um it should be it should be noted that for any given source fuel it is always better to generate the power at the power plant level and then charge electric cars and run them for any given source fuel because power plants are much more efficient at extracting the energy than uh than internal combustion engines in a car they're at least twice as efficient and usually more like three times as efficient um so so for any given source fuel it's all you know even if the whole world were always going to be powered by hydrocarbons it would still make sense to do electric cars but of course we must find a sustainable means of generating energy as well and and i i think that the the most likely the main candidate for energy generation is actually solar i think the physics of this is actually rather obvious because the earth is actually almost entirely solar powered today as it is um the um would be a frozen ice ball at i don't know three or four kelvin um if it weren't for the sun and uh and our entire system of precipitation is powered by the sun the ecosystem is almost entirely 99.999 powered by the sun except for some chemotrophs at the bottom of the ocean um so uh that's um it's rather obvious that i think once you try to take take a little portion of that energy and it's actually not much and convert that into electricity for use by um by society so um uh i i i'm quite confident that um solar power will be the single largest source of energy or electrical energy uh for for humanity in the future and it will be combined with other things of course such as hydro hydropower and geothermal and i actually think nuclear is not a terrible option uh as long as you're not located in a place that's susceptible to natural disasters that's also i think uh defies common sense but um so as long as there aren't huge earthquakes or sort of weather systems that have names coming at you um then then i think nuclear can can be can be a sensible option and there are much safer and better ways of generating nuclear energy i'm talking fission here um then then existed in the past when nuclear reactors first first came out um and then and then at some point in the future every night to make fusion work of course that would be quite quite good um but in the meantime i think um indirect fusion being solar power is the uh it is a good thing to do and so that's what solar city is doing is really trying to improve the economics of solar power and they're doing doing a great job i don't run the company so the credit for seoul city really goes to the the two key guys um who who um run that company but they're doing a great job of really accelerating the adoption of solar power in the united states so um and hopefully they'll they'll come to the uk as well so that's um that's about it um q a thank you so much uh elon for that you make it sound so easy if only we a small fraction of us can achieve that in our lifetimes i think we'd be absolutely delighted uh but thank you two for agreeing to take questions and answers i know that's what you really were looking forward to uh today so we have um a roving mic uh we have some time and please keep your questions uh clear and concise uh to to elon i'm afraid there's no microphones at the higher level uh it's gonna be difficult for the people carrying the roving mic to get up to the higher tier so if you want to ask a question come down to this level uh of the sheldonian who'd like to go first lord reese over here um well amazing talk can i be greedy and ask two questions one of the constraints on both your projects is the energy isn't concentrated enough uh batteries can't store energy as densely as liquid fuel and even liquid fuel isn't dense enough to have an efficient uh launch into space right so i wonder if you could speculate on that and the second question i wanted to ask is about uh robotics in the future um i guess even though you can have a driverless car people still want to drive the tesla themselves they won't want to leave that to a robot but do you think that the advance of robots is going to change people's perspective on manned space flight so energy concentration and the role of robot um yeah absolutely um in fact the um energy density basically the the amount of energy you can store in a given amount of mass or volume has been a fundamental constraint on electric cars for a while um and uh and then that's paired and correlated to some degree with the the cost per kilowatt hour the cost of storing that energy in a car um now with with the with the advent of lithium-ion uh technology uh that that i think is really what enabled um a compelling car and lithium-ion batteries continue to improve it's sort of a roughly on average maybe eight eight eight or nine percent per year which when compounded over several years ends up being a meaningful improvement um and as mentioned in my talk i think even if there was no improvement in um no no fundamental improvement beyond lithium-ion batteries i think we could still take all terrestrial uh all ground transportation could go electric we need we do need a further breakthrough for aircraft where the energy density requirements are at least two to three times more significant but but even with current generation lithium ion i think we could go to mass market with with with ground vehicles um and in fact our focus is is really more on reducing the the cost uh of the battery pack then improving the energy density um so i think we're actually in a pretty good spot i'm quite and i actually now am reasonably optimistic that there will be a breakthrough in um high-end density capacitors um and um it's sort of interesting if you do the sort of base do the basic physics on the energy density potential of a capacitor um it using naturally occurring materials um it's quite hard to to beat lithium-ion batteries but if you can figure out a way to make sort of unnatural materials i suppose that are accurate to the molecular level then then i think i think you can actually have some fairly significant breakthroughs um and that that was actually developed the the ability to do that was developed um in the photonics arena um and applying the sort of photonics breakthroughs to capacitor technology is what um has the potential for a really big breakthrough there so i i think we may see something on that on that level but it isn't totally required for for cars um for rockets um well there's there's no way to make a rocket electric that's for sure um unfortunately newton's third laws cannot be escaped um i think maybe i mean certainly there have to be a few nobel prizes awarded uh if that if there's some way to get around it that would be really really convenient um but uh i do think it's possible with um a really efficient combustion rocket to achieve [Music] the settlements of mars i think i think you would probably want to switch to uh methane um i think it's really methane or hydrogen are the kind of the two best choices uh there and probably slightly leaning in the direction of of methane because it's easier to handle than than hydrogen methane is just ch4 versus h2 um and and both can be produced on the surface of mars which is important so yeah [Music] in fact i should say that i i'm quite confident at this point that it is it is possible to um set up to to to create a self-sustaining civilization on mars using only a methane or oxygen a methanol hydrogen-based launch system and yeah just just a and it needs to be a fully reusable methanol or hydrogen uh launch system will uh it can be done and i the key thing i was trying to figure out was it with volume is it possible to get the cost of moving to mars down under half a million dollars which i think is anyone can argue about the exact threshold but i think that's about the threshold at which um enough people would could save up money and move to mars you know i mean that's that's how that's how america got created basically and come back if they want they don't like it of course you get a free return cricket um the the i mean actually i mean there's sometimes a debate about going to mars one way um and whether that makes things easier and i think for the initial flights perhaps but long term to get the costs down you need the spacecraft back whether the people come back is relevant but but you must have the ship back because those those things are expensive so so anyone who wants to return can just jump on um so that that's but until a few years ago i wasn't sure that success was one of the possible outcomes and now i know i think i'm quite sure that success is possible of course there's a long way between possible and making it real but i believe it's possible and then robotics right i think one can accomplish a lot with robotics i do slightly worry about if robotics get too good what's the point of us so it's it's some i think either either robotics get get so good and there's not much point to us i guess i don't know um or or or they're they're not as good as us in which case we need to go and i i i'd advocate the second um and uh hopefully the future does if there's not some sort of ai apocalypse um yeah the gentleman over here good evening thanks for taking questions uh i just had two brief questions one on tesla and the second one on spacex i was wondering if you're familiar with the sabre engine the the hybrid engine um which is um there's a team of hard-working rolls-royce engineers working on it in the oxfordshire cluster at the moment it's a hybrid engine that uh breeds air on the way up and it's you talked about it earlier in your talk um that you're specifically looking at reusable space delivery vehicles and rockets so that was the space spacex one and the test storm was what happened to the original tesla prototype the mule one oh um yeah well we still have the original mule one of the tesla roadster um and uh here i should give credit to a small company in southern california called ac propulsion um that had a vehicle called the t zero um so our very first mule was really um taking a lotus release kind of jamming uh ac propulsion powertrain into it and then sort of making it drive um and then yeah we originally thought that well it would be um this is another example of making some some mistakes sort of dumb mistakes but the thought in the beginning with tesla was to use ac propulsions powertrain and the lotus lease and get to market fast with an electric car um as it turned out uh the ac propulsion powertrain didn't really work very well and was not scalable for production um had a lot of issues and so we had to completely redesign the powertrain and then the the elise um because our car ended up being 50 heavier and had different uh weight distribution and low points we invalidated all the crash structure and had to completely redesign the chassis um and in the end i think about seven percent of the parts were in common with the release um so almost nothing uh and but we actually inherited some of the limitations of the release so okay okay sir and and then but there's a lot longer tonight so i'll try to be less less longer than my answers but um so with respect to to um air breathing hybrid stages i i have not i've not seen how the physics of that makes sense um there may be some assumptions that i'm that i have that are that are incorrect um but really for for an orbital rocket you're trying to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible because the atmosphere is just thick as soup when you're trying to go fast and um and it's not helped by the fact that the atmosphere is mostly not oxygen you know it's sort of 80 nitrogen so um so mostly what you're everything is is chaff not wheat and and having a big sort of intake is like having a giant break so the the breaking effect um tends to overwhelm the advantage of ingesting 20 oxidizer um so so so you can just make to say that the the boost stage five to ten percent larger and get rid of all the everything stuff and you're done uh thanks you know uh the gentleman down here i i should say that this is being filmed so if any of you uh don't want to be filmed either don't ask a question or else uh tell the people who filming up here afterwards that you'd like your questions extracted but the assumption is that you're happy to be on record good evening with the new technologies that has made the availability of shale gas really cheap and with the boom of the us energy sector do you think the there'll be a limitation in the development of sustainable energy in the coming decade because of the new energy boom that us is facing right now um yeah that's a good point um new technology and innovation can have a downside one of the downsides is the ability to extract far more hydrocarbons than we thought were possible including you know once you start getting into deep methane or deep natural gas you're actually tapping into things that are not related to dinosaur fossils um methane is a naturally occurring uh gas um there are there are places in the solar system where that that they're with atmospheres primarily methane so it's not it does not require organic origin so if we if we dig too deep for methane we're actually going to a level that has never never been seen before not even in in the the you know the very earliest history of earth so that that's very dangerous i think um and uh but but that's why i think it's it's important for electric cars to be able to compete with without economics being a factor and but but i think this is it is very dangerous uh to to be extracting vast quantities of hydrocarbons from from deep within the earth and putting them in the atmosphere uh sooner or later something very bad will will happen and um yeah it's just uh and i i i mean there are a lot of people particularly in the u.s who who are vehemently uh against um electric cars and sort of sustainable power it's quite difficult to reason with them actually um you know they'll say well you know some scientists don't think it's a problem uh and i'm like well okay you know you can find some number of people that will disagree with anything um and and uh you know this this actually reminds me of the of the tobacco industry where for the longest time they were actually complaining that you'd see ads where their claim tobacco was healthy for you i mean hard to believe these days but um and then there was there were these reports where there seemed to be some correlation between lung cancer and smoking and they're like you're like our scientists have conducted experiments and they show it's there's nothing no relation at all it's completely nonsense and um and so go to the point where almost any any any reasonable scientist would would say that yes of course smoking causes lung cancer and all sorts of other bad things um not definitively but it's extremely likely and yet the tobacco industry would still say oh scientists disagree because one or two percent of the scientific community didn't feel that way and that's kind of and then the public just hears scientists disagree not they're not here 99 percent of them think it's stupid um yeah so it's it's definitely a tough thing and um hopefully that i mean how hopefully that transition occurs before it's before it's too late i mean there's already quite a bit of momentum in the direction of climate change um and accelerating the uh removal of hydrocarbons from the crust and placing in the atmosphere is is i think just very unwise um so anyway that's why i think it's the biggest problem of the 21st century legitimately you're an incredibly successful and very modest man but my question is about failures i think we'd always think you're modest my question's about failure so i was just wondering what are you trying at the moment or what do you think you'll attempt in the future that you're not expecting to succeed at well i i think i think i would stay on on electric cars and rockets for a while um and yeah it was actually never never my intent to to run tesla i i kind of because running two companies is quite quite a burden actually um um i i you know it's sometimes around people who who who think oh if you're ceo of the company then they sort of imagine themselves if they were ceo of the company they would grant themselves lots of vacation um and do lots of fun things it's like that doesn't work quite work work that way what you actually get is a distillation of the the worst things going on in the company it's like and uh anyway so i i that the idea of taking on something more is uh is very frightening um but uh i mean possibly at some point in the future certainly not the near term there are i think there's there's an opportunity to create an electric jet essentially and i do think one could create an electric jet that that um is really exciting something that would be supersonic vertical takeoff and landing pure electric um and just just a vaguely forward i think i think that's that's a distinct i i i'm quite confident it's doable um provided that there's a uh a rough doubling of the energy density um in in batteries or capacitors so you know basically around around the 500 watts per kilogram level is where it starts to make sense um and then there's um i do think there's the possibility of kind of a fifth mode of transport uh which i've talked about kind of mentioned tangentially uh which is uh like i i i call kind of the hyperloop um and um you know i i i'd like to sort of publish something about that maybe in the next month or two um once tesla's at steady state production um and i want to flesh it out a little bit to so that um and and pre-address some of the rebuttals that people will come up with um rather than just sort of put it up there and then happy have the rebuttal occur and and have an unaddressed rebuttal um but um i guess the way to think of it is um it's like a cross between uh a concord and a railgun the gentleman with the blue shirt at the door then we'll come to the side hi thanks for a great talk um at the risk of asking for trade secrets i was just wondering having built the falcon rockets what was the final conclusion of your analysis to as to why your rockets were so much less expensive than government projects well there's there's it's not a the the full answer is is quite complicated um and requires at least at least some understanding of how rockets work and but but if you if you divide a rocket into the cost of the engines the airframe and the electronics and then the launch operation itself those are the marginal cost drivers and then there's the fixed cost of the company which is the you know we should divide it over the number of launches that take place but just look at the marginal cost drivers it means you have to make a significant advancement in engines significant airframe electronics and launch operation um in fact um it would be easy to point out one of those areas but success in one of those areas would only have a small effect so let's say you had three engines um well that would only reduce the cost of the rocket by probably thirty percent the cost will launch by thirty percent um and and so that that's not much that's not a huge breakthrough uh or free electronics or free airframe you actually have to compress all of them quite a bit and then like i said you have to make them reusable [Music] i can give sort of an example an illustrative example in the airframe that may be helpful the normal way that a rocket airframe is constructed is is a machined isogrid and ice that that's where you take high strength [Music] aluminum alloy plate and you machine uh stiffeners into integrally machine stiffness into the into the plate and i apologize it's gonna go a little slightly technical um but imagine you sort of have a plate of metal and you're just um cutting triangles out of it um and that that's normally how rockets are made and most of a rocket is propellant tanks these things have to be sealed um so to maintain pressure and everything and they have to be quite stiff so that's what has done then the approach that we took is um is rather to build it up um and and to start with skin sections and friction still weld um stiffness into the skins into the skin sections um and uh this is a this is a big improvement because if you machine away the material you're left with maybe five percent of the original materials you have 20 to one roughly uh wastage of material plus a lot of machining time and it's very expensive if you can roll sheet um and stir well the stiffness in then your material wastage can be five percent so since the other the inverse essentially um where where uh you know instead of having a 20 to one ratio you've got if you're 1.1 ratio it's it's it's you know sort of having 95 wastage it's five percent waste which is huge huge improvement um and then you can actually improve the mass fraction too because if you have um still well the stiffness you can increase the profile and geometry and improve the geometry of the stiffness so uh you can have something which is say uh five centimeters tall uh whereas if you machined it from a plate it would be limited to the plate which may be two or three centimeters tall um so you actually end up with something which is both um more advanced and and in in that it is a better mass fraction but it was also a fraction of the cost that's one example but there are there are many such things i saw one of the most amazing uh 3d printers when i visited oh yeah getting carbon out of transport group in the uh in the oxford martian school so elon the question i have for you is to say that uh we can see that our society is going to go through a major change because of the the the climatizing the carbon problem that we have and looking back in our history south africa went through a major change one of the key uh enablers to that was the scenario work with clemson where they had the high road and the low road scenario and that that enabled people to envisage what would be a good outcome and what would be a bad outcome right what is your good outcome for the climate change challenge how would you envision what that right what a good world would look like with this climate change challenge uh well i i think the thing we need to do is we the the the best thing to do to to achieve that um would be the carbon tax um and uh so i think if we were to just the market system will work extremely well if it has the right information um to work uh so if if we just apply tax to carbon and then dial that up according to whatever achieves the the target maximum carbon um proportion in the atmosphere that that's that's i think the right way to go uh and and countries really need to act you know unilaterally people can't have this thing well you know if such and such country isn't doing it i'm not doing it well okay set a good example you know and and hopefully over time other countries will will fall in line um or get ostracized um so um so i think that that's probably the smart move and then we can avoid all of there's no need for subsidies and um special incentives which are really a backwards way of trying to deal with the lack of a carbon tax um so i think in in a good scenario the the best possible scenario would be that something like that is instituted um yeah um and we're still going to have a significant increase in in the carbon in in the atmosphere temperatures are still going to rise sea levels will rise uh there will be um uh but it should be i mean the dutch can manage you know with their probably a lot of diet companies will there's a lot of options in the dyke business i think um but i i think i think if we if we take out action reasonably soon um we can avoid a calamitous outcome um if we only take take action say towards the end of the century then it's it's it's going to be extremely bad um um and um i don't think people quite appreciate the fact that there's the the momentum of the climate you know of climate climate change it's like even if you stop now even if we immediately stopped all carbon production the momentum will still carry forward and increase the temperature raise water levels make storms more powerful all those things um [Music] that's why yeah so i'm not i'm trying to like what's the good i can get out because we do we do carbon tax we minimize uh carbon production we move to sustainable transportation energy production um which likes there's going to be sort of solar wind geothermal hydro uh and some nuclear i think i think we have to actually let's sort of accept that that nuclear is a good option in certain places um and um and then i actually think that that the most likely outcome is is is a is a good one and a reasonably good one one when that where there's there's there's damage but but we could we recover i i actually think that will occur so i don't i i'm quite optimistic about the future um not suggesting complacency in the least but i'm i i am optimistic about the future um trying to find a woman the lady at the back there hi um please excuse the pessimism of this question but could we uh expend so much energy running around on the surface of the planet that um we don't have enough to eventually get off it to another planet if we wanted to and if so how long might we have to that point yeah i actually think as long as the sun is shining we'll be fine um that and that's gonna if if if we had to if humanity had to get all of its energy from from the sun it could it could do so um it's really this a truly astounding amount of energy that comes at us from from the sun um and i mean it's interesting that um if you took the land area of used by by um by nuclear plants including the stay out zones and everything um and said okay what generates more power the nuclear power plant or or just covering it with solar panels in most cases it's solar panels just the area used by the nuclear power plant in solar panels to generate more energy because you actually have to have a big stay out zone you can't you can't just put you know nuclear power plant in the in out in the suburbs and and with a bunch of people around it so you have to have this big clear clear zone um and so they use a lot of area and um but just to give you just a sense of how much power can come from the sun this is literally true what what i've just said um the gentleman to read jump for that hi thanks very much for your talk i think you're a visionary um so you talked earlier about setting up a sort of colony on mars and you've talked before about hopefully retiring onto mars um so i was my question is just why mars right so people have talked about uh upper atmosphere of venus or various moons so like why definitely not venus why why okay but like why martial oh okay so you just by process of elimination um the the uh mercury is obviously way too close to the sun um um you definitely get i mean there's maybe some narrow habitable zone on the back side of mercury but but i think one sort of asking for trouble on that one um and and then venus um i mean venus would be a lesson for for what earth could become you know in a worst case scenario um which is a a a sort of a superheated high pressure um well in the case of venus acid bath so it's literally a high pressure high temperature acid bath um so definitely not a good place uh to to to to make another i mean i think the most that any probe is even lasted on venus is measured in hours um and then the moon is close but it's it's really a small rock you know that's just circling earth with no atmosphere um some very limited amounts of water ice uh that are sort of in in very permanently shattered craters um and um and then it's got a 28-day rotational cycle which isn't great for plants um so so it would be quite tough to make a self-sustaining civilization on the moon um something coming to mars um hey mars is definitely a fixer-upper of a planet not perfect but um but but feasible i mean it's got a rotational period of 24 and a half hours so um remarkably similar to earth um it's got um just under a half earth's gravity so it's a lot closer gravitationally it's got a lot of water ice uh this is almost all of mars has a water bound up in ice form in the soil the salt has turned out to be non-toxic based on on probes that we've sent there so you could clearly add if you had a greenhouse and some fertilizer and you just sort of warm things up and pressurize it a little bit then you could you could grow plants on mars and mars has a co2 atmosphere which plants like to consume so plants turn consume co2 and on net exude oxygen so it's i think it's very very doable to create a mars um base uh self-sustaining mass base and then ultimately uh terraform the planet to to make it like earth so we could just walk around outdoors uh it'd be also a longer term project but um but it's it's it is within the realm of possibility um and then under of course going beyond that you're going to like jupiter and gas giants and you could potentially do something on the moons of jupiter or saturn but but that's way harder than it was um alex heller who is the head of maths physics and life science and october also gf physicist um so i loved your talk and i look forward to talking more nasa and issa in nasa in particular has done a huge amount to transform our understanding of the solar system through wonderful planetary missions the apollo program even though it had a political and military dimension to it was persuaded at the late stages to actually bring some rocks back which totally transformed our understanding of the inner solar system through the examples so the way things are going with you can you tell us how you envision um private space exploration taking over from major space agencies and jpl and organizations like this in the future and with this move towards privatization uh how are we going to be able to address scientific priorities as opposed to commercial priorities and solar system exploration sure so um i i think i think space exploration is going to be a mixture of of private and government government activities and um and in fact for spacex there are many things we want to do to to enable scientific missions um and and and enable nasa and jpl to be able to um and ease certain others to uh to to to do much more for a given budget um and um in fact we've had a number of conversations with jvl which is located quite close to spacex um about using um our falcon rocket and dragon spacecraft uh it was the version two of the dragon spacecraft will have propulsion propulsive landing capabilities so version two of the dragon spacecraft will be able to land on any liquid or solid surface on the in the solar system so there's the potential to turn that into a generalized uh science instrument delivery platform for for anywhere in the solar system and then if you can see where you could you one could figure out how to do a sample return um you know if you're the land dragon and then and and have a smaller sort of sample return rocket housed within the dragon spacecraft that could return um some some martian regolith that would be pretty cool um and um so so we're exploring some ideas there and i think we'll i think we'll see at least at least some science missions being done in the future maybe a lot of them um so um it's still the early stage but we do have one of we have jason 3 which is a joint nasa esa mission that's going to be launched on one of our rockets in about two years um and then of course we're we're supplying the space station um so as i think it's gonna be a mixture of government commercial i'm for whatever means we'll we'll make it happen so i'm not you know hard over on commercial government i'm just let's whatever works for all practical purposes is it too early to think about establishing some not rules but some attitude towards the comments let it be common because you know that the entrepreneurs are going to go and try to mine things there there are many valuable minerals and things on on mars and to keep it from being exploited what kind of thinking do we have to do now well i i don't think it's going to be economical to to mine things on mars and then transport them back to earth because the transport costs would overwhelm the value of whatever you or whatever you mind but i mean there will likely be a lot of mining on mars that's useful for a mars base um but but unlikely to be transferred back to to earth i think the the the exchange of the economic exchange between say a mars would be mostly in the form of intellectual property um anything that can be transmitted by a photon um that that's what i think that that's the most likely exchange of things um that will occur um yeah uh but yeah i mean i i i don't think we need to worry too much about sort of exploitation of mars essentially it's uh um yeah i mean that would be a high-class problem to deal with for sure okay um lots of hands up the back uh the the gentleman uh yeah hello um just want to ask two quick questions real quick we've been having a lot of argument about the food vest as well debates i just want to take get your your take on the use of biofuels as a means of transportation and also the use of electricity electric cars is most likely to put some sort of strain on the electrical grid of our cities i just want to ask what kind of adaptations you like to see done to the transmission grid sure um so um i i'm i'm not i'm not the biggest fan of biofuels um because i i think it's difficult you know again i try to try to look at things like just calculate the basic physics of it i mean really elementary stuff and uh and say okay well what what percentage of the incident sunlight is bound up in usable chemical energy and then once you have that chemical energy how how much of that is then translated into electricity and you have to compare of course that that uh total efficiency with just having solar panels um and i mean unless i've made some really dumb mistakes possible but uh you you're about 100 times off with biofuels i mean at least two orders of magnitude um so if you so so essentially what it boils down to is how many um what what's your what's per square meter of electrical energy generated with the best case biofuel i'm not talking about like take every every assumption and and maximize it so don't worry don't say oh well maybe there's something somebody could invent something better say what is the best i just just enveloped the hot the whole thing and so you had unbelievably efficient plants inc maximally efficient you can't violate any laws of thermodynamics but but like assuming you're at the limit of the laws of thermodynamics in in all those cases and biofuels at least for terrestrial your land-based biofuels there's no way this this makes sense um you end up being around maybe 0.2 percent um you know efficient whereas in turning sunlight into electrical energy whereas solar panels commercial solar panels are 20 percent efficient so why would you ever do biofuels um and then and then it's not as though there are large swaths of arable land unused so you have to say well this if you go with biofuels it's going to either result in wilderness being being cultivated or an increase in food prices and then you can also say is it possible if you stop all food production in the world to to uh generate enough energy to meet the world's needs and like yeah you could probably that's about right actually if you stopped all food production um you could just about me meet the world's energy needs so now there is a possibility of of um ocean based um because earth's surface is mostly ocean so if you could find a way to um maybe maybe some sort of ocean algae based solution where you're unconstrained by surface area although i still think you'd have to compare that to a bunch of floating solar panels uh and and i think you still lose on floating solar panels so i i can't see how how it would make sense um so what was the second question uh the question second the electricity grid exactly so yeah um at some point there will be there need to be improvements to electricity grid but because that there's a huge disparity in the peak energy used during the day and the energy use at night and most charging of electric cars occurs at night and we have quite a strong empirical uh basis for including this because we can look at all of our customers and and and and plot their energy usage and it's very predominantly at night it's just like basically just like your cell phone you you go home you plug it in and it charges overnight and and this there's um you know the electricity grid is has to be sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year with some power plants not functioning that's well that's how early electricity grid should be sized sometimes so it doesn't work out that way but and and so um most of the time you have huge amounts of excess capacity um and then and so in the us there was a study done years of like this that studies done on all sorts of things some complete nonsense i love the word studies say um but but i think the study is actually probably accurate um that you could replace about 70 percent of the passenger miles in the united states at least i'm not sure how to apply to britain but in 70 passenger miles with no changes to the grid um assuming charging occurred predominantly at night and then if you combine that with increased use of solar panels on houses and and businesses you have localized power generation and the nice thing about solar power is it tends to match energy usage because you're just generating power during the day when and that's when you tend to use the most power [Music] and uh and particularly on summer days where you have air conditioning running and air conditioning is a huge consumer of electricity um and you generally only need it when it's warm and sunny so that's when you need it most so um so i think we're okay on the on the grid front um at least for the near future um it's only going to become a problem once let's say electric vehicles are at least approaching 10 or 20 of the vehicles on the road and then i think you'll be able to address the problem on a fairly localized basis i'm afraid that's um that's all we have time for i know many of you uh have have your hands up we will be running a blog and we'll try and encourage elon to engage when he has a second in his time as well and clearly lots of different things happening in the oxford martin school around this that we'd like to engage you all in as well i'm going to ask the vice chancellor to make some concluding comments ladies and gentlemen it's worth remembering that the great breakthroughs in exploration of the world in past centuries came from this combination that's been touched upon in the question time of government sponsorship but private genius and drive and it was pioneers that discovered the indies that crossed the atlantic that explored the western extremes of canada and the united states and i think you'll agree with me today that we have heard this evening a true pioneer and as we imagine the possibilities of space exploration we've heard tonight some of the possible solutions that might take us there like ian golden i had the great pleasure to visit elon at spacex in los angeles it's hard to describe the scale of the ambition the scale of the enterprise as the rockets are being built you see not only a real focus and dedication on solving practical problems in this vast many many football field size factory not only rockets being built but also soaring ambition in the new designs the carrying of astronauts as we've heard trying to turn the rockets into reusable vehicles and i think today we've we've really had an insight into into the way elon's mind works and i think it's given us all an object lesson in innovation and no don't limit your ambitions go back to first principles be ready to make lots of mistakes but not so many that you run out of money exactly and perhaps the last and most important of all don't buy icbms from the russians right ladies and gentlemen it's been a fascinating lecture a fascinating question and answer session let me thank all of you for participating in in it so wonderfully but most importantly would you join me in thanking elon musk for coming to oxford for visiting us and for giving us such a wonderful exposition this evening you

https://youtu.be/wB3R5Xk2gTY

that's always going back here this is a really important place and I always like talking to people from their space industry by the King family okay okay all right great so yeah I think when I came here four years ago that was I think I think I was talking about right before we actually reached always maybe just several months before each forward to it just to put things in perspective while while recent years have been good that is not always been the case and the the first three clients of Falcon one actually been the first flight failed quite soon the nation shut up about 30 seconds into flight and continued ballistically for another 30 seconds and then and then landed like an anti-tank weapon not far from the launch site at some point or at least gregorio but I think I think we'll wait a few years before do that so yeah but from those first days where my selfless team were picking up three things that come a long way thank goodness so we actually had two more babies after that one then the fourth flight in late 2008 was successful and that that was a close one because because I really have run out of money and they would a lot of people that were keen on on funding the rocket company and I think if we if we could said yes a fourth point wasn't successful but the third one's the charm that would not have won that one so it was thankfully that the both more spirited work and net I think a customer spouse NASA others enough confidence to to award us additional board contracts and for private investments additional private investment to come in and help fund the company besides myself so I'd like to sort of thank thank those investors that parachute rivets in and now respondent penalty so that aggravated early stage to interested sir so since then we we have that both one demonstration watch to work and then we did our first satellite launch which was a commercial relationship or Malaysia and that most as except into orbit and I think it's actually still up there and and then we were able to go from there exterior develop 2009 and the calculator we leverage the the engine we developed in 2001 rollin white see and and especially gank nine goes together on first stage and then one on the upper stage with the expanded also and that actually gave us about 20 times the capability because they in the case of fell tonight we were using a hotbed of the stage as opposed to oppression manifestation it's important difference for those familiar with heroin society and it seems we really hope we learn much weekly group we took we took most lessons learned from from thousand one they were able to tie that to to bail tonight so that the the launches about my whole successful they all reached over here sometimes they were there's a little glitch one way bit there but they already saw it we're again there's a batch to having the nine engines because if it one of them doesn't work and has what we call arrived rapid unscheduled assembly it's all waste to all which and at supporting 6q prince will have something we think it's important for commercial airlines that's why all commercial elements have multiple engines so that if you're very across the Pacific at night English tension you know you're gonna have to use that that life raft or the that a jacket that they give you sure I think it's not going to use effectively very often so system oth I think is good and we're going to keep keep that philosophy going forward and what we were going out is to to the next generation of alkaline which is a vertical takeoff and landing capabilities and after you actually I'll show you the video which is the first sort of flight the grasshopper budget connections work to do well so that the crap is actually quite quite big as its own it's about ten stories tall and it's that that that flight was to about five meters and in the coming months will be increasingly the envelope just a really sort of thing they do with aircraft where you have envelope expansion you gradually increase the altitude and speed and as you see things getting a little wobbly then you make frankly corrective action ideally before you you're before there's a crater and and then you can iterate to a successful outcome how do you think there probably will be a few craters long way so you know make sure that I think that's the likely likely outcome will get very very likely if there's no craters long a way of creating vertical landing rock or so we know how to do work but to take over with each piece we were planning and the other reason to be able to do the road of the beurre blanc is to is to business respiring this to achieve a breakthrough that it is extremely important for rocketry which is rapid and complete reusability and it's important that we both rapid and complete like an air crack or like a car or a horse or bicycle and you had to repaint a plane between flights you probably want to double the cost of the potato so it's really you really going to be able to just relearn melt and flying and that's going to take a bit of effort so it can happen overnight but we keep going in that direction until ultimately it's a it's it's as close to aircraft like despatch capability as one can achieve and if you compare but the cost of the rocket to the constant repellent you can see why is the cost of propellant is only is only about 0.3% the cost of the rocket and we have made a low class rocket rocket exclusive petal the developed line is sixty million dollars and that's for something with four times trust to the 747 and about the same little mass so that's that's a good deal the the propeller is only two hundred thousand dollars and so if we could use the let's have that we use the top nine rocket a thousand times then the capital cost would go from being sixty million dollar claim to $60,000 pointing us a humongous difference now there would still there were do some incremental costs in terms of service and you're just like you have an aircraft or or better inspections in servicing and adorable that to think so so to be that back part is to take into account but so it would be dramatically dramatically more costly to to fly to take over and I think we would open up opportunities today that that are hard to appreciate their justice in the early days when when they're just during the early days of aviation I was just in it in the camel room so quick camel I don't think people could have envisioned that you take a 747 nonstop from Los Angeles to London so it's difficult for us to say or we see today where where things will be in the future but if we make it remember that capability and dramatically improve the technology then I think we'll see all sorts of things happen we really better make that happen we're going to that goal and I think it's a pivotal step on the way to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars if we don't do that I just don't think we'll be able to afford it because kid it's the difference between something lasting you know half a percent of GDP and all of GDP you know obviously it can't be all of GDP we get a lot of complaints like that and and we have this energy be more maybe a quarter percent of GDP okay that's management I think most would agree that even if they don't intend to go themselves that let's say spending someone commits a quarter to half percent GDP on establishing a self-sustaining civilization on another planet he's probably worth doing you know sort of life insurance for life collectively and that's that seems like a reasonable insurance premium and plus it would be a fun adventure to watch even if you're going to participate it just is where people went to the moon only a few people actually went to the moon but in a sense we all went there I carry asleep and I don't think I think most people would say well that was that was a good thing you know that was 50 we'll look look back in 20 20 seconds say what are the great things that 20 century that would have to be right there chocolates so so that this value even if someone doesn't go themselves detectors the two thing so so that's why it's really important and then if you get to what why don't we have why don't we have fully wrap they're reusable rockets why is this I want just do it it's quite tricky that's really though do we live on a planet where this is where this is not easy is possible but not quite difficult if we looked on watch this would actually be quite easy well as we speak but at 1g this is just very impossible thing and the reason has occurred in the past is because when people try to design a rocket and even one that's expendable then after a lot of smart people have worked on the rocket and then using advanced materials and chemical techniques we typically get two to three percent of liftoff masculine and then that's expendable nice air fuel but if you want to add in the reusable bits well you're adding in really it turns out it takes takes one to three percent so then you end up with zero or negative as much more just sitting in rocket orbit with nothing on it and so in the past things have been canceled when it looked like success was not one of the possible outcomes in fact usually they were canceled after it was cleared thank you that's existent is something a few years after expanded successful across planets so so the trick then is to make up that so mass sufficient that it gets close to 4 percent of its payload to orbit in an expendable configuration and then improve the part that the weight of the the reusability bits push that down to to run 2% to get a net of 4-2 on the order of 2% of your color to open in a full original sorry and and that that requires being incredibly paying really close attention to every aspect of the Rockets design the way it's a beep actually the efficiency in the engine the weight of the edge of the weight of the tank to the legs the even the secondary structure just the wiring and plumbing and the electronics make sure your guidance system is extremely precise and interesting pulling all sorts of tricks every trick in the book and then they're coming up with new ones in order to achieve that doubled mass efficiency now I think I think I see a path to making this happen but just physically there starts words and and so that's just what we're seeing in the game take a while to come over take bit I'm a little you start to bring back the first aid in the next year or two we're all actually a very poor background so in or create something back from or what is like and we started to reduce the match requires extreme to come back forward to really have to hone it down so that the thermal shielding and the strengthening of the structure is only just what is needed to come back and not anymore so it's a I think past full reusability is in the five five or six year time frame hopefully it could be thanks that's work so that's all that that's the most important thing technically that SpaceX needs to achieve and and in parallel we're doing things like the Falcon Heavy which will have two additional side boosters to tinted traditional first stages of Cyprus's and what they upgraded thrust fell tonight that will take it to about maybe 60% to 65% thrust of a Saturn 5 so maybe around the four and a half million pounds rustling which is about twice as ours in the other opera but a great thing because if you want to go to Mars you need something even substantially bigger than that so so some future be quite an improvement would probably came to be quite a bit bigger yeah so that's sort of where we stay sexy is and I think stay tuned for more developments but it would with that said I'm happy to answer any questions from the audience and if we have volunteers who are going to read microphones so can I ask that anyone who asks a question gives their name and affiliation for asking the question in addition to people with room asking questions Society has also been putting out on Twitter the ability to ask questions that I have said on the sheet rock I will at some point I asked some of these questions probing festival whilst all the questions from the end on floor here you have to cover this side Hut I said I remember to play this video this gives you a sense of what I'm talking about for the reusability now this was this weather this was done by a through a modeling team it wasn't done by SpaceX this basics engineering team so it's not entirely physically accurate but essential for things at least so no country stage separation so the first stage is going to turn around and reignite it's actually gonna replace three of the engines not yes it's a trick trick three there they're sort of magically got rid of the interstate states and the real legs are much bigger than that that's approximately imagine Wesley relates in a much taller stage with an interesting on top of its approximately yes that's the vehicle and then this the next generation of tracking we're regular to which this actually just not look like that but but we'll be unveiling that fairly soon I think it was pretty cool dragon version one we didn't really know we're doing there's slightly more at this point so that's why Greg version one looks sort of similar to things that are go to the past we go well better straight to fall things in the past and hopefully works yeah yeah so the next version track will do that but it's for different now but it'll it'll have like step up out and and it has eight thrusters that are arranged in both has around the exterior the actual vehicle the repairs are not quite at 90 degrees part because we wanted to we wanted I'll ship the engines that are on the windward side of the backshell a little more towards the leeward side so they're not quite 90 degrees apart they're a little closer together on the science and in much bigger than than what you see there because the super great go engines are designed to accelerate the Dragon spacecraft at over six GS so you can go this way depending upon what's with dynamic pressure facing go past go through the sound barrier about three seconds yeah yeah because if you're else to your your thrust increases you're actually when I get seven to eight GS can hear me copy enjoyed space.com as you talk so you've been quoted an artist saying privatized funding something good half a million dollars is that based on a meter study have you heard our detailed study of whatever it takes to get through their money right now to become self-sufficient and also will driving land will drag them out you need great conversion - sorry I think what have we done with respect to 5000 miles sir colonial service system I didn't like a locker room a detailed study to get things BN come up with a half million dollar price tag oh yes so the questions are I don't come up with a half a million dollar price tag to victimise well I sort of started back up curve from the half-million dollar point to source area well in order for one self-sustaining civilization but ticket price has to be low enough that if someone were to work hard and save up then then muck than most people in vast countries you're after in FSA in the mid forties or something like that could could put together enough money to make the trip that's so it work a half a million dollars well you know that's a bessa global middle class house California basically it's kind of sort of hard to get one round so there's something on that border that's about the right attitude and and then working backwards well you definitely need to have little reusability because the unit even partial expendability will kill that price and then you need to use a source propellant or resource fuel issues liquid productions in your head which you to the garage seems like two or three cents a pound so really it comes down to the fuel and pressure it and well the deepest fuel is methane it's going to be methane and also the nice thing about methane is that you can create it almost because Mars has a co2 atmosphere and there's a lot of water ice this oil can conceivably I mean you might be able to extract water vapor from the atmosphere but that may be harder than simply mining or but then with water you bod h2o with a co2 that gives you ch4 plus no.2 and bigger you can reply to propellants and you can I use you with hydrogen or with penne and for a while we're going down the hydrating path and I was looking the the numbers and you get to roughly equivalent Delta P with methane or hydrogen because of the better mass fraction of methane system and then you combine that with the much easier fact there is much easier to deal with it's not as it's not a hydrogen and it to have a sort of Wiggly hydrogen molecule that likes to get into all sorts of unpleasant places and you just sort of like metal embrittlement and create sort of invisible high-temperature fires necked I think so so many adjust how much easiest thing to deal with and so so almost about the same easier to deal with obviously I mean retrospect and with the properly designed methane engine it's a you know a stage combustion a stage of Russian engine then you you can achieve with decent combustion efficiency in the 99% rain and reasonable sort of area ratio 380 ISPs is quite achievable in fact Russians route the Russians at ground tests have achieved three to the NSP so this is really an achievable number so that sort of the freshmen in here guarding for that so yeah and then you want to go something that's pretty big because if you're gonna go spend a lot of months in it can't be the size with money man you know around a round trip to Mars with six months there eighteen months on the surface six months back two and a half years if you want a little room at our shadow do you think of doing that in Dragon you go to look you'll come back babe if you're not back so I think dragon could be quite useful as a generalized sign story platform for anywhere in solar system because we repulse planet you could that's a generalized solution so you could land on any liquid solid liquid service in the solar system and and I think really enable a lot more science missions working a budget if getting their estate care so I do think dragon is going to be extra useful in that respect apartment being able to carry cargo and people to orbit missions and maybe some other missions to do and direct a better design design design cost and you can in its low cost and innocence which is a massive I think we want dichotomy but but we can people do sir how does one fix markers to it how close it is and it's only the Aztecs u-20 track and cost within operations maintenance hospital what they think numbers that are usually refers to a pressure fed stage and it usually means minus the two apart I think that's actually not a good way to go to a pub you want to advise your office's to too heavy and and they also need to because because if you go at the pressure pad stage you have your entire stage because has to operate at something and they even have a ton of pressure there at the end of the flight so this is not a great way to go and two of us are walking it up at home it just is spinning simple pump strictly bit about and the hot thing about a rock mention is just getting that those those two there's last your mental seconds of ISP that that's where it's really quite difficult and those last seconds of ice P matter a lot for something that's ago the algorithm okay we're never just very little kind of advice news report so it's already continued push everything to to the limit in terms of past materials smart design everything high-efficiency engine specs all going to be pursuing it we don't to do though it is the official launch of your engines of structure such that your pilots got to rebuild them after returning medicine the shuttle cssmerr they were just really difficult to reuse require a lot of inspection and partial facelift in between flights so that you need to back up a little bit on chamber pressure excellent for a high combustion efficiency Oh right yeah well the everywhere SpaceX's with this pie well is in the mass ratio of the stages to record stage mass ratio that asila with the card version of Dalton I work the first pages throughout the 94% will about 94% propelled by mass and with the new zydeco tonight work for 696 in 1995 and with the sign improving too nicely but the current ability picture is recycle architecture so it's it doesn't have the HP advantage of a station question system and it's using our p1 you were talking I speak for the restated activex people through stage engine that's maybe around three times in 312 and for the vacuum version that's 3:42 3:45 the penalty for termination is much less in fact so so that's where we are so we definitely need a new engine for any kind of sending people to Mars but I think we can still hit the floor usability with the current engine is 500 I speed this map got to say that the Russian kerosene station Rochelle the daughter you see I just want to know if you said it Falcon nine to the maximum acceleration of six or seven G once it becomes open up with dragon dragon so is that human certified six seven G or a celebration exception typically when we're going through escape the dragon super great arrangements on Dragon will generate a minimum of six GS and depending upon the scenario actually that could grow up to eight G's kind of ensign how much but how much way you have loaded on it and and whether you're at altitude or not the rocket actually limits the thrust to 5 G's - and so the norm and normal but will actually bottle down or shut down engines in all scenario to limit the accelerations integrated functions and that's that set really by the comfort level of the satellites the 5 G's is like an app like this that's like a nice amusement park ride such about see that well we we don't like to talk about our customers tailors that's up to that so we recycle I receive our customers drink no doubt direct requests to do big load one thing I should point out though is that they've got about forty six or so witches on our manifest and not only the more actually on the website as most boys for the mark model and twelve visit NASA with the remainder of commercial so sometimes people are doing impression of that NASA is prepared about business but actually it's the biggest single customer but they were about a quarter he could happen only with knowledge and best insect infestation in Spanish how about some flights get to 2013 you know I don't think good anything example Hector of Lights we get growth next year people probably do for plants so let's get fiber for lucky and one of one of those mites would be the allows to be falcon occurs once and then expect three of these three flights of the operator tonight and then we might do father at that point we'll see but certainly how the rock is produced on very much you're grateful for that now the program generates random so we'll have the rockets on the ground and social expression of its silent already or there are any other constraints that one expects things recounted what happened the Rockets made imagine this boy tell us our last one of the questions from the people around on Twitter this question is from Kepler Cruiser is it what do you think is the next great challenge for rocket technology after we use busy well that's the big one usually that's a better reusability it every once we have read recently improve its really going to be very important and I think that's really the cutting board I would say of this everything that's on power that sort of like war crime maybe only key to another question and once you crack that problem this question came from however Sergey about is you took all my writing the paper you don't like it Carly Tesla you took by the space final SpaceX what you going to do next I think I just focus on SpaceX and Tesla for a while and I'd like to just slightly decrease you know and their work and I think I will do that when does this cash flow positive which hopefully is I'd suit and then I definitely do not want to run it very quickly so I have some ideas like the Hyperloop could be cooler than just having another little train and and I'll get motion at that plate this year box me on La Tercera want to bet it with the team at SpaceX as well people put it out there and then and then ask people to contribute ideas and see if there's a better way to be able to make it better kind of like a wiki where diverse and inclusive collaborative static design that people what we think is good way to go and that is anyone was fully personally great and I mean I think the potential to have supersonic electric jet and the best in our space so my question is in your feelings first super equinox estimation well that the first human mission to Mars is actually some collaboration of high Victorian Government and and then but I think we all see possibly that it has to be just emotional so that might take longer is a requirement martial law resources in scores yeah you have to get the money together to do it but I want to prepare for a scenario where either possible basically needs to happen one that's important I'm not automatically how it goes just better question these are over the next decade we very much force and a little technology little space there being an American companies will be taking a positive approach which I work with accompanies us gets up in space or we be more invested like an apologia competitor collaboration is up in the air is like our website not sure they want to collaborate so it's a nice competition is good so my guess would be this probably not collaboration but hopefully friendly competition so how it's working or collaborating where to overcome this lottery challenges or positive smiles about something sorry always beginning the class true I think it's going to disagree with me too bad I mean clearly we know but we know that two people can survive in deep space because your dad first went to the moon flipped one lives and listened in other words and I also know that people can live in zero-g for one here at the time I think the record is almost two years the plaintiff cases we had six months to a year which is the journey to act smart seating that need to exercise one way and make sure you don't have muscle and bone atrophy but I think you'll be okay in terms of shielding again it's the soloed radiate universe or so storm you soon as that promise stated as you need several meters of water you know to shield yourself and then somebody that's calculation for the volume of the sphere and that ends up being normos quantity border but you don't need to have that you can just have a column of water pointed at the Sun and make sure that you're mostly in front of that column and you should be okay so Sonny I think we had a case you should showstopper mr. silly on our showstopper and we'll figure out ways to make it better and better over time research business there will be it won't be ready there isn't now these were just focused on the things that I was talking about but there will be at some point yeah Matthew Taylor and molasses I wondered will you will find many of the people reacting right Sanga and what do you and this is sort of using everything first day yes every week is it right on food you know hi when I'm with the clothes it didn't seem to be compelling relative to simply having a slight increase in size the first stage so if you're going to add a bunch of complexity it needs to really pay off and at least numbers I've seen I have a lot of time seeing how it is payable I could be wrong about that and and if there is really a bigger bathroom with just being but I would be sort of it would have a big advantage to be reluctant to add essentially some sort of jet engine on top of the rocket engine problem hi this nucular from college I want to ask you what is your opinion on horizontal damages that's a tricky one well I think you what's an important reminder the the paillards forward advantage from canal which is is negligible this is perhaps not we have the custodians probably understand that most people that it seems like well you high up there and and so surely that's good and you're going it say 0.8 0.7 mark and so you got some speed and altitude you can use a higher expansion ratio on the nozzle doesn't all that add up to a meaningful improvement in pillar to orbit the answer is no it's not unfortunately it's quite a small negative so it gets maybe five Taylor towards something like that and then you've got this humongous play a review so which which is just like having a stage service they will approach basic standpoint would it make more sense to have a gigantic plane or increase the size the first stage by 5% I take two and then once you get your on a certain scale you just it just you just can't make a plane ticket the yeah and when you drop the vehicle or you drive the rocket your site on which you're not going the right direction as if you see what say all the sciences to comparison DeltaWing to do the sort of turning turn maneuver and then you have to speak wave or sad a bunch of maths and you're able to mostly be done tallying to go lastly to vertical velocity almost impossible and the net is really not so great and so although for example the an interesting example where the Texas besouro Pegasus as an obstacle Nets ultimately do not do any air which builds your noggin saw Spencer a programmer here is fairly confident the technologies that in the future to get people to Mars are interested in financial success what is the best age to say how do you make money going on well I think the that there is definitely a this is somewhat of money that will need to be spent establishing based on what is that basically getting the fundamentalist place votes or the activation cost prospects and that was true also the communiques politics it really took a significant fence to kind of get things started you really don't wanna be part of Jamestown so it took it took quite a quite a bit of effort to get the basics established before for the subsequent economic space sense so there is that of that investment and you know so what more we need to gather the money to do that but then what once this is the regular flights that's where I think it's important to get the cost down to happen you know range or receiver tomorrow is that I think there will be enough people that would revive that your cell list our models to have it be every small business case yeah I mean just need to be able to simply people on earth probably average about eight billion it was a century and the world on the pole is getting richer so so I think I think you have one in ten thousand people that go to 90 or 100 thousand how many people do you expect go on each journey to Mars well if getting you that you go with a smaller number of people and you have a higher proportion of cargo and emergency improvements in that kind of thing once you really got rolling you increase the number of people on the flight because you have supplies there so you wouldn't need to worry about they're carrying with you all the supplies for the journey they're staying services Macbeth so initially you start with maybe a handful people less than in destroyed Wars 90 here but then you go to 100 or more in steady-state down the way of life they took what little of the sauce give up the MC tianjin the breaches in the day by 1.5 billion has rust E is a really big boost available by us MC t is not an engine it's really doing one engine one major engine that's the reparation just about manage we talk about these as that next year but we're not doing another engine there made a a Russian - alright know what America Russians built and one less generation and I just asking and would you invest yourself can see space so I would not get watching I don't make sure that things are going well on earth you know like basically if I die and I want to make sure that things keep going the way they should sort of the company with that us have been what do you think my vice with respect to say Arianna is is that I think anywhere at the rem-pod is not really compared with velvet so the regular never be to to rethink your picture or el6 role which one most people are in success they all say but they break up about that picture I make sure it has going to say Iraqis just what do you think about edge technology especially and DC any operation viewpoint in that let's make sure that what stakes elevator sort of doesn't really appealing out sort of think of Charlie the chocolate factory space elevator the way powered space elevator suppose we need a lot of porches just to get you know the carbon energy broke up there in the first place and then this thing would be anywhere from there forty to sixty pounds four miles long that's that's long and nobody see a bullet but a little you know puts to a lot of carbon nanotubes I wasn't aware of so having something that's forty thousand miles long it's big Lee and then there other issues gives up being this big sweeper going through Kovac and any mortal debris that's going to be really good catching and it's going to be very laid-back so and it once you get to the end of the elevator you better do something you plug on place so you still eat rockets so really when the space elevator would be as potentially a means of reducing the cost of transporting propellant to orbit they fit in that letter I wrote it as as a long time optimization not anything worth working on right now friendly and sauna Rosie I saw any excess volts HSS tassels and crew capability so we chose our career we reached X to be ready to we expect to fly out first crewed mission in about three years we technically if someone were to still aboard the cargo version dragon that actually find don't give a came back bit if I may because in the pressurized volume actually maintained sea level pressure humidity we maintain the temperature very precisely because we're vital to transport experiments that have plants and mice and fish and that kind of thing to over to back so see you certainly stowaway and I do it but in order for it to be really safe enough everyone establish a new standard of safety beyond this participation at all and any excess priority so you go to you really want to have a Spanish escape capability and you want to have lots of flights on the belt and tested control you got anyone on board people when people work so so that the longleaf for us is before dragon version 2 is is the testing point escape system and that's what drives the three-year time frame yeah I'm very sorry what we love is inspiration I realize I was kid and I see some furniture in this many forms source of inspiration I very like dialogue words amendment dogs and Ozzie parsley and rubies are reliable the obvious stuff like Star Trek Star Wars but from an inspiration standpoint I think it's I just want you having read all those books and seen movies and many other books meetings you know I have just the idea of having a future where that didn't come true just it seemed terrible so that's why while you focusing on Mars rather than on the known are we happy to take it what's the matter let's go very good and if it bit as far as as as a making life multiplanetary you know I do sort of for logically one must have a second pilot and Penenberg also this is riveted to small rock orbiting Earth no atmosphere 28-day period per the rewards are lacking a lot of the key elements one more needs for creating a civilization it's but it's it's now descending to to the octave the doctor gets close to two written but kind of sucked over there and so that's why America is not there except it's worded even though it's a lot more interesting likely to be promoted practically were to effective so it gets really small when to establish a self-sustaining civilization and really grow into something significant really good and you know whiskey a scenario actually we have heard that you have redundancy where is it much harder stronger and plus if something clouds happen on earth very close to the Gerard Kelly O'Neil idea was that other countries showing is an oddity did you give any thought to building colonies as opposed but you know space colonies as opposed to building colonies on a planetary surface well the problem with space are these is all that can be done it's just it's that's doing it the hard way because in order to create a substantial space colony you have to transfer a mass from a planet or from some aspirate or something you have to move mass one phase to another so while you're a strong place to know that centrist courage where that mass is in the first place yeah any a sort of orbiting space colonies always in order to expand is always going to have to pull mass or somewhere and why do I bother doing it it seems like much part of its true that is good or the argument that would be to use asteroid Connie's got gravity wells you're going to have in March for an accretion yeah you're actually be harder to travel to the asteroid belt and it would be travel to Mars so if you're talking about people coming from it's going to be easier to go to Mars and whilst having the atmosphere use atmospheric braking as well and they just have an enormous number resources large muscles but it's not perfect but it was pretty good it's got 24 and a half hour rotational period it's going to co2 atmosphere which means that it will just have transparent no pressurize down in a pump you can actually grow plants in options well in fact it's recently turned out that Martian soil isn't is is non-toxic so you can actually grow plants in marswell just by getting it up and pressurizing this year to simplify you need will fertilize that expertise as as 2.7% something like that nitrogen in the atmosphere which means you can synthesize fertilizer as well so a pretty good option let's say that the only option - at this point I'll ask one final question from the air crispy this question is from Chris Daly's if spacebar becomes successful to general public what will it need to the idea what it is to be human I think what we make with horses and yeah Kathy look really great because I think that would make for a very exciting future because we start off with the establishing base Mars and eventually spread out to the rest the solar system and incite cynic shifts to other star systems and you know what you got a pilot and a large base on Mars a lot of travel between pilots that's great forcing function for the improvements of space transport technology and I think we'll see the rapid improvement and all sorts of inventions that were just in fact vision today if I finish the questions notices by announcer and ten must we've got time for two or three more questions people come to us that's question yes this is more of a commercial question Wendy's what kind of business for do you see or project within SpaceX until this time we have will be able you can sell them as an honest review panel party well the at least in the short to medium term we would operate them but I'm not opposed to you selling them and having others operate them it is require some additional effort to to be able to hand off something to so somebody else can use it but I think I think long term it probably will be an airline type model and short to medium a little while remains of things similar to an operative of us always tricky I mean like if you have someone in the donors of air flight what do you market forecasts I mean they're going to be wildly wrong probably on the low side you're going to probably most optimistic people early days of aviation would seem like pessimists today you're an organ often playing birds are quite Ribbit's personally but you don't upgrade over Centauri well though does make sense having eyes for little piece of hair engines they've got nervous ages even with light bulbs you dismiss the space analyzer I love it but if he isn't yeah do we have the SpaceX have any here other stations that are a little importance even if you're wrong okay I think liquid cool rock sorry about so yeah I think I think there's some for each planetary transports having high efficiency high thrust ion drives it can be helpful and yeah so it's this roof I think that's something you want to do anyways if you had a big spacecraft you love excess power generation might as well you know scrap a man can die after that and the Asians question of how what's what's your efficiently convert power to to thrust and that's one thing and then potentially something like an electromagnetic sail would be pretty cool I think that that would be kind of neat so we all know nucleoside is I think that's tough it's really tough taking up with a lot of you know nuclear fuel in a rocket very few of our time with establishing nuclear power stations I do like one that's flying over your head in my crash I mean we really think that's a good idea but we're in the minority I owe you an apology mr. fun question a video you showed on your plans for usability it reminded me of again Wilson sea salt outer space program and you had no ethical Kerbal space where I could give you back my Kerbal okay it's Pacey very fun game it does exactly what Dalida know okay last question and the city vote from astron I understand that monitoring present the Boston team of making Orion spacecraft if you have all designed engine five and you sign my hello yourself in hell yeah thundering is that okay to thank or anything do you think that way and how much do you actually make it happen number two is it open to a year I think critical diversion is sensible and will really read your Steve look at it say okay if we made it pastels how much you're positive somebody else made it how much for cost and then go with one that is more more efficient I mean that's really how I operate and that's resulted in I don't know seventy eight seventy plus percent depending on how you count of my mask I've lost 70 plus percent of the rocket is built from raw material at space things I mean I actually would like to do less and as well as photos that we want to always we could find more of more efficient suppliers to great two floats in that cellar okay think of it at this point in our they will not be questioned houses are talking about interactive games

https://youtu.be/L-s_3b5fRd8

welcome to foundation a show where we profile some of the world's most interesting entrepreneurs for more episodes check out foundation kr today we're talking to Elon Musk a founder at Tesla SpaceX and PayPal let's go talk to so let's start the beginning where'd you grow up I was born in South Africa Olivia I was 17 and then truck moved by myself trigger the whole story oh I've got here okay very beginning sure so yeah it's born in Pretoria South Africa lived it lived in Johannesburg and Durban as well I was able to travel to a few countries growing up within Africa and around the world went to the US when I was I don't know tannish or something like that and I read a lot of comics and books and stuff and or seams and stuff and things on technology and always seemed like when there's cool technology or things happening it was kind of in United States so my goal as a kid was to try to get to get to America basically what were your favorite comics well I write I read every comic in the store and I like obviously the the Batman Superman stuff I mean the green lanten Iron Man I got a Nazi Iron Man first cousin people think uh but I did think that was pretty cool one and but I read everything like Doctor Strange you know just if there was a comic on the rack I read it awesome yeah and when did you decide to get into computers of Technology did you started coding or was it is it just a lot a lot of construction can you still hear okay okay so you start yeah so when I was about 10 years old I was I went into store in South Africa and saw a Commodore vic-20 and Miss Piggy I was nine years old and isomeric summer at that time and I thought this is like you know the most awesome thing I'd ever seen and you could like make this write computer programs and make games and I played you know Atari and other things for other games consoles when I was like maybe six or seven the idea of being able to like create game stuff it was really exciting and so I got that was my first computer is the Commodore vic-20 I think it had like 8 K of memory and then what led you into entrepreneurship was it something that you always knew that you want to be an entrepreneur and start to start something on your own or did you stumble into it yeah I know I wouldn't say that I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur I I actually wasn't sure what I wanted to be to do growing up and I think at one point I thought well I like inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do but I wasn't really sure if that meant starting a company or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff and in fact when I first came up to Silicon Valley it was through a degress sighs at Stanford in applied physics material science and then I I saw this in 95 I kind of thought the internet would be something that would change the world in a major way and I want to be part of it and actually what I what I first try to do was I try to get a job at Netscape so I wouldn't actually try to start a company I try to get a job at Netscape and then let him work out now I didn't get any I didn't get any reply so I I am I mean I had a physics and economics degree or physics and business degree from Wharton and I was doing grad studies and apply pest control science and I I guess that you know I didn't have a computer science degree or or several years working at a software company for whatever reason I didn't get a reply from this gap and I actually tried hanging out in the lobby but I was I was too shy to talk to anyone so it's just like studying the lobby and I and then I could walk in did you have your resume with you or was it yeah actually it was pretty embarrassing I was just sort of standing there trying to see if there's someone I could talk to and then I just couldn't I couldn't it was I was too scared to talk to anyone so that left amazing so then you went on to do what from that point I so now I just I was writing software that summer and it got to the start of the quarter for Stanford I had to make a decision so I decided gone deferment so I figure if I start a company and it doesn't work then I can always go back to grad school sure it's just you know talk to the chairman of the department and he let me go on deferment and I said I'll probably be back in six months and he said probably never going to hear from me again and he was correct I've never spoke to him since so so yeah so sort of company with my brother and a friend of mine Greg Curry who and and the three of us created zip to which where the initial idea was to create software that could help bring the media companies online so we helped in a small way bring companies like that like New York Times Hearst Knight Ridder and and so forth bring them online because they weren't actually always online people don't realize that well you the the CEO at the time or did you give that role to someone else yeah I started off being the CEO so CEO for probably the first year and then but but after we got VC funding the venture capitalists wanted to hire a professional CEO is that frustrating or were you were you like I just this is over my head I'm ready to give up this role to someone else I at the time I thought it was a good idea because I don't really know what I was doing and I figured they would hire someone who'd be awake really good and that person would increase the chances of success the company and so that seemed like a good thing and then I could work on software and kind of product direction and that's that's what I like doing so that seemed like a great thing in retrospect I think that that wasn't the best thing because that the person that was hired in my opinion was actually not that great so so I think yeah I mean I think quite frankly the company succeeded in spite of that person not because of them what you know starting a company for the first time is very challenging for a lot of people they don't even know where to begin you must have run into a lot of I mean we all made mistakes is starting our first company as far as hiring like you said the people you bring in like CEO the replaced you yeah did you surround yourself with mentors how did you who did you look to for advice I read a lot of books and talked to lots of people I didn't have any any one person who was a mentor but I I always look for feedback from from people around me and feedback from historical context so you know which is books basically mm-hm so that's any any book stand out is something that was like something that you really relied upon or well they're just general business books or I don't read actually very many journal business books but I I like two biographies and autobiographies I think those are pretty helpful so I like and actually some really business solo like something like Franklin's both his autobiography and say the biography that's recently been written by a buyer or not that recently but in I guess five or ten years ago in and written the biography by Isaacson on on the frankness really good and you can sort of see how he kind of cuz he was an entrepreneur I mean he sort of started from nothing actually just like a runaway kid basically and created his running business and sort of how he went about doing that and and then over time go sit at science and politics so that I would say certainly he's one of the people I most admire like in Franklin is pretty awesome but they're not I think it's also worth reading books on scientists and engineers Tesla obviously you hear about that Tesla Museum that they're having yeah I actually contributed some funding to to save the land oh that's great yeah awesome yeah that's a very cool thing to oatmeal did yeah but it was pretty cool I like I like the way that they put it too it looks like let's have a go dentist Museum yeah tourism so so forward a little bit you know you obviously did PayPal that was very successful and then at some point in time you're like I'm gonna do something crazy something that's never been done before with Tesla and the space related stuff into yeah why take on such huge very ambitious type projects I mean did you have ever have a feeling like this might not work oh yeah absolutely well so this kind of goes back to college where I start to figure out what are the things that would most affect the future of humanity and the things that I thought would most affect future would be that with the Internet sustainable energy which is both production and consumption and so effectively Seoul the cities like production Tesla's consumption in a sustainable way and then also space exploration and specifically making life multiplanetary now I didn't expect at the time to be involved in all those areas but those just areas that I thought would would most affect the future and as it turned out I've been fortunate enough to be involved in those areas but that's the thread that connects them it's like it's kind of my best guess at what would most likely affect the future it had been the biggest way and and we're not when I first thought about doing something in space but the thing I was going to do was actually going to be a kind of philanthropic mission to to Mars to land a small greenhouse in the surface of Mars which was seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel that you hydrate upon landing you have this little greenhouse on on Mars and you have this great shot of green plants on a red background and the public tester spent risk respond to precedents and superlatives so I thought that would people get people really excited about setting life to Mars and and my expectation when that project would be 100 percent loss because you know I wouldn't expect maybe you can make a little bit back on advertising or sponsorship or something but but it would be essentially a complete lungs so starting at a rocket company was necessarily be have a greater what likely outcome than 0% financial return right but at the beginning of starting SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure and how about Tesla Motors I walk me through your process of wine one something like that yeah so in terms of an electric car company the at first I thought that there would be no need to do an electric car company startup because California regulations basically forced General Motors to create the bulbs or rather the ev1 I should say so so when General has had the ev1 I thought hey this is great biggest car company the world is making electric car told the ev1 that would apply if is going to be an e b234 right you know and they killed that project off that right they did yeah and that was very unwise I mean it's sort of really short-sighted I think action I mean retrospect that seems perhaps obvious but at the time not only that they canceled the project they forcibly removed the eveyone's that they've given out and which they only gave out on lease they removed them from from customers against their wishes took the cars and crushed them in a yard so that they could never be used a game and the the customers whose cars had been taken away that tried legal action to try to I try to sue General Motors to keep their car they actually had a candlelit vigil at the at the yard where the cause got crushed and it's like you know wins last time there's a candle at vigil for for a product that's pretty ridiculous right and let alone a General Motors product I mean you have to be the passion the limitation right if you yeah actually pretty pretty tone-deaf to - you don't need to run a customer's you don't need to do a customer survey to figure out that that that at least some number of people what the cars if they are treating it like somebody's being sent as a dad only you know and yeah so when I saw that I was like holy crap you know something this is not going to happen and so that will there really needs to be a new car company that comes in and shows that it can be done and the key thing that needed to be done was to show that you can make an electric car that was good-looking high performance long range and and then if you made such a car that people would buy it that they didn't have some fundamental affinity for gasoline so that's um what do you get started you have the capital to obviously put into something on your adventure but you know you're sitting there and you're like okay I want to do this like yeah but my initial subway well my initial thought was that I did not want to run to create an electric car company and run it myself because of running SpaceX and the idea of running two companies that's a lot of work and you know just like imagine if somebody had to pretty demanding jobs and they're not oh you had one really demand job now you got to do two of them it's you know it kind of takes the fun away and you know it's makes a pretty pretty arduous yeah the social life goes away there's something else so something's got to give yeah so my initial thought was okay I'll I'll hire some people and work work with a team and I'll work I'll just sort of work on the park design and so make it overall strategy or something but I'll leave the day-to-day operations to a CEO that I'd hire so unfortunately that didn't work out I actually tried hiring a couple of CEOs and I guess I don't know I couldn't find the right person and and so Inuk then came to 2008 I was kind of co-ceo from 2007 in 2007 2000 eight while while trying to bring up you know as some other people up to speed and then when the market fell apart this is the financial market elrod and the Connery called Parton in 2008 and I had a choice of like basically commit all of my remaining resources to Tesla or it's going to die for sure and I thought okay if I'm going to do that then I got a bike the bullets and run the company because it's just too much at stake you know if got all your chips on on the table you've got to play the hand yourself yeah why do you why do other car companies just really suck like a lot of their designs are horrible but they're not going to consumers there's no like your to seem like obviously bad I mean oh yeah they seem obviously almost I look at them and you're the first company I feel has that kind of Apple ask a design aesthetic you know like right why do other car companies just make horrible looking cars the outside blows my mind I don't know how to it because it just seems like you know you can take a body panel and you can stamp it with that shape with this shape or that shape and yet they chose they choose to do the bad shape but it costs the same either way right I mean there are some things that cost a little more in terms of the quality materials and the you know you're getting things really to fit accurately and so the few things that cost more of a lot of it doesn't you can make an ugly expensive car you can making you know a good-looking expensive car and actually the same goes oh I think you can make a affordable good-looking car or or an ugly looking car and I think the cost differences are really actually relatively small and I mean I I don't know it just I think maybe there's some of logic all-comers just trapped in there within their own history did you do like did you have focus groups where you decide on the decision or was it very much I like the way that looks let's go with that no it's just literally just a series of weekly iterations with with the design team hmm ah so just there every every Friday afternoon I meet with the fronts and the design team and we go over the every nuance of the car every every bumper every curve every little tiny piece of the car what's right what's wrong and then that has to be filtered against you know the engineering needs and the economic needs and regulatory requirements so it's a really there's a lot of constraints yeah and you can't just make a car any old shape you want and still achieve it meet all the regulatory requirements b5 stock crash safe and all that sir I just requires a lot of iterative activity and caring about every millimeter of the car and that's that's or results a good product so I know we have limited time I want to jump towards the future talk to me about this Hyperloop I think um yeah so the the Hyperloop III I need to set aside some time to actually write down some of the details and I want to make sure that I don't say something completely stupid so hey some I'm I'm spending time with the both the SpaceX aerodynamics team and the Tesla rep nameks team just to make sure that whatever whatever I put out there really will work we're talking train here or is this just an alternative something that we haven't thought of before yeah I think it's it's genuinely it would genuinely be a new mode of transport hmm since I'm maybe a I think the one way to think of it is like it's it's kind of like a ground-based Concord Wow like if you could make something go as fast as a Concord on the ground how would you do that right would you require rails in that sense or I mean is it just you'll see no actually I think rails I'm not needed awesome yeah so I mean do you have a lot of ideas like this is where you have a schedule or ideas then you know - time to implement yeah I think so is it something where where do you come up with your best ideas are you on vacation are you kind of just like in the middle of the night you wake up and start drawing things down or oh you know this sounds really cliche but like the shower is probably like you know wake up and go shower in the morning and I think actually what's really happened is kind of stuff is populated in the subconscious right and it's not really occurring the shower but you're kind of getting the results of last night's you know computation basically right and then sometimes it's it's a late at night if I can't sleep and there's something bothering me then it'll occur then and it went one one key idea for a super sonic vertical takeoff and landing electric plane it could to me at Burning Man a lot of good ideas came out of burning yeah exactly absolutely so suddenly it's a very very creative place so so yes yes that's a shower Burning Man awesome one last question I always ask of everyone that I interview for the new entrepreneurs are just getting started out there what's one piece of advice that you would always recommend to an entrepreneur something that you've learned over the years that they can take with them in their new venture and then something you'd completely avoid like something that you really screwed up on that you'd never do again um okay sure so I think in terms of advice I think it's very important to to seek out to actively seek out and listen very carefully to negative feedback and this is something that people tend to avoid because it's painful yeah but but I think this is a very common mistake is to to not actively seek out and listen to negative feed but do you do that you go into forums you go into Twitter like what are your areas where you go to look for feedback on let's say the Tesla well it's like everyone I talk to is in fact when when friends get a product I say look I don't tell me what you like tell me what you don't like right and and because otherwise your friend is not going to tell you what he doesn't like right this kid is going to say oh I love this and that and then and leave out the this is the stuff I don't like list because he wants to be your friend one you know it doesn't want to offend you so so you really need to to sort of coax negative feedback and you should you know that if somebody's your is your friend or at least not your enemy and they're giving you negative feedback then that may be wrong but it's coming from a good place and sometimes even your enemies could be a good negative feedback yeah only so so I think that's important pihl's just feel like positive feedback like water off a duck's back that's like you know really underweight that and overweight negative feedback and then I think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy so the normal way that we conduct our lives is we we we reason by analogy it's we're doing this because it's like something else that was done or it's like what other people are doing me to type ideas yeah it's like yeah slight iteration yeah on a theme and and and it's because it's it's it's kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles but by first principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and and say okay what do we sure is true or sure as possible is true and then reason up from there that takes a lot more mental energy you an example that like what's one thing that you've done that on that you feels work for you sure so somebody could say in fact people do that battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they'll always be because that's the way they've been in the past you're like well no that's that's pretty dumb you know because if if you apply that reasoning to anything new that then you wouldn't be able to ever get to that new thing right so you know it's like you can't say oh you know horses nobody wants a car because horses are great and we're used to them and they can eat grass there's lots of grass all over the place and you know there's not like a there's no gasoline if you booking by so people are never going to it never get ever going to get parts right the people did say that and and for batteries they would say oh it's going to cost you know the historically its cost six $600 $600 per kilowatt hour and so it's not going to be much better than that in the future and you say no okay what what are the batteries made of so the first principles would be say okay what are the material constituents of the batteries what is the spot market value of the material constituents so you can say okay it's got cobalt nickel aluminum carbon and some polymers for separation and steel can so break that down on a material basis and say okay what if we bought that in london metal exchange what would each of those things cost like oh jeez it's like eighty dollars per kilowatt hour so clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much much cheaper than anyone realizes is that your big challenge at Tesla is is battery yeah it's it's the single biggest item but it's right now it is not it's not it's not any kind of obstacle to us it did a whole bunch of little issues that are kind of trivial that are challenges when you're making a new product because there are several thousand unique in the car 90% of them are fine 5% them are slightly problematic 3% of 4% are problematic and 1% are extremely problematic but you cannot ship a car that is 99% complete it's not like software you can just stable functionality but with a car you know you can't ship it without like a steering wheel or like without backseat or something like that yeah well thanks for being on the show you're a huge inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs out there so I know they're gonna enjoy this and thanks for having us in your factory here going awesome so it's good thanks thanks coming back

https://youtu.be/QLK_oIEJ860

hi I'm Neil and musk I'm the co-founder of Tesla SpaceX PayPal and zip - I currently run Tesla and SpaceX and I'm chairman of Solar City and I'm here to answer some reader questions the first question is how did I break into the business world well I started zip2 instead of going to graduate school at Stanford so I originally came out to California to do a PhD at Stanford in retail science and Applied Physics and basically working on advanced capacitors for use in electric vehicles so I had a long-standing interest in sustainable transport and sustainable energy in general and I came out in 95 and then started working on some internet software the summer of 95 and decided to defer grad studies at at Stanford and try starting an Internet company and it wasn't from the standpoint of actually sort of wanting to be an entrepreneur necessarily but I actually applied to Netscape at the time but they didn't respond to me so that was the only internet company that I was aware of so liking any other net company I had to make my own and that's what resulted in in zip - and zip - both soft internet software for newspapers and other media companies so had New York Times knight-ridder Hearst and a bunch of others as investors and customers so essentially is up - helped bring the the media companies online in the early days so that was that was my start and in business I guess but really I think myself is more kind of a like an engineer who been in order to do the event the things that out that I want to and create them that I have to do the company as well so I'm somewhat reluctantly the the CEO not my preference actually how was i involved in co-founding PayPal so the PayPal story is quite complicated even though it took place over the relatively short period of time it was about roughly three and a half years from the creation of company to it being sold to to eBay in mid-2002 and PayPal was created from the merger of two companies XCOM which I found it and con Finity which was founded by Peter Thiel Max Levchin so we kind of combined our resources in early 2000 and both companies were only about a year old at the time and then we were able to submit I think sort of pooling our resources were able to survive the dot-com implosion of late 2000 and then ultimately go public in early 2002 and then have a successful sale to eBay later that year that's a summarizing crazy amount of stuff that happened over that period of time what are your thoughts on PayPal being criticized for stealing account numbers hidden fees and not being a reliable money transfer system well there's definitely lots of things that should be fixed about PayPal but unfortunately since I am no you know I have not been part of the company since 2002 it's difficult for me to do do things about about people I think this like a lot of functionality that should be added and a lot of things corrected and there's still errors in the PayPal system like most mistakes and structure that that I put there and you know I really you know there's no actual good reason for them being there I just didn't have enough time to kind of fix them and I certainly think the fees are too high and there should be much more functionality added to the system and an overall PayPal has the opportunity to become the financial you know the financial services company that that addresses everything that the person needs and PayPal could really quite quickly become largest consumer bank in the world I think you just need to take away the reasons that people remove money from the PayPal account and then it's like why not just use it for everything so and and somewhat it's somewhat counterintuitive but I think if you reduce the fees in the PayPal system then the revenue will be greater because more people will use it question 4 is how did SpaceX come to be and what are the long-term goals well the reason for SpaceX quit and the full form full company name is SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies the the reason for SpaceX is to or the goal of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary or at least get us you know make progress in that direction with seeing that I'm not asserting that we we will develop all those technologies but we're going to try and and at least advance the cause of space exploration as much as possible the the key invention that needs that someone needs to come up with whether it's SpaceX or or another company is a fully and rapidly reusable orbit class rocket this is an extremely difficult thing to invent because Earth's gravity is quite strong even for an expendable rocket if you use the most advanced materials and advanced design techniques and get super efficient you typically would get two to three percent of your liftoff weight to open that's a pretty small number and if you would just make a few mistakes in the design of the you will get nothing to open at all and that's why only a few countries have reached orbit just a handful and so so then if you say well now let's make it a fully reusable system then you have to take into account all of the increased weight of to make the system more robust to withstand the rigors of reentry you have to have heat shields you have to have something that's going to bring the rocket back to the launch pad and then be able to land it so whether it's parachutes or propulsive landing and all these things add a lot of weight and in the past when people try to make a fully reusable system they've gotten sort of partway and then had and then basically cancelled the effort because they realized they would get negative Paylor to orbit anyway that's that that's what SpaceX is really trying to achieve long term and I think I think we've got a good shot at achieving that and some people say might say well why I care about reusability well if you think of any motor transport it will consider whether it would get any use if it was not reusable whether it's a horse or bicycle plane car and if you look at the cost of a falcon 9 rocket to build the Rockets maybe about 50 million dollars but the cost the propellant of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only $200,000 for launch so that's only about 0.3% of the cost of the of the other vehicle so just like a plane how much does the cost how much does the plane cost and how much does the fuel cost obviously fuel is quite small compared to the cost of plane it's the same with rockets so if if someone can invent a fully reusable rocket and to be precise needs to be fully and rapidly reusable I like like a plane then the cost of launch would drop by about a hundred that that's pretty significant maybe more than 100 so and that that's a critical factor if life is ever to expand beyond Earth and become multiplanetary because he figure there's got to be ultimately we would have to transport millions of people and millions of tons of cargo and if if Rockets were not reusable well you just simply wouldn't be able to make I think it even make enough Rockets and where the discarded stages we're being dropped and you there'd be a small island of discarded stages just in terms of sheer number of expanded rocket stages so I think it's pretty pretty intuitive that this is what has to happen and and and someone SpaceX or or some other company has to make this this pivotal invention and it really is it's something that will shift the entire future of life as we know it if if that's invented because you know life has been confined to earth for four billion years and that's a long time and you know if if there's no if no wonder if life does not become multiplanetary it will eventually go extinct on earth if for nothing if one or other reason then then gradual expansion of the Sun here that sort of a lengthy answer there how did Tesla come to fruition all of these stories are quite long stories so I'm trying to condense them to relatively short answers well as I mentioned earlier I've had a long-standing interest in electric cars because I think that's the way to achieve sustainable transport and you know that's the original reason I came out to California was to study to try to develop energy storage mechanisms for for electric vehicles and I guess it was in 2003 I got a call from a JB Straubel and another guy who wanted to meet and talk about space stuff and then during that conversation they will also have him dimension electric cars because of both there were they're pretty sure certain electric vehicles and they mentioned a company called AC propulsion if we're in Southern California that had developed a kind of a prototype electric sports car with really good statistics like zero to 60 in under four seconds turn 50 mile range now it was just a primitive kit car so basically taking a kit gasoline sports car added lithium-ion batteries to it and achieved that performance so I've got a demo in the car it's like whoa this is great and so I try to convince the AC propulsion to commercialize the the sports car but they were not interested in doing so and eventually after not being able to convince them for several months I said okay look if if you guys don't do it then then I'm gonna you know then I'd like to try to commercialize electric sports cars because I think that you know we really need to show that you can make a compelling electric car and then they said well if you know if you're going to do that then let's connect you up with a few other people so I connect up with JB Straubel and then a couple other guys Martin Eberhard marked happening and Enright and we created Tesla Motors to essentially commercialize the t that the T zero which was the AC propulsion car and yeah and up see started that company with a lot of naivete about what it takes to create a car company and pretty much everything went wrong so ultimately I think it took five times the amount of capital that we thought it would to bring the Tesla Roadster to market and get it up to an iron out the issues it's a pretty capital intensive business and I mean that that's why if you look at the car companies that exist in the country today in General Motors Ford and Chrysler all get started a hundred years ago roughly so clearly it is not an industry conducive to startups but at this point Tesla is actually doing pretty well I would love it a couple thousand roadsters in over 30 countries customers seem pretty happy with that and were at a very advanced stage with the Model S sedan which is due to come out around the middle of next year so that's I feel really good about boy things are with Tesla well Tesla cars ever become affordable to the middle class well with with the with the Model S sedan we're able to significantly improve the affordability of cars because we're going from the road said about $100,000 to the Model S which is started as a starting price of about $50,000 so it's a big step sort of you know it's hat it's half the cost and the functionality is much broader because it's it's designed to carry up to seven people the tremendous amount of cargo space five-star crash rating great ride and handling it's really going to be a super great car I mean I go with the Model S is our aspiration with the Model S is to make the best car of any kind and not just the best electric car then the third generation beyond the Model S that that's where we're aiming to get to about a thirty thousand dollar car and and that hopefully in about four years or so maybe five years old depends on how well things go in the next few years but but certainly that the goal of Tesla from the beginning has been to make mass-market cars it's just that we didn't really have a big enough factory or enough money to to do that so we're kind of earning our way there in the shortest paths possible which is you know first generation being expensive low volume second generation with the Model S being mid-price mid volume and then the third generation being low price high volume what's your role at SolarCity and what are you working on there at present so that's all Cydia I'm the chairman of the board and largest shareholder but fortunately I do not have to be there day to day I just show up for the board meetings and hear the good news that's that's basically what I do at Solar City the cofounders there Linda and Peter I've really deserve the credit for making Solar City what it is and they've done done an amazing job so Cities is now the largest provider of solar powered systems in the country and yeah it's awesome there's growing like gangbusters and very simple goal which is to make solar power as affordable and widespread as possible and that they're growing the company about as fast so I think it's possible to grow a company so it's going really really well if you could clone yourself and take on one or two more big issues aside from renewable energy environmental cleanness and space exploration what would they be well there's there's a couple of things that well this may be three ideas that I have that I would I'd like to execute on at some point you know but without affecting what a do it Tesla and SpaceX I think I think it's possible to create a much better airplane that I have a design in mind for a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic electric jet that kind of combines would've learnt at SpaceX and Tesla because sort of SpaceX has got the aerospace side of things and Tesla's got the electric powertrain side I think that would be a really cool vehicle to have in the world because you wouldn't need big runways and you get places fast if you're awfully quiet and and of course it would be very low cost to operate and and good for the environment moment that's that's one idea and another is what that sounds kind of mundane but pre fabricated metal sections for creating a double-decker highway and living in LA this is something that I've gotten I've had a lot of opportunity to think about and it's a bit tricky too if you want to increase throughput on a highway because you want to be able to do it ideally without affecting the existing traffic as the current construction on the 405 is is can be very very annoying and and and then when that they're widening the 405 right now and it'll be nice to have that extra lane but in the meantime we often have like - one lane so I think if you could have if you really think of double-decker agree way as the double-decker is the wrong word because I'm actually thinking of kind of like a box section down the center divider with an elaine on the bottom lane on the top and but but then you know just created as prefabricated section so you can drop it in place like a Lego system I think that would be really cool somebody should do that and then the third thing is like I think the fusion problem is probably easier than people think it is and if by this I'm talking about magnetically confined fusion it was so that's a problem which gets easier as you as you scale it up because you get like a surface-to-volume advantage so it seems like a pretty obvious thing that you could if you made it big you know if you could have a really effective make- sort of McNelly magnetically confined fusion reactor that's probably out the easiest problem to solve in relative or this you could do like a thorium fission reactor or better fission reactors so it's maybe it's not the maybe it's better to do better fission reactors but but I think fission does have a bit of a marketing problem so and Fusion is the energy forever solution so that's those are the interesting things that I can think of to what do I had tribute my drive to take on such large issues I want to be involved in issues that will have a significant effect on the future and yeah let's see I guess I can probably trace that back to when I was a teenager and I was trying to figure out what's the meaning of life and they didn't seem to any good answer so it seemed like well then in the absence of having a good answer then we should try to expand the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better appreciate the nature of the problem that we're trying to solve and figure out what questions to ask just like hit the track his guide to the galaxy I dug less Adams he you know he really hit the nail on the head that the really tough part is figuring out what questions to ask once you have a properly phrased question the answer is comparatively easy so so if we're gonna do that then we obviously want to maximize the likely lifespan of humanity and expand beyond Earth and you just sort of get a better understanding the universe so that's so I just I thought I would get involved in things that would do that what future propulsion techniques will drive space exploration in the future well so he kissed sort of ironic thing which is I think I think that essentially all modes of transport Walker fully electric except for rockets and that the problem with with with getting out of Earth's gravity well is that it's very difficult to escape Newton's third law which is that you kind of need to react against something or you know you need to you need to expel matter in order to have the opposite reaction and have that momentum transfer such that you can move I mean there are sort of some ideas about having space elevators and that kind of thing but I I don't I don't think those are likely to be successful so you you you do need chemical propulsion but I think that you would consider Lee improve on the chemical propulsion that's been done thus far and I think probably a very high efficiency light hydrocarbon engine that uses predominantly methane it's probably a good way to go and that's something SpaceX will like will end up working on once you get into space orange orbit should say then there are an interesting potential okay I think having high-power ion drives are probably a good thing for interplanetary transport and and there's some symmetry singing ideas about having solar sails or sort of solar electromagnetic sails that those could be this could be interesting ways to go but I think I think if we can establish a base on Mars and that and that that will then create a forcing function to improve space transportation technologies and all sorts of things that we don't really know about today will get invented in the future but you kind of need that forcing function just like before there was a need to cross the Atlantic there wasn't really a forcing function to improve ships but once there was the United States was there then there was a you know a big incentive to improve shipping technology across the Atlantic and actually that that's the brings you back to the reusability thing you know if ships had not been reusable in the days of American Colonization then the United States would not exist all right so the next question is has your definition of a good idea for a startup or innovation changed in the past five to seven years no not really I think it's pretty much the same same idea you if you're going to create a company you have to come up with a product or service that would that you think will be compelling that would you know serve some need and then really a great company has just built around a great product or service that's the whole purpose of a company is to propagate that product or service and put it in the hands of people who would find it useful and yeah so I think that's that's the main thing is try to try to think the most useful thing you could do for your fellow human things and and then and then try then a company is in the process of scaling that up and in scope you're increasing in bed in scope and scale with the downturn of the economy obviously is less likely to invest in startups I think I'm not sure what the how much venture capital is being invested right now I think it's but actually I don't even know if it's a big change but but there is a lot of bench capital being invested so I I think I think this this this little plenty of venture capital for good ideas and I think the best way to attract major capital is to try to come up with a demonstration of whatever purpose it is and ideally take that as far as you can just you know see if you can actually sell that to real customers and and start generating some momentum and then if the further along you can get with that then the more likely you are to get funding what's the best advice you have for aspiring entrepreneurs well I think starting companies is a very tough thing there's a friend of mine bully who's his phrases you know starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass so I you should certainly expect that it was gonna be very hard it's gonna be harder than getting a job somewhere it bye-bye pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you've invested or your friends would invest that is pretty high I mean that's just those are just basic facts so I if you don't mind things being really hard and in high risk then starting a company is is a good idea otherwise it's it's probably unwise and will certainly stress you out so I think you have to be pretty pretty driven to make it happen otherwise you will just make yourself miserable and then then the in in creating company as I said a moment ago it's just you just want to really say how do you make the best product or service possible you know companies that don't make good products or service services just shouldn't exist you know that's I think that's just pretty illogical how do you stay focused motivated and maintain enthusiasm where things don't go the way you had hoped you know I think my sort of drive to get it done is somewhat disconnected from hope enthusiasm or anything else I just I actually just don't care about hope or enthusiasm motivation they just give ever give it everything I've got irrespective of what the circumstances may be you know there yeah you just you just keep going and get it done how do you find balance in your life being involved in so many companies well I think valid terms of what somebody's definition of balance is if I think my life would be very unbalanced by most people's definition since I worked quite a lot and you know I've probably put in between 80 and 100 hours a week of work which is which is a lot and yeah so and then there but most of my remaining waking out is less spent with my kids so that's that's my life I wouldn't I would say it's roughly unbalanced so the great thing about having something like an iPhone Blackberry or whatever is that you can kind of intermix activities so I can kind of view with my kids and on email at the same time is that they don't require constant attention what are a couple of inventions you expect to change the world in the coming years well I I think the the biggest problem terrestrial problem that that earth basis is the sustainable energy problem and it's soso I think there's gonna be a number of breakthroughs in that arena because they well they kind of have to be but I think that I think there will be as as I say necessity is the mother of invention so I would expect to see significant breakthroughs in energy storage and that's probably most maybe the biggest area probably breakthroughs in energy generation as well although I actually think that there have been some pretty big breakthroughs in solar power in fact a lot of people are unaware of the fact that the cost of solar panels has dropped by a factor of basically almost four so it certainly three but almost four over the last five years that's a massive massive reduction I classify that as breakthrough and yeah there's going to be huge breakthroughs in genetics and in decoding DNA and and then also writing DNA so once you've read DNA you and you figure out where's the the error you want it you want to sort of write the corrective code I mean DNA is basically firmware so you know if you incur if it if there's a disease that somebody has and it's genetic and you could sort of fix that and you think we're may be able to fix sort of Alzheimers and I so expect there's going to be a lot of write throughs in it in the genetics area that that's that's you that that's gonna be really really huge of course the lot of the biggest breakthroughs are going to be difficult to anticipate in advance yeah but probably the whoppers are energy you know energy transport and and genetics probably there'll probably be some really big breakthroughs in understanding of the human mind and consciousness as well so how did it feel to have Ironman based on you well I should point out that Ironman was only partially based on me because you know I've got five kids and I'm men didn't never sort of swinging bachelor so but I guess it's kind of cool and we've got a an Ironman statue that was donated by to space expert by Jon Favreau signed by the whole cast including Scarlett Johansson everything was kind of cool it's so yeah that's pretty cool I guess what happened to the top gear debacle over the Tesla Roadster and this is basically where Top Gear falsely implied that the Tesla Roadster had run out of energy work when they tested it which which it didn't in fact the whole vehicle is a detailed computer lock so we can see it and and and then also we when we dropped the car off one of our guys happen to see a script sitting on the table it already dropped the car off and so reading through the script and in the script the car breaks down like wait a second you wrote the script before we even gave you the car so there's something wrong wrong about that and you wouldn't think it was we were hoping it wouldn't be that bad but then when we did the test IPO Roadshow we just got one investor after another asking us why our car broke down on Top Gear particularly in Europe every investor we've met with in Europe asks us why our car broke down I was like well this is ridiculous so and then to add salt through and a Top Gear just kept repeating that episode so who knows how the lawsuit will go but it's it's slow working its way through the British courts and a demands are pretty simple it's just like stop playing that falsely there's something episode where you mostly claim that and we reply that our car broke down it seems like a reasonable thing to ask for do you ever feel obligated to provide philanthropic support back to South Africa well I'm not sure I'd say I feel obligated to provide it to South Africa specifically as a country but I do do a lot of philanthropic things and and you know South Africa is is sort of among the beneficiaries I guess of that and I've done a lot of sort of science education things I've donated to a couple of educational institutions in South Africa but but overall in terms of my my little I've got a little foundation called the musculation and I try to figure out what what's the most good it can do independent of one country or another and you know with with a folk so with a focus on science education get the pediatric research and and the kind of environmental causes all that trying to make sure that the you know anything we do from an environmental standpoint that isn't related to Solar City or Tesla because that won't be right what is the greatest factor that has enabled you to reach the point do you have in your career mmm-hmm well I think probably I have a really high intrinsic drive and yeah I just get really sort of set on something and then I just kind of I'm able to keep going that direction and the reason I say it seems to be intrinsic is because when I was like five or six or something and my mom grounded me said I couldn't go play with my cousins who lived on the other side of town I don't know ten miles aware of twelve miles away or something and and then I was pretty mad about that and so I couldn't really read I can really read but and I only I didn't really know the way I'm a kind of near the way but I walked clear across town and arrived at my cousin's house several hours later freaked my mom out and that's kind of a weird thing to do if you're a five so I figured that must be something intrinsic who are some figures that you look up to in the business world well I think you know obviously somebody like Steve Jobs I mean everyone their mom looks up to Steve Jobs and in that respect the Larry Page and Sergey Brin for sure they're friends of mine I've done an amazing job and you know Warren Buffett on the investing side and yeah I think I think Bill Gates has done a number of impressive things obviously with Microsoft and with the Gates Foundation yeah this lot of great people out there and I think also historically you know the guys like Edison and Tesla obviously were big fans of Tesla he's well known in the scientific community the units of magnetism are units of Tesla but he's not as well-known in that in the popular mindset so that's that's why Tesla Motors is named after him yeah you know something guy well I also like my people like your Winston Churchill and just some of the great interesting people Oscar Wilde I mean it's like lots of really interesting cool people in history so so what advice do I have for college graduates interested in getting involved in the spheres you've tapped into well certainly I didn't write you to apply for a job at solar city or Tesla or SpaceX and if not then if that doesn't work for whatever reason then I guess apply to drops at other companies in that arena or try starting a company although I have to say that in the in the the space business is quite it's quite hard to start a company in space business because it's such a capital intensive business so it may be better to do something in solar power or if you're gonna do it in cars do it in as kind of a component supplier for cars something like that yeah all right well this has been ill on musk answering your questions have a great day

https://youtu.be/PK0kTcJFnVk

so now um come to the main event as it were this is an award this is the very first mars pioneer award that the society has given and it's it's to an extremely uh unique talent um the and it it's going of course to go for uh elon musk now i want to say you know everybody has read in the news the various accomplishments of the spacex one thing after another falcon one falcon 9 dragon so forth and of course they just won a major contract for nasa 440 million dollars which will uh i think is a reward for work well done um so congratulations for that but i want to make some personal observations about um elon musk okay by the way is frank mcnamara here frank mcnamara does anybody know where frank mcnair is does anyone know who frank mcnamara is okay uh well okay forget it but the um all right um i first met elon musk at amar society fundraiser that was held in the bay area in 2001 and it may seem strange to you but in fact prior to that event i had not heard of elon musk despite the fact that he was already at that time a very significant figure in silicon valley in that world but i didn't live in that world and i didn't know about him um but um you know he came there and he made a significant donation and and then we talked and he came over to my place and we talked a lot more and uh he made a much larger donation to the mars society and i must say one that allowed us to launch the mars desert research station program um which since that time there has been over 700 people have been able to participate as crew members in that station and and which is now self-funding uh but then he went off to uh you know do his thing and uh when i first heard that uh what he was going to try to do was build a rocket company and accomplish uh you know cheap access to orbit on you know his own money um i and a number of us who've been around the block on this thing uh were frankly dismayed um because we had heard the story before uh there had been a succession of wealthy individuals who had made similar declarations and launched companies uh the two of the most recent examples was the beal company there was the walt anderson and the rotary rocket company before them they were conestoga people it's kisler and every single one of them had failed uh in fact none of them ever cleared the tower um and uh you know this seemed to be another one of those things um and but then i i uh a few years went by and i had a chance to go on and visit elon in his uh initial factory out in in the la area not the same one he has now this was considerably smaller but he had gotten started and uh there were it was apparent there's some things going on here that were very different from uh walt anderson or orbeal in the first place um by 2005 or so which whenever this visit occurred um elon knew a lot about rocketry okay in fact he knew everything about rocketry in 2001 you know nothing about rocketry and and by the way and this really matters because these what these other fellas had done is thrown a chunk of their discretionary change at this and said let's see if something happens well nothing happened i guess i'll give up uh he didn't just throw his money into it he threw himself into it okay he he learned the trade he put his mind into it he put his talent into it he put his heart and soul into it and he was working on it and um it was at that point that um you know it it became clear to me that this could go in in a significantly different way than the previous story and then of course he actually started succeeding uh well first with launches that didn't succeed but at least there were launches and then with launches that did succeed and and i must say also the fact that he persisted after uh several failures several uh obviously very expensive and daunting failures and by the way i got to tell you because you know i build and test things and you put a great deal of effort and you put your resources into it and you work on this and work on this work of this and then it's finally time for the test and the thing blows up and boy it's not a nice day um okay and and but then you you have to try again you got to stay in the game you got to push on these other people were quitters he pushed on through the several failures to finally make the thing work and then went and launched the the the the falcon 9 uh which was a serious launch vehicle and and and i did a calculation of my own at that time i did not have any inside knowledge about spacex but i i looked at the thing i looked at what i knew about the size of his payroll and how long he'd been working and he calculated that he had done this for a few hundred million dollars and this was a program that um in a conventional aerospace environment would have cost a couple of billion dollars and i wrote an op-ed in um spacex uh the new sputnik you know uh basically telling the aerospace industry hey guys you're being sputnik here um and an analysis from saic rhoden says no you can't be right they couldn't have done this for a couple of hundred million dollars is absolutely impossible this must have cost at least two billion dollars and then spacex corrected them um but it's um but that's the thing i mean the the to create this system and then i went and visited him in his new place and i saw this incredible company and i saw how dynamic it was and the kind of workforce that he created in the team he had created and you know he told me certain stuff things some of the stuff i believe and some of this i think but i just had to look at the people and look at what's going on on that place to know that he had put together a winning team and these guys were winners and these guys were serious and and and and this is extraordinary and um it's totally extraordinary what has gone on here and um there is something new under the sun here um and then finally one more thing well two more things i i have to say uh this guy he is living disproof of the materialist view of history okay that is that uh all major things that happen are driven by uh economics by greed um the the i mean he may well make money in spacex because this guy could make money doing anything i mean he's even making money with electric cars which is just astonishing okay but the the but he's not doing this to make money don't believe that for a minute if if he wanted to make money he could have set up a dozen dot coms and stuff between 2001 and now that all of which would have made incredible amounts of money without him knocking his brains out trying to build rockets which sometimes blow up and really leave you feeling very unhappy and be uh and really going out in the lurch and and of course you know he's doing well right now but this is still a very risky business he's exposed to technical theory he's uh exposed to the political shifts that that are are beyond his control to economic shifts of uh you know and and to be right out there right now is doing that this is not being motivated by profit it will need to be sustained by profit in order for it to happen but it's being motivated by an idea and i'm sure we're going to hear from him his view on that but you know i i only know elon a little bit from the outside i've met him on several occasions talked to him at some length a few times but i think i know him on the inside because i think i know what motivates him and it's the same thing that motivates me and i think the same thing that motivates most of us it really wants to make something truly grand and necessary happen and is willing to put himself on the line for that purpose so it's my great honor to present the mars pioneer award to elon musk and before he comes up i would like to show you the trophy okay so uh the symbolism here i hope is apparent uh okay we have uh the planet bars and upon it a possibly recognizable uh spacecraft uh the dragon and uh that's the vision and uh here is the man who is uh very much in this world but not of it elon musk so and the inscription reads the mars pioneer award presented to elon musk by the chapters and members of the mars society the 15th international mar society convention held in pasadena california usa august through 5th 2012 for outstanding achievement in furthering the goal of the human exploration and settlement of mars all right well uh thank you very much for the award um and um yeah it's great it's great to be before uh so many people who uh believe strongly in in the establishment of life on mars um i i i think my my reasons for um being interested in mars and doing spacex um really that they come down to basically just two two things uh one which the prior speaker i was articulating which is there's the defensive reason um in that if we are on more than one planets the probable lifespan of human civilization uh and the the line of consciousness as we know it is going to be far greater than if we are on one planet um so there's that defensive reason that life insurance reason um and i think that that's obviously a very important thing um in earth's been around for four billion years and civilization about 10 000 years and it's only now that we have this little the window has just cracked open uh where it's possible for life to uh extend beyond earth and um and so i i think it sort of seems sensible to uh to take advantage of that window while it's open um hopefully it will be open for a long time but it could be open for a short time and so that so we should take action um and that's that's sort of the the defensive reason it's not actually the reason that i'm that gets me most fired up about about mars the the thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that i just think it's the it's the grandest adventure i could possibly imagine um it's the most exciting thing like i couldn't think of anything more exciting and more fun and more inspiring for the future than to uh have a base on mars and it will be incredibly difficult and probably lots of people will die and you know terrible and great things will happen along the way just as happened in the formation of the united states but it will be it'll be one of those things that uh is incredibly inspiring and we must have inspiring things in the world life cannot just be about solving you know this problem or that problem there must be things that when you wake up in the morning you're glad to be alive and and that i think is for me the most important reason why we should pursue the establishment of life on mars now of course um i i'm preaching to converted here um you know i i expect to hear a few objections from this audience so i i think really what what matters is finding a way to do it in fact i'll give you a little bit of background my genesis of how i got into into space um sort of started when i was in college there were there were three areas that i thought would most affect the future of humanity um and and space exploration extension of life beyond earth was one of those things and uh i didn't ever expect to be involved in it because i thought it was the province of governments and and besides which it sort of seemed at least you know 21 22 years ago that um it was likely to occur because we went to the moon and then of course that people could go to mars and we'd be establishing a base on the moon and then eventually based on mars and that sort of seemed like the natural progression of things and then amazingly it didn't happen um i kept thinking well well it's it's about to happen um and it again just didn't didn't happen there's a monty python skit about this suddenly nothing happened before you know it nothing happened so um in fact in approximately 2001 um i was with a good friend of mine in college my college housemate actually in new york and um he asked me what i was gonna do after paypal and i said well you know i've always been interested in space but um but of course there's nothing that i as an individual could do do about that but but the question got me curious is to sort of to find out okay when are we sending people to mars um so after i got back to my my hotel room i went to the nasa website to sort of look look up the schedule because of course there had to be a schedule and and and i couldn't find it i i thought i thought the problem was me um because it you know it simply it must be here somewhere on this website it's just well hidden and and it turned out not it wasn't another website at all so which was shocking um so then i thought well perhaps the reason is that uh the american people have at least have lost the will to explore or or with you know if if we just had more if we've got people more interested in the subject then then they would be inclined to uh want to do it um this turned out to be a false premise by the way but that was my initial my initial thought it was a mistake um so at first i thought well perhaps if we do a small philanthropic mission to mars something that would get the public excited then that would result in a bigger budget for nasa and and then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again um and and that's about the time that i started talking to robert zubrin and a few other people and so initially the thought was to to send a small greenhouse to the surface of mars with seasoned dehydrated nutrient gel they were hydrated upon landing and then you'd have this little greenhouse on the surface of and the public tends to be as they should uh uh interested in things that are precedents and superlatives so this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled the first life on mars and um and then you'd have this great money shot of green plants in the red background um so so that that that would be that was that i thought okay that could get people pretty exciting they get pretty excited and so uh i started investigating what what that would take uh and and i was able to get the cost of the spacecraft down to to load sort of low single digit millions and the cost of communications down and all and and i was able to get everything compressed except for the cost of the rocket um and uh and so i the u.s rockets were way too expensive um something like a delta ii would have cost 60 million dollars and i figured i needed to do two parallel missions so two identical missions in case there was a a an equipment failure because then it could be counterproductive um you know it's like look at that fool he did that mars mission it didn't work and now we definitely shouldn't do mars so so i figured we had to have redundant missions um and i just didn't actually have enough money um from from the sale of paypal to to for my stake in the sale sale paypal to actually do that so just didn't have enough money so i went to russia uh in late 2001 early 2002 to try to buy icbms and that's as crazy as it sounds uh you know so i guess about 30 30 years old internet guy arrives in moscow and wants to buy the biggest icbm in the russian rocket fleet i said i don't need the nuke just need the rocket and and they thought i was crazy but then they also always got money so that's uh um so i was able to actually negotiate a deal to to buy a couple of um of dinners uh and um now at the end of all that i decided not to conclude the deal so negotiator price but decided not to conclude the deal because after my third trip to russia i i that's about the time that i realized that my original premise was wrong um that that it is in fact we do we do not lack for will particularly in the united states and perhaps the world as a whole but particularly not the united states it does not lack the world to explore not in the least um in fact the united states is the distillation of the human spirit of exploration almost everyone came here from i mean they came here somewhere else so um you couldn't ask for a group of people that are more interested in in exploring the frontier and um so uh but if people do not think that there is any way to do it if they don't think there's a means then it's it's somewhat irrelevant um you know you're not gonna bash your head against a brick wall if you're confident that your head will break before the wall will break um it's just not going to happen so um so that's when i started to start the rocket company um because it was clear that the the we'd not made advancements in rocket technology and that was the reason that that we had made progress the rocket technology got was actually going worse it was costing more and more to send things to space uh than been in the past so we had a negative technology curve which is counterintuitive because we're so used to things in the consumer electronics realm and in everyday life improving we sort of take it for granted like it's it's those things as though things automatically improve they do not automatically improve they only improve with lots of effort and and resources um you saw the graph of the the picture the pyramids there the egyptian civilization um it got to the point where it could create things like the great primitive chiaps but then lost that ability and never got back there um and or roman civilization went through a deep dark period it's not it's not a given that things improve um there has to be it has to be a forcing function people have to do it um so anyway so i started started i started spacex and um i had many people try to convince me not to start the company that really tried their best and um many of my closest friends uh i mean if there was anything they could have done to stop me from starting rock company they would have done it one one good friend of mine compiled a a footage of rocket failures and forced me to watch it i sort of seen them all so um so it was certainly but i think that they perhaps misunderstood the premise because when i started spacex it was not with the expectation of success i thought the most likely outcome was failure um but given that the thing i was going to do previously which was the uh the mars greenhouse mission i expected that would have a 100 chance of 100 likelihood of losing all of all the money associated with it um so anything if a rocket company had less than 100 chance of losing all the money associated with it um and therefore was actually quite a bit less risky than the thing i've been doing before um and uh anyway so fortunately i think things went really well with with uh spacex not in the beginning because the first three launches of the falcon 1 rocket that we did failed um and and as of zuma was saying it's not it's not a good day when the rocket fails um the first rockets uh failed only i mean it impacted 60 60 seconds after liftoff not not far from the launch site so me and the rest of the team spent uh all of that day picking up pieces of the rocket uh which is a very sad thing um but we picked him up to sort of to see if we could if would help figure out what went wrong um fortunately the the port launch we were able to uh reach orbit um that's a good thing it's a good thing we were able to do that because i had no more money left my wife are there she's a witness to the third and then the fourth launch so um yeah i was so stressed out at the fourth launch i didn't even actually feel elation i i just felt relief um but it was a very very close call but fortunately the fourth launch worked and and then since then all of the launches have worked i hope they continue to to work um and um and spacex has gotten a lot stronger and we've actually been slightly profitable for the last uh four years approximately and should be a game this year and and the rockets now are much bigger uh and we've got falcon 9 which is about a million pound thrust rocket um and we've got an upgraded version of falcon line that's going to launch next year which will be almost one and a half million pounds of thrust and then the falcon heavy uh which will be over four million pounds of thrust which is about uh 60 that of saturn v in fact with two falcon heavy launchers uh you could actually send people back to the surface of the moon um most people probably aren't quite aware of the scale of the rocket that we're building and falcon heavy should launch probably around the end of next year or certainly by early 2014 at the latest and uh and that i think will represent a significant improvement in in rocket technology and then and then very importantly we're also working on reusability um because if you really boil it down to the various the the crux of why don't we have a base on mars as i mentioned there's rocket technology but what really needs to be developed the key invention that's necessary is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket and this is a very difficult thing to do on earth because grab earth's gravity is quite quite high it's right on the cusp of impossibility for such a thing for a chemical rocket so if you take an expandable rocket even after people a lot of smart people are using advanced materials um and uh and and really approaching the limits of engine efficiency and everything you'll typically get two to three percent of your liftoff mass to to orbit um that's for expandable rocket now if you say well we want to make it reusable we want to bring it back to the launch site it's got to survive the rigors of a re-entry it's going to all the systems have to be capable of surviving multiple firings and thermal fatigue and just it's really uh you add a lot of mass when when that happens and previously when people have tried to make a reusable system they found that um that they would get some portion of the way and then conclude that success was not one of the possible outcomes now in government programs of course that the program would still continue for quite some time it's funny but true um and and uh and so the real trick then um is to say can you create a rocket that is efficient enough uh that in an expandable form you can push that what would normally be two to three percent of mass to orbit up to maybe four percent of master orbit and then if you can get really good about the reusable elements maybe that can only be um cost you two of those four points so on net you would still get two percent of roughly of your liftoff master orbit that's the thing that needs to happen in order for that to happen you you have to really get kind of straight a pluses across the board in all elements of the rocket design um every little tiny thing the engine efficiency thrust weight the engine the the tank mass the pressure and mass the secondary structure the wiring even the weight of the computers and everything matters immensely and and and but if you do all those things right then then this it is possible to make this work um and this is what has given me hope recently in in last few years because i wasn't sure whether it was possible but in the last few years i've become convinced that it is it is possible of course just because something is possible does not mean it will occur um but but i think i think it can occur which is like saying here success being one of the possible outcomes is very important so uh that that's that's that's that's the breakthrough that spacex is is really trying to achieve because the stuff we've done thus far i think is is good i think it's um it's evolutionary it's not revolutionary and we really need the revolutionary thing to work so um so i think over the next few years we'll see if we're going to be able to do that rapid and complete reusability thing but but i i'm actually you know if the place may i probably should sound more optimistic than i i i i am actually quite optimistic that this will occur so i don't want to leave any doubt in people's minds i'm quite optimistic it'll occur and um and and then going beyond that that that's for earth orbit but not to establish life on mars i think you really ultimately need to be able to carry millions of people there and millions of tons of cargo so you really need a fully reusable mars transportation system which is yet a more difficult step in creating a quality reusable earth system and then i i i was was really worried that that would not be possible but last year i became convinced that it actually is possible which was made me very happy actually in fact i think fluid was there where i was pacing around the bedroom late at night trying to see if this would work and yeah so um yeah so that's that's good news now i could be deluded but i i'm pretty if unless i'm deluded i think i i think uh i i think i think we've we've got uh something in mind which would be a good which would be a solution that would work um and then it comes to sort of the threshold of what it really comes down to a cost what what's the what cost does does a trip to mars have to be in order for it to be a self-sustaining reaction um and i think it's got you've got to roughly get to the to the uh i think around half a million dollars so if if people could pay half a million dollars to move to mars sell all this stuff on earth because you don't need it obviously then then you could remove mars then i think that that would work because um you know that that's the basically the net worth of of sort of a roughly middle-income earning person after about 25 years in the united states it's roughly half a million dollars so um in fact it's kind of hard to buy a house in southern california for you know half a million dollars in a lot of neighborhoods so so but i think at roughly that level is where it would be kind of where it works that's what we're going to get to um and my calculations show that that it should be possible that it in fact it is possible according to me and and then so so that but there's a great deal of work that has to occur and then and then to make to make it a reality um so that that i think is uh you know i think i think that's that should be really good reason to feel good about the possibility of of life on mars um and uh yeah so i i think that's that's what probably what i'd like to to leave you with um and uh and then in in the ensuing years we will unveil more and more about what we're going to do and um there'll probably be some ups and downs along the way but uh but i can finally see a path to to that objective like i said as long as i'm not delusional or haven't made some significant error then i think that that will hopefully come as good news to people in this room thank you

https://youtu.be/uegOUmgKB4E

we have a lot to talk about we only have you for an hour so I want to get to it I think the main thing that I want to get out of you tonight is you seem to play this game differently than everybody else um you know there's in the history of Silicon Valley um there's only one guy who's created three companies that were worth more than a billion dollars each and that's Jim Clark and he did it with silicon Graphics legitimate company Netscape legitimate company and Halcyon which never would have been a million dollar company without a bubble but all sort of in the same industry you've done it if we count um if we count SpaceX even though it hasn't exited but it has a multi-billion dollar contract so I think we can count it as more than a billion right yeah SpaceX is a private yeah I mean it's it's a private Market valuation sort of a couple billion dollars right so so you're the only other guy who's done it and you've done it with payments probably one of the hardest Industries to disrupt on the web cars and going the space right yeah so so listen later this year by the way so oh Duke has as a co-founder for that one no actually they opted to have me be listed as a co-founder but I thought that um although I had suggested the initial idea I did not put enough um sort of Sweat Equity into it to uh be considered so you should have been because you could have been the first guy with four uh yeah uh it's uh I think there's sort of a certain threshold of of idea contribution and um you know initial effort uh that's that's required for that that's sort of you know I mean it's sort of subjective but I think I don't think I did enough right they did offer it to me but I said no so it's part of the reason you've done this that you are sort of crazy um are you lucky I you know I've been thinking about that lately um and and I I sort of Wonder you know um I think I probably am a bit crazy uh but uh I think but maybe that's that's sort of a healthy sign um because of the point which you conclude you're not crazy at all then you probably are so the fact that you really sort of a recursive thing yeah here's the story that made me think you were crazy okay um and you can tell me does this involve the New York Times no Elon got me in so much trouble several years ago and I he called someone a douchebag and a liar and I started laughing to be precise douchebag and an idiot we actually for the liar we cut out the liar yeah because we thought it would be liable okay yeah well I think that that may well I guess that's probably true too but but I think it's more more the first two yeah so um no this is the story that made me think you were crazy yeah I heard right after you sold PayPal before the other two companies um you went and bought a McLaren S1 yes sorry no that's that's the same part that's not right because partially because you were going to race cars with Jim Clark and Larry Ellison um no well not really no actually and I never did although that was one of the things that was sort of talked about at one point but I never did in fact I've never raced anyone with McLaren I had several years I put 11 000 miles on it and I drove it from LA to San Francisco it was my daily driver which is a crazy car to have as daily driver particularly on the 405. so um but I understand when you got it yeah you're driving down 280. and you wrecked it no uh well and you let me just tell the story okay yeah let's see if the story that you tell is actually how does that how that compares the reality because the reality is pretty messed up so exactly their allies better so you wrecked the car you get out of the car you're doubling over with laughter person with you said why are you laughing that you just wrecked this car and you said no you don't know the funny part it wasn't insured well the punch Line's correct um yeah so I was actually I was driving up Sand Hill Road um with with Peter Thiel the co-founders of PayPal we're actually driving to see Mike Moritz um this is in in 2000 and uh so we're driving up at Saint I didn't really know how to drive the McLaren and uh Peter says so so what can this do and then like I'm probably number one on the list of famous last words I said watch this so so I floored it I floored it and did a lane change um on on Sandhill and so the McLaren has no uh attraction control or anything it was just it's massive power to to the wheels so 600 640 brake horsepower and it only weighs a ton so it has massive power weight it can break Wheels free at 80 miles an hour so broke the rear end free and and started spinning um and uh I I I sort of let's see I think it was sort of I was I was going straight and then turned um and and I remember seeing the the the the cars coming towards me while I was going backwards and then we hit the hidden embankment uh sort of a 45 degree embankment on Sandhill which tossed the car into the air like a discus and it kept it kept rotating with about three foot of air air clearance according to Witnesses um and then slammed down on on the ground going the original Direction um and we blew the suspension out uh and uh now it didn't actually wreck the car the core chassis and the engine were okay but but all the glass and the wheels and everything was was shredded and um and there was massive body damage in the front and rear um and um yeah because you start laughing um I don't recall laughing um I I mean uh I could have been laughing in shock but I don't recall laughing um and um and then and then Peter uh quota hitched a ride to to Mike I I waited while the fire truck and the ambulance arrived then finally the did Peter Thiel literally hitch a ride two two like two yeah over to to Sequoia to yeah and then then I I once once the car was uh taken care of then I I hitched a ride too um and so and we we continued the meeting that's I'm picturing you and Peter Thiel like that scene in Tommy Boy we're like the deer and you're both like ah like yeah really I think wow yeah is there a parallel that could be alive really I I should say so is there a parallel with how you build companies in that story I hope not let's see yeah you can do uh yeah watch this that could be awkward with a rocket launch you know yeah it's it's one thing if you've got a one-ton car versus um a million pounds of TNT equivalent that is a little dice here yeah um now what I think is so I mean one of the things I find so interesting about you what the rest of the PayPal guys um they get done with PayPal they start starting and investing in Web 2.0 companies at a point in time whatever and said that's insane that's insane the internet will never come back they were considered The Crazy Ones meanwhile you moved to LA and start working on SolarCity SpaceX Tesla's a glint in your eye yeah um why didn't you what you ever do an internet company again do you find the internet boring um I think it's unlikely that I'll do an internet company again um because not that I find the internet boring I mean I'm still sort of I think I'm relatively sort of net Savvy and interested in the internet and what's going on um you don't I I don't ever want to be the like like Grandpa who doesn't do email or something like that you know um so um I I think um but but I think I'm trying to allocate my efforts to that which I think would most affect uh the future of humanity in in a positive way and um the I think there's there's lots of entrepreneurial energy and fine and and financing headed towards the internet um whereas uh in certain sectors like automotive and solar and space you don't see new entrants you know there's not there's not a lot of capital going to startups and not a lot of entrepreneurs going into that into those Arenas and the the and the problem is that in the absence of uh some um new entrance into an industry you you don't have that in a that Force for Innovation it's really new entrance that that drive Innovation more than anything um so um that that's why I have devoted my efforts to those those Industries um and and there are industries that require as I said your cap quite a bit of capital to get going um and even with SpaceX I mean I I invest I mean my proceeds from PayPal after tax for about 180 million dollars under that went into into SpaceX 70 inch Tesla and 10 inch solar city um and and that literally had to borrow money for rent um so um that was um that was not the plan what was the plan you thought oh dessert well actually I thought um the SpaceX I thought it would be about well I guess I was probably about double at good cost it ended up being double in in most cases so with SpaceX I thought it'd be 50. Tesla I thought it'd be I thought I'd be putting in 25 maybe 30 with Solar City for well Solar City actually went really well and that's that's the one where I wasn't the co-founder so maybe that's a good sign um I mean I should co-found less stuff um uh so that's um so what happened why did you have to put more money in the other two or did investors flake did you have well I didn't actually seek investor funding for the first um three rounds of SpaceX because I mean the first thing that investors want to ask you is sort of well what's tell us about prior successes in this field um and and you know what could we compare this to uh and um and there's you know when you've got kind of the donut in the success category and a lot of you know a cemetery full of failures then they're not that Keen and Rockets are just pretty far out of the comfort zone of most natural capitalists um and and um now we were able to to get Venture funding after we've made some progress and demonstrated that we were able to um almost get to orbit um uh and um the credit goes to sort of to Founders fund and uh which is also some of my compatriots from from PayPal Peter and Peter Thiel and Luke nosik and and the canary and the other guys so uh and they invested before we got to orbit so so credit to them for that but but I did have to show that I could actually make stuff like I never actually made physical stuff before you know before SpaceX so let alone Rockets so you started with a rocket yeah I mean it's that's a that's a hard one um and uh it's the probability of success was low in fact when I started SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure um but um and and I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational so so why did you want to do it I know for Tesla it seems more obvious like oh Save the Planet big automakers aren't doing this I mean I think it's for Fairly up so that's good for Humanity why did you feel like SpaceX needed to be done well um I I I I I I guess um the if you if you look at the trajectory of space technology and and progress um the the Pinnacle of of that progress was was around maybe 1969 1970 um you know with the with the moon missions and so we we made incredible incredible progress in the 60s and and then we're able to land Moon and then with the space shuttle we could only get people to lower tho but now the space shuttle is retired and that's just there's no trajectory of improvement it's a trajectory to nothing so um and I kept thinking that there'd be some plan to send people to Mars because that's the obvious next step and um the actual origin of SpaceX is is um when I was um I think it's around 2001 or so and I was visiting a friend of mine they arrested who actually um you may have met but he lives in Palo Alto now um we were College housemates and he asked me what I was going to do for PayPal and I said well I've always been interested in space and but I didn't think there was anything I could do in space as an individual so my initial plan in space was actually to send um to do a small Mission to Mars with uh with a greenhouse essentially seasoned dehydrated nutrient gel and a little Greenhouse that would land and you'd hydrate the gel and then you'd grow the plants and you have this great shot of green plants and a red background and that would um be the money shot essentially and and and the people tend to respond to precedents and superlatives and this will be the furthest that life's ever traveled the the first life on Mars as far as we know and um and that would get people excited I thought well that would result in an increased NASA budget and then we could send people to Mars because that's you know I think you want to have a future where you're expecting things to be better not one where you're expecting things to be worse so that was how things started out and then as I learned more and I I went to speaking of crazy things went to Russia three times to negotiate a deal to buy a couple of of the largest icbms in the Russian Fleet um a strange experience appreciation well you talk to people you know people and I'm pretty soon you're talking to the Russian rocket forces and um you know they uh it turns out Russia is quite quite a capitalist Society uh um and and uh so but it definitely has had some some weird meetings um in in places like that I swear they looked like at Santa sanitarium or something I don't know it's very odd we keep going back to the theme of crazy yeah um seriously this place had padded walls you're like why do you have added walls it was weird um and uh yeah and then I had some some sort of Russian guy who was missing a front two started yelling at me because his friend one of his front teeth was saying he was like spit flying at me in a place with Pat it was like this is really bizarre what's happened in my life right and that wasn't what you thought I'm gonna build my own rocket yeah that was probably when I got back from that third trip I was like well I realized that the real issue the reason we haven't advanced in space is because the cost of of space transportation is is become unaffordable it's got It's become more and more expensive to do to do less and less in space and we really need to improve the technology of space Transportation so that's why I started SpaceX um but uh it may seem odd that I would saw SpaceX with an expectation of failure but bear in mind that my initial uh thing was to do essentially a philanthropic Mission with a zero percent chance of success from a financial standpoint so it was it would have effectively been a donation to the cause um and so anything better than that is a win right right so you know I know people think of you as someone who's had a lot of success but you had several failures within SpaceX before the recent launch can you can you tell us a little bit about what it's like to put that much work into something and and be doing something that really no one else is doing yeah and at least trying something and putting that much of your own money in it that you're having to borrow money from friends to pay your rent and there are launches and it's failing yeah that that well it super sucks um um yeah that that that was uh 2008 particularly was was was was awful because um we had the third launch failure in a row of of our Falcon wanted vehicle at SpaceX um and um we uh the Tesla financing round that we were raising fell apart um because the economy was going to tailspin um and it's pretty hard to raise money for a startup car company uh you know late 2008 when Jim and Chrysler are busy going bankrupt um that that was that was tough and then SolarCity had to deal with Morgan Stanley and Morgan Stanley had to renege on the deal because they themselves were running out of money um so it looked like all three companies were gonna die and I was also going through divorce so that was definitely a low point um and uh but fortunately the fourth launch worked and um and then uh did you think the third launch was going to work was it a shock that it didn't um well I I thought it would mostly I think I thought the odds of it working were better than 50 um but um yeah there was just a little little change in the thrust transient of the first stage engine that resulted in um that we didn't we couldn't see it on the ground because of the thrust transient well to get slightly technical for a second um the the pressure Decay on the thrust transient dropped below sea level pressure so when you when you look at it on the test stand at with you know at sea level you don't see it it doesn't it doesn't look like there's a Thrust transient and because we changed the architecture of the engine uh to one that was regeneratively cooled instead of available it had this little tiny transient which caused the first stage to round the upper stage and and the upper stage engine started it started inside the interstage section like it's like sort of firing up this giant expansion indoors with uh with a big plasma blowback that fried the fried the at the stage wow yeah I wasn't expecting that so so it's 2008 you're going through a divorce which like some to borrow your award douchebag vloggers are writing about to make even worse right yes that's true um in addition to to all that stuff happening I was getting dumped on massively in the Press right yeah you're you know it looks like all three companies yeah are gonna fail I mean why do you keep going with all three like I feel like even a lot of great entrepreneurs in that situation would have been like I've already sunk up everything I have in these companies and I gotta pick one but you didn't I mean you kept doing all three why um yeah that was that was a very tough call um at the end of 2008 that was that was probably the tough you know one of the toughest goals I've had to make um because I could either um Reserve capital for one company or the other four so the city didn't need a ton of capitals they were they were okay um but between SpaceX and and Tesla um you know it's sort of like like you've got two kids and what do you do do you spend all your money just to maximize probably the success of one or to use to try to keep both live unfortunately it worked you also had the CEO of Tesla Tesla um my goal was never to be the CEO of Tesla from the beginning I mean I bet Henderson electric cars that goes back 20 years to you know when I was in college in fact I used to talk to my dates about electric cars probably not the best strategy to close those dates no uh no uh I uh usually have to stop talking about that um but um yeah so I I've had long long-standing interest in electric cars but since I was doing SpaceX um I knew that if if I did try to start an electric Cloud company and run it um that it would be extremely painful uh to run two companies so I didn't I tried really tried my hardest not to be the CEO of Tesla I mean any at any point from day one I could have been the CEO because I had a majority control of the company right um but uh uh I really tried not to and in the end it was at the end of 2008 it's I'd commit um all of my Reserve Capital to to Tesla um yeah all that and that was an allocated SpaceX and uh so I I I felt I had to sort of steer the ship directly um but it was it was not it was not out of uh it was most it was really not fun like super not fun yeah I remember we talked next year after that you said you know this is running these two no I mean it's definitely gotten a lot better um with SpaceX you know we're so since we've now had five successful launches in a row and we're able to talk with the space station and with Tesla we're able to raise enough Capital to get the company to be able to produce the model S and and do the IPO and uh you know so I've got a much stronger much stronger a much stronger team a lot of bench strength at both companies um so uh you know I can go from essentially almost every waking hour being being spent on the companies to 90 percent which is a big difference actually is the ambition still to find another CEO for one or the other um well I um I I expect to run both companies for the foreseeable future uh because I've I've made a commitment to people at both companies uh to do that um will I be running both companies forever I think that's that's unlikely but but certainly for the foreseeable future I will be is there one that um well they know they they both they both do have my heart um but um I think that there may come a point you know several years in the future um where the the fundamental good that Tesla is trying to accomplish which is to serve as a catalyst for the um acceleration of sustainable transport um has been accomplished in other words I mean that's really what what has the inflicted from a historical standpoint or what what's important here in um affecting um the world uh it's it's to what degrees Tesla serving as a catalyst for the Advent of electric vehicles um and um at some point you know when the say most cars being manufactured are electric then um that will have been accomplished and um or the catalytic value of Tesla will will have been realized um and the diminishing returns to our garden I think at that point um I I would not need to run the company uh can we talk a little bit about across the companies um your experience with Venture capitalists because it's been pretty varied right yes so you've had good experiences and you've had not so good experiences I've had a wide wide range yes what have you what what would you advise entrepreneurs watching this or in the audience to make sure they don't they don't live through what you did in the bad experiences and can you tell us about the bad experience um well I think I think one thing that's important is uh if you have a choice of a lower valuation uh with someone you really like or a higher evaluation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation um it's better to have a higher quality uh bench capitalist who you think is it would be great to work with than to um you know get a get a higher valuation with someone where there's even a question mark really you know I think that's that's important it's sort of like getting married you know I don't know well maybe I'm that good at that but but tenure is okay I mean it's not too bad did you do that wrong did you maximize for evaluation um the I suppose in in the case of the Tesla series C um I I mean at some point I think I'll tell the the full story but not tonight but not tonight um the they did wait an hour right no I know well I'll tell I'll tell I'll tell part of the story so um the there was um there were two there were there multiple competing bits but there were two competing bids um uh one was from uh Klein of Perkins the other one was from vanish Point um planner offered 50 a 50 million dollar pre-money vanish Point offered 70. um I actually said to John Deere that if if John joins the board we'll do it at 50. um but uh John felt that there was that that he had too many obligations and that there was another partner at Kleiner who who really wanted the deal and so he could not supplant that person um and I I I thought well we could do I would I would be okay if if John Doe would joined I I mean there's a 40 different that difference has pretty significant I thought if John would be willing to join the vote then we could do that but not if it was somebody else um yeah that was probably a mistake then they did just Fisker instead which and that was their mistake yeah yes I I hope they lived past the election three are both of issues yeah what has Tesla done that it hasn't fallen in that bucket what was I mean looking back was there a Crossroads where you made a right choice that has put you guys so far I mean you're not profitable yet but in a different category uh well the Tesla is a really different company to to Fisker I mean we're Tesla's a hardcore technology company um and and we we do really serious engineering um and and I think you only build value in a company if you if you're doing hard work to solve tough problems that that's that's why companies are valuable it's why they should be valuable and largely is why they're valuable so um and and we do we don't we do real manufacturing as well I mean the model S coils of aluminum and plastic pellets come in and Cars come out I mean we're we do real hardcore manufacturing uh quite vertically integrated um and uh we did all the vehicle engineering all the powertrain engineering all the software um and um whereas uh and also we also of course do the The Styling and design of the car we've got a great Design Studio our head of design France when horse housing is awesome um uh in the case of Fisker um it's it's headed by it was headed by um you know Henrik Fisker and uh and he's he's a designer so he's he's good at sort of the styling of the cars um but he thinks it's all about styling um and it and and it's not um you know it's really this is you know the the reason we don't have electric cars is not for lack of styling right um at the time when you were getting started with Tesla um the valley was trying to take a turn back towards science and towards saving the world uh you had Kleiner Perkins Coastal Ventures a lot of these big firms really getting aggressive about clean tech and saying that was going to be the next internet that has not been the case right um why did cleantech not work for the valley well um I think the jury's out on cleantech I think as far as Tesla and Tesla and Solar City are certainly uh clean tech or say I think you're more like sustainable energy stuff um I think sustainable energy is a better it's a little bit more of a mouthful but it's more accurate than than than clean tech um and uh I mean I think the I think I think Tesla is going to be an extremely valuable company in the long term um and what have you done different because a lot of VCS have said well the problem with cleantech is you have to rely on subsidies and if you have to rely on subsidies it's never going to work I mean people buying a Tesla in park get a subsidy it takes down the price I assume with Solar City so it's like like that hasn't been a knock against you guys like why have these two companies worked when when so many other ones haven't um I think it's you know in any industry there are only a few companies that that kind of get big and and succeed um and um I don't know I think it just seems I that um in in the case of Tesla we were focused on making great products uh and and doing solving hard engineering problems um I mean as evidence in Tesla for the fact that we solve hydrogenary problems is the fact that uh Toyota and Daimler and Mercedes you know buy electric powertrains from us I mean they if this was easy they would just do it um so so we focused on solving really hard engineering problems at Tesla um that like I said that contrast with Fisker some degree and um and then at Solar City the Solar City does everything except the panel so um what a lot of people don't realize is that the solar panel if it's a standard efficiency solar panel the difficulty of manufacturing that is about as hard as manufacturing drywall it's really easy uh-huh um and so uh I mean it seemed to me pretty obvious that in the long term we'd see um Cutthroat competition between silicon PV manufacturers in China Japan Germany and other places much as you see this competition in the dram Market I think the PB Market the dram Market are very similar and so you that that cost will be driven down to a very low number approaching the raw material cost really and that's that's pretty much what happened and and so the real the real cost of solar and a real challenge for solar is what's called balance of system it's everything except the the panel and um and so the the the cost per installed what for a residential system might be around four dollars now which is a big drop from where it was a few years ago it used to be sort of seven eight dollars now it's it's sort of kind of half that um but the optimization really has to be at the at everything except the panel because the panels are dropping now to like 90 cents a watt so you know over three you know three dollars of the four dollars is balance the system which you know which includes the um you know it includes the custom ownership experience the designing the system particularly to particular rooftop installing it the wiring the inverter after sales Service uh figuring out the financing financing of it all um you know it's in the same way that say say Dell Dell doesn't make the CPU or the hard drive or the the Ram or anything but they kind of designed the system and they manage the customer experience and um that's that's kind of how SolarCity is so uh when I looked at the problem of um solo power uh that that that's what it looked like to me so that's why um SolarCity is work in the problems that's working on and it's doing super well with you know knives and the credit 95 of the credit due to Lyndon Peter arrive and the rest of the team at uh solo city um you've said um I think this is the first time I've interviewed you and you haven't said it that being an entrepreneur is like standing on the edge of an a bit looking into abyss and chewing broken glass um yeah actually that's a phrase from a friend of mine bully who is an early entrepreneur has done a number of things since um and um and he he the the phrase that he uses is like starting companies like it's like chewing glass and staring into the abyss right um so I flipped it so it's it's um I mean there's a point which obviously it's not that not that way um do you still feel like that or honestly now um I I you know the steering the best part is just you know are you are you facing imminent death and we certainly were at SpaceX and Tesla and Solar City for a long time I think we're no longer staring into the abyss which is great there's always going to be some amount of glass that's got to be chewed um it's never zero um but it's less and less as time goes by for Less glass and no more Abyss yeah the best is kind of there in the distance but I'm not staring right now peripheral vision yeah yeah um I mean you know you guys did PayPal which was you know obviously started at a time when that there was a lot of money and there were advantages but you know compared to other dot coms was a very hard company to build and then you go on to keep alive yeah right um as you point out I mean uh PayPal got started in like late 99 late 98 to early 99 um and uh uh yeah it was a sort of merger of two companies x.com that I started in uh infinity that Max Peter started and we started to come sort of pull our resources and Tackle problem together um and um uh but but we went from um starting the company to less than 18 months later maybe 14 months later or something uh having a valuation of 500 million dollars um and uh you know those these days you know after you see some of the um you know things like uh the recent position by Facebook you think oh well yeah maybe that's not that great um but um but at the time I was certainly it was like this is this is completely ridiculous um did you feel that way though because I mean there were some people inside the company who thought why do we why are we only worth 500 million I thought it was completely ridiculous um but um I mean the NASDAQ peaked I think in March or thereabouts of 2000 right and that's around when we when we did the valuation for 500 million dollars the the challenge was really keeping the company alive uh for the next uh two years roughly until uh well until it was sold to eBay what what is your relationship like and what was it like then there's there's a lot of stories that the two of you guys did not get along in that merger um you know we've had a disagreements um but uh we're our friends um and um I would say for 95 of our the time we've known each other we've been friends it was a little rut yeah I think it's a little bumpy at one point um and uh I think um I'm I'm not I'm I have more tolerance for risk than Peter does uh so I I was sort of maybe more kind of pedal to the metal and Peter was like well let's be a little cautious here uh he may have been right actually so which is ironic since he encouraged you to gun your car that made you guys I don't think that was what he had in mind but uh yeah he um I'm probably slightly more risk tolerant computer is um uh but um I think between all of us we managed to make Paypal work which is then what was that was the important thing but back to the back to the abyss and the the broken glass I mean do you only enjoy this if you're just the odds are failure no no I'm I'm liking life more and more actually um as as there's um less staring into the averse and less claturing I'm finding that to be a good thing um so um I I hope never to return uh to uh the experiences I had in 2008 and 2009 if you were to start other companies one that you had an idea for was a electric plane that could take off and land vertically yeah does that see are you now like no I am not starting another company are you still thinking that that's how I feel that is um yeah I've actually did I mean there are three things that that I think uh well arguably for um that I think could be done I I think it could probably do it maybe you know have a better than even chance of success uh one is the um an electric uh jet sort of it's this would be kind of something cool because one of the things that I guess where the idea where these things tend to come from is like I'll read something that seems like like a sad thing in technology and they're like well how could we make it not a sad thing so when I read about the Concord being retired and I was like oh geez you know we don't even have supersonic transport that's terrible um and I didn't actually have a chance to to find the Concord so um you know that just seemed like a terrible thing so initially I thought well um I started reading up about it and I read that that the Concord is it was really designed in the 60s and and so aerodynamics have improved a great deal with computational fluid dynamics uh engine efficiencies improved massively and even if you just change the engines on the Concorde you could double the range um or thereabouts and um so that thought well okay what if what if you were to figure out a really efficient design that could make it uh economically competitive to have a supersonic aircraft and um and then I started looking at it more and more and then um I started doing the math on on all of it it seemed like well you just really want to go higher and higher um you know the lower you are in the atmosphere the more drag you have atmospheric density decays exponentially um so as you go up you you your air density just drops drops dramatically and it's it's really easy to go fast and I mean and your speed is just a force balance it's whatever your the output thrust of the engine is you know bounced against the uh the drag that you're experiencing so as you go higher you just go faster for the same pause and uh and and then there's a slight um uh outward acceleration you experience which is also slightly helpful like like a satellite you know when satellite is going Mark 25 it it just goes on forever I went inside the atmosphere so anyway um this may be slightly rewards but the an electric uh fan um gets better the electric aircraft gets better the higher you go um whereas a combustion aircraft does not you have you you start starving it uh stopping it from from oxygen um and um and only but the area is mostly nitrogen so when you as you're going through the air you're sort of sucking in all this all this nitrogen which is uh kind of slowing you down and and you're trying to combust oxygen anyway so um with with aircraft with combustion aircraft you hit a an optimal altitude that's in the sort of um 35 to maybe 55 Max altitude whereas an electric aircraft you could you'd want to go like maybe 80 000 feet um and um anyways long way of saying you can get super efficient and super fast with electric aircraft and and vertical takeoff Landing works well with being Supersonic and um internet so I think I think you could uh you can make a really break through aircraft that's several Generations beyond what currently exists but are you going to do that not anytime soon it's possible that I may do it at some point in the future because between SpaceX and Tesla I kind of have the ingredients um so it's very tempting easy after those yeah um but I the the the I think maybe it's with something worth considering in a few years um that's so that's one idea then there's um I think we could really improve uh transport by um having a prefabricated uh kind of double decker actually what would really make sense is a a steel box beam um over the center divider with a lane on the inside and laying on top um that's made in prefabricated sections and stole down the center divider and you can get two lanes you can have the traffic be you know all one way or all the other and massively improve life in places like Los Angeles where I was just stuck in traffic going right took me an hour to go three miles um so I know who's in charge of the damn 405 construction but they're a bloody idiot and I hate them it is the worst construction project I've ever witnessed in my life um you curse them daily um uh well the other one um uh well one of the third one would be I I think you could make fusion work um and and uh I mean and I mean by that I mean magnetic confinement fusion um you're relatively standard Fusion if you will um and um and then the fourth one um photo sharing app right subscription Commerce in a box absolutely um the fourth one I'm considering just open sourcing you know basically just describing the idea saying this is what will be done and um if somebody wants to do it then then they can do it um and I'm thinking like maybe I should patent it and then offer to open source the pattern to anyone that can make a credible case that they could actually do it um so I'm sort of debating it but it would be for for a fifth mode of Transport so right now we've got of Crystal transport we've got planes uh trains Automobiles and boats um for getting around Earth um and what if there was a fifth mode um and uh I have a name for it name for it which is called the hyperloop the hyperloop hyperloop yeah it's like a Jetsons tunnel what it's something like that yeah look you just get in that whisks you uh yeah well and I'll tell you a characteristics so this is partly prompted by the California train thing like we know we've got like a bullet train um that that's like this it's the it has the dubious distinction of being the slowest bullet train um and the most expensive per mile um uh so we're setting records that but you know both ends of the the wrong the wrong answer that of of the spectrum and um you know apparently it's gonna be like 60 billion dollars or something uh to go from San Francisco to LA and if it's if they're saying 60 now it's going to be more later right um and of course it's a really slow put this in perspective 100 million got you into space well it got me started I mean it got it got me to yeah it's only got me into space and quite get me in trouble but very close yes yes something like that yeah and so there's a cap of cap a venture capital investment it's been a couple hundred million total including outside investors so and it's basically been profitable for the last few years so um I I think we can do do something that's probably 10 of the cost and and and I try to think of what are the attributes that you'd want in a new motor transport um in fact what is the theoretically fastest way that you could get from LA to San Francisco um and uh and so the system I have in mind which is you've sort of you're guessing in the right direction um sort of how would you like something that uh can never crash um it is immune to weather um it goes uh three or four times faster than the the sort of bullet train that's being built like that well it goes about let's say an average speed of twice uh What uh what what an aircraft would would do so you go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes um and it would cost you uh much less um than an air ticket or cart much less than any other motor transport which is the fundamental energy cost is is so much lower and I think we could actually make it self-power it's self-powering if you just uh if you put solar panels on it um uh you you generate fire back the envelope is you generate more power uh than you than you would consume in the system um and there's a way to store the power so that it would run 24 7. um without using batteries uh so you just different you can you have different ways to store energy um anyways that's you think this is possible this is not just yes absolutely absolutely yeah wow is there ever a time you retire you have five children you ever just want to hang out with the kids um yes I do I do want to hang out with the kids I don't want to retire but I do want to have kids um my goal is to retire right before senility um it's a tough you know tough you know yeah it's like getting hypoxia you don't like you don't realize you're just your decisions suck uh until you're dead um so um so I don't intend to retire maybe like at 80 or something and it would be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars yeah yeah you've said before you want to retire on Mars this is more or less feasible um well actually I was asked do I um it's more like if I were to retire it's not like I want to retire but if I were to retire on the verge of senility I'd like it to be on Mars that would be cool it's funny because you're saying earlier that you're slightly more risk-taking than Peter Peter wants to be on a boat that's like an island out somewhere that has no laws you want to be on Mars it is the slightly riskier crazy version yeah um I think Peter entertains a lot of interesting ideas I'm not sure he necessarily wants to be on an island offshore um I mean last time I saw him he was in San Francisco so um but but I think he likes to he sort of entertains interesting ideas and he's not bound by convention certainly that's for sure all right we want to get some questions from the audience so we've got a couple microphones if anyone wants to line up while we're waiting on people um you're an investor in stripe and a very tiny investor very tiny investor and I have no idea what they're doing fine this is the only subject where I know more than you okay I talked to them the other day but which leads me to the question do you think PayPal is finally screwed well if if PayPal doesn't do something it will be screwed yes there has not been a lot of innovation no in fact if if you look at the product plan that I wrote um in 2000 uh there's hardly any difference in fact it's it's slightly worse than that we've gone backwards yeah uh I mean PayPal should be where all the money is yeah and it's not it's definitely not all right go ahead I first wanted to thank you Sarah for believing in La I was actually up at one of the events in San Francisco and I think we have two to three times as many people here so thank you it is the same it's actually a hundred people fewer than we fit in our in our San Francisco venue but it sold out the fastest all right so Ben Horowitz sold out in about four hours and you sold out in three all right you have a writer here Michael so thank you for believing in La I think we are the only blog with a full-time writer here there we go my question is for you Elan first of all thank you for doing these big things to you know improve Humanity I work for Space Adventures when I was in college all right cool yeah and I really believe in the space Frontier the abyss uh so to speak the good of us yeah but uh indeed uh but just thinking about La uh for a moment uh what do you think we can do to improve the ecosystem here in L.A well I think better freeways would be huge honestly I don't I I wish there was like who do I complain to about the freeways uh um yeah yeah so some somebody's got to be responsible for it um yeah um don't do that I'd rather you build Jets and hyperloops than be the mayor of La um but I I think if somebody could uh seriously it's like if improving the transport system it that's got to be but anyway it lives in La what's going to be the number one gripe it's it's the damn highways startup uh to do that but no one would fund me yeah um ending gridlock.org I'm open to finding someone if they if they want to do the Box theme thing over the center divider um which would be I mean a regulatory challenge but I mean I think people you can get people to vote for it I vote for it in like three seconds um and it's just you got to do it in a way that it doesn't impede the existing traffic flow and so it's got to be prefabricated sections that just get dropped in place like Lego why did you move to LA uh because the Southern California has the biggest concentration of aerospace engineers in the world oh um and it was a choice I might I mean I lived in in um Berry for 10 years and lived in Palo Alto um I lived like three three blocks away from the PayPal office that's why PayPal's on University Avenue because I lived on Forest um this is really convenient so um I moved down to La just because the odds of success with the rocket company were pretty low to begin with and if I insisted that experienced uh aerospace engineers moved from Southern California to Bay Area and can leave their job and buy it buy a house in the Bay Area which is really expensive right then the odds of success would would go would be decreased even further so um that that's why I moved to LA is all right yeah I want to try to get through as many of these questions as possible but because we do not have Elon for much longer so let's ask him realtor real quick okay okay all right okay huge fan of yours so thank you so much for inspiring young entrepreneurs all over the world um quick question one of the area of um Innovation is in the area of Education right so I'd love to hear your thoughts on what are some of the ways that we can disrupt or to in an area of Education right um well what um Sebastian thrawn is doing um and uh someone Khan I mean I think that's real that stuff is really disruptive um sorry um and yeah so so what Sebastian thrawn and and so and and Connor doing uh is that that's great stuff sort of online learning um and I think there's a to the degree that you can gamify learning I think that's really helpful um most uh you want to make learning not a chore um if people are drawn to it like they're drawn to video games then um then I think that would really help what do you think about Peter's hole getting people to drop out of college thing um yeah I think I think going to college is you know entirely optional I mean it's if you've got a if you've got a good idea um I'd say drop out and try it out you know um you can always go back to college nobody's it's always there yeah all right Honda Mercedes have both said to me very clearly they the hydrogen fill in fuel cells of the future but I believe strongly in batteries I know why do you think there's something why do you think they're so committed to hydrogen is like the next step whereas batteries I really feel like we can make this happen um I don't really know because the the math is so super obviously in favor of batteries um that it's like it's like staring facts in the face and saying they're not true if you take the best case scenario for a fuel cell and you say you know forget about it's like assume it's fully optimized so you're you can you can envelope it from a physics standpoint um and say and give it the best case situation how does that compare to state-of-the-art lithium ion or current current lithium ion in production and it loses so so it's like success is not one of the possible outcomes what why Embark upon that um it's crazy I think part of it is like this this they felt for a long time that there was this need to be doing something um and since fuel cells were 10 years in the future noise would be then they could always say they're working on fuel cells and that and that would satisfy people um you don't have to deliver yeah it says it Tesla called it full cells um all right great go ahead hey there um my name is Richard cooperstein I was an early executive at Facebook where I headed up all the international business development corporate development and strategy and so you know thinking big was something that you know has been a part of my DNA from those days and before and so as I look at all the things that you've been building obviously it resonates very much so in order to build the things that you're building obviously you need sources of capital and you have you know a sort of network of people around you I recently partnered with a group called liquidnet and they think about providing liquidity on a nine-figure and up kind of basis and they've created this really Dynamic platform where they have 700 Partners who all have an average of 20 billion dollars under management which equals about 14 trillion dollars and what they're trying to do is identify really tremendous technology companies biotech Pharma and that kind of thing and space being sort of the next Frontier my question to you is where do you think you know the next big buckets of efficiency are for you in your Capital formation efforts vis-a-vis you know really finding that way to Mars and finding that way to kind of create the next uh the next wave of humanity out in the in the in the wider universe and you know we have a platform that provides for that my question is is where do you find you know efficient sources of capital or is a platform like what we have something that would serve your needs well in my case um I I find the public markets to be a pretty effective source of capital um it's worked out well for for Tesla um and Solar City will probably go public later this year and so generally um you know so so and and SpaceX could go public at any point it doesn't need space it's been cash flow positive for a few years so it doesn't really need doesn't really need additional Capital um it's actually as far as I'm concerned I I at this point I do not feel myself to be Capital constrained um but going public is is more efficient for you than than sort of staying private you know thinking about what's been happening in the Pro in the public markets and sort of the the gyrations and the need for public disclosure and all that kind of stuff you think that's more efficient um yeah I actually invited to too much of a problem um to be to be a public company um and I'm going to kind of run uh the private companies like their public companies um in terms of you know having the uh you know the appropriate controls in place and and mechanisms for effective governance I don't I don't think it's actually that bad to be a public company and unless uh if if unless you're going to sort of get really um concerned about the day-to-day fluctuations in the stock price but so as long as you just say look uh it's the stock price is going to fluctuate day to day and I don't care um then you know that that's the only time it's an issue just you just shouldn't worry about the day-to-day fluctuations too much what do you think about the trend of the Dual class shares and this whole idea like being pushed by Patrice and Horowitz and others is basically you need a fortress to go public um I think they can be submeric to a dual class I mean Tesla has a single class um and and there's this summer to a dual class I think it can be taken to about an extreme in some cases where it's a dual cluster one class basically doesn't count right um I think that's that's probably about unreasonable um we we you know you need there needs to be some path towards ultimately I think having a single class because you just get the succession problem right um and it's just it's just rare that say somebody's successor particularly if that's still their kid um is is the right person it is it does happen but it's unusual um and so um but I mean there are cases where it's been well managed say like with the with Ford like Ford was the only company not to go not to go bankrupt and what could argue that the Ford family was the stabilizing influence on the company um and had more long-term thinking um and and so um like I said I think there's merits to to having a dual class uh of ownership as long as it's not taken to an extreme right yeah I'm signed that we 've done yeah and I I apologize I'm actually supposed to be at a at a screening for a format about Haiti and that's actually where I inadvertently went first uh and why are we so late um so but I I absolutely have to show up um there because so I apologize you guys um but you're getting the last one all right um so I I work in the space industry out here as well so I appreciate the things you're doing with SpaceX um you tweeted yesterday that you thought we were going to be in at Mars in 40 years and we haven't been to the Moon in four years so I was wondering what spacex's plan is for that yeah actually I was I was saying that I thought we could conceivably be at Mars around 12 to 15 years from now and SpaceX is continuing to develop the technology Beyond Falcon 9 Falcon heavy and um on you know on paper at least I think we've got a system that could achieve um Moss colonization um there's a long way from having such a system on paper or electronically really I really have it on paper um uh and actually making it real um but it was only maybe a year or two ago that less than two years ago that that I concluded that it was possible uh to um uh just to have to create a self-sustaining civilization on Mars that's uh yeah so I read earlier a quote from you that said that that Mars was just this side of impossible or is it further than this side of Empire I believe it's possible just extremely difficult okay yeah so I wasn't sure it was possible until about a year and a half ago uh-huh so last thing um we we always ask everybody a series of questions and the the crowd favorite is always what would be your mediocre superpower now this is absurd to ask you because Tony Stark is partially modeled after you right so you actually are sort of have real so we are asking they didn't technically have a superpower he I guess except a conventing technology or something right so we're sort of asking you to downgrade from that a bit so an example of a media mediocre superpower would be um one of the best ones we've ever gotten is this guy who wished to temporarily detach his arm while spooning with a girl um sometimes it's set it's sometimes it stays that's what he wants to do with a girl you know that's some people's um the other day my nanny had a great one um which was to inflict menstrual cramps on her enemies wow okay yours be a mediocre superpower so it can't because I think the most awesome superpower would just be to be lucky um and uh one would say you have been yeah so if you could dial that back slightly what would be a good mediocre superpower um I think between mediocre superpowers here yeah to just to always beat the traffic I think that's an appropriate way to end tonight um so just a couple housekeeping things um we're not going to do la monthly but we are going to do it regularly so we'll do two or three more of these before the end of the year and we will try to have as impressive guests as Elon um we have a couple in mind already that I think will be surprising um if anyone would like to sponsor these events we are a for-profit company and we're trying to make money um you can email uh me at Sarah pandodaily.com and I will get you to the right people as you can see it's an amazing event you should absolutely give us money so we can keep doing it and pay people like Michael who cover La companies um next week if you're in San Francisco we have Mark Pincus we would love to see you there and uh other than that let's just give a huge round of applause to Elon foreign

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60 minutes rewind in the history of spaceflight only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the earth the United States Russia China and Elon Musk mr. musk is a wealthy internet entrepreneur who has vowed to revolutionize space exploration by bringing down the astronomical costs and that can't happen fast enough for NASA which retired the shuttle last summer and now has to pay its old rival Russia to fly American astronauts into space musk is one of the contenders vying for a NASA contract to build America's next man's spacecraft a contest he believes he has the right stuff to win when the final shuttle mission ended last July for the first time in three decades the United States had no way to launch astronauts into space it was the end of one era and the beginning of another instead of NASA designing the next manned spacecraft the White House decided that private industry should design build and fly it opening space to commercial development one of the companies vying for that contract is SpaceX Elon Musk is the founder and CEO it's what we are experiencing at this moment in time the turning point in man's reach for space going from governments to private companies like yours I think we're at the dawn of a new era and and it's I think it's gonna be very exciting what we're hoping to do with SpaceX is to push the envelope and provide a reason for people to be excited and aspire to be human musk is 40 years old a naturalized American citizen and reportedly worth nearly two billion dollars he isn't your typical corporate CEO as a teenager he wrote computer games in his native South Africa or immigrating to the US and to Silicon Valley where he was one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs the co-founder of PayPal ladies and gentlemen mr. Elon Musk despite a chorus of skeptics musk built a car company called Tesla that turns out 5000 high-end all-electric cars a year another musk company sells solar power systems but his lifelong passion is space and when eBay bought PayPal in 2002 musk started looking for ways to launch his new fortune into orbit I went to Russia to look at buying a refurbished ICBM which is a very trippy experience it was very bizarre and when I tell people that I feel like what musk made three trips to Russia trying to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile called the knepper his plan was bizarre put a greenhouse on the rocket landed on Mars and bean packed the pictures don't get people really excited and that would recharge human space exploration you know that was my original idea you just wanted to get people interested in space I guess yeah capture the imagination yes though it does that it turns out the Knepper was so expensive his idea never flew so musk decided that the only way to get an affordable rocket was to build it himself and he started SpaceX other words me coming into the rocket business not knowing anything about rockets not having ever built anything I mean I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor why even begin when something is important enough you do it even though flowers are not in your favor how much of your personal fortune have you poured into this 100 million dollars a hundred million dollars into something that you did not believe would work at the beginning yes must truly believes that low cost space exploration is essential to the survival of mankind I think it's important that humanity become a multi-planet species I think most people would agree that a future where we're a spacefaring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event that that's really why I started SpaceX SpaceX is housed in a sprawling factory near Los Angeles where fuselages for Boeing 747s used to be built from its beginning ten years ago its goal has been revolutionary change in rocket and spacecraft manufacturing now tell me what's that big piece right up there that's the second stage of a falcon 9 rocket instead of multiple companies building parts all across the country SpaceX builds most of its rockets and spacecraft in house based on Musk's belief that it's more efficient and lowers costs 1,400 engineers and skilled technicians work here building engines rockets space capsules creating mostly from scratch the thousands of components that are the guts of a rocket so what that means is raw metal comes in and then we build the engines the airframe the electronics and we integrate all of that together and that's all done more or less under one roof metal comes in one end of this factory yeah spaceships come out the other yes final assembly takes place at the Cape Canaveral launch pad if the margins there and we don't then have margin to the fourth power that's fine musk has college degrees in business and physics but SpaceX is his first venture in aerospace he bills himself as chief designer and chief technology officer how did you get the expertise to be the chief technology officer of a rocket ship company well I do have a physics background that's helpful as the foundation and then I read a lot of books and talk to a lot of a lot of smart people you're self-taught yeah well it's self-taught yes meaning I didn't I don't have an aerospace degree so how did you go about acquiring the knowledge well I like said I read a lot of books talked to a lot of people and have a great team his team is a mixture there are newcomers mostly 30-something engineers some of them straight out of college and then there are the skilled technicians and aerospace veterans former NASA astronaut Garrett Riesman spent three months aboard the space station and flew on one of the final shuttle missions he was brought in to help oversee the company's manned space work you know I'm curious you have so much background in engineering you could have easily gotten a job at Boeing or at Lockheed but you came here if you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA if he had a chance to be there at that when it was the dawn of a brand-new era wouldn't you want to do that I mean that's that's why I'm here and that's why most of the engineers we met are here building spaceships is the chance of a lifetime if you reach the point of having a successful manned flight what will you have proven we're not doing it to prove anything you know we know it can be done we're just trying to do it a little bit differently a little bit faster and to push the push defense a little bit farther out and then we can all go I mean I want to go into space I assume most people here do as well how many want a ride to what four years after starting SpaceX rolled out its first rocket an unmanned booster called the Falcon one Falcon has cleared the tower but the first three test flights failed to reach orbit we are hearing from the launch control sensor that has been an anomaly on the vehicle when you had that third failure in a row did you think I need to pack this in Devin why not I don't ever give up I mean I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated it turned out that the third failure was caused by a two-second glitch in the timing eight weeks later must bet the company on another flight this time around everything worked perfect if that poor Florence hadn't work that would have been it we would have not had the resources to the amount of v you couldn't have gone out at that point yes death would have been I think inevitable because we did not have the resources to do not to Perth launch this is a tricky business trucking yeah yeah I wish it wasn't so hard the story will continue after this in 2010 SpaceX tested a larger more powerful 9 engine rocket called the Falcon 9 and an unmanned cargo capsule known as dragon it was the first privately developed rocket designed to carry cargo and eventually astronauts to the space station and back ignition confirmed 3.2 km/s in its first test flight the Dragon capsule performed flawlessly orbiting the Earth twice before splashdown in the Pacific the first time a private company had launched and recovered its own spacecraft and this is a historic spacecraft yes yeah we came across the Dragon capsule while musk was showing us around you know what I noticed about your cargo ship is that it has windows yeah absolutely the windows are there in case there's an asteroid on board who wants to look out but people don't put windows in cargo ship that's right exactly so what that tells me is that this was never intended to be only a cargo so I know the Dragon was always designed to carry asteroids musk says a manned version of the Dragon capsule will be safer than the space shuttle and a lot cheaper engineers are already designing escape rockets life-support equipment and computer guidance systems they were studying seating for seven when we were there do you believe that your rocket will be the next American rocket to take an astronaut into space I think that's the most likely outcome yes that sort of confidence has not exactly endeared him to the space establishment or to his competitors there are people who've been in the rocketry business for decades yeah who say about you that you don't know what you don't know well I suppose that's true of anyone how can anyone know what they don't know critics say you can't do this your answer to them is we've done it he's done it in partnership with NASA which has given SpaceX technical advice and a contract worth up to 1.6 billion dollars mostly for 12 cargo flights to the space station but SpaceX is lack of experience bothers some NASA legends like Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan they've testified to Congress that the Obama administration's drive to commercialize space could compromise safety and eventually cost the taxpayers now it's a time to overrule this administration's pledge to mediocrity you know there are American heroes who don't like this idea the alarm strong gene cernan have both testified against commercial spaceflight in the way that you're developing it and I wonder what you think of that I was very sad to see that because those guys are yeah you know but those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough you know I wish they would come and visit and and see the hardware that we're doing here and I think that would change their mind they inspired you to do this didn't they yes and to see them casting stones in your direction difficult did you expect them to cheer you on so they hoping they would what are you trying to prove to them what I'm trying to do is to make a significant difference in in spaceflight and and and help make spaceflight accessible to to almost anyone and I would go for as much support in that direction as we as we can receive President Obama made his support clear when he visited SpaceX's launch site just before Falcon 9's first test flight as this animation shows Elon Musk's next flight will be far more ambitious carrying cargo all the way to the space station it was scheduled to fly in February but it's taken longer than expected to perfect the flight software the flight will be a complicated rendezvous with a space station that is moving 17,000 miles an hour 240 miles above the earth okay so it looks like our burn performance is nominal in the SpaceX mission control flight simulations are continuing and if all goes well SpaceX will begin routine Space Station cargo deliveries later this year but the big prize is winning the NASA contract to build America's next manned spacecraft and Elon Musk is facing stiff competition I'm probably not the guy that most people would bet on it wins it's it's like a little kid fighting a bunch of sumo wrestlers usually the sumo wrestlers win we're a little scrappy company every now and again those Grand Prix company wins and III think this will be one of those times

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thank you doing this I know today was a busy day at the office yeah I guess every day is a busy day in the office when you run into the companies some are poor in tents and others this is on the more intense side and let's let's talk about Tesla and if one were to believe everything one reads in the press haha which I don't is a former journalist the recent fires in the Tesla cars sound like the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 right the humanity and reality is somewhat different tell us tell us what really happened there yeah so I think first of all that it's fair for a new technology to receive more scrutiny than its then older technologies because it should be held to a higher standard but there's some reasonable limit to to what that increased standard should be and I mean since since the Model S went into production about a year and a half ago they've been about a quarter-million gasoline car fires in the u.s. about 400 deaths 1,200 serious injuries our three fires which course no injury received more headline news and the other quarter million combined that seems like an unreasonable ratio and I believe all three owners of those cars have crashed wanted to get another one yes right exactly that's like don't take my word for it like that they know that was likes it well how soon can they get a loaner car until the insurance thing gets figured out and yes sir it was to give him one right away but yeah the nessa acid tests like do this the guy that was they experience the fire does he want to have that same corrugate you feel safe in it yeah and stock price down again today ten percent do you care about that I mean it's it kind of sucks running a public company I mean the stock goes through these huge gyrations and yeah but for like seemingly arbitrary reasons and then I'm asked to explain why I changed I'm like I have no idea it should be pointed out it's up 300% on the year yeah right I mean on balance that's still a little good but I mean when the stock price is way higher and people after what I think of the valuation I said well I think it's probably more than we have right to deserve we'll try to get there in the long term and I think we will and probably exceed it but I I would not try to justify that a company with little over two billion dollars of revenue should be worth twenty two billion dollars in market cap that does seem pretty high to me you know it's socially yeah and it's fair to say you wouldn't be there without government subsidy well I think it would have taken longer so the I mean there's a slight misperception about the history of Tesla which is that that the government funding was pivotal it was an accelerant but it was not pivotal but the really pivotal the focal point was an investment from Daimler in 2009 there were early 2009 when there was I basically spent all the money I had it and we had one company that was willing to invest or one entity that was willing to invest period and that was timeline and if they hadn't come in with that investment we would definitely be dead fortunately bankrupt finish yeah gone and fortunately they did we've done a number of vehicle programs at Daimler was the Mercedes b-class which is not currently produced in the US but it's very popular in Europe other parts of the world we will be coming to the US and that will have a Tesla battery pack and powertrain it will be the largest electric vehicle programming down the history so that so it got a great relationship they've they've been a great great supporter and how about self-drive version of Tesla why do you think that's an important technology although the difficulty increases exponentially to get to fully self-driving to cover all the corner cases so I think we can get to maybe 90% of miles driven being order pilot as we call it this is using a little sort of aircraft analogy but I can get there pretty soon maybe in a few years but then covering that last 10% is really difficult and so getting from ninety percent to 99 1999 point nine and then ultimately to be truly self dropping like you can fall asleep in the car I was your destination which would be really great some people do already by the way yeah exactly they die yeah that that's good that just it just I think you probably need like six nines reliability like the standard would be it's actually way higher than it then the safety of us of a person probably by a factor of 10 or 100 in order for people to be comfortable or otherwise will well like the spire thing you know just like a car is basically the safest car you could possibly drive if you care about fires and that that's not the impression what would have reading the headlines we would absolutely officer impression and so for self or self driving order pilot hopefully the media doesn't do the same thing same like maybe a disproportionate response but but I do think that it should be held to a standard that's maybe like 10 times better than a person and I know Google is working this to 10 years more or less yeah I mean I think the right path is probably a little different from what Google is pursuing and when Larry Page is a friend of mine I've known him since before he got venture funding for Google I think it's a really brilliant guy but I mean it's not Google is isn't focusing on on on autonomous cars where is it it's gonna be a pretty significant focus for Tesla and and from our standpoint it only matters if the autopilot capability is does not result in it you know it's a substantial cost increase to the car and the way the Google sensor suite is set up it's like they were like 60 grand yeah I mean that's like a lot I want to ask you about risk taking and because there's a theory that entrepreneurs who hit it out of the park one time make that billion dollar plus company work right they are reluctant to do it again not because they're afraid of losing their money but because they feel if they were is just to fail a second time around then in their own minds maybe they would think well the first time it was just luck it wasn't really my own skill or my own sense of how to run a business but not only did you well you rose PayPal came up to 1.5 billion you got out of that only did you invest again me invest again twice not only that would you chose probably two of the most risky capital intensive industries to go with rocket technology which is basically a bomb right direct it up yeah and then cars which are you know we know what's happening to Troy yeah and so what is it that that motivates their to do that to go through the visible again to times again yeah I'm not sure was the right decision but so far so good yeah it's much less fun than it been it may appear but I mean the case of what I thought of I would do was start and run SpaceX then and and then create a electric car company with a few other people it worked but just like apply 20 percent of my time and work on the product design you limit like my main thing isn't is engineering of site so that yeah that was an illusion so yeah and then but I don't really have any choice but to apply a ton of time to Tesla or the company would be you know definitely dead so but the other way to do it you could have stayed in Silicon Valley started another few internet companies made a billion dollars and then you could have bought Chrysler and probably bought a NASA - and you wouldn't have to start from scratch that's easy yeah all right well I don't really want to know what is not so sort of owning a car company it's but rather to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport and it seemed like it would be difficult let's talk about SpaceX SpaceX you have said you started with the specific intention of getting to Mars yeah well the Arjun and SpaceX was actually not my interest in space my additional thought in space was that it wasn't possible to create a company and I mistakenly thought that the reason that we're not send people to Mars was because we'd lost the world to explore some more like maybe that and I thought well maybe that needs to be reignited and so I can't was idea to do a basically a philanthropic mission to Mars with what was a hard percent probability of losing all the money in order to reignite interest in that goal but after after a while I realized that's that was actually those mistake given the particular United States is a nation of explorers came here from other parts of the world I think more than any other country is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration there's no lack of world the but people need to believe that there's a way that that in a way that's feasible and and that it's not going back up the country and they're living standard will be weren't being materially affected you know and then I think they're super super keen on on that that goal now as you look out whatever we're talking 10 15 20 years to get to Mars it's not just rocket technology and you've talked about reusable rocket technology it's also how you shield people from radiation it's a 10 12 month trip what you do when they arrive you know how are they gonna live here are you is that something that you want to work on to or will you partner with other companies how do you how do you see that playing out over the next decade well I actually think the the technology required to live on Mars is not not particularly difficult but but but getting there is is really difficult I mean it's like hundreds of millions of miles yeah exactly it's a place that kind of looks like Arizona you know you're like a cold version of Arizona with not quite as much water so I mean least that that's that's my best might my guess is I think if we can if we can get there but technology required to live there well is is not a not a really big challenge I mean Morris has some advantages it's got a it's quite sort of earth-like in some ways it's got a rotational period of twenty four and a half hours by far the closest of any other planet the atmosphere is carbon dioxide no it's not it's a low pressure but if you were to have a transparent dome you you all you need is a pump and so and some fertilizer and you could grow plants on laws the plants would convert the co2 to oxygen the other thing that's been big in the news reason is the Hyperloop which you have sketched out you estimate from LA to San Francisco in 35 minutes yeah you could push that a little bit but it well I'd be happy if I could get from Santa Monica to downtown I know I don't know you have your personal issues with the four or five the four or five is like this is like the most brutal construction project I've ever personally witnessed obviously mind-boggling but I also know that so you sketch this out but I know that your your your plans for the Hyperloop have been put in some pretty sophisticated simulation technology yeah and it looks like it actually might work I'm alright yeah and we did run simulations at SpaceX and Tesla so we you know we yeah we thought it would work but you know I don't actually don't think it's particularly like I mean I think I think it's like the engineering of it that that it would work is is actually pretty pretty obvious obviously but I mean it's so I think the larger issues are political you know getting the the political support to do something like that and and then you know making sure the economics pan out and yeah I hope someone does it because I think it would be cool I mean every break this to have something like that yeah it's just like it doesn't seem like our mass transportation is getting any better it seems to be kind of getting worse so that's that's not a good future you said something or you hope somebody else would do it I'm curious what makes you really so unique it's not only your ability to dream big but to execute lots of utopian thinkers out there but they kind of execute yeah but there are some other people who can do good things and I'm wondering what seems to motivate you you see things that frustrate you or you think are not as good as you like and then you try and fix them you've worked on on solar power you've worked on electric cars and Flandre space travel and I'm wondering what are the things about America and about the world for that matter would you like to see fixed either by a company you might do yourself or by someone a smart entrepreneur what what else out there is feasible you know we all want to give the world poverty and get rid of childhood diseases but but what what problems out there can feasibly fix say in our lifetime well I mean I think first of all the world's actually pretty great right now I mean arguably better than any point in history and just this is sometimes lost if you read the newspapers they're they're like a magnification of all the world's problems it's like I mean newspaper seems to be attempting to answer the question what was the worst thing that happened on earth today yeah it's yeah and and it's like okay I mean and I think there's there is kind of a evolutionary reason for that because it makes more sense to like you want to prioritize danger over a reward or because it's it if you get eaten by the lion game over but you know if you if you forget where you left some snack that's that's okay I mean you yeah so so there's a if it's not quite the same in terms of the rest of us for balance but we didn't evolve with newspapers and and and global media's so like our brains sort of having a fear response to a lot a bunch of dangers that are extremely unlikely to ever affect us oh yeah you have I believe about 3,000 people a Tesla we've 6,000 yes 6,000 I'm not informed and SpaceX's is 3,500 so that's a massive agglomeration of engineering talent yeah yeah if I could take the metaphor of a ship how much time do you have to go down into the engine room roll up your sleeves get your hands dirty and fix stuff as an engineer and how much time do you spend on the steering and looking at the at the distant horizon well not a lot on that last point I it's I mean there's there's a constant flurry of executional challenges and so I try to triage my time according to what would be best for the companies and and still you know have sometimes see my kids because the message of them growing up so you know it can vary from big issues two things that seem small that actually could have a really big impact so I mean it's it's all the way from design aesthetics to the details of say the vehicle functionality or in the case of the rocket the you know behavior next propulsion system and airframe I mean the rocket is kind of a head that has milk more of a concentrated pucker factor because of you got it's you got these launches and and leaks for the car you can do a recall or like do a software update that's not gonna happen with the rocket so it's like passing grade is our percent which is induces anxiety you know how do you handle a launch anxiety when you're actually waiting that countdown we saw on here well beep these ones actually I mean there there's this I have quite a lot of anxiety so I think it must be something that we did wrong and there's anything I could have done to prevent this hypothetical thing from from bad thing from occurring I mean the last roughly 10 launches have have worked but but the three launches we started off with did not so the by far the worst emotional stress was the fourth launch of felt the Hawaiian because the first three launches did not make it to all of it they got they got to sort of space on launches 2 & 3 but they didn't get to full overall velocity and you know when I started out I figured I would have enough money for three three launches yeah so is we squeaked by on the fourth fourth one we sent out a link today I don't know if how many of you saw it but it's a view using a your hands as 3d molding sort of tools for stuff you're doing on a computer screen and it's a rocket engine that you're able to manipulate with your hands and and I know that you have told Jon Favreau who produced or a directed Iron Man that that was the inspiration because we see Tony Stark to English and and I know also you know I've read a bit you Isaac Asimov's Foundation series you've also said he's been inspiration so I'm wondering as well actually when you're on the cutting edge of technology today in the fields that you're in do you feel you've almost got one foot in science fiction is that did you at do you have to be that far ahead well well you have to imagine an outcome in order to head in that direction and science fiction explores a lot of different ideas so it can be helpful as a source of inspiration and any like books TV shows movies and they're all I think source of inspiration most of the movies and TV shows that space are totally wrong but but they still have interesting ideas like the Star Trek communicator was an inspiration for the cell phone yeah right in fact the weird thing is like like the like the phones we have in our pocket fastly exceed what was on Star Trek we're gonna go to ask some more students and some questions but first one more and I saw I'm a big James Bond fan you just bought the Lotus Esprit that they used in the Spy Who Loved Me which goes underwater yeah and you're gonna make that work so it's it's definitely a backburner project okay my question is when do we get to see a functioning version of the Millennium Falcon that's a tricky one because it's not actually the right shape it's a note to George Lucas I mean the the Falcon 9 Falcon rocket was named after the Millennium Falcon even though it looks nothing like it and yeah I mean yeah that's not the shape you'd want for my spaceship really okay so we can swing the camera to our student tables we get a couple of questions from there then I'll go to the written questions and the rest the audience buta Cole good evening sir my name's Ariel hi miss I'm from Vaughn next century referring to Merlin 9 does basics have a working prototype and when will it be ready to launch well rolling is the name of our alright so in the Falcon 9 is name of the rocket and we we've done several launches of Falcon 9 and then an important milestone having a few months ago which was the the launch of the next generation of Falcon line which is designed to be able to return and land at the launch pad and came we came close on the initial mission but didn't quite get there we need to make a few few corrections but I think we've got a good chance of getting there next year ok hi I'm Kennedy green from harvard-westlake so I've seen you speak at a TED talk and I remember you spoke pretty emphatically about the success of your innovations and how you kind of take a physics approach where you take the idea and boil it down to its basics and from there start to build up so can you talk about an example where you use that process an important thing in innovation or trying to create new things is to try really hard to do that which may sound incredibly obvious but that that's what I find is most often what people don't do they actually didn't didn't try super hard to come up something new and it is helpful to have cross-pollination of industries I mean it's been quite difficult to run SpaceX and Tesla but there has been good ideas you know focus since I got both in my mind space this this good idea is going back to forth but for example on the car with respect to the car the Model S is the only aluminum body and chassis car made in North America and very few cars are aluminum in the aerospace industry it's that that's the default so it seemed like like obviously the right move in order to minimize the the non battery pack mass of the car so in order to offset you know fairly heavy battery pack we had to make the rest of the car light but but still achieve a five-star safety rating I don't think it would have been possible to do that if we had used steel which is the traditional method and and what's helped SpaceX has been that the car industry is really good at making complicated objects at a low cost I mean it's actually quite incredible that like one can buy a decent car for twenty thousand dollars I mean all the stuff that's in that car is I mean it's nutty how much stuff is in a car so that that's basics I hired a bunch of people from the auto industry to run manufacturing which just worked out reasonably well let's take two more student questions please and they will hello I'm Natalie Watson from Marlborough school and we have a sort of two-part question that builds so why do you think Tesla succeeded whereas other companies car companies have failed in their methods of electric cars and is the location in Silicon Valley and important part of this yeah I think I think being in Silicon Valley is pretty important because what's really critical with electric cars is electrical engineering software and electronics and Silicon Valley has the best concentration of talent in those areas in the world and yeah sorry what was the first other question oh why do we succeed oh yeah alright I'm sorry what was your question oh the first part okay why do you think Tesla succeeded whereas other car companies failed in their methods of electors of electric cars like why do you think Tesla is the leader in this idea well but there haven't been that many car companies startups remember there was sort of Fisker and coda and then a few smaller ones and and then the rest has sort of been some some fairly small scale efforts by the big companies III think if we say what was the first we say Fisker and Tesla does maybe the bit most direct comparison Tesla is a hardcore engineering company and Fisker is kind of it was based on kind of on styling you know it's like styling is good important but it's that's not the reason we don't have electric cars so it's a you know bed for styling we would have electric cars that's not the reason so in the case of this car they made a car that a lot of people think looked really good but didn't work properly so then people don't want to buy the car that's like a pretty reasonable thing yeah yeah if you think alike like what what what's the point of a company existing but the point is that it's a group of people that have gathered together to create a product if the product is good company should exist and if it is not good the company should not exist that seems like fundamental to nature companies so the I mean clearly then one should focus on making the absolute best product you can otherwise you reduce the probability of success but a lot of companies focus on things that aren't really to do with the product as though a company has any basis for existing apart from doing useful things that's kind of strange good evening sir my name is Eric pelayo from bond next century and regarding the Mars the proposed Mars expedition what how exactly do you plan on making it cost-efficient sure well now that is that is indeed a tricky problem I mean I feel reasonably possible that that success is at least one of the possible outcomes like this is a I mean this is pretty important when you're trying to do something it's like well it can't can that be one of the outcomes I wasn't actually confident about that until a few years ago now in most thing we will get there but III I'm confident that it is at least possible and like the key to that is having a fully reusable mass transportation system so that all your all you are placing between flights maybe apart from minor maintenance is the propellant I mean this is this like the reusability is so fundamental to having a major change in spaceflight it's difficult to overstate its importance but I mean thank you with analogy to other modes of transport you can imagine that if airplanes could only be used once they would very few people would fly because it would be super crazy expensive I guess like a 747 costs a quarter billion dollars you need two of them just for a roundtrip however people are not paying half a million dollars to fly it back and forth to London and that's because you can use the 747 like 20,000 times and for a rocket you know a Falcon 9 rocket costs about 60 million dollars to build and so if it can be used once obviously that's a 60 million dollar capital cost but if you can be used a thousand times then it's only a sixty thousand dollar capital cost and I mean that is you know and it's also it is it is the fundamental difference so you have to have freely use well then you have to make sure that the propellant used is as low-cost as possible so our next-generation rockets will be using methane as a fuel which is met methane is the is the lowest cost sauce fuel on the planet by a good margin so at the inside I think if your propeller costs too low and the system is fully reusable then I think it I think it should be possible to Egypt to move to Mars for less than half a million dollars which i think is an important threshold because if people can sell all this stuff on earth and move to Mars well and there's enough people who who can do that combined with those who actually want to do that then that then that that's that's the fun well thing needed to have a a growing colony on Mars you kind of like the way that the u.s. was it's like the early English colonies in America when it became affordable for people to sell their stuff in England and moved to America it grew really fast in the absence of that it's it were just required humongous amounts of government support and I think probably wouldn't be wouldn't result in a self-sustaining civilization so the economics of it are extremely fundamental Thanks okay I'm gonna go through some questions that we got from the floor and and the first one I want to ask is what is what do you think is the next battery technology after lithium ion I guess living your mine has sort of reached its ceiling more less or I think this that I think there are substantial improvements that will occur with lithium ion batteries without any no miracles required the the thing with lists in my own technology in terms of the cost of energy density is that the sort of average improvement per year is about 8% which isn't that noticeable on a one year basis but but your compound interest is a very powerful force and so after say four or five years the cost is cut in half it's assuming there's a forcing function for a strong forcing function for improvement which I think electric cars provide so I feel pretty good about achieving a substantial reduction across the battery pack I say in kind of a three or four year time horizon still way behind yeah sure double nothing nothing I mean anything that operates at worst low speed is Moore's law you know semiconductors just have this incredible advantage that as you made them tinier they got way more efficient for something with like that's that's a lot large like a macro structure like a battery pack you just don't have or really almost anything essentially I say in fact anything except microprocessors in memory that does not improve at that pace yeah another question here it's about medical technology is there a medical application or technology that you you would like to change or see somebody else change work on well medical technology well I think the thing that would so most profoundly affect people would be to be able to recode genetics which is obviously a dodgy situation but that that's the thing it like we're we were close to saturation on on lifespan I mean it's sort of pretty much leveled out and and so even if you solve say any one particular disease you maybe slightly improve life expectancy but but not a lot you know it's like you kind of have a genetic programming any given species for a certain lifespan like the like you cannot make a fruit fly I live for ten years no matter what you do I mean healthy living vitamins or anything this was like yeah so for 20 years that would be that would be a truly astounding achievement but yeah so I mean it's a really tricky subject you know it's fraught with with all sorts of moral issues but that's the thing that would most affect people's lives but it's I mean it certainly is double-edged swords here's another question from a Tesla owner why is there no coat hook in the back yeah he says PRC says you can design a rocket but you forgot the coat hooks well I didn't actually forget it I just I intentionally didn't like it so weren't there like the aesthetics of it really bothered me but and I know obviously some people disagree with that decision but I think I think we might have a retroactive fix for that if somebody has the panoramic roof which is to basically have a hook on the bow section and in the middle of the roof and then like your code could hang down in the second or a passenger footwell which is actually slightly better than having a code hook that's stuck on the side of the car so I think we'll probably do that yeah wherever that question came from hold on it's not the first time I've heard that question is there a future in hydrogen fueled engines yeah exhales invention one Atlantica which is in the beginning of the Model S production I also didn't have reading lights in the second row I was like well people I thought people were really going towards your ebooks in Kindle and iPad and I can't think it's like so they have like their own light they don't need like an actual light in the back and then those driving with one of my kids and and he was trying to read his book daddy yeah he said this is a stupid car in the world all right we'll put the light back in hydrogen fuel engines they have a future I you know I don't think so hydrogen is a very difficult energy storage mechanism I mean essentially it's the means of storing energy chemically but there a way that if you want to do that they're way better materials than hydrogen like I'd go with methane or propane way before hydrogen in fact the way that they make the hydrogen is by taking methane and chopping the carbon atom wolf so like well that seems like a waste yeah well they'll do electrolysis which is even worse so it's a really energy intensive it's either like either taking either still mining hydrocarbons on a large scale or you're applying massive amounts electricity to separate h2o and then sometimes we'll say over the hydrogen is the most common elements in the universe yes but not on earth which is the important consideration you know it's it's yeah it's one of those things that sort of this always sounds like it's like it's well she's like it's the future and it always will be like the Hindenburg issue yeah I mean in in the case the Hindenburg my sending is that the main issue was the paint on the outer surface as opposed to hydron itself but but hydrogen does combust extremely well I hydrogen has a has a there's a good argument argument for hydrogen as a fuel in the alpha stage of a rocket say saturn v in the second of those stages had hydrogen and particularly for the up stage of a rocket where you're not volumetrically constrained or other you your mass constrained rather than volumetrically constrained hydrogen is good if you care about mass and terrible if you care about volume and and it's also horrible from a handling standpoint this is a really tiny molecule and it goes all over the place you look at Apple after Steve Jobs and Microsoft after Bill Gates struggle to keep up the momentum I wonder if you thought about the future of your companies Tesla and SpaceX and I know you've talked about giving away a lot of your money but then I know you've had some other thoughts about that and you looked at Ford and wondering if you want to give I mean what's where were you out on that succession issue now well I I don't know if like I'm not sure about the whole sort of family dynasty from a well standpoint thing I mean that seems to you often work out worse than if if the kid wasn't given a huge sum of money I mean listen unless they've actually demonstrated a high ability to be a good steward of capital then it you know it's not gonna work out I think to give them a huge sum of money now that said I mean I'm wavering a little bit on that because if you look at the example of Ford and GM like GM went bankrupt Ford did not and Ford had the Ford family as a stabilizing influence so that there could be some merit to having a family stabilizing influence but maybe not necessarily complete control we're gonna end with two questions on the Hyperloop which is clearly a arouse a lot of emotion in Los Angeles and one is from UCLA Anderson I know that gene block is here who runs UCLA and but they want to know how do you envision the Hyperloop as an open source project to be run in traditional Enterprise fashion which would make profits that make sense but and I think it's be quite difficult for force me to execute the Hyperloop and the thing that will really matter is how good is that company at executing as opposed to the basic sort of ideas of the system so what I don't think it company has to worry too much about the creating value if they're really good at execution and like really the best example of open source is Linux and there's lots of companies that are quite valuable even though Linux is open source - that is from somebody else who wants to know when will the hyper ooh Hyperloop potentially be ready and can we get to Australia huh that would be I would not recommend it for we're going to Australia because Australia is really far so that were queer that we're something like the Hyperloop would work best is for distances that are maybe five about 500 miles but probably not more than a thousand and that's because if you're compared to say an alternative being supersonic air transport in order to go really fast with the plane you have to climb pretty pretty high because the atmosphere just looks like molasses when you're very fast so you in for distances certainly under five hundred miles you spend all your time just ascending and descending and you don't really get an opportunity to spend time at cruise so something like the Hyperloop can complete really well in that arena because you instantly but will break almost instantly enter a low-pressure environment and so the tube contains a low-pressure environment that's you know like the cruising altitude of well it's like very high altitude atmosphere basically and and so you don't have to spend any time ascending or descending so there's no way for it well extremely difficult for a plane to be faster than high for distances under five miles because that S&T same thing however once you get to long distances then the cost of the tube starts to become a big factor and and and so then I'd say it's probably the right movies to go to super star transpose because then you're spending a large percentage of your time at cruise and and you could probably get there fast to within a supersonic aircraft interest so no kangaroos in the Hyperloop and I know you have an insane schedule I know that you have to go from here back to your office tonight yeah I just wound up being at my best this has been it's like working noise last night so we are deeply grateful you came and gave us some time thank you so much thank you you

https://youtu.be/rixp9hbQgbM

the one and only Elon Musk is here I could have introduced him as Tony Stark and with that jacket on you look like Tony Stark we have a lot to get to about Tesla about SpaceX about entrepreneurism and about everything however you are in the news for some reasons that you may not wish to be which is that there have been now three fires in these tesla vehicles with the most recent one in the past week and there are questions lots of questions in The Wall Street community among the regulatory community wants to understand all this since I want to I want to do this I want to understand what you understand about this they're rumors that there's going to be a recall what is going on with these fires sure well there's definitely not going to be a recall that there's there's no there's no reason for a recall I believe and in fact I think the but but I mean the perception is if you cure the headlines it's it sounds like Tesla's have a greater propensity to catch fire than other cause and in actually in reality nothing can be further from the truth the the rate of fires for the average rate of fire for cars for gasoline cause is about 1,000 want one fire for every 1,300 cars at Tesla we now have almost 25,000 cause in the road we've had three fires so it's sort of roughly one for every 8,000 cars so we're about five times less likely to have a fire than the average gasoline car that doesn't mean we have zero likelihood it's you know the sort of law of large numbers and statistics suggest that they would but but the the headlines are extremely misleading in fact if the fire risk is your concern you would have a great deal of difficulty being in any better car than the Model S as so it's it's it's five times less fire risk than a gasoline than the average gasoline car moreover in in the mr. Tesla we've never had a serious injury or death in any of our cars so the that this is I mean maybe there is a card that is as safe as the Model S but there is certainly not a car that is safer because you would have to have less than zero let me ask you this well when you walked in and I was thrilled to see you I've compared this gentleman to the next Steve Jobs but when you walked in I said how are you and you said you know it's been a tough week when you hear about a fire like this what happens tell it bring us inside the room for a moment what happens at Tesla because I imagine everybody says oh my goodness there are clearly issues and concerns in the marketplace about batteries and fires period I mean that's that's where this fall begins and then what do you do well I guess we you know we kind of see what the reaction is and and then you know in this case their action is extremely inaccurate under and unreasonable you know the fact that there are two hundred thousand two hundred thousand gasoline fires car fires per year in the United States two hundred thousand there are on average 250 to 300 fire automotive fire deaths in the u.s. there are about 1,200 to 1,500 serious fire injuries per year how many times have you read about that can you recall all right no one isn't complete fairness and complete Vantage exactly so I mean so it's like wow this is extremely unreasonable and wrong the the the the expert press you know in this sort of automotive industries so like to take the the order of motive news editor at Automotive News actually wrote a great article kind of debunking the fire risk of the Model S because they know that then the propensity of fire is vastly greater in a gasoline car but in the popular press unfortunately it's easier to report online it's a sensation even though that since even though that is demonstrable false with a simple Google search so just just to explain everybody explain every to everybody what's happened in these three fires because there's a sense that these cars got in got into accidents from what I understand by the way every driver who of the cars is then asked to get a new car yes exactly but there's something going on where something underneath the car asked for a replacement Model S as soon as possible have you in conversations by the way with any of the people have been attacked yes what do they tell you it's the best quality of ever driven in all three cases they think they were saved from serious harm by the Model S and if they've been in a different car they would have been seriously injured and in the case of the second fire probably dead in a case the second fire that was in in Mexico there was I won't comment publicly on the exact speed but it's sort of four times the maximum kinetic energy that a car is supposed to be survivable at and the the the accident was in multiple parts at the the first impact was a concrete roundabout where fifteen feet of concrete wall was sheared off of eight inch thick concrete was curb also you know like a foot high time to think then the car bounced into a seven foot tall concrete wall smashed through that but by this time the wheels had been torn off so we're just getting along on its belly basically on the battery pack and and then it finally came to arrest against the tree the driver and passengers got out and walked away afterwards there was a small fire in the front ok final fire it's I mean it's sort of like okay let's say that the you know which is probably the wrong analogy but let's let's say that the Titanic okay instead of the Titanic sinking well if it was smashed through the first iceberg smashed through the second iceberg came to arrest on the third iceberg all the passengers disembarked safely and bought another ticket on the Titanic and and then the the newspaper report was kitchen fire on the Titanic okay not the point final question on this topic and we're gonna move on which is this has any regulator contacted you about this and what is the threshold for deciding that you need to look at these types of issues more meaningfully in terms of either thinking about either recalls or changes in the production of these vehicles and I know that you consider this vehicle to be safe yeah I mean so I'm sort of a perfectionist and safety is like an as I know one priority it was always there more Parthians on a car because I Drive it my kids are in it my friends are in it it is the absolute number one priority in fact when I call was tested by Consumer Reports safest car on the road yeah by long shot yeah it has the Model S when it was tested by the federal government as well the you've got the lowest probability of injury of any car ever tested in history in other words you could not drive a safer car and if there was something that we thought would negatively affect the safety we would immediately do a recall and in fact there was something earlier this year which was basically a bracket there were no injuries there were no even there were no near injuries but we discovered a slight issue maybe with one of the the rear seat belt brackets we recalled all the cars replaced the bracket I'm ask you a different question I think of you as an entrepreneur or someone who likes to operate your business and think about the future and what the future should be like what is it like though at the same time running a company that has become not only a sort of pop-culture sensation but this market sensation where you have a stock that has run up for those of you you know who've been counting at one point it was up 474 percent this year it's come down a little bit but you're still up 307 percent this year in terms of how much you think about that issue how much your employees think about that issue what it does to the culture I mean this is sort of a bit of a wild ride that you're on yes I keep thinking that it'll get less that's the wild ride but that seems to keep going I actually think that the high stock price was somewhat distracting and in fact I I went on record as saying that I thought the price was higher than we had any right to deserve no I mean that said I do think long term that the price will be all that well the value of the company will be well in excess of that but to give us that valuation now is to have a lot of faith in our future execution which we'll do our best we'll do have estimated that faith and but I mean I don't believe in sort of talking out the stock or you know something wasn't trying to talk it down but I was trying to be accurate when I think the stocks pretty good deal with where it is right now but it's it was probably a bit high before right that's my honest opinion how do you feel about one company that is clearly in the public eye we were talking in the back there's a piece in a newspaper day George Clooney is commenting we down now quoted George Clooney twice today because we had we're talking with Dan Loeb earlier today and I quoted something to him but to George Clooney was commenting that that he got stuck on the side of the road too many times with his car and he's gotten rid of it how do you want a company well this just that's not quite accurate so what I said our Clooney what you said and I think so the clearly comment was like it's it was a needless comment needlessly reported because he made an offhand comment in an Esquire article by Tom Junod who some reason doesn't love Tesla that it clearly said that his 2008 roads too broke down and so he sold it at a charity auction that was in 2008 so it's kind of like you know it's that was five years ago that this happened it's not a Model S it's not even recent it's not really news I'm not sure why it was even reported I mean it were like saying you know my iPhone one in 2001 had a bug right okay let's let's talk a little bit about you talked about the valuation of the company you've started to sell more vehicles in Europe yeah less vehicles in the US or because of this will be blessed vehicles in the u.s. there have been some analysts and folks who speculated that maybe the demand in the United States right now has already reached some kind of peak peak level do you buy that no I don't think so I mean I the the the main reason I think we got dinged on the stud that the valuation of stock wise was that we are at least in the short-term constrained on production so it's not we don't have a we're not demand constrained where production constrained and it's going to take a bit of time to work out the production constraints I mean our volume is increasing it's just not increasing as fast as if we didn't have that production constraint so yeah okay take take us to the future what what are the roads going to look like 10 years from now right now you're built your building charging stations all across the East Coast and across the country if you go on their site you can see this map and see where how it's all going to roll out what percentage of cars will be fully battery operated what percentage will be hybrids in terms of new vehicles that other auto manufacturers are producing and I asked it in part because I remember talking to some executives at Toyota recently and they said look we can't make a bet on one thing or the other weekend because it could be natural gas that could be the big winner in this it could be batteries it could be a combination could be some other thing that we haven't thought of yet well it's a people to predict the intermediate but I feel confident in predicting the long-term that all transport will be 100% electric with the ironic exception of rockets the and unfortunately there's no way around Newton's third law so the you know aircraft will be the last because of the you need on a very high energy density in the battery pack to have long distance aircraft for air travel but everything's gonna go fully electric it's kind of weird that we're not I mean it's I mean I think people will look back on this era like we look back on the sort of steam engine you know it's quaint and you know we should have a few of those around in a museum but but it's not how people would drive out how far batteries though generally from being widely adopted safe I mean you got you guys may be doing it better than anybody else I remember when this when the 787 came out originally you had some comments about how they had produced them yeah I mean 787 the issue was spontaneous combustion I mean I think it's understandable if the 787 had well if it crashed and and the bat did have been a factory fire yeah that would be factory fire would be not the point but the you know the the issue in 787 was the spontaneous combustion yeah if you if you got a ticket by the way an airplane ticket I know you probably fly muscare but when you fly commercial air if it said that it was a 787 87 plane would you fly on it today I guess so I mean it wouldn't be my first choice as an aircraft but it's because of a safety or because you prefer to high privately no I mean relative to other airliners my favorite eyeliner is actually the 747 I think that's just an awesome design it's a fast airliner it's the fastest of Vienna airliners actually quite quite aerodynamically efficient and I like this like the look of it on the state so that what that was the ring I mean that's a sort of a hall-of-famer right there the the 787 is kind of an improved version of this triple7 and I think it's a bit it's bit disappointing because it's main attributed as being ten percent more efficient per passenger mile than the seven the tread down the triple seven and eight of those ten points come from the engine so it seems like a lot of money to spend to get two percent more efficient on the airframe side it sounds like you've thought about this a lot you want to make air airplanes too I I do think that there's there's an interesting opportunity to create a supersonic electric vertical takeoff landing jet I think that would be really great how far away from that well it seems unlikely to come from Boeing or Airbus given that they seem to be focusing on very incremental improvements to the planes as opposed to radical improvements but it could come from a start-up we if I would have another company in the future which I would not be anytime soon the I think that would be a thing to do is to do an electric aircraft you want to do an electric air and supersonic and vertical takeoff landing actually work well with electric so you were a believer as a Sebastian thern believes that we will it'll be like the Jetsons by 2050 this is one of the guys who started Google glass playing cars flying cars flying cars everywhere is that is that directionally how this all goes for you I mean I kind of like the idea of flying cause on the one hand but you know it may not be what people want because if you have a huge number of cars and you have mechanical failures then yours you know I think we're sort of vaguely be wondering where the cars can land on your head and or you know house or whatever so I think that's concern and then maybe there's also a question of noise pollution and to what degree does it affect the skyline you know is it just buzzing thing of cars how about driverless cars so so Google is out there with its Google car how far are we from driverless cars and driverless Tesla cars well so the approach that Tesla's taking in this regard is to develop active safety and and do active safety and the limit you know things like active cruise control keeping in the lane during automatic passing by passing and that kind of thing and and then gradually improving active safety until ultimately the car is able to drive itself in long term in virtually every scenario maybe every scenario in the threshold I think for something to be autonomous is it's going to be much safer than a person driving a car because the it'll just be held to a higher standard it's kind of like like as an electric car even though like we're much safer than a gasoline car we're held to a much higher standard and and I think it's gonna be the same thing for autonomous cause I do think it'll happen but for afford to be truly autonomous you have to take care of these corner cases and so getting from getting tonight is one thing but then it's going to be another factor of 10 harder to get to 99 percent another factor to get to 99.9 then it you know because exponentially more difficult to get rid of the corner cases so how far out is that the to get to the 99 points yeah I like six nines or something like that something that you left your kids in the backseat I think that'll be a while I would say it's probably at least more than ten years maybe twenty years right I have a friend who's an entrepreneur who sent me an email last night knowing that I was going to see you and said the question you need to ask he want is how many ideas does you literally have a week and by the way we were in the back and just Elon and I and I felt yet 10 new ideas how do you sort through them how do you decide which ones are good and bad and for example you came out with this Hyperloop idea which you went public with something you're not going to do on your own but how do you even decide to do that I mean what's going on inside your brain if you could try to unpack it for us well usually it's um that there's something that that makes me not like the future you know or that's not like some element of the future and then wonder whether there's some way to fix that so in the case of the Hyperloop it was like you know we're building this train in California and it's it seemed very expensive and not that fast and it seems to be not as good as what they've done in China or Japan and so I was like wow that that's kind of depressing in fact that they liked the electric supersonic plane but I've got a I've got a design for that in mind and that that came from when when the Concorde was course since you it's when the call Cobras canceled right I you know it's like well that's that's sad now there's no supersonic transport and you know is the future getting worse and I it bothers me when the it seems like the futures getting worse so that's where the supersonic electric lane thing came from and and then the Hyperloop who was well is there a what's the best way to do mass transit between two cities like LA and San Francisco there's sort of teleportation what would you do that we really great I don't know how to do that so so the next best thing within the known laws of physics that I could think of with the Hyperloop and I'm a pretty sure would work and other people have you know redone the offense there were simulations and they've they've said it would work two more questions because we're gonna run out of time you are a serial entrepreneur and a successful serial entrepreneurs have one great idea in them do you believe that do you believe what there's another view well that there there's another view that and I've heard it from Peter Thiel and others that a great entrepreneur has that one great idea and that success takes them away and then the the motive to keep coming up with the next idea doesn't happen what you hate I think it's more that I think I think people can cope with one great idea so I think it's more like I mean creating a company is a very difficult thing if friend of Mines go saying that like creating a companies it's like eating glass and staring into the abyss I mean it's just you have to do lots of things you don't like and and there lots of seemingly intractable problems that come along and you know you so you have to put in incredible amounts of effort and huge amount of stress and it's it's much more painful than it would maybe people like people realize and most companies die and good and on a certain level in your brain it your brain it we didn't it but we didn't evolve like with companies right so we evolved to respond to real death and even though this accompanies death is not real it's like somebody's physically dying your brain doesn't quite understand that you know at the limbic system level so that it's really sort of painfully stressful and I don't people apply to want to go through that more than once okay final question for you I have compared you as others have to Steve Jobs who do you think the next Eve Jobs is out there who who do you admire and go you know what there's something going on over there well you know I mean I a big kind of Larry Page is a good friend of mine I think he's he does great things see Jeff besos is doing some impressive stuff with with Amazon and yeah it's companies like Dropbox and it's a bunch of uber you know this cool things are happening and we see what chief Jobs was a very unique individual I'm not sure that's anyone that's gonna be like him for a long time before I forget I know is for seshu one more question Microsoft you want to be the CEO no no is it fixable if the right person was there I'm sure it could probably be turn around with my purse and there I mean there's a lot of talented people still at Microsoft's the right person could probably steal the ship in it in a good direction okay he won Musk everybody unbelievable thank you for this conversation for being so forthright and take on these issues really appreciate it thank you very very much

https://youtu.be/K-uLAFb7GOg

now there was a very peculiar car launch in Britain today it's the Tesla s electric car which claims to be able to reach 60 miles an hour in just over four seconds finally putting an end to the idea of electric cars are basically milk floats without the raw power of a lawnmower engine while the Tesla s is the brainchild of the American billionaire Elon Musk he made his fortune in PayPal and other ventures and is now spending it on the Tesla project and sending rockets into space I went to meet him in West London what we could really try to achieve with the Model S was to create a compelling electric car something it was really different from people's prior experience because most people last time they drove an electric car which probably a golf cart or maybe a milk no milk float yeah so so that they're used to and their idea of an electric car is something that doesn't look good isn't fast it doesn't have high performance it has low range we wanted to break the mold of all of that and subdue something that was beautiful had high acceleration incredible handling had tons of capability lots of room and really was better than any gasoline car that's what we sought to achieve because this is the front trunk with nothing yeah now if somebody buys this car in the United Kingdom now how many places are there we can plug it in well anywhere there's an electrical outlet anywhere yes it is nothing special about the electrical the charger is built into the car so you can you can plug it in anywhere you go you can plug it in if you're traveling somewhere if you're a cottage at a hotel in addition to that however we're going to be creating supercharged locations throughout the UK so you'll be able to charge anywhere at a Tesla supercharger location and one of the things that we do with with these supercharged locations is that they're they're free so if you buy a Tesla you could you'll be able to travel for free anywhere in Britain and it's free forever and I'll add one more think that which is we're going to be installing solar panels at all of the supercharger locations which are intended to develop or generate more electricity in the course the earth and the cars consume that their charge there so the the net result is that you'll not only be able to travel for free forever but on pure sunlight well on this question of our energy bills which is the huge pivot a huge political topic now have we got it wrong in terms of where we are sourcing our energy mark my words solar will be the single largest producer of energy in the UK long term and you may say well isn't it rather it may be cloudy around here I was going to say a benign sight yes and even though it's cloudy you still get probably 80 to 90% of the energy coming through the clouds it's just that you don't have that bright point source of a Sun and a way to appreciate those perhaps is to look at the fact that plants are essentially a solar-powered chemical reaction and UK is a very green country now you're you live in Southern California in Los Angeles you travel a lot to San Francisco and you're also interested is it as a big thought in whether it's possible to travel by what's called a Hyperloop in other words you go at 800 miles an hour on the ground essentially right like it kind of like a train from Los Angeles to San Francisco and we do we suffer from generally a kind of low level of ambition should we think bigger than hs2 and think about something like this I think so I mean for reasons beyond the objective Oh we'll get there faster it's like you want to do projects that are inspiring and that make people excited about the future my life's got to be about more than just solving problems who want to get up in the morning and say yes I'm looking forward to that thing happening and I guess that was my essential disappointment with the California so-called high-speed rail is like I was looking at well and it's like well they've got better things and did better things in Japan 30 years ago they've got something way better in China why are we doing this and spending so much money on it and it's gonna take 20 years and by that time we'll be 50 years behind what they go to Japan I mean this just doesn't make sense a weird that that was my reactor that was your reaction to what's happening in California we are behind the California oh my god really the other big part of Musk's life is with his company SpaceX which is committed to improving rocket technology and even getting the human race to other planets you see really the future must be in space for the human race you really see this this is not science fiction this is actually yeah the fact absolutely I think history fundamentally bifurcates in one of two directions either we are a multi-planet species and out there exploring the stars or we are a single planet species waiting around for some eventual extinction event it's really that that I did personally I find more motivating which is your going and setting off a base on Mars would just be the greatest adventure ever not everyone's our fans back on earth Tesla sued the program top gear after it rubbished the Tesla Roadster Tesla lost so what is must think about Jeremy Clarkson I think what Clarkson fluxes show is much more about entertainment than is about truth and I think most people realized that but not everyone and I've actually enjoyed a lot of his shows it's not as though I just hate Top Gear or anything he can be very funny and irreverent but he does have a strong bias against electric cars I need particularly seems to hate American if like his two pet peeves are Americans American cars and electric cause and we're an American electric car so we're we're in the worst possible situation for someone like clucks and so do you see this is a missionary activity you're over here trying to convert and jerk Jeremy Clarkson I don't think it'll be any converting of Jeremy Clarkson that seems quite unlikely [Music]

https://youtu.be/fWCCcgVwNJ0

next speaker is certainly face big very big it dreams big does big things his ideas have been described as excessively cool whether it's PayPal the cars SpaceX obviously as you know when the cofounders of PayPal CEO Tesla drove one of his cars short while they going man they are they got to pick up and go they are really cool SpaceX he always tied in here with Z cast Kozlov SpaceX rocket components are made right here in Butte I am Robyn's family so we're very very proud of all that let's give a big big run applause to Elon Musk all right thanks very much for having me I actually just came from from a/c cast which is a that they make a cast titanium and inconel parts for the SpaceX rocket engines and actually brought all my five kids who are sitting right there [Laughter] [Applause] so that they got to see steel being poured and and then titanium being being poured as well and and creating sophisticated castings they seem pretty excited about that and it was it was kind of like Charlie in the metal Factory I guess so let's see I guess I'll maybe talk a bit about entrepreneurship and technology you know tell me tell you about my experiences and what you know what happened to me and and then I think we're gonna try to reserve as much time as possible for Q&A from the audience and certainly feel free to ask any any and every question and so I can I give the nutshell account because it's getting a little bit long at this point so I I am I arrived in North America when I was about 17 I was born in South Africa but I was actually named after my American great-grandfather so I was returning to my ancestral homeland actually and he was he was John Ilan Haldeman and he was actually from Minnesota and Jerry from the Masonic Minnesota Wisconsin area okay but I want to come to the United States because I think it's it's where great things are possible it's where the technological frontiers are pushed forward and I knew I wanted to be involved in that I don't know exactly how but anyway I went through through college and I ended up at eventually at Stanford with the idea of studying applied physics and material science try to figure out ways to store energy more effectively for electric cars so you can make them go go further and I ended up putting that on hold to start an Internet company in 95 and at the time it wasn't from the perspective of making a lot of money because nobody had made any money on their internet and in 95 but it seems to me that the internet was something that would create effectively line a nervous system for Humanity so whereas previously if you wanted to access information you'd have to go to a library and you know if even even if you went to a lot of libraries you still wouldn't have access to all that much information but but if everything got connected then any of anyone anywhere if you were in sort of a jungle in middle of Amazon jungle in South America or something and you had an internet connection you'd have access to all the world's information in fact you'd have access to more information than that the US President did and let's say 1980 which is it so it'd be pretty incredible and transformative so I thought well I I wanted to be part of helping make that happen and and so I decided to put my studies at Stanford on hold and and start an Internet company initially to help the media companies get online and so we had as investors in customers New York Times company Hearst knight-ridder and so forth and that that ended up working out so we sold that company and then created PayPal and and there the idea behind paper was simply to facilitate payments on the internet because at the time if you bought something from someone you'd have to mail them a check and it would take weeks to conduct the transfer and we we figured out how to make it really fast and easy to transfer funds from one person to another and then that actually grew superfast it grew virally and the key to that was figuring out how to make the friction of signing up for an account very very low and make it easy for one person to refer another and and so as our customer base grew the actual rate of growth grew and this resulted in some initial challenges and scaling because we started off with with five people in customer service and after two months we had a hundred thousand customers so our phone lines exploded basically but we were able to overcome that that those issues and and then eBay bought the company and in 2002 and it and it sort of burned from them so what that did though was gave me the capital to try to do some things that that are a fairly high capital and there were two things there two areas that I really wanted to get into one was sustainable energy production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner and the other was space exploration and I started off initially with the idea of doing something in the space exploration arena in fact it wasn't actually what the idea of creating a company was initially with the thought of spurring interest in in sending people to Mars so I put together this idea of called Moz Oasis which was to sand a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars and get people excited about the idea of going there and thus increased NASA's budget in order to make it happen and as I got more and more into that I discovered that the the real issue was that the cost of space transportation was really high in fact and it was getting worse so we're used to technology getting better over year but in some arenas that actually does not it goes gets worse particularly when you consider that in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and then we were unable to go beyond low-earth orbit and now with the space shuttle retired we're not even able to go to earth over at all even with people so that's you know that was not the right trajectory so I would actually went to Russia three times to look at buying an ICBM to launch this mission just very crazy very cool so after my third trip of trying to negotiate with the Russians to buy an ICBM and I did actually get a deal so figured out what it would cost and everything but I concluded that my initial assumption had been wrong that it was not a question of trying to generate more will to explore because I think the United States in particular its distillation of the human spirit of exploration people its space exploration is fundamental to the American psyche so but people really need to believe that it can be done and it's not going to break the bank if it does so that's when I decided to start a rocket company and I actually didn't think it would succeed and it almost didn't so we we we saw drove developing a small rocket which was kind of a scale scale model version it was about a hundred thousand pounds of thrust so big you know big by normal standards but small for a rocket and felt the engine and the airframe and the electronics and the guidance control system and and and then proceeded to have three failed launches in a row and so for various technical reasons the the first three launches did not succeed in reaching orbit launches two and three did did get to space but they didn't achieve enough speed to reach orbital velocity and and so this is 2008 and and so we're heading into the recession and we had way too one rocket left and unfortunately in in late 2008 that fourth launch did work and we made it to orbit and then we won a NASA contract after that and and so fortunately things worked out but if that if that fourth launch had not worked then there's basics wouldn't be around so it was very close call if I when I when I started I thought okay I've got enough money I think I've got enough money for three launches unfortunately it was just enough to make that fourth one so in parallel there was there was Tesla and the the impetus for Tesla was was really to to create a compelling electric car and at first I thought there would there would not really be a need for such a thing because other people aware of this but Jim at the time it had created the EB one or electric vehicle one and Toyota done the electric rav4 it had been primarily as a result of regulations from the zero emission mandate States particularly California so they created the these electric vehicles and I thought okay this is great well GM's obviously can go from the ev1 to the ev2 and eb-3 and everything will be fine but when California changes to regulations they actually at GM recalled old eveyone's and and then crushed them in a so that they could never be returned so it was clear that if if a start-up company did not create an electric vehicle and show that it's possible to have an electric car that looks good goes fast has long range and that if you created such a thing that people would buy it then it would be a very long time before the large incumbents did so and so that was the I felt was important that we create Tesla for that reason and and it has also almost died in 2008 and the view as you call the the recession was particularly difficult for for car companies and writers in the summer 2008 we had to raise a big funding round but because of the collapse in the financial system that that funding round didn't didn't happen and we had to piece together the money to keep the company going from myself and the existing investors and were able to just come to complete a financing around that was just barely enough to keep the company going and we closed it on the last hour of the last day that it was possible to do so it was it was Christmas Eve 2000 2008 6:00 p.m. and after that the investors would would have had they were going on vacation wouldn't have been possible to bring them back to the table and we would have run out of money a few days after Christmas so that was also close cool so while things are going really well these days I think it's always important to remember that when you're creating a company there are very dark times and it's about getting through those those dark times that that's the difference between success and failure so of course now things are actually going pretty well for for Tesla may they stay that way and and also for SpaceX we've got the Model S which is in production and it's the it was like Consumer Reports gave it a 99 out of 100 which it's actually the highest score that Consumer Reports has ever given a car of any kind was given to the Model S [Applause] and and then the when the federal government did the safety tests it actually also got the the highest safety rating of any car ever including minivans and SUVs so for a sedan and area so that's let's that's going pretty well and we're actually exporting a lot of the cars to Europe currently and then we start exporting to Asia and it's funny exercise running like we got these incredibly good rates for shipping goods to China because all these container ships come in full and they go back empty so it's real cheap to ship things to China so we'll start doing that in first quarter and then with SpaceX we've got a launch coming up which is our next generation rocket because the the the the key thing for rocketry the key breakthrough that's needed is to create a fully reusable rocket because I think what SpaceX has done less polished evolutionary but not revolutionary in order for that to occur you have to bring the rocket back to the launch pad and be able to relaunch it again and write it just like it has to be reusable and much in the way that an airplane or a car or or any other mode of transport is reusable so that's the that's kind of the Holy Grail goal of spaceflight which we're we're hoping to make progress towards but it's very risky so there's there's a good chance that the upcoming launch could go wrong it's currently slated for the end of this month and hopefully that that goes well it's always a tricky thing with with rocket business because you can't issue a recall or you know send us off for a patch or anything after the rocket lifts off nine minutes later it's either in orbit or it's exploded yeah it's nervous nine minutes all right so with with those introductory or monks let's let's just go to Q&A under happy to answer any questions you have yeah I think the one question lined up the student by presidency of Montana zane somehow magically seen is going to appear on the screen as good question okay Zane well in terms of influencing public policy I'm not sure we've been particularly successful in influencing public policy but but we've been able to go with the flow of what other people are doing to influence public policy I think so in you know in the case of electric vehicles GM was a big proponent of an electric vehicle tax credit to help with the eb1 or not the v1 I mean the the vault and and then Nissan was also a big proponent of that so that they have a lot more influence than intellibid serve me so but we were able to kind of go with them in that direction maybe add a little bit to to the influence on that front and then on the on the space side we've been arguing for a greater share of that more of space should be commercial and I think that's that there's been some success in that direction well though it's still a very small part of the NASA budget it's it's maybe a seven or eight percent of the NASA budget so it's still slow pelvis is fairly small so I wouldn't I wouldn't say we've been particularly successful in influencing you know policy but but we have taken note of where policy what general policy directions are happening and then trying to you know go along with those yeah on the truth I'll ask the first question that we know but it up you it said something which is very interested in true that is it's every business started up reaches a point where the clouds are dark yes and it's leaving yourself and going through with the Tesla and also in the SpaceX a couple of times you almost lost it most companies all over the country and also like clear in our state will face issues like that could you just tell us a little bit more about how you dealt with those dark moments yeah sure because I think that's pretty key to succeeding absolutely so I think so when you when you create a company I mean if you well what is a company really a company is a group of people gather together to create a product or service and that that's really all the company is and so you have to really believe in what you're creating and and that it's and and and know in your heart and mind that this is something that matters that and and and that the world ought to have and I think it's important to investors to to show that that you were you're all in and I think for example with with Tesla the fact that I invested all the money I had literature literally I had to borrow money from friends to pay the rent and in 2008 the fact so the fact that I was all in I think was hugely made a huge difference to to the investors to convince them to invest in and in Tesla at the same time that that GM and Chrysler were we're going bankrupt and yeah I think you have to show that you really care like it's like you you you've got skin in the game that if you've given it everything that you've got and then the other people the company will follow suit as well investors I think that's really important and yeah did that oppose SpaceX and Tesla like that that's that's really really fundamental and then when you hire people or really what you're trying to when you hire people that just means you're convincing people to join you in in the endeavor you should hire people that are they're also passionate about what you're doing so it's not just that they're not just there for the salary that they really need to care about what what they're doing and and then that then they will stay during the dark times thank you lon wait nice question I just see your five sons in the front row of gleams beer and I went to see your dad nobody Oh why would six seven months ago I saw your photographs on the wall alone has five boys three triplets and two twins and I want to know your dad is really proud really proud of of all you talked about you and on this wall there okay first question yes sure what I mean I think that the reason it's important to develops a sustainable energy production consumption is that even if even if one ignores the environmental consequences and and and says okay well simply a scarce resource well unless we move towards something that is sustainable that will be there in the long term then leaving aside any questions of environmental impact will face economic collapse if we run out of fuel to burn and and then put in vehicles so in my initial interest in Tintin in sustainable energy production and consumption was actually not driven from an environmental standpoint although I do think there are environmental consequences but rather from the importance of the continuance of human solute civilization which we were before we would face a disaster if we do not find some alternate means to power society and and and travel and and and I well although the scarcity issue will only become really serious maybe towards the end of the century because of the enormous industrial base of power generation and transport it will take decades to transform that to a sustainable system so we must take action now in order to avoid a calamity towards the end of the century I think sustainable production consumption of energies is the most important terrestrial problem that we face in the 21st century well the the overarching goal of SpaceX is to develop technologies that will enable the establishment of a permanent city on Mars a self-sustaining base on Mars and we'll try to get as far in that direction as possible because I think the future Humanity is fundamentally different if we are a spacefaring civilization and multi-planet species compared to one where we are not and I think both for defensive reasons and essentially to have life insurance to life itself on another planet and pull frankly the the adventure of it I think we ought to do that sort of thing and and I actually personally am sort of more motivated by the fact that it would just be the greatest adventure if any of us would like to join you all I realized I was at a no card I should've been dressing people the question is that the microphones that's why they lined up over there okay yes over there mr. musk welcome to Montana and I have to tell you that you've been one of my great heroes ever since Jeremy Clarkson on top gear fell in love with an electric car thank you very much for that my question for you is how do you balance your capacity for risk your risk tolerance against your desire to continue to innovate how do you manage to to weigh the two because with Tesla you went all-in right so how how do you reconcile that that risk with yourself knowing that this last project could very well be you know the end versus your desire to to keep innovating with the Hyperloop or whatever innovations you have down the pike sure um well I mean at the end of the day I I you know I think that what I mean I was certainly facing the loss of all assets I mean technically it would have been negative because it would have been owing people money but I but I figured I could always make enough to you know already spot her enough to pay the rent and and you know buy food and that kind of thing so I didn't think we would starve or lack for shelter although it would be would have been sad to not have lost all the assets gained from prior companies but really the toughest decision was was not whether to invest the money into Tesla it was really that had Tesla and SpaceX and that the tough decision was if if I if I split the money between the two companies then it's possible that both may still have died and so I I had to decide would I dedicate funds to just one company or and let the other one die for sure or split the funds between the two companies and that's that that was really that was the really difficult decision okay couple more questions keep them very short please it works right answers yeah dust and young Montana Department of Commerce thank you for your time mr. musk my question relates to v's and electrical storage on the grid and what your thoughts are on that and what your company is doing to move that forward sure um I do you think that we'll need to pair solar power with grid storage with battery storage and and I don't think actually using the car is going to be ideal solution because people I usually want to use their car and their house so I think but this is often suggested and it is true that the the car has a big battery and and so one could use a map perhaps in an emergency but I think what we'll need to do is have a moderate amount of a pack of stationary pack storage combined with Sola and then an electric car but and I think that works over here yes sorry thank you for on your presentation today and my question to you really is is a young man who's out there Saoirse for himself and as many of my generation are we have jobs not really careers and we're searching we're continuously facing employment how do we convert that a yellow ideology of space future and energy and how do we personalize it so that we ourselves can convert this energy into something meaningful how do we get involved okay well I think you could either work work at a company in those arenas or or say okay what's some important piece of the puzzle in rockets or cars or something and then put together a group of people and figure out how to make that piece of the puzzle super good and and that's that's a I think that best way to do it over here good morning math sergeant from headframe spirits here in Butte I'm wondering how a rural state like Montana can increase its technology economy you know what lessons have you learned from Silicon Valley that could apply here in small-town America well I mean the most important thing is people so you need to gather together a group of Engineers essentially to create technology and that's what engineers do they create technology and and but you have to have a critical mass of such such people that's equal to the task that you attempt to complete so that's the most important thing critical mass of people thank you over here hey max Ilan right on John right on John innovations Elon it's please a pleasure to talk to you here oh you're like myself here except you with innovation but you have more money so I started out with zero though yes I'm at that this point rate at this point I have innovations that could actually move SpaceX the tunnel even Tesla car what would be the easiest way to be in contact with you to bring ideas forward well you can send an email to yo and musk office at SpaceX comm if you'd like that's okay all right and can i I do have a sheet right here with my with my info if I could leave it with somebody all right okay thank you very much go get that dog okay yes hello my name is Jackson I'm a sentinel high school or from Missoula Montana thank you for coming and I want to know what is the one thing that is surprised to you about your life oh one thing well well I certainly I'm surprised by the whole thing I wanna see I certainly didn't expect to be to be 20 of these things to happen honestly yeah I just do I knew I wanted to be involved in technology and in fact the only reason I started a company back in 95 and here at company was because I couldn't get it there were only a few internet companies and I couldn't get a job at any of them I try to get a job at at Netscape and sent my resume and I tried hanging out in the lobby but I was too shy to talk to anyone and and there's like okay well I guess I'll have to start a company because I can't get a job anywhere thank you [Music] my name's Toby macadam I have a company called Rising Sun hell I deal with government regulations what do you think of them I've actually dealing with the FDA and after talking to Senator Baucus I've had 5050 and attorneys and they spend three and a half million dollars wearing a middle of a consensus we've got they have 15 attorneys after I've talked to senator Baucus and Senator tester we end up with 15 attorneys on the FDA and they've signed a consent decree but government regulation what do you think of those are they two strictest with the FDA they haven't had a regular they haven't had a I guess since 1995 but they keep changing the rules in right now in the last three years more fatales have been in the previous 50 yeah I mean I think we probably are getting a bit too regulated right well I know I think generally with with laws and regulations I think I think they should all come with with some sort of a sunset clause in every case otherwise they're just they have infinite line well I do think I mean I do think that there ought to be standards bodies I'm not you know it's sort of sort of I'm not completely libertarian in the sense of like I don't think there should be regulations at all I just think that that the natural bias of regulations is to last forever unless there are actively I mean you have to actively delete a regulation or a law you know what the way things are set up in most lost of some walls have sunset provisions and and the problem with that is you you get bested interests who like that law and and and there's a an inertia around it and so over time the body of law and regulations grows and grows and grows and it I mean it is as something that I think is is not ultimately good for society so in fact I think it would generally be a good idea to have it such that it's hard to establish a rule and easy to remove one what you're saying is the rules should be consistently used to all companies well sure of course absolutely that's that's fair thank you one couple more very quick we're already over the end there's a big sign here that says the end brother Craig Sundberg you know I'm just I'm just been interesting yeah go ahead I just sighs been hosting space travel and one of the problems where they've had was the lack of gravity and the fix of that on the human body I was wondering how your company has made progress in that area so that you know causation of Mars at some point can be possible sure well the zero gravity or on the way to Mars it's not too much of a problem because people have actually shown that they can live for over a year in zero gravity and you know your bones do get a little thinner but they come back and they're walking around they're doing fine so I think I think the zero gravity Trent you know spending 3 to 6 months in zero gravity is not a problem and and and then one can deal with the solar radiation for solar storms essentially by having a column of water between you and the Sun so on your spaceship you orient the spaceship so that the there's a column of water between you and the Sun they'll take care of the the solar storms thank you we're gonna have to wrap up you're really very so we're way with it's bent we're it's a little tell you this sign the ends been nothing but 10 minutes oh yeah that's [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

https://youtu.be/T55CcN5c5as

their accomplishments are a study in opposites out-of-this-world down-to-earth high-tech high-touch but while Elon and Kimball Musk's means may differ their end is the same to push humanity forward to greener pastures and beyond they were born and raised in South Africa but Elon came to America first earning undergraduate degrees in both business and physics before briefly attending Stanford in 1995 my brother was in Canada at the time and I said look I think we should try to create an Internet company so he came down and joined me Eno was more the business mastermind I was more than sales guy their first venture zipped to sold to Compaq in 1999 Kimball was an early investor in the elands next company which would eventually become PayPal and sell to eBay in 2002 in the years following Kimball pursued the culinary arts eventually landing in Colorado I'm one of the founders of the kitchen which is a restaurant in Boulder Colorado it's a nationally recognized restaurant while Kimball was pioneering local farm-to-table cuisine at what would become a family of four renowned restaurants brother Ilan was charting a different course when I was in university I throw it well what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world in 2002 Ilan founded Space Exploration Technologies SpaceX continues America's mission to resupply the International Space Station from US soil I'm talking about setting ultimately tens of thousands eventually millions people to Mars and then going out there and exploring the Stars in 2003 he founded Tesla Motors to build all-electric cars we had $100,000 sports car which was the Roadster the Model S which starts at around $50,000 you know about third-generation car which should hopefully be out in about three or four years we'll be able to $30,000 fire the winner by unanimous decision Tesla Model S in 2006 he became chairman of Solar City the largest full-service provider of solar power in the country meanwhile Kimball while also serving on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla found another cause obesity is the epidemic of our day so I created a nonprofit called the kitchen community and what we do is we help put learning gardens in schools around the country to fight childhood obesity and to improve test scores when you teach kids in the garden you can increase scores by over 15 points on a hundred point scale restaurant tour is literally means restorers let's energize and connect our community let's do it with kids let's do with real food with their unique forms of disruptive innovation the Musk brothers are creating the future while holding fast to the ideals of family teamwork and service that got humanity this far in the first place pretty amazing he's if you think their mom's proud so leading the conversation with Elan and Jeff Elan and Kimball is Jeff Skoll as you as you all know Jeff is one of the planet's true visionary leaders in a number of fields as a business innovator he was the first full-time employee of eBay and he led the company's emergence into a transformative trading platform the democratized economic opportunity throughout the world in 1999 Jeff founded the Skoll foundation which quickly became the world's largest foundation for social entrepreneurship and in 2004 he founded participant media with the belief that a well-told story has the power to inspire change jeff has been the executive producer now on over 39 films which have garnered five Oscars and 35 nominations in 2009 Jeff fan of the skull global threats fund with a focus on the five issues that if unchecked could endanger the future of our planet his many awards and include Time Magazine's 100 most influential people business week's 50 most generous philanthropist and the John W Gardner Leadership Award we're honoured and delighted truly delighted to welcome Jeff Skoll in his conversation with lon and Kimball musk thanks very much thank you very much Paul for the very generous introduction my name is Jeff Skoll and I'm delighted to be here with my good friends Ilan and Timbo musk in fact we're in for a treat I'm not I'm usually the one that gets asked the question so this is as a chance for me to put the shoe on the other foot and it's also the first time Ilan and Kimball have been on a panel together I first met Ilan in 1995 when he was dating a classmate of mine not long after that I I dated the same girl and and I realized then that Ilan always likes to be first I've known Kimball for about a decade Kimball runs four restaurants in Colorado and he's invested heavily in learning gardens which I hope he'll talk about at length tonight Ilan is the CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX and he's the chairman of Solar City but the first question for both of you what do you admire about each other so I know this but the advantage of being his younger brother is I kind of used to get what he wanted and he wanted a lot of stuff and so the one time I remember we we he wanted motorbikes I was too young well he was 7 I think and I was 6 or something like that which in this country is not very common to get motorbikes but one of the one of the great things I admire about you Don is when he when he wants something he really wants it and he goes and gets it and it's amazing to watch him do that as his business brother and and he's done it throughout his life interesting well I think what Kimble is just one of the night the nicest people I I know in the world I've never in all my life seen Kimble intentionally do a mean thing so I admire that a great deal the the the two of you as I understand it I mean entrepreneurs are interesting because they often get started at a young age of doing entrepreneurial ventures of some kind and I understand that when you were still in South Africa you had a venture of some kind yet the video arcade yeah we're the this brilliant idea to start a video okayed because we really knew what games were popular yeah and also we were video game experts at 14 and 15 and the reason we had to stop was because we went to the city to get a code variance and you need to be eighteen to sign and we had never told our parents and we already at least we had games coming and when the parents found out they put a stop to it which is a real bummer because it would've been very successful yeah well I'm glad that wasn't the the final barrier to success but you you that was the first time that you worked together as brothers and eventually that led to a company called zip - I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking about zip - how did it come about what was the idea what was what was the whole process like for you sure well I Kimble do you want to do a start off or should well I mean I would start with the road trip throat trip yeah yeah okay so a year before this is 94 we took you know was working at some video game company in there's a theme here what yeah as actually working two jobs the one was at a video company a video game company that was ironically called rocket science and and then working on ultra ultra capacitors during the day for electric cars so we went on a road trip from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia and that was in 94 and we were both I'm younger than email but we were both finishing school at the same time because I'm much smarter than him you know actually was doing a double major so that's why you but anyway so we ended up doing that and the we wouldn't we started with a medical network medical database remember that yeah well there were bunch of iterations yeah but I think the that the thought in 95 who is that the internet was gonna be something really that fundamentally changed humanity there was like humanity acquiring a nervous system you know previously people would communicate information almost by osmosis relatively to how the internet works you know if you wanted to have access to a lot of information like you go to like the Library of Congress but unless you have physically where the books were you didn't have access to that information but with the internet you could be anywhere in the world and if you connect to the internet you have access to all the world's information so it was really just like the humanity was almost becoming like a super organism with a nervous system so we want to be part of you know building some elements of that there's a funny time because it made someone says to us but we had literally had a guy throw us through a Yellow Pages book at us he was a very senior executive and tell us do you ever really think the internet is going to replace this yeah literally and you're kind of looking at them going screwed yeah yeah he didn't and people didn't know what the internet was yeah including its Silicon Valley yeah yeah there was like something that universities and like the government used and nobody was really doing anything on it and you certainly couldn't make money yeah did you know that you were on to something right away or did people just think you were crazy and pursuing some bizarre dream when did it occur to you that zip two might be a success well I mean when we first started out I think our ambitions were really quite quite low it was really to make enough money to pay the rent yeah that's money that was yeah but we thought it was all over then yeah it was pretty crazy I mean when we start out at 95 we're literally at the beginning we had one computer which would be the web server during the day and and then at night I'd program on it and we'd sleep in the office yeah we couldn't afford to - yeah Department it was cheaper to rent the office than to rent an apartment so we just rented the office and stepped in the office and showered at the YMCA and me the worst part was eating a jack-in-the-box three times yeah yeah man this I'll see it's really difficult to get food Palo Alto after like 10:00 p.m. it's like jack-in-the-box and a few other options we rotate it through the jack and thoughts menu I remember the one time I I was literally a jack-in-the-box hopefully you guys want rivers from the company's not here and it was it was was like 3:00 in the morning things it was I took a milkshake and I was so tired and it was something in the milkshake linear like this your standards just dropped to nothing yeah so they were in through through the end of 95 word that's essentially were just sleeping in the office and chairing the YMCA and then and around the end of 95 as where net skate went public and and then whether or not somebody knew what the internet was they knew that you could make money on the internet somehow or even if it's only on the greater fool theory so when we went and talked to venture capitalists in early 96 there was a much greater interest in what we were doing in fact around closed and like maybe a week or something it's crazy yeah we went from sleeping in the office to people throwing me at the game this is a financial crowd so you guys see these numbers every day but for us who here will give you three million dollars yeah extremely we thought they were crazy why would they do that it was these people are insane but obviously do not realize we're sleeping in the office in fact when they when they did fund us they realized that we were illegal immigrants well it's a gray area yeah illegal immigrants we were sleeping in the office we didn't have a car we had one car with the wheel kept falling off but Oh excellent yeah the wheel did actually pull up the car and an adventurer kept us actually bought us cars yeah well like I gave a sporty grand goes 40 grand to go buy a car which was at the time was more money than I've ever seen yeah and I bought a port I spent 35 K on a series 167 Jaggi type which didn't drive it looked really great by the side of the road driving home from the dealer and it broke down and he had to come to the house with a flatbed truck right it didn't and it didn't improve from there I mean it was really really kept the truck yeah it reminds me in some ways of you know eBay went public in 1998 and we had kind of the scrappy startup mentality as well and the the first time I ever saw Ilan on TV was when you took delivery of McLaren supercars right so yeah right so presumably somewhere between sleeping on the floor of the office and McLaren something happened yeah so EXO - we basically created software to help bring the media companies online so we it was sort of internet publishing software it was the yellow pages white pages maps and directions that kind of thing and and we help bring some of the major media companies online or at least a portion of what their online presence was and so we had his customers and investors New York Times Company knight-ridder a Hearst and most the major media companies and then we tracked the guy that threw the telephone book at us eventually became an investor yeah right and then the company sold to Compaq right or a little over three hundred million yeah circa 1999 late late 90s right it was a yeah we think the deal was sort of struck late 98 and included early 99 and so then what happens to you guys I mean at that point you're 23 24 years old give or take and you you've gone from being barely able to pay the rent to having substantial resources how did that influence your paths in what you did next way I like to think about it is I was like a dog in a cage getting beaten leaders and then they let me out and here all the t-bones you can eat so it was a very weird experience actually because you don't think I've thought I was building that company for life and then boom they you know they give you lots of lots of money in easy to carry bags and it was totally surreal and and what did you do so I went to New York so I I was done with Silicon Valley I think technology is my brother's thing he loves it and I enjoy it too but but honestly for me food is what I've always been passionate since I was a kid I was the cook and a family in ironic he's much thinner than I am you know sure I can eat anything although I'm fine as you get older doesn't work out that way yeah but no so I went to New York and I learned to cook I went to I was young and I figured you know what what else do you do when you have enough financial resources to do whatever you want and I always wanted a little cook so I enrolled in cooking schools one of the top schools in the country in New York City and had this incredible experience of cooking with some of the best most talented chefs world and it was a unique circumstance for me personally because I was there in New York during 9/11 and and I graduated from cooking school just before 9/11 and I lived right behind the World Trade Center so I sort of everything happened it was a very big event in my life but what the rare opportunity it gave me was the opportunity to cook for the firefighters so I spent six weeks of' Ground Zero cooking for the firefighters and that's when I kind of what I'll always loved food with my passion for community and connecting people to each other through food was just in them I mean I literally couldn't even describe mahai incredible experience was and so I came out of that with a very strong intention to to start a restaurant and having been part of a company that just sold for 300 million and will help investing in PayPal which at the time is worth billions of dollars doing a restaurant was a weird decision but for me it was the right decision so for you it unlocked a path to dreams that maybe you had beforehand or just opportunistically you just said this is what I want to do and and you you still not only run the restaurant you began but there's more to it yeah well you mean the nonprofit or do you know I mean just in terms of there are more than one wrestler oh yeah sure so you know i am i i'm turns out I'm actually pretty good at cooking I didn't I didn't really know I was gonna cooking but when I opened the restaurant with a I to partners Hugo and Jen opened the restaurant we were supposed to do 60 people a night and it was just gonna be the slide project for me because I was still involved in eelain's companies Tesla and SpaceX and you know today we serve 10,000 people a week you know and it's just just continues to grow Elon for you zip - happened you sold it and it both McLaren and if I'm not mistaken you would you invested most of that money into your next your next venture XCOM that's right so yeah most of the funds went into XCOM which was later renamed PayPal and yeah and that worked out pretty well it worked out pretty well but looking at looking back on it would because you put a lot of your eggs in that basket would you advise entrepreneurs to roll the bones quite the way you do yeah absolutely I think so I think I think I think it's worth investing your own capital in what you do I don't believe in the sort of other people's money thing you know I think if you're not willing to put your own assets at stake then you shouldn't ask other people to do that to do that so eBay comes along buys PayPal and then I remember 2003 give or take meeting a LAN at a at a coffee shop in Palo Alto this was not long after the PayPal deal had closed and I said to Ilan what would you like to do next and and you had three things to say right do you remember what they were well yeah but yeah I mean they basically you know space solar and electric cars solar and electric cars yes two points yeah make space lacrosse what was the middle one well as so I asked him what he wanted to do and he he said he wanted to do something in solar power he wanted to colonize Mars eventually but but to get there by building a rocket business a sustainable business and and building electric cars let's talk a little bit about about Mars so what where did where did this come from when when did you have that dream how did that come to be well I guess we're not in college that I thought about things that weren't most affect the future of humanity and and there were three areas that I thought would have the biggest impact and those were the Internet sustainable energy of which solar power is the production side and electric cars the consumption side and then humanity becoming a multi-planet species I think a future will fundamentally bifurcate to one where we our space bearing civilization or one where we are confined to earth until some eventual extinction event although I'm quite optimistic about life on Earth I should point out many people think that that by that I expect some imminent catastrophe but I think that the probable probable outcome for civilization is on earth is quite quite good for a long time but I still think that we should try to extend life beyond Earth and have a end the thing to do is to establish a base on Mars and ultimate and try to make that a self-sustaining base as soon as possible so I don't expect that base X is going to do that sort of single-handedly but I think we're gonna try to advance the technology of space travel to the point where we can at least send some number of people to Mars which is not currently possible as I recall when follow-up question Jeff when when SpaceX started I think the first three rocket launches weren't successful yeah and and the fourth one was what would have happened if the fourth one hadn't worked we would have failed yeah but let's talk about one of the the failures were spectacular I mean I would go out to the island of Kwajalein with you know and seeing giant exploding rockets is quite an amazing sight and I was one of the only investors in SpaceX and I said you know what if all I get to do is to see these rockets explode well worth every dime I put into this there's something to be said about brotherly support but it was an amazing thing to watch what he done would be had built with those rockets at in I mean on a shoestring in the middle of nowhere and literally the middle of the Pacific 2,000 miles from Hawaii and that experience we'd fly on these these what are they called if you ease you'll find the Huey's you feel like you're right out of out of Apocalypse Now flying to dr. Evil's island really amazing I mean and again worth every penny still to this day I'd say so I think the failures were actually unbelievably exciting to be part of yeah yeah Thank You Eli I mean the the point the point being that these ventures now seem to have a wonderful momentum and things are going well but I I remember well there was a point in time when when each of them had their their tipping point and could have gone either way I wonder I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the origins of Tesla sure so with the I as mentioned I was quite a student electric cars from when I was doing my undergrad physics and in fact I originally came out to California to do a PhD at Stanford and applied physics material science to work on ultra capacitors and electric cars so it was a long-standing interest of mine and and the internet it kind of put that on hold for a few years but then once after PayPal I've had a senator where to get back into electric vehicles and make something happen in that arena particularly since GM had come out with the ev1 and and I thought okay well there's not really a need for a start-up company to develop electric cars because obviously GM is going to create the ev2 and the ev3 as logical sequence and we get increasingly getting it better and better with each iteration and so not really need for a new company in that arena but but actually what happened was that after California changed the regulations to no longer acquire electric cars GM recalled all the eveyone's and then just to make sure that nobody could get them back they crushed them in a in a in a lot somewhere and in fact while they were being crushed the the people who have been the ev1 owners who did not want those cars recalled actually held a candlelight vigil as though somebody was getting executed basically and it's like that just seemed extremely crazy that GM would ignore this because it was quite rare for people to hold a candlelight vigil about a product and particularly a GM product so if people are doing that you should really pay attention but that they that they wanted to just sort of erase all that and so that okay well we got to try to create an electric car company but it wasn't as though in creating these companies that we thought that we would be successful I thought that the most likely outcome was failure but but it was still worth doing even though the odds of success were low in fact in full force for SpaceX the originally what I started doing was not creating a rocket company but but actually was going to do a small mission to Mars which was just a fun topic mission where we would send a small green house with seeds and dehydrator gel in the word upon landing hydrate the gel and you'd have this cool picture of green plants on a red background and the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives so this we the first lap on Mars life's ever traveled and you have this great money shot of green plants on the right background it's so yeah I thought that would get people's attention so but but the expectation for that was was no return so they expect I thought we wouldn't get any you know we'll just spend the money on that and it wouldn't wouldn't happen and it was in the process of trying to do that mission that I concluded that I'd made a mistake with respect to my assumptions about why violet why they know people on Mars because I started off thinking that it was because there was a lack of will and that if you could reignite the will then then it would happen so my initial good thing with with even with the space side was was really to get the public excited and to to get people to essentially vote NASA to have a bigger budget that was my goal initially and but as I try to do try to do that mission I was able to compress the costs of the satellite or the spacecraft and and the the greenhouse everything and the communication cost but I wasn't able to compress the the rocket to the rocket costs and I actually tried had some adventures along the way trying to try to get a good deal on rockets actually flew to Russia three times to try to buy our as some ICBMs and I negotiated a deal to actually but after the third trip to to Russia which was it was very very strange it was like there in 2001-2002 and I thought well if we do this well it's it's going to generate a lot of interest but if the if the solar fundamental technology issue with rocket transport then it's not going to solve the problem so excited that it was it was not a question of well it was a question of way and if people thought there was a way to do it without it fundamentally affecting their standard of living and they would support such an endeavor particularly in the United States which the United States is a as a nation of explorers I mean it's a distillation of the human spirit of exploration people came here from other places and and so I think that that that exploratory spurt is is actually very strong but people need to know that that it's possible the skills can be done without materially affecting their center of living so I mean what you've accomplished is amazing between linking up with the with the space station on launches and the Model S winning carved the year and and and being just the phenomenon but you good yes I mean it's amazing it's amazing and we'll come back and talk about Solar City in a second but you mentioned Gardens and I think that's a natural segue we're surrounded by some beautiful gardens here on stage and Kimball I wonder if you might want to talk a little bit about about these sure so the restaurants that we do in Colorado are before farm-to-table was a term we'd work with local farmers and bring local food to the tables and we really consider ourselves a community restaurant and one of the things we did as part of the community was to reach out to kids in the community in schools and get them connected to food through school gardens and we you know we bring them into the restaurant and we you know do everything from keep them chicken-liver paté without telling them what it was and they would you know thoroughly enjoy it and then you tell them then they spit it out of their mouth okay fun things like that that we would we just did as a site as a great way to connect into the community and then I had a personal accident to a very severe accident I was paralyzed on my left and horizontal for two months after breaking my neck and just it really helped me focus on well let me go back to having a more of an impact on society and I know there's a lot of philanthropists in the crowd and a lot of respect for that but for me it was very much about how can I give back but in a way that really I understood and and could could really see that see the impact and I'd been working with these school gardens for many years and so I came up with this idea called the learning garden which you see beautifully presented thank you very much Nancy for doing this and what we do is it's a non-profit we go to schools around the country and we install these outdoor learning environments that are school gardens and they're very different to traditional school gardens the traditional school gardens being in the corner of the schoolyard or the fence around it these are designed to be in the school yard on the playground where the kids will see it every day they hundreds of kids will enjoy it and and and play with every day and it's made out of the same materials playground equipment so it'll last for decades unlike traditional school gardens which are very temporary we also came up with this idea to make it more modular so that you could fit it in any school yard rooftops asphalt there's a lot of toxic soil sadly in our cities where you literally couldn't put a gardener if you wanted to and these are all were designed to be FDA approved this for growing food and so what I did was really look at the problem based on the experience that I had working with Elon and working in whether its manufacturing or operations or politics frankly which is a very big political problem and you know what what value could ia and there are lots of great gardeners out there and I'll be the first to tell you I'm not a gardener but I what I've really believed in the impact that these were having and the data is amazing I mean we see a doubling of vegetable intake when kids have a learning garden on their school yard literally a doubling from two and off to five portions a day we see tests test scores particularly in science go out by 15 points on 100 point scale when they get taught the same science lesson in the learning garden versus in the classroom this incredible impact on their lives and the challenge was not a question of school gardens that had already been proven the challenge was how to use scale how do you get something that will reach a hundred thousand schools within a few years because that's the problem we have of childhood obesity is today's problem it is not tomorrow's problem twenty percent of underserved kids go up going into kindergarten obese it's an awful tragedy we have these poor children that are not only obese but they're actually starving because the food we're giving them has no nutrients it has calories but no nutrients and it's just this awful awful situation a real tragedy that we're creating and so for me what I wanted to do is how do I come in and say okay I know what I know I know what I think I can do well let me see what I can create that could actually go into a hundred thousand schools within a few years and so so I created the learning garden with this idea to by the end of this decade to to reach every child that wants one or every school at once one and we have that we have a capacity even now what we need is the political will to to go do it and so we'll have about 200 installed this year and we started two years ago and we did one two years ago we did 50 last year we'll do about 200 this year hopefully a thousand next year and then many thousands after that Kimbell if people are interested in finding more out about learning gardens where would they go the kitchen community or again please go if you're a superintendent and I know there's some superintendents in this room because I had a car some heated conversations with you guys earlier please go learn about it because there's no better way to teach kids about science which we all understand is a massive problem in this country getting our kids to love science is so important and childhood obesity is so important we need to fix this problem we are creating expensive unproductive people let's just stop that and let's fix the problems to fix it now absolutely I I think we'll talk a little bit about solar city and then maybe open up to questions from the audience Solar City I mean your family is a remarkable maybe you want to talk a little bit about how Solar City got going and your role as chairman so well so Seoul City was founded by two cousins of ours Linda and Peter Raya they're really great guys every for Seoul city that had a company called ever dream which did large-scale management of computers and other assets electronic assets which was sold to Dell and that did pretty well so and the genesis of seoul city was actually you know we're burning man with our cousins and they were thinking about what to do next and I said what I think there's a real need for for great entrepreneurs in the solar industry and and I said if they were willing to start a solar power company then I would completely back them on that so they they took me up on the offer and created Solar City which what Seoul city is essentially is a giant distributed utility or its I'd say right now it's a small distributed utility but will be hopefully a giant distributed utility and and it's obviously one that's based on on the Sun that giant fusion reactor in the sky so it's something that will last for for a very long time ultimately think that we will generate more energy from solar power than from any other source in fact it's worth noting that the the planet is already almost entirely solar powered in that we would be a frozen ice ball at 3 Kelvin if not for the Sun and the Sun powers our whole system of precipitation and the the ecosystem so so we're really were just talking about a little bit of extra power that humanity uses for to run civilization essentially but it's really quite a small amount relative to the amount that actually hits the earth right and and SolarCity went public a few months back yeah went public in in December was quite a difficult IPO and grayble to get it through and now it's doing reasonably well well there are amazing successes on both your parts we're gonna go to questions from the audience assuming these monitors work as as of the moment they're not and if not then I will oh I see a monitor coming on here all right what what are the key traits skills or circumstances that have allowed you to be so successful I don't know why don't you answer for me that's a great idea so the I live in a small town in Colorado called Boulder and my joke is I grew up in South Africa during the collapse of apartheid very very difficult time then I went to California during the rise of the Internet exciting but difficult time and I was in New York City during 9/11 difficult time now I'm in this little small town of Boulder waiting for some serious to go down so I think those had very big impact on me and I think the the impact personally is constant paranoia I guess I hate to say that not in a negative way but it's a you just kind of you know you're waiting for something really intense to happen all the time so I think that just keeps you on your toes and and keeps you moving forward yeah I think just obviously being tenacious and being well I think just being super focused on on the truth is extremely important and looking for feedback from all sources I think those those are really key yeah I'd also add knowing both of you is that you're very detail-oriented there there's no small part of the experience that doesn't get attention from you so another question that I had you know Ilan you've you've been compared to Henry Ford Richard Branson you know Steve Jobs who do you compare yourself to I mean I don't really compare myself to anyone I mean it's not there's certain people that I admire from history that I think are you know I think a great certainly many of the scientists and engineers and literary figures and so forth and like I'm a big big fan of Ben Franklin you know there's a scientist and sort of thinker and get me he was kind of guys who did did what needed to be done you know what guys like that I write wouldn't say I compare myself in any way but I certainly admire them are there people you you look up to I think the the two that I look up to in my way I look for the same things you know as kind of look back I love Winston Churchill yeah he's cool I think it was one of the greatest gifts to mankind and I think Steve Jobs right yeah and I think the thing that that makes me like these people is that they put their passion into their work and it's not about the job it's not about coming to work it's about creating making a difference in in your society and I think that that's what I've always admired if my brother and with anyone else you know one thing I've observed from my own entrepreneurial history is that people that start out building a company to make a lot of money almost invariably fail it's people that start out with a dream or something that they're passionate about and they care about and the money just kind of comes as I think if you think about you can get money both ways but if we have a mutual friend of ours Billy who has this phrase that doing starting a business from scratch is like chewing gloss and looking into the abyss it is really really hard and if you don't like to a glass sandwich you can have a miserable miserable life and so it's a very important lesson do it your passion right because no matter what you do if it's making a difference it's super hard to do it and so you better enjoy you better be passionate about it let's see if we have any other questions from from the audience yeah next next question please for Kimball what role and impact do you see impact investing in social ventures having in solving the world's major problems so I actually get this question asked to me a lot I was literally had this conversation with it but a major social investor a week ago I really struggle with it to be honest I think the idea of obviously investing as a philanthropist I love I think that's really great but if you're looking for a financial return it is super hard to not have that as your key driver I get the idea of double bottom line or triple bottom line it and I've lived that life all day long but it's a personal decision of mine and I I really do struggle with the right answer because the more money you make the more difference you can make in philanthropy and you can separate the two and you can be quite impactful as a philanthropist if you're a financier on Wall Street you can choose to I'm sure once you reach a certain point everything you do will be for philanthropy after that and that makes a big difference in the world if you chose to invest in social ventures and get a smaller return I think you struggle you actually success is very important and so I really believe in isolating the the problem focused on success getting it done and in the case of investing that means focusing on investing and getting the highest possible return within reason you know human rights and all that stuff but but social investing I think is a very difficult space to to make work and actually baby Jeff you show us that question is you do that all the time except I'm sitting in this chair well III agree with you I think you know social investing has all the rigor and challenges of for-profit investing but added into that is the qualitative sometimes unmeasurable aspects of dealing with some sort of social change or social good so one of the things I actually I mean on the nonprofit side I was specifically referring to for-profit social ventures which fit on the nonprofit side I get really frustrated because there is no measuring stick it's how are you doing you get to measure yourself that's you need to have you need to have some measuring some common ground at measuring sticking in the in in the for-profit world you've got profit and in the nonprofit world it's very weird it's my first nonprofit so I'm learning as I go I don't know what the answer is you want anything to add on that but I think generally anything that that if it's possible to solve a problem with a profitable venture then it's that's the best thing to do so it's only when like the there's some failure in the market and there are some but they actually aren't that many but in the grand scheme of things there are some feelers in the market that have to be addressed with it with a with a non-profit and but generally I'd say or on the side of I mean I do have a small foundation there as far as I am against giving stuff I do donor to the nonprofit I mean yeah generally if there's a way to fix the market system that's the better way to do it but sometimes there isn't or it's that complications in doing it how is the Elan of 2013 different from the Elan of the zip two days what have you learned Oakland well quite quite a lot a lot of scar tissue from between out dream better now I think you know I've mentioned this at at winners game I talked itself by Southwest but I think the I've I've made several hiring decisions in the past which where I valued intellect over heart and I think that was a mistake and so try to try to adjust accordingly you know that it actually matters whether somebody is a good person beyond just you know goodness itself it right yeah Kimble the same question the Kimble of 2013 how are you different from the zip two days yes as I said that is a long time ago the I would I would say I'm much more comfortable with myself I'm much more able to say no you know so if there's an opportunity in front of me that is very financially attractive or whatever and it's not what I want to do I just I noticed they know and you're in the past that I would always say yes and I would get involved in things that that weren't what I was passionate about so I think that's probably the most valuable thing I've learned I think I still have a lot to learn so that's I think we have time for one last question we got anything please wrap up in that case my last question is are are you are you guys gonna go to Mars together we might I think we mean over 95 what the hell else we gonna do yeah I think that'll be fun I don't think I would want to go before that but well Ellen has a famous line about going to Mars right would you mind repeating okay I mean so yeah I mean I think I would like to die on Mars but just not an impact all right I think on that note I'd like to thank you Ilana Kimball for a wonderful panel thank you pretty extraordinary let's hit one more time for Alana and Kimble and Jeff thank you before before you all leave we have a great late night show for you in the Beverly Hills Ballroom Lionel Richie David Foster and Paul Anka I'm reliving my childhood and and a series of special guests so it's gonna be a lot of fun Beverly Hills Ballroom right down the hall thank you so much

https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io

SAL KHAN: So first of all, I just want to thank Elon for coming-- hungry. You didn't even have dinner. And we didn't even feed you properly. ELON MUSK: No, sorry to be a bit late. I just came from the Tesla factory in Fremont. SAL KHAN: Yes. Was something wrong? ELON MUSK: There's always something. SAL KHAN: Did you have to like-- ELON MUSK: At any given point, there's always something wrong. SAL KHAN: Yes. ELON MUSK: Because there's just too many things going on. So one of the trickiest things about a car is that there's thousands of individual components-- there are thousands of unique components-- and even if one of those things is missing, you can't make cars. So today's fiasco was-- I kid you not-- we were missing a $3 USB cable. OK. So we could not complete cars, because-- SAL KHAN: So the whole line was stopped? ELON MUSK: Yeah. So essentially, because it's part of the wiring harness. So you can't put the interior in without this cable. And so we could either make a whole bunch of cars minus the interior, which means that you've got to stack them up in the yard. SAL KHAN: The resale value would be no good. ELON MUSK: Well, it can be done, but if then things go out of sequence, and it's way more inefficient-- you don't have a moving production line. Then you have to send people out to hundreds of cars that are sitting in the storage yard. And so this happens to be a particularly pernicious cable. It's kind of routed under the carpet, in a difficult place. And it's literally $3. And so we basically had to send people throughout the Bay Area to go and buy USB cables. SAL KHAN: Like, literally, Radio Shack? ELON MUSK: Like Fry's. SAL KHAN: Oh, Fry's. That's better. ELON MUSK: You're going to have a hard time getting a USB cable right now at Fry's, because we bought every one of them. SAL KHAN: That's good. ELON MUSK: And so we're able to continue production. And I don't want to belabor the anecdote, but essentially the supplier is in China. And we had plan A and plan B. And plan A was like the normal supply chain process. But what the supplier did was instead of sending our parts in their own package, they grouped it together with a bunch of other stuff for other companies and sent that all via some extremely slow boat from China to LA. And when it got to LA, the other stuff didn't pass customs. And so they wouldn't let our stuff through, because-- SAL KHAN: They put it like a barrel fruit or something. ELON MUSK: I don't what they put it, but something that customs didn't like. And the paperwork wasn't in order or whatever. So it got stuck there for like a couple weeks. And then we had plan B. So we called and said, look you've got to air freight some of these cables-- cause they're just little cables-- to us. And we talked to their US subsidiary and ordered from the US subsidiary, who then communicated to China. But then because this was another batch of parts, so it was kind of double the order, it exceeded the credit limit that we had. So it bounced off the credit limit, so they didn't ship it. SAL KHAN: Fascinating. So someone's losing their job now. This is-- no, I'm kidding. You shouldn't fire anyone. ELON MUSK: I mean, it's pretty farcical. And, anyway, so, it's coming like tonight at 11:00 PM or something. SAL KHAN: Wow. And these things are happening like all the time? This was an unusual circumstance? ELON MUSK: Yeah. That's like one example, but there's many things like that. SAL KHAN: I guess, I mean, that's actually a really good example, because that leads into what I've always been fascinated by a lot of what you're doing. Well, I'll start with, how did you get into this? ELON MUSK: Into cars? SAL KHAN: Into cars. Into taking over NASA. Well, not taking over NASA-- being a contractor for NASA. ELON MUSK: Just for the record, we are not taking over NASA. SAL KHAN: You're not taking over NASA. They are an independent organization. But you are becoming a major provider of services for NASA. Obviously, kind of internet payments and payments generally. I mean these are three completely different spaces. I think a lot of people would not take someone seriously, if they had a business plan in one of these. ELON MUSK: Right. Sorry to eat. SAL KHAN: Oh, yeah, take your time. What was your-- did you always think you were going to be doing this or-- when did it dawn on you that you would try to revolutionize three industries? ELON MUSK: Well, when I was in college-- I didn't actually expect to do it. So it was not like this is some long-fulfilled expectation. But when I was in college, I thought about what were the areas that would most effect the future of humanity, in my opinion. And the three areas were the internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration, particularly if humanity becomes a multi-planet species. You know, there's kind of like a pretty substantial bifurcation in our future, if we're either out there among stars on multiple planets, or if we're confined to Earth until some obviously eventual extinction. Not Not that I'm pessimistic about live on Earth. I mean, things are likely to be good. More likely to be good by far than bad. SAL KHAN: Yellowstone's due for an explosion every several hundred thousand-- Shandra knows about that. It's been 700,000, ELON MUSK: Right. Right. Yeah. SAL KHAN: Super volcano for those of you who don't know. It would envelop, but well-- ELON MUSK: Yeah. Exactly. I know exactly what you're talking about. So-- SAL KHAN: We read the same books. I can tell. ELON MUSK: Absolutely. I mean something bad is bound to happen if you give it enough time. And civilization has been around for such a very short period of time that these time scales seem like very long, but on an evolutionary time scale, they're very short. A million years on an evolutionary time scale is really not very much. And Earth's been around for four and a half billion years, so that's a very tiny, tiny amount of time, really. But for us that would be-- can you can imagine if human civilization continued at anything remotely like the current pace of technology ad advancement for a million years? Where would we be? I think we're either extinct or on a lot of planets. SAL KHAN: Yes. We should-- ELON MUSK: Those are the two options. SAL KHAN: But given that-- I mean, one, that's kind of as epic as one can think about things, literally. How did you make that concrete? How does that turn into SpaceX, Tesla and Paypal? ELON MUSK: Well, so I thought about these things kind of in the abstract. Not from the expectation that I would actually have careers in those arenas. But, I wanted to be involved in at least one of them. And at first I thought the best bet was going to be electric cars. And so the area that I was studying was advanced capacitors. So essentially capacitors that have an engine density exceeding that of batteries. Because they have a very high power density, but a low energy density. Maybe you have lecture to that effect, I don't know. SAL KHAN: Oh, yes, no. We should do that. We'll get to it later. ELON MUSK: Exactly. So obviously, if you could make a capacitor that had anywhere near the energy density of a battery with this incredibly high power density and this quasi-infinite cycle and calendar life, then you'd have an awesome solution for energy storage and mobile applications. So I was going to try to work on that and try to leverage the equipment that was developed for advanced chip making and photonics to create ultra-precise capacitors at the molecular level. SAL KHAN: And this was when you were going to go into grad school? You had a brief stint at Stanford? ELON MUSK: That's right. SAL KHAN: At a PhD in applied physics? ELON MUSK: Applied physics, material science. SAL KHAN: Right. So even then you were thinking of trying to do something in the space? ELON MUSK: Actually, this was d to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars. And I'd actually worked at a company in Silicon Valley called Pinnacle Research, which did advanced capacitors. There were electrolytic capacitors. And they actually were pretty good. They had like the energy density of a lead-acid battery, which for a capacitor, that's a big deal. But they used ruthenium tantalum oxide. And I think at the time, there was maybe like one or two tons of ruthenium mined per year in the world. So it's not a scalable solution. But I thought there could be some solid-state solution, like just using chip-making equipment. That was going to be the basic idea. But it was one of those things where I wasn't sure if success was one of possible outcomes. It's difficult to bound that problem exactly and say, OK-- SAL KHAN: So you're saying, I felt like this was a destined failure is another way to parse that sentence. But anyway, sorry. ELON MUSK: No. I didn't think it would fail, but I wasn't sure that success was a possibility. SAL KHAN: OK. Yes. ELON MUSK: And generally you want to embark on something-- it's desirable to figure out if success is at least one of the possibilities. SAL KHAN: Right, exactly. ELON MUSK: Because for sure failure is one of the possibilities. But, ideally, you want to try to bracket it and say success is in the envelope of outcomes. And I wasn't quite sure if that was the case. I think success on an academic level would have been quite likely, because you can publish some useless paper-- and most papers are pretty useless-- SAL KHAN: We have a few-- don't take offense. ELON MUSK: I mean, how many PhD papers are actually used by someone ever? SAL KHAN: That's a good point. ELON MUSK: Percentagewise it's not good. And so it could have been one of those outcomes where you add some leaves to the tree of knowledge. And that leaf is, nope, it's not possible. And there goes seven years of my life. So that was one path. And I was prepared to do that. But then the internet came along. And it was like, oh, OK, the Internet, I'm pretty sure success is one of the outcomes, and it seemed like I could either do a PhD and watch the Internet happen, or I could participate and help build in some fashion. Like, I was just concerned with the idea of watching it happen. So I decided to put things on hold and start an Internet company. And we worked on internet publishing software, maps and directions, yellow pages, those kind of things. And we had as investors and customers the media companies. So like the New York Times Company, Knight Ridder. SAL KHAN: And this is just at the early stages. I mean this was like-- ELON MUSK: '95. SAL KHAN: '95. So it's really early stages, so it's really out the gate. ELON MUSK: Yeah. Absolutely. And so then we-- the reason we worked with the media companies was because we needed to have money. There was no advertising money in '95. In fact, the idea of advertising on the internet seemed like a ridiculous idea to people. Obviously, not so ridiculous anymore. But, at the time, it seemed like a very unlikely proposition. And a lot of the media companies weren't even sure that they should be online. Like, what's the point of that? SAL KHAN: And did you all think that PayPal was just going to be a simple, little internet way to-- or did you think it was going to turn into the major kind of transaction processing engine that it is right now? ELON MUSK: I didn't expect PayPal's growth rate to be what it was. And that actually created major problems. So we started Paypal on University Avenue. After the first month or so of the website being active, we 100,000 customers. SAL KHAN: Really? That fast. Wow, I didn't realize it was-- ELON MUSK: Yeah, it was nutty. SAL KHAN: And how did it start? How did people just even know to use it? I mean, obviously, both buyer and seller have to be involved. ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. And $20 if they referred anyone. And then we dropped it to $10. And we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer. SAL KHAN: So much money did you all spend with that kind of $5, $10, $20 incentive to get that critical mass going? ELON MUSK: It was a fair amount. I think it was probably $60 or $70 million. SAL KHAN: Oh, wow, OK. So it was substantial. OK. So we're not talking peanuts here. ELON MUSK: It depends on your relative scale. It's a peanut to Google. SAL KHAN: Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. ELON MUSK: Here's a peanut. I mean, Google's got $50 billion. Apple's got $150 billion, some crazy amount of money. That's just cash. SAL KHAN: Yeah. So it's not an outlandish-- I didn't realize that was so core. ELON MUSK: Like 1% of Google's cash would be $500 million. So, you know, that's 0.1% percent of Google's cash. SAL KHAN: That's true. You're right, that's inexpensive. It's nothing. ELON MUSK: Relative to them, it's pretty inexpensive. SAL KHAN: That's right. ELON MUSK: And then we did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It's just like bacteria in a Petri dish. So what you want to do is try to have one customer generate like two customers. OK? Or something like that. Maybe three customers, ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast. And you could probably model it just like bacteria growth in a Petri dish. And then it'll just expand very quickly until it hits the side of the Petri dish and then it slows down. SAL KHAN: And then after Paypal, then I mean-- to some degree, especially us in Silicon Valley, we kind of understand the Internet. We know people. PayPal's obviously of the scale that is noteworthy, but then SpaceX just seems really, you know-- well, one, how did you decide that I'm definitely going to do that? And then like what's the first thing that you do? How do you even go out-- I don't even know how to start trying to make a rocket company. ELON MUSK: Well, neither did I really. And in fact, the first three launches failed. So it's not as though it was like spot on. It's like, did not hit the bull's eye. But SAL KHAN: But even getting to the point where you're launching rockets. I don't even how do you get there? One, how did you decide? And then what did you do on day one? Like, who did you call? Did you write a plan? Did you start-- I don't even know. ELON MUSK: Actually, the origin of SpaceX is that I was trying to figure out why we'd not sent any people to Mars. Because the obvious next step after Apollo was to send people to Mars. But what in fact happened was that we sent a few people to the moon and then we didn't send anyone after that to the moon or Mars or anything. But if you'd asked people in 1969, what would 2013 look like, they would have said, there will be a base on the moon. We would have least sent some people to Mars. And maybe there'd even be a base on Mars. There'd be like orbiting space hotels. And there'd be all this awesome stuff in space. And that's what people expected. And if you said, well, actually, the United States in 2013 will not be able to send anyone to orbit. But I'll tell you what will exist is that there'll be this device in your pocket that's like the size of-- smaller than a deck of cards that has access to all the world's information, and you can talk to any one on planet Earth. And even if you're like in some remote village somewhere so long as there's something called the Internet-- they wouldn't know what that means, of course-- then you would you be able to communicate with anyone instantly and have access to all of humanity's knowledge. They would have said, like bullshit. There's no way that that's going to be true. SAL KHAN: Right. Right. ELON MUSK: And yet we all have that. And space is not happening. So I was trying to figure out like what was the deal here. And this was 2001. And it was just a friend of mine asked me, what am I going to do after Paypal. And I said, well, you know, I've always been interested in space, but I don't think there's anything that an individual could do in space, because it's the province of government, and usually a large government. But, I am curious as to when we're going to send some one to Mars. So I went to the NASA website to try to figure out where is the place that tells you that. And I couldn't find that. So I was like, either I'm bad at looking at the website, or they have a terrible website, because surely there must be a date. SAL KHAN: That should be a big date. ELON MUSK: Yeah. This should be on the front page. And then I discovered actually that NASA had no plans to send people to Mars, or even really back to the moon. So this was really was disappointing. I thought well, maybe this is a question of national will. Like do we to get people excited about space again? And try to get NASA a bigger budget, and then we would send people to Mars. And so I started researching the area, becoming more familiar with space, reading lots of books. And I came up with this idea to do so-called Mars oasis, which was to send a small greenhouse with seeds in dehydrated gel that upon landing, you hydrate the gel. You have green plants on a red background. The public responses to precedents and superlatives. So it would be the first life on Mars. The furthest that life's ever traveled. And you'd have this money shot of green plants on a red background. So that seemed like it would get people pretty excited. So I started getting into this. And trying to figure out, OK, well can I afford to build a spacecraft? Because I had some money as a result of PayPal, but it had to fit within that budget. And I figured we had to do two missions, because if we only did one and it failed, then it might have like the opposite effect. SAL KHAN: But you were willing to bet the farm, so to speak, on this? ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, I figured I was willing to spend half the money that I got from PayPal with no expectation of return. Because I thought this was just something that was pretty important and yeah, it seemed like I could spend half the money I made on PayPal on this, and if that got NASA a bigger budget and resulted in us going to Mars, that would be a pretty good outcome. SAL KHAN: And when your friends or your family came up to you and said, look there's nations that can't do this. You're a guy, I mean you have some resources, what did you say or do or think? ELON MUSK: Well, so I had a lot of friends of mine try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, because they thought it was crazy. And one friend of mine made me watch a video of rockets blowing up. And there were just lots of people that thought it was a really crazy idea. And there was some people that had tried to start rocket companies, not succeeded. And they tried to talk me out of it. But the thing is that-- their premise for talking me out of it was, well, we think you're going to lose the money that you invest. I was like, well, that was my expectation anyway, so I don't really mind if I lose-- you I mean, I mind, but I mean it's not like I was trying to figure out the rank-ordered best way to invest money and on that basis chose space. It's not like that's-- I thought, wow-- SAL KHAN: You weren't looking at like money-market bonds, AAA bonds, rocket company. You weren't like-- ELON MUSK: I could do real estate. I could invest in shoe making. Anything. And, whoa, space is the highest ROI. That is not what-- it wasn't the premise. I just thought that it was important that humanity expand beyond Earth, and we weren't doing that, so maybe there was something I could do to spur that on. And then I was able to compress the costs of the spacecraft and everything down to a relatively manageable number. And I got stuck on the rocket. The US rockets were way too expensive. I ended up going to Russia-- I flew to Russia three times to negotiate a purchase of an ICBM. I tried to buy two of the biggest ICBMs in the Russian fleet in 2001 and 2002. And I actually negotiated a price. SAL KHAN: I'll just let that statement stand. I'm not even going to-- Well, actually, I have to-- like who did you call? ELON MUSK: You open the yellow pages. Go to ICBMs. Oh! SAL KHAN: How does this-- I don't want to get too much in to it but I'm curious about this one particular thing. You decide at some point you need to buy an ICBM? ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, actually at first I tried to buy just a normal launch program that they use to launch satellites, but those are too expensive. SAL KHAN: I see. I see. ELON MUSK: The Boeing Delta II would have cost $65 million each, so two would have been $130 million. And then I was like, woah, OK, that breaks my budget right there. And I tried to negotiate with them. And that was not-- I did not make progress. SAL KHAN: How much does an ICBM go for? I'm curious what's the market rate for one of those? ELON MUSK: Well-- SAL KHAN: This is right after the fall, it might have gone up. ELON MUSK: Yeah, it's gone up a lot since then. But in 2001, it would've been about $10 million each. So two would have been $20 million. And then I thought I could get the rest of the mission down to also around $10 million per, so we'd have a dual mission with like two identical launches, two identical spacecraft for roughly $40 million. And so I thought, OK, I can do that. SAL KHAN: But you must have had some like rocket scientists advising you at this point? This sounds like you were serious. I mean you were-- ELON MUSK: Yeah. I engaged a bunch of consultants and started to get familiar with the space industry. But then after the third trip to Russia, I came to realize that I was actually wrong about my first premise, that there was a lack of will. In fact, I think that there's a tremendous amount of will in the United States for space exploration. Because the United States is essentially a nation of explorers. I mean, it's a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. So of course it was quite silly of me to think that people lacked motivation. But what people don't want to think is that, OK, sending people to Mars is going to be so expensive that they'll have to give up health care or something. They're not going to do that. So it's got to be that going to Mars is not going to cause some meaningful drop in their standard of living. So if it's like maybe a quarter of a percent or half a percent of GDP-- something like that is palatable. Anyways, so I thought, OK, it's not really going to maybe matter that much if I do this mission, because what really matters is having a way. So I was wrong-- I thought there wasn't enough will, but there actually was plenty of will, if people thought there was a way. So then I said, OK, well, I need to work on the way. How hard is it really to make a rocket? Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually that's not true. If you say, what is a rocket made of. And say, OK, it's made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber, if you want to go that direction. And you can break down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components. And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be. And I was like, wow, OK, it's really small. It's like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged. So you've got to figure out to OK, how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out is the some catch here that I'm not appreciating. And I couldn't figure it out. There doesn't seem to be any catch. So I started SpaceX. SAL KHAN: And you ended up-- you had some failures, but obviously some huge successes. What was the cost that you were able to build this rocket for relative to what they were being built for before? ELON MUSK: So let's see. For the Falcon 1, which is the first rocket we built. And the first three flights did not make it. In fact, we got progressively further. But like the first rocket came in and landed maybe a couple hundred yards away from the launch site, and tiny fragments. So, yeah, anyway, that rocketed ended up costing around $6 million compared to other rockets in that class, which were about to $25 million. SAL KHAN: Wow. So significant? ELON MUSK: Yeah, like a quarter. But there's an even better step beyond that which is to make rockets reusable. Right now that is around what our comparison price is-- excluding the refurbished ICBMs. So, if you say building a rocket from new, how does the SpaceX rocket compare to a rocket from Boeing or Lockheed? It's about a quarter of the price. However, if we make it reusable, then it can be two orders of magnitude cheaper. SAL KHAN: Two orders of magnitude cheaper. A 100th of the price? ELON MUSK: That's right. For you. SAL KHAN: Only today. Memorial day sale. And I've seen some-- you all are doing these vertical landings, like literally out of like the 1950s Sci-Fi movies. And that's what you're talking about? ELON MUSK: Yeah. Essentially, the rocket needs to come back and land at the launch site, and then reload propellant and take off again. Like an airplane in its reusability. SAL KHAN: How far do you think we are from that? When do you think-- your best guess, when we'll actually see that happening? ELON MUSK: Well, I'm hopeful we can do it next year. SAL KHAN: Oh, OK. Yeah. That's-- we've got some ambitious stuff at Khan Academy for the next year, too. So we can compare. We're redesigning the site. ELON MUSK: Right. We've been working on it for a long time. I should say, SpaceX has been around for 11 years, and thus far we have not recovered any rockets. We recovered the spacecraft from orbit. So that was great. But none of our attempts to recover the rocket stages have been successful. The rocket stages have always blown up essentially on reentry. Now, we think we've figured out why that was the case. And it's a tricky thing, because Earth's gravity is really quite strong. And with an advanced rocket, you can do maybe 2% to 3% of your lift-off mass to orbit, typically. And then reusability subtracts 2% to 3% So then you've got like nothing to orbit or negative. And that's obviously not helpful. And so the trick is to try to shift that from say 2%, 3% in an expendable configuration to make the rocket mass efficiency, engine efficiency, and so forth, so much better that it moves to maybe around 3.5% to 4% in expendable configuration. And then try to get clever about the reusability elements and try to drop that to around the 1.5% to 2% level. So you have a net payload to orbit of about 2%. SAL KHAN: But you're doing it at one, two orders of magnitude cheaper. ELON MUSK: Yeah. Absolutely, because our Falcon 9 rocket cost about $60 million. But the propellant cost-- which is mostly oxygen-- it's two-thirds oxygen, one-third fuel-- is only about $200,000. SAL KHAN: Wow. ELON MUSK: And it's much like a 747. It costs about as much to refuel our rocket as it does to refuel a 747 within-- well, pretty close, essentially. SAL KHAN: So assuming you all are successful, and you all have proven yourself to be successful on these audacious things in the past, I mean, what happens? I mean that seems like it's-- what happens in the next 5, 10 years in the space industry, if you all are successful there? I mean do we get to Mars? Do we have kind of market forces, commercialization of space starting to happen? ELON MUSK: Yeah. Let's see. Well, the first step is that we need to earn enough money to keep going as a company. So we have to make sure that we're launching satellites. Commercial satellites like broadcast communications, mapping, government satellites that do scientific missions. Earth-based or space-based missions. GPS satellites. That kind of thing. And then also servicing the space station. Transferring cargo to and from the space station, which we've done a few times. And then taking people to and from the space station. So we've got to service the sort of Earth-based needs to launch satellites and that pays the bills. But in doing that keep improving the technology to a point where we can make full reusability work. And we have sufficient scale and sophistication to be able to take people to Mars. SAL KHAN: Wow. So you think this is going to be a reality? What's your best guess of when we're going to have someone on Mars? ELON MUSK: I think probably about 12 years. SAL KHAN: That's nothing. And you think it'll be a round trip? It won't just be some type of permanent colony on Mars? ELON MUSK: I think it's probably a round trip. It's not for sure. SAL KHAN: I could talk about this for-- people know, I'm-- ELON MUSK: Aspirational it'd be a round trip. SAL KHAN: This is mind blowing. And then on Tesla. I mean Tesla's obviously, from my vantage, it's a huge success. What do you think in that industry-- well, one, I'll ask kind of the same question. What did you think-- this is something that GM and Toyota and these massive multi-billion dollar organizations have been trying. What gave you the confidence to pursue it? And now that it seems to be a huge success, where do you think this industry's going to be the next 5, 10 years? ELON MUSK: Yes. So with Tesla, the goal is try to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. I think it would happen anyway, just out of necessity. But because we have an un-priced externality in the cost of gasoline. We weren't pricing in the environmental effects of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere. That's causing the normal market forces to not function properly. And so the goal of Tesla is to try to act as a catalyst to accelerate those sort of normal forces. The normal sort of market reaction that would occur. We're trying to have a catalytic effect on that. And try to make it happen, I don't know, maybe 10 years sooner than it would otherwise occur. That's the goal of Tesla. So that's the reason we're making electric cars and not any other kind of car. And we also supply powertrains to Toyota and to Mercedes and maybe to other car companies in the future to accelerate their production of electric vehicles. So that's the goal there. And so far, it's working out pretty well. SAL KHAN: I mean, I just saw a news report earlier today that you all sold more Model S's than-- you all are leading that segment of the industry. The Mercedes S class, the BMW 7 Series, or the Lexus LS400, or whatever it is. ELON MUSK: Yeah, actually, that seems to be the case. I didn't realize they sold so few cars in that segment. Because we don't sell that many cars. We sell 5,000 a quarter, or 12,000-- SAL KHAN: Well, out here they seem like you know every-- ELON MUSK: Well, this is our home team. So it's-- we better sell a lot in the Bay Area. Because otherwise we're like-- SAL KHAN: And, well, I mean, similar thing. How did you start? What gave you the confidence? And do you see yourselves as kind of a major automotive, mainstream brand in 5,10 years, all the way down to competing with the Honda Accords and Civics? ELON MUSK: I mean, yeah. Our goal-- it's not to become a brand big brand or to compete with Honda Civics, rather to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And so we're just going to keep making more and more electric cars and driving the price point down until the industry is very firmly electric. Like maybe half of all cars made are electric or something like that. Which is not to say that we expect to make half of all cars. We want to just have that catalytic effect until at least that occurs. And I think the point at which we're approaching half of all new cars made are electric, then I think I would consider that to be the victory condition. And so the faster we can bring that day, the better. SAL KHAN: When would be your guess when that happens? ELON MUSK: Well, I made a bet with someone about three years ago that it would be sooner than 20 years. So it's 17 years from now. But that's conservative. I think it's probably maybe 13 or 14 years. SAL KHAN: Wow. Right when we're going to Mars. ELON MUSK: Right. SAL KHAN: It'll be exciting times. ELON MUSK: True. Exactly. I was just thinking about that. It was like, oh, those time frames are kind of coincident. The nature of new technology adoption is it tends to follow an S-curve. So what usually happens is people under-predict it in in the beginning, because people tend to extrapolate in a straight line. And then they'll over-predict it at the midpoint, because there's late adopters. And then it'll actually take longer than people think at the mid-point, but much shorter than people think at the beginning. But I'm pretty excited about how things are going. And, in fact, I think that the pace of technology improvement in electric energy storage is really moving faster than anyone thinks. SAL KHAN: Wow. I got one more-- how are we doing on time? Where's Ester? Oh, 9 o'clock. So how much time do you have? I want to make sure we don't go over. ELON MUSK: Well, I guess maybe another 15 minutes. SAL KHAN: OK. So I'll finish with one last question and then we'll open it up. What advice do you have for us at Khan Academy? ELON MUSK: I don't know. You guys seem to be doing really great. So I was wondering if you had advice for me. SAL KHAN: Oh, no, well. ELON MUSK: Yeah. It seems like you're doing an amazing job of-- really super leveraged. I mean, obviously, a small team, and you're having a dramatic effect-- SAL KHAN: Yeah, half these people don't even work here. There just like-- so it's like it's even-- ELON MUSK: Right. So it's, I think very impressive thing you're doing to spread knowledge and understanding throughout the world. SAL KHAN: The universe soon, if you hold up your end of the bargain. ELON MUSK: It's actually kind of funny. If you think, what is education? Like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain. And it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education. Because like it shouldn't be like this huge chore. So you're making it way, way better. But I think a lot of things that I would say, you've probably heard 100 times. And, in fact, are if not doing. The more you can game-ify the process of learning, the better. For my kids, I do not have to encourage them to play video games. I have to like pry them from their hands, like crack. SAL KHAN: Yes. ELON MUSK: It's like, drop that crack needle. SAL KHAN: You have that problem at your house, too. The crack is addictive. ELON MUSK: So to the degree that you can make somehow learning like a game, then it's better. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of education is very vaudevillian. You've got someone standing up there kind of lecturing at people. And they've done the same lecture 20 years in a row, and they're not very excited about it. And that lack of enthusiasm is conveyed to the students. They're not very excited about it. They don't know why they're there. Like why are we letting this stuff. We don't even know why. In fact, I think a lot of things that people learn that probably there's no point in learning them. Because they never use them in the future. SAL KHAN: Because who's going to launch a rocket into space? I mean, that's just like-- exactly, that never happens. ELON MUSK: Well, you have to say-- people don't stand back and say, well, why are we teaching people these things. And we should tell them, probably, why we're teaching these things. Because a lot of kids are probably just in school, probably puzzled as to why they're there. I think if you can explain the why of things, then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation. Then they understand purpose. So I think that's pretty important. And just make it entertaining. But I think just in general conventional education should be massively overhauled. And I'm sure you pretty much agree with that. I mean the analogy I sometimes use is, have you seen like Batman, the Chris Nolan movie, the recent one. And it's pretty freaking awesome. And you've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound, and it's very engaging. But if you were to instead say, OK-- even if you had the same script, so at least it's same script. And you said, OK, now that script, instead of having movies, we're going to have that script performed by the local town troop. OK, and so in every small town in America, if movies didn't exist, they'd have to recreate The Dark Night. With like home-sewn costumes and like jumping across the stage. And not really getting their lines quite right. And not really looking like the people in the movie. And no special effects. And I mean that would suck. It would be terrible. SAL KHAN: That's right. Very-- ELON MUSK: That's education. SAL KHAN: So with that-- and I apologize to all of you guys for hogging up all of the time, because, obviously, I could talk for hours about this stuff. But we do have time, probably 5 or 10 minutes for a handful of questions. If none of you all have any, I have about nine more. But, yes. SPEAKER 1: So I noticed-- I picked up two kind of themes from what you were discussing. One was somewhat audacious goals. And the other was I don't think I heard you use the word profit in anything that you spoke about. You seem to be-- each thing is pointed at like re-invigorating an industry or bringing back space missions. How much of your success do you attribute to having really audacious goals or versus just not being focused on the short term, money coming in, or I don't know, investors? ELON MUSK: Unfortunately, one does have to be focused on the short time and money coming in when creating a company, because otherwise the company will die. So I think that a lot of times people think like creating company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean there are periods of fun. And there are periods where it's just awful. And, particularly, if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you're only spending your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have like the worst-- you have a filter for the crappest problems in the company. The most pernicious and painful problem. So I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it. And have a fairly high pain threshold. There's a friend of mine who says, starting a company is like starting into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company. Because most start ups fail. It's like 90% percent-- it could be 99% of start ups fail. So that's the staring into the abyss part. You're constantly saying, OK, if I don't get this right, the company will die, which can be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on and not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you really wish you weren't working on. And so that's the eating glass part. And that goes on for a long time. SPEAKER 1: So how do you keep your focus on the big picture when you're constantly faced with, we could be out of business in a month? ELON MUSK: Well, it's just a very small percentage of mental energy is on the big picture. Like you know where you're generally heading for and the actual path is going to be some sort of zigzaggy thing in that direction. You're trying not to deviate too far from the path that you want to be on, but you're going to have to that to some degree. But I don't want to diminish the-- I think the profit motive is a good one, if the rules of an industry are properly set up. So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with profit. In fact, profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing than you're spending to create it. That's a good thing. And if that's not the case, then you'll be out of business. And rightfully so. Because you're not adding enough value. Now there are cases, of course, where people will do bad things in order to achieve profit, but that's actually quite unusual. Because usually the rules are set up mostly correctly. Like not completely, but mostly correctly. SAL KHAN: I think we have time for one more question. Joel. JOEL: Yeah, I have an important one. SAL KHAN: OK, very good. Yes, please. SPEAKER 3: No. JOEL: OK, so few months ago, you teased Hyperloop, and we haven't heard anything since. So, first of all, a few of us engineers were talking about it, and I think we have a few ideas, if you need help. But, if you feel comfortable, maybe you could tell us a little bit more. ELON MUSK: I was reading about the California high-speed rail, and it was quite depressing. Because California taxpayers are going to be on the hook to build the most expensive high-speed rail per mile in the world-- and the slowest. Those are not the superlatives you want. And, it's like, damn, we're in California, we make super high-tech stuff. Why are we going to be spending-- now the estimates are around $100 billion-- for something that will take two hours to go from LA to San Francisco? I'm like, OK, well, I can get on a plane and do that it 45 minutes. It doesn't make much sense. And isn't there some better way to do it than that. So if you just say, OK, well what would you ideally want in a transportation system? You'd say, OK, well you'd want something that relative to existing modes of transportation is faster-- let's say twice as fast-- costs half as much per ticket, can't crash, is immune to weather, and is-- you can make the whole thing like self-powering with like solar panels or something like that. That would be pretty-- SAL KHAN: That would be great, yes. ELON MUSK: --a good outcome. And so what would do that? And what's the fastest way short of inventing teleportation that you could do something like that? And some of the elements of that solution are fairly obvious, and some of them are not so obvious. And then the details-- the devil's in the details of actually making something like that work. But I came to the conclusion that there is something like that that could work. And would be practical. SAL KHAN: Is this around the evacuated tubes? The vacuum tubes? Like the old bank-- ELON MUSK: It's something like that. SAL KHAN: But you haven't been more public with what this is? ELON MUSK: No. Although I did say that once Tesla was profitable that I would talk more about it. But, we haven't done our earnings call yet. So I think I'll probably do it after the earnings call. And the thing is I'm kind of strung out on things that I'm already doing. So adding another thing-- it's like doesn't-- it's a lot SAL KHAN: Learning the guitar You could pick up all sorts of things. ELON MUSK: Right. I tried learning the violin. That's, by the way, a hard thing to learn. SAL KHAN: Yeah. Launching rockets, electric cars, revolutionizing transportation. Yeah, it's easy. ELON MUSK: I cannot play the violin at all. Very horrible. If you think about the future, you want a future that's better than the past, and so if we had something like the Hyperloop, I think that would be like cool. You'd look forward to the day that was working. And if something like that, even if it was only in one place-- from LA to San Francisco, or New York to DC or something like that-- then it would be cool enough that it would be like a tourist attraction. It would be like a ride or something. So even if some of the initial assumptions didn't work out, the economics didn't work out quite as one expected, it would be cool enough that like, I want to journey to that place just to ride on that thing. That would be pretty cool. And so that's I think how-- if you come with a new technology, it should feel like that. You should really-- if you told it to an objective person, would they look forward to the day that that thing became available. And it would be pretty exciting to do something like that. Or an aircraft. Like I thought it was really disappointing when the Concorde was taking out of commission, and there was no supersonic transport available. And of course the 787 has had some issues. But the thing is, the 787 even in the best case scenario is only a slightly better version of the 777. And it's like, OK, not that exciting. SAL KHAN: So this is something that you are working on? ELON MUSK: I wouldn't say working on it. SAL KHAN: And one day in the not-too-far future-- or there's some plans or consultants involved or something? SPEAKER 4: You called Russia. SAL KHAN: You made some phone calls to Russia. ELON MUSK: No, every now and then, it's percolating away. I'm not actually thinking about it. But then they'll be some new element of that I'll think of. Oh, this would make it better. SAL KHAN: Fascinating. Well, I think I'm speaking for everyone. This is like the most epic possible conversation one could have over about the course of an hour. And I think all of us would love to chat with you for hours on end, but thank you so much. I know you have a lot of free time, so it probably wasn't that big of a deal for you to come here. But, it was a huge honor. And I think it's inspired all of us to go out and change the world and the universe. ELON MUSK: Cool. All right. SAL KHAN: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

https://youtu.be/LeQMWdOMa-A

thank you and good afternoon so we have a lot to cover you lend us a lot of things there is at the moment one of his space ships docked to the space station the dragon spaceship this is the third time that's been docked second commercial one it was launched last week many of you may have followed the launch but there was drama you know there were solar panels and all this kind of stuff we could follow it on your Twitter feed yeah what can you just tell us what it's like to be Elon Musk in the control room during a launch when something happens when there's an issue well it's it's extremely nerve-racking I mean it's but the thing about rocket launch is that all of your work is distilled into these few minutes particularly the first several seconds around the liftoff because the worst thing that can happen with a rocket in a touch word is if if if if you have an engine failure or some some huge failure right above the launch pad and the whole thing can come down with about a million pounds of TNT equivalent and destroy the whole launch pad that would be that that's what's going through my mind in case you're wondering yeah that's actually what I'm thinking about yeah so when it clears the lightning towers and it's gotten further enough away from not actually destroying launch pad they're not then it's that's one sort of go down a notch on you know the fear and anxiety and then after first stage separation that's another one and when the second stage lights up so it's sort of you going down in intensity as the rocket is going up and the the thing is that the first three rocket launches that we had failed okay and if the first one failed quite close to the launch pad almost destroyed the launch pad in fact I spent that day picking up rocket pieces off the reef which is which sucks so I think like there's a pretty powerfully ingrained fear response as a result of that because three in a row just you know and but the images those rocket failure is kind of going through my mind as I'm seeing the rocket launch so that's what's going on and then in this case you've made it through the the stage separation but then there was an issue with the solar cells um tell me a little bit how you sort of spotted the problem diagnosed it what's the team do I mean you've got there in the end but how's it work yeah so the solar panels were actually okay but and the rocket launch went went really well so that was not a problem where things kind of winter I was after spacecraft separation we try to initialize the four thruster pods so there's there's four thruster pods with a combined total of 18 engines and that the system is designed with a huge amount of redundancy so it can take all sorts of failures and still complete its mission that's that's the whole way it's been made in fact it can it can work with even if it has only two of the four thruster pods working yeah it can still complete to a mission so three-word working and that would which was a huge puzzle like what why are three not working because these things are crushed prepped so you kind of think that either maybe one wouldn't work or a crushed draft pair wouldn't work but not three it was really really strange so so we have the spacecraft just going through kind of free drift in space like we're just tumbling and and which makes it also it's also difficult to communicate with because the antennas are like pointing you know every which way you can imagine so we had what we had was was a very slight to kill a bit occasional to kill a bit link that would go in and out and and that was an omnidirectional signal beaming off the nasa tigress satellite system so in order to actually improve the the foot we first had to improve the bandwidth so we actually asked the Air Force we can have some of their long-range telemetry scanners can with what they give us access and we have this communication system they would call the mega proxy so we had to recode the mega proxy to go through the airforce long-range dishes to blaster the spacecraft with enough intensity to be able to upload new code to try to fix the problem and so we wrote some new software to essentially precious Lamb the two of the three oxidizer tanks that were refusing to pressurize and it turned out we I think we figure out foam which is that there's a there was a slight change made to a check valve that was in three of the tanks not and on the other they were able to replicate their problem in the ground later and were able to to basically have the have the system build up pressure upstream then release that pressure and slam the valve so we're trying to give it the sort of the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver basically and and then we got one of the pods - that looked like it was making progress and we didn't want to unfold the solar panels until we had at least two pods active so we could we could go from sort of drifting - to an active hold but then the the temperatures of the solar panels which were in these protective covers was propping and it can drop to like almost absolute zero if it's pointing in it's a dog space so it was dropping dropping dropping and we're like the vocation we better release the solar panels otherwise they could literally freeze in place and so we ran a simulation to see what what would what would happen and it's actually slightly beneficial and it's kind like when a skater you know where the skater puts her arms out it slows down pull them in it speeds up so when actually when the the arms went out when the solar arrays we're not it slowed down the rate of rotation actually slightly helped us with maintaining communication with the spacecraft and so then we're able to with with that pressure slam thing get it get it get apart active then it then then a third one and then a fourth one they've got all four working and we're able to continue the mission talk with the space station in fact dragon is currently duck with the space station right now and if all goes well we'll return to Earth and about to we pursue that sounds terrifying I don't wanna go through that again okay you are not just here in in in Austin first South by Southwest but also to meet with the Texas Legislature to talk about possibly a launch base here in Texas tell us more about that yes so right now we put two main launch locations one is Cape Canaveral in Florida and the other is a Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and so that Cape Canaveral is good for kind of eastward launches Vandenberg for southerly launches and we figure we need a third launch site that's kind of a commercial launch site you know it's not good because Cape Canaveral at Vandenberg Air Force bases which is cool and it's obviously there's an important need for Air Force space launch bases as there is for Air Force airports but then there's also a need for commercial airports and just like you wouldn't expect commercial airliners to land at an Air Force Base in a normal course of events it makes sense to have a commercial spaceport and we need to be able to launch eastward and we want to be close to the equator so that basically means the potential States or Virginia through Texas going south Hawaii and Puerto Rico because the other things when you stay on on u.s. territory is rocket technology like we're doing is considered an advanced witness technology so it's very difficult to export that if you will to other countries and anyway so those are our options right right now Texas is arguably the leading candidate but we need certain legislation passed that's supportive of Space Launch and I think it's particularly controversial there one of the things we need for example is we need to be able to close the beach when we're doing a launch and Texas has the open beaches act I was like okay you know we we can't launch if there's someone right right next to the rocket you know on the beach so that's I don't like said I don't think it's a particularly controversial thing it's pretty straightforward and and then and then we kind of need deliver protection for kind of the one in 10,000 person case who complains about the thing like we had this dude who filed a lawsuit against us for our rocket development site in in Central Texas near Waco he's like not even in the same County he's in a neighboring County and he like also thinks like the CIA is listening to his brainwaves so we need like just a little bit of protection for people like that so we don't like spending a ton of time in court because that's basically what we're asking for slightly nothing major and I think it's likely to move forward so I think you know if if things go as expected there's this it's likely that we'll have a launch site in Texas which I think it'd be really cool around when so it depends on how the environmental approvals going away but I think like well if things go well I mean notable nodal of it's in our hands so for assuming that things go as expected you know there'd be a decision this year and it would start construction next year and then and probably the first launches would take place and from there in two to three years terrific yeah so Falcon 9 with a the rocket that launched a dragon is traditional rocket which is to say it's disposable bits but you're essentially you're ultimately focused on reusable robbery's the name of that can you talk a little bit about what's why reusable what's different about reusable and I think you probably have some things to show as well yeah absolutely so reusability is extremely important if you think it's important that humanity extend beyond Earth and become multi-planet species and all that yeah I mean it's super important I thought so I think it's also incredibly obvious common sense like you can imagine watching like Star Trek and then they got a new starship after every every trip that would be pretty silly and and every motor transport that we're used to like cars planes trains automobiles horses bikes they're all reusable and but but not Rockets and if we can't make Rockets reusable the cost is just prohibitive the the like the cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon 9 is 0.3 percent of the cost of the rocket Wow so it's basically it's a very tiny number it's it's very similar to to an airplane so it's how much does it cost to fuel up an airplane and how much does it cost to buy an aeroplane they're very different things so if if we're if humanity's ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining Basin or the planet it's critical that we solve this problem whether it's SpaceX or someone else someone has a solar problem and we can have a hundredfold reduction in the cost of spaceflight so so that's what SpaceX has been trying to do and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company so so far I've not been very successful in that in that regard so but I think we kind of have a handle on it I think I think we've got a we've got a design that in the simulations in any CAD and so forth it it closes like it should work if we can build that thing it should work and in fact and it may be worth just rolling the reusability videos people have a sense of what I'm talking about I know where that place would find us people in the audience see that all right so what you're seeing here is that the first stage after stage separation the first stage turns around boosts back to the launch pad and then lands propulsively with landing gear it's kind of how often should land that's that's the upper stage this is the this is the quick version of the video obviously and they sing dragon version - so dragon version 2 will land on thrusters with landing gear with the act epic as accurately as a helicopter circling anywhere on earth as with the accuracy of a helicopter one last question about space before we turn to two cars you've talked before about how you decide to get into this you were you founded you know co-founded PayPal you don't really I mean have a physics degree you know something about about you know the underlying mechanics but you didn't have any space experience right you decided I think on a train to go to Mars and decided that you could out-compete NASA or that you could get to Mars you could get to space faster cheaper better than the one of the largest the largest Space Agency in the world how did you get that confidence well I think first I should say maybe give some of a preface to what happened before starting SpaceX in fact the way I sort of got into space was introduced I was really disappointed that we had not sense anyone to Mars that would not progress beyond Apollo and I kept waiting for when we would and it just didn't happen year after year and and so afraid mine asked me about what I wanted to do after PayPal and I said well you know it was curious about space but I don't think about that there was anything I could do do in space and I went to the NASA website to just see when are we going to Mars and I couldn't find find that out I thought maybe it was there but I well hidden or something but so so that then I thought well perhaps this is a question of of will is there sufficient will to do this and in the first idea I came up with was actually to do a philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated gel that would hydrate upon landing and you'd have this cool greenhouse these green plants on a red background they'll be the money shot and and and then you know people like presidents and superlatives so be the first plant first life on another planet furthest the life's ever traveled and and that would get people excited and you will learn about a lot about what to support earth lands earth plants in a greenhouse on Mars the the whole purpose of that was to get people excited about sending people to Mars and increased NASA's budget so that was my whole goal I was gonna basically torch yeah it it was not had nothing to do with competing with NASA in fact my goal was to increase their budget and and I should say that today NASA is our biggest customer we've got almost 50 launches and about a quarter of those of for NASA but 3/4 3/4 commercial but one quarter NASA and NASA has been incredibly supportive and helpful and we wouldn't be where we are today with that without the help in Asus it really got night through with competing with NASA it's really just about what do we need to do to have an exciting inspiring future in space that that's that's what I think really matters at the end of the day you didn't end up raising the fund the money to pay NASA to the mission you end up doing building your own company and and ideally to do it cheaper than government's good yeah so as able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft and the greenhouse on the communication system way less than it normally would cost for such a thing I got stuck on the rocket and I went to to Russia three times to try to buy a couple of their biggest ICBMs this is about this is in 2001 late 2001 in 2002 it was definitely an interesting experience and I sort of got the feeling I could avoid the nuke - but I don't don't want to go there and then when I go back from the third trip to Russia that that's when I thought okay look even if we do even if we buy these these ICBMs from russia i-i-i i thought i'd i thought my initial supposition was wrong and so what I thought really was that we'd lost the world to explore that we'd lost the world to push the boundary and Anna and in retrospect that was actually a very foolish error because the United States is a nation of explorers the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration it's ludicrous to actually in retrospect - made such an assumption but people need to believe that it's possible and that it's not going to be it's not gonna bankrupt them it's not they're not gonna have to give up something important like health care you know it's going to be a cost that isn't gonna meaningfully affect their their standard of living and I think the United States would absolutely be super super excited about sending people to Mars and people I think a lot of people really wish that that would occur anyway so that was that was what I came to conclusion of and I thought well if if we don't make a difference in the cost of the rocket of the transport system it's all it doesn't matter it's it's not like it's not a question of well it's a question of way and so that's when I came back and started SpaceX but when I started SpaceX there wasn't with the perspective of like we'll just you know take over the world and withwith awesome rockets I don't know what the I was doing I was like clueless I thought the most likely outcome was that we were failed and the first three Rockets did fails and you put all your money into it between Tesla SpaceX and SolarCity : yeah that wasn't the plan at the beginning by the way okay and Peter tail says we don't think big anymore you must have conversations with him about that well you know Peters been a big supporter actually so he's he invested in SpaceX at a very important time in 2008 before we reached over so after a third failure but before our first success so you know big credit to Peter and Luc no stick and the other guys found respond basically my my buddies from PayPal but buddies from PayPal saved my butt you know it's really really good so let's talk about cars many many in the audience may recollect the notorious New York Times review of the Model S yes exactly of the Model S earlier this year yeah and your reaction to that review and The Times reaction to your reaction and and and the effect on your share price and orders and all that sand without rehashing the review or the facts I'd like you to just a post-mortem the entire experience wait do I know can I do a post-mortem without any facts post mortem your reaction okay to the review and what you know put you on the couch and what would you do differently today having seen the way it all played out well I think I think there's one thing I didn't do and maybe still which is to post the the the rebuttal to the rebuttal cuz I I withheld that and waited for the public editor I sent that information to the public editor waited for her to do her thing and she came down kind of on the side of Tesla with respect to the fact that the article was an error but but disagreed upon the motive on the ethics yes and because you impugn both facts and ethics I did yes and and and I think it was I think it was a call it a low-grade ethics violation not like a big one I don't think he thought he was doing anything particularly terrible mm-hmm and I would call it a low grade look great violation and not part of the Jayson Blair you know crazy fabrication variety but I would call it a lower grade it was not in good faith if that that's that's that's an important point and and I probably should have posted that rebuttal to make that clear but I didn't do it that's what I regret so the only change you would make is that the very last bit the rebuttal that you wrote but has not been published you would get maybe I should you would get out there yeah see you would continue to use the same language in the same way I just think the language was inaccurate I really don't you fall you've often said that one of your management techniques one of the secrets of your success is that you listen to need negative feedback yes was the times review not didn't fall into the category of negative feedback I have no problem with negative feedback I have a problem with nor do I have a problem with critical reviews a matter of fun with critical reviews I would spend all my time battling critical reviews there have been hundreds of negative articles hundreds and yet I've only spoken out a few times I I don't have a problem with critical reviews I have a problem with false reviews all right one of the technologies that you had to you know basically develop to near perfection or at least or at least work on hardest was lithium batteries for the electric cars or run on looking batteries safety has always been an issue accidents etc recently Boeing had fires what they're looking at batteries and bees and the Dreamliner is now at a service because of that you volunteered to help the Boeing executives I guess diagnose and redesign yeah can you talk a little bit about what they did wrong what you would have done differently and and what do you think that if the future of you know Boeing and others airline batteries are gonna be sure well first of all on the very front I mean obviously even though SpaceX and Boeing compete on the space side we've no competition on the commercial airliner side and some of the comments that I made about Boeing if somehow be interpreted as an attack on Boeing when it is in fact not an attack on Boeing the the only reason I actually I mean the main reason I should say I offered to help was that there's a friend of mine Richard Branson who's whose airline is suffering as a result of this both him and I on fire and he was mentioning that he's losing hundreds of millions his boards airline is as a result of this was problem I said well I think we could probably help and then he so he said are great well let me connect you with the chief engineer for the 787 I said cool we're happy to help so you know provided some some advice and hopefully that'll be helpful and I said we're also happy to actually do the solution if you want and haven't taken us up on that offer but we were happy to help either in an advisory capacity or to do the solution whatever would result in the 787 getting back to flight sooner we're trying to be productive and helpful so I mean I think in the case of the battery boeing doesn't have a ton of in-house battery expertise so they they outsource the the battery and then you had a whole bunch of kind of nested outsourcing where the answer was the battery system and then and then that got outsourced to another company then to another company and there's a whole bunch of other companies and and you're like four layers deep before you actually got to any hardware and so that resulted and I think and a kind of a breakdown of communication I mean from an architectural standpoint the fundamental issue is that the AI is that I think is that the cells are too big the battery cells are too big and the gaps between the battery cells are not big enough hmm the problem with with a big battery cell is that the thermal pathway is is in a worst-case scenario is very long so you say well if there's a hot spot in the battery can it get its heat out and if it's deep in a cell it can't you can't do that and it's also hard to thermally condition the cells but the life of the pack will be will be dependent upon on the temperature would the average and not the average temperature but the worst temperature at any point in any cell so you want to really even that temperature that's why Tesla is a fan of having lots of small cells and then actively cooling each cell to keep the temperature even and make sure that if hot spots of this develop that's a very short pathway to the cooling system and again and it could you know take care of it and you also want to make sure that it's I'm again quite technical here sorry it's it's passive propagation proof so so if you even if you're active cooling system fails and you get them or run away in a cell that then we run event can't cascade into a neighboring cell so and you get the thermal double domino effect right I mean it's not super complicated so so it just if if you have big cells what big gaps and ideal you what you don't want big cells if you do you want big gaps small cells small gaps I mean so I mean this is this is really important because because I'm the whole thing about this new generation of airplanes that they're light they use composites they use electronics rather than mechanical systems and so electricity drives the whole thing so basically my understanding is that you need lithium batteries in the sky it just doesn't work any other way and your point is it can be done Oh Tony can be done yeah like the themes getting a bit of a bad name here the theme is obviously the way to go maybe people have lithium-ion batteries in their cell phones and their laptops I mean I don't think anyone's panicking here with the fact that they're gonna look in mind battery you know next to a sensitive region of probably of their body you know got it once of just staying on on on power for one last set of questions before we before I return to you your life which seems insane it is the same you're also a chairman of Solar City which I believe is America's largest solar installer you know so space transportation energy picking off the big ones there now you know solar got a bad name over the last few years because of the Solyndra meltdown etc but yeah in my sense the people different are not differentiating between the making of solar cells and using a solar cell right and and the Chinese competition and the glutton of the market on the supply side is what Solyndra what gots Linda in trouble they couldn't compete with the falling prices but you're a consumer of solar cells right so how do you see you know Chinese Chinese competition and sort of the glut of solar solar cells on the market what's that give you I mean I think what China's doing in the solar panel arena is awesome because they're lowering the cost their solar power for the world and they have these huge Giga factories that they created outlet in the Chinese desert and with with a ton of funding from the Chinese government so it's like a giant donation from the tiny Chinese government like thanks that's awesome you know and you know people sort of complain about a Solyndra but I mean obviously anyone who's been involved in the venture world knows that you don't bet a thousand there's some companies that die the only reason we know about cilinders because it became a political football right and I mean there are other solar panel manufacturers are still doing reasonably well but but but it is tough when you're competing I mean I think good rule of thumb was don't is don't compete with China and with a commodity product you know you're really asking for for trouble if you can that in that scenario and and it's really super easy to make fifteen percent efficient or standard efficiency solar panels it's super easy it's like these are the making freakin drywall at this point so it's like does anybody think we should be competing with China in drywall manufacturing okay probably not so so that's the thing so and that the the hard part of Seoul power is not the panel it's actually the whole system it's basically designing something that's gonna fit on particular rooftop because all you have all these heterogeneous rooftops you've got a you've got to mount the system you've got to wire it up to get it connected the inverter is connected to the grid I'm gonna do all the permitting I mean it's a bunch of like thorny unglamorous stupid problems but if somebody doesn't optimize them they're still gonna cost a ton of money and and a lot of them are really not they're not fun problems today they're not you know exciting promise to optimize but but they are the problems that actually matter in the cost of of solar power so it's really more like you know like like a Roofing Contractor than it is I mean what you're doing is you're putting a second roof on a building yeah okay so and you got to do it at scale and then you've got to manage all these systems because there's still some I mean even though the after-sales service is small when you've got like hundreds of thousands of systems best low-light to manage and and so what solar city really is is a giant distributed utility and it's working in partnership with the house in business and in competition with the the big sort of monopoly utility I mean I think it's like literally power to the people okay it's like literally I think it's really awesome because utility just never had any competition before yeah and and now they're like deaf to actually think about the cost of power and they're got better ways to do it and that kind of thing I think it's really great and the credit there is really due to Lyn and Peter I've co-founders I mean I've thrown a few ideas every now and then but mostly it's just about showing up at the board meeting to hear the good news those guys are just doing session or some job so you are CEO and CTO of SpaceX so not just running the company Bergersen chief technology officer as well yeah you are CEO and chief product designer for Tesla so not just running the company but designing the cars yeah and you're chairman of Solar City right what is your life like it's it's very busy and I'd actually like to take it down just to Scrooge honestly because they're all they're always I mean these things that the last few years have been really really great but then there were a number of years that suck horribly and I'd like to just not have it be so extreme and like last year was a year of great achievement but honestly I didn't have that much fun it sucked I didn't have that much fun um when year's resolution was to have a little bit more fun this year so hey I'm it's off myself with ya and you have five children dude they're awesome kids are awesome by the way you guys should all have kids kids are great how much do you see them III didn't see them enough actually but but I what I find is that I'm able to be with them and still be on email because they don't need like constant interaction except when we're talking directly so I find I can be with them and still be you know working at the same time but I are you think you can do email while you're with your children yeah absolutely sure Wow we got all the time but a lot of the time that's why I tend to have a phone you can sort of you do email in in interstitial moments in the absence of that I would not be able to get my job done well that's impressive we are I have five children I can't do email while I'm with my children it's not the children and it's really not good for the email I do have to have a nanny there otherwise they'll kill each other so yeah um we are going to turn to audience questions at this point just a reminder that if you tweet your questions to hashtag ask musk there's a team in the back that will be selecting the other ones that we have already covered and it seemed interesting and I get them in front maybe you can see them as well so us the first one from David solace yes when it comes to researching analyzing entrepreneurial opportunity how do you go about qualifying or legitimizing presumably the idea well I'm not sure I'm the best guide here because things that I've chosen have not been up to I've not been trying to optimize on a risk-adjusted return basis so there are like I would not say that I went into the rocket business the car business or the solo business thinking that it's a it's a great opportunity I just thought that that something needed to be done in in these industries in order to make a difference and that's why I did it so but in general I do think it's worth thinking about like what you whether what you're doing is gonna result in disruptive change or not if it's just incremental it's unlikely to to be something major it's got to be something that's substantially better than than what's gone on before that Q's up our next question really well this is from a Craig look Legree's space automotive finance energy you've disrupted major industries what would you do if you had a free rein over education well I think that the way that we currently do education is is wrong and we're when you see something like the Khan Academy and so I think that's probably going in the right direction I mean generally you want education to be like as close to a video game as possible like a good video game like you do not need to tell your kid to play video games they will play video games on autopilot all day so if you can make it interactive and engaging then then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do so I think that's how it should be and it shouldn't be that you got like these grades where people move in lockstep and so everyone goes through you know goes like normally you will go through English math science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it's an assembly line but but people are not objects on an assembly line that's a ridiculous notion people learn and are interested in different things at different paces so you really want to disconnect the whole grade level three of the thing from the subjects allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or interested in in each subject it seems like a really obvious thing I mean I think like most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville where and it's and as a result just not that compelling it's like somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row they're not necessarily all that engaged or in doing it and you compare that to say Batman The Dark Knight okay and they but like the world's best special effects you've got the world's best director screenwriter multiple cuts amazing you know editing and and and and and and that's amazing but but I imagine if instead you had like the local town aspiring actor do the one-person play version of that that would not be compelling yeah do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessary nests of university higher education I don't actively I do agree with Peters a point that a university education is often unnecessary that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people but I think you've probably learn about as much but the vast majority what you're gonna learn there in the first two years and most of it is from your classmates because you can always buy the textbooks and just read them like nobody stopping you from doing that or go online oh go online so now for a lot of companies they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end and that's actually what's important to them so it really depends on what somebody's goal is if the goal is to start a company I would say no point in finishing college in my case I had to otherwise I'd get kicked out of the country yeah so that was important but although you went on and got a master's degree as well right I I came out to Silicon Valley to do a PhD at Stanford in Applied Physics and material science to work on ultra capacitors for used in electric cars and that's what I was going to do and then I started put that on hold to start a company but since I already had my under undergrad I could then get an h-1b visa and I can I think so h-1b visa requires a degree but other than that I would have if that wasn't the case I probably would have just stopped education sooner did you not go to Wharton for yeah yeah the dual undergraduate physics and business at Wharton I say yeah but it was undergrad but not masters understood another question from the audience to Dan Griffiths fill on the blank you will be disappointed if blank does not happen in your lifetime well probably the most thing I've disappointed us if if humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime I'd be really disappointed that would be you know that probably my biggest disappointment and yeah I think I think that's the thing I'm most concerned about because because we're at this or obviously that's what SpaceX is working on so I'm not trying to be self-serving here but it's just I kind of worry that we've hit this if I don't know whether our technology level will keep going or subside and for the first time in four and a half billion years the technology level is at the point where we can extend life to another planet make life multiplanetary and I I think it's too easy to take for granted that it's going to stay above that level and if it doesn't and it falls below that will it return who knows you know the Sun is gradually expanding and in about you know roughly 500 million years maybe a billion years at the outside the oceans will boil and and then we know no meaningful life on Earth I mean might be like some you know chemo trove sort with or ultra-high temperature bacteria or something but nothing that can make a spaceship and and that's it like if you think it's like maybe it's the five million time frame that's only a ten percent increase in the life of lifespan of Earth so if if if humanity had taken an extra ten percent longer to get here it wouldn't have gotten here at all yeah and so far we haven't seen any signs of life from other worlds that we have we haven't detected anything I hope yeah hopefully we do and hopefully it's not a warship coming towards us but I just think that that's the thing that really concerns me we need to get this done and then that is the best thing we can do to ensure the continued existence of humanity so that's why I would say that's the most important thing do you personally do you personally want to step foot on Mars I do personally want to step foot on Mars but honestly I would be doing this even if there was no even if I knew there was no chance of me going to Mars because I think blech said it I think it's just important that we are in a path to getting there so I would like to go at some point I'll go if I'm certain that SpaceX will be fine without me and that that path will continue that may have heard me some people may have heard the joke I made before which is like you know I I wouldn't have to be I would like to die on Mars just not on impact not the question from the audience that we just we just lost lost that one there was like I don't remember who would ask this question but the question was which when I mean which do you think is going to have more impact on the world SpaceX or Tesla well I think if we look back or with historians if I would look back on the impact of Tesla in many years from now I think it would be that Tesla hopefully the Tesla advanced the advent of sustainable transport by something like a decade maybe maybe two decades but I do think electric cars are inevitable in fact I think all modes of transport will go fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets and so that's that's what I think and then for Solar City perhaps something similar on the energy production side sustainable energy production then for SpaceX hopefully SpaceX to both develops the technology necessary to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars and I mean I think that's you know a bigger impact but or other the what so city and and tears are about are solving what I think is the most pressing terrestrial concern which is this sustainable production and consumption of energy for helping solve it I mean they have many people solving it and then what SpaceX is about is helping solve the biggest non-terrestrial problem which is the extension of life beyond Earth so that those are how I see it we have two related questions one that's no longer on the screen but and another one that is that the first was what was the best advice you ever got and the second and you've maybe can join them in your answer is you mentioned working with your friends Peter Thiel and Richard Branson who influences and inspires you sure well I I'm inspired by a lot of historical figures like one of my favorite guys is Ben Franklin you know I think he's you know he's a really good guy I mean he was a scientist and he also I mean it worked in obviously publishing and the political sphere but it kind of like he's just thought about like what are the problems that need to get solved and worked on those names justic seemed like a good guy all around sorry I like him and and I like just historical figures like in science and literature and I'm gonna huge fan of Churchill and and obviously like Tesla we named Tesla after Nikola Tesla better than most murders you know and I actually haven't named any product or company after myself but but that maybe gives a sense of like I've I think like Tesla is someone who deserves a lot of recognition and sorry what was their well they're all dead I don't any yeah I mean I think there's a friend of mine a Larry Page I think what Larry's doing and Sergey at Google I'm really admire what they've done I think most he's recently dead but Steve Jobs Peters or in Maya Steve Jobs I think Jeff business is doing some great things among others competing with you yes but that's a good thing in fact every time I see Jeff is list I say why aren't you doing more in space yeah yeah yeah the other half the question was the best advice you've ever got best advice I ever got well I think the you know the physics training is a very good training where it's a good framework for reasoning we you're trained to think about first principles and reason from there and that means boiling things down to the most fundamental truths and then connecting those truths in a way to try to understand how reality is because you know physics has this problem where they're trying to figure out things that are totally counterintuitive and so they had to have a framework for forgetting they're like quantum mechanics is incredibly counterintuitive but it's true and so you had so the physics developed a framework for figuring out things that aren't obvious and that's why I think it's it's it's a lot of advice but it's it's it's the right framework and then just in general critical thinking is good you know examining whether you have the correct axioms are the most applicable axioms does the logic necessarily connect and then what are the what are the range of probable outcomes outcomes are usually not deterministic they're they're they're a range and so you want to figure out what those probabilities are and make sure ideally that you're the house you know it's fine to take it's fine to it's fine to gamble as long as you're the house and you know and the so that is is to listen to critical feedback which we alluded to earlier voice oolitic solicit critical feedback particularly from friends because generally they will be thinking it but they won't tell you the question here from a Giles of songs any news or development on your Hyperloop idea and you might explain what your Hyperloop idea is haha well what I've said is that I'm putting the Hyperloop stuff on hold until I get Tesla to profitability because I think if I was an investor in Tesla and they heard me sort of spouting off about the Hyperloop before I got the company profitable they were like hey you know go go do it go do your job so that's what I'm doing I think once Tesla isn't it you know has been profitable maybe for at least for a quarter maybe two quarters then I'll I'll talk about the Hyperloop I think it could be an interesting way to I mean it would be interesting way to travel really quickly from one city to the next quickly explain just in one sense what a Hyperloop is huh well it would be something that would be let's say twice as fast as a plane at least in terms of total transit time maybe a little faster it would be immune to weather incapable of crashing pretty much unless there's like a terrorist attack and the ticket price would be like I would say half that of a plane so it'd be better in every way train of some sort though it's kind of it's it's not exactly a train it would be a different it would be a new mode of transportation that doesn't currently exist terrestrial terrestrial yeah okay underground above-ground could go either a kind of subway perhaps I think it's I think it's the capital cost to be less if it's mostly about ground but you can go underground to all right maybe last question what's the biggest mistake you've ever made and this is from Alexi Hill was the biggest mistake you've ever made and how did you move forward looking back was it really that big a deal biggest mistake I've made lots of mistakes some of them were pretty big I mean it's hard to say because things have worked out pretty well in the end so how how big of a mistake could it have been as the question is really really asking you know I did lots of dumb things in my first company and at PayPal and you know I think I think sometimes yeah I don't know there's so many I like God I'm hard pressed to say this is this is the biggest one you know this one or two okay first okay sure so they're the biggest mistake in general that I've made I'm trying to correct for that is to put too much of a weighting on somebody's talent and not enough on their personality and I've made that mistake several times in fact then I would say like gee I mean I'm not gonna make that mistake in then it would make it a game and and I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart it really does and I've made them I've made the mistake of thinking that sometimes it's just about the brain on that heartfelt note we're done thank please join me in thanking you you

https://youtu.be/IgKWPdJWuBQ

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. CA: That scale delivers efficiency. EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video -- So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently -- by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive -- if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common -- don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that? EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. (Applause)CA: How? EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest -- those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal. CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that -- I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is? EM: More from solar than any other source. CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but -- CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars. EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars -- being the only realistic option -- and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going? EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests. CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then -- EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters. CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so -- Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you? EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot. CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and -- and this is the critical thing -- feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that -- could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done. EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

https://youtu.be/jMkwsSAIAfY

well well well welcome to my talk show [Music] milkshake [Music] yeah tasty chicken burger sure you may be a billionaire yeah entrepreneur inventor man extraordinaire you're not getting any of my chicken burger all right nope no problem i can i can do without the chicken burger that's so good elon musk yeah what is it like to be named after the scent of a of a of an animal it certainly led to um a lot of marking in in junior high i know what that feels like my name is ryan right could you imagine if you were named rain musk right it's raining musk i mean you grew up in south africa yeah you you were in the army there no uh no i left at 17. well in in part in order to avoid conscription into these selections so that you didn't have to do with the army you know spending two years suppressing black people didn't seem to be a great use of time i think that's probably the worst use of any human being's time right so good for you right right on elon musk draft dodger um i guess the first question um is you're the founder of tesla motors right can i have a car yes for free uh no what if i told you that i will not let you out of the van unless you give me a car for free um next question now what was that like when all of a sudden like you're a millionaire you're a millionaire you're working your butt off you're creating these software companies you're developing paypal and then all of a sudden like that needle goes blank and you're a billionaire did you ever go like did you have like a party did you blow a party favor like when you became really a billion did your accountant call you and like guess what elon you went from millionaire to billionaire not really no uh no i uh i mean it's not as though i've got like a billion dollars just sitting in a bank account or something it just means that that my ownership of the companies if you add them up uh you know it's a couple billion dollars right it's pretty awesome in that you earned it and you made it yourself right i didn't i did not inheritance yeah i did not and that's so cool because people that inherit their billions i just want to punch them in the throat right right i mean actually i do i do think that uh from taxation standpoint it's better if taxes are focused on um it's on estate taxes when somebody dies as opposed to taxes when somebody's living um ah okay so you're you're in favor of a high estate tax given that there's a certain amount of tax that must be raised it's i think it's better to obtain that tax upon death than right during during life um i could go with that you know if if somebody's demonstrated that they are a good steward of capital then uh they um you know they want to have more capital in order to do more good things with the economy but if somebody's inherited uh money then they have not demonstrated that they are a good student of capital and so it's it's less it makes less sense that they inherit money also it i always think that then it urges them to not just stockpile their money but to give it away charitable foundations or or art or or gifts or there's a manner of things that you can do foundations in your estate planning you know if you've stockpiled all that all that money yeah absolutely you know it's it's really there to give it away what good is it when you're rotting in the ground yeah absolutely and and also i think we want to avoid creating aristocracy of wealth you know that's uh where this you want to avoid having entrenchment of wealth and i think that leads to stagnation of society and why is that um well if the rules are set up such that um you know somebody can't make headway uh you know because the resources are constrained to a small number of people and and then they ensure that it only goes to their kids which is essentially the feudal system right then um you know there's not much point in working hard or or trying to create great things because you know there's no reward for that and there's a lot of countries that are like that some say the united states is like that but in a lot of ways it's not really there are a lot of countries where it's just it's locked up by like in haiti there's six families right that own 99 of the wealth right right and the wealth is not trickling down it's not going anywhere it's just staying in those families right and the united states i think is actually the the best in the world in terms of enabling opportunity but we need to be uh conscious of retaining that that status right on where you want to go anywhere anywhere in the universe mars wow we're there and you didn't even need a spaceship you just needed a van yeah why did you want to go to mars uh well the reason i want to go to mars is because i think that's the best place where humanity can can become a multi-planet species and a space bringing civilization and i think it's uh it's the most exciting place that we could go in the solar system now how would that work for people to go to mars like what would happen what happened um once we were there well like like describe to me that process so a bunch of people to get on a spaceship what happened talk me through mars travel well we need to have a big spaceship that uh takes you away it'll take initially six months to get there although i think we can bring that down under to under three months and maybe eventually under a month and then you have to land on mars and establish a base there and initially people would have to live in pressurized domes but over time you could you could tear from the planet and make it like earth so you could do what would you terraform mars you'd actually uh heat the planet up by um emitting greenhouse gases kind of the what we're doing on earth we're learning a lot about that here on earth so we would just do that on mars and that would warm the planet up it would thicken the atmosphere and then the atmosphere mars is carbon dioxide so as you grow plants the plants would convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen how could you plant the first plant on mars how would that work well you'd have to initially have plants um uh in a pressurized transparent dome but all you need is a transparent dominar and a pump to to pressurize it from the mars atmosphere so you can grow you can grow earth plants in more soil you can grow earth plants in mars soil that's correct but it's cold over there on mars isn't it right so you have to warm it up you need a lot of down comforters over there yeah you need to but if you have a a greenhouse sort of a space heaters well the greenhouse has a greenhouse effect right so it's just like it's just like greenhouses that's fantastic and then what do the humans do when they're there uh well i think initially all or what initially uh people would would work on creating a mars base um and and creating the infrastructure necessary sport uh life on on mars so that would take a lot of effort just just as it took a lot of effort uh to establish the american colonies now does the ship come back yeah when you go to mars are you gonna go like i'm gonna die on mars so you take healthy people that are just gonna plan on living the rest of their 30 or 40 years on mars or something like that well most most people would actually i think most people would go to mars to move to mars but the space ships would come back because we otherwise would be way too expensive to travel to mars so people could choose to come back to if they want or come back to earth for for a visit or something like that did you imagine the first baby born on mars right that would be huge that would be freaky right a lot of pressure for that poor kid right the first martial the first martian that's right would you go to mars yeah yeah i would like to go to mars uh but but um the reason for spacex is to enable anyone who goes to mars or anyone who wants to to go to mars so we want to enable people to go to mars you know governments or the world government would you know united nations or something like that would would pay to get the people over there because spacex is a for-profit company obviously so spacex is with the goal of advancing rocket technology so that eventually we could travel to mars um and and and establish a base on mars um and make life multi-planetary because i think that's one of the most important things that that we could accomplish in fact i think it's important enough that would actually fit on the scale of evolution itself um if you consider the the major elements on the scale of evolution as being the advent of single-celled love life multicellular life differentiation of plants and animals life going from the oceans to land um mammals and consciousness those are probably the big ones but i think on that on that scale would also fit life becoming multi-planetary for the first time you know i think it's perhaps at least as important as like go from the oceans to land um and it would i think preserve the light of consciousness uh you know the consciousness the probability of consciousness existing for a long time uh would would be much greater if if we're on two planets if something catastrophic would have happened to earth then it would you know life would still exist on another planet right let's say there was a a giant uh meteor impact or a super volcano or you know we had sort of a massive nuclear war on earth or right some super virus right um you know i mean it could be something that that doesn't necessarily initially uh destroy um human civilization but knocks it back to a much lower technology technology level right and and and then there's sort of a decline to eventual extinction so i i totally uh believe in science i mean science isn't something you believe in it's something that just is but it just you had referenced kind of the reverse climate change but what drives me crazy is the of the climate change deniers and what what is up with that has it just become so politicized that they just have stopped believing scientists that's what drives me crazy is that people don't believe scientific reports they believe conservative am radio disc jockeys and certain you know fox news reporters instead of scientists right i mean it's it's i think it's it's problematic and i think often that this debate is phrased in the wrong way um because uh they'll often say uh well how do we know for certain that co2 emissions cause global warming um and if you ask a scientist do you know anything for certain they will generally say well no we don't know if we're certain or we don't know we know hardly anything for certain right but but that's that's not the right question the question is really um uh do we know that it won't cause global warming um and and we absolutely do not know uh it won't close global warming in fact it's quite the overwhelming opinion uh among the scientific community is that co2 is causing global warming um and uh given that we will run out of oil anyway and must find a sustainable means of generating energy and and consuming energy it it makes no sense to run this experiment um you know wow it's we're going to run out of oil and coal these these are finite resources sure so um why not look for those alternate resources and right and and also potentially heal the planet's atmosphere at a much faster rate yeah it just doesn't make yeah it doesn't make any sense to to consume to to put trillions and tons of co2 in the atmosphere and see what happens which could be catastrophic um when we have to find a non-uh hydrocarbon-based way of generating and consuming energy anyway so it's just a dumb experiment now you have said that there are three main problems that you are focused on the most what are those three uh right so um well there were three uh when i was in college i thought there were three things that most affect the future of humanity and those were the internet uh sustainable energy and uh space exploration so those three things would they're not problems per se but they're the three things that will affect humanity the most right exactly uh the things that that would and in a good way right yeah internet energy and space exploration yeah and specifically um extending life beyond earth now why did you choose those three things and not healthcare education and the environment sustainable energy is about the environment um it's the biggest environmental issue that we face and so with respect to healthcare the real problem is not it's not curing any any one particular disease it's actually that we have a natural kind of age limit if you will which is around 80. uh that that's that's the the a human being is essentially genetically programmed to die around age 80. um and the cause of death will will vary um but it's it's just because you're having multiple organ failure your immune system isn't working well anymore and you're suffering from dementia you're just going to die around around 80 on average maybe 80 you know maybe that'll creep up to the sort of 85 sure level but that's that's really it in fact if we cured all cancer um the average lifespan would only increase by like two years if you do just i have heart disease or right over any number of yeah exactly you just start falling apart in your 70s and things just start falling apart right i mean all creatures have a natural lifespan that is built into their dna um so you know for instance fruit flies live live i think a few weeks right um and it really doesn't matter can you reprogram the dna well let's get in there and do that and reprogram human beings to live 250. we'll see that that's essentially uh what would have to happen is is uh in order to live longer and particularly live longer in in a sort of good way a healthy way healthy healthy way like you know not just decrepit living in an old family right i mean you could be on like life support you know where you can't move and you've got one functioning neuron that's that's not fun right um uh but uh but but so you'd have to reprogram the dna in order to um live longer in a healthy way um and so that's that's probably that that that that's an area where i think there's likely to be breakthroughs um but it's going to take a while um because of the sensitivity of experimenting with dna right um and um so i do think that that's also an area that that'll have a big effect but it'll have more effect on individual lives than on humanity collectively gotcha now you have been called uh real life tony stark you're inventing lots of cool new stuff what does that feel like well i guess elements of it are true um although i mean tony stark doesn't have five kids so i get you know most i spend more time at uh like disney world than or disneyland really in california uh that then i do you know having parties and stuff you know i like having parties i could probably make a flying suit but uh you know i think you could make a flying suit and you're making solar power sure what are you thinking think i mean there's no strange i mean what would i do with a flying suit i mean i could tell you a thousand things to do with the flying suit you fly around in it it would look awesome it would look awesome you could blow up things i i i'd probably be locked up hey listen i thought that we were gonna be flying around in jet packs now right can you be the guy can you make the jet packs please i mean people actually have made jack jet packs and rocket packs i've seen them on youtube but they crash all the time that's the problem see um it's like you can't have random people flying around with jet packs because they'll crash like crash on you but could you imagine the air in los angeles if there were jet packs right it would just be like it would be swarms of gnats bumping into each other and people going right i mean people cutting each other off it would be awful if if somebody crashes you know that you know you have to be constantly looking up in case somebody's with a jet pack lands on you that's true yeah okay have a dodgy situation yeah so what do you think about the singularity well so the singularity is uh is what uh singularity that that's that's the uh point where uh artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence and the reason it's called singularity and i think greco as well coined that term is because after that we don't know what's going to happen um you know we'll what will happen you know if you've got some sort of super smart computer that's increasing into intelligence in kind of a runaway fashion do you have a spiritual life oh well it sort of depends on what spiritual means um well what do you think spiritual means i mean it is one of those words that kind of needs to be defined for everyone some people it's like their religion and it's a very specific kind of thing for some people it's a very vague kind of yoga and crystals and meditation classes and stuff like that and uh for me it is the life of the human being that's beyond the physical and the material uh that also is a little bit more than just thought because we have thoughts right but those are physical because there's neurons that are bouncing around right so i mean i mean maybe there's some some dimension where thoughts exist or something because i don't you know what is a thought and what is it i mean is it i mean i'm not sure what what thoughts are um you know whether there's some some manifestation of thought in in a way that uh you know is different from the physical dimensions we're aware we're aware of i mean there's certainly things that we don't understand about the universe but uh you know i'm i'm less convinced that there's say um some some super consciousness watching over our every movement and kind of evaluating it against some criteria you know and deciding whether we're going to go to one place or another when we die that's unlikely right i i think that's very unlikely right too that's i i personally do believe in god but i don't define god in that way i would define god as closer to being like science right or the energy of the laws that propel science because science really quantifies so what is it quantifying yeah yeah exactly i mean and and it does beg the question if there is some super consciousness of consciousness where did the super consciousness come from um and uh so i think the most likely explanation is that complexity evolved from simplicity you know that the simple elements over time combined to become more complex and arrive to what we are it's also possible though that we're in a simulation that we're in a simulation like the matrix yeah well different from the matrix but a simulation of sorts yeah well this whole world could be a dream it could be a dream yeah yeah but i mean it could be a simulation i mean have you ever ever played like these foot like the most the advanced video games and how how realistic they were getting i know there it's it is like a whole nother it is like a whole nother life right with the goggles and everything and 3d and everything yeah all of that stuff it could be that uh you know that's that's that's what we know to be with maybe we're some some of the creatures avatar you're blowing my mind you deal with so much stuff i mean you do with space travel and energy and the source of consciousness and you're thinking about all of these giant life's big questions what blows your mind what gives you awe well i think that i mean the the nature of the universe uh gives me more and just the huge expanse of the universe and um here's how far away things are and how big they are and the fact that there are things like super black holes that are equal to a billion suns what about dark matter doesn't that freak you out too uh yeah and dark matter is also i mean i don't matter dog energy are are kind of interesting because mean i'm not sure what those actually are you know people don't know what those actually are and it's particularly dark energy in fact this is why you know that may be an argument for this being a simulation um because in a simulation you wouldn't you know you could just make things be however you want the the lowest done will have to be consistent but that could be a great argument for heaven and earth and it's another way of looking at it as that this physical plane is like a video game and we're down here thinking it's very real just like our avatars do in you know call of duty or whatever game we're we're playing and then we get unplugged in our 80s and um then we're onto some other plane or some other reality right where we go oh that was just a video game right that whole time and i thought it was real yeah what would you say to young people that want to change the world that have big ideas what advice could you give i would say you know go do it um just just go out there and and and do it um the i mean the biggest thing i think people uh fail to do is that they're they're too afraid to try things that they shouldn't be afraid of of failing and and they should just go go and do it did you fail at anything that you tried i've i've lost i mean i've not lost a war but i've lost battle certainly yeah i mean the first three um flights of of the falcon one rocket uh that crashed wow that must have been a big bummer there was a big bomb did you cry no no i'll make you cry with the new lightning round from seoul pancake do you own my book no i don't you suck okay what do you worship well i don't really worship anything but i do devote myself to the advancement of humanity using technology what can technology never replace i think human feeling are you a workaholic i suppose i am uh i work a lot what fuels your creativity pressure necessity what do you do to unplug and relax well i like doing like going to the movies i like going to parties um having dinner with friends um a good bunny man that's pretty fun did you go to burning man sure what do you do there just it's it's just like a crazy sort of mad max meets vegas meets us in wonderland do you put on a hippie wig no i usually have some kind of costume i went to softheater once do you believe there's life on other planets i think there's a good chance that this simple life on other planets um it's much more of a question as to whether there's complex life like consciousness with all the trillions of stars and all those trillions of planets you don't think that isn't that an arrogant statement to say we're probably the most evolved in all of the universe um well no i'm not saying that we probably are just i think that the chances of of consciousness are much much lower particularly in our galaxy um you know because we have to ask the question if there's consciousness where is it can science and religion coexist probably not do you pray i don't i didn't even pray when i when i almost died of malaria wow that's really not praying right so you put your money where your bug spray was yeah um what's your life's big question what's the big question you personally wrestle with well i mean i i guess i i i wrestled with the the question of of what is the question um you know like from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the answer is the universe what's the question one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs is here in the back of my van what's your big ideas what how do you want to be an entrepreneur what kind of passion or dream do you want to pursue to make the world a better place to take humanity to the next level can you upload it on a video or write it down in the comments below i'll tell you what i'll give you a bite you get me a tesla sounds like a good deal yes subscribe

https://youtu.be/fPsHN1KyRQ8

[Music] a man who needs no introduction but welcome thanks for being here number one on the vanity fair' new establishment West is that the highest honor you've ever had of course that's right the no bells are now you're doing an announcement tomorrow and the next day is a Nobel Prize so if you get all three that's a great trifecta let's talk about your announcement tomorrow yeah what is it you're going to announce I'm glad you asked well I think I can give maybe one clue which is that one of the things is already there and people don't realize it so we just need to turn it on yeah well cool and it'll be part of a new car I used to be a drummer so you're gonna be good at this yeah it's um will be will be a different are we different from the current one that would be some part of I announce will be different from things in the past obviously its announcement but I can't say it's it's we're not gonna talk about the model 3 or the Model X the model 3 would be the $35,000 electric vehicle you're going to talk about something that labeled D yeah D and then there's another thing which is it actually would have said the other thing except it would have been too obvious and that's the reason I didn't like the weather because I can't say what the letter is okay and what is the D stand for yeah I think the Internet is very good at guessing these things so there they understand directionally it's it's directionally correct but the magnitude is not well appreciated yet and the magnitude of the something yeah that's a really big it on this I can tell I kind of got myself in trouble by because I you know we had the Model S and the X and then just for fun we try to trademark the model E and and then then Ford sued us said they were going to see us so we have to change the model 3 so it's s3x you know totally different and so I kind of I guess when I say that that we're about to unveil the D and something else then it's I kind of dug my own grave on that front yeah we look forward to why in the world are you doing this i we went to impelling you to make an electric special car I think it's important that we accelerate the advent of a sustainable transport future so it it it's better if we move towards electric cars sooner rather than later and then we can get away from burning oil and obviously that needs to be paired with sustainable generation of power that's where Solar City comes in and but in order for us in order for Humanity have a good future the century we have to figure out a way to sustainably produce and consume energy and that's what Tesla and SolarCity are trying to be helpful in that regard so that's that's really the purpose but it's not as I think that there's a need for another car company plenty of you know good car companies very competitive industry but but there is need to show that electric cars can be better than gasoline cars otherwise people will continue by guessing cars when you say better I'm gonna push you back to where you didn't want to go which is what you're announcing they're better means that it would be faster and stronger than a gas car which we think electric car cannot be yeah it will be bigger and faster yeah can I have a way for that court to be out there yeah unveil the D it's bigger and faster yeah and now there's a lot of jokes that car Swisher started today that yeah I know we have to steal a conference call All Things D yeah zip it why did you give away or open up the intellectual property Oh was satins yeah to two weeks a robust response in order to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles that's the main reason I think people think that maybe there was some competitive reason or that that this would somehow be helpful to test of you know because more people would enter electric cars and somehow there would be you know rising tide lifts all boats but actually I think I think the open sourcing our patents does slightly impair our competitive position on balance but I'm hopeful that it generates enough good will to overcome that competitive impairment but medicham conclusion at least on a personal level that patents were kind of like buying a lottery ticket to a lawsuit you know and so why would you want to do that what drove you into the electric car business was a really sustainability for the planet or was it just the intellectual curiosity of it all actually Sophie if you go back to like when I first thing about electric cars in college and it was really more from the standpoint of the need to transition to it to some transport means that was sustainable in independent whether there was an environmental impact or not because if if we're burning oil you know to move and that's not a renewable resource then the independent of any environmental impact we must find some alternative or there'll be economic collapse so and civilization would prefer crumble because we have to or revert you know degree so that so that that was actually originally why I was very interested in it is just because it's it is I mean I think and from a physics standpoint it's really obviously the way to go is electric motors I mean kind of crazy to do something else or actually and and then the environmental thing grew over time it became it became evident that the environmental impact was quite significant because we're putting so much carbon into the atmosphere that were fundamentally changing the chemical makeup of Earth's atmosphere and then and the oceans too because of the co2 that gets absorbed into the into the water in creates carbonic acid so if we don't take corrective action we that that the probability of a catastrophe will increase over time eventually there's like certainty of of a catastrophic outcome and the longer takes us try to make that transition the greater the probability of something bad happening and sooner so that but I think what's the fundamental good that Tesla can achieve it would be to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles perhaps by you know if we're fortunate at a decade or something like that because it it'll happen anyway independent it could even tells was not not around so that's the say that that's a really fundamental good and since we're making cars I mean it seems like we should try to make really good cars and and you know maybe make the buying buying experience level pleasant there's a peter thiel line as you know about you know promised flying cars but we got 140 characters do you think that other innovators people not like yourself aren't really shooting as high as they should be when you're doing things from you know space shots to electric cars do you think that should be flying cars yeah okay yeah am I missing something gosh I think that would be fun don't you I'm not sure I mean I think I think there should be vertical takeoff and landing a supersonic air transport yeah that that's obviously should be the case we had that 30 years ago and then we don't meet him sonic sure yeah no it's kind of innovation for big things has actually slowed down it seems is that true I think whenever you have a large industry that is monopoly or duopoly the forcing function for innovation is weak because innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry and if the barriers like Tesla into the auto box yeah yeah when there are huge capital barriers to entry then it's very difficult for new entrants to enter that dentistry is like being in a forest of giant redwoods and in that in that situation the innovation is weak because if you sort of it sank it's fairly easy to understand this because if you would say the senior executive in that company or CEO let's say if you do something incremental you are very unlikely to be fired if you do something bold and it doesn't work out you're very likely to be fired so that's than they do incremental things you mentioned a moment ago the environmental sustainability thing that's really big that you worry about your other big thing that you worry about is sort of machines getting out of control explain that or the artificial intelligence singularity yeah I don't think most people understand just how quickly machine intelligence is advancing it's much faster than almost anyone realizes even within Silicon Valley and certainly outside Silicon Valley people really have no idea so why is that dangerous I mean if there's if there's a super intelligent particularly if it's engaged in recursive self-improvement if there's some digital super super intelligence and it's optimization or utility function is something that's detrimental to humanity then it will have a very bad effect you know it could be just something like getting rid of spam email or something and it's like concludes well the best way to get over spam is to get rid of humans you know but why would we lose source of all spam I know we've all watched how in 2001 but why would we lose control of our machines there are no data points showing that that that our connection to machine has ever been loosened actually I think the thing to do would be to plot the progress of digital intelligence versus time and and then to maybe curve fit or extrapolate that progress and see where that leads but you're talking about machines that are not just intelligent but have intentionality is that right they have the intention of their utility function which is really programmed in right yes okay but it can have an attention understand consequences is that propelling no pun intended your Mars mission ideas no I think it's quite it's more likely than not that if if there's some digital super intelligence apocalypse scenario it would probably follow people to Mars not necessarily because because of that utility function if it simply has utility function that is already convened to earth it would be totally fine doing that but I mean it's this is it's just it's a computer what what is let's get to the Mars mission why do you feel that is something we should be aiming at I think the reason for this two main reasons for Mars or becoming a multiplanetary I think what one is the defensive reason it's life insurance for life as a whole and this there's some value to having that you know it would in terms of a small percentage of our economic output like let's say half a percent or maybe even less of our economic output to insure that that the light of consciousness as we know it propagates into the future - for a much longer period of time and so there's a defensive reason and and this is the first time in four and a half billion years in the sense of Earth you know first formed that it's been possible for life to move to another planet to become multiplanetary and that window may be open for a long time or may be open for a short time I'm actually quite an optimistic person so I'm hopeful that we'll be open for a long time but maybe it'll be open for a short time in which case we should take action now and not delay you've been a fan of science fiction books have they actually influenced you sure I'll just say the other reason which I actually find personally more motivating with respect to Mars which is that it would just be the greatest adventure ever and very exciting and I think we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring you can't just be about solving some awful problem they have to be reasons to get up in the morning and I was talking about the books you've read in the science fiction I noticed you're a science fiction for that do you think maybe you've read too much science fiction right maybe have that's certainly certainly possible so that the yeah I mean we're we all right now is we've I think at on the SpaceX front we've made evolutionary but not revolutionary progress we're hoping to make revolutionary progress in the coming years but the key breakthrough that we're in for is what they're aiming for is to be able to have the rocket booster come back and land and be able to reap light it why is that important it is that's not the way we've been doing it well yeah it's been expendable rockets up to now really to accept that the space shuttle was partly reusable but but it was extremely difficult to refurbish for flight you need 10,000 people needed to work nine months to refurbish the space shuttle so what we really need is rapid and complete reusability like an aircraft or a car or really any mode of transport is that besides rockets is reusable a horse bicycle we can think of almost anything but imagine if that mode of transport was not reusable so very unfortunate in the case of the horse and but but I even like in cars like if you could use a car once and you have to buy a new car every time you took a journey odds are you would not buy many cars because they'll be very expensive so it reusability essentially it opens the door for reducing the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100 or more and if you do this how much of it will be government funded in a way aren't you under a lot of contracts with government yeah in the beginning there was no government I funded SpaceX entirely with the proceeds from PayPal and but we got off so first government contract about five or six years after starting the company from NASA and but I should say about NASA's maybe a quarter of our flights three quarters are commercial but the way we have been doing innovation in this country especially starting with World War two has always been a combination of government private enterprise universities and that is now dissipated the government is not doing as much basic research do you think that's going to be a problem for the United States well I think we'd ever come it is quite a lot and that I'm not exactly sure whether we're at the right number of basic research I mean I'm a fan of research side we I'd be in favor of spending more money on that Alec or allocating more resources to to basic research but I think the governs doing doing quite a bit I mean NASA is doing doing a lot of things because they've got the the Rovers on Mars I've got the Hubble things like the Hubble telescope the upcoming James Webb telescope there are planetary probes and earth science missions launching all the time so NASA's doing quite a lot actually what are the big things like electric cars space shots whatever do you dream of I think it's face and cars a lot obviously we've eliminated flying cars yeah well I'm not I mean I I'm I'm not sure about the flying cars I mean let's not say I don't think there should be flying cars I mean but if the sky was full of cars flying all over the place and it was you know it would affect how this how things look would affect the skyline and and I would be noisier and there would be a greater probability of something falling in your head yes right disappointment you know those are those are not good things on the other hand that you could be able to go from one place to another faster but I think actually if at least push if you eliminate the choke points in cities then there's really not that much traffic outside of the choke point so you look at sort of in suburban streets you don't see a lot of I mean you know the traffic doesn't doesn't choke things it's really on the highways and major arteries since because the the cities grew way bigger than the major are how would we fix that tunnels tunnels what about autonomously driving cars with that help that would help something yeah I'm going to open it up but I'll have one frivolous question while they bring the lights up everybody so far today has been touting how much they love Silicon Valley the HBO show and you said some bad things about it why don't you like it well first of all I should say that the I mean the article was not very accurate that was written it was just one article which was it was simply not an accurate cool so I the I I thought it was okay the but I think like Mike judge did an amazing job with office base like that's one of my favorite movies ever and he may be here so be nice great man to get a problem anyway so so maybe like office space just really nailed it I don't think Silicon Valley the show quite nails it it's not it's not quite it's not quite right so that's you know that's my objection to it it doesn't it doesn't quite get it right in my opinion Bay but I've heard that the later episodes are better I saw the first two sir yes UC Berkeley hi um I used to work in large-scale renewable energy mostly solar and I was wondering that given all their the release of the patents of the batteries and knowledge on small scale renewables like solar city if if is there something coming about like large renewable energy storage from there from the all the batteries patents in Tesla what the test is going to do a stationary storage of you know in a very large-scale way because it's it's very important to para battery packs with solar power and for wind it's even more important so with with the gigafactory that we're creating in nevada we're going to create many of probably tens of gigawatt hours per year of stationary storage on the battery friends so that yeah there's a lot coming for sure hi name is Tina emerging Phil in China so my questions is relevant to China market how would you in your perspectives how are you forecast about the electric vehicles the demand in China and how's the task strategies in the coming year uh yeah yeah sure I think things seem to go you know fairly well in China we've had a very enthusiastic response and yeah I think I think long term it seems likely that China would be the biggest market for Tesla so yeah I'm really really optimistic about things over there is it going to be bigger than the North America it seems likely that it you know it would likely be bigger than North America yeah in long term how about the government regulations and the local compilers there the government's been pretty good I mean there's there is certainly in terms of the incentive structure it is favored local production but overall it's had you know I think it's not been too much of an issue the government's been been great so far yeah thank you hi I'm manu I'm a sophomore at Stanford and all of your work has been bringing people from place a to be in the in the fastest and the most environmentally friendly manner there's also another kind of research happening in the valley where people are trying to avoid transportation at all we call it virtual reality right so I can be in my dorm and I can see you speaking with the same level of contact on my oculus rift as I am here right now taking the Cal train or the Tesla or even a SpaceX rocket in the future how do you think will virtual reality tie in the future of Transportation which you are working on thank you well maybe we're in a simulation right now yeah yeah seriously some of this feels like that yeah I think it is going to from what I've heard of oculus rift and and some other immersive technologies that it's quite transformative you really feel like you're there and and then when you come out of it it feels like reality is real so I think we'll see probably less physical movement in the future as a result of the virtual reality stuff yeah and when we come out of what we're here now into this virtual reality we'll think it's real I mean it's like work well I mean I mean there's some interesting things here on the virtual reality front I mean just on the whole notion of a simulation which is that if you just if you extrapolate into the future and say well how good let's say well video games be in a hundred or two hundred or thousand years from now if if there's continued improvement and you're going to full-body haptic suit with a sort of surround vision and you it becomes beyond a certain resolution indistinguishable from reality if and there were likely to be there like three millions maybe maybe billions of such simulations so then what are the odds that we're actually in base reality isn't it one in billions is it I mean give I can give the calamari I'd rather you give the counter-argument I it obviously this feels real but but it mean I mean it seems unlikely to be real my name is Danielle I'm an architect from Palo Alto I just completed a NetZero Passivhaus and I'm now a fellow at the Stanford Business School and I'm working with a group of students on a project to come up with the most innovative ways to solve big problems in cities we've identified Detroit as our prime target to questions what do you see as citywide innovation and and since women don't ask as we're taught I'm going to ask would you come down to Stanford and brainstorm on this with us mm-hmm this may sound trite but I think I honestly think tunnels should be given a lot more consideration so that I mean if you look at a city you have a look at I cannot we have all these upon buildings and office buildings and there are many levels like they're gonna feel like an average of in Manhattan I don't know what is an average of like 30 stories or something like that but then you've got a street which is one story this is an obvious issue like you have a thirty to one ratio of you know so we should have multi-layered highways yeah underground stacked up yeah you can have tunnels to the tunnels don't have to follow the buildings they can they can be they can go diagonally through the basement yeah yeah and you can have as many levels as you want so it it's really just the cost of building the tunnels and but really it's all tunnels a hole in the ground like how hard can it really be I mean just so it seems like if some mantra has put their effort into building tunnels you know what other effectively would be transformative to cities around the world also they consider coming giving a talk I mean I'm in Palo Alto every week so it shouldn't be open to it sure what other things besides you know tunnels hyper loops you've talked about other things that are great visions I could transform a daily what we call reality with Russian is reality at the moment yeah I mean it's really it with within cities it's sort of tunnels tunnels and tunnels and tubes and the I mean for long distance travel I really think that the vertical type of landing electric supersonic aircraft is the way to go and I think it's very doable so that they'll be the way to go for long distance trapped in like if you're going more than like 500 miles because then you have any - any you solve the any - any problem of a long distance for shorter distances because you have time to climb at a time to descent penalty below 500 miles aircraft are not as good so that's why I think sort of it needs some sort of evacuated tube is a better way to travel what is an evacuated tube well you know just something where you've reduced the air density the drag is dramatically reduced and it's like it's as though you've got got teleported to altitude right and you can go much faster and not have to have the climate descent issues hi I'm Lawrence I'm a sophomore at Stanford and I run a music syrup we all know that you have all those really crazy ideas in the best way possible but how do you come up with those ideas could you tell me more about your eating process and also once you have those great ideas how do you go about capitalizing those really ambitious ideas if you have very few limited financial resources what if the great thing about software or anything which just involves intellectual capital you a couple of you and you friends you and a few friends is that you can just do it so that's why they're doing some sort of internet thing or software thing is great as an initial company to create that's why it's up to and paypal they gave me the capital to attempt to do more capital intense activities I mean in as far as idea generation I think I tend to think of things from sort of physics standpoint like from first principle standpoint what would be the best way to accomplish something and then pursue that so and that's also a good way to determine if there's a if something's far from its optimum and like on rockets for example one could say oh you know that you could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that's what prior Rockets have cost or you can say well what is a rocket made of what are the material constituents what are those missed what are they weigh what's the cost per unit mass and that that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be so if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape then you can achieve a much better outcome that's the first principles approach and I think also just combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation so what do people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries that's I think also a great source of ideas but usually just struggle on a solution and you try try a bunch of things some of them don't work and some of them and most of that work and occasionally one does you mentioned this startup of PayPal which is a great innovation that happened in sort of how we pay for things that seems to me an area in which it hasn't been as much subsequent innovation other than Bitcoin as a be in other words quickly transferring money especially to people you don't know whatever is to me maybe I'm wrong far more difficult than it seemed like it should be are you somewhat disappointed with the way PayPal then proceeded or you disappointed with the lack of innovation in the digital currency in environment yeah if people has definitely I mean it hasn't moved much since from when when it was sort of bought by eBay the the long-term vision that I had for PayPal sort of in sort of finance was to - well it sounds but strange like do to convert the financial system from a series of heterogeneous insecure databases to one database or well not one database and maybe there'd be like a few more but the money is just a number in a database that's what it is and it's primarily an information mechanism for labor allocation and the current databases are not very efficient like they're you know there are these old legacy mainframes that don't talk to each other very well have poor security and only do their and do batch processing once a day are you glad PayPal is being spun off it's probably the right move and what would you do with it well I think I think I converted into more of a full-service financial institution so you just you want to do all the things that a consumer you want to have like all the financial services that somebody needs in one place seamlessly integrated together and easy to use and I really really care about the consumer I think a lot of banks don't seem to care that much about the customer so I think there's not ready to be like a really good bank effectively but but but much more than what people think of it you think Bitcoin will be disruptive in that way and we now it's a speculative currency will it be something that will be what normal consumers would use and will disrupt the banking industry my opinion bitcoin is that I think what coin is probably a good thing but it's it's essentially its main thing thing will be even this probably get quoted in there but the it it's it it's Ike is primarily going to be a means of doing illegal transactions but that's not necessarily entirely bad because on the inner side if something should be maybe shouldn't be illegal so but a combination of Silk Road and Bitcoin will save us well it will be useful for legal and illegal transactions otherwise it would have no value as a use of for for legal transaction because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge yeah I don't own any Bitcoin all right okay well I'll let you get the last word sir I promise it'll be fast Ilan Bob short guy from Thomson Reuters India just launched a mission to Mars 75 million dollars to get that thing was it as Astro teller said a miracle or is there something fundamental about the Indian space industry that allowed them to do a mission like that for so cheap and if so is there something that we can pick up and learn from that I think it's a very impressive mission given that it was executed by a government entity that's like really really impressive I mean impressive no matter who's doing it but from a cost standpoint impressive because it's being done by a government entity ultimately we have to be able to do missions to Mars for much less than that otherwise it will be impossible to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars because we'll have to transport millions of tons of cargo planes people and the cost of moving to Mars has to be affordable otherwise people won't be able to so it has to ultimately come down by couple resumed attitude from from that level circularly $7,000,000 a couple orders of magnitude I say blow well below million here Elon Musk great innovator thank you very much and good luck tomorrow what will will be looking to see what was right under our nose when you announce it tomorrow starts good thank you [Music]

https://youtu.be/dbOwc_unjkg

[Applause] welcome back everybody my guest tonight was the founder of paypal tesla and spacex i on the other hand enjoy pie please welcome elon musk all right mr musk good to see you again good to see you now um i can't begin to tell you the excitement i get over the things you do great all right to tell people who you're one of the founders of paypal you're uh you're a scientist your inventor you've you created the the initial concept for solarcity the largest provider of solar power in the united states as i said before spacex and tesla and paypal uh also designed something called the hyperloop which would transport riders from l.a to san francisco in 35 minutes at what point at what point do you tip over from visionary to super villain and where are you building your secret right lair i'm wondering about myself actually what i love about you is that you saw the future as a kid i imagine and you went yeah let's make that happen yeah because because the future you're giving us is the future that i thought i once saw i saw x-men on saturday night yeah and then i walked out to my tesla because i have a tesla yeah and it it just it it just greeted me the the door handles came out and i just felt like it was my friend right yeah i said i don't need the damn movie i've got a car yeah uh we kind of want the car to be your friend actually in fact with the new version of software that's coming out you're going to get to be able to to name your car like it's a pet or something yeah really yeah yeah what would you what would you name your car if you could well i actually i since i have the advanced software i actually i have named my car um yeah i i named it old faithful uh it's the second production version yeah that's nice too don't name it oh yeller right exactly okay let's talk about spacex for a second people know you already from tesla i want to show a little bit of footage here of of one of the test flights you've done for a reusable rocket [Applause] that is one of the most badass things i have ever seen that's that's that's what we were told rockets were going to be able to do when i was reading all those 50 science fiction books that's what they should do absolutely so why is that so important well the the main reason it's important is uh that we want to achieve full and rapid reusability with rockets so the way rockets work today is they're they're single use and you can imagine that if you had an aircraft or a car that was single use well not many people would use it because it would be too expensive so we need to make make the rockets rapidly and completely reusable such that you just need to reload propellant in order to fly again so this this seems to me is the kind of rocket we need to be able to go to mars because you can't go there and build another rocket you got to go land suck some hydrogen out of the water in the soil and you know pack it back in and off you go yes actually if you could conceivably do go to moss with an expandable system but you would only be able to send a like a few people maybe on on on one or two missions um and in order to actually establish a modest base that's where the reusability is is critical um otherwise it's simply too expensive people won't be able to afford to to move there okay so more immediately than going to mars we've got to get up to the international space station yes and the russkies have said right no more rides for you a matter of connish i believe the deputy prime minister russia suggested that america use a trampoline to get there okay no joke it actually did say that it's kind of crazy you're the only company that's actually sending payloads up to the international space station right now the only private company that's doing that what's the name of the company that's doing that well yeah so it's a spacex and then uh orbital sciences is our uh competitor for bringing uh well they also take cargo to the space station so two of you are doing it yes uh although we're the only uh uh company that's bring stuff back uh in terms of cargo back so if i were going to go up i'd want to go with you guys because if you want right exactly right right now that the russians have said they're not going to give us rides anymore how good is that for you can you step up and take over for the the man flights um i mean arguably you know with with enemies like that who needs friends but uh yeah i mean i suppose russia is being helpful um yeah probably being helpful did you think about sending them some flowers right they used us a ride sure how long before you're sending men up or women yeah uh so we we um uh we hope to be sending uh people up in about two to three years with the uh dragon version two um the version two about dragon spacecraft is is able to land uh propulsively and with precision so uh like that thing just did yeah yeah basically so similar to that um although the the it has uh eight side mounted thrusters and uses uh differential throttling for control instead of gimbaling the main engine you don't have to tell me right can you hold on a second i want to uh talk a little bit more here for just a second we got to take a commercial break sure we'll be right back with more from elon musk all right stick around welcome back everybody i'm here with spacex and tesla motors founder elon musk the two of us are talking as i said i've got a tesla and i love the car and it's miles and it's the best damn golf cart i've ever tried wow it really the acceleration is incredible it's incredibly comfortable they won't let me take it on the links at my club but other than that you recently um made all the patents for tesla available to everybody said we're not going to prosecute people if they use our patented technology for tesla yeah why are you giving away the store like that why are you being the edward snowden of you all right i'm not sure the the right analogy exactly but i mean i sort of viewed like uh if we're all on a ship together and and we uh but and there's some holes in the ship and we're sort of bailing water out and we we we have a a great design for a bucket um then uh you know even if we if we're bailing out way better than everybody else we should probably still share the bucket design because we're all going to sink um last question your future man where's my jet pack um you know you you can actually if you look on youtube there's a lot of interesting videos um i don't want to put a cat in a jet pack i want to get in the jet pack right but have you worked on jetpack of your own i i haven't no uh no i i i'm not i'm not sure about jet packs i mean there's some fundamental physics that make it very difficult to have a jet pack uh because it'd be very noisy and it's hard to land a rocket on its tail too true um eyes on the prize but you know um something i think would be great to have is um is that aircraft should be vertical take open landing you know and the uh oh like a hair ear or something kind of like a harrier except that you should really it's better to move the move of the fan than it is to to duct the the the air right now a harrier does it with ducts it just with thoughts um yeah and uh and duct tape won't imagine this yeah it's so but i think the harry is a great plane uh but i think that there's there's a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing um electric uh supersonic jet electric jet yeah to shoot sparks out the back i don't understand how do you have electric jet no you just you use an electric motor to drive a fan yeah oh okay okay yeah yeah yeah actually jetta aircraft are mostly fan driven uh yeah yeah the the the uh sorry sorry uh traditional jet yeah direct jet aircraft like when you see something that's called like a high high bypass uh jet engine like on a triple seven yeah you know it's got like that huge yeah fat of fatty it looks huge yes huge yeah um and and that's because most of the propulsion is really coming from the fan um so so you need a big fan yeah so it's really it's really uh so really it's a prop plane that they've dressed up to look like a jet kind of yes kind of that yes i've been i've i've been lied to well there are some there's some value to to having ducts um but um but it's actually more efficient to have an open fan uh if you just care about uh sort of efficiency per mile but you can go faster if you have a ducted situation uh yeah what's next what's what's what's the next thing what's what are we what are you gonna blow my mind with well um what what what do you wish there was um i i wish i wish um there weren't any cables i i wish that computers didn't have to be typed into i think that the mouse and the keyboard is terrible it's terrible it's a terrible interface that i could have a relationship with the machine and it would and would i'd have a discussion of my needs and it would do it right and i also think that cables on anything is terrible charging not communication but charging cables as well yeah that i would just walk into my house and things would charge right or just i would have a subscription service to a charging uh system and that anywhere i went in the united states there would be a charge that would follow me around right right okay okay get back to me yeah no we'll do it thank you elon thank you thank you so much elon musk spacex tesla motors and wireless charging we'll be right back you

https://youtu.be/SVk1hb0ZOrE

good morning Stanford I'll tell you seeing so many students up this early in the morning is really a great experience for the president of the University and I'm so delighted you're able to join us here and I can tell you're going to be in for a fascinating discussion this morning if you think about are you our University and what make what makes that bowl venereal spirit that pioneering spirit that Jane and Leland brought to us when they marched across the country to come to the West Coast and help found this University today we remain committed to pursuing opportunities that will change the world to using our knowledge in important ways to work on the grand challenges we face but that entrepreneurial spirit is about more than just launching the next startup it's also about training and educating people who will go out and make our world better and those Innovations come in all walks from the medical care we do and new ways of dealing with health problems to Energy Efficiency to robotics to Art to everything we do but every innovation begins with an idea and every idea began with somebody who imagined it and that's what today is about the Stanford technology Venture program's future Fest is an opportunity to examine and celebrate the impact of breakthroughs and pioneering Technologies on our world and I'm delighted you could all join us this morning this is organized by stvp in collaboration with Stanford Arts the future Fest will be the place where discussions about futuristic Technologies occur and today we'll hear from two for our thinking individuals Elon Musk and Steve jerverson Steve is a Stanford Alum and a partner at Draper Fisher germanson he was recently held in the New York Times as a space investor and Rocket maker his firm has invested both in SpaceX and a satellite company Planet labs Steve is a Stanford alumnus three times over and he also has the important characteristic that he was once my advisee despite that disadvantage he completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in two and a half years was the Henry Ford scholar went on to earn his Ms and despite my attempts to convince him to pursue a PhD went off and got his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an R.J Miller scholar he's recognized widely for being forward-thinking the San Francisco Chronicle and examiner named him as one of the 10 people expected to have the greatest impact on the bay area in the early part of the 21st Century now Elon Musk I think is a name known to everybody who thinks about the future he is a Serial entrepreneur inventor engineer and investor he was born in South Africa attended Queens University in Canada before moving to the U.S where he earned his undergraduate degrees in economics and physics from the University of Pennsylvania he arrived at Stanford to pursue his PhD in physics but left after two days I said what was wrong along was the food the water the weather no he left to launch his first startup zip2 a successful internet-based City God and then he went on to launch PayPal he founded his third company SpaceX in 2002 and six years later NASA awarded him a contract for cargo transport to the International Space Station he was an early investor in Tesla Mota and now leads the company as its CEO and product architect but along dreams big as he told CNN a few years ago we should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur if our forefathers had taken that approach the United States wouldn't exist Amen to that I think when you see the kind of work that elon's doing and I still remember my first trip down to Los Angeles to visit SpaceX and to see the first Tesla prototype before it came out I realized he was going to change the world this will be a wonderful exchange after Steve and elon's discussion Matt Harvey executive director of stvp will close the program but now please join me in giving a warm Stanford welcome to Elon Musk and Steve germanson thank you president Hennessey and uh this is a daunting venue I feel like we should sing or something dance perhaps wow okay so a future Fest now today is all about the future and uh I can't imagine a better person to speak with about that than Elon Musk he is forging the future as you all know across multiple Industries repeatedly in the most spectacular way in a way that others have failed before him and uh perhaps unprecedented in history so I'm a big fanboy future Fest originally I think bounced around and why this month because this is a special month for future Fest is that for those of you old enough and it looks like maybe five or six of you in the audience to have been around Back to the Future the movie came out they had this vision of the future in the second edition of that Series where they fast forwarded in a Time Warp to the Future and it was October 2015. and uh they had flying cars and hoverboards and Biometrics and video calls and what looked like Google Glass a lot of the times and a lot of other stuff that was completely cockamami but um some of those dreams were true some were not and as a framework for future Fest we can think to the past and our dreams that did or didn't come true I think that's what we'll start and then move to the Future we're sitting here today what do we think the future may Bode so turn Elon maybe as a starting point as you think back to your high school days 30 years ago when we were both there and dreaming of that future what about today is or isn't in accordance what you thought back then I mean where have your dreams of the future the Bold Visions met or not met reality today I think the the most remarkable thing that we we do have today is the the internet and access to all the world's information from anywhere so that that's having a super computer in your pocket is I think something people wouldn't have predicted um you know in Back to the Future yeah um so that's the that's the biggest thing um and uh and probably the the what they would be most prized at is that we haven't progressed more in space um so the people would have expected I think to have a space hotel in fact Authority Clark went to 2001 yeah yeah exactly um I thought 2010 was really crazy you know space advancement so we would like be going to Jupiter and that kind of thing so that that's probably like the most surprising thing like particularly if you go back even further if you say in 69 when um people first landed on the moon um if you'd ask people if you'd asked the public what uh what would the situation be in 2015 I think they would imagine that we're we would have a base on the moon a base on Mars and be you know all over the solar system by now that's probably Vegas what happened I mean is there any pattern you can sense for where our dreams and science fiction realities Drift from reality and where they are reality is there there's some reason you think like as you because we have dreams today of where the you know that we're going to have these Mars colonies in the near future and uh well unless something jumps to mind let me let me I have a bunch of questions by the way from the audience as well here I want to I want to move to something a little more current as we move forward in time 20 years ago when we first met you were starting your first internet company up to the one before PayPal uh ZIP two and I know that in your youth you envisioned a variety of industries that needed to change um when you were pursuing your first one did you imagine you would get to the next one and the next one or no I mean when I was in college I just thought well what are the things that are most likely to affect the future of humanity just in you know at a macro level and it just seemed like it would be like the internet and sustainable energy making like multi-planetary and then genetics and Ai and I thought the first three if you worked on those there were like almost certainly going to be good and then the the last two a little more dodgy in terms of the net benefit yeah into the double-edged sword and you're not sure which Edge is the worst interesting so it would it seems like begging the question are genetics and AI the ones that are ripe for students today they'd be thinking about as they look I mean they are yeah um my my cousin a younger cousin who's just finishing up uh sort of a physics and computer science degree actually at Berkeley um we know and um and he's uh he says everyone there is in the computer science department is working on AI so I I mean I think we're going to see some crazy breakthroughs in the next few years on that front yeah I want to come back to that later as we look more to your vision of the future as you as you think back though to your younger self or you know many of the people in the audience are themselves college students in either undergrad or grad programs and are thinking about the world they're entering and I'm curious this may be an odd question but one that I find fascinating as you think here today back to your younger self is there any advice you wish you could have given your younger self in with hindsight given what you know now well I mean I give like a lot of advice dating a whole bunch of things like that yeah I got you but just in terms of how to how to think about a life trajectory perhaps or um how to pursue your passions I mean I'm reasonably happy with how things turned out um so it's like touche not terrible um yeah that's a good point uh I think like if there's anything um I'll let you if something jumps to mind let me know but let me uh I mean apart from the obvious like just telling telling my younger self exactly how the future will unfolds which is right but that that you know wouldn't be that that's not exactly or has been encapsulated into none like warping wisdom yeah yeah exactly like wisdom um um I mean I mean there's there's a lot of things I mean it's sort of I mean certainly um yeah I mean uh you know listen listen more to critical feedback um you know uh I mean like a lot of things I learned in college actually were pretty helpful I mean I think the physics approach to thinking is very good like the first principles approach um and you applied that broadly yeah playing the first principles approach to thinking um is I think a good way to figure out a counter-intuitive situations um and um and I thought I hope that I was that was really a helpful thing to learn um that's good yeah I mean yeah oh sorry go ahead no no feel free to jump in because I don't know how I'd answer that question I mean yeah what would you do what would you tell your younger self okay all right you weren't as dorky as you think give me advice like that nothing really too actionable don't worry about it well just don't be so insecure about everything you're insecure about yeah we'll probably be advice to myself but uh let's move on I'm not used to thinking about me um so you know I I may be roughly over generalizing here but it seems to me that there's some often a trigger problem that generates in your mind a great solution for when you come up with new company so for example when trying to negotiate with the Russians for launch capacity the AHA that at least you just build a better rocket to solve this problem comes forth or when you uh deal with the commute on the Fortified or whatever in L.A it's like my God what is wrong with mass transit and perhaps hyperloop and then you know with with uh with a variety of ideas there seems to be some trigger something that's broken in the world that and you have an idea of how to fix it and I guess what I'm curious about is not how you've picked the areas of interest and the solutions but how have you decided what not to fix in other words there's many things that need fixing in the world and students here probably could think of a long list many of which you could probably imagine solutions to using the physics first principle approach but has there been any framework or idea you've used to filter out what you don't do what you don't pursue um yeah I mean well if sort of Follow that what I did initially was um you know well you go back to like college times I was working on um energy storage Technologies for electric vehicles and that's what I was going to pursue at Stafford actually was work on um like Advanced capacitors and batteries to improve uh the energy density for electric vehicles and then the internet was kind of happening it was clear like the internet was happening like back in like 94 95 and uh and I wasn't sure if what I worked on in the PHD would actually be useful so I was like I was really concerned that if timing or what was your intuition meaning I think like it could be academically useful but not practically useful um like I think it could result in a PhD and adding some Leaf to the tree of knowledge but then then discovering that well it's not really gonna gonna matter like that's you know is it is it going to be a good enough thing to actually be used in an electric vehicle I wasn't sure I mean so it was like I was uncertain as to whether success was one of the possible outcomes like I thought maybe it was but I wasn't sure and and then I thought well if I watched the internet get built while I'm doing this um that that that would be really frustrating there's a sense of that eminent timing that like that was the time for the internet and maybe the other stuff could wait or be on the back yeah of your mind was it always there is like one day I'll get back to that or was it um yeah I thought probably I'd get back to it and it did end up doing that um but yeah I thought sort of the the the internet was was happening it like really taking off all the most people weren't aware of it in 95 and uh and so I figured like electric vehicle technology energy storage technology will there'll be some sort of natural progression in that and I could come back to it later but the internet you know it was really that was the moment to really do something um well although in 95 it wasn't obvious that you could actually make any money on the internet this was like nobody until Netscape went public I think at the end of 95 at um nobody even thought there was like uh you could make a valuable company on the internet it wasn't as obvious as it seems now yeah like now it seems really obvious but back then it was not at all um so it was really from the perspective of it wasn't like oh I want to make a bunch of money it was actually from I was like oh I want to just be a part of fooling this thing that I thought was like like a nervous system it was like previously people had communicated effectively by osmosis and um you know you'd have like basically physically you know connect with somebody to really communicate um you're like a letter like you said letters like that on paper and with the internet anyone who had a connection anywhere in the world would have access to all the world's information just like sort of a nervous system in a soap like so Humanity was effectively becoming super organism um and and qualitatively different than uh what had been before and so I wanted to be part of that and uh um yeah so but but initially the goal was just to make enough money to pay the rent it wasn't um you know to do anything beyond that and then as many know that much of that Capital then got plowed back into your next businesses right right exactly so then they and then the internet is also helpful because it's anything to do with software is a low Capital endeavor so I didn't have any money um I just had a bunch of student debt and um but software you can just write like by yourself um and you don't need a lot of atoms like you don't need a lot of tooling and equipment and so it's not Capital intensive so the ability to start a company um if it's software related and it's the first company is much much easier right right and yeah it seems obvious now that of course the easier place to start and then as you get more of a personal reputation and have more personal Capital as some Marion I know SpaceX was almost was entirely funded by Elon for its first period partially from you know and in an era when others probably wouldn't have funded it in those parts of the days and actually I mean with the precursor to to SpaceX was not that the idea wasn't really to create a company it was um it was to try to figure out why we hadn't gone sent people to Mars so um so so we went from step two to PayPal and then um and then going from PayPal to sort of the next thing I was sort of thinking well um is there some way to reignite the dream of Apollo um and I thought well it was maybe a question of like we'd lost the will to explore but I actually think that that my original premise was wrong we had not lost the will to explore but people did not think there was a way and people don't think there's a way then they just they won't batch their head against the wall continuously they'll you know they'll sort of give up so um but but in the beginning I thought it was a question of will so so that would if we can send a small Greenhouse to the surface of Mars and you could and you have seeds and nutrient gel and you hydrate it upon landing and then you'd have this little greenhouse on the surface of Mars and people tend to respond to precedence and superlatives and this will be the first life on Mars as far as we knew whether it's the life's ever traveled we have this great shot of green plants on a red background and I thought well maybe that would get people excited about sending people to Mars so the headlines were clear in your mind once you had success on what that would lead to a catalyze action and actually the goal was was to get the public excited about that and get NASA's budget increased so that that was actually the original goal and um so I went to Russia to try to buy some icbms in 2001. um it's an interesting experience a lot of vodka yeah a lot of vodka yeah it's crazy um and uh I couldn't afford the regular Rockets like the Boeing and Lockheed Rockets are too expensive and uh still are yeah still very expensive sorry we've got me a jump in here for a sec because the anecdote you brought up of wanting to change government policy and Inspire the world to have a Mars program if you will whether it's popular Uprising or space programs at the government level I think it's a fascinating anecdote because in a sense what you were saying is I as an individual want to start a entity business or otherwise that will catalyze change even beyond the company level or the industry level and I see a parallel in other initiatives you've taken on in that if you look at the goal of Tesla under your leadership it is to assure the transition to all vehicles being electric not just the cars that currently are produced by Tesla and with Powerball and Solar City arguably the the description is one of ushering in a wholesale shift to renewable energy many of the solutions required wouldn't be provided by the companies you're starting and so as I as I deal in entrepreneurship as a venture capitalist every day we we see this incredible scope of ambition here that is breathtaking like change the world with Steve Jobs and others talk about it in a company maybe shifting an industry but we're talking about shifting like the entire Zeitgeist of the world in a sense and maybe eventually other worlds so my question is do you do you start always in your mind with that as a like I said like where's the starting point is it okay I see this Arc of a story like but the Mars example or renewable energy and then do you pull back to where's the best product to un get it unstuck like why isn't this happening and like if I solve that problem then it unlocks value like how does that happen in your mind um sure so um I mean I should say like the when when we started SpaceX and Tesla I mean I really thought the probability of success was very low I mean it wasn't like I think oh we'll definitely be successful I thought I thought we'd be like maybe 10 likely well uh yeah um and then okay we came very close to both companies not succeeding in 2008 you know we had the we'd had three failures of the SpaceX rocket um so we were zero for three um we had the crazy Financial recession like the Great Recession um the Tesla financing round have fallen apart because like pretty hard to raise money for the startup car company FGM and Chrysler going bankrupt um yeah that's that was a tricky one um and um you know unfortunately at the end of 2008 the fourth launch which was that was the last much we had money for uh worked for SpaceX and um and then we closed the Tesla financing around as you know uh Christmas Eve 2008 last hour of the last day that it was possible yeah and thanks to you for those who don't know it's the most extraordinary Act of entrepreneurial Zeal and commitment I've ever seen where Elon personally saved Tesla in those hours like when no one else would write a check he spoke for it all and that flipped the mentality from Fear to Greed and everyone joined the bandwagon and everything changed from you know dividing into the ground to success but you were willing to go like net negative personally of his entire net worth and it's it's a remarkable story and well thanks for supporting by the way that was but yeah much appreciated yeah we were happy to fall right behind in line but but it was all him um so I guess on this this idea of the big picture I'm curious in the way I heard you just now describe the greenhouse and the headlines is interesting do the marketing headlines flash to your mind as you introduce new products that are a step to a much grander vision I'm curious because it seems like it has two purposes like getting employees customers everyone really gung-ho about the vision but it also makes it larger than life in so many ways if you're trying to convince the public to do something you have to say okay how's this going to read um and what message are we going to try to convey what will people respond to what would I respond to if I was you know sort of an objective member of the public and um so that's that's really you know if you're trying to change people's minds or get people fired up about something then you got to think okay what's that message what what's going to get them really excited uh I think that's really good advice by the way for all the engineering students yeah well as I was the one as well I'm curious there's a as an adjunct sometimes to these Grand Visions like making Humanity a multi-planetary species or shifting us to renewable energy or making all vehicles electric that has a purpose-driven element to it there's a higher calling than the quarterly bottom line in fact it was a Tesla quarterly report I remember famously where the opening the literally opening line it was while profits are not a priority comma you know nevertheless exactly and it occurred I was struck by it at first and it did occur to me that it's not like a miss some sort of misdirected fiduciary question to me it seems like how could you lead an industry transition if your business model was worse than what's already there I mean like if you weren't more profitable in the long term and a better business why would anyone shift right so it almost seems like with the right purpose profits follow yeah well if if you make a if the you know if the output is more valuable than the inputs which is really that's that's profit like the upward's more valuable than the input um that that that says you're having useful company um so but now in a high growth scenario you have a lot more inputs for for future outputs so that you have negative cash flow and lack of profitability and which we currently have at Tesla um but in the in the long term of course that has to be that that has to be fixed they can't be negative cash flow in the long term and that there needs to be a net positive output which is sort of profits in in the long term but in the short term when there's high growth that that doesn't it isn't the most sensible thing and then there's also related things like open sourcing patents and acts that to me relate to the purpose let's let the whole Auto industry do this and I'm sorry I'm curious what do you see from your advantage point as the benefits of a purpose-driven company meaning when you have this thing that every employee and customer knows is the purpose of the company how do you see that flowing through to benefits for the company well I think I think having a purpose certainly is going to attract the the very best talent in the world because um if people can if there's something that's intrinsically enjoyable and the thrash rewards are good but then also it's something that's going to genuinely change the world and that's I think that's a pretty powerful motivator um and um but I don't think like everything needs to change the world you know I mean honestly like there's lots of like useful things that people do and I mean I think really it should be like a usefulness optimization like just say like is what I'm doing as useful as it could be and entertainment the goal of an organization or ethical in general yeah and um you know just if even if something isn't changing the world if it's make making people's lives better I think that's that's great and uh you know if even if something's like making only people's lives only slightly better but it's a large number of people I think kind of like the area under the curve sure is is quite good is that mathematical first principles appointing utility and number exactly yeah okay like I mean because it's sort of like one could say like so like is like some app really making people's eyes better but if it's affecting a lot of people even in a small way then yeah the sort of area is good so let's shift gears a little bit since it is future Fest um looking to the Future right we started 30 years in the past but the future keeps accelerating so let's maybe look 20 years in the future for an equivalent leap arguably five years in the future it might be equivalent to the past 30 but let's say 20. so the year 2035 what does the future look like as far as you can tell what would you uh yeah 20 35 yeah 20 years um it's always really tricky to predict the future um I mean some of it's pretty obvious like computing power is going to be just crazy um and the the really the big change is the cost of computing power not so much the sort of circuit density sort of the Moore's Law thing but if you if you look at say what is the actual um you know dollars per per instruction um and that that is right I mean that that cost is is dropping exponentially when you think about it like like if you're making a computer just you're rearranging silicon and copper you know so if on a little chip and once the capital cost of the development and the the chip plant is paid for uh the the ACT I mean the marginal cost of a chip is very very tiny um so I think we'll see massively parallel computers and computing power and storage being you know as really as much as you want um and it's interesting I too start with that like if I I don't know what else to predict but as a foundation for sure this seems like the safest starting you know premise but then what does that Ripple through to and feels like genetics in AI which you mentioned in autonomous driving space related topics I mean just ubiquitous Computing everywhere I think like AI is going to be incredibly sophisticated in 20 years like it seems to be accelerating and the tricky thing about predicting things when there's an exponential is that an exponential looks like it looks linear close up um and and but it's actually it's not linear so and AI appears to be accelerating um from what I can see um for that you look at autonomous driving and point AIS like the cre like functionality as your guidepost um well I had sort of debate about someone like is AI accelerating or not and the like you're saying well what's the y-axis you know if it's accelerating um your t on the x-axis but what's what the y-axis is it well I thought about that I think you could have a recursive y-axis so that if if at any point in time your predictions for AI are coming sooner or later that that actually would help define whether it's accelerating or not whatever that access was so you mentioned immersive access like so if in any given year if you find your predictions are going further out or coming further or coming closer in that that actually you know is one way to think of acceleration because like because otherwise what's the what's the qualitative quantitative measure of AI um everything technology is always 20 years in the future yeah if it's always 20 is the future it's like more logarithmic um so today I seem like it's one of the most fastly accelerating things that you're aware of yes um and I actually say that with with autonomous driving where um you know three years ago I thought it was 10 years away and like two years ago I thought it was five years away now I think it's three years away or less than three years away wow So when you say away like like release to Market available for Consumer adoption because as opposed to prototyping no I mean like like the technology works there's a sort of second question as to when Regulators would approve it yeah yeah yeah yeah um but but like luck with that the technology Works in a so technology works as a general solution so like that time was driving like race crosses anywhere so it could be sooner for Point things like Highway only or I mean Highway only we're already in public beta with a Tesla so um we'll be hopefully in the next several weeks releasing to to all of the cars that have the autopilot Hardware which is all cars built in like roughly the last 12 months wow wow and so it this seems like one of those things that once you've experienced it the inevitability of it becomes more apparent kind of like first time I sat in an electric vehicle it's just so clear and same with autonomous vehicles um do you think that will help persuade public opinion and like like the regulatory question is an interesting one because this technology continues to accelerate human nature doesn't and acceptance of change I'm just not sure if there's like as we look out in the future should we assume that no matter how fast something like Moore's Law accelerates there's always the counterbalancing force of human nature and habit um yeah I mean yeah I think yeah there's always going to be the sort of is always going to be human nature and it's so difficult to predict I think what what that will how that will affect things um but um I mean I'm not sure if I fully answer your question so in in terms of what what I think 20 yeah please um so for sure ubiquitous Computing AI that's beyond anything uh like the public appreciates today um I think we'll have um most of the new vehicles being produced being Electric and we'll be probably have a super majority of energy being produced being sustainable so I think I think we're on head of solar primarily in your mind primarily solo yeah and um so I think those I think that those are sort of some good things I think will be hopefully on a good path with sustainable energy um uh sooner is always better but I think by 2035 I think will be substantially like most of Transport most of new energy being produced will be sustainable Broadband everywhere Broadband everywhere yep um Mars colony and hopefully hopefully a small base on mars or City on Mars in 20 years yeah well okay fine Town Village Hamlet I mean that's exciting I mean that could get people fired up about the future yeah I do I agree exactly I think that uh the idea of being modified species and getting out there and exploring the stars is one of those really inspiring exciting things I mean just as Apollo was incredibly inspiring um to everyone around the world and even those I mean only a very tiny number of people went there but I mean vicariously we all went there that's true and and I think that's true of if we have a Mars base as well and it's very important that we have things that are exciting and inspiring in the future because otherwise wake it up in the morning you know if it's just about one sort of sad problem after another it's like life's not worth living are there are there any other things that excite you a lot about the future beyond the multi-planetary species perhaps AI uh although it may scare you as well as excites you um the autonomous vehicles are there any other planks that you think looking forward 20 years like this is what I really get excited about well um I mean so for sure for sure Mars and sustainable transporting like those items like are really then it's sustainable energy those are I think really cool things um and uh I mean in terms of getting excited about I mean it's like uh I I think we'll probably start seeing like more like truly cyborg activity like a human brain like like brain computer interfaces okay um like there's alongside the AIS that are purely yeah yeah I think so it's the only way we can relate I think you know and have a conversation yeah I mean there are amazing things happen like happening these days like this they've been able to figure out how to do an artificial hippocampus in in rats and monkeys and um and now they're looking at doing that to solve severe epilepsy but half of severe epilepsy cases originate in the hap um so we have a campus and uh and by having sort of artificially augmented hippocampus they can actually solve the severe epilepsy cases so it's like like wow and you can you can read and write information back to the chip from your brain at the individual neuron level like today pretty exciting yeah the whole field of biology and things inspired by biology and the information systems biology fascinate me personally as a computer science oriented person um before I go to the student questions um which I'm about to do there was one last story I wanted to share that we experienced together and ask your thoughts about it we were in Hawthorne Texas when the grasshopper vehicle occur happened I mean yeah spectacular explosion right in front of us and right exactly I wrote the SpaceX board out to take a look at one of the protocol takeover Landing tests and of course that's the one that blows off I mean we're all in the tent you know over the glasses wow I mean you feel the repercussions and then walking through like those right it's a wrap it on schedule disassembly that's right right yes rapid unscheduled assemble anyone rocketry like a hobbyist or professionally knows what that one is every component part is just spoon strewn across and as we walked one of the other board members asked and maybe in a cheering up kind of method with some quoting Bill Gates or somebody that said you know if you haven't failed then you're not learning or something that's a paraphrase of the quote and I remember your reply and I have it written as a quote because I want to put it on a placard given the options I prefer to learn from success which I think is a great comeback and so I guess I was curious in general what do you think of the Silicon Valley Mantra fail fast fail often or as Esther Dyson says always make new mistakes as if failure is The Crucible of learning I'm curious if you had any further thoughts on that and that maybe off the cuff comment you made out there well I mean there are many that sort of I mean I think it's sort of there's like some entropic basis for this like there are many more ways to fail than to succeed so you I mean you have to explore I mean particularly like for a rocket there's like a thousand ways to think and fail and like one way it can work so uh you could you could have a lot of Rocket failures to explore all the ways in which it could fail um so but I do think that one great thing about Silicon Valley is that failure is not a not a big stigma so it's like if you if you try hard and it doesn't work out uh that's okay like you can learn from that and you know do another company and it's not a big deal and I think that's that's really one of the great things about Silicon Valley interesting do you also I'm curious either on the well it seems to me that on the system design side you can accommodate a likely failure of sub-components and and so much of the Elegance of let's say a falcon 9 or a falcon 9 heavy as an ultimate incarnation of this vision of how the rocket should be built to say hey parts will fail thing but here's how the system can succeed and I'm curious if there's any other thoughts along that how to how to accommodate anticipated failure and then also maybe enter like in managerially is there ways that you motivate the team either in advance of failure to coach them on hey this is going to happen or in the aftermath of failure to get them fired up to solve it and move forward when it might be dark times and like for example when you the Notions like Failure to Launch uh uh you know exploding on the pad you know there's all these it's a very visual it's public spectacle when you have a setback in the rocket industry and I'm curious how you manage around failure I I mean I think it's it's like quite quite painful and difficult honestly um and it feels terrible um but uh yeah I mean the the company is sort of looking to you know me to you know rally them and so I do um but I honestly feel super bad like punch in the gut yeah yeah I remember it's almost like a time like the stages of grief I remember in Texas it's kind of like sort of denial and it sort of hits us at dinner oh my God what just happened yeah I mean it's just I mean it's particularly with rockets it's it's just a really like a Rockers are Rockets space is hard and Rockets tend to fail unfortunately and even when you've got like a lot of really smart people working super hard to minimize the probability of failure it's still it's still there and it's um and it's you know it's quite significant and um you know people have asked me like well why why are Rockets you know especially hard um and and the you know part of it is like everything has to work the first time like there's there's no you can't do a recall you can't patch it it's got It's like nine minutes to orbit or it's over um and uh and then the you you never you can't you can never test the rocket completely in the environment that it's actually going to experience because you you can't fully recreate something that's moving super fast in a vacuum on the surface of Earth like you can only really recreate that on in space so the limited the simulation tools all right is that a limit of the simulation tools today or is that yeah absolutely the if if there's any error between the simulation and reality and there's always some amount of error then then that that can result in a failure so it's a really really tricky one it's like um in the software analogy it would be like if you had to write a whole bunch of software modules and you can never run them together and you can run them on the target computer like like when you're testing them you don't have to test them individually and not in the actual computer that they're going to run on gotcha then you put them put all the modules together run it for the first time in a completely different or very different computer and it has to run with no bugs that is difficult the software analogies to Rocket design are deep on the modular reuse I mean there's many of these like there's those who aren't familiar it's not like this is an aerospace engineer by traditional training coming but but is in fact radically changing the industry I think applying a CS perspective to Industry after industry I'm like how would how would you know computer scientists or a physicist approach the problem which oftentimes the solution very unlike the industry incumbents there's a certain Elegance to it at least from the outside after I Observer like myself um let me switch if I may to some student questions which will be completely in a different direction um first one comes from Nick zoo and an architectural design co-term so this would be switching more to the other side of our brain for a moment what do you look for in design and related if you'd like what do you look for in art design might be more immediately relevant but that's where he's coming from sure um I mean I I think there's um I mean you you want to make something beautiful I mean you want to trigger whatever fundamental aesthetic algorithms or like like in your brain there's you have I think some intrinsic uh elements that that represent beauty um and and that that trigger the emotion of appreciation of Beauty in in your in your mind um and I think that these are these are actually relatively consistent among people I mean not completely um some people like not Everyone likes the same thing but there are there's a lot of commonality um and but but I think it is important to to combine aesthetic design with functionality like the thing that's like if you say like what was really hard about say the model S or the model X um was to combine Aesthetics and utility so to balance the two you can make a car look very good by giving it sort of certain proportions like making it sort of low and slim and and um but if you uh if you do that the utility is significantly affected so the big challenge with the say the model S was trying to figure out how do we get five adults plus two kids because I want to have through a seven seater it seems like the dragon and every Tesla has room for seven seven five children I can see yeah that might be an important design parameter I don't really don't think we should take the whole family on the spacecraft but but uh but that like the big challenge with the like with yes was having a car that had a high utility and looked good um and the same with the X um so like it's like with the to make a sports car look good is relatively easy but to make a sedan look good or an SUV look good is quite difficult um and um and I think another principle is you want to have it feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside um and that's also a really hard thing to do and then really pay attention to the little details the the nuances of of design and shape and form function and um that you know just the way it looks in different lights and when something's off the little thing how do you experience that never drives me bananas yeah um I mean it's and it the the problem is like if you you can train yourself to to pay attention to the tiny details I think almost anyone can um although it it this is a very much double-edged sword because then you see all the little details and then little things drive you crazy so but like most people don't they don't see they don't consciously see the small details but they they do subconsciously see them like you you sort of your mind takes inner Gestalt of the overall you know the an overall impression and and you you know if something is appealing or not even though you may not be able to point out exactly why um and it's it's a summation of these many small details so most of us experience that as a oh I think that's ugly or I think that's beautiful or like wow that's elegant but yeah you can't break it down you mentioned something in passing like you can train yourself in this though yeah you can train yourself I think you can make yourself pay attention to to why um you're essentially to bring the subconscious awareness into conscious awareness I wish I could do that how do you do that just just pay really close attention almost like a meditation on the object that I've been trying to find the details like why do I not like this is that what yeah just look look closely and carefully um and you know for any given object it's that it's geometry it's uh um I heard someone was for Steve Jobs and that thought occurred to me as well I worked briefly with him and I I could only experience it as a visceral agitation with imperfection and like that's just wrong like that has to be fixed I I have to turn it off otherwise it can go through life it's just yeah it's yeah the world around you or even in yeah yeah if you because there's always something wrong somewhere all the time and so um it I really have to turn it off otherwise you know you just get the like the list of the mental list of things that are wrong just drives you crazy I just wish this way you could just like record it for everyone else to go fix like it's like just running tally right oh my god um so uh let me go to uh one other question I found that one interesting I I had no idea where that was going to go so I really appreciate that question Nick thank you um let's see which one of these doing there's some combination of questions let me mention both and you can pick which one you like more because they both relate to colonizing Mars one comes from Henning rodol a PhD Canada in civil environmental engineering which just asks Elon given your plan to being a bring a million colonists to Mars what are the pressing future technologies that need to be developed in order to support robust and thriving surface Colony so it's technology for I guess survival and then maybe related from the Stanford space initiative students how do you envision humans governing a separate Planet I'm not sure I had to think about that yet I thought a little bit about those things I mean the obviously like the first challenge is just getting there at all and like that's you know so SpaceX is working super hard on pretty much just how to get large numbers of people on cargo to Mars um and I think you know we've got something that I think works at a sort of fundamental physics and economics level so it's like a question of figuring out the detailed design um what we're working on we're only spending like half an hour a week on it because of like pressing near 10 priorities but I'm kind of excited about how it's coming together um so it's getting just getting that transport thing solved I think we'll then open up a tremendous number of opportunities for people on Mars you know just like you know having the Union Pacific Railroad to California and the you know and look at what what you know resulted after the system of other companies figure it out it's like what are you going to do there then you get you then the opportunities for entrepreneurs are tremendous um that ranges everything from you know everything you can imagine like starting the first you know like the first Italian restaurant or something on Mars you know it's like somebody's got to do it that'll be kind of cool um you know like a iron an iron Refinery you know like resources you know the like the the old the entire face of Industry um and um and then there'd probably be things like that are just unique to Mars um but but we gotta we gotta get that you know effectively that Union Pacific Railroad there in order to get get the entrepreneurs that that and and and then create a fertile environment for them to uh create uh companies um so that that's that's yeah so so once you're there it's it's going to be I think a lot of exciting things that can be done um and and in the beginning you know people would live in kind of glass domes uh but but over time we were terrible Mars and make it like Earth and uh so so I think it'd just be a lot of super exciting things that are hard to predict just like when they're building you Pacific they it would nobody would have predicted Silicon Valley and Hollywood right you know that that's would have been like an urbanization in general yeah well that California would be like the most popular state in the country like they were like that sounds crazy before them gold is discovered right yeah um so and so the yeah I think like it's really uncommon on SpaceX or you know maybe other organizations to figure out how to get there well otherwise nothing else matters right and then once you get there there's a lot of sort of yeah a lot that can be done um from a governance standpoint um I mean obviously ultimately the governance of Mars will be up to the Martians but the people that we have a name from become a martian when you go there um but but I I think if you said like how would you do democracy 2.0 you know or like some a new version I think would probably have more of a direct democracy than a representative democracy um and you know when the when the United States was formed it was really it was impossible to have a direct democracy like like even sending a letter took weeks so there was no way that people could like vote directly on issues you had to have Representatives interesting so I think um I think probably there would be more direct democracy and is this thing about the latency of communication agency you've seen I just like communication errors and communication latency when you have letters that that take weeks to get anywhere would have made governance almost impossible um I think if if it hadn't been a representative democracy he had a lot of people who couldn't even read or all right you know so that's fascinating I was just wondering if you were to start over with a clean sheet of paper on governance is do you think a framework that could be envisioned that encompasses other sentient beings to come meaning the AIS and others who might clamor for their rights alongside right uh yeah it's difficult to predict but I can say like I think probably we would aim for a more direct democracy um and then uh and us talking to Lara page about this and he had a like a good suggestion like we should limit the number of words in the law because like we have these like thousand page laws that could pass and like nobody's read them Twitter equivalent of parsimony yeah like I don't know a thousand word letter count or something like that like if you can if you can't write the law in a thousand words then probably it shouldn't be there um and you know just we shouldn't have you know a single law passed that's like the size of Lord of the Rings that's right um and like literally not a single person in Congress has read the whole thing yeah like the tax cut it's unscrutable yes exactly so that so does that and then I think um laws also have an infinite lifespan unless they're given some sort of you know Sunset period so probably it'd be good to default laws to to have a sunset period like and if it's not it's not good enough to be renewed then it then it goes away um and and maybe some hysteresis um in that in making it easier to remove a law than to put one in place um you can just imagine because like over time like the body of law just gets bigger and bigger and bigger it's like you like how do you avoid that um and and you have inertia associated with laws um and so maybe you know it would take 60 to create a law but only 40 to remove a law um how interesting the rules of a constitutional democracy have such a profound impact and uh to have a a new playground would be fantastic um there's something embedded in what you said a moment ago that I want to highlight on a transition to perhaps a closing question I heard in passing you know I think about some of these things about a half hour a week if I heard you right and um this is I think a profound thing to do to dwell on is that you know he's changing the world in so many areas and not many entrepreneurs I see get and myself and included enamored with all of the possibilities of a future Mars base of the terraforming of the every aspect of it that might need to come into being and and I find myself often distracted by those future questions that are a little less relevant today what you just heard was we gotta solve the railway first like let me put 90 95 of my effort into that and not get distracted by all the other interesting questions that need to come later and I remember a few years ago maybe three or four years ago trying to get you to brainstorm with Craig Venter about you know doing a sample return from Mars and sending a genetic sequencer there to help understand life there that might exist et cetera and I remember profoundly the the response was that I did a really interesting topic but I got to get these Rockets to work first before that's going to be relevant to me and let me hunker down on what's important here and that ability to prioritize it up on the Stepping Stones to a huge Vision it's this it's this interesting dichotomy like not just pure Visionary scattered across many things alone it's a clear sense of where we're heading chaining back to the present and making sure we're taking the right steps in a fumbled future if you will I think I wish we could all do that no in the way we try to implement change um so let me move if I made a one last question which could be broad or not which is there's a lot of people here from all kinds of parts of the world and I think everyone who hears your story uh you know an immigrant from South Africa through Canada to the US taking on four or five different Industries with greater Plum and success is inspiring but it's not just that you've had business success or technology success it's that you really are changing the world for the better in these areas um so I guess maybe for as a closing question again looking from the present to the Future what do you see as the sort of the biggest pressing problems that need to be addressed this may in fact require you to pull that filter off for a moment on the things of the world that are broken and if if everyone here in the audience could be a change agent themselves in their area of fashion what would you hope to catalyze today if you can say guys go solve this big hairy problem and figure out why it's broken you know I say I don't think everyone needs to go you know try to solve like some big big world changing problem I mean I think that like if I I really think like we should just think like are we doing something that's useful um to the world like if you're doing something useful that's great like imagine it's like animals I really think some things are more useful sure um sure but but uh like maybe one of your personal things like I just think that like you're sort of a usefulness optimization is is like that's like a really good thing um you know if you've done something that's useful to your fellow human beings that's you've done a really good thing um and uh the ocean feel I'm proud of doing that um you know it doesn't doesn't always have to be something that's going to change the world I mean sometimes the world to just keep going in a particular direction um yeah why people might be going the right direction and and and I mean in a lot of ways the the world is we're we are in in great shape in that if you look at say violent crimes um you know um or per capita in the world it's I don't know like all-time low um uh were actually quite prosperous and you know compared to in his history um and um you know I think there's a lot of things to feel good about in terms of how the world is today um access to information is incredible I mean uh anyone with like a 100 device could has access to basically all the world's information which is an incredible thing um and um yeah so I honestly I just think like the best thing for people to try to do is say like hey what is something I can do that would really be be useful to the world and just do that you know that's great well fantastic thank you so much for being with us today on future fests and unfortunate future so just very quickly uh on behalf of all the faculty and staff affiliated with stvp we'd like to thank president Hennessey the School of Engineering and our home Department of management science and engineering Matthew 2's Stanford arts and the amazing staff here at Bing that was so helpful to us this morning uh dfj obviously for your incredible sponsorship of future Fest and also for your continued long-term support of stvp and our hope to create entrepreneurship education opportunities for Stanford students and of course we offer our most sincere thanks please help me in thanking again Elon Musk and Steve germanson

https://youtu.be/ZmEg95wPiVU

so it is my great honor to introduce a man who needs no introduction I'm not sure where he's at but I'm sure he's gonna come in here somewhere where is he okay there you go a gentleman who we can call Ilan and everybody at least in this country I know exactly who you're talking about but mr. Elon Musk he's the CEO lead designer of SpaceX everyone I think knows this SpaceX is an amazing commercial company it's the first company to launch commercial rocket into low-earth orbit with their Falcon one launch then in 2008 they were one of the winners of a contract to bring services to the international space station the first commercial company to berth with the international space station bringing supplies they're also the first commercial company to return a sizable return vehicle with all the components still intact which is very important to us back to to the surface of the earth and so it's an amazing companies done a great job and continues to push the boundaries that you'll you'll hear from Elon but his interest really is not so much in low-earth orbit as it is going beyond low-earth orbit and and making sure humanity will continue to live by exploring beyond beyond Earth Elon has a varied history of things that he's been involved in this was this is one of the things that makes it so exciting to have this conversation with him today he's not one-dimensional space guy he's involved in Tesla Motors which he is the co-founder and CEO and also a major player in the design efforts and what they choose to go build and how of course he was a co-founder of PayPal and zip2 he's deeply involved in a number of other industries as well and so it's my great honor to welcome Elon Musk to the stage thanks for coming appreciate it okay well these are great chairs you guys look at those chairs you're in let's see so Ilan you've you and I were gonna have a little chat this morning we said it was gonna be a fireside chat so - the fireside I guess we're ready again I've as you heard I've encouraged folks to ask a few questions along the way but I have a few a few questions I thought to get us started so the first one which is probably on everybody's mind is perhaps you one discuss a little bit about the the recent loss of the Dragon and in the Falcon 9 here on SpaceX 7 sure well I think it's it's obviously it's a huge load to to SpaceX and and orbit do we take these missions incredibly seriously the investor one that can engage in the investigation of SpaceX is very very focused on that and it in this case the data does seem to be quite difficult to interpret like whatever happened is is clearly not not a sort of simple straightforward thing so we want to spend as much time as possible just reviewing the data obviously going over it with with NASA and with the FAA and with the number of other customers and just sort of seeing what feedback everyone has based on their prior experience to see if we can get to what the most likely root cause is look at look at both what we think most likely happened and then anything that's a close call and try to address all of those things and maximize the probability of success for future missions any hints on where you think the problem lies you well I know there's this media in the audience so there yes you have to be there right I never really learned that but that is Alessa working on so so it's yeah I mean I you know the I think I think I think we'll be able to say something more definitive towards the end of the week at this point really the only thing that's really clear is that there was some kind of a pressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank but the the exact cause and the sequence of events there's there's still no clear theory that fits with all the data so we have to determine if some of the data is a measurement error of some kind or whether there is actually a theory that matches that the sort of what would appear to be conflicting data points very good I'll just make a comment the tweets you put out regularly particularly when events like this happen are really useful to everybody we really do appreciate it you'd be amazed at how many folks quote what you said and and and how how glad they are that you just step right out and at least give some sign about what's going on and that you know we'll get through it things are going well so we appreciate that absolutely and for sure as soon as we think we've got a clear line on on what what happened and we've sort of cross-checked it with as many experts as we can and I certainly appreciate the feedback from from NASA on this front remember very much appreciated the will certainly put a put out that's where I'm only reticence about saying something quite yet is I don't want to say something that subsequently turns out to be a Mis misunderstanding of the situation oh yeah absolutely understand so one of the questions that I asked myself regularly is at what point does all this government help hurt so this have been occurred and we have you have NASA folks there from from about three different programs that intend to use your services ISS being one of them you have the FAA that's that's involved the range folks are there without feeling like you're giving your customers a hard time or how is that interaction and what what should we consider doing differently so that we in those areas where we can help we are helpful and in those areas where we're really keeping you from getting your job done we can modify ourselves yeah actually I think the interaction with NASA has been great thus far the the big the biggest challenge is there there are a lot of enquiries coming in simultaneously so it's hard to sort of keep you know respond to respond to everyone right away but but actually it seems to have gone fairly well it the biggest thing that's needed in the me sort of short term is you already just sort of gather all the data create a very precise timeline so you know by by the millisecond we know what each sensor was reading and we can correlate that with ground video and actually like one of the biggest challenges is mashing but these things to the exact time you know because when you're talking about you know a matter of milliseconds you know being able to say what is the ground track video compared to the data as received by the you know by the ground station from the rocket and then taking into account for exactly for the the actual time taken to generate a packet of information when was that this answer red when was it encoded into a packet and when was that packet sent to the ground when you're drilling in in milliseconds that all that stuff actually makes quite a big difference yeah so that that's the biggest sort of effort we've been engaged in those far is just putting together a super detailed timeline and then just making sure that they have a sequence of events down as precise as possible that's what we're working on and but but actually certainly with with the interaction we've had with with Nass and with us it's actually been quite good thus far and we've explained that this is what we're doing and and then we very much welcome any feedback or input or a few of the data that would lead us to a better understanding of the circumstances I thought we had a very productive discussion back when we had the engine one anomaly and so I found it to be very useful but that's a perspective from from a NASA perspective so it's always interesting to know your perspective of that yes be quite quite good actually right now so you're building the last couple launches you've had landing legs and you've been working on landing the first stage back eventually to shore and you talked a little bit about that and what your vision is for that and for a SpaceX in general as you go forward sure well the the overarching goal of SpaceX is to try to advance the state of space transport advanced space transport technology to the point where well it get as far along the path as we can to to where space travel is a hopefully common place at some point in the future and and where we can send large numbers of people and cargo to other planets and you know they it's like that's the sort of thing that that needs to happen for Humanity have a great future in space so we want to keep pushing that I think like key to to that future is reusability so that's why we've worked quite hard and reusability unfortunately we haven't succeeded yet and in fact the last launch ironically was we we actually had the best chance of landing the pickle on the drop on the just sort of drone ship that's keeping station in the Atlantic so we're actually quite sort of geared up for for hopefully this would be a really great launch and unfortunately in anything the the opposite on my birthday of all things the real downer you'll remember it though yeah definitely but low point but but but I do think in the in the future launches that that we've got a decent chance of landing one on the ship and then bringing the boo stage back to land and then the next challenge of course is trying to figure out how to efficiently effectively reuse it and it is designed for easy reuse in theory but we got to see what the stage looks looks like when it comes back in one piece mm-hmm we have been able to over the last few years to a number of vertical takeoff and landing tests of hardware that's essentially in the flight configuration so we know we can we can handle that the terminal phase if you know if things go right we can take off land no problem so it's just a question of completing all of the pieces and hopefully later this year won't be able to do that but at that that's key so but of course that doesn't address upper stage reuse but it addresses boo stage reuse which is sort of 70% to 80% of the cost and and but I think would be a great step towards lowering the cost of space transport so you know if you look at your history I guess zip to PayPal these are largely software type efforts now you've got Tesla electric cars you're building a battery of plant a solar city I guess you're involved in the solar city so why space this seems space to me and just what I rate we with you seems to be more of a passion and the others are our businesses but I can't tell why space why are you why do you think it's important for us to be sure and I access to low-earth orbit well the I mean actually technically I mean with with Tesla and SolarCity they're about helping to solve the sustainable energy problem and so we're trying make progress on that front on the with those companies with with SpaceX it's to help solve the kind of space bearing problem I mean I think that a future where we're a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species is very exciting inspiring awesome future and in order for that to happen we've got to dramatically improve the cost of spaceflight and and that's that's why why SpaceX exists is to try to try to lower the cost of spaceflight which we've made some progress in doing but still I would call up improvements thus far evolutionary not revolutionary and but with with a lot of continued work I mean I think there's the potential for for order of magnitude or greater improvements reusability being key to to all of that of course and and then hopefully if at you know would we want to see if we can keep improving the cost of spaceflight and eventually that trend is in the right direction it could be leading to a city on Mars and certainly along the way a lot of activity and low Earth orbit and the moon and you know what's of other exciting things so one of the things we're trying to do with the International Space Station is try to figure out which industries will prosper from the use of low Earth orbit to try to understand or or help grow the kind of and economy essentially in low-earth orbit and folks who are doing that are all taking risks today our job is to try to reduce the risk as much as we can near-term so that they can get the information they need to really have a business case for the future but everyone's trying to calculate a risk so is there an Elon Musk philosophy of risks versus benefit and when you when you think is the right time to jump in I mean what is your thought on on how to approach new industries innovative areas and when's the right time to jump or not or do you just mean is there no crystal ball or is it a crystal ball or a Ouija board I mean how do you how do you figure out what you should go after well definitely the Ouija board of course much more reliable than the crystal ball so the yeah I mean I don't really like risk for risk sake or anything it's and I do think that the only things are are very risky with a low chance of success but if you want to try to come up with an interview that's kind of that's gonna be how it is and anything which is significantly innovative is going to come with a significant risk of failure and but you know if you've got to take big chances in order for the potential for a big positive outcome and you know just if I mean if the outcome is exciting enough then then taking a big risk is worthwhile yeah it's really how I approach it but with but then once executing down a path actually do my absolute best to reduce risk you know because or to improve the but another way of saying it to improve the probability of success because when you try to do something that is very very risky that you had you have to spend a lot of effort trying to reduce that risk as you walk down that path I mean one when I started SpaceX the I thought the odds of success very low the words most likely fail but I thought well we should give it a try nonetheless and then I'm not sure if you know what what preceded SpaceX because people why I got into the space that's right you remember you're trying to purchase a vehicle - from our rushing car well actually it was the reason I got into space was to try to increase NASA's budget and so I'll say this of the roundabout way I thought we that might be accomplished was I thought well if if NASA's budget was more larger than we could do more in space exploration and I thought well what work particularly if we could get the public excited about sending people to Mars and I thought well if I could do a small greenhouse and and send that to the surface of Mars with seasons in nutrient jail and you hydrate the gel and landing you have a little miniature greenhouse and then you'd have the public tends to get excited about precedents and superlatives so if we like the you know sort of first life on Mars the farthest life's ever traveled and get people sort of excited about war but we wish some people there like the health plants we should send people oh right right and and then I thought well that could give the effect could get the public really excited about sending fuel to Mars then that would translate into congressional support for bigger NASA budget that was the goal and then I don't have enough money to buy and I thought that the bad outcome would have a harvesting chance of noticing nope no commercial success so the harvest a chance of losing all the money so so compared to that SpaceX which I thought maybe had a 10% chance of success that was an improvement that makes good sense so are you still thinking about that I would do remember that conversation this was my idea we used Martian regolith you send these self-contained habitats who do not have it totally it wouldn't land chamber pretty things and grow oh yeah like a meter across or something but just to prove the concept yeah just to get it I mean the real goal was to get the public excited you get some engineering data about what does it take to maintain a little habit on Mars type of thing but the main thing would be to get the public excited and you know get people to be you know the public to being a paper of a bigger NASA budget it wants to go again god bless you it's a worthy goal I hope you guys this OP so Commercial Crew so you've been selected as one of the providers for the Commercial Crew can you tell us a little bit about where that's headed for you as the company and perhaps maybe house affected your company if it has if it's changed do you thing and how you approach space miss thing seems to be going really well on the Commercial Crew front I mean the I mean overall I mean I mean that there are small disagreements here and there but overall I think I think we very much agree with the way it's being done and yeah I think it's it's it's pretty pretty good I mean there are a few things where like it seems like the amount of lot of sort of mass and volume reserved for poop is too high but that's you know like little things like that we're like well are they really gonna do that much but it's quite it's quite large volume and really is so I could really they're pretty small disagreement so I think that it seems to be pretty pretty sensible and and then we did the the orange abort test earlier this year which at the cave which actually went went pretty well and yeah so things were going going along great getting pretty exciting and yeah I think there's also some potential use for Dragon 2 as as a science delivery platform you know going to sort of delivering payloads to Mars or other places we're in discussion with other parts of NASA about some of those ideas because the propulsive landing you know it could really lower the cost of getting science instruments to various places in the solar system so it's kind of exciting so I'm going to come back to that in just a second but commercial the the crew vehicle versus the the dragon cargo vehicle clearly there are some significant differences fairly innovative approach I think to abort testing where traditionally you've seen the the Jessen rocket on top that it's a polar versus the pusher technique where you utilize fuel that you otherwise would use for right on orbit but of course you're not going there so very innovative approach are there other areas where you feel like you're from an innovation standpoint you're making some significant strides with the vehicle yeah I think the the big items for weather the biggest item really for Dragon 2 is the ability to do a propulsive landing and it's basically you have having heavy thrusters on board so those same heavy thrusters can then do the abort but retain the the engines so instead of in a normal sort of crewed mission like safe to take the Soyuz for example that have a tractor motor on the nose of the vehicle that would have to be basically rocket engine on the nose that would have to be discarded on every flight which is a potential reliability issue and it and then you have obviously unable to reuse the the abort system and yeah and it adds your adds bunch bunch of mass but but then in addition those same thrusters can be used for propulsive landing so you can achieve a precise propulsive landing which are on land or water which is I think a significant improvement and I mean it sort of also it's sort of like really I think feels feels more like the future to have that that capability and then as I mentioned it before it can be extended to do paler delivery to the Moon or Mars or other places because of the generalized capability propulsive landing to to land land almost anywhere very good so let's go back to dragon at one point you had a conversation talked a little bit about something I think we referred to as dragon lab where you go to low-earth orbit and do what I assumed was sortie kind of research and then and bring the vehicle back are you still pursuing that or something like that is this an area where you think that there is a potential there is some potential for to essentially just take things too low over it and then bring them bring them back you know after a few weeks or something like that it's it's not a huge area of attention at SpaceX but I think we might do a few missions like that but yeah I mean dragon is it's very much sort of very its primary all space optimization is as a transport vehicle to and from the space station and and so things like dragon lab and then the science delivery platform I think are interesting extensions of that and I think as as dragon to first flies and then gets into regular flight I think they'll probably will be some you know more applications that that people could think of particularly since with Dragon 2 the reusability of the vehicle should be quite high so if we have reusability of the Dragon spacecraft and reusability of the the booster and somebody's willing to sort of do a bunch of flights with with the fully reused system there's the potential for for much lower cost access to space there is a bit of a chicken and egg challenge because like the certain amount of fixed costs that have to be carried no matter what so the the the marginal cost of launch or the cost of each subsequent launch can drop quite significantly as long as the launch rate per year is is high and stays that yeah of course it adds other challenges to the system yeah trying to fly as often as you as you need to to make that yep well let's see I I don't want to bore everybody with all my questions and we had talked about if folks had any questions in the audience let's see this oh wow they're not bashful that's good so I don't know if we're gonna need microphones but but I'll start here because you are like a kind of mentor and a visionary and you give hope to a lot of people around the globe because when they see you they realize that they can realize their dreams but my question is different when you are a dreamer when you are when you are a dreamer when you are a visionary of course we have your vision but there are moments that sometimes maybe you stop believing in this vision especially in the moments of some problems or failure so could you tell me and could you tell also to thousands of people who maybe will be motivated by your answer what keeps you fighting for your vision what helps you to reach your dream well I mean I I think I'm kind of constitutionally just geared to to just keep going I don't know it's a yeah I mean it just I don't know I mean it certainly there are times when you know things don't go well and then that's quite aspirating for sure and so then it's difficult to proceed with the same level enthusiasm but but I do think like I do think the things that we're doing are you know pretty important to the future and if we don't succeed then you know if there's well this is not so clear what other things would succeed and if if we don't succeed then we'll be certainly pointed to as a reason why people shouldn't even try for these things so I think it's important that we do whatever is necessary to keep going okay and last question last question so in 2004 when you are going to body man with your cousin you were thinking there is a Sam and let's make energy out of it yeah and I would ask you why do you believe so in solar energy and kinetic energies and also in sustainable energy and the last question I will not ask any more questions what will be the role of solar in the exploration of Mars sure I think the solar energy is probably fairly significant for Mars and what's gonna be quite important is having a very lightweight solar system that you know both volumetrically and gravimetric lee dance so actually you were sort of playing with the different concepts like you know that like thing that party thing where you've played it and it rolls out but the thing I think one of the solar concepts is is to have like a big roll that you just basically inflate and if it rolls out with with with like really thin solar panels on it but but it's it's gonna be pretty important because really either got to do that or nuclear and you know nuclear has it has its challenges but for solar it's pretty straightforward so I think I think so is very important to the future exploration of Mars for sure so thank you and I wish you that your next birthday is very successful thank you so much okay let's go let's go okay LT my name is valentino verify I'm from the United rocket and space cooperation which shortly will become a part of state separation Roscosmos so I've made this one quest to the west because I'd like to ask one question of you and mask what is his secret to become a successful businessman in space industry and then coming back to Russia to tell Russian businessmen there is way to become it icon space industry so serious seriously speaking I'd like to ask you when you started your business was the government your partner was it useful in what areas and so there are always two sides of the coin sure as there there were times when you had to fight the bureaucracy thank you sure well I should say with respect to starting a space business it's definitely not the easiest environment to start a business I think if most people were to rank order what's the highest return on investment I hate I mean space would not be very good I mean it's I'm very Pro space so it's like I you know but it's I mean it's just true that like if you you know start a hedge fund or if you're like many other industries then it's much easier to make money than the space industry this is not the easiest one to make money in yes yeah car industry also quite difficult so the if I I mean when starting SpaceX the the joke I heard the jokes this joke so often it was ridiculous the jerk was how do you make a small portion in the space industry the punchline of course being start with a large one yeah I got through a point I've heard the jokes so many times that I would just get to the punchline and say like well I wanted to figure out how to turn a large portion just one that was my goal like how did you know that so yeah I mean I do think there's that there is opportunity in space but but it is it's it's it's it's tough going I think if but I think if if if SpaceX and other companies can can lower the cost of transport to to orbit and perhaps beyond then there's a lot of potential for Entrepreneurship at the destination I mean you can think of it like like the Union Pacific Railway you know before there was a universal railway it was real hard to have commerce between the west coast and the East Coast we go by wagon or a really long sailing journey but once there was the transport then they were opportunities and now look at sort of you know the California and Washington State and and all the industries that have been created in Silicon Valley in Hollywood but you got to have that fundamental transport element otherwise there's just it's really tricky so we're trying to establish that transport element make it easier to get to low-earth orbit and hopefully in the future make it easier to get to the Moon or Mars and I do this long term vision of like if there was a fordable transport ship to a place like Mars I think the entrepreneurial opportunities would be phenomenal you know because there be people they would want to create everything from the first pizza joint to the first iron ore Factory to be like just a enormous amount of opportunity for people to create things on Mars and then it'd be different things on as some of the things would be different they wouldn't even imagine on earth be very exciting so I think that's that's really key to making things happen in space is you've got to have your someplace you gotta have someplace to go in some place in some way to get there yeah so so along those lines did you read Andy where's but the the Martian yeah yeah it's good what do you think I thought it was it was pretty excellent certainly one of the most realistic books on Mars that that I've read I mean I'd like there were a few things like the wind force on Mars it's not really that high I was it's not gonna knock you over or anything it's a high obviously high velocity with low force but overall I thought it was pretty cool and apparently it's being made into a movie intervening you don't you don't have a cameo on that one too I don't ever come in on that one I'm a little worried that it might not make people too keen or go to Mars like this is looks really hard I think we need a show about a Hamas is also now it's like the Wild West and you've got the gunslingers and like the cool Cowboys and that kind of thing maybe gotta write a book to you let's see there's a question over here right hi there my name is Anita go L I'm here at out of Harvard and MIT run a company called nano bio sim so in your vision and dream to achieve low-cost space travel how do you allocate your investments between engineering and essentially driving down the cost of existing technology versus investing in new breakthrough physics things like breakthrough propulsion physics anti-gravity what's your vision in the bifurcation of those two kinds of portfolios well we don't spend a ton of time on you physics in the I think with get with current physics if this there's huge potential so rather than rely on a breakthrough which we you know really it's difficult to envision what that breakthrough would exactly be already didn't implicate in exactly be the I'm quite confident that with what we know of current physics sort of just going with kind of you know where the standard model of physics is today that there are dramatic improvements possible in spaceflight and I think with the you know certainly with Falcon 9 I think we make improvements and then with our next generation rocket system which is still you know many years away that'll be a deep cryo methyl ox system I think I think we can achieve full reusability and that that's really that's that that's a huge potential for you know I'd like maybe the two order of magnitude reduction in the cost of spaceflight so as far as our D is concerned that we we we hire great engineers as fast as we can find them so it's like the it's not that easy to find but I should say great issues with the sort of like the right mindset and everything we hire at the at the at the maximum rate that we can find people that we think what would really be an asset to the team so there's no limitation on that hey over here hi my name is Zachary multum a student from Babson College I just want to say it's an honor to be here I read a Schliemann C's biography about you one thing that really was intriguing to me was the super Draco engine for the dragon v2 that was unused printed out of a three-day technology division using that technology more in the future and when he first splashed acceleration and you think they'll how about effect the costs in terms of getting to Mars like that yeah absolutely so as really - we we we actually print the super Draco engines so they're printed out of titanium in a canal and and that actually allows us to reduce the cost of those engines quite a bit in particular because we can it a print integral cooling channels so when you've got it an hourglass chamber and you've got cooling channels in in the wall of the chamber where the whole wall consists of cooling channels it's only quite difficult to create that a thrust chamber or nozzle because you've got to create an inner jacket outer jacket kind of machine the inner jacket it's and then braise the whole thing together it's real pain and you've got a bunch of joints in there to make it all work so with printing you can print something that you can't make by any other means so it actually ends up being lighter and cheaper then if we built it by traditional methods for our next generation engine which we call the the Raptor with transmission is sort of it's just it's a deep-fryer methyl ox so what I mean by that is that the methane and oxygen are cooled to close they're freezing points so not not far from the freezing point as opposed to close to their boiling point which is more witches than only the case the you-know-what for that engine we're trying to print as much as possible it's a bit the biggest limitation on 3d printing right now is the theater sized envelope so with this limit on how big we can print something but we're able to print the turbopump components and much of the injected not the whole thing but but many of the critical parts we can print so that actually helps us in speeding up the development so instead of waiting for castings to be developed which can take several months and then if the casting is wrong you've got to iterate in the casting and each iteration can take several months with printing we can have those iterations can be reduced to a matter of weeks or months so that that actually helps up with these disputed developments as well see over here hi I'm Ross Buntrock with a company called high orbit I wondered if you could give us a little bit of an update on what's going on with the Hyperloop and is there any overlap between the work we're doing with SpaceX and Hyperloop technology yeah SpaceX is not neither I nor SpaceX are doing anything to try to commercialize the Hyperloop there are I think at least two maybe more than two companies that have formed that are a completely independent of me or SpaceX that are working towards commercializing the Hyperloop technologies idea or design what's basics is doing is we're we're gonna just create a little student competition for for Hyperloop ideas so I can like around the way that Formula SAE works where students can come up with a design and compete against each other to design the best pod so what what SpaceX will do is just construct about a mile long low-pressure tube near nearly vacuum tube basically in which students can kind of race their pods so we're it's just basically to support get get students excited about engineering that's the that's the only involvement to SpaceX myself with the Hyperloop at this point okay oh I'm Paula Mustaine you I'm a sociologist and I'm writing a book about the International Space Station how would you describe the scientific value of the International Space Station and where would you draw the line between luxury and need when it comes to space exploration well I mean for space that I mean I really spend all of my time thinking about just how to get to the space station be honest I I actually hadn't even really seen a proper movie of the inside of the space station until I went to see the I a preview of the new IMAX thing that's coming out we're and it's amazing yeah like when that space station IMAX movie comes out people are going to blown away it's awesome I actually bought my whole team at at SpaceX to go see the preview of the a of the IMAX movie and I mean I'm it's like it is a very unique laboratory because this is the only thing that's in sort of microgravity that's above the Earth's atmosphere and you can learn a lot about basically human physiology and do experiments that you can't really do any other any other laughs and you know and you can have bring scientists up and they can actually work in this incredibly unique lab so I think that there's a lot to be gained there and and I think it just you can't sort of you know ignore the coolness factor of it like that's like people think it's pretty cool so I think it's pretty cool and you know the public one I have something going on in space that involves people and yeah and it's it's just I don't know it's the coolest thing going on in space so like that's a lot of value that you know what we tried to to sells the wrong word it's the word we use but sells really the wrong word we're trying to get people to recognize that there's a platform in low-earth orbit and that this is important what's done in low-earth orbit has benefit to to those of us on earth that will never actually go to space but in doing that you're trying to get their interest level and part of their interest level is the cool factor that she talked about and and I've always kind of struggled with that being sort of black and white I understand the purpose in my head that's why I joined NASA right but over the years this is one of the things that I've started to recognize as important so my question to you is did we I've heard a rumor that for the suits for Commercial Crew that you wanted to play in a role in that and so is that true and and is there some reason behind the design of the suit that you want to personally be involved in other than crew safety yeah I think you've actually spent a lot of effort on the spacesuit design on the both the functionality and the aesthetics but I think just just getting it is actually really hard cause if you're just sort of optimized functionality it's one thing if you optimize for aesthetics it doesn't work like you know this thing except TVs they don't work so the so it's just like okay how do we make something that looks cool and works and with a key goal here of being being that you know when people see that space you think they want them to think yeah I want to wear that thing one day yeah that looks awesome so that that's that's the reason for it very good let's see we'll do a couple more questions and then let's let's can we get back in the back here do we have somebody else here already with the microphone all right go ahead thank you would made any more to it I'm Alex Pearlman I'm with Boston Magazine and I'm writing for advice today I was hoping that you could give us a little bit of an update on the most recent news with the idea of putting satellites to provide Internet to developing countries and unconnected people sure so we slowed the early stages of a sort of a big Leo constellation communication idea and we're hopeful hopefully going to launch I get a test satellite next year and a bit but IIIi think the long term potential of it is just pretty pretty great but I don't want to overplay or overstate you know things quite you know that this you know or any stage of the game really but the the the long term goal is to create a comprehensive global communication system that's that provides high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity anywhere in the world and provides cross links through the satellites so that you can have improved long-distance internet there's one things that sort of your eyes when you look at this is that you can actually have a more direct path through space and you can and photons move faster and we depending upon what fiber-optic material they're running through photons actually move about as 40 to 50 percent faster ends in vacuum than they do in fiber optic cables and if you look at the way that the fiber-optic cables go if they trace the outlines of the continents and they go through many repeaters and routers and everything so if you want to say communicate from a server in California to one in South Africa it's a very very long route and so very roundabout path and it's high latency low photonic speed and you could actually have that communication be quite a bit faster if it's in space so I think there's there's the potential for doing a fair bit of long-distance internet activity as well as providing bandwidth portly but it's also worth saying that a lot of companies have tried this and kind of broken their pick on it and I think we we want to be really careful about how we deliver it about trying to make this thing work and not not overextend ourselves so we're being you know fairly careful about it but I I do think this is something that should be built and would be quite good to have well in our case the the communications technology would be substantially more advanced in the past would say Tim's like Teledesic that the electronics of the day were very low bandwidth I'm a really analog or barely digital and they weren't very high bandwidth so you said it really didn't compete with Sager with terrestrial phones in the case of tells you that they were looking to compete with or or to address the cellular needs that the system we're talking about would not attempt to compete with cellular needs it so for example it wouldn't compete directly with say iridium which is which which can talk directly to a handset our system would seem to would safe to talk to a small user terminal that's about the size of a pizza box or much like you know current dishes that I know satellite dishes but it but it will be flat because we have phased array antenna that's tracking those satellites but you could mount it in a window or just anywhere outside as long as you can see the sky it would work see back here we'll take our last pushing back here hey Ilan thanks for coming out I would like to show you we brought a virtual reality camera here it's a record for the first time we have a small start-up in San Francisco called space VR and we believe that virtual reality is the future of space exploration because you can put people on the very cutting the very front of every every exploration mission is that something that you've given much thought or have any opinions on well I've gone I've received the virtual reality demos at oculus and at valve and it's pretty impressive you can sort of imagine if that's extrapolated into the future it's really gonna super feel like you're there and I wonder if some people are never gonna want to take that off honestly it's like it's pretty I mean it's pretty entrancing but I do think it'd be quite exciting through that for space as well yeah do you have a setup here okay it's right there Wow yeah cool okay are you based in are you based okay I think maybe today's gonna be tricky but but but maybe if since you're based in California we could arrange something in you know in the coming weeks all right let's see Elan we'll we'll call it a a conference I wanted to first thank you very much you've been very generous with your time and we you know from the moment I called you you were all in and it's really this open conversation and your your thoughts on on the on what's in front of us that really excites us all in this room so thank you very much for your time we really appreciate it thank you

https://youtu.be/5RkMwBUFgFM

I'm your host usually grass tyson you're pushing and I have with me Chuck nice that's right Chuck hey Neil tweeting at Chuck nice comment that is correct sir as always good good to have you on the show good to be here you know you know what this topic is today that they're probably no more important topic we've ever addressed then this topic oh the future of humanity oh okay that's what it is future of humanity and we are featuring my interview with the one and the only Elon Musk a man who is contributing to the future of humans not he's not contribute to it he is the thing it's not something that everybody else is doing come in on it no no he's he's he's he's making it okay okay and sometimes he's referred to as the real-life Iron Man Tony Stark I have to agree with that actually and he's the founder of PayPal and it's an Internet company he's a founder of SpaceX a rocket company he founded Tesla Motors an electric car company and he's chairman of Solar City a solar energy company he is the real Tony Stark there you go and I thought that mean I don't love you but I thought I should bring in some help on this one okay okay another man who yeah there's someone else in walk in my wife now that now this is awkward [Laughter] biting my lip is dr. Tyson gonna introduce me am I should I say anything talking about you we're talking about Elon Musk who is ill good heck of a guy yeah good to have you here cuz you've got some serious engineering background and so a lot of the show we're gonna talk about engineering the future of our civilization yeah sensation of fostering but I'd rather you could say what the real stuff and you what's you're writing a book on like what sustainability climate change and and doing more with less you know what's going to be called unbounded unbounded and I want to private go ahead subtitle you're a brick an idiot if you don't believe in climate Joker's have what it is that might as well be so it's an extraordinary time I mean we're talking about Elon Musk and his vision for the future of humanity but as an extraordinary time as we record this the state of Florida just forbad were made kept would not allow state officials to use the phrase climate change yes really yeah or sea level rise or cielo and they're gonna so what is what's going to happen states of georgia mississippi and alabama are gonna build fences like we have in Texas so yeah the Floridians both the Seminoles and the Chuck I can no disrespect to anybody that lives in Florida Georgia or Alabama but I got a feeling it's gonna be a chain-link fence - well it's fine now right so let's get let's get to the bottom of what created the Elan musk I wanted to find out you know what where do you come from what where did you grow up I don't know anything about the man let's find out what egg hatched you into this world where were you before you well I was born in South Africa won in South Africa and you come to America and make a billion dollars yeah I mean unexpected what make a billion dollars I suppose I grew up in South Africa honestly seeing a lot of the same TV and movies and reading comic books and and it really didn't feel all that different from say Southern California honestly so you had a kind of baptism into American pop culture at the time yeah yeah you know a lot I have ogres and wind of steak houses and read like every comic book you know so my father brought me on a trip to the United States when he goes about ten I remember it was really awesome experience because the hotels all had arcades so my know one thing was when we went to a new hotel a hotel or whatever it is go to the arcades and so that they have got any other services for that whether they have bedbugs you're looking for arcade games yeah what did video games do for you and that they're incredibly engaging and they maybe want to learn how to program computers because then I thought well I could make my own games and then I could also I wanted to see how the games work like how did you create a video game that's what led me to learn how to program computers to be a programmer yeah so I had one of the first video game console didn't have enough cartridges you had like four games that you could play and you could like pick one one of the four games you could play that was it and then it went from there to the original Atari and then in television and then I was in a store and saw at the Commodore vic-20 and I was like holy crow you can actually have a computer and make your own games I thought this was just one of the most incredible things possible to go all of my saved allowance and and in houndour my father until we got the Commodore vic-20 and there came with this manual on how to program in basic search I spent all night there were days in a row just observing that and on your own no one forced you know this is self-motivated I got to know this this is good for me I've spent like nine nine or ten or something so you're fluent in basic at age nine or ten yeah I kind of went got OCD on the thing maybe so technically OCD is but silly got obsessive let me put that at least the o clock so programming nothing else you get to control something hey you construct a little universe and when you first do it you're like wow this is incredible you can actually make things happen like you type these commands and then something happens on the screen that's pretty amazing so there is hope for all the parents who have middle school children who are lost in their video game absolutely they too can be a billionaire I'm sorry what I was just playing over here put the video game down PSB the down yeah you know actually that my son is a video game crazed ball how old is he he's nine he's nine yeah it doesn't get better doesn't get better but his favorite game is something called Minecraft yeah I know nothing about it however I started watching him play this and I went you know what this isn't bad this guy's learning how to create his own universe it's very imagination driven and now he wants to learn how to code we love the guy because I could go diabolical if you want to create his own universe so just a quick resume of Elon Musk so you know in 1999 he founded the company that would become PayPal and then sold it to eBay and he ran off with 180 million dollar and it was 32 years old and so how did he make a living between University and 32 well there's more of this interview that way we'll find out but I don't know if he was like making companies and selling them and then the way you do yeah of course that's how you do it let's find out that's hard so what I wanted to know was while he was in college what what was he thinking about you know most of us in college you want a major get a job when you come out let's find out what he was thinking about know when I was in college I saw one of the things that are most going to affect the future of humanity and the electric cars solar power essentially sustainable most people thinking I just want a job when I get out and you're trying to reshape Humanity as an undergraduate I mean it's pretty in America it's pretty easy to keep yourself a lot so I mean my threshold for existing is pretty low I mean I said I figured I could like be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay and not stop mm-hmm in fact when I first came to North America I was in Canada when I seventeen and just to sort of see what it takes to live I try to live on one dollar a day which was able to you so just buy food in bulk at this yeah rice and beans and yeah I would go for the hot dogs okay my dogs and oranges you did get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after a while and we closed it like you know pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of source and that can go pretty far too so I was like okay you know I can [ __ ] look for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint well it's pretty easy to earn like thirty dollars in a month you know yeah thing so probably be okay okay so is that allowed you to not have to worry about money because you did the experiment yeah did the experiment exactly so this was an important psychological philosophical anchor for you let me put words in your mouth but that's a starting point to launch anywhere you want to go yeah absolutely and so now you've got a baseline a life baseline from which to go new places intellectually psychologically financially so what came first lots of an electric car or thoughts of space hmm you know when you're starting out in college I can get pressure in sophomore year like you three sort of marek philosophical wanderings and I try to think of okay what are the things that it will seem to me would most affect the future of humanity there were really five things three of which I thought would be interesting to be involved in the three that I thought were were definitely positive would be the Internet sustainable energy both production and consumption and space exploration more specifically the extension of life beyond Earth on a permanent basis and then although I never thought I'd actually be involved in that that's that was way something I thought that was important in the abstract but not something I thought I would ever have an opportunity to be involved in and then the fourth one was artificial intelligence and the first one was rewriting human genetics these were just the five things that I thought would most effective future of humanity so Chuck did you want to change you manatee when you went to college I didn't want to change my underwear when I was in college are you kidding me well your engineer man do you agree with this list yeah it's a pretty cool less a cool list I would have included educating women and girls raising Stan of living of women girls so that the human population of the world will slowly become more manageable a greater tapping the lost intellectual capital that's right among those who have been disenfranchised from it or never franchised as in the first place a franchise what you said I love when you say that because it it's basically you when women are educated they don't have as many babies that's it that's all there was in a verb or more loved and better care for and so that's where the the burgeoning of society happens with mom being a happier healthier person more educated end up with better educated kids end up with a better world just like that that's like that furthermore the woman has a higher quality of life she has a better job she's happier which just makes everybody happy so so Elon after he sold PayPal we had a bajillion zillion but see now that's where I stopped you know a couple hundred million dollars 180 million balanced you know good good he's not that kind of guy so what he wanted to do he wanted to go into space let's find out how that got started when I started out my goal was to do a phone traffic mission with the intent of increasing NASA's budget that was my goal I was confused as to why I would not yet sent a person to Mars it seemed like this was obviously the goal after the moon and we'd not made progress on that and when it became clear like that paper was gonna get sold off air might ask me what I'm gonna do next I said well I mean I don't know what imma do next but I'm always curious about what's going on with space and why I ever made progress I just wonder when we're gonna send a person to Mars so I wouldn't come on the NASA website and I couldn't find a date I was like well maybe it's here somewhere and I just can't find it the date that NASA wants to land on Mars yeah this is gonna be like some schedule or something game plan or it's the state even if it's far in the future and there was not to be found anywhere and anyways I started learning about that back history and I thought well okay maybe there's something that I can do to send a small mission to the surface of Mars that would get the public excited and as a result of that public excitement NASA's budget will be increased and we could resume process of sending people to Mars essentially so you thought you can do that with your lousy billion dollars no I didn't have a billion dollars at that time I had about a 180 million slot and I figured well you know maybe I could spend half of that on a mission to Mars so I spend every time investigating the space industry and provincially decided on this idea of sending a small greenhouse of surface of Mars we were called the Mars Oasis mission and so you have seeds in dehydrated jello I would land your hydrate jump on landing and you have this great shot of green plants on a red background and the public responds to precedents and support it so this would be the first life on another planet furthest that life's ever traveled so as we know and that's how you get a headline yeah yeah exactly it's very something new or something superlative mm-hmm and I thought well look and that would maybe reinvigorate excitement and the result would be NASA's budget gets increased so the whole goal in the beginning was just how do we get more money for NASA but after spending over time on this I came in vision that I was actually in correct my initial assumption is wrong because I thought that where there's a will there's a way and that we just sort of lost our will that was that's false but there's plenty of will people needed to believe that there was a way in a way that would not bankrupt the country or mean that they'd have to sacrifice something of critical importance like health care so it became clear that the space transport problem had to be solved unless there was a dramatic improvement in the cost of space transport then none of it would matter so in your first successful launch what was the cost per pound to orbit about six thousand dollars six thousand yeah not a hundred dollars a pound no she gets down or dollars per pound you need a big rocket that's fully reusable are you there yet no we're making progress though spent twelve years so far we've not recovered a stage but I think we'll recover a stage within the next year and be able to reflect is there a date on your website where someone can say uh-huh he's gonna land Touche a good point that's not like an oh well I mean I've said of publicly many times although maybe we should put something on the website which is that I think we've got a decent shot of being able to send a person to Mars in about 11 or 12 years so bill what is he gonna do this to reuse a stage yeah yeah and then they'd get the cost down and yeah it'll cost down to a hunt but who's gonna get to Mars Elon Musk or NASA so let us keep in mind please that NASA pays SpaceX okay it's about two billion bucks so far okay so SpaceX is now a contractor Forness okay so our tech money is going to yeah SpaceX okay so what is this vehicle that's gonna get us to Mars so there's a couple of innovations just three innovations that I've seen with my own eyes which must hide another hundred thousand innovations that are very much more subtle first thing is all the same engines first stage second stage how many stages it's the same engine okay so why didn't somebody else do that this is a good question everything was a one-off and yes yeah well or a five off Saturn five off and so then the other thing is let's see if we can reuse a stage right and this is his thing it almost worked the other day tried to let he the company tried to land on a barge just east of Cape Canaveral and it it landed on the barge just a little faster than everybody walk because it ran out of fuel to slow itself down okay but that means you'll get faster and if you're going fat generally need fuel to slow down yeah unless you're gonna arrow break or something yeah well we've come through the atmosphere after it launched its and the thing is not shaped for aerobraking room but it is shaped for retro rocketing look I can coin the verb Bay though but then the other the fundamental thing you guys when you just when NASA was created I believe dr. Tyson on the year of your birth just within a week or so yes same week yes same damn week I come out of my mother NASA comes out of coincident out of Congress perhaps anyway the idea was to keep the thing I feel messes they put NASA centers all over the US so when they went to manufacture rockets they put pieces of the rocket all over the US solid things are made over here the liquid things were made over here they're tested over there they're gonna train cars and go down there just right that just the expression houston we have a problem why isn't it Florida we have a prom Cape Canaveral we have a problem Chuck do we have a problem the instant the spacecraft clears the gantry in that instant there's a full control transfers to Houston I mean if there's a human being on one board that was our nautical miles away right all the whole countdown and everything or go to launch go to think all of that is Cape Canaveral but it's a nice moment it takes a moment it passes the thing then it's like alright guys we'll take it from here that's exactly thanks a lot guys for your work SpaceX it's just south of Los Angeles International Airport train car drives up full of stainless steel full titanium full of let's make rocket alien parts and it comes off the train car and they shape it mid and do their own thing we're Canadian I want somebody yeah well you can get it 6061-t6 aluminum t7 sometimes tempered seven aluminum so then it comes down they make they make the tank they make they attach the plumbing that comes over here's a bunch of electronics they attach that they vacuum tested over here but then it goes back on the train car to either a cape canaveral close to the equator as the US can get or up to Vandenberg Air Force Base which is north about nate'll us is a cars closer yeah Hawaii's coast miss on a train car yeah it's not an extraordinary train car yeah yeah yeah and so hover train is a fundamental lowering of cost huge huge reduction of cost is that low enough to like go to Mars like everybody says he wants to go to Mars he still wants to go to well I I would like to go to Mars but I want to come back and I don't want to go to Mars to live I think that is not all the way thought through in my opinion we choose to go to my house a thrice it's not easy because it will kill you right it's so yeah I mean it's really for your consideration for your consideration we can talk about this after the break but Elon Musk is a native of South Africa South Africa colonized by Dutch people I am a descendant from people from northern and Central Europe you guys are much more recently descended from Africa but we have this human tradition of just spreading out we don't like it here we're gonna go over there we'll just keeps which means of course with your descendant of Africans as well oh yes you have arbitrarily selected I say more recent descent yeah recent let the record show that was a completely arbitrary line that you drew but arbitrary but historically is not insignificant yeah I'm just I'm just so anyway human pride is all read and spread this table across Eurasia the ice age has the snow frozen up yes keep going in North America right spearing mammals partying it's what we do and so it's not clear that you be able to leave the earth and go live on Mars so you are skeptical of this but you would not interfere with the dream state however we do not want to violate and star trekky in terms the prime directive just so dumb which is we don't want to mess up the ecosystem on Mars if I raise the news means we have no qualms messing up our own damn ecosystem that doesn't make it a good thing I know but when after why should Mars be the sacred place and not our own there's a it's a rule it's open in our own backyard it's an arbitrary but it's not arbitrary it's a reasonable rule mm-hmm we can poop there after we determine whether or not there's something alive Mars is nothing more than the table for me sir yes sir I got Bill Nye the Science Guy so good to be here and since we're radio I must alert people that even in studio you are in bowtie let the record show yeah well what you see is what you get maybe he's like the guy in Terminator 2 where there's just a poly metal you know no Bobby no but nobody is his his police uniform yes right was part of a metal that is the metal that's how I roll so maybe bill and the bowtie watch out wacky even king of Death thing which is shiny we're talking about the future of humanity we're featuring my interview with Elon one that does not feature poly metal no does not yes yes yet and i snared that interview when i visited him at SpaceX headquarters which is what's the name of the town that he's in is Crenshaw Hawthorne hor thorne California near Los Angeles New York Hawthorne horse Hawthorne art form fine fine so so bill if we're gonna go to Mars do you do you see engineering challenges to that or is it only no no no this is a very serious question Engineers love a challenge so don't tell me don't don't play that with me hey baby bring it on don't bring it on don't even so my question is is it just a matter of money or even if I gave you as much money as you want you might not be able to solve some of the engineering problem oh we can solve the plan that yes no we can saw a shape yeah because we Land Rover I'm a frickin rocket crane right we can solve the problems but as far as this colony idea everybody okay yeah I mean there's no liquid water as such Oh Mars was once very wet and we felt evidence of ice all good but it's not like there's a river there right okay then you know is it's underground and no one has found it okay and let me go on to say it's on it's summer day at the equator it's 20 below okay yeah you can get what it said everybody wearing this year canada arctic crew that was a goose down canada goose down brand jacket all very good that's debt that's when things are really good that's all you got it's midsummer midsummer the main thing i think you would pick up on right away there's no air you would suffocate in a second well there's air but there's no oxygen in the air so you just have to make all that so chuck somebody's thinking about the future here stop you there bill oxygen in the air carbon dioxide is separated from your carbon carbon carbon dioxide co2 is one of the most tightly bound molecules ever made I mean you can do it but you got to put in the energy again put in the other man you're gonna be living everybody you're gonna be living in a submarine you're going just to be clear so you have to get that energy from somewhere right right so justjust there's no such thing as a free lunch and you're one and a half times the distance that we are from the Sun so your solar energy if you just want to run if you wanted to run solar panels what's 15 squared so it's a 2-1 in a quarter to two and a quarter times more less it's one quarter times more solar panel yeah yeah conversation [Music] weii well it is the next logical place to look for like getting high pitch on you want to go there is because you're gonna explore and when you explore two things happen those two things Doc Chuck whiny you will make you'll make discoveries okay you'll never find something you never found before all right but the other thing is you will have an adventure you will have an adventure it will engage you like nothing else whether it's your backyard the video game or the surface of Mars now if I die but it'll be the best what we want to do as an engineer and this is what astronauts say part of their pride as being astronauts is coming back that's like landing the airplane is part of a pilot's pride I mean ejecting and letting the 350 million dollar fighter plane explode it's kind of cool on video but it's not really your goal as a pilot or an astronaut so if we were to go there with a human we would be able to make discoveries at an extraordinary rate it's estimated 10,000 times faster than our best robot spacecraft right now but if the day comes when we have a ten thousand times better robot you'd still probably want to explore want to send a human so then that's so here's the thing if we found evidence of life Fausta lies bacterial mats or cooler yet something so alive some Mars krob then the question would be and I want to know do those Mars probes have DNA like you and I do or they a whole nother another of nother Ness Mars krob that's a Martian microbes a Martian microbes Mars probe and then if they have DNA and there's so much like us does that mean Mars was hit by an impact or who went off into space and you and I are descended of Martians okay so you know you know he's trying to change humanity by reinventing space exploration and I get that I get that but he's also worried about problems on earth okay that's okay is he lapis or is he allowed I have no I say bring it on okay so you know he's co-founder of Tesla yeah the electric car company cars just sex with wheels are very cool he's also fantastic he's also chairman of Solar City let's see how he just got into this from a terrestrial standpoint the biggest problem when you solve an earth the century is sustainable production and consumption of energy this really is quite a serious problem people really should take this quite seriously even if you put the environmental consequences of dramatically changing the chemical composition of the oceans and atmosphere aside we will eventually run out of oil all the medicine well if we don't find a solution to burning oil or transport and we then run out of oil the economy will collapse and civilization will comes in it over as we know it Lister without global one yeah will that work exactly I mean and so if we know that we have to ultimately get off oil no matter what we know that that is an inescapable outcome it's simply a question of when not if then why would you run this crazy experiment of changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere oceans by adding enormous amounts of co2 that have been buried since the Precambrian era that's crazy that is the dumbest experiment in history by far promise it's not even think of a dumber experiment I honestly cannot what good could possibly come of it so therefore we need another solution here but of course electric cars still uses coal that's why I need sustainable power production like solar and wind which can still charge your your car yes bill Neil do you still have your house in California yes Studio City yes I've been there yes you're like a native New Yorker now not native but you would live in the earth somebody else is living in your house yeah it's a crazy house that you live at that it's cool it's completely alive with self generated electricity well it's got four hello watts of soar that's great which is more than enough for ten months of the year maybe ten and a half months of the year and I would have more but my neighbor's house shadows my panels oh I thought you say your neighbor stealing your electricity I'll she's stealing the same travels a lot and I thought maybe while she was out of town I could just cut off just like this one part of the second story mm-hmm these are ask forgiveness than permission okay bill but yes sorry there's tons of oil still in reserve ah that has yet to be drilled or here's the bad news okay but we'll never run out of fossil fuels oh that is the bad news that's terrible it really is because burning it and burning it is just the worst thing for all of us so plan what's your plan so the plan is because as long as our oil is cheap and it's cheaper than my solar panels how do you expect people to so if you're rich you can you can buy the car that saves okay bear in mind they cost you more than the car that doesn't say well but the reasons on wheels the six no wheels no reason you want a sex on wheels electric car thing how much yeah yeah it's my mattress deep breath it's 95% efficient or 93 percent efficient whereas a gas powered car constrained by the second law of thermodynamics is at best twenty eight percent thirty percent so you're squandering energy you just can't get back when you try to get it out of heat at low temperature differences so with that said there is it's been estimated that we could save about 30 percent of the energy we use through conservation we can have electric cars we can improve transportation systems to be sure but the big thing you guys I just if as we say about climate change if you are opposed to government regulation now you don't like governments now just wait'll stuff gets bad just wait until Floridians have to abandon their homes and Miami's half under water and then there's going to be regularly at the market an example of this world war ii regulation happened like crazy and everybody was very proud of it want to create the next great generation so what I neglected to mention here and I think you should have mentioned too was if you can start out with a hundred thousand dollar car is a test of concept people like it wealthy can buy it but the real test is can you make an electric car that's competitive in price - absolutely and I'm told there's a Tesla Model 3 and he's picked it to come out and that's priced at 35,000 and so I drove a Nissan Leaf for three years yeah I got that same probably brought that same price so that's that there you have I mean I I you know I did other stuff I thought I went to sleep I had meals as I didn't just drive but Bill's what I really want is the flying car the flying cars a real tough profit is this but I think Elon Elon cured me of my urges I find a flying car oh well just wait everybody's in traffic flying car no no no no no no he he told me what the deal is with flying cars wing loading let's find out of course what we all really want are flying cars yeah actually let me ask this so are you sure you weren't applying car no but it was a wall this look cool I mean you know whenever you see sort of cities in like some futuristic concept that was throughout the flying car in there and can't tell me you never thought of it no I put a lot about yeah yeah okay and there's some people I know that are working on flying cars or flying coastal transport devices if you hover boards I hope you don't have a boss but I mean I sort of want her to the interview you can show me your hover board room another the hover board I won't tell anybody the microphone is on mute now okay you can talk just between just between us I'm debating like should I be flying cars or shouldn't be flying cause I'm have two minds on that you know because if there are flying cars then well obviously you have added this additional dimension where our car could potentially fall in your head and will be susceptible to weather and of course you'd have to have flying car where it would be like an autopilot because I mean otherwise forget it you don't people navigating yes that's why I'm gonna be it Scotty autopilot mm-hmm but even in order paths marry this and even if you've got redundant murders and blades you've still gone from near zero chance of something falling on your head to something greater than that and there's also a noise challenge so I see we don't know how to fly quietly right okay so I'll wait it out some more that I do think would definitely help a lot in cities is more tunnels essentially with like are you looking at going 3d and there's a fundamental flaw with cities where you've got dense office buildings and apartment buildings and duplexes and they're operating on three dimensions but then you go to the street and suddenly you're two dimensional because it's a flight as a surface yeah this is how the New York City solve this with the subway go right underneath multiple layers of subway right so we are actually traveling in three dimensions but below the ground rather than in the air but I think if you were to extrapolate that to cars and have more car tunnels than you would alleviate congestion completely and you wouldn't need the foreign car you would not need a flying car in that case and it would always work even if the weather's bad and would never ice up and we're never ice up and we're no fooling your head so we're gonna get started on that right away I think those sound like the words of a man who owns a car company so I'm saying a non-flying if I had a company that made non flooring cars I probably wouldn't want to have a flying car they build more rodent want a car falling on your head plus a point that came out within my conversation with it but we didn't make it didn't make the clip was we have flying cars today they're called helicopters yeah and they're really noisy yeah and in fact if you want something as heavy as a car to levitate you're gonna it's gonna be making some noise well it's also gonna use a lot of energy and a lot of energy well that's because in the word of another physicist I know who flies his own plane he said helicopters don't fly as much as they beat the air into submission who said it's true it's always completely there the air doesn't submit it just flows down having enough momentum to hold the helicopter up he also Elon Musk brings up another good point what when we have humans operating the tie sonic flying car which you can at the Chinese subterranean vehicle who's gonna drive the thing without all kinds of trouble and so you know it always fascinates me when you look at highways from the air when you're in an airplane or a helicopter it looks so orderly yeah it really does cars all the birds that go along very cool but you're using a human brain this thing is capable of art and radio shows and rocket companies you're using this brain to do nothing but operate this car on this right-of-way stay in a straight line stay in the straight over your shoulder we'll go ahead check head check whoa whoa head check and so this is why this seems like a real opportunity with my favorite bumper stickers have a caution driver applying makeup in shock you don't you don't want humans driving cars you want driverless cars yeah and a very high level reliability you know I used to work at Boeing and you get a triple or you were on the 747 747 a little bit seven two seven three seven five seven but yeah what you want is lingo check I know let's how you showing that off now sound like giving me your number these are all planes seven seven seven seven in it yeah well yeah but the interesting point of interest the 727 to 737 757 have the same tube a seven one seven which was the 707 kc-135 have the same tube and so where was I going that when it's triple redundant autopilot you can count on it it's gonna land the plane guy see us but the problem with cars is not you don't have nearly the traffic control that you that you have in airplane so who do you think's in a win this Tesla and with a driverless car perhaps coming out of the air shop or Google well Tesla makes cars Google makes software you can't have one without the other to be Lewis so this is like a chocolate and peanut butter thing exactly whoa you got your car wait you're both wrong I love setting you up but wait there's more when you think about the automotive industry large everybody uses the same parts what the gas gauge sensor the speedometer your tires the nuts all the sit bolt Saul the same standards there's a little competition but you can get a lot of commonality and so we will see what happens in the near future we're back to you start talking Jason co-host check nice in the house hey hey in the house and then I got Bill Nye in the house I am cohousing cohousing donning a bowtie as usual the earlier segment we were sure that it is Holi its Holi metal poly metal surgically attached to him we're featuring my interview with Elon Musk and just before the break I teased you to tell you that we would be saving for this final segment yeah what he fears the most fears now if you're it took he's a confident guy he's a confident guy and to quote bill if you've been scoring along with us you may remember in our first segment we listed the things he wanted to introduce to change humanity right one thing he does not want to touch let's check it out I mean I'm quite worried about artificial superintelligence these days I think and I've said this publicly I think it's maybe something more dangerous than nuclear weapons so we should be really careful about that if there was a very deep super digital super intelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non logarithmic way then you know that software yes so like it just could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers well then that's all she wrote that's all she wrote I mean we won't be like your Pat Labrador if we're lucky I wouldn't elaborate over their pets let me select the friendliest creature know they'll domesticate us yeah we will be exact lap pets to them yes I mean or something strange is gonna happen they'll keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones and then read the docile humans yeah I mean the utility function of the digital super intelligence is of stupendous important this what does it try to optimize and we need to be a really cap with saying oh well how about human happiness because it you know made conclude that all unhappy humans should be terminated and you know that we should all be just be captured and with dopamine and serotonin directly injected into our brains to maximize happiness happiness because it's concluded that dopamine and serotonin are what caused happiness therefore therefore maximize that I'm just saying I'm saying we should exercise caution what do you think of that Wow so so just to be clear he's not talking about artificial intelligence isn't about artificial superintelligence ikonn that can self learn okay so 20% of the world's population of people does not have electricity mm-hmm they've never made a phone call not a cell phone call they've never made a phone call mm-hmm so when the super intelligence takes over or Chicago or whatever what are people in East African are gonna give a rip about okay so allies have managed to kill yourselves way to go where we're looking for some corn there so I get it but I think people have to keep in mind we all take computers are so reliable and there's so much part of our everyday life now we take them for granted but somebody is in a city literally or in a sense shoveling the coal what happens if you unplug the super computer intelligence thing it will find a new source of energy yes it has its own nuclear reactor the failure of that logic is the assumption that it would let you unplug it right create that thing to keep it from descent I don't I don't you know I'm with you here seems like a solvable problem so I'm looking at here we have three three levels themselves are official narrow intelligence so that's computer doing one thing better than anything is not getting anybody's way a calculator calculator one wins at jeopardy and no no that'd be artificial general intelligence which would be general intelligence but it's not it's not hell-bent on taking over the world this is that IBM computer right yeah yeah yeah yeah it goes across the oh yeah yeah which one was that Watson Watson its Watson okay watch this was the super intelligence that scares him and again I I can't agree with you bill you could at some point just unplugged a dude and and well I just think about the Colossus project Forbin the Colossus project mm-hmm and so this is where these the two superpowers on earth have nuclear arsenals they controlled by computers say they connect the two computers and thenö trouble and Sue and so you try to unplug it but they have their own nuclear reactors that run them these are the movie wargames like all over it yeah yeah what was before wargames yeah yeah and so in a movie but the deal is that running a nuclear power plant is not straightforward it takes some somebody shoveling the coal or rate we're going to stuff around in the waste in the pile yes yeah so so there's also much much ado about the singularity rakers walls and I got to get him on Startalk because I don't I'm just not with him on this well I don't want to bad-mouth him unless he's spitting them for everybody but I think bad-mouthed me back how does this happen to you Neal when I do a college talk somebody asked me about the singularity I know and people computer is as smart as a human right then this would be always plugged in and has no arms or legs right and does something right right somehow what is it good they're gonna chase you down the street like what's it gonna do well no it's going to actually get the machines to do its bidding for yes it'll like in Terminator all your thermostat and your self-driving car I'm cool with that but this notion that somehow the world is fundamentally different before and after but the single historical standpoint I could buy it no will be different but we're not gonna be it's not we're gonna be running out of the screaming out of the out of the apartment know what when machines took over our physical labor did we say oh my gosh this is a crazy day no no it happened slowly and we're fine right now we got people repairing machines you know so and they're still artisans carving the thing we got to get him on the show I want to get him on the show and then we'll give up this our mind but we can't leave people freaked out over the fate of the machines that we create and their capacity to turn us into domesticated pets let's find out if Elon has any positive talks about the future at all thank God I'm quite optimistic about the future I mean I don't think we're about to enter a Dark Age it could happen but it's not I think not likely anytime soon no before you get to Mars hopefully not before gets Mars but bear in mind that part of the act of trying to get to Mars is a force to keep us out of the dark ages I mean this always a chance that something calamitous could happen to us either a natural man-made catastrophe suddenly we see that in the fossil record and we've invented all sorts of ways of doing ourselves in that the dinosaurs didn't have and we haven't managed to stall of the asteroid problem so therefore our risk is higher okay sure people realize this if you haven't solved the problems that of course the prior extinctions and you've added new ones you've not improve the situation and that's sort of where we are right now and any other people better some really smart people that are a lot more pessimistic than I am like you know there's Stephen Hawking's of the world and Martin Rees they're all astronomer they're all quite pessimistic I'm a naturally optimistic person but I do think that there's value in establishing life insurance which if life as we notice on more than one planet then the light of consciousness as we know it is likely preserved into the future for much longer of consciousness no this is a beautiful talk was optimistic oh you know the thing that took out the dinosaurs that still a thing and by the way will probably take ourselves out before that and that's still a thing but you guys back in the day there were no humans when the ancient dinosaurs were taken out yeah there's no evidence that the ancient times first had a space program at all they didn't have opposable thumbs doesn't seem like they did and so we have that leg up also there are going on nine billion people if you kill almost everybody through extraordinary means somebody's gonna leak through much more easy to leak through here on earth and on here's what I'm saying you want to become a multi-planet species whatever effort that takes I've said this before it seems that would be less effort to select the asteroid yeah then to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there yeah I'm with you on that deflect the damn asteroid get all the other board terraform Mars you have the power to fix Earth yeah Martian atmosphere is getting scraped off all the time so I'm saying let's fuse you the most we got it we got to wrap it up what fears you the most the dark sorry I go with the simple stuff it's the truth look the monster under your bed alright bill but future the most climate change then asteroids you know I fear the most what that we lack the wisdom to understand our own fate so that we then become victims of it rather than conquerors this sounds like those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it it's a version of that

https://youtu.be/TDm6Snkle70

I can't imagine someone who enjoys cars and building cars and building self-driving cars and figuring out where the future of cars is going to go and has broken every rule in building cars and somehow managed to have created just an amazing company I still remember the first car I bought from him my only question for Elon at the time was are you gonna be around to service this car if something happened to it and he says no trust me and look what happened what an amazing achievement I have all three versions of his cars it just gets better and better not only does it get better and better each version gets better and better it just delights me to no end when I get an OTA in the morning you know and I read it oh wow all these features I didn't even pay for it I'm not suggesting that I'm willing to pay more for it but ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen please welcome Tesla CEO founder Elon Musk you wanna come on up I've never seen anybody walk this low how are you welcome welcome guys Elon Musk now now I you know we made it a point not to not to rehearse anything and so as I just want to just as a just a reminder you're you're my last thing okay okay could you not ruin the whole thing all right all right so remember no speaking of that speaking of that I think everybody would like to before we get into all of the good stuff okay and they want to go directly to the juicy stuff okay okay and the juicy stuff is this look you know you were quote as a saying that that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear weapons and I said potentially and and well it goes on it goes on in this go on yes you said you say that it's like summoning the demon it could be how do you consolidate rationalize the that conflict between artificial intelligence of course deep learning that that obviously is going to be very important to self-driving cars how do you think through that well I don't think we have to worry about autonomous cars because that's sort of like a narrow form of AI and it's not not something I think is very difficult actually I think the to do autonomous driving to a degree that's much safer than a person is much easier than people think and yeah I I'm I think it's gonna just become normal like if you're like an elevator like nobody's to have elevator operators and then we you know we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just to automatically come to the floor that you you're at and you can just press the button even that nobody needs to operate the elevator if the car is just gonna be like that and the elevators these days are even smart I mean it knows it knows where to position an elevator so so that if you were to need an elevator it's pretty close to you cars in the future will be pretty smart about that too yeah you'll be able to tell your car like take me go here go there anything and it'll just do it yes yeah I did an order-of-magnitude safer than a person mm-hmm and in fact in the in the distant future I think it's probably going to be if people may outlaw driving cars mm-hmm because it's too dangerous like you can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine now if we if we have the right type of intelligence in a car we we also don't have to make the cars that heavy I would think you know cars are getting heavier and heavier and it's got more and more stuff in it because it needs to survive all these incredible collisions and things like that if I wonder if if we were to design cars that that just simply don't collide as much I wonder if we could we could relax on some of those laws and and yeah make cars more fuel efficient and lighter and better to drive you could definitely do that if you could count on not I'm not having an accident then you can get get rid of a huge amount of the crash structure and the airbags and it'll be we're a long way from that because there's always gonna be some for a very long time there'll be some amount of legacy cars on the road and I think it is important to just appreciate the size of the automotive industrial base like it's not as though like when somebody makes an autonomous car that suddenly all the cars will be autonomous it's like there's 2 billion of them ok so the but the total total number of cars and trucks on the road is 2 billion and climbing the capacity of car and truck production is about a hundred million a year so if tomorrow all cars were autonomous it would take 20 years to replace the fleet assuming the fleet stay at the same size arguably it could get smaller if things are autonomous but still it's it's still you know maybe 15 years or something and it's not all gonna transition immediately it'll take quite a while so I mean and it's the same for electrification of cars changing that industrial base to be electric I mean if if all-cause were suddenly four cars produced were electric tomorrow it would still take 20 years to replace the fleet and right now it's less than 1% so now you you uh you're you mentioned just now about about self-driving cars being easier than people think now you have a your vision of how to go from where we are today now my model my p85d has Lane detection and so it gets a little you know when I get close to a door lane yeah it detects the the the speed signs and then uses a uses computer vision technology to do that and but and that's today's a dance what is your what is your roadmap you know how is that different than other people's roadmap how do you think about how to get to self-driving cars yeah well you you kind of need the the hardware foundation the sort of sensor and computing foundation and then you can keep uploading new software at least you can with the Tesla because so it's always connected so the car that you have you'll notice that it it's the features of start steadily improving we're now you know have active cruise control so it'll it'll use radar and camera fusion to track the car in front of you it's also looking at at was with of some things that are coming out it's got it looks at the brake lights so it anticipates that the cars got the brake lights are active it's gonna get basically smarter and smarter even with the current hardware suite so the current hardware suite is 360 degree ultrasonic sensors they go up to about just over five meters it's a Ford Cameron a Ford radar so will make but even with just just that sensor suite we can actually make a huge progress in autonomy we can certainly make the car steer itself one on a freeway we're gonna do lane changes it's really autonomy is about what level of reliability and safety do you want even with the current sensor suite we could make the car go fully autonomous but only to but but not to a level of reliability that would be safe and say a complex urban environment at 30 miles an hour where the lane markings out there and children could be playing and things could be coming at you from the side so in order to solve that you need a a bigger sensor suite and you need more computing power and I think what you're doing actually with the tigress in the future is super interesting and will really be a big enabler for autonomous driving so I think you know what videos doing really great stuff on that front I appreciate that yeah so some of the challenges that you see what are the what are some of the technological hurdles that and there's all kinds of researchers in the room there all kinds of engineers in the room what are some what are some of the technological hurdles they need to think are really important for us to go tackle I'm Shirley Shirley we're gonna get to some better cruise controls on highways but beyond that what are some of the things that you would like is to go focus on the tackle for the car industry well it's it you know where it gets tricky is it's just the is that sort of urban environment around 30 or 40 miles an hour so like right right now it's fairly easy to deal with say things that are sub 5 to 10 miles an hour because we can do that do that with the ultrasonics we just make sure it doesn't hit anything you know because you can always just the right thing to do in large like why would you want to hit anything with so at 5 10 miles an hour you can stop within the range of the ultrasonics and that then from let's say 10 miles an hour to you know call it sort of 50 miles an hour that that area in in complex suburban environments that's that's where you can get a lot of unexpected things happening like let's say there's a like a road closure or a manhole cover open children playing is a big issue bicycles once you get above 50 miles an hour and you're in kind of a freeway environment then it also gets easier again like the the the the set of possibilities is much reduced so like that so high highway crews is easy low speed is easy intermediate it was hard and so being able to recognize what what you're seeing and make the right decision in in the suburban environment in that 10 10 miles an hour to 50 mile an hour zone is is the challenging abortion but it but I really think like its I mean I almost this may sound welcome faced by almost view it as like a solve problem like we know exactly what to do and we'll be there in a few years just like Mars but that's it's kind of the the the the the spirit of of innovators send me in a lot of ways in your mind you kind of you kind of see things solvable or arguably arguably solved in and a lot of it is is really about getting there yeah we'll take autonomous cause for granted and in quite a short period of time it's amazing how comfortable you get and how quickly you get comfortable with it so now what about government government policies like one of the things that I would like to do is I would just like to keep working on my email as I'm driving to work sure there's there's a thirty what somebody will do that already like I said I would like to do it without without without breaking the law so where do you okay where do you think government intervention falls in and some of this stuff because you know I obviously have you car drives by itself and it does it even better than people you would like it to drive by itself but largely the laws don't allow you to do that today right absolutely so how do we cross that bridge and how do you think about government intervention regulations right so I think it'll be from the point at which a car is definitely safer than a person but there's probably at least another two or three years after that before regulators will allow that to be the case because they will want to see a large amount of statistical proof that it's not merely as safe as a person but much safer so I think what you can do is you can run run it in shadow mode and essentially say okay this is what the computer would have done in all these circumstances and was there a crash or was there not like what are the false positives felt that false negatives and then you know it's to achieve a large population group and then and then make a really clear statistical argument with the regulator's and then they're gonna digest that observe it for a while see if they agree with it and and then I think they will because the evidence will be overwhelming yeah and the evidence is actually already worked quite overwhelming that if you if you if you would've would have noticed break light in front of you in the highway and you didn't you didn't crash into what we were in collision right a lot of city lies are safe you know ideally ideally hopefully people don't don't overreact with this with this unknown technology and and prematurely regulate nope immature regulations well I mean drinking regulate I was a joke haha I think when it comes to public safety I think there's that there's an argument for being you know quite cautious and and making sure that things are okay before before there's a change and I mean and I don't think it's the case that right now there's a fully autonomous system and regulators are not approving it but that that really be a substitute for people but there will be in a few years we get more computerized technology into these cars and this card becomes really a software-defined car I mean a lot of your engineers are software engineers I mean yeah absolutely one of the great things about Tesla you guys right here in Silicon Valley you're rich with software engineers and and you have that you've got computer sensibility about architecting a computer properly designing the software properly designing the software for many generations of cars or refines and gets better and better and it has been getting better I mean the software from the first time you sent me my Tesla attendant now it's just like unrecognizable software right there's a big improvement so that's what the first thing we try to do is establish the the hardware platform make sure that we have the the sensors and compute power and and so we do that first even though the software is only taking advantage of a small percentage of the sensors and compute power and then we do continuous updates to make the car more and more capable we're gonna see a lot of that happen later this year I didn't have an announcement Thursday morning I would be saying a lot more of it yeah the audience doesn't understand why they have to wait until Thursday morning you tweeted it already you're announcing you're gonna do an OTA what kind of announcement is that I'm gonna do an OTA on on Thursday that's like a new product announcement these days it's just it's just that well it's just saying that there's gonna be a call on Thursday morning and we describe what's gonna be in version 6.2 or anyone who's interested that's so awesome though I'm interested I get excited every time I get an OTA and and it's you know one of the things that was really interesting is in the beginning when we first built the first Tesla together the tegra in it we thought was more than enough and recently you said can we just squeeze more performance out of that platform and it just happened in literally two years you know several versions of your software updates all of us on the computing platform is not powerful enough right and and it's because you want to add more features and a lot of temperatures these days are based on software true yeah and so so I'm one last question and it's it has to do with I guess something that that a lot of people are very concerned about which is your card becomes a software platform and software platforms get hacked how do you think about that how do you think about security and what are some of the things that we could do to try to make make make the car more resilient to two security attacks yeah I think that that becomes really important when the cars are fully autonomous I mean the way the cars work right now every system the car it's assumed could actually have a mechanical failure or some client or or a logic failure a fundamental logic failure so you can always overwhelm the braking of the car with your foot and you can overwhelm the steering wheel with your hands so but but when when there isn't a steering wheel there isn't you know brake pedal or something in the like you know many years from now then it's really really dangerous you know because but even as it is right now where we spend most of our time on is making sure that it's it's very difficult to do a multi-car hack if you have direct access to a car just like if you got direct access to a computer or any even a conventional car you can do a lot of things to it but that's less of a concern than somebody being able to hack an arbitrary car or multiple cars so that's what we focus our energy on is making sure that that in that ways it's a lot like a like a cell phone or a laptop you know you focus on making sure that the kite they count or that it's very difficult for there to be any kind of system-wide hack so we put a lot of effort into that and we have third parties try to attack it and and in certain parts of the the car at the very fundamental level like the drive unit controller or the steering controller have an additional level of security so somebody may be able to you know hack something that's cosmetic but it's much harder to hack something that's that's actually physically dangerous there's multiple levels and so this way of you if you were to able to penetrate maybe the infotainment system it doesn't allow you quickly as a result of that all right I display a funny message or something but it would not you would not be able to then control the steering or the motor yeah well the future of cars is so exciting and the work that you guys are doing are so exciting and it's it's it's great to see you guys pioneering these computerized cars I mean a lot of people think about thinking about Tesla as the electric car and but I think it's obviously more than that it's an electric car but it's a whole computer platform on top of that yeah I think Tesla's retells sort of the leader in electric cars but I think we'll also sort of easily der and autonomous cars at least Thomas cars that people can buy and I mean does anybody's interested in working on autonomous cars we'd love to have you work at Tesla by the way so we're gonna put a lot of effort into automotive autonomous driving because it's gonna be the default thing yeah and it could save a lot of lives yeah save a lot of lives and hopefully hopefully one of these days like it would be nice of invidious campus has no parking lot yeah right it drops us off and and meanders off to a place where the lands a little cheaper and you know and parks a whole bunch of cars there and and when it's time to go home yeah summon at the top it will be extremely transformative that's for sure but yeah I mean when it comes to AI I'm not really worried about some narrow narrow AI like like autonomous cars or like you know a smart the air conditioning unit at the house or something it's more like sort of the deep intelligence stuff that is where we need to be cautious I actually like there's many potential flavors of AI and you know it's odd that we're at we're so close to the advent of AI like it's strange that would be alive in this and this time well come back every year come back every year and you'll see the the work that this this group is gonna do I mean there's so much deep learning work being done here you have you have a lot of engineers here as well at night they're there it's fantastic to see the whole community focused on advancing this field and along the way we're gonna spin off a whole bunch of new capabilities that you know that's gonna make cars just safer and more fun to drive long before we have to get to essentially a self-driving car there's gonna be a lot of versions along the way that's just gonna bring joy to a lot of people yeah absolutely I just hope there's something left for us humans to do well I'm not gonna look but I go of my steering wheel you know I've got mine on it on the craziness mode and the same board steering mode is that the way you have it I don't you you get driven to work now no I well I Drive half the time actually and which mode do you have it in I always have an insane mode yeah all right you love you thank you the engine the engineer of engineers Elon Musk okay let me summarize very quickly we announced four things today we had really exciting show really an exciting event a lot of its gonna focus on deep learning you guys know why now deep learning is so important deep learning is so important to us and the tools that we're going to create so that we can create the future together first I announced tight next the world's fastest GPU I announced digits def box a GPU deep learning platform so that data scientists could plug it in and get right to work Pascal it's going to be ten times faster than Maxwell in deep learning as a result of three fundamental technologies on top of the Pascal architecture 3d memory mixed-mode precision and MV link those three capabilities in on top of the Pascal architecture will give us a 10x boost and then I talked about the Nvidia Drive px a developer's platform that enjoys the ability to bring deep learning to augment today's 8s and start us down the journey of creating more exciting cars in the future a deep learning platform for self-driving cars everybody have a great GTC thank you

https://youtu.be/LeQMWdOMa-A

thank you and good afternoon so we have a lot to cover you lend us a lot of things there is at the moment one of his space ships docked to the space station the dragon spaceship this is the third time that's been docked second commercial one it was launched last week many of you may have followed the launch but there was drama you know there were solar panels and all this kind of stuff we could follow it on your Twitter feed yeah what can you just tell us what it's like to be Elon Musk in the control room during a launch when something happens when there's an issue well it's it's extremely nerve-racking I mean it's but the thing about rocket launch is that all of your work is distilled into these few minutes particularly the first several seconds around the liftoff because the worst thing that can happen with a rocket in a touch word is if if if if you have an engine failure or some some huge failure right above the launch pad and the whole thing can come down with about a million pounds of TNT equivalent and destroy the whole launch pad that would be that that's what's going through my mind in case you're wondering yeah that's actually what I'm thinking about yeah so when it clears the lightning towers and it's gotten further enough away from not actually destroying launch pad they're not then it's that's one sort of go down a notch on you know the fear and anxiety and then after first stage separation that's another one and when the second stage lights up so it's sort of you going down in intensity as the rocket is going up and the the thing is that the first three rocket launches that we had failed okay and if the first one failed quite close to the launch pad almost destroyed the launch pad in fact I spent that day picking up rocket pieces off the reef which is which sucks so I think like there's a pretty powerfully ingrained fear response as a result of that because three in a row just you know and but the images those rocket failure is kind of going through my mind as I'm seeing the rocket launch so that's what's going on and then in this case you've made it through the the stage separation but then there was an issue with the solar cells um tell me a little bit how you sort of spotted the problem diagnosed it what's the team do I mean you've got there in the end but how's it work yeah so the solar panels were actually okay but and the rocket launch went went really well so that was not a problem where things kind of winter I was after spacecraft separation we try to initialize the four thruster pods so there's there's four thruster pods with a combined total of 18 engines and that the system is designed with a huge amount of redundancy so it can take all sorts of failures and still complete its mission that's that's the whole way it's been made in fact it can it can work with even if it has only two of the four thruster pods working yeah it can still complete to a mission so three-word working and that would which was a huge puzzle like what why are three not working because these things are crushed prepped so you kind of think that either maybe one wouldn't work or a crushed draft pair wouldn't work but not three it was really really strange so so we have the spacecraft just going through kind of free drift in space like we're just tumbling and and which makes it also it's also difficult to communicate with because the antennas are like pointing you know every which way you can imagine so we had what we had was was a very slight to kill a bit occasional to kill a bit link that would go in and out and and that was an omnidirectional signal beaming off the nasa tigress satellite system so in order to actually improve the the foot we first had to improve the bandwidth so we actually asked the Air Force we can have some of their long-range telemetry scanners can with what they give us access and we have this communication system they would call the mega proxy so we had to recode the mega proxy to go through the airforce long-range dishes to blaster the spacecraft with enough intensity to be able to upload new code to try to fix the problem and so we wrote some new software to essentially precious Lamb the two of the three oxidizer tanks that were refusing to pressurize and it turned out we I think we figure out foam which is that there's a there was a slight change made to a check valve that was in three of the tanks not and on the other they were able to replicate their problem in the ground later and were able to to basically have the have the system build up pressure upstream then release that pressure and slam the valve so we're trying to give it the sort of the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver basically and and then we got one of the pods - that looked like it was making progress and we didn't want to unfold the solar panels until we had at least two pods active so we could we could go from sort of drifting - to an active hold but then the the temperatures of the solar panels which were in these protective covers was propping and it can drop to like almost absolute zero if it's pointing in it's a dog space so it was dropping dropping dropping and we're like the vocation we better release the solar panels otherwise they could literally freeze in place and so we ran a simulation to see what what would what would happen and it's actually slightly beneficial and it's kind like when a skater you know where the skater puts her arms out it slows down pull them in it speeds up so when actually when the the arms went out when the solar arrays we're not it slowed down the rate of rotation actually slightly helped us with maintaining communication with the spacecraft and so then we're able to with with that pressure slam thing get it get it get apart active then it then then a third one and then a fourth one they've got all four working and we're able to continue the mission talk with the space station in fact dragon is currently duck with the space station right now and if all goes well we'll return to Earth and about to we pursue that sounds terrifying I don't wanna go through that again okay you are not just here in in in Austin first South by Southwest but also to meet with the Texas Legislature to talk about possibly a launch base here in Texas tell us more about that yes so right now we put two main launch locations one is Cape Canaveral in Florida and the other is a Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and so that Cape Canaveral is good for kind of eastward launches Vandenberg for southerly launches and we figure we need a third launch site that's kind of a commercial launch site you know it's not good because Cape Canaveral at Vandenberg Air Force bases which is cool and it's obviously there's an important need for Air Force space launch bases as there is for Air Force airports but then there's also a need for commercial airports and just like you wouldn't expect commercial airliners to land at an Air Force Base in a normal course of events it makes sense to have a commercial spaceport and we need to be able to launch eastward and we want to be close to the equator so that basically means the potential States or Virginia through Texas going south Hawaii and Puerto Rico because the other things when you stay on on u.s. territory is rocket technology like we're doing is considered an advanced witness technology so it's very difficult to export that if you will to other countries and anyway so those are our options right right now Texas is arguably the leading candidate but we need certain legislation passed that's supportive of Space Launch and I think it's particularly controversial there one of the things we need for example is we need to be able to close the beach when we're doing a launch and Texas has the open beaches act I was like okay you know we we can't launch if there's someone right right next to the rocket you know on the beach so that's I don't like said I don't think it's a particularly controversial thing it's pretty straightforward and and then and then we kind of need deliver protection for kind of the one in 10,000 person case who complains about the thing like we had this dude who filed a lawsuit against us for our rocket development site in in Central Texas near Waco he's like not even in the same County he's in a neighboring County and he like also thinks like the CIA is listening to his brainwaves so we need like just a little bit of protection for people like that so we don't like spending a ton of time in court because that's basically what we're asking for slightly nothing major and I think it's likely to move forward so I think you know if if things go as expected there's this it's likely that we'll have a launch site in Texas which I think it'd be really cool around when so it depends on how the environmental approvals going away but I think like well if things go well I mean notable nodal of it's in our hands so for assuming that things go as expected you know there'd be a decision this year and it would start construction next year and then and probably the first launches would take place and from there in two to three years terrific yeah so Falcon 9 with a the rocket that launched a dragon is traditional rocket which is to say it's disposable bits but you're essentially you're ultimately focused on reusable robbery's the name of that can you talk a little bit about what's why reusable what's different about reusable and I think you probably have some things to show as well yeah absolutely so reusability is extremely important if you think it's important that humanity extend beyond Earth and become multi-planet species and all that yeah I mean it's super important I thought so I think it's also incredibly obvious common sense like you can imagine watching like Star Trek and then they got a new starship after every every trip that would be pretty silly and and every motor transport that we're used to like cars planes trains automobiles horses bikes they're all reusable and but but not Rockets and if we can't make Rockets reusable the cost is just prohibitive the the like the cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon 9 is 0.3 percent of the cost of the rocket Wow so it's basically it's a very tiny number it's it's very similar to to an airplane so it's how much does it cost to fuel up an airplane and how much does it cost to buy an aeroplane they're very different things so if if we're if humanity's ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining Basin or the planet it's critical that we solve this problem whether it's SpaceX or someone else someone has a solar problem and we can have a hundredfold reduction in the cost of spaceflight so so that's what SpaceX has been trying to do and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company so so far I've not been very successful in that in that regard so but I think we kind of have a handle on it I think I think we've got a we've got a design that in the simulations in any CAD and so forth it it closes like it should work if we can build that thing it should work and in fact and it may be worth just rolling the reusability videos people have a sense of what I'm talking about I know where that place would find us people in the audience see that all right so what you're seeing here is that the first stage after stage separation the first stage turns around boosts back to the launch pad and then lands propulsively with landing gear it's kind of how often should land that's that's the upper stage this is the this is the quick version of the video obviously and they sing dragon version - so dragon version 2 will land on thrusters with landing gear with the act epic as accurately as a helicopter circling anywhere on earth as with the accuracy of a helicopter one last question about space before we turn to two cars you've talked before about how you decide to get into this you were you founded you know co-founded PayPal you don't really I mean have a physics degree you know something about about you know the underlying mechanics but you didn't have any space experience right you decided I think on a train to go to Mars and decided that you could out-compete NASA or that you could get to Mars you could get to space faster cheaper better than the one of the largest the largest Space Agency in the world how did you get that confidence well I think first I should say maybe give some of a preface to what happened before starting SpaceX in fact the way I sort of got into space was introduced I was really disappointed that we had not sense anyone to Mars that would not progress beyond Apollo and I kept waiting for when we would and it just didn't happen year after year and and so afraid mine asked me about what I wanted to do after PayPal and I said well you know it was curious about space but I don't think about that there was anything I could do do in space and I went to the NASA website to just see when are we going to Mars and I couldn't find find that out I thought maybe it was there but I well hidden or something but so so that then I thought well perhaps this is a question of of will is there sufficient will to do this and in the first idea I came up with was actually to do a philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated gel that would hydrate upon landing and you'd have this cool greenhouse these green plants on a red background they'll be the money shot and and and then you know people like presidents and superlatives so be the first plant first life on another planet furthest the life's ever traveled and and that would get people excited and you will learn about a lot about what to support earth lands earth plants in a greenhouse on Mars the the whole purpose of that was to get people excited about sending people to Mars and increased NASA's budget so that was my whole goal I was gonna basically torch yeah it it was not had nothing to do with competing with NASA in fact my goal was to increase their budget and and I should say that today NASA is our biggest customer we've got almost 50 launches and about a quarter of those of for NASA but 3/4 3/4 commercial but one quarter NASA and NASA has been incredibly supportive and helpful and we wouldn't be where we are today with that without the help in Asus it really got night through with competing with NASA it's really just about what do we need to do to have an exciting inspiring future in space that that's that's what I think really matters at the end of the day you didn't end up raising the fund the money to pay NASA to the mission you end up doing building your own company and and ideally to do it cheaper than government's good yeah so as able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft and the greenhouse on the communication system way less than it normally would cost for such a thing I got stuck on the rocket and I went to to Russia three times to try to buy a couple of their biggest ICBMs this is about this is in 2001 late 2001 in 2002 it was definitely an interesting experience and I sort of got the feeling I could avoid the nuke - but I don't don't want to go there and then when I go back from the third trip to Russia that that's when I thought okay look even if we do even if we buy these these ICBMs from russia i-i-i i thought i'd i thought my initial supposition was wrong and so what I thought really was that we'd lost the world to explore that we'd lost the world to push the boundary and Anna and in retrospect that was actually a very foolish error because the United States is a nation of explorers the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration it's ludicrous to actually in retrospect - made such an assumption but people need to believe that it's possible and that it's not going to be it's not gonna bankrupt them it's not they're not gonna have to give up something important like health care you know it's going to be a cost that isn't gonna meaningfully affect their their standard of living and I think the United States would absolutely be super super excited about sending people to Mars and people I think a lot of people really wish that that would occur anyway so that was that was what I came to conclusion of and I thought well if if we don't make a difference in the cost of the rocket of the transport system it's all it doesn't matter it's it's not like it's not a question of well it's a question of way and so that's when I came back and started SpaceX but when I started SpaceX there wasn't with the perspective of like we'll just you know take over the world and withwith awesome rockets I don't know what the I was doing I was like clueless I thought the most likely outcome was that we were failed and the first three Rockets did fails and you put all your money into it between Tesla SpaceX and SolarCity : yeah that wasn't the plan at the beginning by the way okay and Peter tail says we don't think big anymore you must have conversations with him about that well you know Peters been a big supporter actually so he's he invested in SpaceX at a very important time in 2008 before we reached over so after a third failure but before our first success so you know big credit to Peter and Luc no stick and the other guys found respond basically my my buddies from PayPal but buddies from PayPal saved my butt you know it's really really good so let's talk about cars many many in the audience may recollect the notorious New York Times review of the Model S yes exactly of the Model S earlier this year yeah and your reaction to that review and The Times reaction to your reaction and and and the effect on your share price and orders and all that sand without rehashing the review or the facts I'd like you to just a post-mortem the entire experience wait do I know can I do a post-mortem without any facts post mortem your reaction okay to the review and what you know put you on the couch and what would you do differently today having seen the way it all played out well I think I think there's one thing I didn't do and maybe still which is to post the the the rebuttal to the rebuttal cuz I I withheld that and waited for the public editor I sent that information to the public editor waited for her to do her thing and she came down kind of on the side of Tesla with respect to the fact that the article was an error but but disagreed upon the motive on the ethics yes and because you impugn both facts and ethics I did yes and and and I think it was I think it was a call it a low-grade ethics violation not like a big one I don't think he thought he was doing anything particularly terrible mm-hmm and I would call it a low grade look great violation and not part of the Jayson Blair you know crazy fabrication variety but I would call it a lower grade it was not in good faith if that that's that's that's an important point and and I probably should have posted that rebuttal to make that clear but I didn't do it that's what I regret so the only change you would make is that the very last bit the rebuttal that you wrote but has not been published you would get maybe I should you would get out there yeah see you would continue to use the same language in the same way I just think the language was inaccurate I really don't you fall you've often said that one of your management techniques one of the secrets of your success is that you listen to need negative feedback yes was the times review not didn't fall into the category of negative feedback I have no problem with negative feedback I have a problem with nor do I have a problem with critical reviews a matter of fun with critical reviews I would spend all my time battling critical reviews there have been hundreds of negative articles hundreds and yet I've only spoken out a few times I I don't have a problem with critical reviews I have a problem with false reviews all right one of the technologies that you had to you know basically develop to near perfection or at least or at least work on hardest was lithium batteries for the electric cars or run on looking batteries safety has always been an issue accidents etc recently Boeing had fires what they're looking at batteries and bees and the Dreamliner is now at a service because of that you volunteered to help the Boeing executives I guess diagnose and redesign yeah can you talk a little bit about what they did wrong what you would have done differently and and what do you think that if the future of you know Boeing and others airline batteries are gonna be sure well first of all on the very front I mean obviously even though SpaceX and Boeing compete on the space side we've no competition on the commercial airliner side and some of the comments that I made about Boeing if somehow be interpreted as an attack on Boeing when it is in fact not an attack on Boeing the the only reason I actually I mean the main reason I should say I offered to help was that there's a friend of mine Richard Branson who's whose airline is suffering as a result of this both him and I on fire and he was mentioning that he's losing hundreds of millions his boards airline is as a result of this was problem I said well I think we could probably help and then he so he said are great well let me connect you with the chief engineer for the 787 I said cool we're happy to help so you know provided some some advice and hopefully that'll be helpful and I said we're also happy to actually do the solution if you want and haven't taken us up on that offer but we were happy to help either in an advisory capacity or to do the solution whatever would result in the 787 getting back to flight sooner we're trying to be productive and helpful so I mean I think in the case of the battery boeing doesn't have a ton of in-house battery expertise so they they outsource the the battery and then you had a whole bunch of kind of nested outsourcing where the answer was the battery system and then and then that got outsourced to another company then to another company and there's a whole bunch of other companies and and you're like four layers deep before you actually got to any hardware and so that resulted and I think and a kind of a breakdown of communication I mean from an architectural standpoint the fundamental issue is that the AI is that I think is that the cells are too big the battery cells are too big and the gaps between the battery cells are not big enough hmm the problem with with a big battery cell is that the thermal pathway is is in a worst-case scenario is very long so you say well if there's a hot spot in the battery can it get its heat out and if it's deep in a cell it can't you can't do that and it's also hard to thermally condition the cells but the life of the pack will be will be dependent upon on the temperature would the average and not the average temperature but the worst temperature at any point in any cell so you want to really even that temperature that's why Tesla is a fan of having lots of small cells and then actively cooling each cell to keep the temperature even and make sure that if hot spots of this develop that's a very short pathway to the cooling system and again and it could you know take care of it and you also want to make sure that it's I'm again quite technical here sorry it's it's passive propagation proof so so if you even if you're active cooling system fails and you get them or run away in a cell that then we run event can't cascade into a neighboring cell so and you get the thermal double domino effect right I mean it's not super complicated so so it just if if you have big cells what big gaps and ideal you what you don't want big cells if you do you want big gaps small cells small gaps I mean so I mean this is this is really important because because I'm the whole thing about this new generation of airplanes that they're light they use composites they use electronics rather than mechanical systems and so electricity drives the whole thing so basically my understanding is that you need lithium batteries in the sky it just doesn't work any other way and your point is it can be done Oh Tony can be done yeah like the themes getting a bit of a bad name here the theme is obviously the way to go maybe people have lithium-ion batteries in their cell phones and their laptops I mean I don't think anyone's panicking here with the fact that they're gonna look in mind battery you know next to a sensitive region of probably of their body you know got it once of just staying on on on power for one last set of questions before we before I return to you your life which seems insane it is the same you're also a chairman of Solar City which I believe is America's largest solar installer you know so space transportation energy picking off the big ones there now you know solar got a bad name over the last few years because of the Solyndra meltdown etc but yeah in my sense the people different are not differentiating between the making of solar cells and using a solar cell right and and the Chinese competition and the glutton of the market on the supply side is what Solyndra what gots Linda in trouble they couldn't compete with the falling prices but you're a consumer of solar cells right so how do you see you know Chinese Chinese competition and sort of the glut of solar solar cells on the market what's that give you I mean I think what China's doing in the solar panel arena is awesome because they're lowering the cost their solar power for the world and they have these huge Giga factories that they created outlet in the Chinese desert and with with a ton of funding from the Chinese government so it's like a giant donation from the tiny Chinese government like thanks that's awesome you know and you know people sort of complain about a Solyndra but I mean obviously anyone who's been involved in the venture world knows that you don't bet a thousand there's some companies that die the only reason we know about cilinders because it became a political football right and I mean there are other solar panel manufacturers are still doing reasonably well but but but it is tough when you're competing I mean I think good rule of thumb was don't is don't compete with China and with a commodity product you know you're really asking for for trouble if you can that in that scenario and and it's really super easy to make fifteen percent efficient or standard efficiency solar panels it's super easy it's like these are the making freakin drywall at this point so it's like does anybody think we should be competing with China in drywall manufacturing okay probably not so so that's the thing so and that the the hard part of Seoul power is not the panel it's actually the whole system it's basically designing something that's gonna fit on particular rooftop because all you have all these heterogeneous rooftops you've got a you've got to mount the system you've got to wire it up to get it connected the inverter is connected to the grid I'm gonna do all the permitting I mean it's a bunch of like thorny unglamorous stupid problems but if somebody doesn't optimize them they're still gonna cost a ton of money and and a lot of them are really not they're not fun problems today they're not you know exciting promise to optimize but but they are the problems that actually matter in the cost of of solar power so it's really more like you know like like a Roofing Contractor than it is I mean what you're doing is you're putting a second roof on a building yeah okay so and you got to do it at scale and then you've got to manage all these systems because there's still some I mean even though the after-sales service is small when you've got like hundreds of thousands of systems best low-light to manage and and so what solar city really is is a giant distributed utility and it's working in partnership with the house in business and in competition with the the big sort of monopoly utility I mean I think it's like literally power to the people okay it's like literally I think it's really awesome because utility just never had any competition before yeah and and now they're like deaf to actually think about the cost of power and they're got better ways to do it and that kind of thing I think it's really great and the credit there is really due to Lyn and Peter I've co-founders I mean I've thrown a few ideas every now and then but mostly it's just about showing up at the board meeting to hear the good news those guys are just doing session or some job so you are CEO and CTO of SpaceX so not just running the company Bergersen chief technology officer as well yeah you are CEO and chief product designer for Tesla so not just running the company but designing the cars yeah and you're chairman of Solar City right what is your life like it's it's very busy and I'd actually like to take it down just to Scrooge honestly because they're all they're always I mean these things that the last few years have been really really great but then there were a number of years that suck horribly and I'd like to just not have it be so extreme and like last year was a year of great achievement but honestly I didn't have that much fun it sucked I didn't have that much fun um when year's resolution was to have a little bit more fun this year so hey I'm it's off myself with ya and you have five children dude they're awesome kids are awesome by the way you guys should all have kids kids are great how much do you see them III didn't see them enough actually but but I what I find is that I'm able to be with them and still be on email because they don't need like constant interaction except when we're talking directly so I find I can be with them and still be you know working at the same time but I are you think you can do email while you're with your children yeah absolutely sure Wow we got all the time but a lot of the time that's why I tend to have a phone you can sort of you do email in in interstitial moments in the absence of that I would not be able to get my job done well that's impressive we are I have five children I can't do email while I'm with my children it's not the children and it's really not good for the email I do have to have a nanny there otherwise they'll kill each other so yeah um we are going to turn to audience questions at this point just a reminder that if you tweet your questions to hashtag ask musk there's a team in the back that will be selecting the other ones that we have already covered and it seemed interesting and I get them in front maybe you can see them as well so us the first one from David solace yes when it comes to researching analyzing entrepreneurial opportunity how do you go about qualifying or legitimizing presumably the idea well I'm not sure I'm the best guide here because things that I've chosen have not been up to I've not been trying to optimize on a risk-adjusted return basis so there are like I would not say that I went into the rocket business the car business or the solo business thinking that it's a it's a great opportunity I just thought that that something needed to be done in in these industries in order to make a difference and that's why I did it so but in general I do think it's worth thinking about like what you whether what you're doing is gonna result in disruptive change or not if it's just incremental it's unlikely to to be something major it's got to be something that's substantially better than than what's gone on before that Q's up our next question really well this is from a Craig look Legree's space automotive finance energy you've disrupted major industries what would you do if you had a free rein over education well I think that the way that we currently do education is is wrong and we're when you see something like the Khan Academy and so I think that's probably going in the right direction I mean generally you want education to be like as close to a video game as possible like a good video game like you do not need to tell your kid to play video games they will play video games on autopilot all day so if you can make it interactive and engaging then then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do so I think that's how it should be and it shouldn't be that you got like these grades where people move in lockstep and so everyone goes through you know goes like normally you will go through English math science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it's an assembly line but but people are not objects on an assembly line that's a ridiculous notion people learn and are interested in different things at different paces so you really want to disconnect the whole grade level three of the thing from the subjects allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or interested in in each subject it seems like a really obvious thing I mean I think like most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville where and it's and as a result just not that compelling it's like somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row they're not necessarily all that engaged or in doing it and you compare that to say Batman The Dark Knight okay and they but like the world's best special effects you've got the world's best director screenwriter multiple cuts amazing you know editing and and and and and and that's amazing but but I imagine if instead you had like the local town aspiring actor do the one-person play version of that that would not be compelling yeah do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessary nests of university higher education I don't actively I do agree with Peters a point that a university education is often unnecessary that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people but I think you've probably learn about as much but the vast majority what you're gonna learn there in the first two years and most of it is from your classmates because you can always buy the textbooks and just read them like nobody stopping you from doing that or go online oh go online so now for a lot of companies they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end and that's actually what's important to them so it really depends on what somebody's goal is if the goal is to start a company I would say no point in finishing college in my case I had to otherwise I'd get kicked out of the country yeah so that was important but although you went on and got a master's degree as well right I I came out to Silicon Valley to do a PhD at Stanford in Applied Physics and material science to work on ultra capacitors for used in electric cars and that's what I was going to do and then I started put that on hold to start a company but since I already had my under undergrad I could then get an h-1b visa and I can I think so h-1b visa requires a degree but other than that I would have if that wasn't the case I probably would have just stopped education sooner did you not go to Wharton for yeah yeah the dual undergraduate physics and business at Wharton I say yeah but it was undergrad but not masters understood another question from the audience to Dan Griffiths fill on the blank you will be disappointed if blank does not happen in your lifetime well probably the most thing I've disappointed us if if humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime I'd be really disappointed that would be you know that probably my biggest disappointment and yeah I think I think that's the thing I'm most concerned about because because we're at this or obviously that's what SpaceX is working on so I'm not trying to be self-serving here but it's just I kind of worry that we've hit this if I don't know whether our technology level will keep going or subside and for the first time in four and a half billion years the technology level is at the point where we can extend life to another planet make life multiplanetary and I I think it's too easy to take for granted that it's going to stay above that level and if it doesn't and it falls below that will it return who knows you know the Sun is gradually expanding and in about you know roughly 500 million years maybe a billion years at the outside the oceans will boil and and then we know no meaningful life on Earth I mean might be like some you know chemo trove sort with or ultra-high temperature bacteria or something but nothing that can make a spaceship and and that's it like if you think it's like maybe it's the five million time frame that's only a ten percent increase in the life of lifespan of Earth so if if if humanity had taken an extra ten percent longer to get here it wouldn't have gotten here at all yeah and so far we haven't seen any signs of life from other worlds that we have we haven't detected anything I hope yeah hopefully we do and hopefully it's not a warship coming towards us but I just think that that's the thing that really concerns me we need to get this done and then that is the best thing we can do to ensure the continued existence of humanity so that's why I would say that's the most important thing do you personally do you personally want to step foot on Mars I do personally want to step foot on Mars but honestly I would be doing this even if there was no even if I knew there was no chance of me going to Mars because I think blech said it I think it's just important that we are in a path to getting there so I would like to go at some point I'll go if I'm certain that SpaceX will be fine without me and that that path will continue that may have heard me some people may have heard the joke I made before which is like you know I I wouldn't have to be I would like to die on Mars just not on impact not the question from the audience that we just we just lost lost that one there was like I don't remember who would ask this question but the question was which when I mean which do you think is going to have more impact on the world SpaceX or Tesla well I think if we look back or with historians if I would look back on the impact of Tesla in many years from now I think it would be that Tesla hopefully the Tesla advanced the advent of sustainable transport by something like a decade maybe maybe two decades but I do think electric cars are inevitable in fact I think all modes of transport will go fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets and so that's that's what I think and then for Solar City perhaps something similar on the energy production side sustainable energy production then for SpaceX hopefully SpaceX to both develops the technology necessary to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars and I mean I think that's you know a bigger impact but or other the what so city and and tears are about are solving what I think is the most pressing terrestrial concern which is this sustainable production and consumption of energy for helping solve it I mean they have many people solving it and then what SpaceX is about is helping solve the biggest non-terrestrial problem which is the extension of life beyond Earth so that those are how I see it we have two related questions one that's no longer on the screen but and another one that is that the first was what was the best advice you ever got and the second and you've maybe can join them in your answer is you mentioned working with your friends Peter Thiel and Richard Branson who influences and inspires you sure well I I'm inspired by a lot of historical figures like one of my favorite guys is Ben Franklin you know I think he's you know he's a really good guy I mean he was a scientist and he also I mean it worked in obviously publishing and the political sphere but it kind of like he's just thought about like what are the problems that need to get solved and worked on those names justic seemed like a good guy all around sorry I like him and and I like just historical figures like in science and literature and I'm gonna huge fan of Churchill and and obviously like Tesla we named Tesla after Nikola Tesla better than most murders you know and I actually haven't named any product or company after myself but but that maybe gives a sense of like I've I think like Tesla is someone who deserves a lot of recognition and sorry what was their well they're all dead I don't any yeah I mean I think there's a friend of mine a Larry Page I think what Larry's doing and Sergey at Google I'm really admire what they've done I think most he's recently dead but Steve Jobs Peters or in Maya Steve Jobs I think Jeff business is doing some great things among others competing with you yes but that's a good thing in fact every time I see Jeff is list I say why aren't you doing more in space yeah yeah yeah the other half the question was the best advice you've ever got best advice I ever got well I think the you know the physics training is a very good training where it's a good framework for reasoning we you're trained to think about first principles and reason from there and that means boiling things down to the most fundamental truths and then connecting those truths in a way to try to understand how reality is because you know physics has this problem where they're trying to figure out things that are totally counterintuitive and so they had to have a framework for forgetting they're like quantum mechanics is incredibly counterintuitive but it's true and so you had so the physics developed a framework for figuring out things that aren't obvious and that's why I think it's it's it's a lot of advice but it's it's it's the right framework and then just in general critical thinking is good you know examining whether you have the correct axioms are the most applicable axioms does the logic necessarily connect and then what are the what are the range of probable outcomes outcomes are usually not deterministic they're they're they're a range and so you want to figure out what those probabilities are and make sure ideally that you're the house you know it's fine to take it's fine to it's fine to gamble as long as you're the house and you know and the so that is is to listen to critical feedback which we alluded to earlier voice oolitic solicit critical feedback particularly from friends because generally they will be thinking it but they won't tell you the question here from a Giles of songs any news or development on your Hyperloop idea and you might explain what your Hyperloop idea is haha well what I've said is that I'm putting the Hyperloop stuff on hold until I get Tesla to profitability because I think if I was an investor in Tesla and they heard me sort of spouting off about the Hyperloop before I got the company profitable they were like hey you know go go do it go do your job so that's what I'm doing I think once Tesla isn't it you know has been profitable maybe for at least for a quarter maybe two quarters then I'll I'll talk about the Hyperloop I think it could be an interesting way to I mean it would be interesting way to travel really quickly from one city to the next quickly explain just in one sense what a Hyperloop is huh well it would be something that would be let's say twice as fast as a plane at least in terms of total transit time maybe a little faster it would be immune to weather incapable of crashing pretty much unless there's like a terrorist attack and the ticket price would be like I would say half that of a plane so it'd be better in every way train of some sort though it's kind of it's it's not exactly a train it would be a different it would be a new mode of transportation that doesn't currently exist terrestrial terrestrial yeah okay underground above-ground could go either a kind of subway perhaps I think it's I think it's the capital cost to be less if it's mostly about ground but you can go underground to all right maybe last question what's the biggest mistake you've ever made and this is from Alexi Hill was the biggest mistake you've ever made and how did you move forward looking back was it really that big a deal biggest mistake I've made lots of mistakes some of them were pretty big I mean it's hard to say because things have worked out pretty well in the end so how how big of a mistake could it have been as the question is really really asking you know I did lots of dumb things in my first company and at PayPal and you know I think I think sometimes yeah I don't know there's so many I like God I'm hard pressed to say this is this is the biggest one you know this one or two okay first okay sure so they're the biggest mistake in general that I've made I'm trying to correct for that is to put too much of a weighting on somebody's talent and not enough on their personality and I've made that mistake several times in fact then I would say like gee I mean I'm not gonna make that mistake in then it would make it a game and and I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart it really does and I've made them I've made the mistake of thinking that sometimes it's just about the brain on that heartfelt note we're done thank please join me in thanking you you

https://youtu.be/H7Uyfqi_TE8

JEAN LEGALL: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Jean LeGall. I'm President of the French Space Agency and the President elect of the International Astronautical Federation, and it is my pleasure to welcome you here at the 67th International Astronautical Congress. Elon Musk is founder, C.E.O., and lead designer of SpaceX. Elon founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing space technology and ultimately enabling humans to become a multiplanetary species, and that's the plan he's going to lay out for us today. SpaceX has had a number of firsts including as the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station and the first entity to land a nautical thrust booster back on land and on ships out at sea. Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk. [APPLAUSE]. ELON MUSK: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. I look forward to talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture. And what I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go. And is there really a way that anyone can go if they wanted to? I think that's really the important thing. So, I mean, first of all, why go anywhere? Right? I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multiplanet species, which I hope you agree that is the right way to go. Yes? [APPLAUSE]. That's what we want. [APPLAUSE]. Yeah. So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city, a city that is not really an outpost but can become a planet in its own right and thus we can become a truly multiplanet species? You know, sometimes people wonder, Well, what about other places in the solar system? Why Mars? Well, just to sort of put things into perspective, this is -- this is what -- this is an actual scale of what the solar system looks like. So we're currently in the third little rock from the left. That's Earth. Yeah, exactly. And our goal is to go to the fourth rock on the left. That's Mars. But you can get a sense for the real scale of the solar system, how big the sun is and Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus. And then the little guys on the right are Pluto and friends. This sort of helps to see, it's not quite to scale, but it gives you a better sense for where things are. So our options for going to -- for becoming a multiplanet species within our solar system are limited. We have, in terms of nearby options, we've got Venus. But Venus is a high-pressure -- super high-pressure hot acid bath. So that would be a tricky one. Venus is not at all like the goddess. This is not in no way similar to the actual goddess. So it is really difficult to make things work on Venus. Mercury is also way too close to the sun. We could go potentially on to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out, much further from the sun, a lot harder to get to. Really, it leaves us with one option if we want to become a multiplanet civilization, and that's Mars. We could conceivably go to our moon, and I have nothing against going to the moon, but I think it's challenging to become multiplanetary on the moon because it's much smaller than a planet. It doesn't have any atmosphere. It's not as resource rich as Mars. It has a 28-day day, whereas the Mars day is 24 1/2 hours. And in general, Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to a self-sustaining civilization. Just to give some comparison between the two planets, there are actually -- they're remarkably close in a lot of ways. In fact, we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth. And, in fact, if we could warm Mars up, we would, once again, have a thick -- a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. So, where things are right now, Mars is about half again as far from the sun as Earth. So it has decent sunlight. It's a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere which, in the case of Mars being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. And it has nitrogen, too, which is also very important for growing plants. It will be quite fun to be on Mars, because you will have gravity which is about 37% that of Earth, so you will be able to lift heavy things and bound around and have a lot of fun. And the day is remarkably close to that of Earth. So we just need to change that bottom row, because currently we have 7 billion people on Earth and zero on Mars. So there's been a lot of great work by NASA and other organizations in early exploration of Mars and understanding what Mars is like, where could we land, what's the composition of the atmosphere, where is there water, or ice, we should say. And we need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city. The issue that we have today is that if you look at a Venn diagram, there's no intersection of sets of people who want to go and can afford to go. In fact, right now you cannot go to Mars for infinite money. Using traditional methods, you know, if taking sort of a holistic style approach, an optimistic cost number would be about $10 billion per person. For example, the Apollo program, the cost estimates are somewhere between $100 billion to $200 billion in current-year dollars, and we sent 12 people to the surface of the moon, which was an incredible thing and I think probably one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But that's -- that's a steep price to pay for a ticket. That's why these circles only just barely touch. So you can't create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion a person. What we need is a closer -- is to move those circles together. And if we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to a median house price in the U.S., which is around $200,000, then I think the probability of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high. I think it would almost certainly occur -- not everyone would want to go. In fact, I think a relatively small number of people from Earth would want to go. But enough would want to go and who could afford the trip that it would happen. And people could get sponsorship. And I think it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved up and this was their goal, they could ultimately save up enough money to buy a ticket and move to Mars. And Mars would have labor shortage for a long time so jobs would not be in short supply. But it is a bit tricky because we have to figure out how to improve the cost of trips to Mars by 5 million percent. So this is -- this is not easy. I mean, it's -- and it sounds like virtually impossible but I think there are ways to do it. This translates to an improvement of approximately 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. These are the key elements that are needed in order to achieve the 4 1/2 order of magnitude improvement. Most of the improvement would come from full reusability, somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 orders of magnitude. And then the other two orders of magnitude would come from refilling in orbit, propellant production on Mars and choosing the right propellant. So I'm going to go into detail on all of those. Full reusability is really the super hard one. It's very difficult to achieve reusability for even an orbital system, and that challenge becomes even substantially greater for a system that has to go to another planet. But as an example of the difference between reusability and expendability in aircraft -- and you can actually use any form of transport. You could say a car, bicycle, horse. If they were single-use, almost no one would use them. It would be too expensive. But with frequent flights, you can take something like an aircraft that costs $90 million and if it was single use, you would have to pay half a million dollars per flight. But you can actually buy a ticket on Southwest right now from L.A. to Vegas for $43, including taxes. So that's -- I mean, that's a massive improvement. Right there it's showing a four order of magnitude improvement. Now this is harder -- the reusability doesn't apply quite as much to Mars because the number of times they can reuse the spaceship is -- the spaceship part of the system is less often because the Earth-Mars rendezvous only occurs every -- every 26 months. So you get to use the spaceship part roughly every two years. Now, you get to use the booster and the tanker as frequently as you'd like. And so it makes -- that's why it makes a lot of sense to load the spaceship into orbit with essentially tanks dry and have it have really quite big tanks that you then use the booster and tanker to refill while it's in orbit and maximize the payload of the spaceships that when it goes to Mars, you really have a very large payload capability. So as I said, refilling in orbit is one of the essential elements of this. Without refilling in orbit, you would have a half order of magnitude impact roughly on the cost. By "half order of magnitude," I think the audience mostly knows, but what that means is each order of magnitude is a factor of ten. So not refilling in orbit would mean a 500%, roughly, increase in the cost per ticket. It also allows us to build a smaller vehicle and lower the development cost, although this vehicle is quite big. But it would be much harder to build something that's five to ten times the size. And it also reduces the sensitivity of performance characteristics of the booster rocket and tanker. So if there's a shortfall in the performance of any of the elements, you can actually make up for it by having one or two extra refilling trips to the spaceship. So this is -- it's very important for reducing the susceptibility of the system to a performance shortfall. And then producing propellants on Mars is actually also very obviously important. Again, if we didn't do this, it would have at least a half order of magnitude increase in the -- in the cost of a trip. So 500% increase in the cost of the trip. And it would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just kept staying on Mars and not going back to Earth. you would have this, like, massive graveyard of ships. You would have to, like, do something with them. So it really wouldn't make sense to -- to leave your spaceships on Mars. You really want to build a propellant plant on Mars and send the ships back. So and Mars happens to work out well for that because it has a CO2 atmosphere, it's got water rights in the soil, and with H2O and CO2 you can produce CH4, methane, and oxygen, O2. So picking the right propellant is also important. Think of this as maybe there's three main choices. And they have their merits, but kerosene or rocket propellant-grade kerosene which is also what jets use. Rockets use a very expensive form of highly refined form of jet fuel essentially which is a form of kerosene. It helps keep the vehicle size small, but because it's a very specialized form of jet fuel, it's quite expensive. Your reusability potential is lower. Very difficult to make this on Mars, because there's no oil. So really quite difficult to make the propellant on Mars. And then propellant transfer is pretty good but not great. Hydrogen, although it has a high specific impulse, is very expensive, incredibly difficult to keep from boiling off because liquid hydrogen is very close to absolute zero as a liquid. So the insulation required is tremendous, and the cost of -- the energy cost on Mars of producing and storing hydrogen is very high. So when we looked at the overall system optimization, it was clear to us that methane actually was the clear winner. So it would require maybe anywhere from 50 to 60% of the energy on Mars to refill propellants using the propellant depot. And just the technical challenges are a lot easier. So we think -- we think methane is actually better on just really almost across the board. And we started off initially thinking that hydrogen would make sense, but ultimately came to the conclusion that the best way to optimize the cost per unit mass to Mars and back is to use an all-methane system, or technically deep-cryo Methalox. So those are the four elements that need to be achieved. So whatever system is designed, whether by SpaceX or anyone, we think these are the four features that need to be addressed in order for the system to really achieve a low cost per -- a cost per ton to be of service on Mars. This is a simulation about the overall system. (Music). (Video). [APPLAUSE]. So what you saw there is really quite close to what we will actually build. It will look almost exactly what you saw -- like what you saw. So this is not an artist's impression. The simulation was actually made from the SpaceX engineering CAD models. So this is not -- you know, it's not just, well, this is what it might look like. This is what we plan to try to make it look like. In the video, you got a sense for what this system mock architecture looks like. The rocket booster and the spaceship take off, loads the spaceship into orbit. The rocket booster then comes back. It comes back quite quickly, within about 20 minutes. And so it can actually launch the tanker version of the spacecraft, which is essentially the same as the -- as the spaceship but filling up the unpressurized and pressurized cargo areas with propellant tanks. So they look almost identical. This also helps slow the development cost, which obviously will not be small. And then the propellant tanker goes up. It will go -- actually, it will go up multiple times, anywhere from three to five times, to fill the tanks of the spaceship in orbit. And then once the spaceship is -- the tanks are full, the cargo has been transferred, and we reach the Mars rendezvous timing, which as I mentioned is roughly every 26 months, that's when the ship would depart. Now, over time there would be many spaceships. You would ultimately have, I think, upwards of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, if you have seen that thing. Good show. So it's a bit like that. But it actually makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you have got two years to do so and then make frequent use of the booster and the tanker to get really heavy reuse out of those. And then with the spaceship you get less reuse because you have to prepare for how long is it going to last? Well, maybe 30 years. So that might be 12 to maybe 15 flights with the spaceship at most. So you really want to maximize the cargo of the spaceship and use the booster and the tanker a lot. So the ship goes to Mars, gets replenished, and then returns to Earth. So going into some of the details of the vehicle design and performance -- and I'm going to gloss over -- I'll only talk a little bit about the technical details in the actual presentation, and then I'll leave the detailed technical questions to the Q and A that follows. This is to give you a sense of size. It's quite big. (Laughter). [APPLAUSE]. The funny thing is in the long-term, the ships will be even bigger than this. This will be relatively small compared to the Mars interplanetary ships of the future. But it kind of needs to be about this size because in order to fit a hundred people or thereabouts in the pressurized section plus carry the luggage and all of the unpressurized cargo to build propellant plants and build everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to you name it, we need to carry a lot of cargo. So it really needs to be roughly on this sort of magnitude, because if we say like the -- that same amount of threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars for civilization would be a million people. If you only go every two years, if you have a hundred people per ship, that's 10,000 trips. So I think at least a hundred people per trip is the right order of magnitude, and I think we may actually end up expanding the crew section and ultimately taking more like 200 or more people per flight in order to reduce the cost per person. But it's -- you know 10,000 flights is a lot of flights. So you really want ultimately on the order of a thousand ships. It will take a while to build up to a thousand ships. And so I think if you say, When would we reach that million-person threshold? From the point at which the first ship goes to Mars, it's probably somewhere between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous. So it's probably somewhere between maybe 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars. So that's sort of the cross-section of the ship. In some way, it's not that complicated, really. It's made primarily of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon fiber part is tricky when dealing with deep cryogens and trying to achieve both liquid and gas impermeability and not have gaps occur due to cracking or pressurization that would make the carbon fiber leaky. So this is a fairly significant technical challenge, to make deep and cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber. And it's only recently that we think the carbon fiber technology has gotten to the point where we can actually do this without having to create a liner, some sort of metal liner, quad liner on the inside of the tanks, which would add mass and complexity. It's particularly tricky for the hot gaseous oxygen pressurization. So this is designed to be autogenously pressurized, which means that the fuel and the oxygen, we gasify them through heat exchanges in the engine and use that to pressurize the tanks. So we will gasify the methane and use that to pressurize the fuel tank. Gasify the oxygen. Use that to pressurize the oxygen tank. This is a much simpler system than what we have with Falcon 9, where we use helium for pressurization and we use nitrogen for gas thrusters. In this case, we would autogenously pressurize and then use gaseous methane and oxygen for the control thrusters. So really, you only need two ingredients for this, as opposed to four in the case of Falcon 9 and actually five if you consider the ignition liquid. It's sort of a complicated liquid to ignite the engines. That isn't very usable. In this case we would use spark ignition. So this gives you a sense of vehicles by performance, sort of current and historic. I don't know if you can actually read that. But in expandable mode, the vehicle, of course, we are proposing would do about 550 tons and about 300 tons in reusable mode. That compares to satisfy max capability of 135 tons. But I think this really gives a better sense of things. The white bars show the performance of the vehicle; in other words, the payload-to-orbit of the vehicle. So you can see essentially what it represents is what's the size efficiency of the vehicle. And most rockets, including ours -- ours as they're currently flying -- the performance bar is only a small percentage of the actual size of the rocket. But with the interplanetary system which we will initially use for Mars, we've been able to -- or we believe massively improve the design performance. So it's the first time a rocket's sort of performance bar will actually exceed the physical size of the rocket. This gives you a more direct sort of comparison. This is -- the thrust that is quite enormous, talking about liftoff thrusts of 13,000 tons. So it's quite tectonic when it takes off. But it is -- it is a fit on Pad 39A, which NASA has been kind enough to allow us to use, where -- because they somewhat oversized the pad in doing Saturn 5 and, as a result, we can actually do a much larger vehicle on that same launch pad. And in the future, we expect to add additional launch locations, probably adding one on the south coast of Texas. But this gives you a sense of the relative capability, if you can read those. But these vehicles have very different purposes. This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people, ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. So you really need something quite large in order to do that. So talk about some of the key elements of the interplanetary spaceship and rocket booster. We decided to start off the development with what we think are probably the two most difficult elements of the design. One is the Raptor engine. And this is going to be the highest chamber pressure engine of any kind ever built and probably the highest thrust-to-weight. It's a full-flow staged combustion engine which maximizes the theoretical momentum that you can get out of a given source fuel and oxidizer. We subcool the oxygen and methane to densify it. So compared to when -- propellants normally use close to their boiling point in most rockets. In our case, we actually build the propellants close to their freezing point. That can result in a density improvement of up to around 10 to 12%, which makes an enormous difference in the actual results of the rocket. It also makes the -- it gets rid of any cavitation risk for the turbo pumps and it makes it easier to feed a high-pressure turbo pump if you have very cold propellant. Really one of the keys here, though, is the vacuum version of Raptor having a 382-second ISP. This is really quite critical too to the whole Mars mission. And we can get to that number or at least within a few seconds of that number, ultimately maybe exceeding it slightly. So the rocket booster in many ways is really a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster. You will see a lot of similarities, such as the grid fins. Obviously clustering a lot of engines at the base. And the big difference really being that the primary structure is an advanced form of carbon fiber as opposed to limited lithium and that we use autogenous pressurization and get rid of the helium and the nitrogen. So this uses 42 Raptor engines. It's a lot of engines, but we use an I.N. on the Falcon 9. And with Falcon Heavy, which should launch early next year, there's 27 engines on the base. So we've got pretty good experience with having a large number of engines. It also gives us redundancies. So that if some of the engines fail, you can still continue the mission and be fine. But the main job of the booster is to accelerate the spaceship to around 8 1/2 thousand kilometers an hour. For those that are less familiar with orbital dynamics, really it's all about velocity and not about height. So really that's the job of the booster. The booster is like the javelin thrower. You've got to toss that javelin, which is the spaceship. In the case of other planets, though, which have a gravity well which is not as deep, so Mars, the moons of Jupiter, conceivably maybe even one day Venus -- the -- well, Venus will be a little trickier. But for most of the solar system, you only need the spaceship. So you don't need the booster if you have a lower gravity well. No booster is needed on the moon or Mars or any of the moons of Jupiter or Pluto. You just need the spaceship. The booster is just there for heavy gravity wells. And then we've also been able to optimize the propellant needed for boost-back and landing to get it down to about 7% of the liftoff prop propellant load. We think with some optimization maybe we can get it down to about 6%. And we also are now getting quite comfortable with the accuracy of the landing. If you have been watching the Falcon 9 landings, you will see that they are getting increasingly closer too to the bull's-eye. And we think, particularly with the addition of additional -- with the addition of some thrusters and maneuvering thrusters, we can actually put the booster right back on the launch stand. And then those fins at the base are essentially centering features to take out any minor position mismatch at the launch site. So that's what it looks like at the base. So we think we only need to gimbal or steer the center cluster of engines. There's seven engines in the center cluster. Those would be the ones that move for steering the rocket, and the other ones would be fixed in position, which gives us the best concentration of -- we can max out the number of engines because we don't have to leave any room for gimbaling or moving the engines. And, like, this is all designed so that you could actually lose multiple engines even at liftoff or anywhere in flight and continue the mission safely. So for the spaceship itself, in the top, we have the pressurized compartment. And I'll show you a fly-through of that in a moment. And then beneath that is the -- is where we would have the unpressurized cargo, which would be really flat packed in a very dense format. And then below that is the liquid oxygen tank. The liquid oxygen tank is probably the hardest piece of this whole vehicle because it's got to handle propellant at the coldest level and the tanks themselves actually form the air frame. So the air frame structure and the tank structure are combined, as it is in all modern rockets. And in aircraft, for example, the wing is really a fuel tank in wing shape. So it has to take the thrust loads of ascents, the loads of reentry, and then it has to be impermeable to gaseous oxygen, which is tricky, and non-reactive to gaseous oxygen. So that's the hardest piece of the spaceship itself, which is actually why we started on that element as well. And I'll show you some pictures of that later. And then below the oxygen tank is the fuel tank, and then the engines are mounted directly to the thrust cone on the base. And then there are six of the vacuum -- the high efficiency vacuum engines around the perimeter, and those don't gimbal. And then there are three of the sea-level versions of the engine which do gimbal and provide the steering. Although we can do some amount of steering if you're in space with differential thrust on the outside engines. The net effect is a cargo to Mars of up to 450 tons, depending upon how many refills you do with the tanker. And the goal is at least 100 passengers per ship. Although I think we will see that number grow to 200 or more. This chart is a little difficult to interpret at first, but we decided to put it there for people who wanted to watch the video afterwards and sort of take a closer look and analyze some of the numbers. The column on the left is probably what's most relevant. And that gives you the trip time. So depending upon which Earth-Mars rendezvous you are aiming for, the trip time at 6 kilometers per second departure blast speed can be as low as 80 days. And then over time, I think we could probably improve that. Ultimately, I suspect that you would see Mars transit times of as little as 30 days in the more distant future. It's fairly manageable, considering the trips that people used to do in the old days would routinely take sailing voyages that would be six months or more. So on arrival, the heat shield technology is extremely important. We have been refining the heat shield technology using our Dragon spacecraft. We are now on version 3 of PICA, which is the phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator. And it's getting more and more robust with each new version, with less ablation, more resistance, less need for refurbishment. The heat shield is basically a giant brake pad. How it's like how good can you make that brake pad against the extreme conditions and the cost of refurbishment and make it so you could have many flights with no refurbishment at all. This is a fly-through of the crew compartment. I just want to give you a sense of what it would feel like to actually be in the spaceship. I mean, in order to make it appealing and increase that portion of the Venn diagram of people who actually want to go, it's got to be really fun and exciting, and it can't feel cramped or boring. But the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so you can do zero-G things, you can float around. It would be like movies, ElectroPuls, cabins, a restaurant. It will be, like, really fun to go. You are going to have a great time. (Laughter). So the propellant plant on Mars, again, this is one of those slides that I won't go into in detail here, but people can take that offline. The key point being that the ingredients are there on Mars to create a propellant plant with relative ease, because the atmosphere is primarily CO2 and there's water ice almost everywhere. You've got the CO2 plus H2O to make methane CH4 and oxygen O2 using the Sabatier reaction. The trickiest thing really is the energy source, which think we can do with a large field of solar panels. So then to give you a sense of the cost, really the key is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go. And we think, based on this architecture, this architecture, assuming optimization over time, like the very first flights would be fairly expensive. But the architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000, maybe as less -- maybe as little as $100,000 over time, depending upon how much mass a person takes. So we're right now estimating about $140,000 per ton to the trips to Mars. So if a person plus their luggage is less than that, take into account food consumption and life support, then we think that the cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000. So funding, talking about funding sources. So we have steel underpants; launch satellites; send cargo to space station; Kickstarter, of course; followed by profit. So obviously it's going to be a challenge to fund this whole endeavor. We do expect to generate pretty decent net cash flow from launching lots of satellites and serving the space station for NASA, transferring cargo to and from space station, and then I know there's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars and then perhaps there will be interest on the government sector side to also do that. Ultimately, this is going to be a huge public-private partnership. And I think that's -- that's how the United States was established, and many other countries around the world, is a public-private partnership. So I think that's probably what occurs. And right now we're just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available and just sort of keep moving both forward. And, hopefully, I think as we -- as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream, it is something that can be made real, I think the support will snowball over time. And I should say also the main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. So I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary. [APPLAUSE]. Time lines. Not the best at this sort of thing. But just to show you where we started off. In 2002, SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band. That was it. That's all of SpaceX in 2002. As you can see, I'm a dancing machine. And, yeah, I believe in kicking off celebratory events with mariachi bands. I really like mariachi bands. But that was what we started off with in 2002. And really, I mean, I thought we had maybe a 10% chance of doing anything, of even getting a rocket to orbit, let alone getting beyond that and taking Mars seriously. But I came to the conclusion if there wasn't some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars. Because, you know, in '69 we were able to go to the moon and the space shuttle could get to low-Earth orbit, and then after the space shuttle got retired. But that trend line is down to zero. So I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem that it improves. And there are many examples in history where civilizations have reached a certain technology level and then have fallen well below that and then recovered only millennia later. So we go from 2002 where we're basically -- we're clueless. And then with Falcon 1, the smallest useful little rocket that we could think of which would deliver a half a ton to orbit, and then four years later we developed the -- we built the first vehicle. So we dropped the main engine, the upper stage engine, the air frames, the fairing and the launch system and had our first attempt at launch in 2006, which failed. So that lasted about 60 seconds, unfortunately. But it's 2006, four years after starting, is also when we actually got our first NASA contract. And I just want to say I'm incredibly grateful to NASA for supporting SpaceX, you know, despite the fact that our rocket crashed. Of course, I'm NASA's biggest fan. So, you know, thank you very much to the people that had the faith to do that. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]. So then 2006, followed by a lot of grief. And then, finally, the fourth launch of Falcon 1 worked in 2008. And we were really down to our last pennies. In fact, I only thought I had enough money for three launches and the first three bloody failed. And we were able to scrape together enough to just barely make it and do a fourth launch. And thank goodness that fourth launch succeeded in 2008. That was a lot of pain. And then also at the end of 2008 is when NASA awarded us the first major operational contract, which was for resupplying cargo to the space station and bringing cargo back. Then a couple years later we did the first launch of Falcon 9, version 1. And that had about a 10-ton-to-orbit capability. So it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1, and also was assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft. Then 2010 is our first mission to the space station. So we were able to finish development of Dragon and dock with the space station in 2010. so -- Sorry, 2010 is expendable Dragon -- expendable Dragon. 2012 is when we delivered and returned cargo from the space station. 2013 is when we first started doing boat take-off and landing tests. And then 2014 is when we were able to have the first orbital booster do a soft landing in the ocean. The landing was soft. The (inaudible) exploded. But the landing -- for seven seconds, it was good. And we also improved the capability of the vehicle from 10 tons to about 13 tons to LEO. And then 2015, last year, in December, that was definitely one of the best moments of my life when the rocket booster came back and landed at Cape Canaveral. That was really ... [APPLAUSE]. Yeah. So that really showed that we could bring an orbit-class booster back from a very high velocity all the way to the launch site and land it safely and with almost no refurbishment required for reflight. And if things go well, we're hoping to refly one of the landed boosters in a few months. So, yeah -- and then 2016, we also demonstrate landing on a ship. The landing on the ship is important for the very high-velocity geosynchronous missions. And that's important for reusability of Falcon 9 because about roughly a quarter of our missions are sort of servicing the space station. But then there's a few other low-Earth-orbit missions. But most of our missions, probably 60% of our missions, are commercial geo missions. So we've got to do these high-velocity missions that really need to land on a ship out to sea. They don't have enough propellants on board to boost back to the launch site. So looking into the future, next steps, we were kind of intentionally a bit fuzzy about this time line. But we were going to try to make as much progress as we can. Obviously, it's with a very constrained budget. But we are going to try to make as much progress as we can on the elements of interplanetary transport booster and spaceship, and hopefully we'll be able to complete the first development spaceship in maybe about four years and start doing suborbital flights with that. In fact, it has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit if you limit the amount of cargo with the spaceship. Well, you have to really -- you have to really strip it down. But in tanker form, it could definitely get to orbit. It can't get back, but it can get to orbit. Actually, I was thinking like maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world, provided we can land somewhere where noise is not a super big deal, because rockets are very noisy. But we could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest. So most places on Earth would be maybe 20, 25 minutes. So maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of, you know, say -- off the coast of New York, say 20, 30 miles out, could you go from New York to Tokyo in, I don't know, 25 minutes; across the Atlantic in ten minutes. Really most of your time would be getting to the ship, and then it would be real quick after that. So there's some intriguing possibilities there. Although, we're not counting on that. And then development of the booster -- we actually think the booster part is relatively straightforward because it's -- it amounts to a scaling up of the Falcon 9 booster. So there's -- we don't see a lot of sort of show-stoppers there. Yeah. But then trying to put it all together and make this actually work to Mars, if things go super well, it might be kind of in the ten-year time frame. But I don't want to say that's when it will occur. It's, like, this huge amount of risk. It's going to cost a lot. Good chance we don't succeed, but we're going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible. And we're going to try to send something to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from here on out. So Dragon 2, which is a propulsive lander, we plan to send to Mars in a couple years, and then do probably another Dragon mission in 2020. In fact, we want to establish a steady cadence, that there's always a flight leaving, like there's a train leaving the station. With every Mars rendezvous we will be sending a Dragon -- at least a Dragon to Mars and ultimately the big spaceship. So if there's a lot of interest in putting payloads on Dragon, you know you can count on a ship that's going to transport something on the order of at least two or three tons of useful payloads to the surface of Mars. [APPLAUSE]. That's part of the reason we designed Dragon 2, to be a propulsive lander. As a propulsive lander, you can go anywhere in the solar system. So you can go to the moon. You can go to -- well, anywhere, really. Whereas, if something relies on parachutes or wings, then you can pretty much only -- well, if it's wings, you can pretty much only land on Earth because you need a runway, and most places don't have a runway. And then anyplace that doesn't have a dense atmosphere, you can't use parachutes. But propulsive works anywhere. So the Dragon should be capable of landing on any solid or liquid surface in the solar system. I was real excited to see that the team managed to do the -- all our Raptor engine firing in advance of this conference. I just want to say thanks to the Raptor team for really working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the presentation, because I really wanted to show that we've made some hardware progress in this direction. And the Raptor is a really tricky engine. It's a lot trickier than Merlin because it's a full-flow stage combustion, much higher pressure. I'm kind of amazed it didn't blow up on the first firing. Fortunately, it was good. It's kind of interesting to see the mock diamonds forming. [APPLAUSE]. And part of the reason for making the engine sort of small, Raptor, although it has three times the thrust of a Merlin is only about the same size as a Merlin engine because it has three times the operating pressure. That means we can use a lot of the production techniques that we've honed with Merlin. We are currently producing Merlin engines at almost 300 per year. So we understand how to make rocket engines in volume. Even though the Mars vehicle uses 32 on the base and 9 on the upper stage, so we are at 51 engines to make -- that's well within our production capabilities for Merlin. And this is a similarly sized engine to Merlin except for the expansion ratio. So we feel really comfortable about being able to make this engine in volume at a price that doesn't break our budget. We also wanted to make progress on the primary structure. So, as I mentioned, this is really a very difficult thing to make, to make something out of carbon fiber. Even though carbon fiber has incredible strength-to-weight, when you want to then put super cold liquid oxygen or liquid methane -- particularly liquid oxygen -- in a tank, it's subject to cracking and leaking, and it's very difficult to make. Just the sheer scale of it is also challenging, because you've got to lay out the carbon fiber in exactly the right way on a huge mold, and you've got to cure that mold at temperature. And then -- it's just hard to make large carbon fiber structures that could do all of those things and carry incredible loads. So that's the other thing we want to focus on is the Raptor and then building the first development tank for the Mars spaceship. So this is really the hardest part of the spaceship. The other pieces we have a pretty good handle on. But this was the trickiest one. We wanted to tackle it first. You get a size for how big the tank is, which is really quite big. Also big congratulations to the team that worked on that. They were also working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the IAC. We managed to build the first tank, and the initial tests with the cryogenic propellants actually look quite positive. We have not seen any leaks or major issues. This is what the tank looks like on the inside. So you can get a real sense for just how big this tank is. It's actually completely smooth on the inside, but the way that the carbon fiber plies lay out and reflect the light makes it look faceted. So then what about beyond Mars? So as we thought about the system -- and the reason we call it a system, because generally I don't like calling things systems because everything is a system, including your dog -- is that -- is that it's actually more than a vehicle. There's obviously the rocket booster, the spaceship, the tanker, and the propellant plant, the in situ propellant production. If you have all of those four elements, you can actually go anywhere in the solar system by planet hopping or moon hopping. So by establishing a propellant depot on -- in the asteroid belt or on one of the moons of Jupiter, you can go to -- you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter no problem. In fact, even from -- even without a propellant depot at Mars, you can do a fly-by of Jupiter without a propellant depot. So -- but by establishing a propellant depot, let's say, you know, Enceladus or Europa or -- there's a few options, and then doing another one on Titan, Saturn's moon, and then perhaps another one further out on Pluto or elsewhere in the solar system, this system really gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system. So you can actually travel out to the Kuiper belt or the Earth cloud. I wouldn't recommend this for interstellar journeys, but this -- just this basic system, provided we have filling stations along the way, is -- means full access to the entire greater solar system. [APPLAUSE].

https://youtu.be/tnBQmEqBCY0

today we have Elon Musk Eon thank you for joining us thanks having right so we want to spend the time today talking about your view of the future and what people should work on so to start off could you tell us you famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on um if you were 22 today what would the five problems that you would think about working on B well first of all is it I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society I think that's a good thing like it doesn't have to change the world like you know if you make something that has high value to people and frankly even if it's something if it's like just a little game or you know the some improvement in photo-sharing or something if it if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people that's I mean I think that's that's fine like stuff doesn't need to be change the world just to be good but you know in terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the the future of humanity I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity so it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way but that is something that if you if you could look into a crucible and enter the future you would like you would like that outcome because it is something that could go could go wrong and as we've talked about many times and so we really need to make sure it goes right that's that's I think AI working on ai and making sure it's great future that's that's the most important thing I think right now the most pressing item sec then obviously I think Institute with with genetics if you can actually solve genetic diseases if you can promote dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that that was genetic reprogramming that would be wonderful so I think this genetics it might be the sort of second most important item I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain like we're currently bandwidth-limited we have a digital tertiary self in the form of our email capabilities like computers phones applications we're effectively superhuman but we're extremely bad with constraint in that interface between the cortex and your sort of that the tertiary digital form of yourself and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be I think very important for the future as well so one of the I think most common questions I hear young people and bishops young people ask is I want to be the next to go musk how do I do that um obviously the next Elon Musk will work on very different things then than you did but what have you done or what did you do when you were younger that you think sort of set you up to have a big impact well I think this well I should say that I do not expect to be involved in all these things so the the the five things that I thought about the time in college still quite a long time ago 25 years ago you know being you know making life multiplanetary selling accelerating the transition to sustainable energy the the Internet broadly speaking and then genetics and AI I think I didn't expect to be involved in in all of those things I actually at the time in college I sort of thought helping with electrification a bit of cars which was how we start out and that's a that's actually what I worked on as an intern was advanced ultra capacitors with to see thick there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage and in cars and then when I came out to go to Stanford that's what I was going to be doing my grad studies on is it was working on her best at energy storage technologies for electric cars and I put that on hold to start an Internet company in 95 because that that does seem to be like a time for particular technologies when there at a steep point in the inflection code and and I didn't want to you know do a PhD at Stanford and then and what sure will happen and then and I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed I can get you can get a you know doctrine on many things that ultimately are not do not have a practical bearing on the world and I wanted to you know just I really was just trying to be useful that's the optimization it's like what do what can I do that would actually be useful do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs um mostly not so what what is the best some yes but mostly not how should someone figure out how they can be most useful whatever this thing is that you're trying to create what would what would be the utility Delta compared to the current state-of-the-art times how many people it would affect so that's why I think having something that has that that has a mix makes a big difference but effects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great as is something that makes even a small difference but but affects a vast number of people like the area yeah on you know under the yeah exactly the area under the curve is would actually be roughly similar for those two things so it's actually really about yeah just trying to be useful and matter when you're trying to estimate probability of success so you say something will be really useful good area under the curve I guess to use the example of SpaceX mmm-hmm when you made the NGO decision that you were actually going to do that this was kind of a very crazy thing at the time very crazy there shortly yeah I'm not shy about saying that but I kind of agree I agreed with them that it was quite crazy crazy if if the objective was to achieve the best risk adjusted return sliding our company is insane but that was not that was not my objective why I I'd totally come to the conclusion that if something didn't happen to improve ROC technology would be stuck on earth forever and and the big aerospace companies had just had no interest in radical innovation all they wanted to do is try to make their old technology slightly better every year and in fact sometimes we would actually get worse and particularly in Rockets is pretty bad like the in 69 we were able to go to the moon with a Saturn 5 and then the space shuttle could only take people to low-earth orbit and then the Space Shuttle retired and that trend is basically trends to zero it feels I think technology just automatically gets better over year but I actually doesn't it only gets better if smart people work work like crazy to make it better that's how any technology actually gets better and by itself technology if people don't work and it actually will decline you can look at the history of civilizations many civilizations and look at say ancient Egypt were they able to pull these incredible pyramids and then they basically forgot how to hold permit and and then even hieroglyphics they forgot how to read hydrocal hieroglyphics so we look at Rome and how they will to look to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing and they forgot how to do all of those things and there are many such examples in history so I I think choice bear in mind that you know entropy is not on your side yeah one thing I really like about you is you are unusually fearless and willing to go in the face of other people telling you something that's crazy and I know a lot of pretty crazy people you still stand out where does that come from or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea where do you get the internal strength to do that well first of all I'd say I actually think I feel feel fair quite strongly so it's not as though I just have the absence of fear I've I feel it quite strongly but there are times when something is important enough you believe in it enough that you do it in spite of the fear so speaking of important things like people shouldn't think I I I should if you think well I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it it's normal to be to feel fair like you'd have to definitely something mentally wrong you should feel fair so you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know actually something that can be helpful as fatalism some degree if you just think it's just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear so my starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose lose everything but that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward so that were still do some good yeah same with Tesla I thought your odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low what do you think the odds of the Mars colony are at this point today well um oddly enough I actually think they're pretty good so like when can I go okay at this point I am certain there is a way I'm certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self-sustaining moss colony in fact growing lost colony I'm certain that that is possible whereas until maybe a few years ago I was not sure that success was even one of the possible outcomes it's a meaningful number of people going to Mars I think this is potentially something that can be accomplished in about 10 years maybe sooner I mean maybe 9 years I need to make sure that SpaceX doesn't die between now and then and that I don't die or if I do die that someone takes over who will continue that you shouldn't go on the first launch yeah exactly like the first launch will be a robotic anyway so I want to go except for that internet latency yeah they were at latency to be pretty significant I Mars is roughly 12 light minutes from the Sun and Earth is 8 light minutes so closest approach Mazdas 4 light minutes away that furthest approaches 20 a little more because you have to you can't sort of talk directly through the Sun speaking of really important problems um AI so you have been outspoken about AI um could you talk about what you think the positive future for AI looks like and how we get there okay I mean I do want to emphasize that um this is not really something that I advocate or this is not prescriptive this is simply pretty hopefully predictive as you look so I'm Sayla well like this is something that I want to occur instead of so this I mean I think that probably is the best of the available alternatives the best of the available alternatives that I can come up with and maybe somebody else can come up with a better approach or better outcome is that we achieve democratization of AI technology meaning that no one company or small set of individuals has control over advanced AI technology like that that's very dangerous it could also get stolen by somebody bad you know like some evil dictator or country could send their intelligence agency to go steal it and gain control it just becomes a very unstable situation I think if you've got any any incredibly powerful AI you just don't know who's who's going to control that so it's not as I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat I think it's more that's the consumers that some someone may use it in a way that is bad or and even if they weren't going to use in a way that's bad but somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that's bad that that I think is quite a big danger so I think we must have democratization of AI technology make it widely available and that's you know the reason that obviously you mean the rest the team you know created open AI was to help with the democracy our a AI technology so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few and but then that of course that needs to be combined with solving the high bandwidth interface to the cortex humans are so slow humans are so slow yes exactly but you know we already have a situation in our brain where we've got the cortex and limbic system and the limbic system is kind of a mess that's the primitive brain it's kind of like the your instincts and whatnot and then the cortex is thinking of a part of the brain those two seem to work together quite well occasionally your cortex and limbic system may disagree but they attending it works pretty generally works pretty well and it's like rare to find someone who I've not found someone who wishes to either get rid of the cortex or get rid of the Olympic system very true yeah it's that's unusual so so I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving that the neural link between your cortex and the your digital extension yourself which already likes that already exists just has a bandwidth issue and then then effectively you become an AI human symbiote and and if that then is widespread with anyone who wants it can have it then we solve a control problem as well we don't have to worry about some sort of evil dictator AI because kind of we are the AI collectively that seems like the best outcome I can think of so you've seen other companies in the early days that start small and get really successful um hope I don't regret asking this on camera but how do you think open AI is going as a six month old company I taste you go pretty well I think we've got a really talented group what opening eye and yeah really really talented team and they're working hard open a is structured as see a 501c3 nonprofit but you know many nonprofits do not have a sense of urgency it's fine they don't have to have a sense of urgency but opening ideas is I think people really believe in the mission I think it's important and it's about minimizing the risk of existential harm in the future and so I think it's going well I'm pretty impressed with what people are doing in the talent level and obviously we're always looking for great people to join we call a mission list of 40 people knots yes well well alright just a few more questions before we we wrap up how do you spend your days now like what what do you allocate most of your time to my time is mostly split what's between SpaceX and Tesla and of course I I try to spend it's a part of every week at opening I so I spend most I spend basically half a day at opening I most weeks and then and then I have some open enough that happens during the week but other than that it's really traceable interlaced like so Tesla like what is your time look like there yeah so it's a good question um I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business II things but actually almost almost all my time like 80% of it is spent on engineering design in engineering and design so it's developing next generation product at that's 80% of it you probably remember this a very long time ago many many years you took me on a tour of SpaceX and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it I don't think many people get that about you yeah I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something it just fine like business is fine but um a guy it really it's you know it was like it SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell was chief operating officer she kind of manages legal finance sales and kind of general business activity and then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving that the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the most colonial architecture I mean that Tesla it's working on the model 3 and yes I'm in the design studio to agree up happening a week dealing with its aesthetics and and look and feel things and then most of our week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory because the biggest epiphany I've had thus this year is that what really matters is that is the machine that builds the machine the factory and this that is at least towards my to eat harder than the vehicle itself it's amazing to watch the robots go here and these cars just happen yeah now this actually is has a relatively low level of automation compared to what the gigafactory will have and what model 3 will have what's the speed on the line of these cars actually average the line is incredibly slow it's probably about a both X and s it's maybe a 5 you know 5 centimeters per second and what can you go this is very slow or what would you like to get to I'm confident we can get to to at least 1 meter per second so 20-fold increase that would be very fast yeah um at least I mean I think quite a 1 meter per second just put that in perspective is a slow walk or a good medium speed walk a fast walk could be 1 and 1/2 meters per second and and then the fastest humans can run over 10 meters per second so if we're only doing point zero five meters per second that's very slow current current flow speed and and at 1 meter per second you can still walk faster than the production line

https://youtu.be/wsixsRI-Sz4

and let me start by saying we're very glad you're here safe and sound thanks had to circulate I was flying I flew here with the landing gear down because it was like some kind of landing gear issue landing gear was stuck there's some kind of warning light my pilot said that if they were attracted the landing gear it may not go back down again so so this happily Festo even happens to you yeah so anyway we're happy to wait for you and then we're glad you got here safe thanks having me it's great to see you guys thank you for coming I really appreciate it you kept your promise which was nice I think you were drunk when you promised me but that's okay I'll take it so you know in a couple of years since you've come you've done some astonishing things in in terms of substantive stuff with your with both of your companies let's start talking about space and what you've been doing there obviously you've had some success landing the landing the rocket you've had you know you've done a bunch of other things that where people thought you weren't going to be successful talk a little bit about sort of the progress you think you've made with SpaceX sure well I mean there's a lot of things where I think I didn't think would be successful so the the plate and the most significant thing is being able to land in an orbit class rocket Bruce stage and and bring it both back to Cape Canaveral on land on land and be able to land on a drone ship out in the ocean the there is a bit of an education process that's needed to understand orbital dynamics because a lot of people can confuse of like why the heck are you landing our ship landing a rocket in a on a ship in the ocean that seems pretty inconvenient and that the reason is because that going up and staying up is actually about velocity horizontal to the US service so there's a huge difference between space and/or space and or and orbit it like space you could think of as like say being the international waters boundary for the Pacific Ocean like if you go you know 100 miles offshore you're technically out of coastal waters now you're in the Pacific so it's like technically you're in the Pacific but but it's but orbit is like circumnavigating the globe it's a really giant difference and the the reason that things go up and stay up is because you're zooming around the earth so fast that your outward radial acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity and so those balance out and you have a net zero gravity so when you see the space station the thing this little little sort of counterintuitive is that the space station is actually zooming around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour even though it seems like it just seems really still you know but it's moving really really fast I'm going to put that into perspective a bullet from a 45 gun handgun is is just below the speed of sound so the space station is going more than 25 times faster than that and that's what's needed actually to go up and stay up and that's why that's why that is the term escape velocity not escape altitude there's no such thing as an escape altitude there's only an escape velocity you need to be a certain speed to escape the gravity of the earth yeah you can think of gravity is kind of a funnel in space time so I think I'd like a coin funnel like it really it's very much like that in you know but it's obviously a sort of a four-dimensional coin funnel but if you if you spin or spin a marble or a coin on the corn funnel but when it's when it's far out it sort of spins slowly and then as it gets closer its bends faster and faster and if you want if you want if you were to start at the bottom of the coin funnel and you wanted to to to exit you'd spin it horizontally and it would spin out and and and that's really how you how you get to orbit yeah so how does the gravity well is like a funnel why you want to land on the ownership in the ocean because in order to get to orbit you all that matters is your horizontal velocity your altitude is just really matter in fact the the the force of gravity at say the so nominal boundary of space 100 kilometers is almost exactly the same as it is in the strips the earth he said like if it's a few percent lower than the surface the earth so in order to go up and stay up the only thing that matters is how fast are you going horizontal to the Earth's surface so you have that outward radial acceleration or thing about like New York tetherball or something like that it's really that outward acceleration is the thing that matters and so when the rocket is going to orbit the only reason that's going up is to get out of the thick part of the atmosphere because that at high velocity the atmosphere is thick as molasses and so it goes up very briefly but if you look at a long exposure of the the Rockets trajectory you'll see it goes up but it immediately curves over and starts going horizontal and so the at the at the point at which the the at the point which the stage is separate those two stages that the primary Bruce stage which is the most expensive part of the rocket on which that's that staging occurs can be as high as Mach 10 but it's it's so it's going away from the launch site at ten times the speed of sound so you know in order to get back to the launch site you would have to have enough I fuel an oxygen to reverse out that velocity and and and boost back all the way to the launch site and you just don't have the physics of it don't really allow you to have that much it's not about saving money on fuel or anything it's just physically impossible so because another sort of thing about if you're if you're in space is that there's nothing to react against so like whereas an aircraft can conserve very easily because it's reacting against air in vacuum there's nothing to react against so the only way to go back the other direction is to apply just as much it took you to go it we if you want to go backwards you have to fly just so much energies took you to go forwards in fact well twice as much really because you go to zero it out and then you've got a got a land elsewhere yeah so bottom line is this thing is singing out just what was in out to self yet super at ten times but it may well be over the ocean because the ocean covers most of the oh it's it's it's actually at the point of separation it's not that far away it's maybe a hundred kilometers away from the launch site but it is going like hell in the opposite you know away from the launch site so the the only way to really land it is to have it continue on that arc that ballistic arc and then land far out to sea on a ship that's that's pre-positioned to a particular latitude and longitude a very very precise to within about a meter and then the the rocket will then go from vacuum through rarefied air at hypersonic velocity in which so where did say when it's in vacuum it has to obviously you can't use arrow surfaces you have to use the nitrogen jets to control the the attitude and position and then as it starts to encounter the air we use grid fins because Griffins looked like what sort of like a waffle that they were quite well across a wide regime from both very high velocity hypersonics through supersonic transonic and subsonic so it's hard to guess it's hard to have Aero surfaces that work well across that entire regime and then so once the error forces become high it uses the before grid fins to sort of control its attitude and land itself yeah it's controlling it's it's controlling pitch yaw and roll with with the grid fins and and then once it and those grid friends will then position it to where it's fairly close to the ship and then it will light in this case three of the nine engines to arrest the velocity and then drop to one engine for Percy right before landing right okay so maybe but wait okay who we're gonna get to is that's super [ __ ] hard there's a video so why why is that important why has that this moment been important for you well so in order to reuse the boost stage which is about 70% of the cost of rocket so that would cost is that how much is it well I mean it's sort of on the order of 30 to 35 million dollars right so you want to save that yeah I mean it's like I try to tell my team it's like imagine there was a pallet of cash that was vomiting through the atmosphere and it was gonna burn up and smash into tiny pieces would you try to save it all right probably yes yes okay yeah that sounds like a good idea okay so so yeah so we want to get a bag and that way we don't have to make another one right and I think it's quite tragic if Rockets like get smashed into tiny pieces and last question we've been in we've been going to space for what 50 years or something like that nobody until you started doing this and Jeff Bezos company has done it the government never saved the rocket yeah they never saved the pallet of cash why not and the Russians didn't either I mean was it o-o there yeah I mean there was some attempt made to get with the space shuttle but there was no return it's the first time that that a rocket booster has returned to launch site from an orbital mission and absolutely the first time that there's been a landing on a ship out but the regular rockets that went up that weren't designed like planes never tried to do this right the plane thing is not not a good idea in my view the so the the plane and the reason I guess like intuitively it seems like a plane should work but but actually if you consider that really every mode of transport has a design that is appropriate to its medium and if you're in space wings are not very useful because there's no air and and and then if you want to go somewhere other than earth there's also no runways uh-huh so this is these are important considerations so that's why when they went to the moon they use propulsive landing right but what I'm saying was when they built the Space Shuttle it sort of was like a looked like a kind of ball things that appealed to Congress yeah yeah airplane can you explain the day you know Jeff Jeff Mays good one Jeff Bezos was here last night and I asked him what's different from what you're doing and what Eli must was doing and he said well I think we have I think he's the word like-minded in the general sense of it and then he went on to explain some differences do you and then he but he talked about and correct me if I'm miss quoting him but I think he was saying work this is all about laying the foundations of being able to do greater things by getting the basic infrastructure of being able to reuse these rockets down right do you is that correct you have a similar starting point from him and you're thinking I think there's still a some similarities of opinion I think both Jeff and I believe that it's important for the future to be a spacefaring civilization and up there ultimately be out there among the stars and I think that's the that's the exciting inspiring future that I think I think certainly people in this room are warrant and any well particularly after seeing that the asteroids are going to destroy yeah I mean I don't view it as you know we want it we I mean I think I think what when I say you know multi-planet species like that's really what we want to be it's not like you know still being a single planet species but moving planets it's it's really being a multi-planet species and having civilization and life as we know it extend beyond Earth to the rest of the solar system and ultimately to other star systems I think that's the thing that that's the that's the future that's exciting and inspiring and I think that's what you know I think you know any kind of any things like that to make to be glad to wake up in the morning and they like life life can't be just about solving problems like they have to be things that are inspiring and exciting that make you glad to be alive so within the immediate time frame what is what is your goal for SpaceX now that you've done this which is a huge accomplishment what is the plan for you in the immediate time and then the longer-range sure so that so we plan to reef lie one of the landed rocket boosters hopefully in about two or three months something like that and and then that that so that'll be an important milestone so far the stages are looking like quite quite good even they come through through quite there's a really difficult entry reentry situation but they're looking like they're in they're in good shape and we're now at four of them so we want to start replying them you know towards the end of summer and then hopefully by the end of this year we'll be launching Falcon Heavy which will be the the most powerful rocket in the world by more than a factor of two so Falcon Heavy is will be on the order of 5 million pounds of thrust on liftoff which is about two thirds the size of a Saturn 5 oh really yeah that's the rocket that took the ash dress to the moon right exactly so in fact launching from the same from the same pad from very same family Apollo 11 pad wow that's amazing so I mean to launch that Falcon Heavy by the end of this year yeah that's that's our aspiration is that now that's somewhat of a delay from when you first hope to launch it right but the I mean it's not like we had a lot of pressing customers who wanted us to launch it but in fact the first launch will will not have any operational satellites it'll be a demonstration launch and the first operational flights where customers actually want to launch it or next year you know whereas there's there's a lot of customers who want us to launch Falcon 9 so about about a quarter of our launch of uh flights are for for NASA but three quarters are for commercial satellites the broadcast and communication satellites or science missions for other countries and and this just there's quite a big quite a backlog and we had we had an issue with the rocket last year so that put about a six-month hold on our schedule so we're sort of backlogged on on our launches and we're trying to get them out as quickly as we as we can and so you know service our customers the the so we're the launches will take place you know every two to four weeks there's quite a quite a high Portuguese that's a much faster cadence than NASA had right yeah it's I mean it's it'll be more launches than any anything else in the world so London Russia more than Europe more than well more than China by next year certainly largely to deliver customers yeah it's um that there's a lot of broadcasting communication satellites that are going to geosynchronous orbit and and then there's we will also be launching the new Iridium constellation so that iridium has got a next-generation constellation of satellites I think 60 or 70 satellites quick you know decent-sized satellites that'll be like many orders of magnitude improvement over the current Veridian system so you'll be able to have global tour band so that that'll be a whole bunch of launches and yeah and then and the next year we'll be flying dragon version 2 which is the one that's capable of taking up to seven astronauts to the space station in fact dragon 2 really is it's a propulsive Lander as well and it'll be the its intended to carry astronauts to the space station but it's also capable of being a general science delivery platform to anywhere in the solar system so so we're you don't with it we're gonna we're gonna send one to Mars in 2018 now 2018 that's for sure yeah clears now will you be on that flight no we've talked about this you said you don't want it you want to die on Mars just not on landing right is that correct well I mean I think if you're gonna choose a place to die then Mars is probably you know not a bad choice all right but you're not ready so it's not some sort of Martian death wish or something but but yeah I mean you're gonna people one another on Mars it's up to Mars 2018 right sending this up to Mars 2018 when will someone like you get there from your plans sure so the 2018 mission would be a drag dragon version 2 and that I wouldn't recommend traveling to Mars in in that because I mean it has the interior volume of a large SUV okay the trip the trip for Dragon would be on the order of six months mm-hm it's a long time to spend in an SUV I think it can't be done can be done but not not probably not ideal and it also doesn't have the capability of getting back to us right that's that seems more important than the space so yeah we put that in the fine print you know yeah it's like the side effects and their drug add by the way we cannot get back turrets yeah yeah we saw the movie yeah he got back yeah yeah so it's good I've actually toured the movie um so you think he could have gotten back like that there was that plausible I thought there was some in a connection it was it was most it was like 80% scientifically correct there did connect a series of improbable events that's yes well I mean I don't think you can sort of just take off from Oz on an unguided rocket really and and then prick your finger on the spacesuit and navigate to a tow spaceship right yeah not impossible just extremely unlikely so thus and what if your but if you're Matt Damon maybe maybe you have some mad skills yeah so so when will people like yourself get there and I assume you'll be first in line for that yeah so later this year in September at the IAC which is the big mr. world space conference industry space conference I'm going to be presenting the the architecture for Mars colonization so I think what really matters is being able to transport large numbers of people and ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars and that's what's necessary in order to create a self-sustaining and and but not merely self-sustaining but a growing city on Mars I'm curious you have you been to space yet no why you could just go upright for a little bit or not no I could I suppose yeah why haven't you like walked up or something or yeah yeah probably well will you do a moon test before you go to Mars yeah I've never really probably I'm gonna go to orbit in four or five years isn't like that but again it's facing over two very different things but on the Mars thing would you send up two or three whether it's you or not I I kind of would prefer it if you tried it frankly but um because it would be exciting but would you send up some people some people before you do this whole architecture for colonizing Mars just a handful of people to kind of see what I mean the basic game plan is like we're gonna send a mission to Mars with every Mars opportunity from 2018 onwards so and they're currently every 26 months so you know we were establishing cargo flights to Mars that Argo that people can count on for four cago and it's like said that the earth Mars orbital rendezvous is only every 26 months so there's one in 2018 I'll be another one 2020 and I think if things go according to plan we should be able to should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025 is that is that a more certain schedule than United Airlines well I don't know there's certainly some uncertainties associated with that that's the game plan like approximately 2024 do the first to launch the first of the Mars and n1 your transport systems I want to get back to what you said earlier about a month this will be a very big rocket ok I'm a very big bigger than or even five yes 2012 a Gore what September not going to say anything till September come on very big come on has to be very big I how big is very big so big do you think we should abandon the earth that's some go oh I know I think that's great but you have said things Audrey about it is really nice here you've said things about we may have to abandon the earth so it's good to have a plan B I haven't work know that was I don't know but it wasn't me alright okay wasn't me like Jackie so let's move to things on this earth let's move to Hyperloop tests other things let's talk about Tesla first where do you feel like the company is at at this point and there's been lots of activity in self-driving cars and autonomous semi-autonomous how do you look how everybody's jumped in Google Apple others and all the car manufacturers yeah I mean they've been so many announcements of like autonomous evie startups I'm waiting for my mom to announce one okay it's like mom you too [Laughter] I mean there's a lot so yeah I mean in in yeah in the US alone they were there of for I think maybe five China funded EB startups yes at the billion dollar plus level like Cirrus funding and there's a bunch of startups and then of course the you know the car industry as a whole seems to be moving in that direction Volkswagen just uh Nick announced a huge battery factory that they're going to build and I think these are all good you know it's good it's good for the industry moving towards sustainable transport as as quickly as possible we open sourced our patents to try to be helpful in that regard and yeah so it's it's encouraging to see all this activity from a Tesla standpoint you know we're just we want to take a set of action instead of likely to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy so scale up production as fast as we can so we accelerated plans for the model three by two years an trees so we want to try to get to half a million cars in total and kind of the 2018 timeframe which is an aggressive schedule but I think achievable and and there may be a million cars a year by 2020 and you know I can see it like I think a pretty clear path to get there autonomy is obviously extremely important people are gonna want want you tana me it's gonna be odd to have a car without autonomy in the future but yeah so that I think that's what we're scaling up look how do you look at the all these efforts not your mother but yeah my mom's she's not gonna do it she may do a rocket situation but how do you look at each of them let's go through them what Google is doing how do you assess what they're doing when you're looking at it because they'll be competitors at some point these are all eventual competitors well you know I think what what Google's I mean girls done a great job of showing the potential of autonomous transport but they're they're not a they're not a car company so they would potentially you know license their technology to other car companies I think they are now something with the Fiat and so I wouldn't say you know Google's a competitor because that they're not a car company that we would compete with somebody maps that they license technology to you but not to them directly right Apple yeah that'll be more direct that would be more direct yeah you can tell that by the hiring pattern yeah so what are you okay so they're gonna be more directive how do you assess it I mean I say like you know I I think it's great that they're doing this and I yeah I hope they how it works out it's what's the time frame for them do you think I don't know I mean I think they should have embarked upon this project sooner actually that that but I don't know I don't know when they I mean that they don't share with me the details of their production plans but III don't think it's gonna be I don't think they'll be in volume production sooner than maybe 20 20 it'll be like the soonest and that's is that too late we say they should have embarked sooner is that because 2020 would be too late to stop you or beat you or compete with you or why it's just like it's a missed opportunity it's just a that they it's it's it'll be over by 2020 it's a it's just like it's it's it's a couple of years I think they'll they're probably make a good car and probably successful the car industry is very big so it's not as though there's you know one company to the exclusion of others and there's like a dozen car companies in the world of significance so and the most that any company has is approximately 10% market share so it's not like you know somebody comes up with a car and they're suddenly like they kill everyone else it's not not that way and and the sheer scale of automotive manufacturing is is just it's hard to appreciate until you see the plants I mean that they're gigantic yeah they've been the place yeah I mean the sheer size of the industrial infrastructure is is staggering at just the assembly plant but everything else that go the supply chain exactly simplify it's just the engine took the iceberg really literally took the ice for a nominal the the supply chain is you know once you go to tier 2 tier 3 2 or 4 or suppliers that's probably an order of magnitude more than this okay so you think Google will not be competitor after I probably will be a direct competitor and what about the car companies the Adobe competitors yeah sure who do you see out there that has done a nice job so far Mercedes do you have what of what a competitive car the incumbents potentially competitive car I guess I mean I don't think anyone's any of the car companies thus far have made a really great electric car I mean you tell me if I'm if you disagree but I don't think yet that any of them have made a great electric car okay they you know presumably we will continue to improve on what they've done so far and then at some point they may make a car that's that's you know that's great car but no they haven't done that yet can I ask you about batteries for a second oh yeah sure so you're building this Giga factory right you've gets built it's also completely both okay but it part of its big name chunk of its both yeah part of itself it's a really gigantic thing is like when the gigafactory is done it'll be the largest footprint building of any kind in the world of any kind not just factories it literally what is this the largest rocket the largest building I mean there well I mean I think this it's a scale for scale sake it's just like if you say well we want to accomplish these goals then then you kind of have to be make a big thing okay you've got this big thing it's this big giant building yeah it's gonna make batteries the batteries is gonna make our opening well to start taking the opening party since it's been operating for a little while but we're gonna have a party soon you guys maybe want to come pretty but they can't we're seeing this is gonna come right just this is crazy no this is like an alien dreadnought it's really a nutty because I love a battery party but yeah right but but but talk about wearing far these lithium-ion batteries they're so they're the same batteries that Center phone no explain please explain yes so have you made a battery breakthrough is something I'm interested in yeah I mean generally the I mean there's there's so much nonsense out there about batteries like about you can believe about 1% of what you read on a good you know maybe lithium-ion covers a very broad range of technologies and you can have an enormous difference in the power density and the energy density and the cycle life between one chemistry and another they can be really enormous ly different so what you really actually want to ask is what is the cathode and what is the anode right so in our case that's right but it in the looking there's actually 2 percent of the cell mass so it's like the salt in the salad it's it's a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost but it sounds like it's big because it's called with EMI on but it it really like our battery should be cold nickel graphite because it's mostly nickel and graphite okay and it's nickel cobalt aluminum but battery the little things in graphite with a silken oxide layer battery and an efficiency or power that you know the power that you can store in a certain mass seems to be moved very slowly at least compared to you know we're used to Moore's law pushing integrated circuits faster batteries kind of are always and our consumer device is always lagging behind in your you've built this giant thing the biggest building in the world has ever seen it's not fully booked but yes it's you're building a pretty good scene yeah to make batteries your whole business depends on batteries in these cars have you figured out a way to do some significant increase in the yield of energy from a given amount of space in the battery well yeah I mean the the the energy density is increasing sort of maybe on the order of like five ish percent per year and doesn't sound like much but you had that up over a number of years with compound interest it ends up being quite quite a significant number and a lot of people sort of think that oh well we just sort of cobbled together some laptop batteries and somehow made a great car but if it was that easy then I think we would have quite a few competitors who did the same thing but it's it's it's really quite quite a lot harder than that the it's a cylindrical form form factor but the internals of the battery are quite different from what you would find in in a laptop and and and and will be increasingly different with the what's built at the gigafactory which is highly optimized for automotive and and with has improved energy density but but mostly it's not the energy density that's the issue because we you know you can buy if you buy a Model S today the range is around 300 miles and and that yeah that's quite a lot so it's pretty rare that people really need to go more than 300 miles at a time without stopping right you know so I don't think we really have a range issue and we could make a four hundred mile range car today like that wouldn't be too big of a deal that what what really matters is decreasing the cost per unit of energy of the battery packs the okay so you can make the car affordable that's actually the the important thing so there's and there's really two main main dimensions along which cost optimization and making something available to national market can be achieved one is design iteration going through multiple versions of something and then the other is economies of scale you kinda need both of those those things in order to make compelling mass-market product and you look at like cell phones and how many design iterations have you gone through with cell phones and and then and and what and look at the scale at which that they're at their mage is enormous and that's what enables everyone to have a supercomputer in their pocket so speaking of that the sales when you're talking about the sales you have booked how many orders for so in the order of four hundred thousand four thousand consumer interest in a promise a lot of it around you around the idea of you and Tesla and the excitement it was quite surprising actually I mean I the because we didn't do any advertising or there was no guerilla marketing or anything it was just basically like yeah we're gonna have this webcast there was only there were only about a thousand people in the audience and I really caught us by surprise but I think when you have a product that really resonates with with customers the word-of-mouth grows like wildfire and that seems to be but it's a little bit I mean honestly in some groups of especially men in Silicon Valley if you show up and read like the label of a peanut jar they'd be thrilled with the saturation so I mean you a lot of this does base around you like the idea of you and the excitement around this exciting entrepreneur is that is that enough to get it to this massive company you've been hoping to the idea of this is the Elon promise or it's the well I think actually it's not too much I mean I sort of I mean I'm not sure I I think I just deserve less credit than that actually the I mean what what Tesla's done and we've a phenomenal team is like 15,000 people the company worked super hard to create compelling products to create great cars and we're sort of with the Roadster and then the Model S the Model S was rated you know if I Consumer Reports is the best car ever [Music] but the Model X which you know had some has had some teething issues but I think is now at the point where it's it's really starting to I think it's really I think quite sublime at this point and and and so people look at that and say okay well if Tesla's made these cars then probably the next car they make is going to be you know also a great car and yeah but you know so it'll be a great crop it'll be affordable and so great okay that sounds like something I want so this car this next part of the price is starting at 35,000 okay affordable okay when do you get to the really affordable then way down much lower than that yeah I mean it's more to point out that 35,000 particularly when factoring in the lower cost of electricity versus gasoline and that the maintenance cost is much less you don't have to have oil changes you never need to replace your brakes because the car uses regenerative braking so the brakes last as long as the car do that the car does it's basically just need to replace the tires like that's about that all so the operational cost of the car is much lower fundamentally than in a gasoline car and and so and and that would be the average price for cars for gasoline cars is around the mini 32 something like that yeah I mean they're starting prices that are lower but but we're in pickle pick pick options I believe it's in the around 32 or so in the u.s. so we're pretty close to the that but that's your base price right I mean the yeah but is that we bring our the a SP for the car no but it's good it's gonna be a great car even a 35 so it's like even if you order nothing no options at all it'll be great but your but you're likely to have a mix where the average car that you actually sell sells for a little more than that yes probably it's probably going to be yes probably give you some higher number but it's really important up size like 35 so the orders at $35,000 car they'll be very happy like it's not like you need to order a bunch of options in or without which the car is is you know not not good that car will have autonomous 435 I have a I'm gonna do another of Tesla vent and maybe at the end of the year talk more about that and so you could start here it will be real big news if I start here we don't mind that let me just say that we're gonna be the obvious thing okay it's really obvious so good so cupholders good okay so those are nuances all right let's talk about two more things I want to give an AI cuz we've been talking about it a lot here which I wouldn't get it clear what your thoughts are because it's mostly Elan scared of robots I mean that kind of thing or what how do you just get a robot can you like clarify exactly what the issue you have and you deserve the background we've been talking to Jeff Bezos sundar Pichai we talked to mark fields from Ford about it hey Shepherd yeah yeah the Facebook folks there certainly seems to be in the eye in the tech company is a big tremendous new drive or interest to believing there will be all component for intelligent assistants it's good make your life better theory is gonna suddenly get smart Microsoft's one is gonna get smart at Google is gonna cream them all largely a happy version of this is going sometimes technology hurts you but not as much as it helps you that's really yeah so that's there's been a lot of conversation here about sure and yeah and you've staked out of slightly different positions so can you talk about that well I mean I think my sort of full position would require quite a long explanation I mean I I am concerned about certain directions that I I could take that would be not good for the future that mean it I think it'd be fair to say that like not all AI futures of a nine not not all okay and and so if you have something if this if we create some digital super intelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot it's very important that that paper nine and and so actually with with the a few others I created open AI which is an AI it's a non-profit actually it's there's no I think the governance structure her is important so you want to make sure that there was not some fiduciary duty to generate you know profit off of the AI technology that's developed so so we created this 501c3 but it but I it's quite different from a lot of sort of 500 see three SR you know they've they don't have a high sense of urgency and like there's not like you know they're not really sort of developing technology at a fast pace but open a is its opening I has very high sense of urgency and the talent I think that the people that have joined are are really really amazing and and the intent with open AI is to democratize AI power and there's a quote that I love flat from old Acton he was the guy that came up with power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely which is that freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration and so I think it's important if we have this incredible power of AI that if not be concentrated in the hands of a few and potentially to a world that we don't want and what world is that what is what do you see foresee that when you sit it's difficult I mean it's called the singularity because it's it's difficult predict what exactly what future that might be except I don't know a lot of people who love the idea of living under a despot you know I don't think people generally choose to live in a democracy over a dictatorship and the despot would be the computer what the people controlling the computer mm-hmm and do you worry specifically about any of these companies I mentioned who've all seemed to now be pivoting toward this is the battleground in the next ten years I won't name a name but there is only one there's only one you're worried about and they're not preoccupied with making a car that will compete with you I assume there's only one and what about so about competing its desert look like this is sort of like like what we play the point of competing for you know mutual destruction it's like there's no it's not about competing it's really just about trying to increase the probability that the future will be good that's all so the the goal of opening eye is really just to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the positive futures like if you can think of like the future as a set of of probability streams that yeah that branch out and then converge collapse down to a particular event and then branch out again and there's a certain set of probabilities associated with the future being positive and different type flavors of that and at opening I we want to try to cut do do whatever we can to guide to to increase the probability of the good future is happening I think that's that's really what we're trying to you worry that by making this open some bad actors may use some of what has been developed to do bad stuff yeah yeah I mean that that is certainly the the the I mean a good rebuttal to that however I think if AI power is widely distributed then and there is not say one entity that has some super AI that is a million times smarter than anything else you know if if instead air power is broadly distributed and to degree that we can link AI power to each individual's will it's like you know you would have your AI agent in you or like every would have the sort of AI agent and then if somebody did try to do something really terrible well then at the collective will of others could overcome that that actor which you can't do if if there's one a AI that's you know a million times better than its proprietary and it's yeah it's either has its own well or more likely at least in the beginning is controlled by you know some small set of people so I think that's that's really the the risk I mean you know this was augments like what's the best form of government big fan of I think was Churchill like you know democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others right so speaking of that yeah this election you are yes yes how does that strike you what's happening now you're you you've come to this country or naturalized you know I think I'm glad that the framers of the Constitution saw fit to ensure that the president was someone who was captive a large ship with a small rudder okay and there's a limit to how much harm any given president are you sure about that oh yeah yeah yeah so you're not worried about are you backing in either of the candidates at this point trying to stay out of this situation because one think that's the finest moment in our democracy well given that it's not the finest moment in our democracy do you think the best thing is to stay out or it will say get in I'm not sure what I what I got oh you to hit off is worst I don't know how much influence I could have as as one person on the outcome so I mean if I think I could make a difference I would probably do something but like I said I think I'm just glad that being the US president is like being captain of a large ship with a small rudder and so there's just a limit to how much good or bad at president can can actually do I mean obviously if if a president could make the economy great that and there was like a button he could press there be pressing that button at the speed of light so you know that they did but they could they can't so I can't that can't just magically make the economy good no president wants the economy bad ever but they you know like there's just a limit to how much they can do and yeah I guess there is the nuclear thing which is yeah I guess there is the nuclear thing yeah but I I don't know I think I think I think I don't think we would like just arbitrarily more nuclear missiles can do that I mean I think that he's now he's the commander in chief I never done I still don't think that means you can just launch nuclear missiles or whatever you want I think Congress would be like quite upset about that and he might not be consulted yeah but I think I think like the military would be like yeah we really think Congress should be consulted on before you launch a bet that might happen to us right are you willing you're basing your faith in that though I'm quite confident that the military would not just you know randomly agree to launching nuclear missiles at somebody well that's calming this is we're gonna put up just very quick little and on Hyperloop you've been involved with it your level involvement is what at this point just yeah it's bit confusing because I you talked about it when you were here last time yeah I actually came up with the idea I came up with an initial idea which was turned out to be wrong and wouldn't work several years ago and and then but I sort of shot my mouth off and and said I can have an idea that would work and turned out that didn't work but I with a lot of iteration I was able to come up with something that where the physics hangs together and then published the paper and just said like look anyone who wants to do this it's great go you know be my guest because I'm I sort of have a plate full running Tesla and SpaceX yeah yeah and so I think it'd be great I mean either great to have any interesting new transport solutions anything that gets people to their destination in a way that's safer cost less it's more convenient that'd be great I mean and so I think probably the most valuable thing that the Hyperloop paper that I published has done is is to spur thinking in terms of new transportation systems so it's not just oh let's you know have a fast train okay that's not even as fast as what Japan did in the 80s like okay well why would why don't see what the point of that is you know like we should really be trying to think of some something that's I think particularly in California like we should be like saying hey what is the best or this invents something new that's way better than anything else do you want to shoot your mouth off about that well you know I so I mean I'm not an investor in any of the companies that are working on it and I've tried to be neutral because I'm like trying not to favor one company over another but just to encourage anyone that is interested to say that you know they had tried try giving moral support you know and I hope they succeed the only thing that I am doing I'll have blue font is like we're holding a student competition and the student competition is really just aimed towards encouraging students to think about exciting new transport methods as totally cool if they want to like do some architecture that's different from what a proposing Hyperloop and in fact the D winning team at the student competition that we held earlier this year or used a different suspension mechanism than what I proposed which is I you know enjoys using essentially taking taking the error that essentially said that pulls up on the nose from the compressor and flowing that through air skis so they you simultaneously remove the drag from the nose and provide a means of suspending the lip the pod and that's also something that that works well even at super supersonic velocities you can go it's been demonstrated up to mach 1.1 in terms of using air bearings as what they use something different like yeah basically electromagnetic suspension and like that the the reason I didn't suggest sort of any kind of magnetic suspension is that it's very important that the cost of the of the tube will be minimized so you really want because the the the part is cheap the tube is expensive so if you if you want to go say 400 miles and you've and between two directions they've got 800 miles of to the the critical economic optimization parameter is the cost of the tube so you want that to to be as low cost as possible and so if you if you do anything that real quick that requires action on the tube side it's going to make that too much more expensive so if you use air bearings it doesn't change like that's real cheap and yeah so if you think this is going to happen I think something like that I think something will happen in the future it's I think I think if the companies that aren't that are trying to make it happen now if for whatever reason that that doesn't work out and you know I think I'll you know I'll I might I might do something myself in the future I don't want to do something I don't know front I don't want to sort of front run them you know it's like say here's this free idea and then I'm going do it myself you know that wouldn't be nice so so but if I if they if they if much people companies don't try it it doesn't work out then I think I think I think I'll try to just at least do a demonstration system yeah okay last question do you think Tech has gotten more serious do you how do you look at the tech landscape as someone who's you know well-known you probably qualify as a visionary the concept what do you imagine we are right now in the tech space and then we'll get to questions from the audience I think there's a lot of innovation happening and in many different areas the advancements in AI oh I think are quite quite astonishing the advancements in genetics are amazing so I think that there's a lot of innovation going on I think there's probably a few too many talented entrepreneurs in kind of the internet space and and I think their talent actually would be better served in some other industries but do you think that I mean I don't think we're like facing some sort of low innovation period or anything like that I think there's a lot of innovation going on they need to move to other I just think there's like if you had some ideal distribution or probably to be fewer like there's just a lot of talent focused on the Internet and probably some of that talent would be maybe better to have some of that talent in other industries that's about all but there's trans mount of innovation that that's happening it's something that I think is it's gonna be quite important and and and it's there's not I don't know of a companies working on it seriously is is a neural lace so you're going back to the AI situation this is quite important kind of one debate like that if you assume any rate of advancement in AI we will be left behind by a lot and so then we could be in like you know B'nai and such but the venom even the benign situation if you have some you know if you have ultra intelligent AI we would be you know so the so far below them in intelligence that it would be would be like you know a pet like a bat I can't catch you like that yeah we like the house cat right and that's something of the world you know no sir I've seen the movie it could be it could be could be the you know that but that honestly I thought whatever you the benign scenario and so house cat is okay I mean I don't love the idea of being a house cat okay good but that what's the solution yeah so I think the I think I think it I think it's to essentially I think one of the solutions the solution that seems maybe the best one is to have an AI layer if you think of like you've got your limbic system your cortex and then a digital layer a sort of a third layer above the cortex that could work work well and symbiotically with with you I mean just as your cortex work somebody's vertically with the olympic system your did sort of a third digital layer could work symbiotically with the rest this is something that's in surgically inserted or bread the species or what the fundamental limitation is input/output so we already have we're already a sidewalk it's just that I mean you have a digital version of yourself or partial version of yourself online in the form of your emails new social media and all the things that you do and and you have basically superpowers in that with your computer new phone and and the applications that are there you have more power than the president I states had 20 years ago that you can answer any question you can video conference with anyone anywhere you can send a message to millions of people instantly you know you just do incredible things and but the constraint is is input/output so we're I about particularly output bound I mean like the your output level is so low it's likely you're particularly on a phone like your two thumbs sort of tapping away this is ridiculously slow our input is much better because we have a high bandwidth visual interface to the brain like up our eyes taken a lot of lot of data so there's many orders of magnitude difference between input and output so mostly effectively merging in a symbiotic way with digital intelligence revolves around eliminating the i/o of constraint so it's some sort of direct cortical interface you called it a neural layered neural lace yeah it's totally not Google glass right no I'm talking about something where they no I mean it would be I mean I mean there are a few ways to approach this but some sort of interface directly with your cortical neurons particularly but doesn't it my surgical insertion not necessarily you could go through the veins and arteries because that that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons your neurons are very heavy users of energy so they need high blood flow so you automatically with your veins and arteries have a road network to your neurons still some kind of surgery right yes but you could insert something you know basically you know it into the jugular and and have it gets McCobb but it sounds really easy and it doesn't involve I mean it doesn't involve you know like chopping or just get your skull up or anything like that okay yeah and plus you're not a house cat anymore and a house cat so I mean essentially if if we can figure out how to establish a high-bandwidth neural interface with ourselves with with your digital self effectively then then you're no longer a house cat all right well I did just one closing thing I mean I think it's probably you are you in but playable psycho I think are you interested in exploring this possibility that you have just like somebody's got to do it I'm not saying that I will but I'm somebody's gonna do it I mean III mean I so somebody should do it and I mean if somebody doesn't do it then I then I think I should probably do it but and and the goal of this is to prevent there being an external AI particularly one controlled by a small group of people that could yeah be so much more powerful and intelligent than we are that that would be no regard like an issue a shipowners yeah well this has been really cheerful thank you yeah but but if but if we can establish when a spheroid beginning in this I mean ask s words are a low probability existential threat on the timescale that's relevant to us okay okay this is different this requires urgent what do you do for fun yes this is much more fun fun what do you do anything I play video games with my kids all right that sounds good let's get some questions on Neil on the house cat watch movies you know I thank you almost anything why don't we start over here yeah hi I think this last question my Kyle just just did that I won't know how do you live through the stress that kind of conversations we just heard that you went through and kind of ambitions that you carry and then how do you adjust to the everyday work life balance etc things that in your life a little bit of your personal side actually you're very busy how does that work yeah I mean I am sort of in kind of work triage mode a lot of time so I know it seems to be as long as it's not like a crisis simultaneously at SpaceX and Tesla it's okay you know companies or I mean the situation in any given company particularly one you know if it's sort of growing fast and so requires you start up it's it's somewhat sinusoidal so that I mean it's okay if if you don't if the if the waves don't crest together you know when that does happen it then that's a huge strain right now things are like you know motoring along okay and I have like the contacts loaded for both companies that can look sort of see a path to a good outcome so I feel pretty good right now but they've been super stressful times in the past and and then you know and then I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them like I mean kids are really great I mean they're like the 99% of the time they make you happier their kids are awesome yeah then there's that 1% 1% you know like yeah 1% but but like it's it's a anything in my life I would say kids by far make me the happiest I you know I agree yeah that's great I agree yeah hang out with them like so I know that like things like love times kids are kind of in their own world so you don't need to like they don't want to like talk to their dad for hours on end generally I've noticed that yeah so like so I can be in the same room with them they could talk rate from time to time but like you know I can get you know some emails done just get some work done and then whenever they want to talk to me they can and then we we try to do things like you know travel places and actually we play video games together or actual on Monday we went to the new Harry Potter land at the universal it was quite fun yeah so did I think that nobody from Universal iRiver was a charge of Harry Potter land did a great job it's really good I highly recommend it the butterbeer is amazing amazing yeah okay over here hi my name is Ivan burns and the founder of Odyssey and I hope into the future to be in something in the space industry and my curiosity is you've talked about SpaceX getting in many different businesses for example global Wi-Fi through launching mini satellites do you hope space s becomes a platform for others to launch businesses or you see SpaceX being a business that launches many business lines well I mean the general strategy of SpaceX is to like we clearly need a lot of money in order to develop the transport system to establish a city on Mars so you know we're like kind of gathering revenue is earth-based revenue that's who trying to maximize their some other earth revenue well right now is only Earth so we've got to maximize earth revenue as a relates to space you know as a brace to rockets and spacecraft so but I think like what assuming SpaceX is able to transport large numbers of people and goods to Mars it will be an enormous enabler for entrepreneurial activity on Mars because it's gonna be so much to do you know everything from creating like the first iron ore refinery to the first pizza joint to you know something that doesn't even exist on earth it's kind of like when the Union Pacific crossed crust you know and like everybody thought you know this is like what a stupid idea you know like there's nobody living in California well okay now there's quite a lot of people living in California so so just having it won't you need the transport link and so what SpaceX is trying to do is establish the transport link and then try to create a photon environment for a contra NORs on Mars to flourish and I think that will be an amazing expansion of entrepreneurial how long would it take to deliver a pizza from Mars huh well it's gonna be a little cold I think but I mean we and we can certainly see a way to get to Mars in under three months and I think ultimately you'll be able to get to Mars in under a month it does get exponentially difficult as you reduce the time but you know three months is a way to think of it and I think that's probably you know that's that's really where we're SpaceX well I think create a great environment for entrepreneurial potential thanks Neil a Domino's does not get tomorrow special Mars king of Mars so you're obviously very ambitious that's led to some really ambitious deadlines of amidst so Falcon Heavy was originally 2012 the Model X was a little bit delayed the model 3 the Model X was delayed the model 3 seems to be stretching but the model 3 in particular is a consumer product you're taking money from people against a really aggressive production schedule and a huge amount of orders what are you gonna do to hit your deadlines on that because it's real consumers this time in a big class of people sure the I think the the biggest thing is just designing the car for for for manufacturing so in the case of Model S like Manas was the first time we'd really built a car a whole car like what the Roadster Lotus did the body and chassis we did the powertrain and then we did the sort of final installation of powertrain to the to the chassis but the Model S was the first time we made a car so we were just trying to make a great car and but we had no idea like what it meant to design something to be manufacturable so the Model S is super hard to make and then the Model X is built off of the Model S platform except it's got a bunch of other whiz-bang technologies that make it even harder to both so and you know so like that I mean definitely we want to do the opposite of what we do with with the X which is but makes something that is going to be a lot simpler but still a car that people will love and wear every design decision is factoring in the manufacturability in factor and making sure that when we design something that you can manufacture it at volume at an affordable price in the schedule that word that word on the schedule at word that we're targeting one of the things that makes a car very difficult particularly if it's a new car is is that it's an integrated product with several thousand unique components so we also want at the mercy of whatever the slowest component is whatever basically if you say go to tier two and three suppliers they end up being several thousand suppliers so things move as fast as the least lucky and least competent supplier you know but but just and you can think of like like any natural disaster you care to name all of those things have happened to all suppliers they have the factory has burnt down there's been an earthquake there's been a you know tsunami there's been massive hail there's been a tornado the ship sank there was a shootout at the Mexican border no kidding that that delayed trunk carpet at one point we're like and we couldn't get in like didn't like the Border Patrol wouldn't give us the truck because it had a bullet holes in it we just wanted our trunk carpet like it's pretty safe this is like no cocaine or anything good but you know that shut down the production line as an example for several days so so there's that's the biggest issues like the supply chain stuff is really tricky we're trying to anticipate as much that as possible increase our optionality so that there's more internal capability at Tesla not that we want to do things internally but if if a supplier is unable or unwilling to deliver the part we can quickly make that internally so I think the whole company is geared geared for that and I mean right now it looks like you know we should be able to do that we expect to I mean almost all of the model 3 design is done and we're aiming for pencils down basically about six weeks complete pencils down and and we're tabling all you know like if they're ideas for future cool things we'll have an inversion to version 3 in future years type of thing so overall I feel pretty good about it and I'll supply it a clown major supplier partners have been very supportive and are on board but you know I mean I what did I should say like the like when I when I sort of sight a schedule it is actually the schedule I think is true it's it's not some fake schedule that I don't think is true so I mean you know it's never until you know it's maybe delusional that is entirely impossible maybes happen sometime time but it's it's it's never you know some knowingly fake deadline ever so is there an event in six weeks we're going to announce at anima striving is included in the pencils down plan for the model three we're not expecting any event in six weeks Josh hey this is a kind of a weird question I feel like you would be the guy with the right answer for it there's a sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to create simulation yeah maybe you've answered this before I simulated had so many simulation discussions is crazy okay so because because in fact it got to the point where basically every conversation was was the ai ai slash simulation conversation and my brother and I finally agreed that we would ban such conversations if we're ever in a hot tub and I was like sure because that really fills the bathtub so so the idea is right any sufficiently advanced civilization would create could create a simulation that's like our existence and so the theory follows that maybe we're in the simulation have you thought about this and a lot are we even in a hot tub no so much so it has to be banned from the hot tub okay it's not the sexiest coaster are we in are we in the right I think here's and might be like the the strongest argument for the for us being in a simulation probably being a simulation I think is the following that that forty called forty forty years ago we had pong like two rectangles and a dot that was what games were now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3d simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year and soon we'll have you know but virtual reality augmented reality if you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality just didn't sting cool even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now then you just say okay well we'll let's mention it's a 10,000 years in the future which is nothing in the evolutionary scale so so it's a given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have four games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever and they would probably be you know billions of such you know computers to set-top boxes it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in face reality is one in billions how many what's wrong with that our cube is the answer yes the argument is probably it's like is there is there a flaw in that I mean so much but someone I'm not sure what about the error all right no no the argument makes sense so the assumption then is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game no no there's a 1 in billions chance that this is based reality oh ok what do you think well I think it's 1 in billions okay I mean this that seems to be like clearly what the you know what what what suggests and actually I mean all you believe we should hope that that's true because otherwise if if civilization stops advancing then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization so maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation because otherwise cuz they could reboot it well otherwise either we're gonna create simulations that are interesting indistinct or from reality or civilization will cease to exist those are the two options yeah I like those odds okay no we're going to it's unlikely to go into something like you know multi million your stasis so it's either going to increase or decrease hi I'm g2 Patel from Bach's two-part question for you one is if you think about fully autonomous vehicles which have passed through regulatory approvals have passed through in city driving and traffic conditions how far do you think from a time frame perspective we are for that app that becoming reality and number two would be the second part of that question is how far before how long before you think it's either illegal or extremely prohibitively expensive for humans to drive on the road well I mean I think I mean I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem even in cities like Beijing and yeah yeah actually I miss the there's really only one area where it's like a little dodgy and that's basically if you're at roughly the 30 30 to 40 miles an hour in in urban environments which is that's difficult to achieve in Beijing it's like heavy traffic in in in dense traffic situations autonomy is really easy because you could just maintain a set distance from various cars it's actually quite quite easy I'm very unlikely to draw to run anyone over you just not moving fast enough and you can brake in time on highways particularly highways that are that are barriers so that you don't have pedestrians that's also relatively easy and like a Model S and Model X at this point I can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person right now my point is when does it get to be where you don't need to be sitting behind a vehicle and it actually the way that society starts expecting this is I can have my 75 year old mother er who doesn't speak any English it doesn't drive be able to be transported from point A to point B by just sitting in a car by herself and being taken I know it's technically possible but how far do you think the regulatory approvals are for that happening I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy wait safer than a human however regulators will take I think at least another year at least another year and Deepika is it gonna depend on which what part of the world you're in because they will want to see billions of miles of data to show that it is statistically true that there is a substantial improvement in safety if something is autonomous versus not autonomous I don't think that regulators will accept something that's close to it so that's that's sort of approximately as good as a person I think they'll have to be at least twice as good as a person maybe five or ten times you know better in terms of safety and and and that will have to be have to be a statistically relevant data set so like billions of miles over widely differing roads and situations so yeah you know think it's like probably three years before its route from a regulatory standpoint but less than two before it is technically possible and do you think there's a day when it's illegal to drive for humans or well I mean we live in a democracy so presumably that would be a function of the population deciding I mean I mean I'm not in favor of banning people from driving cars like I'm in favor of freedom and and not restricting what people do yeah but maybe the requirements for a license will get more stringent I think that seems like maybe a good move you know so you have to demonstrate a higher level of skill to drive in order to be allowed to manually drive very last question this is the last question has to go and I make it a great question thinking about life on Mars again how do you how do you think about cultural unification systems of government rules of law establishing those very early on well I think I just declared king applause a moment ago yeah yeah yeah take it yeah thank thank you yeah so the the I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be Adamek direct democracy not representative so would be people voting directly on on issues and I think that's probably better because like the potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy so I think that's probably what will occur the I think there's some I think I would recommend like some adjustment for the inertia of laws is what would be wise in that it should probably be easier to remove a law than create one I think you know me that this is just be like it's just more I mean I think I think that's probably probably good because just lowest lows right they have infinite life unless they're taken away so I think I my recommendation would be like like something like let's say 60% of people need to vote in a law but at any point greater than 40% of people can remove it and any law should come with a sunset whether it built in sunset provision if it's not good enough to be voted back in maybe it shouldn't be there and that's that's the framework for government on Mars I mean those that'll be admired those be my recommendations the doctor may direct democracy where where it's slightly harder to in to put laws in place than to take them away and where laws don't just automatically live forever you'll be a good king thank you thank you on must thank you

https://youtu.be/pIRqB5iqWA8

all right good morning everyone I think our next guest really doesn't need an introduction we are going to be hearing from the serial entrepreneur behind a range of companies PayPal Tesla Motors Solar City SpaceX he is a Titan of industry who is disrupted and transformed entire industries we're talking about automotive aerospace energy internet finance and these are sectors that are really tough to operate in as a start-up in the next 40 minutes we are going to hear from Milan musk and we're going to learn more about Tesla Motors in Hong Kong in China we're gonna hear about sustainable energy solutions we're gonna talk about Mars and we're also going to touch on the fate and future of humankind pretty big stuff so in this icy cold day here in Hong Kong let's give a very warm welcome to Elon Musk [Applause] okay you can pick any Mike on the table there's so many to choose from okay okay all right illness Bochum to Hong Kong I talked to your people at Tesla here in Hong Kong and you know Tesla opened up here in 2010 the Model S has been selling pretty well good build up first general question how's the business doing here in Hong Kong actually I mean otezla were super appreciative of Hong Kong it's it's the the the the city with the I believe at this point the most number of Tesla's per capita yeah and I think it's sort of a it's a very exciting I think model in Hong Kong because I think Hong Kong will have over time the highest percentage of electric vehicles of any city in the world and can therefore serve as a model for how other high-density cities around the world can transform to a sustainable transport future so I think I think that's that's very exciting so we plan to work closely with the Hong Kong government and to take lessons learned and see what we can do to then propagate that to cities around the world so we're very excited about the partnership with with Hong Kong because Hong Kong is such a densely packed city there's no range anxiety in Hong Kong but that's not the only factor behind the popularity of the Tesla what are the other factors sure well I think certainly the the bright range not being an issue is is is one factor although that is counterbalanced by challenges with charging yeah so one of the the things that we need to work through and this is a challenge that that any other dense city in the world has is as you have more and more electric vehicles on the roads you have to find someplace to to charge them and the ideal place to charge the car is at your home or or office essentially the same place that you charge your phone but this is challenging because a lot of apartment buildings were most part buildings didn't anticipate having that level of power in the garage and sometimes the parking spot spots float around they're not consistent so it's going to be quite important to get get the power to the buildings that need it and then and figure out a good and convenient way for people to charge at home we are deploying a lot of super charges and of course that's that's getting important but those are really meant for when you're have an unusually long trip you've been away from your home office for a while or you need to top up and you're out and about but by far the most convenient is a home or office charging and that's the thing that we're really working closely with the Hong Kong government on yeah we were talking about this earlier about the impact of falling oil prices because high oil prices was a major selling point for getting into hybrids or electric vehicles now that oil prices are in freefall what does that mean for the industry well it definitely makes the transition to sustainable energy more difficult and I think no doubt that that is going to dampen interest in electric vehicles in general with our cars but what we aspire to do is to make the car so compelling that even with low gasoline prices it's still the call you want to buy yeah that's I mean the only thing I can think of that's the only sort of what else we could do really you have to make it compelling this is really at the Kia Tesla is to create an electric car that's not worthy it's going to help the environment but it is a car that you will covet that you want to drive that happens to be very good for the climate change or very good very good for the environment yeah exactly I think this is sort of general you know advice I'd give to people starting company to entrepreneurs in general is really focus on making a product that your customers love and it's so rare that you can buy a product and you love the product when you bought it this is this is there are very few things that fit into that category and if you can come up with something like that your business will be successful for sure let's talk about China China is the world's largest auto market China is also at a growing electric vehicle market - it's soon to be the world's largest their world's largest carbon emitter we've seen the return of the so called air pocalypse and crazy bad air days and places like shinyang and beijing especially during the winter time China needs your technology is China really aware of that do you get that sense and if you don't mind if you could hold the mic a little bit right yeah absolutely see it's very high gain yes China is definitely where as I've had a number of high-level meetings with the Chinese government and in fact the Minister of Finance recently mentioned Tesla in a speech that he gave oh well as a good example actually he's so he's he's he likes what we're doing which is a good thing yeah yeah absolutely and and and then last year we in an effort to help the rest of Industry and just sort of can be a good good neighbor we open sourced all of our patents so any company in China or elsewhere can use our patterns to create electric vehicles well [Applause] and what you're doing they're just really underscores a theme that emerged at the latest climate change conference in Paris the debate on whether developed countries should be doing more to help developing countries when the goal is a general shared goal and you're saying a company from a developed country should be doing that little bit more in a market like China China is quite quite ways and definitely better trains than the United States yeah by far okay so in fact had a great experience taking the boat train from Beijing to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors yeah that was it was a great experience yeah yeah so yeah so I think there's a lot of a lot of opportunity there I think the challenge for Tesla is that in China we need to establish sort of a local partnership yeah and so we're going to kind of figure that out there is the issue of pollution in China the need for sustainable energy solutions in China gridlock is a huge issue in places like Beijing I don't know if you've been stuck in Beijing traffic I've been stuck in be together people everyone here who's traveled to China you're stuck and it's pretty crazy can Tesla autopilot provide some sort of a solution to that well I think I think what a pilot can certainly take the edge off because the the the our autopilot capability right now is really good in in two scenarios well it would either were on a highway where there's no traffic and the lines are quite clear yeah or or in heavy traffic so it's super good in heavy traffic not that I'd recommend it but you know you can read a book or do email is what I found I've heard people say the the really take the edge off the traffic but I'm actually quite a big fan of tunnels tunnels are so underappreciated please elaborate the fundamental problem with cities is that we build cities in 3d yeah I mean you see but these tall buildings with lots of people on each floor but then you've got roads which are 2d so that that obviously just doesn't work you're guaranteed to have gridlock but you can go 3d if you have tunnels and you can have many tunnels crisscrossing each other with maybe a few meters vertical distance between them and and and completely get rid of traffic problems mm-hmm and just - anything that actually Hong Kong is in the process of building some tunnels and I was very pleased to hear that but but that really is the solution for solving traffic in major cities yeah you can also go 3d with flying cars you can't that's not gonna happen for a long time well I mean flying cars sound cool but then they do make a lot of wind and they're quite of noisy and you've sought this out the probability of something falling on your head is much higher yeah gotcha we talked about charging stations in the challenge for rolling out more charging stations in Hong Kong the challenge is exponentially greater in China especially in the rural areas to connect the big cities what what are your plans on that so we actually have a super charging network throughout China you can go at this point almost anywhere in China using the Tesla supercharger network and then we've got there's a whole bunch of third-party affiliate destination chargers and we've actually had people drive all the way from Beijing to Tibet yeah so it's a Wow yeah in a Model S well that's incredible yeah have you driven a Tesla and rural China the model 3 what can you tell us about the model 3 what it's going to look like and I know that you've mentioned to me about sorry I can't tell you what its gonna look like okay okay but I mean I can tell you just generally some characteristics about it which is it's meant to be a slightly smaller version sort of a smaller version of the Model S and it won't have quite as many bells and whistles but it'll be at a much lower price point yeah it's the intent is to gruffly get the cut the price in half for a smaller vehicle and and and I think really that's going to be probably the most profound profound call that we make is that that'll that'll be I think a very compelling car at an affordable price yeah but this is with the model 3 the electric vehicle could go fully mainstream other car manufacturers you have GM in mind with the bolt doing the same thing and you welcome your rivals doing this right yeah the gold tester from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport so we we actually did some partnerships we did one with Mercedes and one with Toyota and you know from saw stripey and everything so the whole purpose of of it was really to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport so it's always great to hear when other car companies are making electric cars yeah including car companies inside China yeah are there any Chinese electric car vehicle makers that are capturing your attention or well we don't think too much about what what competitors are doing yeah just because I think it's important to be just focused on making the best possible products you know it's sort of maybe analogous to what this about you know if you're in a canoe if you're if you're in a race it's a don't worry about what how the other what the other runners are doing just run yeah but you know do to push that metaphor even more are you afraid that whoever's hosting the race could tilt the race in favor of the Chinese racer I'm trying about this anywhere to answer that question and not lose you get one pass this interview if you'd like to take the pass you could take that pass okay [Applause] we've talked about innovation in China and I thought your answer is really interesting and it'd be cool to share it with the audience here what was what is the example of made in China innovation that you saw it wow that's pretty cool well I think actually a lot of the social medias so soon in China you know Weibo WeChat pretty impressed nothing better than what is available in the u.s. yeah or you want to be chat I am actually oh really yeah you know I only use WeChat when I'm in mainland China on business do you use we chat in LA and Silicon Valley I can to correspond with people in China okay yeah that's it yeah but it's pretty good which do you use Alibaba have you used okay yeah it is very very impressive yeah WeChat how do you use it which messaging functions do you like to use on it well I wouldn't call myself sort of a richer expert yeah I basically just message people yeah and send pictures some text now recently I did a panel discussion in Beijing with a group of technologists and the subject came up or I brought up the question can there be an Elan musk in China and the answer was no and it was because of and this is according to Chi Fuli former head of Google China who started Microsoft research in Beijing and he said it's because of the education system in China it emphasizes too much rote learning you are Elon Musk do you what do you make of that I mean do you do you agree actually I mean obviously are a number of very successful entrepreneurs in China Jack Ma Ponemah that's right exactly so I think I'm a short and how do you agree with that but it is generally true that innovation comes from questioning the way things have been done before yeah and if in the education system you're taught to do that that will inhibit entrepreneurship being able to question what you're being taught being able to yeah I mean just you know saying well is there a better way yeah you know to ask that question yeah let's talk about innovation at Tesla few more questions there so we talked about Tessa auto pilot there's also Tesla summon and I love that name the summit where some in the Tesla with your mobile phone and you know we did talk about this earlier I know that there's a big gap between those two programs and self-driving cars but is Tesla on its way to a driverless model yeah I mean I think the whole industry of what they won't be producing autonomous cars and if you went if you fast forward let's say 10 or certainly not more than 15 years I think almost all cars produced will be autonomist all cars produced will be autonomous all new cars yes but that's not the same as all cars in the road because there's roughly 2 billion cars and trucks in the road and just under 100 billion produced every year so it's so the production rate is only 5% of the fleet size but if you say of new cars produced I'll be surprised if a majority of them are not self-driving in that's a 10 to 15 years and of all those new self-driving cars out on the road how many of them will have you know it's like a will have a steering wheel versus not having a steering wheel it's like the you know just a remnant of the past right the same real thing I'm not sure I mean there may be some perhaps auxilary steering wheel that only pops out when you know when they you need to take manual control for whatever reason but probably if you've got a long long term my guess is there there isn't steering wheel and most cause it would be something that you would have to special order or something yeah in most cars not all cars and I do want to be clear that the predictions are not endorsements yeah you know so I'm not saying that this would be a good or a bad thing I'm just saying that this is probably what this is pattern recognition and anticipating what's going to happen next it's it's likely I mean I think it's sort of like elevators used to have a manual elevator operator and you'd have somebody would be sort of moving the lever and be able to do fine tune adjustments with the elevator for each floor now there's no manual controller for elevators yeah I think it's gonna seem the same way for cause yeah and how about the way consumers interact with driverless cars how many consumers will choose to own their own car versus signing into a networked fleet of driverless cars probably still most people will own their own car but there will be it's hard to predict the exact percentage but I mean I think probably roughly 60 70 percent of people will probably want to own their cars and I'll call it two-thirds own one-third share this is a complete you know shooting in the dark gas but yeah I think so most people will want to own their own car yeah but they also make me choose to add it to the shared fleet and then take it other shared fleet at will yeah you don't see that as a threat to your business model no I think it's just long as we make great autonomous cars it's just additional options for the consumer yeah it's just adding functionality that I think who will consider quite important in a car in the future I mean I've said this before but ending it in the long term owning a car that does not have a port Onam escape ability will be like a bit like owning a horse I mean you sort of own oars for sentimental reasons but not for actual transport yeah yeah let's talk about the futuristic looking Model X and a question that many Hongkongers have is can I park this thing in my parking garage because of those Falcon wing doors what's your answer to that yeah actually the Falcon wing doors are double hinged so call them about going instead of going because they have a dual acting hinge so they're actually I can open open in a tighter space than almost any door and certainly more than a conventional Titus base in the conventional door if you can physically fit between your car and a Model X then you'll be able to get in the Falcon wing door yeah and it looks beautiful and I love the I can't mention this again you thought yesterday I loved the Back to the Future series reminds me of the DeLorean which I know it should not compare Tesla to you know it looks sci-fi it looks cool but it also and this is important it serves a design purpose what is that purpose yes so the following door is designed to improve accessibility of the third row I mean typically in a3 a3 to a car and an SUV it's quite difficult to access the third row directly you have to fold up the second row seats and you really somehow have to move the seat back of the second row which if you've got sort of a child or child seat in the second row can make it really inconvenient to access the third row so by having crowing door we have much bigger opening that allows you to directly step to the third row quite conveniently even if the there are baby seats in the second row and then if you're a mother and put putting your child in the child seat in the second row is very easy because you have such a big opening and you can it you can step into the car and put the child into the child seat instead of cantilever ring your child over sort of you know through a hole over the baby seat sort of on rests so it's meant to improve accessibility and there are really only two ways to achieve that level of accessibility one is the is it is the sliding door of a minivan and the other is to have something like the felt going door mmm and the reason we can go for a sliding door for like a minivan is that it fundamentally constrains the aesthetics of the exterior of the car and you have to have three support rails which also negatively affect the aesthetics that's why all minivans pretty much look the same and we want everyone to have something was that had that level of accessibility and actually has greater accessibility than a minivan door but also looks good this is classic user centered design and can I just say thank you for designing for moms and thank you for designing for parents [Applause] yeah I think I think parents will really really enjoy the model X yeah and what we're also taking good you know feedback from customers and for example one of the things that was asked of some of Hong Kong customers that have ordered the Model X is to have a partial a partial open function of them of the falconwing door so if you're if it's a if it's really heavy rain it's like an umbrella or yeah so you'd once sort of a maybe a 5060 percent open level so you have a good shield from from the rain yeah and I think people would please to know that actually it's already in the works very good and something that is also potentially in the works but only for select few a submersible Tesla not anytime soon but to be a fun fun side project to have a some more submersible Tesla but I think the market for submarine cars is quite small but you don't have to use the cross Harper tunnel in Hong Kong you could just go through the Victoria Harbour yeah that's true that'd be pretty epic just drive right off the right off the edge of the that's right up here be James Bond every day and your commute absolutely yeah a Tesla truck could that ever happen yeah I think it's quite likely we'll do a truck in a future yeah yeah any more details than that no I think it's sort of a logical thing for us to do in the future okay now what Tesla your goal has been to make a better car and you've done that with an electric vehicle that people covet that has quite a cult following that's upgradeable but you also want to achieve and your turn of phrase is very nice or or try to achieve this Platonic ideal of a car right to reach perfection so what does the perfect car look like well I mean I do use that phrase with our engineering design team that aspirationally we're in pursuit of the Platonic ideal of the perfect car and who knows what that looks like actually but it's I you want to try to make every element of the car as as flawless as possible and they'll always be you know some degree of imperfection but try to minimize that and and create a car that is just delightful in every way and I think if you do that then the the rest kind of takes care of itself you're also the chairman of solar city building out a network of solar panels and solar systems and I can see why solar can make sense in a place at California where it's sunny all the time homes are big a lot of roof space you can lay it all the solar panels but in a place like Hong Kong you know densely packed vertical cities how can solar make sense here yeah I think it's true that in dense cities rooftop solar is is not going to solve the energy need what you can do is have ground mount solar power let's say near Hong Kong tapping into the existing power lines that are coming in and so you can supply Hong Kong with solar power we just need to be coming from a land area that's not too far away and I mean it's worth noting certainly a meter China has actually an enormous landing area much of which is hardly occupied at all hmm with given that the Chinese population is so concentrated along the coast once you go inland at the population in some cases is remarkably tiny so you could easily power all of China with solar all of China was solar usually yeah the world's most populous country yep definitely Wow okay let's um let's go even more way out there and talk about SpaceX you're a CEO of SpaceX and you've said that your ultimate goal is to get humankind to Mars I've heard your response to the question but these guys need to hear it why is Mars important why does Mars matter sure well it's really fundamental surgeon we need to make as a civilization you know what kind of future do we want do you want a future where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event however far in the future that might occur or do we want to become a multi-planet species and and then ultimately be out there among the stars being among many planets many star systems and I think the latter is a far more exciting and inspiring future than the former and and Mars is the next natural step in fact it's the only planet we really have a shot at at establishing a self-sustaining city on and and I think once we do establish such a city there will be a strong forcing function for the improvement of spaceflight technology that will then enable us to establish colonies elsewhere in the solar system and ultimately extend beyond the beyond our solar system and and so there's the defensive reason of protecting the future of humanity ensuring that the light of consciousness is not extinguished should some calamity before Earth but also and that's the defensive reason but personally I find the more the word what it gets me more excited is is the fact that this would be an incredible adventure maybe like the greatest adventure ever and it would be exciting and inspiring and they need to be things that excite and inspire people yeah you have to be you know reasons why you get up in the morning it can't just be solving problems it's got to be yeah something something great is gonna happen in the future yeah we talked about this at length yesterday it's it's not an exit strategy or a back-up plan came in kind or it fails right it's also to inspire people on earth right and to transcend to go beyond our mental limits of what we think we can achieve right I mean I think sort of how incredible the Apollo program was and just I mean if if you ask anyone and say name name some of humanity's greatest achievements in the 20th century the Apollo program landing on the moon would would MIT in many if not most places be number one when will there be a man SpaceX mission and when will you go to Mars pretty close to to do it to to standing crew up to the space station that's currently scheduled for the end of next year yeah so that will be don't be exciting without Dragon 2 spacecraft and then we'll have a next generation rocket and spacecraft beyond the Falcon Dragon series and I'm hoping to describe the that that architecture later this year at the International Astronautical Congress which is like the bit the big international space event every year so I think that that'll be quite exciting yeah and and terms of me going I dunno maybe four or five years from now maybe going to the space station would be nice oh wow and in terms of the first flights to Mars and we're hoping to do that in the in around 2025 I'm sorry in 2020 year 2029 nine years from now they're about oh my goodness that's just around the corner well nine years um are you so are you are you doing zero-gravity training I've done the parabolic flights okay but you must be reading up and doing the physical testing to get ready for this the ultimate flight of your life you've seen the Martian we've talked about the harsh it's like the hardest thing anyone could ever do is there's getting there and also surviving and trying to anticipate everything that could go wrong and make sure it doesn't happen you can tell I'm not going to be signing up for your manned spaceflight it's a big take place why do you think I mean going to Mars is definitely gonna be it's gonna be a hard and dangerous and you know difficult in probably everywhere you can imagine but so it certainly wouldn't be you know if you're if you if you care about sort of being safe and comfortable going to Mars would be a terrible choice yeah and this and this is at the heart of who you are because you to quote Pink Floyd you do not like to live a comfortably numb' life you know you take on incredible risk to take on an entrenched big established industries and to shake and rattle them up and to introduce something new and it's it's so cool to watch and I think that's why everybody here is signed up to come here and to listen to you just to hear more about that people want to be more like you and for the fate of humankind I think it would be great to have more Elon Musk's so what do we need to do to become more like Elon I don't know I think maybe sounds better than it is yeah I you know I mean honestly like like there's a friend of mine he's got a great saying about creating a company which is creating turnable the company and have it succeed is like eating glass and staring into the abyss so I mean what tends happen is it sort of quite exciting for the first several months of starting a company and then then reality sets in things don't go as well as planned customers aren't signing up the technology of the part isn't working as well as you thought and and then can that consumers be compounded by a recession and and it can be very very painful for several years so I think frankly starting a company you I would advise people to have a high pain tolerance and thanks for reminding us of the harsh very harsh and brutal reality of launching a start-up there is that Elon Musk / Tony Stark mystique you know people think you know you are Robert Downey jr. modeled his character Tony Stark Iron Man on you it's it's easy it's fun you're a superhero Titan of industry but it's really hard it's it's really difficult and it's something that requires perseverance and grit do you fear that maybe an in this generation or the younger generation that they don't have that perseverance in grit to take on these really tough challenges I think some people do yeah and but but I think it is definitely true that I mean maybe there are occasionally companies that get created work where there's not an extended period of extreme pain but I'm not aware of you know very many of such instances yeah and so but I do think that the new great entrepreneurs are born of every day and will continue to see amazing companies get both so yeah but I would definitely advise people there's not any company to expect a long period of quite high difficulty yeah but I mean song is people stay super focused on creating absolute best product or service that really delights their end customer like if they stay focused on that then basically if you get a such that your customers want you to succeed then then you probably will all right you have to focus on the customer delivering for them yeah make sure if your customers w you will your odds of success are dramatically higher all the entrepreneurs in this were in this room they're listening to that message and you know we're running out of time so this is the final question this is for the budding entrepreneurs in the room who could take an Elon Musk idea and run with it I mean quite famously Hyperloop is a idea that you had to give away because you just don't have enough time to to deal with it what what are the other ideas that you have that you would love to see another entrepreneur just take on and go well I think there's a lot of opportunity in general in electrification of transport so electric aircraft I think there's there's a lot of opportunity there I think in in genetic so it's it's that's sort of a thorny area but I think that's in terms of solving some of the more intransigent attachment diseases genetics are really key to to solving those something that I think people may be only beginning to look at is establishing some kind of brain computer interface so a brain computer interface yeah at their at the neuron level so this is sort of intelligent intelligence augmentation as opposed to artificial intelligence right I mean I think that that is that has a lot of potential you mentioned to me this to me yesterday I really had kind of no idea what you were talking about and then I looked up Ian banks neural lace that's right and so it's this concept of you know wiring the brain so it's either weak dude there could be a brain internet and it could also mean that we can upload our thoughts to the cloud you would never forget anything you you wouldn't need to take photographs yeah I know it's incredible I mean it's you would never forget anything you would expand your ability to process information to remember information right the denial of service attack happens it can also be used to fight degenerative diseases like Parkinson's - yeah absolutely yeah yeah and I think it actually would be quite quite an equaliser as well because I think the the Delta between you know like it would sort of even things out I think you mean a human kind it would be there would be no education disadvantage everyone would are starting at the same level yeah so there would be no meritocracy no there would meritaten there would be but it would be the differences would be smaller the Delta would be smaller probably Wow and you really welcome that kind of world welcome that you asked for predictions okay predictions are not the same as references so I mean do I think something like that is likely to occur I think probably Wow yeah well it's incredible we could go on and on unfortunately have to wrap and leave it that let's let's give it up for yelling - that was really awesome thank you so much thank you Thank You Christy and from CNN and the de facto game-changer Elon Musk if I can invite you to both stay on stage for a moment we're gonna do a group photo I'd like to please invite to join us on stage mr. Gregg so Hong Kong secretary for the Commerce and economic development along with all our distinguished speakers and our vertical champions as well as a venue partner for the start me up HK festival come on up on stage you're gonna take a group photo together I believe we're gonna move the furniture briefly can I also please just make sure that we include these individuals Matt Dooley Renu Bhatia and Sam Baily Irene Chu and Alou Steve Monaghan ng young and the brink team Miki Christina and Manavi will have to get in nice and close with each other

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Elon Musk what's their vision here what are you trying to do to the car industry I'll try to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport so try to get to try get the car industry to move towards electrification faster than they would otherwise move so the fundamental value long-term value they see for Tesla is serving as a catalyst to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport my electric cars what why is that important well electric cars are zero emission at the car level so they're not producing the co2 or nitrous oxide or self rock sides or any of the sort of the noxious gases that any kind of combustion engine car would produce and so if we can have sustainable energy production and combine that with electric cars we have a long-term sustainable future and how's that going I mean you've made a deal of progress but do you see us all having electric cars in ten years time or is it going to be always a minority pursuit no I think all transport with the exception of rockets will go fully electric so that's why I mean I see the the value of Tesla as in as an accelerant as a catalyst in that transition I think Tesla may be when one looks back on it from a historical perspective it might accelerate that transition by a decade maybe maybe more now this is a great car it's an exciting drive but at the moment it's just for the rich isn't it is this really going to mean anything for the mass market yeah I mean the that the Tesla strategy from the beginning has been to start off with a low volume high priced car that was the sports car that we first did in partnership with Lotus and then we have the Model S which is kind of a mid-priced mid volume car and actually when you when you look at the price of the Model S inclusive of the cost of petrol it actually is a lot more competitive than it would then you'd think afford one of these and nobody I know who is um well I think um it's certainly not a low priced car I'm just saying that if you were to lease or finance the car and compare the the lease appliance cost with a much lower cost of operation of an electric car your monthly cost of transport it's a lot more competitive than it may seem at first glance just looking at the price of the car but all you on the road to producing a model that far more people could yes so the model 3 that's the third part of our strategy which is right produce a high volume low cost car and we expect to be in production with that at the end of next year is that all on schedule and what are the ambitions for that car is that the one that will really make this revolution that you've been talking about happen but no question in order to have a substantial effect on on transportation we have to make the cars affordable so I think the model 3 is extremely important as part of that strategy unless there's an affordable car we will as you alluded to earlier only have a small impact on the world so it needs we need to make a car that most people can afford in order to have a really substantial impact how important is it for you that people's lives are changed in this way obviously it's important for this business because you've lost a lot of money so far you need to have a mass-market car but is it important for you as a thinker that that people have electric cars that that that sustainable vision comes true yeah absolutely in the hot like I said the whole point of Tesla is to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport if we could have made an affordable car right off the bat we definitely would have it's just that it takes time to refine the technology you think of any new technology it takes multiple versions and economies of scale in order to make the technology accessible to the general public you can look at say cell phones in the early days of cell phones they were very big and heavy and very expensive but with successive design iterations and scaling up the production we've brought it to the point where for $100 you can buy basically a supercomputer in your pocket how soon will most people have an electric car is this a very long term vision or is it going to happen soon well I think it's going to happen sooner than people think I mean the typical curve of new technology adoption it's like an s-curve so it starts off quite slow and generally people tend to predict to base their predictions on a straight line as opposed to a curve fit and when you have an s-curve of adoption if you make a straight line extrapolation at the beginning of that s-curve it's always going to underestimate that the actual adoption rate so but if you look at say what Tesla's doing every year we are doubling our total cumulative production so at the beginning of last year we had 50,000 cars in total on the roads worldwide and then last year we produced another 50,000 cars so the total fleet of Tesla vehicles doubled last year it will approximately double again this year meanwhile Detroit the traditional motor makers seem to have oaken up is it is it not true that the likes of BMW are eventually more likely to bring electric vehicles to the masses than Tesla well I say more power to them if they I mean I would certainly encourage their actions on electric vehicles and and for all all manufacturers I hope they produce as many electric vehicles as soon as possible that's the right thing for the world what do you think their record has been like so far has has has Detroit from the traditional motor industry been caught napping well they didn't really believe in electric cars they didn't think that it was technologically possible to create a compelling electric car and they felt that even if even if someone did create an electric car with long range and high performance that people wouldn't want to buy it because they have some deep love of gasoline and and that is fine sold to be able to refuel in five minutes so with with Tesla we were able to disprove those axiomatic errors so with the Tesla Roadster we were able to show that you can in fact create a very fast attractive high phones great handling electric car and that if you made such a car with with long range and if you were if you make such car people would buy it so with with the with the Tesla Roadster in fact that that's really what got General Motors to do the Chevy Volt and Nissan to do the leave so we announced the Tesla Roadster in mid 2007 and Bob Lutz is told the story many times took the took out press release to his engineers and said if a little company in California can do this why can't we and that's what got draw motors to do their electric vehicle program which into and encourage the other manufacturers to do to the electric vehicle programs as well but but those programs for the most part have been or really I'd say almost entirely with exception of maybe the leaf have been of quite low volume and more roaring more inclined towards satisfying regulators but but now I think we are seeing a change because people are seeing but Tesla is able to sell quite a few quite a few electric cars in a normal car segment in the premium sedan segment in in fact we were the best-selling car in the in our segments in the United States last year so more than you know I miss more than Mercedes or BMW or Audi in our segment the technology industry generally suddenly seems incredibly enthusiastic about getting into the motor industry we've obviously had Google with its self-driving car do you see that continuing and do you see Apple building a car and that may be being a threat to you well I I think I I would encourage more participation by whoever it is to create electric vehicles it's it's quite hard to do but I think companies like Apple will probably make a compelling electric car it seems like the obvious thing to do are you betting that that's going to happen have you heard anything well it's pretty hard to hide something if you hire over a thousand engineers to do it so you think Apple is serious yeah I do this is an open secret and will that be a threat to you or will that just expand the industry I think it I mean I think it will expand the industry intensively Tesla would aspire to still make the most compelling electric vehicles and that would be our goal while at the same time trying to help other companies make electric cars as well so for example last year we open sourced all of our patents so anyone can use any of our patents for free you've also been a leader in our autonomous driving in its road to the self-driving car how far do you think that's going to go I mean I think the two biggest revolutions in transport or electrification and autonomy the those are the and it's yep those are the two biggest innovations since the moving production line and they're both happening at about the same time I think autonomy is extremely important and I think in the long term nobody will buy a car and less that is autonomous it will be like having a manually operated elevator or something like that so it's a strange mechanism in 10 years time what will I be driving or will I be driving at all will I just be pressing a button on an app a car will drive up and take me where I want it yeah you're you will only drive if you want to drive it'll be like owning only a car that is not self-driving in the long term will be like owning a horse you would own it for it and you would use it for sentimental reasons but not for you no not for daily use really unlikely now you you've had taken a lot of interest in artificial intelligence and this is becoming an artificially intelligent car well it's narrowly narrow artificial intelligence you've also expressed concern about where that's heading is that because you've looked at what that car can do and have thought what happens if it develops a mind of its own why you worry we don't need to be concerned about the cars the car this is every car a car is not deep AI it's a narrow use case you know we're not trying to build sentience into the car it's just trying to look at the lines on the road and steer correctly and I would consider that to be essentially a solved problem it's just a question of refining the details of the technology and bringing that to market and then improving the nines of reliability so in order to have a self-driving car you really have to have many nines of reliability so it's 99.9999% something like that is is is how good it needs to be or you know if let's say to first approximation you'd want a self-driving car to be an order of magnitude safer than a human driven car and if you're like ok it's 10 times safer than it's like there's no more doubt there's a more debate about what which one is safer but it's still a narrow use case the cars are not going to develop consciousness or decide that they want to take over the world or something like that I think we really need to be more concerned about deep AI yeah and why do we need to be said about that well I mean because there are I think scenarios where if there's some vast intelligence that either develops a will of its own or is subject to the will of a small number of people then we could have an undesirable future or if you want to read a real scary one I'd say I Harlan Ellison's I have no mouth and I must scream will give you nightmares you read a lot of science fiction and is it giving you nightmares at the moment this has given me nightmares yeah and are you generally what when you you've been one of the prime movers about a I interviewed Stephen Hawking last year right add similar concerns is that a short-term concern or is it something way off that we don't need to worry about for a long time it's going to come faster than anyone who appreciates I think it's with with each passing year the sophistication of of computer intelligence is is growing dramatically I mean I really think we're on an exponential improvement path of artificial intelligence and the number of smart humans that are developing AI is also increasing dramatically I mean if you'll get like the attendance at the AI conferences they're they're doubling every year they're getting full I have a sort of a young cousin of mine who's graduating from Berkeley in computer science and physics and I asked him look well how many of the smart students are studying AI in computer science and the answer is all of them now you're in three extraordinary industries you're in electric cars you're in Rockets and you're in solar energy what unites you at what unites those those three interests well the what I'm trying to do is to minimize Exocet future existential threats or take whatever action I can to ensure the future is good I didn't expect these companies to succeed I thought they would most likely fail particularly Tesla and SpaceX I thought Solar City had a higher probability of success but I in the beginning I thought SpaceX and Tesla maybe had a 10% chance of success and so I'm quite surprised really to see that they're not that we're alive it's great I wasn't expecting that I had are you now more confident that they each of them will be a success I do feel it so they've reached a level of progress that makes it unlikely that they will but unlikely that well they will die in the near term in both Tesla and SpaceX have a lot of customers sort of built really earn the trust of a large number of customers and and these are really solid organizations or like really you know I think thoughtful and customers for the car and I think like whenever your customers really want you to succeed then then you will succeed finally you're obviously a very competitive person you're competing with the likes of Jeff Bezos in Jeff ooh in rocket you're competing with Detroit in the motor industry you're competing with regulators when it comes to solar city what drives you is it just I am right and they're all wrong well no I mean I actually really take the position that I'm always to some degree wrong and the aspiration is to be less wrong we're always just one degree wrong well it doesn't matter who you are and I think trying to minimize the wrongheadedness over time is is that I believe in that philosophy and and I mean I I think this there's some things that are important for the future sustainable energy obviously sustainable transport ultimately ultimately becoming a multi-planet species and and traveling out there among the stars I think those are those are great things those are the things that make me like the future and what we inspired about the future whereas if those things don't happen the future I think looks quite dumb and and I just feel quite fortunate that we've made the progress that we have on those fronts and will aspire to make more progress in the future

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it's a pleasure for me as president of the International Astronautical Federation to welcome all you today to the concluding session of the global networking forum for this is C 2017 which has been a huge success in particular I want to thank premier was a real minister and that means and Lord may our faith for the support and presence now let me present adduce our distinguished speaker for today Elon Musk is founder CEO and the designer of SpaceX alone founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionising space technology and ultimately enabling humans to become a multiplanetary species today he will provide an update on those plans first chair at ISC 2016 in weather our last year SpaceX as the number of firsts including the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station the first entity to land an orbital class booster back on land and on on ships out of sea and the first to be fly an orbital class booster in addition to SpaceX is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and Sharmon of Solar City please join me in welcoming anonymous yeah I just good all right - I'll walk come here on and I'm gonna talk more about what it takes to become multi-planet species and I just a just a brief refresher on why this is important I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we're or not it you want to be inspired by things you want to wake up in the morning and think the future is gonna be great and that's what what bring a spacefaring civilization is all about it's about believing in the future and thinking that the future we've gathered in the past and I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars that's why so becoming up we go into more detail and becoming multi-client species this is the updated design for the the what we're sort of searching for the right name but the code name at least is bfr and the the the probably the most important thing that I want to convey in in this presentation is that I think we have figured out how to pay for it this is very important so you know in last year's presentation you know we're really searching for what the right way you know how do we pay for this thing we went through various ideas what kickstarter you know collecting underpants these didn't pan out but but now we think we think we've got a way to do it which is to have to have a smaller vehicle so pretty big but one that can serve that were the one that can do everything that's needed in in the greater Earth orbit activity so essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant we want to have one system one ship ones one booster and ship that replaces Falcon nine Falcon Heavy and Dragon so if we can do that then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9 heavy and Dragon can be applied to this system so that that's really fundamental so let's see what progress have we made in in this in this direction so last lesson you saw the giant tank that's actually a 12 meter tank and you can see the relative scale of it it's a thousand cubic meters of volume inside that's actually more pressurized volume than an a380 just to put that into perspective we developed a new carbon fiber matrix that's much stronger and more capable at higher than anything before and it holds 1200 tons of liquid oxygen so we we tested it so we successfully tested it up to its design pressure and then we're a little further so we want to see where it would break and we found out where we're break it shot about 300 feet into the air and landed in the ocean we're fishing it out and but now get a pretty good sense of what it takes to create a huge carbon-fiber tank that can hold cryogenic liquid that's actually extremely important for making a light spaceship then the next key element is on the engine side we have to have an extremely efficient engine so the the raptor engine will be the highest thrust-to-weight engine we believe of having any engine of any kind ever made we already have now 1200 seconds of firing across 42 main engine tests we fired it for 100 seconds it could it could fire for much longer than hundred seconds that's just the size of the of the test tanks and then the duration of the firing you've seen right now is it's 40 SEC 40 seconds which is the length of the firing for landing on Mars the test engine it currently operates at 200 atmospheres to a 200 bar the flight engine will be at 250 bar and then we believe over time we could probably get back to a little over 300 bar the next key element is propulsive landing so in order to land on right on face like the moon where there is no atmosphere and certainly no runways or to land on Mars with Avenue atmosphere is too thin to land even if there were on ways to land with with the wing you really have to get put pulp propulsive landing perfect so that's what we've been practicing with Falcon 9 so this is just a series of landing but I think he's quite mesmerizing but we now have 16 successful landings in a row and that's with so it's six in a row and that's with it with with really without any redundancy so Falcon nine lands on a single-engine and that the final landing is always done with with a single engine whereas the wish PFR will always have multi engine out capability so if you can get to a very high reliability with even a single engine and then you can you can land and and then you can land with either of two engines I think we can get to a landing reliability that is on par with the safest commercial airliners so you can essentially count on the landing it's not like the you want minimum pucker factor on landing so and it can land with also very high precision in fact you believe the precision at this point is good enough for propulsive landing that we do not need legs for the next version it will literally land with so much precision it will land back on its launch mounts so the C's launch the launch rate is also being it has been is increasing exponentially the particularly when you take attacking or refilling on-orbit into account and taking the idea of establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars or the moon or elsewhere seriously you need thousands ultimately thousands of ships and tens of thousands of recovery of rethinking or refilling operations which means you need many launches per day the key the you really need to be looking in terms of how many landings are occurring you need to looking at you watching out your calendar so while this is a quite a high launch rate that we're talking about here you know by conventional standards it's still a very small launch rate compared to what it will ultimately be needed but just for those who are favored how many Ober launches occur every year it's approximately approximately 60 over launches occur per year which means if SpaceX does do something like 30 launches next year it'll be approximately half of all over launches that occur on earth and the next thing is a key technology is automated rendezvous and docking so in order to retain or refill the spaceship in orbit you have to be able to rendezvous and dock with the spaceship with very high precision and and transfer propellant so that's one of things that we've perfected with with dragon dragon 1 we'll do an automated rendezvous and docking without any pilot control to the space station dragon 1 currently uses the canadarm2 before the final placement onto the space station dragon 2 which launches next year will not need to use the the caterpillar hump so dragon 2 will directly dock with the space station and can do so with zero human intervention you just press press go and it will dock a dragon is also allowed us to perfect heat shield technology so when you enter at a high velocity you bet you'll melt almost anything the reason the reason meteors don't reach earth is they they mail to disintegrate before they reach the ground unless they're very big so you have to have a sophisticated heat shield technology that can withstand unbelievably high temperatures and that's what we've been perfecting with with dragon and also a key part of of any planet colorized colonizing system so Falcon 1 this is where we started out you know a lot of people but we really only heard a SpaceX relatively recently so let me think say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was but if it wasn't we start off with just a few people who really didn't know how to make rockets and the the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer there's not because I want it to you it's because I couldn't hire anyone yet nobody good were join so I ended up being that by default and I messed up the first three launches first three launches failed unfortunately the fourth launch which was the that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1 the fourth launch worked or it would have been that would have been it for for SpaceX but fate liked us that day so the fourth launch worked and it interesting - today is the is the ninth anniversary of that launch I didn't realize that until saying until I was told that just just earlier today but this is a very emotional day actually so but the point is is there's quite a small rocket when we're doing Falcon we're really trying to figure out what is the smallest useful payload that we'd get to orbit it okay something around half a ton to orbit would be able to launch at you know that's an order to a decent size a small satellite to low-earth orbit and that's why we sized Falcon one but it's it's really quite small compared to falcon 9 so Falcon 9 particularly when you factor in payload if Falcon 9 is as many times more it's not sort of on the order of 30 times more payload than Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 has reuse of the primary booster which is the most expensive part of the rocket and hopefully soon reefs of the of the fairing the big nose cone at the front so we think can probably get to something like somewhere between 17 80% reusability with the Falcon 9 system and then and hopefully towards the end this year we'll be launching heavy which is its Falcon have you ended up being a much more complex program than we thought it sounds easy electro falcon heavy actually it's it sounds like it should be should be easy because it's two first stages of Falcon 9's strapped on as boosters it's actually not you have to read we have to redesign almost everything except the upper stage in order to take be increased loads so Falcon Heavy ended up being much more a new vehicle then we realized so took us a lot longer to to get it done but the the boosters have all now been tested and they're on their way to to the Cape Canaveral and we are now beginning serious development of VFR so you can see the the payload difference is quite dramatic VFR in you fully reusable configuration without any oval refueling we expect to have a payload capability of 150 tons to low Earth orbit and that you know it compares to about thirty four four four four Falcon Heavy yeah we're rich is partial partial are useful where this really makes a tremendous difference isn't a cost which all comes to in some of the later slides so this go to the next line and just by the way if ya so with VFR you can get a sense of scale by looking at the tiny person there it's really quite quite a big vehicle main body diameter is about is about nine meters or 30 feet and it consists of the booster is lifted by thirty one Raptor engines that produce I throw that's about 5,400 tons lifting forty at forty four hundred ton vehicle straight up so then it's just a basics about the ship 48 meter Blanc dry master expecting to be about 85 tons I technically I design says 75 tons but inevitably this mass growth and that ship will contain 1,100 tons propellant with a design a design of 150 tons and return mass of 50 so you can think of this as essentially combining the upper stage of the rocket with dragon it's like your Falcon nine up a stage and dragon were combined so as we I'll go into each of these items in detail but you've got the engine section on the rear the propellant tanks in the middle and then a large payload Bay in the front and that that payload Bay is actually eight stories tall in fact you can foot you can fit a whole stack of felt for and rockets in the payload Bay and compared to the design I showed last time you'll see that there is a small delta wing at the back of the rocket the reason for that is in order to expand the mission envelope of the of the VFR space ship it depending on whether you're landing or you're coming you're entering a planet or a moon that has no atmosphere a thin atmosphere or a dense atmosphere and depending on whether you have your your reentering with no no payload in the front a small payload or a heavy payload you have to balance the rocket out as it's coming in and so the delta wing at the back which will also which also includes a split flap a split flap for pitch and roll control allows us to control the the pitch angle a despite having a wide range of payloads in the nose and a wide range of atmospheric densities so we try to avoid having the but it was necessary in order to generalize the capability of the spaceship such that it could land anywhere in the solar system just look at a couple of things in detail so the the the cargo area has a pressurized volume of 825 cubic meters this also is greater than the pressurized area of an a380 so really is capable of carrying a tremendous amount of payload in a mass transit configuration since you'd be taking three months in a really good scenario but maybe as much as six months you some number of months a single single injured ones you probably want a cabin not just a seat so the Mars transit configuration consists of 40 cabins and it sort of depends alone you could conceivably have five or six people per cabin if you really want to crab people in but I think mostly we would expect to see two to three people per cabin and so normally about a hundred people per flight to Mars and then there's a central storage area galley and galley and a solar storm shelter entertainment area and I think probably you know a good situation for at least beer for version one then going to the main body of the vehicle the center body area this is where the propellant is located and this is sub-cooled methane and oxygen so as you as you to kill the methane and oxygen below its liquid point you get a fairly meaningful density increase you get on the order of ten to twelve percent density increase which makes quite a big difference for the propellant load so we expected up to do to carry two or 40 tonnes of ch4 and in our 60 tonnes of oxygen the you know in the fuel tank our header tanks so when you come in for a landing your orientation may change quite significantly but you can't have the propellant just sloshing around all over and main tanks you have to have the header tanks that can feed the main engines with precision so that's what you see the most in the fuel tank then the engine section so the the the ship engine section consists of four Raptor forced ford vacuum wrecked referendums and to sea level engines so the all six engines are capable of gambling the the engines with the high expansion ratio have a relatively smaller gimbal area or gimbal range and slower and a slower gimbal rate thus the two center engines have a very high gimbal range and can able very quickly and you can land the ship with either one of the two Center engines so when you come in for a landing you will like both engines but if if one of the center engines fails at any point it will be able to land successfully with repeat with the other engine and then within each engine this great tool of redundancy so we want the landing risk to be as close to zero as possible and there's some basic stats about the engines the sea level engines are about a 330 ice psco at sea level the the alpha stage engine is 375 now this is version 1 so I think over time there's potential to increase that specific impulse by 5 to 10 seconds and as measuring also increase the chamber pressure by 50 bar or so and then for refilling we just saw the two ships would actually make at the rear section they would use the same mating interface that they used to connect to the booster on liftoff so we reuse that mating interface and then and reuse the propellant flow lines that are used when the booster is when the ship is on the booster and then to transfer propellant it becomes very simple use control thrusters to accelerate in the direction that you want to empty so so you shoot sorry in this direction propel goes that way and you transfer the propellant very easily into these from that from the tanker to the ship so going to rocket capability this gives you sort of a rough sense of rocket capability starting off at the low end with the Falcon one at a half-ton and then going up to be afar at a hundred fifty so I think it's important note that VFR has more carefully than 75 even with full reusability but but here's the here's the really really important fundamental point let's look at the launch cost the order the order of versus I know at first glance this may seem ridiculous but but it's not the the same is true of aircraft if you want to if you if you bought say a a small single-engine turboprop aircraft that would be one and a half to two million dollars to charter a 747 from California to Australia is half a million dollars there and back the single-engine turboprop can't even get to Australia so a fully reusable system like this so it's fully reusable giant aircraft like 747 costs a third as much as an expendable tiny aircraft and in one case you have to build an attack aircraft in that case just have to refuel something so it's it's really crazy that we will be sophisticated rockets and then crash them every time we fly this is mad at so yeah is that that this is this is applicant if says how profound this is and how important really is you know and often I'll be told but you could get more payload if you made it expendable I said yes you could also get more payload from an aircraft if you better the landing gear and the flaps and just parachute it out when you got to your destination but that would be crazy and you would sell zero aircraft Surrey's ability is absolutely fundamental no no no one talk about the value of orbital refilling this is also extremely important so if you just fly VFR to orbit and don't do any refilling it's it's pretty good you'll get a hundred and fifty tons slow orbit and have no and have no fuel to go anywhere else however if you send up tankers and refill in orbit you can refill the tanks all the way to the top and get 150 tons all the way to Mars and if the tanker has highway use capability then you're just paying for the cost of propellant and the cost of oxygen is extremely low and the cost of methane is extremely low so if that's all you're dealing with the cost of retail of refilling your spaceship on-orbit it is tiny and you can get 150 tons all the way to Mars so automated rendezvous and docking and refilling absolutely fundamental so then getting back to the question of how do we pay for for this system this was really I said quite a profound I don't call it breakthrough but realization that if we can build a system that cannibalizes our own products makes our own products redundant then all of the resources which quite enormous that a useful Falcon 9 heavy and dragon can be applied to one system you know some of our customers are conservative and they want to see the they want to see PFR fly several times before they're comfortable launching units so what we plan to do is to build ahead and have a stock of Falcon 9 and dragon vehicles so that so that customers can be comfortable if they want to use the old the old rocket the old spacecraft they can do that because we'll have a bunch in stock but all of our resources will then turn towards building VFR and and we believe that we can do this with the revenue that we with the with the rep with the revenue we receive for launching satellites and for servicing the space station so going to the satellites portion the the size of of this being a 9 meter diameter vehicle it is a huge enabler for new satellites we can actually send something that is almost nine meters in diameter to orbit so for example before if you want to a new Hubble you could send a mirror that has ten times the surface area of the current Hubble as a single unit doesn't have to unfold or anything and or you can send a large number of small satellites you do what it's like you can actually also go around and if you wanted to collect old satellites or clean up space debris you just use a sort of chopper over there and go around and collect collect satellites or collect space degree if you want so that may be something we have to do in the future but that that fairing would open up and retract and then come back down so it's it enables launching of earth satellites that are significantly larger than anything we've done before or significant more satellites at a time than anything that's been done before it's also intended to be able to service the the space station I know it looks a little big rose to the space station but the shuttle also looked big so it'll work looks a little out size but it'll work so it's it'll be capable of doing what dragon does today in terms of transporting cargo and what dragon to will do it in terms of transporting crew and cargo so good a space station servicing it can also go up see much further than that like for example based on calculations we've done we can actually do lunar surface missions with no propellant production on the surface of the Moon so if we do a high elliptic parking orbit for for the ship and retain in high elliptic orbit we can go all the way to the moon and back with no local propellant reduction on the moon so I think that that that enabled that would enable the creation of moon base alpha or some sort of lunar base [Applause] you know quite captivating so the Eagles to see for example how do you transfer cargo from the cargo bay down to the ground is crane so very complicated and [Music] yeah but but since this will enable the creation of a lunar base and its 2017 I mean we should have a lunar base by now what the hell's going on and there of course Mars becoming a multi-planet species it's a hell about of being a single plant species so yeah so we'd start off by setting Commission to to Mars where it would be obviously just landing on rocky ground or dusty ground and it's the same approach that I mentioned before which is you send the spaceship up to orbit yuri tank it or refill it until it has full tanks and it travels to mars lands on Mars for mars you will need local propellant production but Mars has a co2 atmosphere and plenty of water ice that gives you co2 and h2o so you've got you can make therefore ch4 no.2 using the Sabatier process and also the you know voice patia process and I should mention that long term this can also be done on earth so as soon as I get some sort of criticism for why why are using combustion and rockets and you have electric cars like well it isn't some way to make an electric rocket I wish there was but in the long term you can use solar power to extract co2 from the atmosphere combine it with water and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket so the same thing that we're doing Mars we could do on earth in the long-term but that that's essentially what happens similar to the two to the moon you land land on Mars that the tricky thing with Mars is we do need to build a propellant Depot to refill the tanks and return to Earth but because Mars has lower gravity than Earth you can you do not need a booster so you can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth just using the ship I'll be eight you need to go for two Macs payload number of about twenty to twenty to fifty tons for the return journey to work but it's a single saddle just a single stage all the way back to earth I'll show you the so this is the true physics simulation it's the last about a minute so you come in you're entering very quickly going seven a half kilometres a second for Mars there will be some ablation of the heat shield so it's just like a sort of brake pad wearing away it is a multi-use heat shield but unlike for Earth operations it's coming in hot enough that you really do you will see somewhere of the heat shield but because Mars has an atmosphere albeit not a particularly dense one you can remove almost all the energy or aerodynamically and we've proven out supersonic retropropulsion many times with without the nine so if you're very careful about that the this is a because it's sort of you could see a sort of a mesh system it's not it's not meant to be sort of particularly pretty because it's just her simulate the physics of it but the the size of the current gives you a rough approximation for how much thrust the entrance are producing that's not a typo although it is aspirational so we've already started building the system the tooling for the main tanks is has been ordered the facility is being built we will start construction the first ship around the second quarter of next year so in about six to nine months we should start building the first ship I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years five years seems like a long time to me and I the the area under the curve of resources over that period of time should enable this time frame you met but if not this time frame I think pretty soon thereafter but that's that's how that's our goal is to try to make the 2022 Maas rendezvous the earth-mars synchronization happens roughly every two years so every two years there's an opportunity for just to fly to Mars so then in 2024 we want to try to fly for ships two of which would be crude and to to cover and to to occur the goal of the of these initial missions is to is to find the best source of water that's what the first mission and then the second mission the goal is to build the the propellant plant so we should with particular with six ships there have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant Depot which will consist of a large array of solar panels very large array and then everything necessary to mine and refine water and then draw the co2 out of the atmosphere and then create and store deep-fryer ch4 and or to then build up the base starting with one one ship then multiple ships then start building out the city then making the city bigger and even bigger and yeah and over time terraforming was and making it really a nice place to be Thanks it really I think it's quite a quite a beautiful picture and other prior slide it seriously note that on Mars donor desk or blue and it's the sky that's the sky is blue and or dusk and and red during the day it's the opposite of Earth and but there's there's something else if you if you build a ship that's capable of going to Mars what if you take that same ship and go from one place to another on earth so we looked at that and the results are quite interesting let's take a look at that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we're traveling 27,000 ponies now a roughly 80,000 miles an hour it's where the propulsive landing becomes very important to be disappear right [Music] [Applause] so most of what people consider to be long-distance trips would be completed in less than half an hour which yes so that the the great thing about going to space is there's no friction so once you're out of the atmosphere you will go it will smooth as silk no turbulence nothing there's no weather no mr. atmosphere and you can get taught most long-distance places like said in less than half an hour and if we're building this thing to go to the Moon and Mars then why not go to other places on earth as well all right thank you you

https://youtu.be/BqvBhhTtUm4

all right everyone I hope you're enjoying your lunch I have to say it was a really exciting morning but there is a lot more to come it's incredible to me that many bold ideas are now turning into actions and that new players from our last panel like Rubbermaid maiden space NIH and Katz and Burke did I say Rubbermaid ah okay how are we doing my guys are in trouble on that one thank you for that okay hopefully that's that's the the last word I want to say there sorry about that Tupperware I think it's because cindy was working so hard on the beady side of that after after he described his experiment so many of these players are investing in space as an achievable destination for human activity research and innovation in a few minutes we'll be joined by someone who has played an important role in changing the equation of what we can accomplish in space and on earth by embracing seemingly impossible ideas however before we introduce Elon Musk we have an exciting announcement as we've increasingly talked about bringing in these new innovative users like Tupperware to conduct research to not only benefit life here on the earth but also to benefit those businesses everyone in this room will be familiar with a company that will be the newest part of the space Rd community please join me in welcoming the Target Corporation as our newest ISS user [Applause] target will be launching an International Space Station research competition in the fall aimed at solving a global issue that is relevant to their industry please welcome Cindy Bhutto who you saw earlier on the panel for Leo commercialization to talk more about the target research challenge thanks Craig thank you so we talked earlier about our mission to use the International Space Station as an innovation platform and to look at solving these big challenges we are so happy to announce that target is looking at solving or understanding more sustainable cotton production using the International Space Station this is really important target is such a good partner from a social responsibility standpoint they have announced a series of sustainability goals long term and short term and they've also started looking at green innovation technologies what we're doing now with this cotton sustainability challenge is we're looking at the International Space Station as the platform to look at things like gene expression with seeds water and membrane technologies and remote sensing applications that could result in more sustainable cotton production and I bet you guys didn't know that in today's world it takes about 700 gallons of water to produce one cotton t-shirt and what Target is doing is looking out at their whole supply chain from a sustainability standpoint trying to learn something through this challenge on the space station bring it back down here on the earth for that more sustainable production so again we couldn't be happier we're very pleased to announce this partner if there is a website that you can see behind me that has now gone live it's going to have all the details of this challenge which is going to kick off in September so stay tuned for that and again very happy to announce this partnership with Target we're excited to share that through this competition target will be investing significantly in space based research enabling new projects to fly to the ISS all right I love that this is another great step in our nation's utilization and investment in space-based research we're proud that casus has facilitated more than 100 million in outside non NASA funding to ISS National Lab research to date target we're really excited to be working with you and to see new innovative research head up to the space station you can learn more online and all of you researchers and implementation partners out there they'll be looking for your ideas so let's move on to the next highly anticipated part of the program a conversation with with Kirk Shireman and Elon Musk from a logistical standpoint Elon and Kirk will be taking questions after their after their talk there are microphones stationed on that side of the room and that side of the room and I see them so we'll be taking questions from those microphones because of the congestion in the audience Elon Musk is a true visionary leader who has helped to redefine multiple industries we're honored to have him join the ISS Rd Conference for the second time he was with us too years ago in Boston showing his commitment and passion for the International Space Station he founded SpaceX in 2002 it's his third successful venture after the innovative companies zip - and PayPal on May 22nd 2012 musk and SpaceX made history when a company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space when an unmanned capsule the vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with a thousand pounds of supplies for the astronauts marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station since then SpaceX has generated many significant milestones and has delivered hundreds of innovative experiments to the ISS from many companies and organizations in this room today in addition to SpaceX Elon the co-founder CEO and proct architect for Tesla a company that is redefining the automated mode of industry when I think about innovation beyond boundaries the theme for our conference I cannot think of a better representation of that concept in our generation please join me in welcoming Elon Musk and ISS program manager Kirk Shireman to the stage [Applause] okay I'm getting an indication there was a little bit of delay in his transportation the second faux pas three strikes I'm out but I'm not going to fill your time Kirk and Ilan are going to come up momentarily they're going to be stepping up to the stage and they'll start the conversation thank you good afternoon we thought we'd start off by by making Gregg very uncomfortable so I hope we were successful where's Gregg you know why all right so hopefully I hope we made uncomfortable Barry good so Ilan thanks so much for being here today Ilan commuted from the West Coast this morning so we appreciate you taking the time and coming out here and talking with us bill expects everybody we've had we've had a pretty good conference so far at least in my opinion over a thousand people signed up for the first time so ignition increase and lots of people interested in in in space and low Earth orbit and the International Space Station and work that's going on so anyway we're very very excited about the work that's going on and excited to have you here today - great thanks Valerie so you were here a number of years ago July 2015 s not that long ago I guess two years ago and had a discussion like this with Mike Suffredini and a lot of things had happened since 2015 for Spacek so can you can you talk about how things have gone up how they progressed how you're feeling about how the industry and SpaceX particular progressed sure what I think I think we are entering a new era of space exploration which is extremely exciting and it's it's not just base X but there's a number of other companies that have developed new approaches NASA is taking your purchase things which is really exciting in the way that the contracting is done for space station resupply I think is a great model that frankly should be adopted throughout government I talked a little bit about this at the governor's conference and it was actually using the nasty NASA cargo resupply contracting process as a really great model for government in general you knows where you have to compare years of fixed-price milestone based with a hotmail sensor are primarily Hardware oriented and then if one of the two companies that's competing does not reach the milestones then the remainder of the milestones are competed to another company and that's what happened with cargo resupply start off with SpaceX and Kistler kisser made some progress but wasn't going to get close to finishing line and then a little sciences was competed for the second slot and they did get a quest finishing line and I was SpaceX and orbital of providing out that NASA with kagra services Space Station and having a competitive dynamic is I think it's a very powerful function for getting a great outcome for the NASA as the customer and I think that that's just a great that was a great model really well executed and to degree that's applicable in other areas of NASA the government I think that the potential for revolutionary progress on that point so from it from a technical standpoint the the the biggest thing that's happened in the last couple of years which I'm really excited about and I think makes the difference for access to space is the landing of the Falcon 9 rocket booster and in the [Applause] and if you ever get a chance to go to the cave or Vanderburgh to see that I've really recommended it's really pretty fun and it'll be a lot of those flights because within the remainder of the year we've got about a dozen flights billed to go this year and then after landing reef lying that same booster with minimal work to the booster and and we believe we can get to the point where in the not-too-distant future fare probably by by next year where the the sakai groups that can be reborn within 24 hours so and the key the key to that is that all you do is inspection and no hardware has changed not even the paint this is very important so that's our aspiration for for next year obviously while paying very close attention to mission assurance and reliability but we think we've got at least a technical path to to achieving that and then the work I think were quite close to being able to recover the the fairing so it does a huge nose cone on the front of Falcon 9 which is a five point two meter diameter nose cone you can fit a basically a whole sort of city bus in there and and that just that that bearing alone with all of its systems and the acoustic damping and qualification will last in separation system that's about a five or six million dollar piece of equipment and the analogy I use with my team is like guys imagine we had you know six million dollars in a palette of cash and that was you know six million dollars is falling through this guy and would we try to catch it I [Laughter] say we do I say we give it a shot you know worst case it ends up at the bottom of the ocean but maybe we do catch it and then pay it six million dollars let me know when ed pallet of cash is coming back yeah I mean I'd like to give it a shot and you know it might as well be a pile of gas because the car six million dollars so and but I think we got a decent shot of recovering the bearing by the end of the year and possibly flight by either late this year or early next and that just leaves the the alpha stage of the rocket upper stage is about 20% of the cost of the mission so if we get through stage and been faring were right around 80% reasonable and then I think I think we've put a lot of missions we can even bring the second stage back so we're going to try to do that although our primary focus will be on the dragon over the next tick Euler the next year or so dragging two spacecraft which is what we'll wait which is a crew crew dragon next generation dragon spacecraft which has got all of the ecosystems and the ability to do a launch aboard all the way to orbit and and do an automated docking maneuver so it does it doesn't need to be both with the aid of the arm it can do a direct docking River and then that will be the once that's operational the new method of taking both call ground crew to the space station so if I say what's what's our primary focus that's making sure we stay on track for getting an included station as we promised NASA around middle of next year that's gonna be real exciting I think it's going to be great for getting the public part up yeah that's really a while since we lost astronauts from us so yeah we're all looking closer than that yeah and I just like to thank people at NASA for giving space extra chance to do this and just want a word of appreciation for the working relationship with NASA which is great in fact that's all the governors last week that you know for a long time my password was I love NASA that is actually true you know you've just given you've given all the hackers around the world yeah hopefully I don't have like some old email accounts to most okay yeah you got to change this we're gonna cut in on yeah very good so how is that you talk a little bit at Commercial Crew how's that going I know it's you know flying flying humans there's more systems involved of course the risk is higher yeah how is that progressing um you know it's it's been way more difficult than cars are for sure yeah misses it's not as sort of people into the picture it's really a giant step up in making sure things go right you know and for sure the EDA oversight the other side from NASA is much tougher it was thought that it wasn't tough with cargo but it's really intense for crew so I come from the right motivations but uh yeah it's you know can be a bit tough them on my guys and I want the kind of a sex but but i but i you know i know where it's coming from it's the right right motivation and in a recent debate you know going into next year about some of the details technical be tonight but I think we really want to do everything humanly possible to make sure it goes well and you know triple check everything and overall I think it's going you know really well you know this getting select these little small technical bones of tension which now we're working through those our engineers we lay together for that exactly yeah it but and some of these things are really like esoteric I mean unless somebody's really in the weaves on rocket and spacecraft design it will just to sound like you're talking Greek but ancient Greek in it but we have it there's you know I think it's good to have these debates and overall I'm confident that it's going to be a system that that NASA feels good about and you just basically supposed to get about and I look forward to continuing the partnership into next year and doing a great job for NASA excellent thank you and of course we're looking forward to we're excited about it and as you mentioned where NASA's working hard with you if on oh yeah and and yeah if we were also all down in the weeds on those technical interviews yeah after you did yep let's see you clearly down to the little ball to the whole thing oh yeah where's cursed curse is here somewhere that's ghosts great to first if you can't have a you can't have a dry loot both pitched discussion with Gersh you know it's not a good day what we've guess I haven't made as many sort of in the weeks technical discussions I actually love I love talking sigrist with my favorite people in the world actually there you go mine too but but he's my boss let's see so you talked we talked a little bit about Commercial Crew we have cargo supply resupply one at which you have the dragon which of course dragon one which is birthed and in fact you've done a reef light recently with thanks for bringing that up you know that's kind of important yes uh and again thanks for the master support on that yeah we really should you know we should have made a slightly bigger deal out of it because it was the first reflow and spacecraft since the shuttle and we kind of forgot to make you know let people know - I mean I guess it was there in the details but we've got to you know I don't think the public even realizes that it's the first grief light of a spacecraft of one overall spacecraft since the shuttle which I found very well - very good yeah clean mission yes solid I mean that no I was a kid especially in full disclosure say that it cost us almost as much to it I probably about as much maybe more tarik without negotiating contract you know I know I know I just ruined totally honest here basics internal accounting who said that it costs us almost as much as building it a dragon one from scratch I suspect our internal accounting was probably being wasn't counting good things there were some circumstances unusual but this one right this wonder why versions and things like that so yeah the amount of rework from disparate abuts had a lot of rework yeah but the next one we think there's a decent shot of being a be sort of 50% the cost of a new one and keep going my contractor yeah negotiate against myself yes and but uh yeah no I mean we would have offered the best possible deal deal for NASA and it's always tough to get that top-line budget to increase hope it is now I think so much could be it could be accomplished if the NASA top-line budget was increased that people have no idea so talk a little bit about CRS 1 and and birthing in CRS two are we talk about Commercial Crew CRS to the dragon is and to his cargo dragon cred it's it's the similar Adam old line of it's the dragon dragon it's like that but it's going to dock and talk about the then we'll have a good commonality between us synergism and things yeah yeah yeah so the I mean the other thing called red dragon would have is the launch escape system or little still have the logic associated with separating from the vehicle so I think most likely even even cargo dragon 2 would be able to support survive booster anomaly but like they would normally the the we don't like them yeah y-yeah I guess I like doing the the it one of them the Lord ill everything else on the dragon crew dragon 2 has except the thrusters but I think in most cases actually it would still be able to survive reentry and and if the cargo safe but but having a commonality is great yeah yeah any going forward it seems like the docking itself and if you know even beyond testing of the systems evolutions and things that might be beneficial to test on on the cargo vers le rue and absolutely and I know you've already done some things on on CRS 1 to prepare for CS 2 in the testing some TPS repair capability and things like that so exactly actually I really you know just like to you know express some appreciation for the whole CRS team because they've really allowed us to update the rocket and you know ad quit crazy things like landing legs and I've been really fair I think in longest to iterate with the booster for for the CRS contract and then and then as you're pointing out drag to being used for both cargo and crew allows us to iterate with a slight list a little more risk on the cargo version and prove it out for this crew on board yeah it's really helpful excellent so let's let's talk about and we got a few more minutes here and then we'll open it up to questions but you know the theme here is for the conferences innovation and and of course we talked already about some innovations in the launch business but what do you think needs to be where are the areas are the thrusts for innovation that we really need both you know not not excluding launch but but also looking at low-earth orbit what are in low-earth orbit where do we where do you think we as a you know space industry need to go and look for our innovation yeah well you know I I think the log Apple even I think maybe we'll do the really the key to opening up space pesos orbit you know leo and beyond is rapid and complete reusability or near complete reusability and it's like we have a deaf craft or cars or normos April or transport that's super hard with space because this is you develop on a planet with pretty high gravity so so be pretty easy for in Mars or something like that but uh but Earth's gravity is really pretty pretty high and we're going to thick atmosphere and so reusability is tough and you're going through you know height sort of you have operated vacuum hypersonic supersonic transonic subsonic that's just a lot of regimes for any sort of flying object to go through but burries ability I think is absolutely fundamental to break through and access to orbit and beyond Leo Leo and beyond anything that can be done and in that direction I think is good turn change the economics of transportation to low-earth orbit right really fundamental you get quick reusability the economic equation it becomes easier to get to low-earth orbit and do more things yeah yeah I mean it's kind of like there are just any mode of transport it's like before there was Union Pacific across the u.s. to California and was like hardly any people in California people thought building Union Pacific was just crazy because you know like nobody there so why are we pulling a railroad to nowhere now you know California's most populous state in the country some people stopped in Texas along the way yeah yeah without a summer by the way I love Texas yeah we do a huge part of our R&D in Texas in Central Texas love y'all don't know about that near Waco we have substantial Central Texas we do keep the Bolsa Chica down and it's out there that's right yeah exactly so we've got a lot of activity throughout Texas we're building a third launch site in South Texas near Brownsville I think that'll that'll give us good you know contingency capability if there's a hurricane coming through the Cape and we still need to get to the station we could you know watch out of South Texas and that will ensure continuity of service and yeah I really spend a lot of time in Texas here it's great all right uh traffic's not as bad as in Southern California oh man tread so that's the biggest issue with Sun Catholic health I mean like like which level of hell are you in okay curat hell yeah Washington's trying to catch it you know you know weird Rick I mean this is I mean we're digging a tunnel and I'd heard about that yeah yeah so it's like the tunnel starts right across from SpaceX HQ so if you ever out they wanted to see our tunnel as long as you promise that close it in after I never thought it would yeah we're digging the tunnel and it's kind of like a so I can make matters sort of it's like a lot actually oddly enough it's like a little low stress activity because like everyone expected to fail and I mean those sort of grown with a joke that I make about the tunnels is that they have low expectations this is no way to go but down yes I can keep going [Laughter] men'she you involved in space you involved in tunnels you kind of kind of yeah they get a basic when we interact guy when I was in started open space as enteric guy Ling space he's probably gonna fail the no stop saying internet guy I think that's got a transport guy he's actually a transport guy so Tom speaking of transport you know today ISS is up there and real the conference has focused a lot on on some of the research and developments going on there but and commercialization too by the way but what in commercialization least NASA strategy is commercialization will be fostered on ISS and then at that point in the future ISS oh go away and and we expect we hope for a vibrant low Earth or economy at that point in time and I'm kind of curious what what you see in terms of SpaceX and your transportation relative to that of that economy what's next for Commercial Crew after after ISS sure well if it's well I don't think the public realizes how cool is S is you know that is an awesome thing that's up there you know it's like a lot of also people don't realize we have a space station like an Academy serious like we have a gigantic space station as huge projects really gigantic I mean it's a pretty incredible structure that we have orbiting over the earth and I think just i i'd recommend like man you've gotta do something to educate the public about the awesomeness of the space station crazies pretty amazing and and big like people just lose sight of like they think oh there's like a little thing it was rigged it's real big and yeah so and now it's finally getting into sort of real operational youth and that's great so I can amazing technological achievement so but then yeah I think the the in terms of low Earth orbit stuff on the commercial side I think there's a lot of opportunities in kind of a global internet capability so providing internet so pause the world that either don't have it or where it's very expensive and not very good and it's like that the space is really good for providing internet productivity for sparsely populated or low populated regions so so it's literally a threat to telcos actually can take big telcos lives easier because a lot of customers that are very hard to serve where like you're digging a fiber cable for two miles they'll never pay off the investment to you know to get to one house type thing but but for space you can really serve so those customers so economically sensible rates Earth Observation you're getting better understanding of of crops and climate and natural is sort of not any or any natural disaster information and no but I think the you want to get the public real fired up I think we got a we gotta have a base on the moon you know like that was pretty cool and then going beyond that getting people to Mars yeah certainly sitting people further we've ever symptom before yeah captivating for the people so yeah it's captivating for me I know that yeah exactly so yeah just having some commander presence on another heavenly body to be the kind of moon base and then the in and getting getting people to to Mars and beyond and you know sort of the consist that that's the continuance of the dream of Apollo that like people really looking for excellent this might be a good time to go ahead and open it up for a few questions from the audience weird where the where there on the side I think microphones on the side I can't tell if people or other life is so bright as hard as well I know it's a risk asking people to ask questions but any any questions looks like there's a few people signed up lined up over here so go ahead hi you Don over here from the UK pleasure to ask a question to you my question is how are you managing the risks associated with the Falcon Heavy and particularly the recently announced private launch around the moon thank you be at I'm sure so the first of all I should say Falcon Heavy that requires the simultaneous ignition of 27 over class engines it was like you know a lot that could go wrong there and I encourage people come down to the Cape to the first Balkan heavy mission it's guaranteed to be exciting [Laughter] but it is one of those things is really difficult to test on the ground I mean we can fire the engines in the ground but and we try to simulate that the the dinette the dynamics of having 27 instead of nine Dragons and the you know the airflow as it goes through transonic it's going to see heavy transonic buffered it max Q what has been about a max Q there's a lot of risk associated with Falcon have a real good chance that that vehicle does not make it a little bit when I make sure set expectations accordingly I hope I hope it makes it pass you know far enough away from the pad that it does not course pad damage I would consider even that of one Creon and yeah directs I major pucker factor really that it's like another way to describe it you know that Wendell that dwindles the amount of people who want to ride on that the first time yeah well people just wall are cat they're still people in full disclosure here man at full disclosure I you know I think false Navy is going to be a great vehicle just just like so much that's a really impossible test on the ground and we'll do our best and it actually ended up being way way harder do Falcon Heavy than we thought because first it sounds really easy you just stick to first stages on as crap on boosters yeah how can that be but then everything changes all the loads change aerodynamics totally change you've tripled the vibration and acoustics so if you sort of break the Lacroix levels on so much of the hardware the amount of load you're putting through that Center core is crazy you got two super-powerful boosters also shoving that Center core and it's like so we have to redesign the whole Center core airframe I like the Dalton iink is good take so much load and then you got separation systems and yeah it just ended up being really way way more difficult than we originally thought we're pretty naive about that but I said but it's nice thing is it's a fully optimized it's about two and a half times the payload capability of a falcon 9 so you know well over a hundred thousand pounds - Julia payload capability 50 tons even get up to a little higher than that if you know if optimized and and the nice thing is that does have the throw capability to toss the dragon - in a loop rather man and Dragon - itself the heat shield is designed with a huge amount of margin so it's got enough margin to handle a lunar re-entry and particularly we do initial velocity scrub do sort of at least one pass to scrub blasty then come in on the second pass yeah but no question whoever is on the first flight fear brave yes let's see let's go over here to this side here's our question from over here hey Ilan Ted tegami with educational company called magnitude I oh I had the good fortune of meeting you back in September watching your five sons launch their own Rockets Black Rock Desert oh yeah cool yeah I'm done and since then we've actually been a had the great fortune of sending students payloads up to the International Space Station and we're now working with cases to extend that we'd like 50 million students to get on the International Space Station their experiments on the space station by 2014 so my question to you is more about the innovations in education your thoughts that same year that I met you and your son's you announced ad astra oh yeah and before the advent of neural lace gets fully implemented uh-huh what are your thoughts on that the innovations in education today thank you just the postal education well I think is maybe the definitely some good schools out there but I think the some of the spaces the mistakes at least in my opinion that I see being made in education is that people the teachers do not explain why kids are being taught a subject you know just sort of get dumped into the math and like why are you letting math what's the point of this it seems like some some people like negative see I don't know why I'm being asked to do these strange problems but you know the why of things is extremely important because you know our brain has evolved to not to discard information that it thinks is has a relevance so then if on the one hand you you'll be asked to memorize or learn say formulas but you do not know why this is the case then you have this cognitive dissonance of it seems irrelevant but I'm being told to remember it so I'll be punished so cuz I better remember it but so the why of things is very important and then being able to edit and then picking kind of a problem and then using various educational tools to solve that problem like using math or physics or economics to to solve that problem is far more engaging than teaching the tools you know difference between if you say well we're going to take apart this this engine and and see how it works and put it back together again and then in order to take the engine apart we need their wrenches and screwdrivers and the winch and allen keys and whatnot and and then in the course of solving the problem of taking engine apart and putting it back together you learn about wrenches and screwdrivers and all the tools that you need and then now you understand the relevance this is why wrenches are important I would you know worst if you had a class on wrenches I feel like I would not seem that great you know so tying it to solving a problem is I think very powerful for establishing relevance and getting kids excited about what they're working on and then and and having the knowledge stick yeah and some to some extent a lot you know building a CubeSat or flying an experiment on ISS is like that right you've gotta you've gotta why or the relevance in the curiosity and in terms of building that that device that experiment then a big result so it really is cool it ties to the it gives you a really a Content example of what what you're learning in Y yeah exactly I think like things like CubeSat exactly would work because select okay what is the solar panel how does orbital dynamics work how do we you know how to repel this thing you know how to batteries work electronics control systems and you need to bet they're like oh we want to make our satellite work that's why we need to understand all these disciplines something it's like like cube size 2 and Q stats are great like things like design both fly for model airplane so Formula SAE we've got a design build a kind of a race car and I raced out against other people that those things are very powerful for learning as learning tools yeah it's very cool all right thank you let's see over here another question hi my name is Jacob and actually live near the Cape so my question is not much of a tech question but more of what your prediction is so about maybe a hundred years after we develop sustainable colonies on Mars do you think and of course many other countries will also try to get to Mars that there would be like a conflict for the best resources on Mars like in I guess you could say in sort of like a interplanetary warfare it's not it's just like a video game doesn't it it's an idea Mars Attacks the you know I think it's a pretty open territory on Mars so this I don't think we're going to be there's going to be any kind of scarcity there's like a lot of land on Mars how many people yeah so they're hiding on the back side yeah no I mean they're you're pretty clever if there are people on Mars man they are way cleverer than us they're hiding well so yeah no there's plenty of land on Mars so I mean you know the history of human civilization does contain a lot of war so I don't think we you know you go to Mars and that you know be war free forever but but it is certainly not going to be a resource based a conflict due to scarcity of resources on Mars I think we're going to go to the Mars is a multinational effort to write so it's not it's not one country going in another country going in then they're fighting over Wars I think it's countries going together and Anna so I think we're more likely to be peaceful in that in that scenario as well yeah you know I actually advocate for I think it's fine if the countries get together to form teams but I think it's actually probably better if they're at least you know at least two or three country coalition's going going to Mars in a friendly way and and competing to see who can make the most progress if you look at like say the Olympics they were pretty boring if everyone just linked arms and cross the fishing line at the same time you're friendly but it would you know dock be more like the opening ceremonies yeah yeah exactly so we I think friendly competition is a good thing yeah very good why I think you know NASA wants to be part of one of those carnal coalition's with the United States and death and so we're I know we're actually trying to build such a coalition now let's see from over here another question I am yota mariel founder and CEO Bluefield we are deploying methane tracking micro satellites and my question to you I hope to learn your thoughts on advancing remote sensing capabilities of critical gases on earth and one mouth thank you that's a pretty esoteric question remote sensing of gases yeah that that's something that's going to be important Mars has a number of trace gases that are pretty helpful it's very helpful that that Mars has co2 and nitrogen and argon those are those are like really helpful gasses to have in the atmosphere mostly co2 but that a little bit of nitrogen and argon really can be pretty helpful yeah and up again whatever other trace gases we can get I don't know we always say Mars has just enough atmosphere to it's not to be really helpful in terms of aerobraking but it sure makes it a lot harder so it's just enough to be to be difficult so what but in terms of interest you research utilization you know when they hit their to be able to build to get your oxygen and that and hopefully we'll have a water-filled build hot get hydrogen may occur hydrogen on on on the planet so yeah and with enough resources it'll we want to carry everything with us well the best thing if having if you got h2 and co2 you can build hydrocarbons of any kind you can singable plastics you can build you know short chain long-chain hydrocarbons because the current basics thought for kind of a large transport vehicle is a primary methane based system because you get to have a kind of smaller the tanks are half the size with with methane so and then yeah but and Mars with with a co2 atmosphere and a lot of water rice is is grateful for that go beyond mazda this is a lot of Merit for a hydrogen because the yelling need water but that's all sort of can't think beyond f1 so we did speaking of that last last year in Guadalajara the IAC conference you talked about plans to go to Mars and and I know you guys have been working on that since then yep you do so you plan at some point to talk about that work publicly yeah making probably the upcoming IC and a delay might be a good opportunity to do the updated version of the Mosel architecture because it's evolved quite a bit since that last talk yeah I might ask for questions to be quite short of time for that is good strategy it wasn't very enthusiastic people to the mic at the IAC last time I mean but but um the you know the the key thing that better figured out is like how do you pay for this whole you know someone to go to Mars that's super expensive and I kind of think by kind of you know today for downsize the what the Mars vehicle you know make it capable of doing Earth orbit activity as well as Peter Mars activity then you know maybe we could pay for it with by using it for a covert activity that's the one that's one of the key elements in the new architecture it's similar similar to what was at ISE but it's a it's a bit a little bit smaller still big but it's but but I think it's I think this one's got a shot at being real and on it on the economic front you know that's correct all right see I think a question how are we here hi you on TV Jane mark I'm mostly one important question in one a little aside can you talk a little bit about your R&D strategy for your companies and is it all focused on short-term problems solution or how much and in what fashion do you allocate time and money towards R&D spending on some of the long-term goals you're working that and then just as a little aside for the boring company are you looking at not only as a habit as a transportation but potentially is a habitat company for ton of not just tunnels with habitats on Mars or the moon yeah actually so I do think like getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars because like once you've got a kind of a it would be a different optimization for you know Mars boring machine versus a boring machine but for sure there's going to need to be a lot of ice mining on Mars and mining in general to get for materials and then along the way building underground habitats where you know you're good good radiation shielding and you kind of have you know there's much you can you can build it really an entire city underground if you wanted to I think people still want to go to the surface you know sometime time but you can build repairs not underground with the right boring technology on Mars so I do think there's overlapping that technology development arena and then Rd you know I try to spend as much on R&D as we can at my companies so we really max out Rd I mean I spent most of my time on engineering that's probably 80% of my week is engineering means and so you know any money that we get a revenue we put that right back into Rd and some of it is longer-term yeah you know like for example the you know bars vehicle look at some drinks and bars communication stuff potentially with with capacity and yeah but I'm super priority site as rings five most fun thing so try to dial that to the max over here hi my name is Chris Lafleur I work for Congress for representative John Conyers a couple days ago I read about you talking about artificial intelligence and the dangers of it and how as a as a businessman you are totally against regulation and stuff like that but as a you know a human being you think it's critical that we get ahead of this issue yeah can you please elaborate on like why what are you saying that we don't get to see and or what as a policy maker I should be looking to do to sort of I guess protect its own huh okay well I think it is difficult to appreciate just how far artificial intelligence has advanced and how far it is advancing because we have a double exponential at work we have an exponential increase in hardware capability and we have an exponential increase in software talent that is going into AI so whenever you have a double exponential it's very cool to predict predictions almost always going to be too conservative in terms of thinking of you further out than it is you know you start to see things like if you seem like the videos where you can sort of really quite accurately video simulate someone and put words in their mouth at the nevus both use Google if it's really pretty amazing and then they had so-called a generative adversarial Network had two of them compete with one another to make the most convincing video so one would generate the video and then the other one would identify where it looked fake and and then that that would be able to fix that and then go back and forth to the point where you can tell which one is the real real video which was the big one and he also had have been some very public things like the defeat of alphago or to be of kovai alphago the blue balls vesko champion people thought defeating go was either never or 20 years away that was the world's best go player was defeated and now that same alphago system can defeat the top 50 players simultaneously with zero percent of chance of them winning and that's one year later so the degrees of freedom to which artificial intelligence is able to apply itself are really increasing I think by 10:00 or 9:30 yeah that's pretty crazy so I think and we're starting and this is on hardware that is really not well-suited for neural nets you know like a GPU is maybe it'll make you better than CPU but something but a chip that is designed optimally for neural nets is order of magnitude that are going to GPU and that is there are a whole bunch of neural net optimized chips coming out either late this year or next year and so I think we should but the other part role of government is to make sure the public is safe like to take our public safety issues and I think so I think the right move is to establish some government or agency which at first is just there to gain insight so it's not about like shooting from the hip and just putting any rules before anyone knows anything but you guys self agency it's got a gain insight once that inside is gain then start applying rules and regulations we have that for the you know crafts they fave at that for cars good at for drugs for food and I don't think anyone wants the FAA to go away or FTA to give away or you know any of those regulatory agencies then I think we just need to make sure people do not cut corners on AI safety so maybe it's going to be a real big deal and it's going to come on like a tidal wave alright thanks see over here question the afternoon lions and and I'm a film director and they are producer and I'm currently working on a film documentary film about future scenarios through humanity which actually brought me to this amazing conference where I can learn big my research on the space exploration area and in the previous three days there was a lot of talks which is I think an extremely beautiful phenomenon about this kind of dual philosophy behind space exploration and space solutions about solutions that are coming back to earth that can benefit humankind and very very wide area and today we've been talking about the commercialization of the of the space area and it brings a lot of questions to me about social responsibility behind gigantic companies that would actually probably take over how the space industry would develop in the near future so I'm very curious how you see in long term these kind of benefits for people or social goals for for SpaceX and especially in the context that you are an entrepreneur that invests in infrastructure and transport hard solution that would probably change the way most of us live and the way we communicate with each other so very very curious how you see that in terms of long term mission long term philosophy and what would be your advice or maybe kind of security signal for other of your colleagues and for all of us I'm not sure I fully understood the question um yeah or the answer but yes I think mainly about lower long-term benefits from the RNG endeavors that your companies would conduct that could actually also not only serving building a service that can be useful for business sort of people but also benefit societies in a wider context and also knowing that it will probably interest the commercial industry in spite would probably develop very quickly and it will grow how do you see a social responsibility of the companies who actually do that and where are the limits of what can be done which should be done the same way as you think about for example open AI mission and areas of AI development so can you track could be translated into space and history endeavors well I think there's a pretty big social benefit or civilizational benefit to being a multi-planet civilization you know that dramatically increases the probable I expand of human civilization if we are a multi-planet species versus a single planet species sometimes that is most interpreted as well should we just focus everything on earth it's like well you know but we should focus almost everything on earth but I think whether it should be maybe 1% or 2% of our resources that are applied to making life multiplanetary because there's certain irreducibly reducible risks for therefore on earth you know it's possible in the future that there there's some global war that knocks us back many levels of technology you know certainly if it was a major nuclear war would and it was just so the general decay of societies over time we see this through history we look at ancient Egypt ancient Rome you know they had repeat peak technology levels and then for reasons that aren't obvious declined and you know something just having being a multi-planet civilization having human bases throughout the solar system I think persuasive is very exciting and inspiring and they need to be things that are exciting and inspiring and make you look forward to waking up in the morning like a future is exciting this is underappreciated you know like tunnels sorry absolutely sorry and yeah but there's gotta be things that make you excited about life so you can't just be problem-solving you know one one food was real calm after another it's got to be like I'm fired up about the future begins here's why and and space is one of those things that does that people all around the world you know when when Apollo 11 when they landed on the moon I mean it was something for all of humanity really was yeah if you will it feels like one TV for 50 miles around people walk their walk 50 miles just to go find that one TV but to what should happen so it in a sense people think well what about what about for nations of the world like you know what it's fire inspires them to and we need things like that without we're gonna have an OP alone all right thank you over here hi you on quick questions I heard that dragon is no longer planned to land propulsively is that true yeah that was a tough decision it dragon is capable of landing for Greg to is capable of landing propulsively and technically it still it still is although you'd have to landed on some pretty the soft landing pad because we've deleted the little legs that pop out of the heat shield but it's technically still capable of doing it the the reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety particularly for crew crew transport and then there was a time when I thought that the Dragon approach to landing on Mars we've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters would be the right way to land on Mars but now I've pretty confident that it's not the right way and that there's a there's a far better approach and and that's what the next generation of SpaceX rockets in spacecraft is going to do so yeah so just the difficulty of safely qualifying dragon propulsive landing and the fact that pro technology evolution standpoint it it was no longer in line with or we were confident was the optimal way to land on Mars that's why we are not pursuing it it could be something that we bring back later but it's it doesn't seem like the right way to apply resources right now we're high ulong my name is Elia overbee I'm a PhD student studying genomics we've all made of evolve together made a lot of technological progress on space system my question isn't about the technology it's about the biology what are the principal biological concerns you have about human health on long-duration missions such as a mission to Mars and have you identified any solutions to these problems well I say Garten Mars not for the faint of heart and it's risky dangerous uncomfortable and you might die now do you want to go you know what a lot of people answer is going to be Aldo and persona scurvy hell yes so it will you know there will be issues I don't think it's like it's going to be a case of like you get irradiated to death long away I don't think that's the case at all you know the radiation levels sort of roughly you know in worst case now really kind of about equivalent to smoking on the way there now smoking is pretty bad but but I think with with some water shielding we can cut down on a large percentage of the incremental radiation and that should be enough that that the sort of marginal risk of cancer is not something that is going to be a showstopper let's that's my best assessment to date something's learning a lot about solar winds and fast particles and or not and one of things I learned recently that I wasn't thinking quite understand is that the I always thought if the particles from the Sun the sort of solar wind is going kind of straight up from the Sun but they follow the magnetic field lines so you actually can get the particles coming at you from the side even though it was kind of a directional thought wall to the Sun so you do need some cut some amount of protection at least on the gallon on kind of for four or five sides and if it I think it's not a showstopper but it is it's definitely you know if its safety is your top goal I would go to Mars you know there's a there's a bunch of work going on ISS right now to understand the risk to the humans for long-duration certainly with it we're in the Van Allen belts to the radiation environments gerrant but and all part of it is understanding what happens to the humans the longer you stay so so far we've had human stay a little bit longer than a year and that's it so in the history of the species they've had someone off the planet for a little more than a year and we're talking three years to go to Mars well you know I think you get the perhaps perhaps sure but it's in the years it's a you know it's so they're very much intial for for things out there that we haven't found yet and so we'll learn more as we go along hopefully learn more before ISS is done yeah it's just actually the here you know Maz is only the same sort of rough quadrant of the above six roughly six months every two years by same I mean sort of Trance lightly off site because it's like a transfer quadrant but but if you can get the ship to and from Mars inside that six-month window then you get to reuse it twice as often so there's actually a lot of Merit to being able to get to Mars in under three months you get there quick and back where skip makes a bigger a bigger vehicle and resupply so anyway well the interesting problem that will I'm sure we'll work on yeah as we go forward a lot of Earth orbit refueling over it's not really mostly oxygen but it propellant realities are good for word for propellant for fuel plus oxygen prof I guess profit prop load will have to divert we'll have to invent a new word right so I answered okay a question over here Dimitri star the performs in Los Angeles first thank you very much for digging those tunnels they will be really handy during Olympics my question is like what Tesla cars will we see you writing the crew module to Isis and back thinking I [Applause] would like to at some point I would like to yeah I think giving things work out you know I'd like to yeah maybe three three or four years something yeah great all right we'll put I on a manifest okay next question over here hello I'm Ana Sofia bag arrived and I have kind of a follow-up on the biology question from before it is one thing to say obviously it's not going to be a safe experience to go to Mars but there are some technologies essential especially we're looking to putting humans there permanently that are going to be have that are going to have to be developed with biological capabilities speaking of like flight suits habitats eventual artificial biospheres for people to live in do you see your company playing a part in the development of those technologies you see biology having a place in space X's work or will that be outsourced to other unrelated companies and before you answer you should know that NSF e over here one genes and space competition and flew on a SpaceX Dragon and it's a via was that that SpaceX 10 when was that SpaceX 8 so and very smart in late I think fact I think she's smarter me in high school and then that I am now so anyway so good luck with your answer okay biology UPS has a significant role to play in any kind of permanent Mars space or city yes I mean it for spacex 16 we're trying to make sure we can get people there reliably at a cost they can afford and and get cargo they're a black ops number you know because it the business there's kind of a threshold cost per ticket or cost per ton to service and mars below which a self-sustaining city can develop and above which it cannot that that sort of critical economic and technical threshold is is what we're focused on at SpaceX but that we will probably have to do a pivotal work on Alec Depot basically propellant plant on Mars but then our intent is to you know we don't want to get in the way of what others are doing we want to make sure that let's say if somebody makes an investment and wants to do something on Mars creative you know a business or do some scientific endeavor that SpaceX does not compete with that you know because they need to feel like okay they're we're not going to go in and compete with them arbitrarily we want to make sure that they feel is going to be a fruitful environment to be the dinner to go there and and and do something special so our focus is going to be a transport kind of fundamental utilities survivability and we know and we'll do more if we need to do more but we want to make sure that lots of people can go and do all those things on Mars or the moon and I feel like SpaceX is going to do anything but try to help them we don't we don't interfere or compete you know they got to feel like the opportunities there next question over here hi Yvonne my name is Tracy and I'm not here for any reason related to my career or to my area of study I'm actually here as a very cool and only slightly overbearing mother to my ten-year-old daughter Harper and a sister to my 14 year old brother Ben who are both in the audience today and who thinks of you the way that I guess I thought of Madonna at the same age I praise their in the spirit of that I wanted to get your advice doing that to kids who are very interested in space and engineering and entrepreneurism thank you I'm sorry face engineering and entrepreneurial is what's your advice alright yeah well you know there's a lot of technical problems to solve so I guess we sort of you know started studying kind of engineering and physics and Biosciences and I kind of think would be the way to go yeah a lotta give me a lot of poems to solve to to make a city work on Mars we were thinking of just as a sort of a semi joke putting a dub scripture on our website for urban planning in brackets Mars but if this is going to be stressed not a problem solve that'll be it was a lot of building building and problem solving so those like the right you know skills to work on if someone's interested in going beyond earth or you know space and channel thank you we're glad you're glad you're here glad your kids are here to their their the future for all of us so thanks for coming see over here hi my name is Gerard by a NASA Johnson Space Center and my question is in your quest to you cause Mars do you foresee utilizing expandables spacecraft modules as a stepping stone or even a final final organization well I think there's definitely going to be inflatable things on our Mars itself you know in the journey there there might be some not as playable but um we're not currently baselining that oughta Mars itself I think they'd be quite a lot yeah okay thank you inflatable and and perhaps just building it with the materials it's yeah ready pray exactly local materials that you don't have to carry it with you yeah I don't you got to get that tunnel the boring machine there though it's gonna be well right now the earth ones are really heavy like really heavy right well built by aerospace engineers they're not worried about wait for tunneling machine you're like wait actually one one that's nice and heavy but Mars one you'd have to redesign it to be super light that's a tricky one and I'm just taking account the different conditions on Mars really yeah realizing the you know the Curiosity rover and the tires being chewed up by the sharpness of the just of the dirt to the gravel there it's a very foreign environment to us and even in very subtle ways so yeah I'll see ya next question over here hi Alan my name is pricilla Chandra I'm a regenerative medicine scientist from Wake Forest University my question is regarding your company near a link that makes a brain machine interfaces so what do you think this technology how is it useful for humans when they are you know going to low-earth orbits or even deep space exploration and do you have any plans in that direction well the reason for reason I want to create neural link was primarily as an offset to the existential risk associated with artificial intelligence I think we will hear intelligence will not we will not be able to beat AI so then if you know the saying goes we can't beat em join em kind of thing so having some it's a bit excited wait up to link you know human will on mass to the outcome of AI having AI be an extension of individual human well that's really the point of neural link now along the way I think will be a lot of good that's in addressing any brain damage that's you know as a result of a stroke or lesion or something congenital or just loss of memory when you get old that kind of thing and you know velvet I'll have well before it becomes a sort of you know brain AI some buyout situation so if we play it you'll see it coming everyone it won't or what happened all of a sudden Betty I do you think it increases the long-term relevance of human exploration and and yeah I think I think it's but for me it's increased my motivation long-term that that it doesn't just need to be done by robots you know yeah if that answers your question that's your question oh yes all right let's say maybe were one more question here and we'll wrap it up on the left here okay hi caller from space nation as we are building the first global Estoril training program for everyone my question relates would you earlier said to the instable International Space Station and how it's a shame that it's not better known around the world as probably compared for example the shuttle program so and thinking that in the future we need thousands and more space pioneers so how do you see the significance of this public engagement and especially in the time where we have more and more tools to do that and do you have specific plans on that and how you see that affecting accelerating or does it haven't that kind of effect for the whole humanity's transition to space and under the new space era sure well I think it's just getting more more human spaceflight is going to automatically engage the public as you point out that dealing with Space Shuttle there was a lot more engagement when the Space Shuttle was launching I think if the public policy is some some path even if it's long term where they themselves may be able to go to over tool beyond or to the Moon or Mars I think their interest level increases dramatically and it may not be even that that they want to go but they have a son or daughter or other brand that really wants to do it and and they want to support their friends and family in that in that ambition but it really needs to be something ultimately that looks like it could be accessible to a large number of people and then I think we'll get a large number of people engaged and one of the things about engagement too I think for the u.s. anyway will be we have it people launch from the United States oh absolutely I can't tell young people around the world said oh you know you guys are still flying well absolutely never stop flying yeah we've had people lives on board is s you know for almost 17 years and but they don't see the smoke in the fire right I see that days I they knew the eternal TV and there's a shuttle going and it's got seven people on board and they see it and nowadays at least in the u.s. it's half a world away you know here in a week a week from Friday we'll be launching three people yeah but it doesn't feel the same as if it was happening in our backyard and yeah in Florida absolutely so so we're looking forward to to that happening very soon here in in the US and we wish you the best of luck okay thanks very much for being here today thanks for for joining the conference [Music] we're a big part of ISS and a big part of the research and development that goes on on ISS so thanks very much I'm glad you've been able to help be helpful thanks having me I'd like just to I send my thanks also for a I'm incredibly insightful and frank discussion that you guys have had with the group so we really truly appreciate it and as my take away I since we are at the ISS R&D conference I loved your quote of I don't think people understand how cool is s is so I hope we all go and spread that word and tunnels are cool too appreciate it we're running a little bit late so if you're going to the technical sessions if you could kind of walk quickly to them we'll begin them as soon as the rooms fill up and for those of you that are going to the Congressional reception that will start at six o'clock this evening at the Rayburn house office building and then we will start again tomorrow at 8:15 so thank you all very much [Applause] you you

https://youtu.be/b3lzEQANdHk

so now for the main event I think everybody has been waiting for me to finish so that we can get to Eli you know I'm really thrilled to introduce a man who's arguably the personification of technological innovation Elon Musk now I have this very long introduction that I had prepared which highlighted his experience is the co-founder CEO and product architect at Tesla the co-founder CEO and lead designer for SpaceX and the co-founder of PayPal amongst some other thing now I know him is the man who's developing the Tesla Giga Factory in my home state of Nevada at full operation the Giga factory will be the largest producer of lithium-ion batteries in the world which will spur the next electric vehicle revolution as well as energy now I know many of you are avid readers and I am an avid reader and when I was thinking about what I was going to say about Elon I came upon a passage that I wanted to share with all of you and I I think this really captures what how I feel about Elon Musk the progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention it is the most important product of his creative brain its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs this is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded but he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against the pitiless elements does anybody know who wrote that passage Nikola Tesla this passage is from the beginning of my inventions which he wrote himself so there are some like Tesla Edison the Wright brothers Ford jobs Bell gates Marconi and musk whose indomitable spirit and vision transcend time rare entrepreneurs who make the impossible possible I know each governor has a vision for his or her own States and we have a responsibility to enact policies to help our citizens in our States thrive so I've asked Elon to join us today to share his thoughts on how governors can not only stay ahead of the curve but become innovation governors so with that please join me in welcoming Elon Musk [Applause] good afternoon and welcome Ilan I was going to take off my ties all right if I do that I came in with attire but then I was like to tell this it is nice then we'll both be more comfortable that was good well take you up having me appreciate your being here today hey you know it's when I'm with you it's difficult to know where to start let's start just what drives you what is it that when you wake up in the morning do you see a problem and you want to solve it I think that the thing that drives me is that I want to be able to think about the future and you feel good about that so that you know we're doing what we can to have the future be as good as possible to be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day so that's that's what really what it drives me is trying to figure out how do we how to make sure that things are great and I'm going to be so and that's the unlined principle find Tesla and SpaceX is that I think it's pretty important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable generation and consumption of energy it's inevitable but it's it matters if we had if it happened sooner or later and then SpaceX is about helping me collect multiplanetary and doing what we can to continue the dream of Apollo and ultimately make contribution to life becoming multiplanetary let's talk a little more about that I think everyone very interested that when you say making life multiplanetary that's exciting it is exciting so what's your vision there you know I think particularly for Americans you know we're like talking about America is a nation of explorers people came here from other parts of the world they you know chose to give up the known in favor of the unknown so I think exploration like the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration and so that's why it appeals to American so much you know you can see this when say there was a shuttle tragedy and seven people died it and that's terrible but a lot of people die all the time but why do we care so much because it was the dream of exploration that was dying along with those people that's why no and I'm one of those that I'm probably like many of you remember exactly where you were when that that's tragedy happened so you have 30-plus governors here today and we're very excited about your willingness to be with us and you hopefully heard me talk a little bit about my initiative which is being ahead of the curve what do you tell us as governors what we what should we be thinking about in terms of innovation and and developing public policy for the future well it sure is important to get the the rules right and you know it's sort of in terms of legislative and executive actions it's sort of like if you say like professional sports or something if you don't have the rules right if there isn't you know if the game isn't set up properly it's not going to be a good game so it's real important to get the rules rules right now I think it's worth noting that I think so in the United States the rules are still better than anywhere else but the you know it's very easy to put something in place which is an inhibitor to to innovation without realizing it so in terms of the regulatory environment it's always important to bear in mind that regulations are immortal and they never die unless somebody actually goes and kills them and then they get a lot of momentum so a lot of times regulations can be put in place for all the right reasons but then nobody goes back and gets rid of them afterwards when they're drilling to make sense you know that they used to be a rule in the early days when people concerned about automobiles because that was pretty scary things see a carriage was going wrong by itself you know you never know what those things might do so there were like rules where you have to in lot of states we had to carry a lantern in front of the automobile that's like a hundred paces ahead of the automobile there's to be someone with a lantern on a pole okay but you really get rid of that regulation and I did you know I think those it really be awkward so so just regulations even if done correctly and for and being right at the time it's always important go back and and scrub those you know periodically to make sure they're still sensible and this also having the greater good I think in terms of tax structure and to what what is what is economically and scented and what it is what is not economically incentive just make sure that the incentive structure is is correct and I think I'm saying just totally common-sense things here but it's economics 101 what have you what have you incent will happen so the if you incent one thing that thing will tend to happen more than the other thing you said another thing that that thing will happen and so the economics should favor innovation and and this is particularly important to protect small to medium-sized companies because because it's sort of like trying to grow Trina forests like it's real hard for a new company to grow when it's just a seedling or sapling it needs lot more protection then if it's giant redwood or something like that so very important to give support to small and small to medium-sized companies on the innovation front and so they're the ones that needed more than big companies and I think the point is is almost big company biggest company anyway so I favor you know supporting smaller companies in Tesla relatively speaking what would your response be because there are critics out there with regard to incentives and that's what in the Tesla has been and I can speak from experience the beneficiary of incentives economic incentives when with regard to the to the gigafactory sure what would you tell those those people yeah I think well first of all as you know the those incentives were a little overstated the the case the gigafactory it's a it's a five billion dollar investment capital investment to get that factory going and I didn't actually know this inch of by the weather I didn't know this until we did the press conference actually that over 20 years the Nevada incentives added up to 1.3 billion actually don't even know this but but but it now he's telling you go ahead they'll listen at the press conference I'm like really no but I mean it's the thing is that they act that took what added up over 20 years and made it sound like Nevada was writing us a 1.3 billion dollar check and I'm you know I'm still waiting for that track I must have to get lost in the mail I don't know so I bid you know this is the way the press works of course so if not you divide 1.3 billion by 20 then it's it's like okay Tesla's on average we receive a sort of a tax well isn't it basically sales and use tax abatement is what it amounts to so it tells like it's like on the order we get on the order of 50 to 60 million of sales and use tax abatement divided over 20 years and but there's for something which has a five billion dollar capital cost just get going and then it would have to generate about 100 billion dollars over that period of time to to achieve a 1.3 billion dollar tax benefit so so essentially it's a little over 1% over that period of time and that's great okay but it's not a you know it's not like it's it's not the way it was characterized in the price it but if because if put in the proper context it sounds like okay well that's neat you know it's about five five percent helpful on setting up the factory and about one percent helpful over the next 20 years cool that actually sounds pretty reasonable and yeah so that's that was that was helpful but there are a lot of other factors as well and we actually had slightly bigger incentive packages from from some other states that were offered but we factored in how quickly could we get the gigafactory into operation what were the risks associated with that progress what would be over or preferred logistics costs over time of transferring battery packs and power trains to a vehicle factory in California and you know and all of those factors weighed together is what me is what led us to make the decision in favor de nada and working with with with your team was great I was very forward-leaning and a big part was also just like making you know sure if you feel really welcome you know within within the state so that's sort of what would love to make the decision for the gigafactory and then we have another factory in New York doing solar panels also exits will be the biggest solar panel producer in North America understand and then we expect us to establish probably at least two or three more Giga factories in the u.s. in the next several years as well as a couple overseas but the overall objective of Tesla is really what what set of actions can we take to accelerate the advent of sustainable production and consumption of energy and I think the sort of the way the way I would assess the stark bit of Tesla is in terms of a part of what that how many years of acceleration was it you know and if we can accelerate a sustainable energy by ten years I would consider that to be a great success even if it was only five years that would still be pretty good that that's the overarching optimization so you you talked about interplanetary travel and sustainable energy and the vehicles a little bit what what would you want things to look like in five to ten years associated with with energy so and with autonomous vehicles electric vehicles hmm well I think things are going to be that they're going to grow exponentially so there's a big difference between five and ten years you know my guess is [Music] they're probably in ten years more than a half of new vehicle production is electric in the United States and China is probably gonna be ahead of that because China has been super pro Evi I think a lot of people know this but like I mean China's environmental policies are way ahead of the u.s. like their mandate for renewable energy far exceeds the US I think this sometimes people are under the impression that China is either dragging their feet over or somehow behind the u.s. in terms of sustainable energy promotion but they're they're by far the most aggressive on earth it's crazy I mean they in fact the coalition of Chinese car manufacturers destroys the Chinese government to beg for them to slow down the mandate because it's like too much they need to make 8% electric vehicles I think like next year or in two years or something is like they can't physically do it so Tizen by far the most aggressive on electric vehicles and solar so but that's a common misperception that they're not there's one Google search way to figure this out I literally restrict it easy so and in ten ten yeah ten years man I think yeah yet so half of all production I think will be vev I think almost all cars produced will be autonomous in ten years almost all it will be rare to find one that is not continuous and that's going to be a huge transformation now things bear in mind though is that new vehicle production is only about 5% the size of the vehicle fleet so you think about how long is a car truck last and they last 15 to 20 years so before they finally scrap so new vehicle production is only roughly at most 115 of the fleet size so even when new vehicle production say switch those which is over to electric or to autonomous that still means the vast majority of a fleet on the roads is not it'll take another you know five to ten years before that becomes majority majority the fleet becomes evey or autonomous but if you say go up 20 years a whelmingly things are electric autonomous a wall melee fully autonomous fully autonomous so no one will have to touch the steering wheel if there is one there will not be a steering wheel twenty years it will be like having a horse people have horses which is cool but so so having a regular car will be like having a horse is that what you say yeah yeah and there will be full that about that had you know non autonomous cars like people out horses I just would be unusual to use that as a mode of transport yes alright let's talk about the energy piece and rooftop cell or and storage yeah so the are useful it's important to appreciate that the earth is almost entirely solar-powered today in the sense that the Sun is the only thing that keeps us from being at roughly the temperature of cosmic background radiation which is three degrees above absolute zero so one for Sun would be a frozen dock and the the amount of so the amount of energy is beside that reach solution alone is tremendous it's over Italy it's 99% plus of all energy that Earth has then there's there's energy we need to use to run civilization which to us is big but compared to the amount of energy that reaches us from the Sun is tiny so it's very easy like it actually doesn't take much if you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels it would take put a fairly small corner of Nevada Texas Utah anywhere look you only need about 100 miles 100 miles of solar panels it's probably the entire United States and then the the batteries you need to store that energy to make sure you have 24/7 power is one mile by one mile in one one square mile that's it I showed the graph of the image of this where this is 100 miles 100 miles looks like it's like a little square and the US map and then what there's a little pixel inside there and that's the size of the battery pack that you need to support that real tiny so will you talked about 20 years from now none of us well some people still be using horses or what b0 yeah but it's so rare so what will be the energy piece look like I mean what will there be transmission lines will there be indeed yeah I think the so there's the use of energy can is roughly divided into three areas and they're more or less equal at a high level is about a third of energy is used for transportation of various kinds about a third is used for electricity about a third is used for heating so if you want to have a tan of the electricity production call it you know something in the order of 10% and in plan how you can it is renewable maybe 15 percent today so that means that there's a master amount of solar that would need to be produced and connected in order to to be fully sustainable because fully sustainable means you're tackling transport non renewable electricity generation and heating so that that means that will need to be a combination of utility scale solar and rooftop skips solar combined with wind geothermal and hydro probably some some nuclear for a while in order to transition to a sustainable situation which means really for the most part massive massive growth in solar and it's very important to have rooftop solar in neighborhoods because otherwise you're going to they'll need to be massive new transmission lines built and people do not like having transmission lines go through the neighborhood so really don't like that I agree so you want to have some localized energy production combined with utility it so what rooftop solar utility solar and that that's that's really going to be the solution from a physics standpoint because I can't see any other way to really do it people talk a lot about fusion and a lab but the Sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky and it's really reliable comes up every day so if it doesn't we've got bigger problems and somebody asked me to ask you this we talked about workforce today that they asked me our robots going to take our jobs everybody's jobs in the future and how much do you see artificial intelligence coming into the workplace well firstly I think on the artificial intelligence front you know I have exposure to the very most cutting-edge AI and I think people should be really concerned about it I keep sounding Li long bell but you know until people see like robots going down the street killing people like they don't know how to react you know because it seems so ethereal and I think we should be really concerned about AI and I think we should this is AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation it's too late and normally the way regulations are set up is that a whole bunch of bad things happen there's public outcry the the and then after many years a regulatory agency set up to regulate the industry there's a bunch of opposition from companies who don't like being told what to do by regulators and it takes forever that they that in the past has been bad but not something which represented a you know a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization AI is a fundamental risk to leaks of human civilization in a way that car accidents airplane crashes faulty drugs a whole bad food we're not they were not they were harmful thing to a set of individuals within society of course but they were not harmful to society as ai is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don't think you hopefully appreciate that you know it's not it's not fun being regulated it's not you know if you're pretty oxen but I you know in the car business you know we get regulated by Department of Transport by EPA and a bunch of others and this regulatory agencies in every every country you know in the in space is the we get regulated by FA and it but you know if you ask the average person hey you want to you want to get rid of the FAA and just like take it take a chance on manufacturers not cutting corners on the aircraft because you know profits were down that quarter like hell no that's sound durable so you know I think even people who are pretty extremely like the libertarian free market they were like yeah we still have somebody keeping an eye on the aircraft companies making sure they build a good aircraft and good cars and that kind of thing so I think there's a role for regulators that's very important and I'm a game over regulation for sure but and we I think we better get on that with AI pronto and so they'll certainly be a lot of job disruption because what's going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us I mean I'm putting I mean all of us you know yeah what's real exactly what to do about this it's like it's a like it was really like the scariest problem to me I'll tell you and yeah so I really think we need to go a regulation here just because you know ensuring the public good is served because you've got companies that are racing that they kind of have to race to build AI or they're going to be made uncompetitive you know like essentially if your competitor is racing the world AI and you don't they will crush you so then you're like ah we don't request so you know I guess we need to build it too that's why you need the regulator's to come in and say hey guys you all need to really you know just pause and make sure this is safe and like when when it's cool and working a bit and regulator to convinced that it's a proceed then you can go but otherwise slow down and bit long but you kind of need the regulator's to do that for all the teams in the game you know a budget share holes will be saying like hey why are you developing AI faster because your competitor is like okay we're going to do that anyway so it's like there's like something like 12% of jobs or transport transport will be one of the first things to go for the autonomous but when I say everything like the robots will be it will do everything barn barn upping let's move back to you're rolling out to model three this year right and how many orders what did what does that come look like yeah it's gone well on that front um we've got two and what I think like somebody orders a model three today they'd only get it probably late next year we're just actually just auto production made the first production unit last week and the thing that is not well appreciated about something but about cars and any kind of new technology is how hard it is to do the manufacturing is vastly harder to do the manufactured by a factor of a hundred like a hundred then to make the to make that hard to make one or something with with maybe 50 or 60 people we could make a prototype of practically anything in six months now to manufacture that thing we need five thousand people to spend you know three years and that's considered really fast so manufacturable does this kind of s-curve where it's excruciatingly ly slow at first and then it it grows exponentially and then but people tend to extrapolate on a straight line so if it's real slow at first that's a little slow look at that they aren't going to make five cars a week forever like nope it will be ten cars a week then 20 hours a week then you know 40 cars a week then 5,000 cars a week eventually just goes crazy fast so we're hoping to get to you know something you know like 5,000 cars a week by the end of the year well I wanted to give an opportunity for some of the governors to ask questions and perhaps some audience questions I was told that you'd be willing to get to do that great so governors any questions for free long governor Scott thank you very much we in Vermont have partnered with Tesla in in terms of a power pack in our homes and they're $15 a day you can rent this for 15 years and it will carry power as a backup generation device for 12 hours and it's been really really interesting from my perspective but I'm curious about vehicles in and where we're going in the future or how far in the future do the cars themselves become the charging device like the roof and deck lids and hood or does or do the batteries get so efficient that you don't need that and then you just power up for a week or something like that where are we going in the future with battery storage yeah I think the future is just the three legs to the stool there's a electric cars is a stationary battery packed and solar power with those three things you can have a completely sustainable energy future that's all vessels needed an assault on the solar front like said it's going to be a combination of rooftop solar and utility-scale solar you'll need both because of the enormous amount of electricity and then you know one of the things that's that's been missing anything up till now is having rooftop solar that looks good and isn't and you know that's we got the solar glass roof that were developing and we're doing any different styles so that it matches the aesthetics of a particular house or the regional style I think this actually pretty important and the conventional flat panel so is willful flat roofs and for commercial will be the way the way to go but yet and putting solar panels on the on the car itself not that not that helpful because the actual surface area the car is not not very much and cars very often indoors and so it's the least efficient place to put solar arrays on the car just wondering about maybe a wrap of some sort is it is that make any sense in the future like a wrap of solar around either a building made of a solar panel or a wrap of a vehicle actually being the solar panel for being the components of the vehicle itself I don't think so I'll scrap that idea it's just way better to put her on the roof for sure I really thought about this I really and I pushed my team about like give me some way we could do it on a car I mean technically if you have like some sort of transformer like thing which will pop out of the trunk like like a you know hardtop convertible and just like like ratchet solar panels over the whole surface of the car extending like this for the entire say square footage of a parking space provided you're in the Sun that would be enough to generate about twenty to thirty miles a day of electricity but that is for sure the expensive difficult way to do it governor burger so thought about maybe we should you know and think thanks for being here with your background in payment systems you understand the important role of security and transactions yeah all that you've got I think it security is a huge concern I guess I have a security yes and you're in the vehicles you're building our incredibly complex software systems I mean the cars really a rolling piece of software it it's like a laptop on oil yes so would share with us a little bit about your thoughts on cybersecurity and how you how we protect each other out protecting society when you have got a rolling fleet of I I think one of the biggest risks for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack you know in principle if somebody was able to hack say all of the autonomous Tesla's they could say I mean just as a prank like it ASIC likes animals Rhode Island question United States and I'd be like well okay that would be the end of headlock and we let me I agree people in Rhode Island that's for sure so we're going to make super sure that that a pleat white hack is basically impossible and then if people are in the car that they have override authority on whatever the guard is doing so if the car is doing something wacky you can press the button that no amount of software can override that will ensure that the you gain control of the vehicle and tie cut cut the link to the servers so that's a that's pretty fundamental within the car we actually have even even if somebody gains access to the car there are multiple subsystems within the car that that that also have specialized encryption so the powertrain for example has specialized encryption here so even if so you would gain access to the car they cannot gain access the powertrain or to the braking system and but it is my top top concern from a security standpoint at Tesla's making sure that we white hack or any vehicle specific hack can occur that they have the same problem with cell phones you know it's kind of crazy today that we live quite comfortably in you know in a world that George Orwell would have thought there's super crazy like we all carry a phone with up with a microphone Acree turned on really at any time with our knowledge with a GPS that goes our position and a camera and well kind of all about the personal information we do this willingly and it's kind of wobbling that that's the case and so the phone like Apple and and Google kind of haven't seen challenge of making sure that cannot be a fleet-wide hack or a system-wide hack of phones or or a specific hack so but that's our top concern yeah becoming it's gonna become a bigger a bigger concern like Tesla's Nora tempt fate here but hidden Tesla's pretty good at software compared to the other car companies and so I do I think it's going to be a bit like an even bigger challenge for for the other car companies to ensure security yeah Thank You governor du gard Thank You governor mr. Mouse gank you for speaking to all the governors today it's an honor to have you here one question I had we saw when gasoline prices went to three and a half dollars a gallon there was a big jump in interest in hybrid vehicles and you saw those vehicles become very much in demand and then as gasoline prices have fallen you've seen a reversal of that and I'm wondering to what extent you have a concern about the future of electric vehicles in the face of those very low prices you speak to that well the economics they kind of set set the slope of the curve so there's no question on mind whatsoever that all transport with the ironic exception of Rockets will go fully electric everything Planes Trains automobiles well plug trains already electric whole ships and but it's question of what that timeframe is and the economic incentive structure drives that timeframe that's really what it amounts to you know there's the big challenge is that there's a none priced externality in the cost of fossil fuels so the unpriced externality is the the probability weighted harm of changing the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans it since it is not captured in the price of gasoline it does not drive the right behavior you know be like if tossing out garbage was just free and you know there was no you just do as much as you want and like streets were full of garbage so and we regulated a lot of other things like sulfur emissions and nitrous oxide emission like I think it's somewhat a good on that front with co2 it's tough because there's so many vested interests on the sort of fossil fuel side and sometimes I think like those guys feel like kind of hard done by because you know wasn't obvious like when they were creating their oil and gas companies that it would be vats in the environment and they worked really hard to create those companies and then they feel like well now they're being kind of attacked on moral grounds when didn't originally start those well companies will pull them up on on bad moral grounds and and it is true that we cannot isn't a Gnaeus leech ange to a sustainable situation but then those guys will also fight pretty hard to slow down the change and that's really what I think is Molly wrong sort of Governor Bevin and then Governor Hutchinson then will take a couple auto and then governor Hickenlooper and then we'll take some audience questions governor Bevin elon thank you for being here the short version of the question then slightly longer the short version is do you ever feel pressure by others expectations of you and your endeavors in light of the progress you've made thus far is the short version and more specifically when you look just at Tesla alone and you look at a company with a fifty four billion dollar valuation and seemingly by typical margin market metrics no justifiable reason for that what do you think I'm just saying as our area for I'm just in all seriousness do you feel a concern ever that your intellect in your intellectual curiosity and your ingenuity cannot be matched by those that are trying to commercialize it does that ever affect how you think or decisions that you make uh well it it is actually I find it quite tough when there are very high expectations I try to actually tamp down those expectations as you know to be possible in fact I've on a record several times is saying that the stock price is higher than we have any right to deserve and that's for sure true based on you know where we are today and have been in the past so the stock price obviously reflects a lot of optimism about where it says it will be in the future and now the thing that makes that there are quite a difficult emotional hardship for me is that you know those expectations sometimes get out our out of control and I like I hate disappointing people and so I'm like trying to real hard to meet those expectations but that's a pretty tall order and a lot of times it's real not really not fun I have to say a lot less fun that may seem so yeah I mean I don't ever sell any stock and there's a happy for for taxes so you know said publicly I'm not going to like take money up table it you know I'll be last I'm going down I'm going down with ship so I'll be glad to do it but yeah I mean it's I really wouldn't recommend anyone start a car company it really wasn't reckon it up it's not a recipe for happiness and freedom thanks governor Bevin governor hutchinson mr. musk ASA Hutchinson from Arkansas thank you for your Frank observations about exploration you know I look at the spirit of invention and the spirit of exploration which is really the hallmark of America what is your comment on NASA its mission I was in Congress I supported NASA but I always feel like it's floundering does not have the support of the American people that's needed what what's your comment on NASA its mission and what advice would you give us sure well I'll put I should say I'm a big fan of NASA in fact at one point my password was I love NASA literally that was my password and you know I think the NASA NASA does a lot of good things for which P porch doesn't get enough credit and that the public I guess doesn't know that much about I like a lot most American public they're not really into hard science but you know it's like not it's not the thing they're tuning in for what is the time I love hard science you know but it's not that popular so but there's great things in terms of that the telescopes like the Hubble and the James Webb and you know the Rovers on Mars and the pro it approves the outer solar system those are all like really great things but you get the public excited you've got to get people in the picture it just it's just a hundred times different if there are people in the picture and you know if there's some criticism of NASA it's like it's like important to remember people in the picture you know if you want to get the public support and but like if you talk to scientists about that Pacific where's the science in that like you're not getting it it's like that's not why people giving you money not that's I mean a little bit of the reason but the the serious scientists or like people just make things more expensive like why we have people like okay well why do we have people at all anywhere sometimes the scientists are the ones who just don't understand even like smart people but like you know so you're going to have something that's going to fire up the you know fire power people up and get them really excited and like I think if we had a serious goal of having a base on the moon and sending people to Mars and said okay this is we're going to be outcome oriented how we're going to do is oK we've got to change the way contracting is done you can't do these like cost plus contracts cost plus sole source contracts because then the incentive structure is all messed up so since you don't have any competition well okay business with the sense of urgency goes away and as soon as you make something a cost-plus contract you're in Sandton the contractor to maximize the costs of the program because they get a percentage so they never want that gravy train to end and they want to make it at enscombe cost maximizers and then you have good people engaged in cost maximization because you just gave them incentive to do that and told them they'll get punished if they don't essentially that's what happens so it's critically important that we changed the contracting structure to be a competitive commercial bid make sure the earth they're always - at least two entities that that are competing to serve NASA and that the contracts a milestone based with with concrete milestones PowerPoint presentations do not count like everything works in PowerPoint yeah exhibit elevation device look there's my powerpoint presentation so milestone based competitive commercial contracts with with competitors and then and then got to be prepared to fire one of those competitors if they're not if they're not cutting it and and recompete the rest of the remainder of that contract and by the way NASA is actually already done this and they did it with the commit with the commercial cargo transportation to the space station and that was the case where NASA you know the NASA actually an honor they thought it would work or not work but they didn't have the budget to do anything else so they're like okay we're going to try this competitive commercial milestone based contracting and it worked great and they warded it to two companies to SpaceX and company called Kistler and SpaceX managed to meet the milestones kiss lit did not so then they NASA recomputed the remainder of the contract to openal Sciences and then Auto Sciences got across the finish line so now NASA has got two suppliers for taking cargo to the space station and it's a great situation same thing for commercial crew to the space station now as it competed that in the commercial career case it's SpaceX and Boeing and that's also a good situation so now like I can tell you like the SpaceX team is like we're going to do this before Boeing that's for sure and then like a relative Boeing team like where you can do is for for SpaceX that's good that's it's a good forcing function to get things done but that can't tell you how important that contracting structure is that is nine there's way too much in government which is where it's the sole source cost plus contract that that Justin again economics 101 whatever you incent what that will happen and then people shouldn't be surprised it's like well you're just you know said okay if that company manages to find some excuse to double the cost of the contract they're going to get double the profit because they're getting a percentage so they can be paid you can do exactly that and and also they're not going to say no to requirements so the Gummer will come with some set requirements 99% of them could make a lot of sense in 10% I'll cockamamie the double equipment the price of the project for those ten percent of cockamamie requirements in a cost-plus contract the contract will always say yes there could be a future for you in government contracting at the state level yeah let's go to governor Hickenlooper and then Governor Ducey so then I think like most governors I find so refreshing to have the unbridled truth I do suspect every time you say publicly that the stock price is higher than we have any right to believe I guess you probably get some calls from investors suggesting that maybe you don't say that so frequently yeah that's true I wanted to go back in just just briefly because I think I wrote this down that you said that artificial intelligence is the fundamental existential risk facing civilizations I get that whole diet in my opinion it is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization is artificial intelligence it's so to a group of leaders what would you advise that we should how should we be addressing something that's so such a large landscape and yet obviously so important I think that the in one of the roles of government is to ensure the public good it an end to that dangerous to the public are addressed so that hence the regulatory thing I think the first order of business would be to try to learn as much as possible you know to understand the nature of the issue to look closely at the progress that is being made and the remarkable achievements of artificial intelligence I mean last year I go which is a quite a difficult game to beat that people for would never be beaten with my computer that the curricular computer would we either never beat the best human player or that it was 20 years away and last year alphago which was done by deep mind which is a kind of a Google subsidiary absolutely crushed the world's best player and now now that now I can crush it can play at the top fifty simultaneously unquestionable so just like that pace of progress is remarkable and and there's you can see more and more coming out like goo robotics you see robots that can learn to walk from from nothing you know within hours like way faster than any biological being but the thing that's most dangerous is the hottest to kind of wrap kind of get your arms around because it's not a physical thing is kind of a deep intelligence in the network and say well what harm could a deep intelligence in the network do so well I could start a war by create by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake press releases and just by you know manipulating information the pen is mightier than the sword so I mean as an example I want to be emphasized I do not think this actually occurred this was purely a hypothetical that I am digging my grave here but you know that like that though there was that second Malaysian airliner that was shut down on the Ukrainian Russian border and that that really amplified tensions between Russia and the EU in a massive way well I would say if you had a an AI that was where the ai's goal was to maximize value of a portfolio of stocks one of the ways to maximize value would be to go a long on defense short on consumer start a war and then how can I do that will you know hacking the Malaysian Airlines rat aircraft routing server a routed over a war zone then sent an anonymous tip that an enemy aircraft is flying overhead right now let's go to Governor Ducey and then [Laughter] we'll have after governor Ducey we'll finish our gubernatorial questions and then to questions and we quick questions or one audience question and we'll be dad we're running short on time governor Ducey thanks Elon I really enjoyed your comments today and as someone who has spent a lot of time in his administration trying to reduce and eliminate regulations I was surprised by your suggestion to bring regulations before we know exactly what we're dealing with with AI you know I've heard the example used if I were to come up with a colorless odorless tasteless gas that was explosive people would say well you have to ban that and then we'd have no natural gas so you've given some of these examples of how a a I can be an existential threat but I still don't understand as policymakers what type of regulations beyond slow down which typically policymakers don't get in front of entrepreneurs or innovators well I think the first order of business would be to gain insight right now the government does not even have an insight and I think the right order of ins would be to stand up regulatory agency initial goal gain insight into status of AI activity make sure the situation is understood once it is then put regulations in place to ensure Public Safety so and for sure the company is doing AI will most of them not mine will spoke and say hey this is really going to stifle innovation blah blah blah it's going to move to China it won't and it won't because like it's like it has like head bowing moved to China so they're bullying aircraft here same one on cars and so I thought it's the notion that if you establish regulatory regime that companies will simply move to countries with with lower regulatory Commons is false on the face of it because none of them do unless it's really overbearing but that's not what I'm talking about here just talking about you know make sure that there is awareness at the government level I think once there is awareness you will be extremely afraid as they should be okay one audience question he'll take the first hand that came up right here Thanks Ilan enough read with Axius early on in this administration you had argued pretty vociferous Lee that it was best to engage in better to be in the room that not be in the room then when the president decided to pull out of Paris you said that was kind of last Ronnie we're going to drop off what drove you to that and if you were still speaking to him today what would you say to the president well I thought it was worth doing trying hard to you know to do what's worth it was worth trying I got a lot of flack from from multiple fronts for even trying when some guy ran at full boards I'm like attacking me and like full-page ads in the New York Times and whatnot just for a bit just for being on the panel and an Iran every in every meeting I was like just trying to make the arguments in favor of sustainability and it's there sometimes other issues like we need to make sure that our immigration laws are not unkind or unreasonable and you know did my best and I think in a few cases I did actually make some progress which gave me a some encouragement to continue but but then I just really think that the Paris Accord man I am if I stayed on the council's then I'd be essentially saying that that wasn't important but it was super important because I think the country needs to keep his word and you know that that is not even a binding agreement so we could always like slow it down the argument that there will be job losses well we could see if there are job losses before we exit the agreement and maybe there won't be job losses maybe they'll be drop gains but yeah this is no way I could stay on after that so you know did my best alright alright well everybody if you would please join me in thanking Ilan for being here today [Applause] well that was a treat wasn't it well ladies and gentlemen this brings us to the conclusion of our meeting again I want to thank our former chair Governor McAuliffe governor Raimondo for hosting us all of you who've supported this organization we will see you in Washington DC in February god bless all of you thank you for being here this hour meeting is adjourned thank you [Applause]

https://youtu.be/aTXwXlRDGVI

in the world and Nealon one of the most reputable renewable energy companies in the world coming from France this project will provide 400 megawatts of battery storage it will be associated with the horned owl website which is located in that same area in Jamestown what it will do is completely transformed the way in which renewable energy is stored and also stabilized the South Australian network as well as putting downward pressure on prices this has been an extraordinary collaboration on an international basis and I want to thank all of those who have participated in bringing us to this day it's been an incredible journey on the 9th of February we had an unnecessary load shedding event coming on top of the blackout that occurred back in September South Australians were shocked and I think completely lost confidence in the national electricity market what balla demanding of their elected representatives is they stand up and take control so the next day we did just that we stood up and said that we would produce an energy plan that takes charge of South Australia's energy future that energy plan was that developed over the a six week period up until the 14th of March and one of the central elements of the plan that we developed was the nation's largest battery today what we are revealing is the world's largest lithium ion batteries a grid scale battery that will provide stabilization services to the grid have the capacity to make a very serious dent in the 48 million dollars worth of SKS services which I purchase from the Australian energy market putting downward pressure on prices here also opening up new possibilities or renewable energy in this state in this nation and around the world to be dispatchable renewable energy providing third essentially based light capacity for people and industrial users to power their businesses so it starts here in South Australia we had about 91 bidders international business to this process of course that was assisted by a little bit of twitter exchange in a few days before we released our plan between Elon Musk and also Mike cannon books and those 91 bidders were carefully assessed and I want to thank all of them for the way in which they participated in the process we did come to a view that there was a superior vision business partnership between neoui and Tesla and we're thrilled to be able to announce today that that is the wind consortium that is going to put this project together I want to also thank the the teams that worked on this in particular I want to thank the team in South Australia led by Tomkinson tonus our Minister for energy the team he assembled a news agency led by Sam Crafton a really an extraordinary group of South Australians who worked incredibly hard to make sure that this incredibly important timeline and is the first of December that the beginning of summer was going to have a delivery of this Patrick one of the offers that was made very early on in the process by Tesla was that from the signing of the grid connection agreement they would deliver this battery within a hundred days or it is free it's an extrordinary often and it's one which is now and committed to and it's part of the structural arrangements and that's a fantastic degree of security that South Australians had that we will have this in spots by the beginning of summer are well also thank the people who have negotiated with us but neo and and Tesla it is an incredibly tight timeline to complete what our incredibly complex negotiations and so ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure now to introduce you to the international head of energy for Tesla kal Leighton and also the chief executive officer of Tesla Elon Musk [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so we need to answer your questions and on topic of the battery and anyone has a question far away well we thought about this Anderson summers because this is going to be the largest factorization of the world by a significant margin this is a hundred megawatt battery especially next biggest battery in the world 30 megawatts to talk about something that is well three times as powerful as the next biggest batch in space in the world and we were actually assisted in writing in during the contract with that that we beheld through the hundred days or it's free so that's what we said publicly as we're going to be elected to think month might Kenan Brooks for that so then focus back with me on Twitter and kind of getting getting that there's some credit there as well it's a very large sum of money I'd have probably fifteen million dollars or more in it a lot you'll run one of your other projects in California was worth about and five billion a race couldn't think about a think like oh yes that was the 80 megawatt hours oh no no if there's a few digits missing there and so how much is this going to cost in total I think if we as much event is something that's we we can discuss but it was is that a public knowledge or that is not okay so Luke a theory that the exact number but also newly fed up to South Australia if they want to disclose it but it's there two to three parties UN husband's Australia we we will perhaps people that necessary play baseball but the the business is significantly bigger than the project in California which was the word when we cut we thought that online in December of last year that was the biggest battery in the world but that's as system is approximately 20 megawatts in power and this is a hundred megawatts so it's a massively different things back I really think that like the roots but the most salient point here is that the system will be three three times more powerful than any system in upon earth this is not like a sort of a short like a minor foray into the parts here is like you know going three times further than anyone's gone before what well maybe if I may add something so beyond focusing on the cost so that the interesting about this plant is actually going to lower costs for consumers that is very low point so as opposed to debating something they cost taxpayer money or the largesse of the public is actually going to provide price stability the market stability and lower prices over offer customers especially as a sum of people Bristol MacLeod they want the Sounders it's just an old technical challenges that come with with scale so you need something three times bigger because it's a work as well we think it will but this would make some rescue map and we're very confident in our modeling techniques and in the designing system but one of you make something three times bigger than anything but scum before there's always some risk select can I just ask the back ok so it's a bell very good as well call the battery be useful of the use for arbitrage or simply stability services and when you say a hundred days are it's free who is it free for now and all the South Australian taxpayers or both I think well I think if it's for the primarily the free would be for South Australian taxpayers so yeah and it has the Greek word stabilization it is a huge factor as Cowell saying because it's able to stabilize the grid and offer power you can essentially charge up a battery pack replication we have excess power and good way where the cost of collection is very low and they discharges when the cost of power production is high and this effectively lowers the average cost per kilowatt hour today to the end customer it's a fundamental efficiency improvements of four degree and an NFS and it's really quite necessary and quite quite obvious ways of considering a renewable energy future we have wind or solar it's often a windy all the time and it's clearly not sunny Tory frost day so you have to Buffalo power and install the power during the middle the day in order to discharge it in its door at dusk and night it's really buckled in and that's it it's really really quite straightforward and then four point energy to sort when it's windy and discharging when it's less windy but this is this is extremely important fundamental and in a way to figure the earth like like it purpose like a giant satellite and the way the satellites of priorities of the geostationary satellites which require your source one actually at SpaceX those will last for 20 years with no maintenance in over little you have no one nobody no one can go to them so they designed to see Romanians and they're entirely powered by solar and battery and but this is a fundamental scaling limit so just as you can power big satellite purely solar in a battery you can power up clearly with solar to country or this giant valid modernist old bubble or dying to you when did you become really involved in the process well certainly never gain but I I was made aware of it by this participate that that there was really this opportunity to make a significant statement up about renewable energy to the world to show that you can really do a heavy-duty large scale utility level batteries better system and that South Australia was up with a challenge and and then the committee asked me like Oh what we willing to take a big risk on this next absolutely if it's all sailors will take my questions are we some people in Australia want to build new coal-fired power stations how does that compare it's economically with building new renewable energy power stations instead yes the final challenge with coal power stations is that it's a perfect way to put your financed because the writing's on the wall for long-term future of coal which is that it isn't called the Condors and I had a long term future and so when when when was the establishment of when you call power plant or doing a major upgrade of our existing helical power plants when we're going to invest it to define a name for that investors know that call them and have long-term future so that the capital cost is incredibly fine because they want to try to bite my registry because they're not expecting it to last 30 years which is normally at this length of time that they would want to advertise the value of the conference so effectively core becomes very expensive because people are going to invent the sub-grantees and have a great future mr. mark Thank You Lee from Sky News of the back here and this will be built in Jamestown what does that mean for the community they and how many jobs do you expect this to create up there well I think this is I think it's a mattress relations there'll also be a huge initial input of jobs and I think long-term because it will be professional powerful than the next biggest bachelor station in the world and we're going to you know make an effort to have also look good that it actually will be a tourist destination for at least some period of time you just want to see was giant bathroom comment and I think that's really quite what nicely arranged kind of white omelets I mean if it's a soup you know just got on earth in the future we're looking for what was this some particles emit or something what would after eiseley you know distant future so I think it'll have some value as a specific tourist spot for a while and ecologies like to elaborate on that yeah absolutely for this especially for the construction phase of the II will beyond the operations of mania for the battery system are designed to be for pretty self-sustaining so it's not a significant amount of people have to be there to upkeep the system for all the construction phase which will last into December around social I would be tens or hundreds of jobs are created there's a local contractor CPP that's won the contract to be part of doing it here so it's a South Australian company CPP and they'll be doing that on work on ground work yes so the useful places are trees depending on how long what energy level is considered to the end of life the battery is sort of on the order of 15 years and it does depend on how heavy the battery is used or what percentage of how do you business tries to help her groceries power and energy of the hardware so cars is added to the task order for the tank yeah so it figures it's a little an order of that but the electronics can last 20 to 30 years and the the cooling system thermal control give a Colonel's last on that order so over time what you can do is you can add more power packs to supplement the decline in the energy capability for the older ones and they will seamlessly bind into the system so sort of so everything is jammed so definitely recyclable and in fact it makes sense to recycle with my vacuum tanks because the material constituents are sort by valuable the primary contractor practical new cells is tend to be nickel so the figure that's very nickel rich or guess one or two think that but typically but the cells have about ten percent of their value even when they have their energy capability lack of wind bounce spread around the state d hope this will be a first step into maybe partnering with other organizations as time goes on even to see set yeah I think this the first sermon to see also going to be incredibly helpful in within Australia and around the world as a proof point for being able to do large-scale usability fabric applications and incidents associated largely looking at at the segment's did they get it done in 100 days did it work other any issues also there's the right questions to ask and so we're gonna make sure that this may be thanks if I can add something you talked about earlier the the shift away from coal I mean I really we talked about you know why would you even build a new coal plant or even new gas plant specifically things that cost is consistently lowering costs of batteries coupled with renewables is going to fundamentally reshape energy landscape much faster than anyone thinks it will already seeing that on island grids we have a project similar in scope to this much smaller in size on the island of Kauai where they have too much Sun so now they're only building solar plants character batteries which are essentially baseload generators they charge it during the daytime and they charge in defiance and Sun and the discharge at night book power and so I mean I think very near future all new renewable energy plants will have batteries coupled with them just as the par for the course and it's going to totally reshape the fundamentally it has the posts that's business with common sense that if you have so you must have battery because otherwise your powers just going to be proportionate to how sunny it is and I think yes sir truly others design council will you on this trip to website I've actually just came right from the airport to here but I I'm overdue at the point again I'm not sure I think at least until tomorrow oh it's worth day if it's Friday right are there any other questions so that I didn't feel sorry for South Australia it's a great place but in fact I'm pretty pretty weird are impressed with with she'll be able to to do a project this magnitude but that's beyond anything else of all they said Australia is very very three times more powerful than anything else on the earth so you know that takes a holistic photo gumption and you just actually should respect for that the but I do see this as the thing that that the world will look at as an example and I'll be able to large scale classy applications photograph that really take lodge not alone and and and so I think it's going to be it's really going to be an example to rest the world so and if but we ate a little we need to start we need to get done we need to make sure it's working properly and and we want to do it in less than and reduce ferrocene is a lot of critics federally about South Australia's energy policy to you in four other states and maybe the federal government to follow food is this the way of the future I think this is this is definitely the way in the future and I think it's worth a lot of states take a close look at this and think it's a light bulb screw their their needs which I suspect in most cases it is okay ladies and gentlemen could you were bank a loan and Cal and [Applause] okay now later to them we have NJ we also have an opportunity to hear from the representatives of neoui and we also have mr. remainder Theresa thank you Ramon and also Frank for here thank you the wall so of course this melon is a world leading renewable energy company based in France but now has a very large proportion of its international operations based here in Australia it of course has the one styling foam which is over a three hundred megawatt when you found with a very large number of wind turbines 99 and so this is an opportunity for them not just to provide the services to South Australia but also in the balance of the battery to also on sell that particular service and participate in the market so this represents another dimension if you like of what we've announced today which is the future capacity for us to firm up an industrial user and introduce competition into the South Australian out of the market this is a critical issue for South Australia to be able to put downward pressure on prices is to actually increase the number of contracts that exist within the South Australian electricity market so these two gentlemen are also here willing to answer your questions thank you from the beginning we've been looking at possible battery suppliers to say that - lava quickly identified outstanding part 1 with an ability not only to deliver such a large-scale product but also we strongly believe to help us operated and integrate into the grid the challenge is not only to build it but its economy to another working with the Remo and the beta to deliver and move understood quickly that there were strong commitments at the highest level of this organization and who you obtain the wind hana well request to integrate the wind form is already the largest renewable generator in south australia and it might not be in the plan to expand in these locations but at the lot of profit we location in australia with the wind and solar regime are outstanding to do more wind farm we storage this is where you buy lots of how we should integrate renewable we storage to make long-term sustainable dispatchable and competitive energy for South Australia but also for most of the places in the world we are this is the role of constructing a commitment to the surface own government of the battery who may be used for the purpose of providing a great security increased ability and power reserve and and there will be actual ruin generated by the market this will be this will be to sell HTT to discuss their issues and solve it right behind so bihaan going from state to India Building Commission and in June this year agent and third stage is really well in the way so we have been developing in building a wind farm with cement and teepee piece of Australian subcontractor for the energy balance system so it doesn't experience understanding of what is going on on site we know the site perfectly well except the practice understanding connection and we believe the FCAT trial which here currently with amo in arena and performing uncommon bill to also elders getting through the registration sets which are important setting us in that context we are not that worried on the delivery of the battery we are considering the connection will be will be person adequately we will be working very hard with all three and empty my aim and I am sorry to to make it happen as quickly as possible the racial factor can you guarantee that power passes for consumers for householders the visitors will actually go down I guarantee would be an overstatement but necessarily the fact that ice cap services provided through convention sources of renewable literacy would have an impact yes we guarantee in Australia the wind farm is selling electricity between half and two-thirds of the price of the average price of a market so with the storage was going to be able to bring the chief election half of the average price at the moment when the people needed and not only when the wind blows and that's really what we want to do and I think we have an arrangement where I think 70% of the the battery is reserved for the South Australian government services nationally 30% for market based activity and there's a series of quite complex agreements about why in which we gain access to that so there's a clear understanding between us about the use of the battery for our purposes and it's also important to note that this is a protest which is in to evolve we plan with the government and the regulator regular meetings to make sure that the battery is used as well as possible and that we take good lessons and good understanding from this unique example in South Australia and that we'll be able to replicate it in Australia and other parts of the world it is a word premier and it means we'll have to work on it to make it as efficient as possible so Linden is a global IPP different all preserve buildings renewable energy generators we have been very Australian since 2012 more than 1 billion million dollars and we're planning to invest approximately the same amount of money in the next 12 to 18 months South Australia has been initiated from the core of our investment through the hotel window and our pretty humble bar result we are several other projects including sofa sorry yes I think we were limited in growing South Australia without the battery now we're ready going to start to be able to do real we in South Australia it's a beginning with the government's initiatives the energy security plan is really a game changer in the world and South Australia is going to be seen I was now a leader in being able to solve the equation of intermittent electricity and bring stability so they only very proud to be part of explosive experimentation forward from there and they're your initiation create the world is going to have the eyes focused on the next four months there now where other questions say that you were paying Frank and remain [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

https://youtu.be/zIwLWfaAg-8

Chris Anderson: Elon, hey, welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here. Elon Musk: Thanks for having me. CA: So, in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic: Why are you boring? EM: Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. We're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life. It's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA. (Laughter) CA: I think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this. Can I show this? EM: Yeah, absolutely. So this is the first time -- Just to show what we're talking about. So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour. CA: How much? EM: 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes -- five, six minutes. (Applause) CA: So possibly, initially done, it's like on a sort of toll road-type basis. EM: Yeah. CA: Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well. EM: So, I don't know if people noticed it in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels. CA: But people -- seen traditionally, it's incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea. EM: Yeah. Well, they're right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is -- I think it's a two-and-a-half mile extension that was just completed for two billion dollars. So it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. CA: And how could you achieve that? EM: Actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and I think you can go beyond that. So the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we're attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that's roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that's a factor of eight. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limits, so you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvement on top of that. So I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile, and our target actually is -- we've got a pet snail called Gary, this is from Gary the snail from "South Park," I mean, sorry, "SpongeBob SquarePants." (Laughter) So Gary is capable of -- currently he's capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel-boring machine. (Laughter) CA: You want to beat Gary. EM: We want to beat Gary. (Laughter) He's not a patient little fellow, and that will be victory. Victory is beating the snail. CA: But a lot of people imagining, dreaming about future cities, they imagine that actually the solution is flying cars, drones, etc. You go aboveground. Why isn't that a better solution? You save all that tunneling cost. EM: Right. I'm in favor of flying things. Obviously, I do rockets, so I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things, but there is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation. (Laughter) You don't think to yourself, "Well, I feel better about today." You're thinking, "Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and guillotine me?" Things like that. CA: So you've got this vision of future cities with these rich, 3D networks of tunnels underneath. Is there a tie-in here with Hyperloop? Could you apply these tunnels to use for this Hyperloop idea you released a few years ago. EM: Yeah, so we've been sort of puttering around with the Hyperloop stuff for a while. We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. And it actually ends up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider, by volume. So it was quite fun to do that, but it was kind of a hobby thing, and then we think we might -- so we've built a little pusher car to push the student pods, but we're going to try seeing how fast we can make the pusher go if it's not pushing something. So we're cautiously optimistic we'll be able to be faster than the world's fastest bullet train even in a .8-mile stretch. CA: Whoa. Good brakes. EM: Yeah, I mean, it's -- yeah. It's either going to smash into tiny pieces or go quite fast. CA: But you can picture, then, a Hyperloop in a tunnel running quite long distances. EM: Exactly. And looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to make a tunnel, you have to -- In order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres. So to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, or near-vacuum. So actually, it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it is automatically capable of holding vacuum. CA: Huh. EM: So, yeah. CA: And so you could actually picture, what kind of length tunnel is in Elon's future to running Hyperloop? EM: I think there's no real length limit. You could dig as much as you want. I think if you were to do something like a DC-to-New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way because it's a high-density area. You're going under a lot of buildings and houses, and if you go deep enough, you cannot detect the tunnel. Sometimes people think, well, it's going to be pretty annoying to have a tunnel dug under my house. Like, if that tunnel is dug more than about three or four tunnel diameters beneath your house, you will not be able to detect it being dug at all. In fact, if you're able to detect the tunnel being dug, whatever device you are using, you can get a lot of money for that device from the Israeli military, who is trying to detect tunnels from Hamas, and from the US Customs and Border patrol that try and detect drug tunnels. So the reality is that earth is incredibly good at absorbing vibrations, and once the tunnel depth is below a certain level, it is undetectable. Maybe if you have a very sensitive seismic instrument, you might be able to detect it. CA: So you've started a new company to do this called The Boring Company. Very nice. Very funny. (Laughter) EM: What's funny about that? (Laughter) CA: How much of your time is this? EM: It's maybe ... two or three percent. CA: You've called it a hobby. This is what an Elon Musk hobby looks like. (Laughter) EM: I mean, it really is, like -- This is basically interns and people doing it part time. We bought some second-hand machinery. It's kind of puttering along, but it's making good progress, so -- CA: So an even bigger part of your time is being spent on electrifying cars and transport through Tesla. Is one of the motivations for the tunneling project the realization that actually, in a world where cars are electric and where they're self-driving, there may end up being more cars on the roads on any given hour than there are now? EM: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people think that when you make cars autonomous, they'll be able to go faster and that will alleviate congestion. And to some degree that will be true, but once you have shared autonomy where it's much cheaper to go by car and you can go point to point, the affordability of going in a car will be better than that of a bus. Like, it will cost less than a bus ticket. So the amount of driving that will occur will be much greater with shared autonomy, and actually traffic will get far worse. CA: You started Tesla with the goal of persuading the world that electrification was the future of cars, and a few years ago, people were laughing at you. Now, not so much. EM: OK. (Laughter) I don't know. I don't know. CA: But isn't it true that pretty much every auto manufacturer has announced serious electrification plans for the short- to medium-term future? EM: Yeah. Yeah. I think almost every automaker has some electric vehicle program. They vary in seriousness. Some are very serious about transitioning entirely to electric, and some are just dabbling in it. And some, amazingly, are still pursuing fuel cells, but I think that won't last much longer. CA: But isn't there a sense, though, Elon, where you can now just declare victory and say, you know, "We did it." Let the world electrify, and you go on and focus on other stuff? EM: Yeah. I intend to stay with Tesla as far into the future as I can imagine, and there are a lot of exciting things that we have coming. Obviously the Model 3 is coming soon. We'll be unveiling the Tesla Semi truck. CA: OK, we're going to come to this. So Model 3, it's supposed to be coming in July-ish. EM: Yeah, it's looking quite good for starting production in July. CA: Wow. One of the things that people are so excited about is the fact that it's got autopilot. And you put out this video a while back showing what that technology would look like. EM: Yeah. CA: There's obviously autopilot in Model S right now. What are we seeing here? EM: Yeah, so this is using only cameras and GPS. So there's no LIDAR or radar being used here. This is just using passive optical, which is essentially what a person uses. The whole road system is meant to be navigated with passive optical, or cameras, and so once you solve cameras or vision, then autonomy is solved. If you don't solve vision, it's not solved. So that's why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that's very effective for road conditions. CA: Right. Many other people are going the LIDAR route. You want cameras plus radar is most of it. EM: You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras. Like, you can probably do it ten times better than humans would, just cameras. CA: So the new cars being sold right now have eight cameras in them. They can't yet do what that showed. When will they be able to? EM: I think we're still on track for being able to go cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year, fully autonomous. CA: OK, so by the end of the year, you're saying, someone's going to sit in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, tap in "New York," off it goes. EM: Yeah. CA: Won't ever have to touch the wheel -- by the end of 2017. EM: Yeah. Essentially, November or December of this year, we should be able to go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey. (Applause) CA: Amazing. But part of that is possible because you've already got a fleet of Teslas driving all these roads. You're accumulating a huge amount of data of that national road system. EM: Yes, but the thing that will be interesting is that I'm actually fairly confident it will be able to do that route even if you change the route dynamically. So, it's fairly easy -- If you say I'm going to be really good at one specific route, that's one thing, but it should be able to go, really be very good, certainly once you enter a highway, to go anywhere on the highway system in a given country. So it's not sort of limited to LA to New York. We could change it and make it Seattle-Florida, that day, in real time. So you were going from LA to New York. Now go from LA to Toronto. CA: So leaving aside regulation for a second, in terms of the technology alone, the time when someone will be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've arrived, how far away is that, to do that safely? EM: I think that's about two years. So the real trick of it is not how do you make it work say 99.9 percent of the time, because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you're probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn't be, certainly. (Laughter) It's never going to be perfect. No system is going to be perfect, but if you say it's perhaps -- the car is unlikely to crash in a hundred lifetimes, or a thousand lifetimes, then people are like, OK, wow, if I were to live a thousand lives, I would still most likely never experience a crash, then that's probably OK. CA: To sleep. I guess the big concern of yours is that people may actually get seduced too early to think that this is safe, and that you'll have some horrible incident happen that puts things back. EM: Well, I think that the autonomy system is likely to at least mitigate the crash, except in rare circumstances. The thing to appreciate about vehicle safety is this is probabilistic. I mean, there's some chance that any time a human driver gets in a car, that they will have an accident that is their fault. It's never zero. So really the key threshold for autonomy is how much better does autonomy need to be than a person before you can rely on it? CA: But once you get literally safe hands-off driving, the power to disrupt the whole industry seems massive, because at that point you've spoken of people being able to buy a car, drops you off at work, and then you let it go and provide a sort of Uber-like service to other people, earn you money, maybe even cover the cost of your lease of that car, so you can kind of get a car for free. Is that really likely? EM: Yeah. Absolutely this is what will happen. So there will be a shared autonomy fleet where you buy your car and you can choose to use that car exclusively, you could choose to have it be used only by friends and family, only by other drivers who are rated five star, you can choose to share it sometimes but not other times. That's 100 percent what will occur. It's just a question of when. CA: Wow. So you mentioned the Semi and I think you're planning to announce this in September, but I'm curious whether there's anything you could show us today? EM: I will show you a teaser shot of the truck. (Laughter) It's alive. CA: OK. EM: That's definitely a case where we want to be cautious about the autonomy features. Yeah. (Laughter) CA: We can't see that much of it, but it doesn't look like just a little friendly neighborhood truck. It looks kind of badass. What sort of semi is this? EM: So this is a heavy duty, long-range semitruck. So it's the highest weight capability and with long range. So essentially it's meant to alleviate the heavy-duty trucking loads. And this is something which people do not today think is possible. They think the truck doesn't have enough power or it doesn't have enough range, and then with the Tesla Semi we want to show that no, an electric truck actually can out-torque any diesel semi. And if you had a tug-of-war competition, the Tesla Semi will tug the diesel semi uphill. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's pretty cool. And short term, these aren't driverless. These are going to be trucks that truck drivers want to drive. EM: Yes. So what will be really fun about this is you have a flat torque RPM curve with an electric motor, whereas with a diesel motor or any kind of internal combustion engine car, you've got a torque RPM curve that looks like a hill. So this will be a very spry truck. You can drive this around like a sports car. There's no gears. It's, like, single speed. CA: There's a great movie to be made here somewhere. I don't know what it is and I don't know that it ends well, but it's a great movie. (Laughter) EM: It's quite bizarre test-driving. When I was driving the test prototype for the first truck. It's really weird, because you're driving around and you're just so nimble, and you're in this giant truck. CA: Wait, you've already driven a prototype? EM: Yeah, I drove it around the parking lot, and I was like, this is crazy. CA: Wow. This is no vaporware. EM: It's just like, driving this giant truck and making these mad maneuvers. CA: This is cool. OK, from a really badass picture to a kind of less badass picture. This is just a cute house from "Desperate Housewives" or something. What on earth is going on here? EM: Well, this illustrates the picture of the future that I think is how things will evolve. You've got an electric car in the driveway. If you look in between the electric car and the house, there are actually three Powerwalls stacked up against the side of the house, and then that house roof is a solar roof. So that's an actual solar glass roof. CA: OK. EM: That's a picture of a real -- well, admittedly, it's a real fake house. That's a real fake house. (Laughter) CA: So these roof tiles, some of them have in them basically solar power, the ability to -- EM: Yeah. Solar glass tiles where you can adjust the texture and the color to a very fine-grained level, and then there's sort of microlouvers in the glass, such that when you're looking at the roof from street level or close to street level, all the tiles look the same whether there is a solar cell behind it or not. So you have an even color from the ground level. If you were to look at it from a helicopter, you would be actually able to look through and see that some of the glass tiles have a solar cell behind them and some do not. You can't tell from street level. CA: You put them in the ones that are likely to see a lot of sun, and that makes these roofs super affordable, right? They're not that much more expensive than just tiling the roof. EM: Yeah. We're very confident that the cost of the roof plus the cost of electricity -- A solar glass roof will be less than the cost of a normal roof plus the cost of electricity. So in other words, this will be economically a no-brainer, we think it will look great, and it will last -- We thought about having the warranty be infinity, but then people thought, well, that might sound like were just talking rubbish, but actually this is toughened glass. Well after the house has collapsed and there's nothing there, the glass tiles will still be there. (Applause) CA: I mean, this is cool. So you're rolling this out in a couple week's time, I think, with four different roofing types. EM: Yeah, we're starting off with two, two initially, and the second two will be introduced early next year. CA: And what's the scale of ambition here? How many houses do you believe could end up having this type of roofing? EM: I think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof. The thing is to consider the time scale here to be probably on the order of 40 or 50 years. So on average, a roof is replaced every 20 to 25 years. But you don't start replacing all roofs immediately. But eventually, if you say were to fast-forward to say 15 years from now, it will be unusual to have a roof that does not have solar. CA: Is there a mental model thing that people don't get here that because of the shift in the cost, the economics of solar power, most houses actually have enough sunlight on their roof pretty much to power all of their needs. If you could capture the power, it could pretty much power all their needs. You could go off-grid, kind of. EM: It depends on where you are and what the house size is relative to the roof area, but it's a fair statement to say that most houses in the US have enough roof area to power all the needs of the house. CA: So the key to the economics of the cars, the Semi, of these houses is the falling price of lithium-ion batteries, which you've made a huge bet on as Tesla. In many ways, that's almost the core competency. And you've decided that to really, like, own that competency, you just have to build the world's largest manufacturing plant to double the world's supply of lithium-ion batteries, with this guy. What is this? EM: Yeah, so that's the Gigafactory, progress so far on the Gigafactory. Eventually, you can sort of roughly see that there's sort of a diamond shape overall, and when it's fully done, it'll look like a giant diamond, or that's the idea behind it, and it's aligned on true north. It's a small detail. CA: And capable of producing, eventually, like a hundred gigawatt hours of batteries a year. EM: A hundred gigawatt hours. We think probably more, but yeah. CA: And they're actually being produced right now. EM: They're in production already. CA: You guys put out this video. I mean, is that speeded up? EM: That's the slowed down version. (Laughter) CA: How fast does it actually go? EM: Well, when it's running at full speed, you can't actually see the cells without a strobe light. It's just blur. (Laughter) CA: One of your core ideas, Elon, about what makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy. Help us picture this. How many Gigafactories, if you like, does it take to get us there? EM: It's about a hundred, roughly. It's not 10, it's not a thousand. Most likely a hundred. CA: See, I find this amazing. You can picture what it would take to move the world off this vast fossil fuel thing. It's like you're building one, it costs five billion dollars, or whatever, five to 10 billion dollars. Like, it's kind of cool that you can picture that project. And you're planning to do, at Tesla -- announce another two this year. EM: I think we'll announce locations for somewhere between two and four Gigafactories later this year. Yeah, probably four. CA: Whoa. (Applause) No more teasing from you for here? Like -- where, continent? You can say no. EM: We need to address a global market. CA: OK. (Laughter) This is cool. I think we should talk for -- Actually, global market. I'm going to ask you one question about politics, only one. I'm kind of sick of politics, but I do want to ask you this. You're on a body now giving advice to a guy -- EM: Who? CA: Who has said he doesn't really believe in climate change, and there's a lot of people out there who think you shouldn't be doing that. They'd like you to walk away from that. What would you say to them? EM: Well, I think that first of all, I'm just on two advisory councils where the format consists of going around the room and asking people's opinion on things, and so there's like a meeting every month or two. That's the sum total of my contribution. But I think to the degree that there are people in the room who are arguing in favor of doing something about climate change, or social issues, I've used the meetings I've had thus far to argue in favor of immigration and in favor of climate change. (Applause) And if I hadn't done that, that wasn't on the agenda before. So maybe nothing will happen, but at least the words were said. CA: OK. (Applause) So let's talk SpaceX and Mars. Last time you were here, you spoke about what seemed like a kind of incredibly ambitious dream to develop rockets that were actually reusable. And you've only gone and done it. EM: Finally. It took a long time. CA: Talk us through this. What are we looking at here? EM: So this is one of our rocket boosters coming back from very high and fast in space. So just delivered the upper stage at high velocity. I think this might have been at sort of Mach 7 or so, delivery of the upper stage. (Applause) CA: So that was a sped-up -- EM: That was the slowed down version. (Laughter) CA: I thought that was the sped-up version. But I mean, that's amazing, and several of these failed before you finally figured out how to do it, but now you've done this, what, five or six times? EM: We're at eight or nine. CA: And for the first time, you've actually reflown one of the rockets that landed. EM: Yeah, so we landed the rocket booster and then prepped it for flight again and flew it again, so it's the first reflight of an orbital booster where that reflight is relevant. So it's important to appreciate that reusability is only relevant if it is rapid and complete. So like an aircraft or a car, the reusability is rapid and complete. You do not send your aircraft to Boeing in-between flights. CA: Right. So this is allowing you to dream of this really ambitious idea of sending many, many, many people to Mars in, what, 10 or 20 years time, I guess. EM: Yeah. CA: And you've designed this outrageous rocket to do it. Help us understand the scale of this thing. EM: Well, visually you can see that's a person. Yeah, and that's the vehicle. (Laughter) CA: So if that was a skyscraper, that's like, did I read that, a 40-story skyscraper? EM: Probably a little more, yeah. The thrust level of this is really -- This configuration is about four times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. CA: Four times the thrust of the biggest rocket humanity ever created before. EM: Yeah. Yeah. CA: As one does. EM: Yeah. (Laughter) In units of 747, a 747 is only about a quarter of a million pounds of thrust, so for every 10 million pounds of thrust, there's 40 747s. So this would be the thrust equivalent of 120 747s, with all engines blazing. CA: And so even with a machine designed to escape Earth's gravity, I think you told me last time this thing could actually take a fully loaded 747, people, cargo, everything, into orbit. EM: Exactly. This can take a fully loaded 747 with maximum fuel, maximum passengers, maximum cargo on the 747 -- this can take it as cargo. CA: So based on this, you presented recently this Interplanetary Transport System which is visualized this way. This is a scene you picture in, what, 30 years time? 20 years time? People walking into this rocket. EM: I'm hopeful it's sort of an eight- to 10-year time frame. Aspirationally, that's our target. Our internal targets are more aggressive, but I think -- (Laughter) CA: OK. EM: While vehicle seems quite large and is large by comparison with other rockets, I think the future spacecraft will make this look like a rowboat. The future spaceships will be truly enormous. CA: Why, Elon? Why do we need to build a city on Mars with a million people on it in your lifetime, which I think is kind of what you've said you'd love to do? EM: I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have. (Applause) CA: People want to position this as an either or, that there are so many desperate things happening on the planet now from climate to poverty to, you know, you pick your issue. And this feels like a distraction. You shouldn't be thinking about this. You should be solving what's here and now. And to be fair, you've done a fair old bit to actually do that with your work on sustainable energy. But why not just do that? EM: I think there's -- I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It's like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream. Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never existed, it would have to happen out of necessity. It's tautological. If you don't have sustainable energy, it means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually you will run out, and the laws of economics will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur. So when I think, like, what is the fundamental good of a company like Tesla, I would say, hopefully, if it accelerated that by a decade, potentially more than a decade, that would be quite a good thing to occur. That's what I consider to be the fundamental aspirational good of Tesla. Then there's becoming a multiplanet species and space-faring civilization. This is not inevitable. It's very important to appreciate this is not inevitable. The sustainable energy future I think is largely inevitable, but being a space-faring civilization is definitely not inevitable. If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 you were able to send somebody to the moon. 1969. Then we had the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the Space Shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like down to nothing. People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it. CA: Elon, it almost seems, listening to you and looking at the different things you've done, that you've got this unique double motivation on everything that I find so interesting. One is this desire to work for humanity's long-term good. The other is the desire to do something exciting. And often it feels like you feel like you need the one to drive the other. With Tesla, you want to have sustainable energy, so you made these super sexy, exciting cars to do it. Solar energy, we need to get there, so we need to make these beautiful roofs. We haven't even spoken about your newest thing, which we don't have time to do, but you want to save humanity from bad AI, and so you're going to create this really cool brain-machine interface to give us all infinite memory and telepathy and so forth. And on Mars, it feels like what you're saying is, yeah, we need to save humanity and have a backup plan, but also we need to inspire humanity, and this is a way to inspire. EM: I think the value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear. I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. That is not the -- I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad. (Applause) CA: Beautiful statement. I think everyone here would agree that it is not -- None of this is going to happen inevitably. The fact that in your mind, you dream this stuff, you dream stuff that no one else would dare dream, or no one else would be capable of dreaming at the level of complexity that you do. The fact that you do that, Elon Musk, is a really remarkable thing. Thank you for helping us all to dream a bit bigger. EM: But you'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right? (Laughter) CA: Thank you, Elon Musk. That was really, really fantastic. That was really fantastic. (Applause)

https://youtu.be/rCoFKUJ_8Yo

What a challenge! To talk to one of the most, in my opinion, in life, we've seen, within this part of the world, great people, like Al-Khawarizmi who invented algorithm. Globally, Newton. Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Albert Einstein and Elon Musk. See, you are in rush, You want to go to places that nobody has been. You are re-inventing a certain industry, from the rocket industry with SpaceX to the car industry with Tesla. What's your life mission? Why do you do whatever you do? Sure, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. And I'm having a really great time with my kids in Dubai. It's really been fantastic. I really encourage anyone who hasn't been to visit, what a great city! Thank you. And, in terms of the motivations, I used to like this sort of... kind of a long version of the explanation but... essentially, when I was a kid I was wondering, what's the meaning of life? Like, why are we here? What is it all about? And I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness, the better we're able to ask these questions. And... So, I think there are certain things that are necessary to ensure that the future is good. And... some of those things are in the long term having long term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation. And to be a space exploring civilization. And for humanity to be out there among the stars. And be a multi-planetary species. I think that being a multi-planetary species and being out there among the stars is important for the long term survival of humanity. And, that's one reason, kind of like life insurance for life collectively. Life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure, and it makes people excited about the future. If you consider two futures, one where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens. Or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond the solar system. I think that space invasion is incredibly exciting and inspiring. And there need to be reasons to get up in the morning. You know, life can't just be about solving problems. Otherwise, what's the point? There's got to be things that people find inspiring, and make life worth living. So, what is life for you? I mean, you look at our life, and I heard you before speaking. Is it a dream? Is it real? Is it a million deal? What is life for Elon Musk? I find that as I get older I find that question to be maybe more and more confusing or troubling or uncertain. Particularly when you see the advancement of something like video games. You know, 40 years ago, you had video games, the most advanced video game would be like Pong, when you had two rectangles and a dot. And you're like batting it back and forth. - I played it. - Yeah, me too, exactly. - Us all. - It sort of dates you a little bit. Yeah, we both played the same game. And that was like a pretty fun game at the time. But now, you can see a video game that's photo-realistic, almost photo-realistic, and millions of people playing simultaneously. And, and you see where things are going with virtual reality. And augmented reality and... if you extrapolate that out into the future with any rate of progress at all, like keeping 0.1% of something like that a year, then eventually those games will be indistinguishable from reality. They'll be so realistic you won't be able to tell the difference between that game and reality as we know it. And then, it seems like, well, how do we know that that didn't happen in the past? And that we're not in one of those games ourselves? Interesting. Interesting. I mean, it could be. Everything is possible in life. I mean there's... Yeah, particularly like things tend to be accelerating to something. Isn't it? I mean, if we look at our life, it seems in the past 100 years life has been accelerating quite fast. - Yeah. - In the past 20 years. - It's getting faster and faster. - Is it more slow? So, my question is really, how will life be 20, 30, 50 years from now? Our education, our transport. How do you see it? Well, I think this is one of those things that are quite difficult to predict. When you think of, say, the first controlled power flight was in 1903 with the Wright Brothers. And then, 66 years later we put the first people on the moon. I mean, if you asked people, say, in 1900, what are the odds of landing on the moon they would've said that's ridiculous. If you try to talk to them about the internet they wouldn't know what the heck you're even... What are you talking about? Like, this sounds so crazy. But today, with a hundred-dollar device you can video-conference with anyone in the world. On the other side of the world, and if you have a Wi-Fi connection, it's basically free. You're free to have an instant visual communication with anyone, or even with millions of people. You know, with social media you can communicate to millions of people simultaneously. So, and you can google something and ask any question. It's like an oracle of wisdom, that you can ask almost any questions and get an instant response. It would be incredibly difficult to predict these things in the past. Even the relatively recent past. So, I think the one thing that we can be quite certain of is that any predictions we make today for what the future will be like in 50 years will be wrong That's for sure. I think directionally, I can tell you what I hope the future has, as opposed to maybe what it will be. This may just be wishful thinking. I mean I hope we are out there on Mars and maybe beyond Mars, Jupiter. I hope we're traveling frequently throughout the solar system, perhaps preparing for missions to nearby star systems. I think all of that is possible in 50 years. And I think it's going to be very exciting to do that. And, I think we'll see autonomy and artificial intelligence advance tremendously. Like that's actually quite near term. My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous. - 10 years. - 10 years from now? Yeah. I think almost all cars built will be able of full autonomy in about 10 years. As it is, the Tesla cars that are made today, have the sensor system necessary for full autonomy. And we think probably enough compute power to be safer than a person. So, it's mostly just the question of developing the software and uploading the software. And if it turns out that more compute power is needed, we can easily upgrade the computer. And, so that's all Teslas built since October last year. And other manufacturers will follow and do the same thing. So, getting in a car will be like getting in an elevator. You just tell it where you want to go and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety. And that will be normal, that will just be normal. Like, for elevators, they used to be elevator operators. You get in, there will be a guy moving a lever. Now, you just get in, you press the button and that's taken for granted. So, autonomy will be wide-spread. I think one of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence. And I don't mean narrow AI, like, vehicle autonomy I would put in the narrow AI class. It's narrowly trying to achieve a certain function. But deep artificial intelligence, or what is sometimes called artificial general intelligence, where you can have AI that is much smarter than the smartest human on Earth. This, I think, is a dangerous situation. Why is it dangerous? I mean, there are two views, one view is that artificial intelligence will help humanity, and there's another school of thought that artificial intelligence is a threat to humanity. - Why is that? - I think it's both. You know, it's like... one way to think of it is imagine we're going to be visited... imagine you're very confident that we're going to be visited by super intelligent aliens, in let's say 10 years or 20 years at the most. - Super intelligent. - So, you think within 20 years... - Yeah... - we'll have aliens on Earth? Well, digital super intelligence will be like an alien. - It will be like an alien. - Yeah. But my question is, do you think there is other intelligent life outside the Earth? It seems probable. I think this is one of the great questions in physics and philosophy, is, where are the aliens? Maybe they are among us, I don't know. Some people think I'm an alien. Not true. - Not true. - But maybe we are aliens. Maybe we aliens. I mean, if you look at this part of the world. Yeah. They believe that human beings are not from Earth, they came from somewhere else. Eve and Adam came from somewhere else to Earth. So, in a way, human beings are aliens to this land. Do you think we'll make contact with aliens within the next 50 years? Well, that's a really tough one to say. If there are super intelligent aliens out there, they're probably already observing us. That would seem quite likely and we're not smart enough to realize it. But I can do some back of the envelope calculations and... any advanced alien civilization that is at all interested in populating the galaxy, even without exceeding the speed of light, even if you're only moving at, say, 10 or 20 per cent of the speed of light, you could populate the entire galaxy in let's say 10 million years. Maybe 20 million years max. This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Once you said you wanted to die on Mars. Why? To be clear, I don't want to die on Mars. It's like, if... we're all going to die someday, and if you're going to pick some place to die, then why not Mars? You know, if you're born on Earth, why not die on Mars? Seems like may be quite exciting. But, I think given the choice between dying on Earth and dying on Mars, I'd say, yeah, sure, I'll die on Mars. But it's not some kind of Mars death wish. And if I do die on Mars, I just don't want to go on impact. Let's come back to Earth, actually. You tweeted that you are building a tunnel under Washington D.C. Why? What is it? - It's a secret plot. - Okay. - Just between us. - Nobody helps you? Yeah, exactly, let's keep that a secret. I think this is going to sound a little... I mean, it seems like so much trivial or silly, but... I've been saying this for many years now but I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network of tunnels under cities. And when I say that I don't mean a 2-D plan of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep. So, you can always go deeper than you can go up. Like, the deepest mines are deeper than the tallest buildings. So, you can have a network of tunnels that is 20, 30, 40, 50 levels, as many levels as you want, really. And so, given that, you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world. The challenge is how do you build tunnels quickly and at low cost and with high safety? So, if tunnel technology can be improved to the point where you can build tunnels fast, cheap and safe, then that would completely get rid of any traffic situations in the cities. And so, that's why I think it's an important technology. And, Washington D.C., L.A and most of the major American cities, most major cities in the world suffer from severe traffic issues. And it's mostly because you've got these buildings which are, these tall buildings that are 3-D and you have a road network that is one level. And then, people generally want to go in and out of these buildings at the exact same time. So, then, you get the traffic jam. Let's come back to... your year in Dubai. The first time I met you it was the 4th of June 2015, at your office in SpaceX. And, I asked you would you have a presence in UAE? And your answer was: I'm busy with China. Maybe not in the near future, and almost a year and a half later, we are here, seems time goes quite fast. Why now? I think actually things are going really well in China. So, we have some initial challenges figuring out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it's actually going really well, and... so the timing seems to be good to really make a significant debut in this region, starting in Dubai. In your opinion, what is the new disturbing thing that will come next in technology? What's next in technology? - What's next in technology? - That will disturb the way we live, the way we think, the way we do business. Well, the most near to impact from a technological standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self-driving cars. I'd say that's going to happen much faster than people realize. so, and that's... it's going to be a great convenience to be in an autonomous car, but there are many people whose job is to drive. So, if... in fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people is driving in various forms. And so, then we need to figure out new rules for what do these people do. But it will all be very disruptive and very quick. I should characterize what I mean by quick. Because there are... Quick means different things to different people. There are about two billion vehicles in the world. Approaching in fact 2.5 billion cars and trucks in the world. The total new vehicle production capacity is about a hundred million. Which makes sense, because the life of a car or truck before it's finally scraped is about 20-25 years. So, so the point at which we see full autonomy appear will not be the point at which there is massive societal upheaval, because it will take a long time to make enough autonomous vehicles to disrupt employment. So, that disruption I'm talking about will take place over about 20 years. Still, 20 years is a short period of time to have I think something like 12 to 15 per cent of the world force be unemployed. Thank you. This is the largest global government summit we have over 139 governments here. If you want to advise government officials to be ready for the future, what three pieces of advice can you give them? Well, I think the first bit of advice is to really play close attention to... the development of artificial intelligence. I think this is, we need to be just be very careful in... how we adopt artificial intelligence, and to make sure that researchers don't get carried away, because sometimes what happens is that scientists can get so engrossed in their work, they don't necessarily realize the ramifications of what they're doing. So, I think it's important for public safety that we... you know, governments keep a close eye on artificial intelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public. Let's see, secondly I would say we do need to think about transport in general. And, there's the movement towards electric vehicles, sustainable transport, I think that's going to be good for many reasons, but again, not something that happens immediately, that's going to happen slower than the self-driving vehicles. Because that's probably something that happens over 30 or 40 years. The transition to electric vehicles. So, thinking about that in context... the demand for electricity will increase dramatically. So, currently, in terms of total energy usage in the world, it's about 1/3, about 1/3 transport, about 1/3 heating. So, over time that will transition to almost all... not all, but predominantly electricity, which means that the demand for electricity will probably triple. So, it's going to be very important to think about how do you make so much more electricity And... It seems they'll have an easy job, that's it, there are no more challenges for them. No, well, I think maybe... these things do play into each other a little bit, but what to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. And I think ultimately will have to have some kind of universal basic income I don't think we're going to have a choice. - Universal basic income. - Universal basic income. I think it's going to be necessary. So, it means that unemployed people will be paid across the globe. - Yeah. - Because there are no jobs. Machines, robots are taking over. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. That's simply... And I want to be clear, these are not things that I wish would happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen. And so, if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, then we need to say what are we going to do about it. And I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary. Now, the output of goods and services will be extremely high. So, with automation, there will come abundance. There will be... almost everything will get very cheap. The... So... I think the biggest... I think we'll just end up doing a universal basic income. It's going to be necessary. The harder challenge, much harder challenge, is how do people then have meaning? Like a lot of people they derive their meaning from their employment, so, if you don't have... if you're not needed, if there's not a need for your labor, how do you... what's the meaning? Do you have meaning? Do you feel useless? That's a much harder problem to deal with. And then how do we ensure that the future is going to be the future that we want? That we so like. You know, I mean do think that there's a potential path here which is, I'm really getting into science fiction or sort of advanced science stuff. But, having some sort of merger with biological intelligence, and machine intelligence. To some degree, we are already a cyborg. You think of like the digital tools that you have, your phone and your computer, the applications that you have. Like the fact that as I mentioned earlier you can ask a question and instantly get an answer from Google or from other things. And, and so you already have a digital touchery layer. I say touchery because you can think of the limbic system, kind of the animal brain or the primal brain and then the cortex, kind of the thinking, planning part of the brain, and then your digital self as a third layer. So, you already have that, and I think if somebody dies, their digital ghost is still around. All of their e-mails and the pictures that they posted and their social media. That still lives, even if they died. So, over time I think we'll probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. And it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and your digital... the digital extension of yourself. Particularly output, and, if anything is getting worse, you know, we used to have keyboards that we used a lot, now we do most of our input through our thumbs, on a phone. And, that's just very slow. A computer can communicate at a trillion bits per second, but your thumb can maybe do maybe 10 bits per second or a hundred if you're being generous. So, some high bandwidth interface to the brain I think will be something that helps achieve symbiosis, between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem. I'm getting pretty esoteric here, I don't know is this is... It's close, we got it. Always you think out of the box. Your ideas are so huge. You want to go to space, you decided to go to space, you did it. You decided that you wanted to land your rocket back, - you failed, 7 times, 8 times? - Yeah, something like that. - Then it landed. - 4 times that I care to count. How do you come with these ideas? Sometimes they are pushing the human limit. You are always pushing the human limit, why? Well, I... I think about what technology solution is necessary in order to achieve that particular goal, and then try to make as much progress in that direction as possible. So, in the case of space flight, the critical breakthrough that's necessary in space flight, is rapid incomplete reusability of rockets. Just as we have for air crafts. You can imagine that if an air craft was a single use, almost no one would fly. Because you can buy like, say, 747 might be... 250 million Dollars, 300 million Dollars, something like that. You need two of them for a round trip. But nobody is going to pay millions of Dollars for a ticket to fly. To do air travel. So, but because you can re-use the air craft tens of thousands of times, the... Air travel becomes much more affordable. And, the same is true of rockets. Our rocket costs... 60 million Dollars, roughly. So, a capital cost if it can be used once in 60 million Dollars. But if the capital cost if it can be used a thousand times is 60 thousand Dollars. So, then if you can carry a lot of people for a flight, then you can get the cost of space flight to be something not far from the cost of air flight. So, it's truly fundamental, because earth gravity is quite deep. Earth has a fairly high gravity. The difficulty of making a rocket reusable is much greater than the difficulty of making an air craft reusable. That's why a fully reusable rocket hasn't been developed that far. But if you use the most advanced materials, the most advanced design techniques, and you get everything just right, then I'm confident that you can do a fully reusable rocket. Fortunately, if Earth gravity was even 10 per cent stronger, I would say it wouldn't be impossible. You need a team around you to deliver a lot of ideas. How do you choose your team? Based on what? Well, I suppose honestly that it tends to be a gut feeling more than anything else. So, when I interview somebody, the main questions are always the same. What do you ask? I say: Tell me the story of your life. And, the decisions that you made along the way and why you made them. And then, and also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them. And, that question I think is very important, because... the people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it. They know the little details. And the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level and then they get stuck. So, what was your biggest challenge in life? Biggest challenge in life? - No challenge? - Well, no, there's a lot of them. I'm trying to sort which is the worst. I think just thinking about how to spend time. One of the biggest challenges I think is making sure you have a corrective feedback loop, and then maintaining that corrective feedback loop over time, even when people won't to tell you exactly what you want to hear. - That's very difficult. - Yes. Time is over. I'll ask you just one last question. If you allow me. In the World Government Summit we have so many people from... so many young people actually from across the Globe. If you have an advice to them, young people globally who want to be like Elon Musk. What's your advice to them? I think that probably they shouldn't want to be. - You? - I think it sounds better than it is. Okay. Yeah, it's not as much fun being me as you'd think. - I don't know. - You don't think so? It could be worse, for sure. But it's... I'm not sure I want to be me. Okay. But... You know, I think my advice is if you want to make progress in things, I think that the best analytical framework for, I'll say in the future is physics. I'd recommend studying the thinking process around physics. Like, not just the equations, the equations are certainly very helpful, but the way of thinking in physics, it's the best framework for understanding things that are counter–intuitive. And, you know, always take the position that you are to some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong over time. One of the biggest mistakes people generally make and I'm guilty of it too is wishful thinking. You know, like you want something to be true, even if it isn't true. And so you ignore the things that... You ignore the real truth, because of what you want to be true. This is a very difficult trap to avoid. And like I said, it's certainly one that I find myself in, having problems with. But, if you just take that approach of that you're always to some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong. And solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends. Like, friends, if somebody loves you they want the best for you. They don't want to tell you the bad things. So, you have to ask them and say: I do really want to know. And then they will tell you. Thank you very much. It's been... It's great for the World Government Summit to have a legend, who's creating the future for humanity, to share his thoughts, his ideas, his visions, challenges, and his hope for life. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

https://youtu.be/h0962biiZa4

I'm going to ask a question, but you can only answer by saying either 'yes,' 'no,' or 'it's complicated.' Alright? So, let's start over here. Is some form of superintelligence possible, Jaan? 'Yes,' 'no,' or 'it's complicated.' Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Definitely. No. Well, this was disappointing, we didn't find any disagreement. Let's try harder. Just because it's possible doesn't mean that it's actually going to happen. So, before I asked if superintelligence was possible at all according to the laws of physics. Now, i'm asking, will it actually happen? A little bit complicated, but yes. Yes, and if it doesn't then something terrible has happened to prevent it. Yes. Probably. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. Shucks, still haven't found any interesting disagreements. We need to try harder still. OK. So, you think it is going to happen, but would you actually like it to happen at some point? Yes, no, or it's complicated? Complicated, leaning towards yes. It's complicated. Yes. Yes. It's really complicated. Yes. It's complicated. Very complicated. Well, heck, I don't know. It depends on which kind. Alright, so it's getting a little bit more interesting. When I think, we had a really fascinating... When is it going to happen? Well, we had a really fascinating discussion already in this morning's panel about when we might get to human level AI. So, that would sort of put a lower bound. In the interest of time, I think we don't need to rehash the question of when going beyond it might start. But, let's ask a very related question to the one that just came up here. Mainly, the question of well if something starts to happen, if you get some sort of recursive self improvement or some other process whereby intelligence and machines start to take off very very rapidly, there is always a timescale associated with this. And there I hope we can finally find some real serious disagreements to argue about here. Some people have been envisioning this scenario where it goes PHOOM and things happen in days or hours or less. Whereas, others envision that it will happen but it might take thousands of years or decades. So, if you think of some sort of doubling time, some sort of rough timescale on which things get dramatically better, what time scale would you guess at, Jaan? Start now or starting at human level? No, no, so once we get human level AI or whatever point beyond there or a little bit before there where things actually start taking off, what is the sort of time scale? Any explosion, as a nerdy physicist, has some sort of time scale, right, on which it happens. Are we talking about seconds, or years, or millennia? I'm thinking of years, but it is important to act as if this timeline was shorter. Yeah, I actually don't really trust my intuitions here. I have intuitions that we are thinking of years, but I also think human level AI is a mirage. It is suddenly going to be better than human, but whether that is going to be a full intelligence explosion quickly, I don't know. I think it partly depends on the architecture that ends up delivering human level AI. So, this kind of neuroscience inspired AI that we seem to be building at the moment that needs to be trained and have experience in order for it to gain knowledge that may be, you know, on the order of a few years so possible even a decade. Some numbers of years, but it could also be much less. But, I wouldn't be surprised if it was much more. Potentially days or shorter, especially if it's AI researchers designing AI researchers Every time there is an advance in AI, we dismiss it as 'oh, well that's not really AI:' chess, go, self-driving cars. An AI, as you know, is the field of things we haven't done yet. That will continue when we actually reach AGI. There will be lots of controversy. By the time the controversy settles down, we will realize that it's been around for a few years. Yeah, so I think we will go beyond human level capabilities in many different areas, but not in all at the same time. So, it will be an uneven process where some areas will be far advanced very soon, already to some extent and other might take much longer. What Bart said. But, I think if it reaches a threshold where it's as smart as the smartest most inventive human then, I mean, it really could be only a matter of days before it's smarter than the sum of humanity. So, here we saw quite an interesting range of answers. And this, I find is a very interesting question because for reasons that people here have published a lot of interesting papers about the time scale makes a huge difference. Right, if it's something that happening on the time scale of the industrial revolution, for example, that's a lot longer than the time scale on which society can adapt and take measures to steer development, borrowing your nice rocket metaphor, Jaan. Whereas, if things happen much quicker than society can respond, it's much harder to steer and you kind of have to hope that you've built in a good steering in advance. So, for example in nuclear reactors, we nerdy physicists like to stick graphite sticks in a moderators to slow things down maybe prevent it from going critical. I'm curious if anyone of you feels that it would be nice if this growth of intelligence which you are generally excited about, with some caveats, if any of you would like to have it happen a bit slower so that it becomes easier for society to keep shaping it the way we want it. And, if so, and here's a tough question, is there anything we can do now or later on when it gets closer that might make this intelligence explosion or rapid growth of intelligence simply proceed slower so we can have more influence over it. Does anyone want to take a swing at this? It's not for the whole panel, but anyone who... I'm reminded of the conversation we had with Rich Sutton in Puerto Rico. Like, we had a lot of disagreements, but definitely could agree about paths slower being better than faster. Any thoughts on how one could make it a little bit slower? I mean, the strategy I suggested in my talk was somewhat tongue and cheek. But, it was also serious. I think this conference is great and as technologists we should do everything we can to keep the technology safe and beneficial. Certainly, as we do each specific application, like self-driving cars, there's a whole host of ethical issues to address. But, I don't think we can solve the problem just technologically. Imagine that we've done our job perfectly and we've created the most safe, beneficial AI possible, but we've let the political system become totalitarian and evil, either a evil world government or even just a portion of the globe that is that way, it's not going to work out well. And so, part of the struggle is in the area of politics and social policy to have the world reflect the values want to achieve because we are talking about human AI. Human AI is by definition at human levels and therefore is human. And so, the issue of how we make humans ethical is the same issue as how we make AIs that are human level ethical. So, what i'm hearing you say is that before we reach the point of getting close to human level AI, a very good way to prepare for that is for us humans in our human societies to try and get our act together as much as possible and have the world run with more reason than it, perhaps, is today. Is that fair? That's exactly what I'm saying. Nick? Also, I just want to clarify again that when I asked about what you would do to slow things down i'm not talking at all about slowing down AI research now. We're simply talking about if we get to the point where we are getting very near human level AI and think we might get some very fast development, how could one slow that part down? So, one method would be to make faster progress now, so you get to that point sooner when hardware is less developed, you get less hardware overhang. However, the current speed of AI progress is a fairly hard variable to change very much because there are very big forces pushing on it, so perhaps the higher elasticity option is what I suggested in the talk to ensure that whoever gets there first has enough of a lead that they are able to slow down for a few months, let us say, to go slow during the transition. So, I think one thing you can do, I mean this is almost in the verification area, is to make systems that provably will not recruit additional hardware or resigned their hardware, so that their resources remain fixed. And i'm quite happy to sit there for several years thinking hard about what the next step would be to take. But, it's trivial to copy software. Software is self replicating and always has been and I don't see how you can possibly stop that. I mean, I think it would be great if it went slow, but it's hard to see how it does go slow given the huge first mover advantages and getting to superintelligence. The only scenario that I see where it might go slow is where there is only one potential first mover that can then stop and think. So, maybe that speaks to creating a society where, you know, AI is restrictive and unified, but without multiple movers. Yeah, Demis, so your colleague Sean Legg mentioned that the one thing that could help a lot here is if there's things like this industry partnership and a sense of trust and openness between the leaders, so that if there is a point where one wants to... Yeah, I do worry about, you know, that sort of scenario where, you know, I think, I've got quite high belief in human ingenuity to solve these problems given enough time. the control problem and other issues. They're very difficult, but I think we can solve them. The problem is will there, you know, the coordination problem of making sure there is enough time to slow down at the end and, you know, let Stuart think about this for 5 years. But, what about, he may do that, but what about all the other teams that are reading the papers and not going to do that while you're thinking. Yeah, this is what I worry about a lot. It seems like that coordination problem is quite difficult. But, I think as the first step, may be coordinating things like the Partnership on AI, you know, the most capable teams together to agree, at least agree on a set of protocols or safety procedures, or things, you know, agree that, maybe, you know, you should verify these systems and that is going to take a few years and you should think about that. I think that would be a good thing. I just want to caveat one thing about slowing versus fast progresses, you know, it could be that, imagine there was a moratorium on AI research for 50 years, but hardware continued to accelerate as it does now. We could, you know, this is sort of what Nick's point was is that there could be a massive hardware overhang or something where an AI actually many, many, many different approaches to AI including seed AI, self-improving AI, all these things could be possible. And, you know, maybe one person in their garage could do it. And I think that would be a lot more difficult to coordinate that kind of situation, whereas, so, I think there is some argument to be made where you want to make fast progress when we are at the very hard point of the 's' curve. Where actually, you know, you need quite a large team, you have to be quite visible, you know who the other people are, and, you know, in a sense society can keep tabs on who the major players are and what they're up to. Whereas, opposed to a scenario where in say 50 or a 100 years time when, you know, someone, a kid in their garage could create a seed AI or something like that. Yeah, Bart, one last comment on this topic. Yeah, I think that this process will be a very irregular process and sometime we will be far advanced and other times we will be going quite slow. Yeah, i'm sort of hoping that when society sees something like fake video creation where you create a video where you have somebody say made up things and that society will actually realize that there are these new capabilities for the machines and we should start taking the problem as a society more seriously before we have full and general AI. We'll use AI to detect that. So, you mentioned the word 'worry' there, and you Nick went a bit farther, you had the word 'doom' written on your slides three times. No wonder there was one star on Amazon on that rating and that it was even in red color. I think it's just as important to talk about existential hope and the fantastic upside as downside and I want to do a lot of that here. So, let's just get some of those worries out of the way now and then return to the positive things. I just want to go through quickly and give each one of you a chance to just pick one thing that you feel is a challenge that we should overcome and then say something about what you feel is the best thing we can do, right now, to try to mitigate it. Do you want to start Jaan? To mitigate what? Mention one thing that you're worried could go wrong and tell us about something constructive that we can do now that will reduce that risk. I do think that AI arms races, I see like a lot of, like, good. I'm really heartened to see kind of great contacts between OpenAI and DeepMind, but I think this is just like a sort of toy model of what the world at large might come up with in terms of arms races. And for myself I have been spending increasing amount of time in Asia recently just to kind of try to kind of pull in more people elsewhere, what has been so far, just been, kind of like, an Anglo- American discussion mostly. So, like this is, I think, this is one thing that should be done and i'm going to do it. Well, as someone who is outside this field, I think the challenge i'm really in touch with is how hard it is to take the safety concerns emotionally seriously. And how hard it is for people in the field to do that as well. I can't tell you have many people outside this room who purport to be experts think the control problem is a total non-issue. I mean, it's just flabbergasting to meet these people and just therefore not worth thinking about. And one of the reasons I think is that in one case there is this illusion that the time horizon matters. If you feel that this is 50 or a 100 years away that is totally consoling, but there is an implicit assumption there, the assumption is that you know how long it will take to build this safely. And that 50 or a 100 years is enough time. The other issue is, I think, most people feel like intelligence is an intrinsic good and of course we want more of it and it's very easy to be in touch with that assumption because right now there is a cure for cancer, which we have not discovered. Right, how galling is that? But for more intelligence, but for knowing which experiments to run, or how to integrate the data we already have in hand, we would have a cure for cancer that was actionable now unless there was some physical law of the universe that prevented us from curing cancer, which seems unlikely. So, the pain of not having enough intelligence is really excruciating when you focus on it, but, and I think to your previous question of doing this quickly becomes an intrinsic good provided we have solved the alignment problems and the political problems and the chaos that would follow if we were just, if we did it quickly without solving those problems. So, I think, it's the thing that is alarming is how ethereal these concerns are even to those who have no rational argument against them. So, Sam it sounds to me like you're agreeing very strongly with what Shane Legg that there is, in some circles, still this strong taboo that, you know, don't even consider the possibility that we might get AGI because it's just absolutely ridiculous. And he was arguing that the sooner we can get rid of this taboo the sooner people can get to work and find all these really helpful solutions and answers that we need. So, suppose for a moment that I came up to you and said to you "this idea of super human intelligence just sounds absolutely ridiculous, sounds completely nuts. And by the way i've never seen your ted talk." And we're in an elevator and you have only 30 seconds to persuade me to take this more seriously, what would you say? A lot of people who are here will have this exact conversation with colleagues and others in the future. Well, there are very few assumptions you need to make to take this seriously, intellectually. Again, the emotional part is a separate piece. But, if you assume that intelligence is just, on some level, the product of information processing in a physical system and there are very few people who dispute that who are scientifically literate at this point and you assume that we will continue to improve our information processing systems, unless something terrible happens to us to prevent that, and that seems like a very safe assumption, then it is just a matter of time before we instantiate something that is human level and beyond in our computers. And, again, the time horizon is only consoling on the assumption that we know we have enough time to solve the alignment problems and the political problems. The other thing that is humbling here that Ray brought up at one point is that even if we were handed a perfectly benign, well behaved AI just from god, you know, we are given a perfect oracle we are given a perfect inventor of good technology, given our current political and economic atmosphere that would produce total chaos. We just have not... we don't have the ethical or political will to share the wealth, we don't have the political integration to deal with this thing being given to Silicon Valley and not being given at the same moment to China or Iran. So, there is just, it's alarming that the best case scenario currently, basically just ripping out 80% of Nick's book because we've solved all those problems, is still a terrifying one. And so, clearly, that's a near term thing that we have to solve. Thank you, Sam. So, Demis do you want to tell us about one thing that you feel is a challenge and say something about what we should focus on now to tackle it. Yeah, I mean I think it's, you know I agree with both the statements already said that, so I think the coordination problem is one thing where you know we want to avoid this sort of harmful race to the finish where corner cutting starts happening and things like safety are easy things to, you know, will get cut because obviously they don't necessarily contribute to AI capability, in fact they may hold it back a bit by making a safe AI. So, I think that's going to be a big issue on a global scale and that seems like it's going to be a hard problem when we are talking about national governments and things. And I think also, you know, we haven't thought enough about the whole governance scenario of how do we want those AIs to be out in the world? How many of them? Who will set their goals? All these kinds of things, I think, need a lot more thought. You know, once we've already solved the technical problems. I think it's wonderful that you're not just saying these things, but actually doing these things since you played a leading role in setting up the Partnership on AI here which goes exactly in the direction of what you're advocating here. So, do you want to pass it off to Nick? I'm sure there is nothing at all you're worried about, right? So, tell us about one concrete useful thing you would to see us focus on. So, I agree with that, I mean, so fun technical work, bring in top technical talent to work on these technical issues, build these collaborations, build a community, build trust, work some more on figuring out attractive solutions to the governance solutions that could work, but don't rush to implement the first idea you have, but first trial them out a little bit more. I think a lot about consciousness, so I was really struck by the 'sentience caution' on the list of principles here that said "avoid overly... avoid strong assumptions about the distribution of consciousness in AIs," which I take it entails avoid assuming that any human level or super human level AGI is going to be conscious. For me, that raising the possibility of a massive failure mode in the future, the possibility that we create human or super human level AGI and we've got a whole world populated by super human level AGIs, none of whom is conscious. And that would be a world, could potentially be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness no subjective experience at all. Now, I think many many people, with a wide variety of views, take the view that basically subjective experience or consciousness is required in order to have any meaning or value in your life at all. So therefore, a world without consciousness could not possibly a positive outcome. maybe it wouldn't be a terribly negative outcome, it would just be a 0 outcome, and among the worst possible outcomes. So, I worry about avoiding that outcome. Now, as a matter of fact, i'm fairly optimistic about the possibilities that AIs of various kinds will be conscious. But, in so far as this community is making this assumption, I think it's important to actually think about the question of 'in creating AGIs, are we actually creating conscious beings?' I mean, one thing we ought to at least consider doing there is making, given that we don't understand consciousness, we don't have a complete theory of consciousness, maybe we can be most confident about consciousness when it's similar to the case that we know about the best, namely human human consciousness... So, therefore maybe there is an imperative to create human-like AGI in order that we can be maximally confident that there is going to be consciousness. So, what I hear you say is that when you have a nightmare about the zombie apocalypse you're not thinking of some terminator movie, but you're thinking about this problem. We create... we upload ourselves and do all these wonderful things, but there's no one home. Is that fair to say? I mean this is a different kind of existential risk. One kind of existential risk is there's no humans, there's AIs, but some people might say well that's OK they are our successors. A much worse existential risk is there are no conscious beings in our future. So, i'll make a confession, so Shane Legg mentioned that there has been this strong taboo about talking about the possibility of intelligence getting very advanced. It's clearly also been a strong taboo for a long time to mention the C-word. In fact, before the conference when we got all these responses on the first round of the principles, guess which one was ranked last? It got huge amounts of minus 1 ratings, that was the one with consciousness, so we changed it to-- it was terribly stated --sentience and stated it better and then it got stated still better at lunch and it's still rated last. Even though I personally share your interests in this a lot. 88% of people agreed to the sentient caution. But, not 90%, so that one also fell off the list here. So, maybe that is another taboo you can personally help us shatter so that people think about that question more. Ray, anything you're concerned about? This isn't what I was going to say, but just to respond... a converse concern is we create AGIs, everybody assumes that of course it's just a machine and therefore it's not conscious, but actually it is suffering but we don't look out for it's conscious subjective experience because we are making the wrong assumption. But, what I did want to say was, there are three overlapping revolutions that people talk about, GNR, genetics, bio-tech, nano-technology, and robotics, which is AI. And there are proposals, there was the Asilomar conferences done here decades ago for bio-tech that have worked fairly well. There are similar proposals for nano-technology. There is a difference with AI in that there really isn't a full proof technical solution to this. You can have technical controls on, say, nano-technology. One of the guidelines is it shouldn't be self-replicating. That's not really realistic because it can't scale to meaningful quantities without being self-replicating, but you can imagine technical protections. If you have an AI that is more intelligent than you and it's out for your destruction and it's out for the world's destruction and there is no other AI that is superior to it, that's a bad situation. So, that's the specter. And partly this is amplified by our observation of what we as humans, the most intelligent species on the planet, have done to other species. If we look at how we treat animals, people, you know, are very friendly, like their dogs and pets, but if you look at factory farming we're not very benign to species that are less intelligent than us. That engenders a lot of the concern we see that if we there's a new type of entity that's more intelligent than us it's going to treat us like we've treated other species. So, that's the concern. I do think that what we are doing at this conference is appropriate. I wanted to mention that I think we should publish these guidelines the way the Asilomar guidelines in bio-tech were published decades ago. And then people can and people can, you can have an opt-in, opt-out, but I think we should actually say we had this conference and the AI leadership/community has come up with these guidelines and people can respond to them and debate them and then maybe at the next conference we'll revise them. The Asilomar bio-tech guidelines have been revised many times. But, I would advocate that we actually take a stand and put forth these guidelines and then let the whole community at large debate them. And have them be, have them guide our research. It's actually worked quite well in bio-tech. Bart? OK, yeah so let me give a little different perspective. So, one concern I have at the high level is these machines become really smart or even in certain areas, can humans still understand, what they, decisions that they suggested, that they make. And I work in the field of automated reasoning where we have significant advance last two decades going from perhaps a few hundred variables to perhaps millions of variables being solved quite routinely. And there was a sense in the community, well we are getting answers from these reasoning engines, mostly hardware/software verification problems, but we cannot, humans can no longer understand these answers. In the last few years, people have actually discovered that you can use the machine to generate explanations for their answers that are, again, human understandable. So, I see sort of a glimmer of hope that maybe even if we have much less intelligence we may be able to understand solutions that machines find for us and we could not find these solutions, but they may be able to provide explanations that are accessible to us. So that's a little positive note. Thank you. Stuart? So there are two things that keep me awake at night, other than email. So, one is the problem of misuse and bad actors. To take an analogy, it’s as if we were building nuclear weapons and then delivering them by email to everybody on the planet, saying, here’s a toy, do what you want. How do we counter that? I have to say, I don’t really have a good solution. I think one of the things we have to do is to make designs for safe AI very clear and simple, and sort of make it unthinkable to do anything other than that, right? Just like it’s unthinkable to have a program with an infinite loop that produces a spinning pizza of death on your -- oh sorry. Or it’s unthinkable to have a buffer overflow that allows your software to be hacked into. The other thing that keeps me awake is actually the possibility that success would lead to AI as a helicopter parent for the human race that would sort of ossify and gradually enfeeble us, so then there would be no point at which it was obvious to us that this was happening. And I think the mitigation, which you asked for, to look on the bright side, is that in some sense the meta-value of human evolvability, the freedom to change the future, is something that the AI needs to adopt, and in some sense that would result eventually with the AI receding into the background, and saying, OK, now I’ve got you through your adolescence, now it’s time for the human race to grow up, now that we have the capabilities to eliminate scarcity, to eliminate needless conflict and coordination failures and all of those things that we suffer from right now. So I can imagine a distant future where, in fact, AI is perhaps even less visible than it is today. Great, finally you, Elon, have as far as I know never ever expressed any concerns about AI, right - I’m just wondering if there is any concerns, in particular any concerns where you see there’s a very clear thing we should be doing now that are going to help. I’m trying to think of what is an actual good future, what does that actually look like, or least bad, or however you want to characterize it. Because to a point that was made earlier by Sam and maybe made by others, we’re headed towards either superintelligence or civilization ending. Those are the two things that will happen - intelligence will keep advancing, the only thing that would stop it from advancing is something that puts civilization into stasis or destroys civilization. So, we have to figure out, what is a world that we would like to be in where there is this digital superintelligence? I think, another point that is really important to appreciate is that we are, all of us, already are cyborgs. So you have a machine extension of yourself in the form of your phone and your computer and all your applications. You are already superhuman. By far you have more power, more capability, than the President of the United States had 30 years ago. If you have an Internet link you have an article of wisdom, you can communicate to millions of people, you can communicate to the rest of Earth instantly. I mean, these are magical powers that didn’t exist, not that long ago. So everyone is already superhuman, and a cyborg. The limitation is one of bandwidth. So we’re bandwidth-constrained, particularly on output. Our input is much better but our output is extremely slow. If you want to be generous you could say maybe it’s a few hundred bits per second, or a kilobit or something like that output. The way we output is like we have our little meat sticks that we move very slowly and push buttons, or tap a little screen. And that’s extremely slow. Compare that to a computer which can communicate at the terabyte level. These are very big orders of magnitude differences. Our input is much better because of vision, but even that could be enhanced significantly. So I think the two things that are needed for a future that we would look at and conclude is good, most likely, is, we have to solve that bandwidth constraint with a direct neural interface. I think a high bandwidth interface to the cortex, so that we can have a digital tertiary layer that’s more fully symbiotic with the rest of us. We’ve got the cortex and the limbic system, which seem to work together pretty well - they’ve got good bandwidth, whereas the bandwidth to additional tertiary layer is weak. So I think if we can solve that bandwidth issue and then AI can be widely available. The analogy to a nuclear bomb is not exactly correct - it’s not as though it’s going to explode and create a mushroom cloud, it’s more like if there were just a few people that had it they would be able to be essentially dictators of Earth, or whoever acquired it and if it was limited to a small number of people and it was ultra-smart, they would have dominion over Earth. So I think it’s extremely important that it be widespread and that we solve the bandwidth issue. And if we do those things, then it will be tied to our consciousness, tied to our will, tied to the sum of individual human will, and everyone would have it so it would be sort of still a relatively even playing field, in fact, it would be probably more egalitarian than today. Great, thank you so much, that’s in fact the perfect segue into the last question I want to ask you before we open it up to everybody. Something I have really missed in the discussion about really advanced intelligence, beyond human, is more thought about the upside. We have so much talk about existential risk, and not just in the academic context, but just flip on your TV, check out Netflix, what do you see there in these scientific visions of the future? It’s almost always dystopias, right? For some reason fear gives more clicks than the positive visions, but if I have a student coming into my office at MIT asking for career advice, the first thing I’m going to ask her is, where will you want to be in 20 years? And if she just says, well maybe I’ll get cancer, maybe I’ll get run over by a bus, that’s a terrible way to think about career planning, right? I want her to be on fire and say my vision is I want to do this - and here are the things that could go wrong, and then you can plan out how to avoid those problems and get it out - I would love to see more discussion about the upsides, futures we’re really excited about, so we can not just try to avoid problems for the sake of avoiding problems, but to get to something that we’re all really on fire about. So to start off I’ll just tell you something that makes me really excited about advanced artificial intelligence. Everything I love about civilization is a product of intelligence. If we for some reason were to say, well, you know, I’m scared about this technology thing, let’s just press pause on it forever, there’s no interesting question about if we’re going to have human extinction, the question is just ‘when?' Is it going to be a supervolcano, is it going to be the next dinosaur-killing-class asteroid - the last one happened 60 million years ago, so how long is it going to be? Pretty horrible future to just sit and wonder when we’re going to get taken out here without the technology when we know that we totally have the brainpower to solve all of these problems if we proceed forward and develop technology. So that was just one thing that makes me very excited about moving forward rather than pressing 'Pause.' I want to just ask the same question to all of you guys in turn. So tell us, just pretty briefly, about something that you are really excited about. Some future vision you imagine with very advanced artificial intelligence that you’re really excited about, that you would like to see. Jaan- So I want to be careful when I imagine concrete fruits of AGI. On a meta-level I think as a first approximation, I think we should just maximize the amount of fun and minimize the amount of suffering. I think Eliezer [Yudkowsky] has written a sequence called “Fun Theory”, where he points out that people have been horrible imagining, are very unimaginative imagining paradises of various sorts, just like really boring places, actually, when you think about them. I think Eliezer has this sketch where he says, “It was hard to spend like one weekend with my relatives. Imagine spending eternity with your dead relatives.” So I think we should be concerned about side effects and try to capture dynamics of improvement, and basically go from there - make sure that we’re going to adjust the trajectory as we get smarter and more grown together. Great, thank you, Jaan. Sam, what do you get excited about? Well, strangely, what excites me really just abuts the parts that scare me the most. I think what is nice about this conversation, in particular about the alignment problem, is that it’s forcing us to realize that there are better and worse answers to questions of human value. And as someone said, perhaps at this last meeting in Puerto Rico, we really have to do philosophy on a deadline, and we have to admit to ourselves that there are better and worse answers and we have to converge on the better ones. And what would excite me about actually the birth of superintelligent AI - one of the things, apart from solving obvious problems like curing disease and energy issues and all the rest, perhaps differs a little bit with what Stuart said. I’m not so worried about idiocracy or all of us just losing our way as apes and living unproductive lives in dialogue with these oracles. I think actually, I would want a truly value-aligned superintelligence to incrementally show us, not merely conserve what we want, but show us what we should want to keep improving our values so that we can navigate in the space of all possible experiences and converge on better and better ones. Thank you, Sam, and what about you, Demis? So obviously this is why I spend my whole career working on this, is that, I think if we do this right, it’s going to be the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity, and in some ways I think unlock our full potential. I mean, I’ve talked to a lot about, in all my talks about using it as a tool to help us make science and medical breakthroughs faster. And so I think that’s an obvious one. But taking that longer-term, one reason I got so into AI is that, like probably many of you in this room, I’m interested in the biggest questions of why we’re here, understanding our minds, what is consciousness, what’s the nature of the universe, what’s our purpose - and if we’re going to try and really grapple with any of those questions I think we’re going to need something like AI, perhaps with ourselves enhanced as well. And I think in that future world we’ll have a chance to actually find out about some of these really deep questions in the same way we’re finding out with AlphaGo just about Go, but what if we could do that with all of science and physics and the biggest questions in the universe. And I think that’s going to be the most exhilarating journey of all, to find that out. To just carry out on a few other things that people commented on is in terms of us as the most intelligent beings on the planet right now, and treating animals badly and these sorts of things, I think if you think about it though - let’s take tigers or something in India. They have huge ranges and those people are very poor and they’re resource-poor, but if they had abundant resources I don’t think they’re intentionally trying to kill off these tigers - in some cases they are - but often it’s just because they need the land for their cattle, and the tiger needs whatever number of kilometers squared to live, one tiger. And it’s just difficult with the number of people that are there. So I think if we solve the kind of abundance and scarcity problem, then I think that opens up a lot of conflicts both between humans as well as to do with resource scarcity, at the heart of it. So I see, if we can solve a lot of these problems I can see a much better future. So Nick, you pointed out, the upside part of your book was a little shorter, so now you have a chance to add something positive. What are you excited about? There are really two sides to that. So one is getting rid of a lot of the negatives, like the compassionate use to cure diseases and all other kinds of horrible miseries that exist on the planet today. So that is a large chunk of the potential. But then beyond that, if one really wants to see realistically what the positive things are that could be developed, I think one has to think outside the constraints of our current human biological nature. That it’s unrealistic to imagine a trajectory stretching hundreds of thousands of years into the future, we have superintelligence, we have material abundance, and yet we are still these bipedal organisms with three pounds of gray tissue matter, with a fixed set of emotional sensitivities and the hedonic set point that is kind of OK-ish for most people but if you get - if something really good happens it lasts for a time and then you’re back to the baseline. I think all of these basic parameters that sort of define the human game today, I think become up for grabs in this future. And it opens up this much vaster space of post-human modes of beings, some of which I think could be wonderful, literally beyond our ability to imagine, in terms of the mental states, the types of activities, the understanding, the ways of relating. So I don’t think we need a detailed blueprint for utopia now, what we need is to get ourselves in a position later on where we can have the ability to use this to realize the values that come into view once we’ve taken steps forward. Thank you, Nick. What about you, David? I’m excited about the possibilities for AI making us humans smarter. I mean some of it is selfish - I turned 50 last year, my brain is gradually becoming slower and older and dumber, but I’m not sure that I am, and that’s partly because of all of the augmented intelligence technology we’re using. Smartphones, and the Internet, and so on, they’re giving me all kinds of capacities, extended capacities that I didn’t have before. And I’m really looking forward to AI helping with that. In ten years or so once everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses with deep learning built into it, then I’m really going to need that around 60. And if you guys really get on the case and by the time I’m 70 or so we've got real genuine AI or AI modules out there which can somehow come to be integrated with my brain processes or maybe eventually we get to upload our entire brains onto AI, then there's a way potentially to get smarter, more intelligent forever. And this is not just selfish, although I can't say that doesn't motivate me, but Demis talked about the AI scientists; I also like to think about the AI philosopher. The problems of philosophy are really hard and many people have speculated that we humans are just too dumb to solve some of them. But once we've actually got AIs on the scene, maybe AI-enhanced humans, then maybe we're going to be able to cross those thresholds where the AI-enhanced humans or maybe just the AGIs end up solving some of those hard problems of philosophy for once and for all. Great, Ray, you have been a true pioneer in articulating positive visions of the future in your writing. So if you picked the one that you're most excited about now, what would that be? So imagine going back 10,000 years and asking the quintessential caveman and woman, Gee, what is a beneficial future? What would you like to see? And they would say, well I would like this fire to stop going out and I would like a bigger boulder to prevent the animals from getting in the cave. Anything else? Well no I think that would be pretty perfect. Well don't you want a better website and apps and search engines? Imagine going back 2 million years ago and talking to primates - imagine if you could do that, and saying, isn't it great that frontal cortex is coming and we're going to have additional neocortex and and a hierarchy and they say, well what's the point of that? And you say, well you'll have music and humor, and their answer would be, what's music? What's humor? So they couldn't imagine concepts that they couldn't imagine, and by analogy I think we will have new phenomena that are as profound as music and humor, you could call it more profound music and we'll be funnier, but I think it'll be as profound as these great leaps that evolution has brought us, because we will become profoundly smarter and if music and humor are up here and we go to even higher levels of the neocortex, we're going to have more profound ways of expressing ourselves and once we have that we would not want to go back. What about you, Bart? Well, I pretty much agree that we can't really predict much in advance, what we would like to have. For myself personally I see the developments in mathematics and science and discovery, and computers are just the hybrids of human computers there is quite incredible and makes the field - makes what we do much more exciting. So I think that will be in the near future the first thing. Great, and what about you, Stuart? Well, so like Jeffrey Sachs - I think that for many of us, and probably like the cavemen - that for many of us life is pretty amazing, and for many more of us it isn't. And I think the best thing that AI can do, the big upside, is actually to fix the latter problem. I mean I love Nick's feeling that there are higher states of being that are so far above our current 'pretty good', that that balances out all the 'pretty bad' that a lot of people are suffering. But I really think the emphasis should be on the 'pretty bad' and fixing it, and eliminating - so Demis was reading my notes apparently, from across the room - but eliminating the scarcity basically eliminates the need for people to act in a zero-sum fashion where they can only get by, by making it less possible for someone else to get by, and I think that's the source of a lot of the nastiness that Jeffrey mentioned earlier. So I think that would be my main upside, and not having to read so much email, that would be the second one. And for you, Elon, you've never articulated any visionary ideas about the future as far as I know, either. What about now? I think I just - I have thought about this a lot, and I think it just really comes down to two things, and it's solving the machine-brain bandwidth constraint and democratization of AI. I think if we have those two things, the future will be good. There was a great quote by Lord Acton which is that 'freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration.' And I think as long as we have - as long as AI powers, like anyone can get it if they want it, and we've got something faster than meat sticks to communicate with, then I think the future will be good. Fantastic, so let's get - I know your caffeine levels are dropping dangerously low, and we also have another panel after this, which is going to be really exciting to listen to, so let's do a just a few quick questions. Make sure that they are actually questions, and say your name and also say, pick one person on the panel and address it just to them, OK? Yoshua? Yoshua Bengio, Montreal. And it's for Jaan - I found your presentation very inspiring, and one question I have is related to the question of eliciting preferences and values from people. Do you think this line of investigation could lead to better democracy, better society, more direct democracy, and you know, what do you think about this direction to deal with the issue of misuse and things like that. Yes, absolutely. There could be one code name for this, even, could be like 'Democracy 2.0' or 'U.N. 2.0' or something like that. So, and as I mentioned in my presentation, just a lot of people today basically want to make the world better, but it's kind of hard to distinguish them from people who say they want to make the world better. So if there was actually kind of like a very easy measuring, like a metric that basically would work as a Schelling point, focal point, then I think that would be super helpful. And yeah, like democracy was invented like hundreds of years ago so, and clearly we have advanced as a civilization and we have better knowledge about how to aggregate preferences. And Nicolas Berggruen, over there. Thank you, Max. Nicolas Berggruen, so I have a very almost naive question. This is a very well-meaning group in terms of, let's say, intentions, but who sort of, looking at who else is doing, potentially, AGI, it could be well beyond this group, it could be in China, it could be any place. And what happens because we've talked about how powerful AGI is, and if Elon is correct, if it is distributed fairly, fine. But if it isn't, is there a way to monitor today or in a year or in 10 years, because once it's out it'll be fast. Who is monitoring it, who has a tab on it? Because this is self-selected, but beyond... Elon or Demis does either one of you want to take a swing at this? Well I think this sort of relates to my point I said earlier about trying to build AI at the hard part of the 'S' curve, so, which I think is where we sort of are at the moment, as far as we can tell, because, you know, it's not easy to make this kind of progress, so you need quite a lot of people who are quite smart and that community is pretty small, still, even though it's getting rapidly bigger at places like NIPS. And so most people know each other, so this is pretty representative of everyone in the West, at least, obviously it's harder to know what's happening in China or in Russia, maybe. But, you know, I think that you need quite a large footprint of resources, people and very smart people and lots of computers and so on. So I think that narrows down the scope of the number of groups who can do that, and it also means that they're more visible. So, you know, I think certainly in the West I think most people around here, someone in this room will have contact with somebody who's in those groups who are capable of making meaningful progress towards AGI. It's harder to know in the East and further apart, but we should try and make links to those Chinese National Academy of Sciences, and so on, to find out more. But you know that may change in the future, I think that's the current state of it. Great, it's - the bad news is it's getting later in the day and we only have time for one more question. The good news is there's a coffee break right after this so you can ask all of your questions if you swarm the panel. And the last question goes to you, Erik. Do you want to stand up? Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT. I'm going to pick up on the thing that Elon said at the end about democratizing the outcome and tie it back to the panel yesterday where Reid Hoffman talked about people caring a lot about not just absolute income but relative income, and I wanted to get the panelists' reactions to the thoughts about whether or not AI had tendencies towards winner-take-all effects, that there's a tendency for concentration, that whoever's ahead can pull further ahead, or whether there's potential for more widespread democratic access to it, and what kinds of mechanisms we can put in place if we want to have the widely shared prosperity that Elon suggested? Elon, do you want to take that? Yeah, well, I mean I have to say that when something is a danger to the public, then there needs to be some - I hate to say government agency, like regulators - I'm not the biggest fan of regulators, 'cause they're a bit of a buzzkill. But the fact is we've got regulators in the aircraft industry, car industry, I deal with them all the time, with drugs, food - and anything that's sort of a public risk. And I think this has to fall into the category of a public risk. So I think that the right thing to do, and I think it will happen, the question is whether the government reaction speed matches the advancement speed of AI. Governments react slowly - or governments move slowly and they tend to be reactive, as opposed to proactive. But you can look at these other industries and say, does anybody really want the FAA to go away? and it's like people could just be a free for all for aircraft - like, probably not. You know, there's a reason it's there or just people could just do any kind of drugs and maybe they work, maybe the don't. You know, we have that in supplements, kind of ridiculous. But I think on balance FDA is good, so I think we probably need some kind of regulatory authority and I think it's, like a rebuttal to that is, well people will just move to Costa Rica or something. That's not true. OK, we don't see Boeing moving to Costa Rica or to Venezuela or wherever it's like free and loose To Demis' point, the AI is overwhelmingly likely to be developed where there is a concentration of AI research talent. And that happens to be in a few places in the world. It's Silicon Valley, London, at Boston, if you sort of figure out a few other places, but it's really just a few places that really regulators could reasonably access. And I want to be clear, it's not because I love regulators, OK? They're a pain in the neck but they're necessary to preserve the public at times. Alright, on that note, let's thank the panel for a fascinating discussion.

https://youtu.be/MevKTPN4ozw

[Music] what's up guys i'm qbhd here and just got back from sunny california where we spent some time with possibly the busiest man alive elon musk but he was super generous with his time and we did this sort of a sit-down chat at the tesla factory and then also did a sort of a factory tour which will be a separate video coming soon but a ton of things we could have talked about since we were at tesla at that time basically our topics ranged from talking about tesla products to our love for tesla to tech and the future all wrapped into one so this is that chat thanks for watching enjoy all right first of all thanks for uh taking the time sitting down on your very busy schedule i'm sure good to see you yeah good to see you uh this is a this is a really interesting place to be we're kind of in like a bird's eye view of seeing a couple a couple different things happening behind us in the factory these occasionally move which is cool those are empty door carriers so like they were carried doors to cars to get assembled and then they're on their way back to pick up some more doors nice so uh i think most people know you as the boss the face of tesla uh the decision maker for those who just for some context what is your how do you spend time at tesla what do you do uh yeah that's a good question i think probably a lot of people don't realize i'm like basically in the factory in design or engineering meetings or production um so that's like 89 of the time i think sometimes people think i spend a lot of time on twitter sure i don't know what gave why why they would think that that's crazy um but uh actually it's like that's like almost nothing um most of my time spent um at least the last several months especially going around the factory um and then working on say uh the paint shop the body shop where we weld up the body um the uh final assembly where we put all the parts together um and and then if i'm not here i'm either i'm at the gigafactory in nevada okay so p100d owner undefeated in stoplight races for a while now uh rich over here in audio okay model three pre uh pre-order okay waiting for his and brandon behind the camera also waiting for model three okay what what version are you waiting for long range long range and and what color okay that is a that is a good combo i got blue uh rear wheel drive nice nice okay cool so my question is how aside from making great products how do you get people excited about tesla there's a lot of people i know and that i talk to who are just intrigued and interested and excited about tesla as a company the thing i really focus on at tesla is like we really put all of our money into an attention to trying to make the product as compelling as possible so um because i think that really the way to um sell any product is through word of mouth so if one somebody gets the car they really like it they and and actually the key is like to have a product that people love um and and generally people that um if they're party or touring friends or whatever um you'll talk about the things that you love but you know if you just like something it's okay you're not gonna care that much but if you get the reactions from the highs and the lows yeah you gotta make sure you really you're gonna you're gonna talk you know and and then that'll generate work turns word of mouth and that's basically how how our sales have have grown like we don't we're not spending money on advertising or endorsements or uh and um so anyone like buys our car they just bought it because they they like the car and you know it's like it's genuine um no discounts i actually even pay full retail price for my own cars okay um yeah and um yeah and we're really focused on trying to make the cars more affordable which is real really tough like in order to make the cars affordable you really um you need high volume see the economy's a scale and because the other car companies make a lot more cars than we do they got way better economies of scale so as we're gradually able to build up um and do do more cars higher volume then we can volume force progressively like less money and then make um make the cars available to white wide range people but it's super honestly like the car industry is like a super this is like super competitive it's like one of the it's like insanely competitive so far i think i read a really interesting or i think i heard it actually from an earnings call but something interesting you said is one of the top five most frequent trade-ins for model 3 is a prius right yeah uh which starts at you know 20 something thousand dollars and they obviously have massive economies of scale do you think there's room i mean tesla has model three model s and road stirring up is there room for possibly an even less expensive quality electric car experience um yeah absolutely um i think i think in order for us to get to like let's say ultimately getting like a 25 000 car um that that's uh that's something we could we could do but it's probably if we really work really hard i think maybe we could do that in three years does it come with time and scale or just yeah it's a bit of both yeah cause like the the key to making things affordable is is like designing it is it's like design and technology improvements as well as scale so if you think of like say um phones um like the very earliest like the earliest cell phones like i'm probably like dating myself here but uh like the original wall street where the guy's like walking down the beach and he's got like the it's like on a giant phone he's carrying like a briefcase kind of thing they're massive like massive massive phone yeah and like all i could do is phone yep yep and like had like 30 minutes of battery life and that kind of thing um now at that time uh in the absence of technology improvements like no amount of money no amount of scale could have made that phone affordable that'd be a lot of engineering iterations a lot of design iterations um and we're probably i don't know on the 30th version of a cell phone or and and with each successive design iteration uh you can add more capability you can design you can integrate more things you figure out better ways to produce it so it actually gets better and cheaper but it's like it's like a natural progression of any new technology that it takes multiple versions and a large volume in order to make it affordable gotcha is there anything in the near future of tesla that you're really excited about yeah there's a lot of things actually um we're really like we've got definitely way more product ideas than we have resources to execute we're just talking about this uh with with my team uh just like hey guys what you know what should we focus on and now in the past we've only done one car at a time um and but as you know as we go into the future we've got to like basically figure out how to walk and chew gum it's like it's like okay how do we do two products at the same time but still have enough resources that both products are great right um and so we're gonna you know we're gonna try to do you know two products um one of them for sure is is like the model y you know sort of compact suv um comparable price point to the to the model three uh then there's uh the semi the pickup truck and the and the next generator yeah like addiction roast is kind of like dessert we got to talk about that yeah yeah it's super exciting but it's like and i think there's definitely some value to doing it to show that an electric car can be faster than a gasoline car in every way yes so i think there's like you know because it's still this sort of like halo effect of of of the gasoline sports cars because like in terms of top speed they're still have the best top speed yeah so that halo effect that i was gonna basically every metric possible seems like really ambitious like there's a lot of things that people people like me kind of accept that like i love my electric car but i i know it's not going to put down lap times 30 laps in just because there's yeah so rejection exactly we got to work on that yeah in fact i was actually um i was just talking to the team i was like uh you know i think we got some headroom there yeah um oh and are we gonna talk about track mode yeah sure yeah because i had a very short experience with trackman with model 3 yeah so i love so obviously roadster is going to be yeah that that halo car and if we're confident it's going to be an amazing car i hope it's that car to beat essentially yeah but then bringing track mode down to model 3 brings that fun experience to a lot of more people that involved exactly yeah so so it's kind of like um you know like uh like we're like basically a bunch of nerds here so um um obviously i don't give away yeah but like like the you know so we're tracking we want to uh open up a lot of settings it's like you can adjust settings and it's kind of like an expert user mode and and you can sort of um adjust traction control uh adjust like battery temperature um uh um you know breakthrough like you can basically configure a bunch of things um and we'll tell you like hey you know if you do this it's a bit risky like you're gonna wear out your brakes a little sooner it's like you might blow a circuit you know like like but like it'll be clear like you know uh but let's see this is the risk that you're taking yeah it's kind of like if you have a graphics card on your computer you can like go in there and you can change the settings and you can like overclock things yeah and like okay but you know so that's going to be all that will be in track mode and you'll be able to see that and mess with it yeah that's cool yeah be cool and you can like try different things and wait um yeah it'd be fun a little more on roadster because i had a i made a video about it just after the event i was sad i couldn't be there but i'm a day one deposit because i was that excited okay uh but i was wondering after you made that announcement one you said i think i quote plenty of space what does that mean oh you mean like it's like like it won't be cramped inside like you're like basically um if you're if you're a tall dude you'll be able to sit in there i'll tell you it's six more and a half okay so i feel like if you're comfortable in there a lot of people will be yeah and and then like my brother's six four so is he comfortable in it yeah yeah yeah okay yeah all right and france is like six three i don't know he's pretty tall and then my other question was uh the side mirrors this has been a theme in in the past with prototypes and cars that we've seen before they come out they don't have mirrors regulatory they have to have mirrors is there an advantage to not having mirrors or is there is it just aerodynamic or is there more to it now it's it's actually surprisingly um how the mirrors particularly at high speeds can have um quite a big effect on the drag of a car they're like little air brakes basically like typical car uh side mirrors reduce a highway range by around five percent wow yeah that's it's pretty intense you see in a wind tunnel like you can see you know when you see like the sort of smoke trails in the wind tunnel you can see just how much yeah they're like they're just like air brakes to be aerodynamic you actually want kind of like a teardrop uh shape so it's like it's it doesn't end in like a bluff right because it creates a low pressure zone behind the the mirror and so you'd have like have a kind of a almost like a cone behind the mirror or or blend it with the body or something like that okay so it's like they're actually surprisingly draggy now a manufacturer is required to have side view mirrors but i i believe that a uh the owner is not like you're i think you're like okay you can modify things like at least in the us you can if you uh the owner can modify things the rule is about manufacturing not driving very much about manufacturers are very tightly constrained okay um it's actually one thing that makes it very hard to to make a car that looks good and has a good performance and aerodynamics because it's like you got you got all these constraints and there's so many rules you need to follow um so it's very challenging to make a car uh look good my other question about roadster um the specs are insane they're ludicrous some might say yeah uh so the flat either the only thing beyond later course is plaid so so 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds but more importantly i was interested in is the 200 kilowatt hour battery and the 600 plus mile range is are these numbers assuming an improvement in available technology by 2020 or are they something you can achieve now but don't have the manufacturing capacity to or is it somewhere in between yeah so um i think it like basically uh it's like two uh model s uh 3100 packs yeah but but you're really just doubling the the internals that the set the cells inside so there's like a lot of stuff that's related to the pack and the packaging and safety and all that sort of stuff that um is uh not related to the cell so you can double the the number of modules inside and at with but it would still be like maybe an 80 increase in the volume of the the packs like the floor would get four four or five inches higher if if it was current technology so but um but we would we we think we'll probably get um another maybe 20 10 at least 10 maybe 20 improvement because we'll use like think about like an expensive car is we can use the the state-of-the-art the most advanced equipment like it's kind of like with uh with computers like they've come out with a new like graphics card or or cpu it's like initially it's expensive um and so but then over time that that price drops down and people like wonder is it like do you have like automation do you have people it's like we have both um you know it's like a cyborg but like integrated sidewalk thing yeah actually like one of the biggest constraints for us is is like being able to hire enough people that's what i was gonna ask so like there's a lot of working man parking there's a lot of parking here yeah if you have a lot of robots and a lot of people in the factory what do people do that robots can't do and obviously there's a lot that robots can do as far as lifting and moving things but as far as precision maybe there's things they can do that humans can't do do you have a ratio off the top of your head maybe as far as people versus machines um you know it varies massively depending upon what part of the production process um right so some parts of it are like 80 to 90 automated and then some parts of it are like uh only 10 to 20 or what are those what are those parts that humans do better than humans are really good at adaptation um and rapid evolution and like doing like little like finicky things like like that um like for general assembly like one of the mistakes we made uh that was like pretty pretty big mistake was trying to automate uh general assembly which is where you put the parts together you know like some of the things it's like like trying to connect uh a hose that's like sort of dangling around i see and and you're like the robot's like gonna find the hose grab it like then connect it to another hose at that point it's like really hard yeah like a person can just go all right they're done gotcha yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah and it's like when you see it it's like wow it's super super obvious and then we try to have robots do this and it's like robots like grabbing the wrong thing and like trying to stick it over here and it's like oh the the the hose was here when the rover threw it was here and so now it like tries to grab air and then like smashes into the car it's like you don't want that we yeah it was a comedy virus uh tragedy of ours like personally you could say like this thing needs to connect to that thing and and then however they they arrive a person can figure it out the robot would be like uh and then as far as uh tesla's overall master plan is what it was originally called so you start with the low volume high priced roadster then you move on model s higher volume lower price to model three as far as i know that's where the master plan ended yeah that was like part one yeah i mean we went model x in there which uh uh you know it was that wasn't that was like that was definitely an exercise in hubris uh the now the x is an amazing car and it's like um but it's like we kind of got carried away with the art i hear it's very difficult to make yeah we could carry it away without the carrier with arden technology it's like obviously you want great art you want great technology but we did get a little distracted from our mission which is to like advance the cores of electric vehicles um and and it probably delayed us a little bit with the model 3 as well so i guess my last question in here would be just as far as the tesla master plan part one coming to an end is it now just a matter of steering the ship towards new opportunities you see there's not a lot of companies making a 35 000 electric car and a quarter million dollar supercar and a semi truck and doing them all really well right do you guys see yourself just keeping a tight ship and picking your your choices here and there yeah that's why we um what i'm saying really like it's it's a it's a tough strategic call between focus and like being wanting to do a bunch of different models like we we i think we want to try doing two at the same time um like we've only ever done one at the same time before do two and then and then um if we get got that if you're good with that then we could just try doing three at a time like a lot of the other manufacturers they'll do like you know 12 at a time yeah so if they're way bigger than us weird awesome yeah i wish you the best of luck with it and thanks for taking the time to sit down yeah thanks thank you all right cool appreciate it

https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08

[Music] hey what's up guys i'm kbhd here and welcome to the sequel to the previous video so the part two which is the mini factory tour with elon i want to preface it just with the intro by saying first of all it is really difficult to shoot good video in that factory as you'll both see in here it's extremely loud and extremely busy so this is more of just like a walking around and having fun and checking things out uh it's it's actually probably just like 15 or 20 of the actual model s and x factory process it's not the whole thing it's mostly just elon showing us around and in fact i didn't even really say much during this interview was more just like a i was kind of like a kid in the matrix just kind of absorbing everything and then it also kind of cuts abruptly at the end when elon basically gets pulled into his next meeting but i still thought it was a ton of fun and worth sharing and also i should mention this entire video shoot this production would not be possible without my buddy john from the tld channel and his crew who helped with audio who were the muscle with the steadicam he has an entire behind-the-scenes video of this process on his channel i'll link that right below so if you want to check that out after watching this in part one feel free but until the next one this is your mini tour of the tesla factory with elon enjoy one that loops back and like i said just gives gives us access to the central corridor yeah so it's really just like lifting it up and over so the car that ends up here came all the way down this previous yeah yeah exactly so like these robots are really just to give us that uh like through through access okay yeah so so it's gonna pick it up and transfer it to the other robot yeah but i think like you know like a design improvement we should do is like really just the one robot just passes to the other robot um just pick it up yeah there's a third one above us yeah it's like it puts it on a table the table rotates it's like like you would do is if we did the sofa we would just have that giant robot pass it to that giant robot fair yeah hand off yeah it's like thousands of like little things like that that help improve production general assembly kind of operates in kind of a use so it goes cars coming over there go all the way down here and then way that way and uh you can see the car get progressively more complex as it goes down the general assembly line what does it look like when it starts this side of the assembly line oh we can go there there you go there let's go should we start there so at the beginning but here you can get a good sense for there's like like general assembly is what i was talking about as being really well suited to people okay uh because you got a lot of weird things that you got to put together like you know like look at some of these um you know assemblies they're like like it's pretty hard for a robot to like connect this on that makes sense yeah it's you know like depending upon how it comes out of the box it could be like in a little different position but it's pretty easy for somebody like oh it's like i just need to move it like an inch you know bolt it in it's probably really hard to write software to kind of know to adapt in all these different ways yeah so you try to order if you try to have the robot do this you gotta have like a complicated vision system and then like the vision system folds out it's like it's not quite right that's the hard part we have a robot in our studio that moves the camera around and the hardest part is when it falls yeah you need a person there to know what to do exactly so hopefully that doesn't happen much um like for parts that are that are complicated and friendly like wiring harnesses are especially difficult you see how like the wiring harness kind of needs to snake uh through the car yeah it's certainly like like winding like a snake through the car yeah you gotta like poke it through holes and and do diverse things that's super difficult for a robot see like how they're like putting the uh there's a part of the air conditioning system there right um so you use like a little bit of mechanical assistance with the winch and whatnot but then it's pretty straightforward for the guys to just like get that in there and then like if they see there's an issue with the part then like they say oh this product's got a problem like we'll put it over here for to you know um to get fixed like this is like semi lines like moving slowly yeah so like moves along and then if you know it gives people like time to get things done like you can like stand on this and i think you mentioned like the the speed of the car coming out the other side is like one mile an hour or something like that yeah it's super slow you want to speed this up right yeah it's not even one mile an hour it's even slower than that right now but for sx but for for three it's like getting close to a mile an hour okay okay um but walking speeds three miles an hour so it's like only one third walking speed at one mile an hour all right but you can see like when you look on the inside of the car you see like how many little complicated little pieces there are a lot um you know the things that are meant to uh for installation corrosion protection um airbags uh road noise like it's all the stuff that gets put in here yeah you can see like these are like the side airbags here okay um i must feel i think it's like pretty cool like most people never see like the inside of the car yeah there's a million things you never see driving the car every day this is like sorry guys starting to rough [Music] if you don't mind being on like on like you know the internet and stuff is that cool all right youtube's small i actually don't interrupt your work but um you know it's like you see like how like there's like a lot of tricky pieces and like if for a person like this is like doable straightforward yeah you know it takes a bit of training out of speed whatever but like once once you like um basically like like a pro human can do this super well and it's like hard for the robots to do that but when we go to the like the body welding i'll show you like what's like what's a robot good at and you'll see like there's tons of robots like tons of people here tons of robots there um but there's so much complexity and variation here um you gotta grab those wires when it comes through especially here at this door so so like this is the car with like less stuff in it and then it goes it's you know and we'll see the beginning of it right and then that then it goes all the way around gets more and more stuff added and does it end at the end well general assembly ends probably somewhere down there yeah okay so um but you can essentially see the car get progressively more complex as we add more parts to it you know this place uh used to employ like about 5 000 people and now we got like we could we got 10 000 people just in this location yeah so what we do is we have like tons of shuttles and like three cars ride sharing yeah uh we got the barrier rapid transit station finally like went went up um so just like trying to get people here is is a big challenge yeah what is this oh this is actually like this is one of my favorite dumb robots okay yeah i'm a fan right now it's pretty cool um so like there's a lot of fancy robots uh that like but they have like lots of issues they break down all the time those these little guys are super great but like they follow this magnetic stripe see basically it's like super easy to program you don't even need to be a programmer because you just like lay down the the mag stripe and it'll follow it yeah just follows the back stripe and then it's got proximity sensors in the front so if if it sees an obstacle or seems like something in the way it just stops and then as soon as something moves out of the way it just keeps going you know just like there's this like little thing all day long like a little train like you're talking about robots faulting out and one of the it's like that's like where like actually um doing things manually can can actually be more um more efficient because if you have like a lot of complicated robots particularly if you have a 24 7 operation like we have with model 3 uh then if robot faults out you're going to have 24 7 like advanced robot technicians make sense and then if the robot like accidentally crashes and like breaks a fixture then it's like man okay now right now we've got the line we've got lined down that's what i have to read alert and then i get pulled on my cell phone at two in the morning and it's like not a lot of time i fly apart in from germany it's like we literally had that two days ago do you have to when you get new robots do you build the robots or do you order them in and program them so there's like different classes there's many many different types of robots so the like the giant robot they were still lifting the car yeah it's like that's that that is a catalog item but then we have to program the the motions right and then and the end effector is that it's custom so the interface that picks up the car drops it off that's a custom made thing okay so it's kind of like you kind of like buy this like powerful arm but it's just like having an arm stuck in the ground and then you're like okay what does the arm do you got to tell it everything to do yeah okay and then you got to put sensors on it and put fixtures but that's like kind of like that robot over there uh that's also one of like the ones that picks up the car oh uh by the way these are like named after x-men oh yeah i forgot about that um just x-men i feel like like marvel and x-men is like gotta start to run out of names yeah yeah actually turns out a lot of x-men yeah okay so you can see like this is like quite a beast of a robot you can't just buy that robot in this case it's a fanuc robot um and uh you can buy the robot but then the end effector that's carrying the car is something that's custom and then you gotta do the programming and the like wire in the sensors and that kind of thing so to the the level of precision of this massive robot is it to like as far as repeatable action is it literally the same path everything yeah plus or minus an inch oh no it's a centimeter it's better than that for a big robot there's a little less precision than a smaller robot yeah but say a medium-sized robot will be accurate to 0.2.3 millimeters oh okay what is the most popular paint color coming through here that's black black yeah it actually varies by country um like uh watch out there's a dumb robot coming through oh yeah this guy's like pretty pretty cool like what [Music] all right this can go wrong i don't know you trust him more than i do yeah okay okay all right good job good job robot yeah i i see a lot of silver and i see a lot of white model x just in new jersey black and white are the two most colors are too much popular colors okay um the white micro are like black slide is is slightly more popular than white in the us but in like europe it's way more popular like white is a very rare color in europe for a car okay um in the u.s it's like it's it's about even with with black black and white the two most common colors yeah and here you can see battery pack this is like to be like a mating station for the battery pack oh this is literally connecting the battery to the car here you can see it's like a combination of manual automatic so it's like they're lining it up it's like yeah exactly it's so it's it's done primarily by the robot system by the automated system but then you've got a person just making sure that the fine tuning is there gotcha how do you feel about matt matte or satin colors about that a lot i actually like the aesthetics of matte it's really tricky to to repair a mat so like yes you can polish it out with that um if you get like a little ding it's really hard to then rematch the so it looks like an even mat yeah you can't just like you know that's fair point yeah um so it's it's doable it's it's something actually we would like to do that in the future um but um like right now for example like the paint shop is really operating at full tilt so adding any complexity to the paint shop we're definitely wise right now but right i think it'll be a cool thing to do in the future but these are the sub assemblies so you can see like the front rear drive units being bolted up and the self assemblies then feed the main assembly line these are a long assembly line oh yeah well it's and it's it's integrating uh snx okay and it's making about 2 000 cars a week is model 3 entirely completely separate i guess yes inside the same building but separate whole process the only place where model 3 and snx come together is in the paint shop so the paint shop is processing s3 and x um simultaneously down the same line but otherwise general assembly is separate body separate um yeah everything else is different so just the paint shop where they come together you've mentioned you've slept in the factory to be able to immediately like diagnose problems and hands-on fix what's not right what type of things happen that you can immediately fix or immediately take action on actually last last three months last year i mostly spent at gigafactory trying to help fix the battery production it's a module production and it's just it's a lot of little things like looking at at each uh at each little little tiny part each process say is the process necessary it's like because the best part is no part best part a process is no process and occasionally at the design level you think something's necessary but then turns out it's not so just like making sure connect connecting between design um and manufacturing uh make sure to make sure we close the loop on that just saying like hey is this if it let's say it's a it's like it's a lot of real simple stuff but it's like times times a thousand yeah so if we have like a automated vault driver going in like what's the rpm the torque settings for the vault driver um can we make that go faster uh usually usually can unnecessary movements um like like for example i actually don't really like the fact that we lift the cars over and and back ideally that would be a robot handoff getting rid of a middle stage yeah exactly because the middle side what's wrong with it's like putting it on a turntable and then the tune table is rotating and the other robot's picking it up it's actually the problem is like sometimes the tune table breaks down wow and and so okay so it's like okay let's eliminate the turntable and just have a robot go to robot um and then you don't have like uh turntable breakage to consider so it's a lot of minimizing things that can go wrong and maximizing the efficiency of these simple things i guess just like like design necessity of every part of it and every process yeah uh just the speed at which um especially the robots are going um other are there any is there any unnecessary movement in the production line that that isn't value-added like we're actually doing something yeah um like replacing elements of the production system that are not not needed or redundant

https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI

ah hahaha four three two one boom thank you thanks for doing this man really appreciate it hey welcome it's very good to meet you nice to meet you too thanks for not lighting this place on fire you're welcome later how does one um just in the middle of doing all the things you do uh create cars uh rockets all this stuff you're doing constantly innovating decide to just make a flamethrower where do you have the time for that well the family i wouldn't put we didn't put a lot of time into the flamethrower the this was an off-the-cuff thing and um so we have sort of like it's sort of a sort of a hobby company called the boring company uh which started out as a joke and we decided to make it real and and dig a tunnel under la and then then people other people asked us to take tunnels and so we said yes in a few cases and then we have a merchandise section that only has one piece of merchandise at a time and we started off with a cap and there was only one thing on it was just boringcompany.com cap or hat that's it and and then we sold the hats limited limited edition it just said the boring company and then i'm big fan of space balls the movie and in space balls yogurt goes through the merchandising section and they have a flamethrower in the merchandising section of spaceballs and like the kids love that one uh that's the line when he pulls out the flamethrower it's like we should do a flamethrower so we does anybody tell you no does anybody go elon um maybe for yourself but selling a flamethrower the liabilities all the people you're selling this device to what kind of unhinged people are going to be buying a flamethrower in the first place do we really want to connect ourselves to all these potential arsonists yeah it's a terrible idea terrible i shouldn't buy one i don't i said don't buy this plane thrower don't buy it don't buy it that's what i said but still people bought it yeah there's nothing i can do to staff them it's building i said don't buy it it's a bad idea how many did you make it's dangerous it's got it's wrong don't buy it still people bought it i just couldn't stop them how many did you make 20 000 and they're all gone in three i think four days but it's sold out in four days are you going to do a a another run no no that's it yes i said we'll do 20 we did 50 000 50 000 hats um and and um that was a million dollars and it's like okay we'll we'll sell something and for 10 million and that was 20 000 flamethrowers at 500 each they went fast how do you have the time to do that though i mean i understand that it's not a big deal in terms of all the other things you do but how do you have time to do anything i just i don't understand your time management skills i i mean i didn't spend much time on on this flamethrower i mean to be totally frank it's actually just a roofing torch with an air rifle cover it's not a real flamethrower which is why it says not a flamethrower that's why we were very clear this is not actually a flamethrower and and also we're told uh that various countries would would ban shipping of it but they would not they would ban flamethrowers so we very to solve this problem for all the customs agencies we labeled it not at flamethrower did it work is it effective i i i don't know i think so yeah so far yes now but you said you cannot serve a flamethrower but you do so many different things forget about the flamethrower like how do you do all that other [ __ ] like how do you how do you how does one decide to fix la traffic by drilling holes in the ground and who do you even approach with that like when you have this idea who do you talk to about that i mean i'm not saying it's going to be successful or so you know it's like asserting that it's going to be successful but so far i've lived in la for 16 years and the traffic has always been terrible and so i don't see any other like ideas for improving the traffic so in desperation we're going to take a tunnel and maybe that tunnel will be successful and maybe it won't i'm i'm listening yeah i'm not trying to convince you it's going to work and are the people or anyone but you're you're starting this though this is actually a project you're starting to implement right yeah i know we've dug um about a mile it's quite long it takes a long time to walk it yeah now when you're doing this what is the ultimate plan the ultimate plan is to have these in major cities and anywhere there's mass congestion and just try it out in la first yeah it's it's in l.a because uh i mostly live in l.a that's the reason it's a terrible place to dig tunnels this is one of the worst places to dig tunnels because the there's mostly because of the paperwork people think it's like what about seismic it's like actually earth tunnels are very safe in earthquakes why is that earthquakes are earthquakes are essentially a surface phenomenon it's like like waves on the ocean so if there's a storm you want to be on the on in a submarine so being in a tunnel is like being a submarine now the way the tunnel is constructed is it's constructed out of these interlocking segments kind of like a snake it's sort of like a snake exoskeleton with double seals and so even when the ground moves the it's able to the tunnel actually is able to shift along with the ground like an underground snake and it doesn't crack or break or or and and it's extremely unlikely that both seals would be broken and it's it's it's capable of taking five atmospheres of pressure it's waterproof methane proof or gas proof of any kind and uh meets all california seismic requirements so when you have this idea who do you bring this to i'm not sure what you mean by that well when you you're you're implementing it so you're digging holes in the ground like you have to bring it to someone that lets you do it yeah so um there were there were some engineers from spacex um who were who thought it would be cool to do this uh and the guy who runs it like day-to-day steve davis he's a long-time spacex engineer is great um so steve was like i'd like to help make this happen i was like cool um so we started off with digging a hole in the ground it's got like a permit for a pit big pit and just dug a big pit and you have to tell them what the pit's for or you just say hey we just want to dig a hole nice fill out this form that's it yeah i was put in our parking lot and but do you have to give them some sort of a blueprint for your ultimate idea and do they have to approve it like how does that work now we just started off with a pit okay big pit and um now you know it's not really you know don't really care about the existential nature of a pit you just say like i don't want a bit right yeah and uh it's a hole in the ground so then we got the permit for the pit and we dug the pit and we dug in like i don't know three days two three days actually i think two 48 hours something like that um because uh eric garcetti was coming by for the hype to he was going to attend the hyperloop competition which is like a student competition we have for uh who can make the fastest pod in the hyperloop and uh he was coming this was good the finals were going to be on sunday afternoon and so eric was coming by on sunday afternoon was like you know we should take this pit and then like show eric uh so we was like friday morning and then yeah so it was about a little over 40 hours 40 hours later we dug the pit it was like when 24 7 or 24 48 straight hours something like that and dug this big pit and and and we're like showed eric the pit like obviously it's just a pit but hey it's hole in the ground is better than no hole in the ground and what do you tell me about this pit i mean you said this is the beginning of this idea yes we're going to build tunnels under la to help funnel traffic better and there you go and they just go okay that but that we've joked around about this in the podcast before that like what other person can go to the people that run the city and go hey uh we're gonna dig some holes on the ground and put some tunnels in there and they go oh yeah okay now they know where they're holding the ground but it's uh people think holes in the ground all the time but my my question is like i know how much time you must be spending on your tesla factory i know how much time you must be spending on spacex and yet you still have time to dig holes under the ground in la and come up with these ideas and then implement them like i got a million ideas i'm sure you did no shortage of that yeah i just don't know how you manage your time i don't understand it it doesn't seem it doesn't even seem humanly possible you know i i do basically i think people like don't totally understand what i do with my time they think like i'm a business guy or something like that um like my wikipedia page says business magnate what would you call yourself a business magnet can someone please change my wikipedia page to magnet they'll change it right now it's probably already changed it's locked so somebody has to be able to unlock it and change it to magnets i want to be a magnet no i i do engineering and you know and manufacturing and that kind of thing that's like 80 percent more of my time ideas and then the implementation of those ideas that's like hardcore engineering like yeah designing things you know right structural mechanical electrical software uh user interface engineering aerospace engineering but you must understand there's not a whole lot of human beings like you you know that right you're an oddity yes to chimps like me we're all chimps yeah we are we're one notch we're not above a chimp some of us are a little more confused when i watch you doing all these things i'm like how does this [ __ ] have all this time and all this energy and all these ideas and then people just let them do these things because i'm an alien that's what i've speculated yes i'm on record saying this in the past i wonder it's true if there was one i was like if there was like maybe an intelligent being that we created you know like some ai creature that's uh superior to people maybe just hang around with us for a little while like you've been doing and then fix a bunch of [ __ ] maybe that's the way i might have some mutation or something like that you might do you think you do probably do you wonder like you're around normal people you're like hmm like what's up with these boring dumb [ __ ] ever not bad for a human but i i think we will not be able to hold a candle to ai hmm you scare the [ __ ] out of me when you talk about ai between you and sam harris i don't even consider it until at a podcast with sam once right he made me [ __ ] my pants talking about ai i realized like oh well this is a genie that once it's out of the bottle you're never getting it back in that's true there was a video that you tweeted about one of those boston dynamic robots and you're like in the future it'll be moving so fast you can't see it without a strobe light yeah you could probably do that right now and no one's really uh paying attention too much other than people like you or people that are really obsessed with technology all these things are happening and these robots are did you see the one where peta put out a statement that you shouldn't kick robots it's probably not wise for retribution their memory is very good i bet it's really good it's really good i bet it is yes and getting better every day it's really good are you honestly legitimately concerned about this are you is like ai one of your main worries in regards to the future yes it it's less of a worry than it used to be mostly due to taking more of a fatalistic attitude [Music] so you used to have more hope and you gave up some of it and now you don't worry as much about ai you're like this is just what it is yeah pretty much yes yes but no it's not necessarily bad it's just it's definitely going to be outside of human control not necessarily bad right yeah it's not it's not necessarily bad it's just it's just outside of human control now the thing that's going to be tricky here is that it's going to be very tempting to use ai as a weapon it's going to be very tempting in fact it will be used as a weapon so the the on the the on ramp to serious ai the danger is going to be more humans using it against each other i think most likely that'll be the danger yeah how far do you think we are from something that can make its own mind up whether or not something's ethically or morally correct or whether or not it wants to do something or whether or not it wants to improve itself or whether or not it wants to protect itself from people or from other ai how far away we some from something that's really truly sentient well i mean you could argue that any group of people like it like a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines that's what a company is and then there are different there's different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed and then there are sort of there's this like a collective ai in in the google sort of search google search you know the where we're all sort of plugged in as like like nerds on the network like leaves on a big tree or and we're all feeding this network without questions and answers we're all collectively programming the ai and the and google plus the older humans that connect to it are one giant cybernetic collective this is also true of facebook and twitter and instagram and all these social networks they're giant cybernetic collectives humans and electronics all interfacing and constantly now constantly connected yes constantly one of the things that i've been thinking about a lot over the last few years is that one of the things that drives a lot of people crazy is how how many people are obsessed with materialism and getting the latest greatest thing and i wonder how much of that is well a lot of it is most certainly fueling technology and innovation it almost seems like it's built into us it's like what we like and what we want that we're fueling this thing that's constantly around us all the time and it doesn't seem possible that people are going to pump the brakes it doesn't seem possible at this stage we're constantly expecting a new cell phone the latest tesla update the newest macbook pro everything has to be newer and better and that's going to lead to some incredible point and it seems like it's built into us it almost seems like it's an instinct that we we're working towards this that we like it our job just like the ants build the ant hill our job is to somehow rather fuel this yes um i mean i made this comment some some years ago but it feels like we are the biological bootloader for ai effectively we are building it and then we're building progressively greater intelligence and the percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence but the the ai isn't formed strangely by the human limbic system it is in large part our id writ large how so we mention all those things the sort of primal drives um there's all all the things that we like and hate and fear they're all there on the internet their projection of our limbic system [Music] that's true no it makes sense and the thinking of it as a i mean think of thinking of corporations and just thinking of just human beings communicating online through these social media networks is some sort of an organism that's a it's a cyborg it's a it's a combination it's a combination of electronics and biology yeah this is in some measure like it's the success of these online systems is the is a is sort of a function of of how much limbic resonance they're able to achieve with people the more limited resonance the more engagement um whereas like one of the reasons why probably instagram is more enticing than twitter olympic resonance yeah you get more images more video yes tweaking your system more yes do you worry about or wonder in fact about what the next step is i mean a lot of people didn't see twitter coming that you know communicate with 140 characters or 280 now would be a thing that people would be interested in like it's gonna excel it's gonna become more connected to us right yes things are getting more and more connected they're at this point constrained by bandwidth our input output is slow particularly output output got worse with thumbs you know we just have input with 10 10 fingers now we have thumbs but images are just are also are there a way of communicating at high bandwidth you take pictures and you send pictures to people what sends that's that communicates far more information than you can communicate with your thumbs so what happened with you where you decided or you took on a more fatalistic attitude like what was there any specific thing or was it just the inevitability of our future i try to convince people to slow down slow down ai to regulate ai this was futile i tried for years this scene nobody's seen in a movie robots are gonna [ __ ] take over and you're freaking me out nobody listened nobody listens no one are people more inclined to listen today it seems like an issue that's brought up more often over the last few years than it was maybe five ten years ago it seemed like science fiction maybe they will so far they haven't i think people don't like the normally the way that regulations work it's very slow it's very slow indeed so usually it'll be something some new technology it will cause damage or death there will be an outcry there will be an investigation years will pass there will be some sort of insight committee there will be rule making then there will be oversight eventually regulations this all takes many years this is the normal course of things if you look at say automotive regulations how long did it take for seat belts to be to be implemented to be required you know the water industry fought seat belts i think for more than a decade successfully fought any regulations on seat belts even though the numbers were extremely obvious if you had a seatbelt on you would be far less likely to die or be seriously injured it was unequivocal and the industry fought this for years successfully eventually after many many people died regulators insisted on seat belts this is a this time frame is not relevant to ai you can't take 10 years from the point which is dangerous it's too late and you feel like this is decades away or years away from being too late if you have this fatalistic attitude and you feel like it's going we're in a almost like a doomsday countdown it's not necessarily a doomsday countdown it's it's a out of control countdown out of control yeah people call it the singularity and uh that's that's probably thing about it is it's a singular it's hard to predict like a black hole what what happens past the event horizon right so once it's implemented it's very different because it it once it's out of the bottle what's going to happen and it will be able to improve itself yes that's where it gets spooky right the idea that it can do thousands of years of innovation very very quickly yeah and then we'll be just ridiculous ridiculous we will be like this ridiculous biological [ __ ] pissing thing trying to stop the gods no stop we like we like living with a finite lifespan and watching you know norman rockwell paintings it could be terrible and it could be great it's not clear right but one thing is for sure we will not control it do you think that it's likely that we will merge somehow or another with this sort of technology and it'll augment what we are now or do you think it will replace us well that's the scenario the the emerge scenario with ai is the one that seems like probably the best like for us yes like if you if you can't beat it join it that's yeah you know um so from a long-term existential standpoint that's like the purpose of neural link is to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbolic with ai because we have a bandwidth problem you just can't communicate through your fingers is too slow and where is neural link at right now i think we'll have something interesting to announce in a few months that's at least an order of magnitude better than anything else probably i think better than probably if anyone thinks is possible how much can you talk about that right now i don't want to drop the gun on that um but what's like the ultimate what's what's the idea behind it like what are you trying to accomplish with it like what would you like best case scenario i think best case scenario we effectively emerge with ai where we ais serves as a tertiary cognition layer uh where we've got the limbic system kind of the primitive brain essentially you've got the cortex so you're currently in a symbiotic relationship with your cortex and limbic system are in a symbolic relationship and generally people like their cortex and they like the olympic system i haven't met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or delete their cortex everybody seems to like both and the cortex is mostly in service to the limbic system people may think that that that they're that they're thinking part of themselves is in charge but it's mostly their limbic system that's in charge and the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy that's what most of that computing power is oriented towards how can i make the limbic system happy that's what i was trying to do now if we do have a third layer which is the ai extension of yourself that is also symbiotic and there's enough bandwidth between the cortex and the ai extension of yourself such that the ai doesn't de facto separate then that could be a good outcome that could be quite a positive outcome for the future so instead of replacing us it will radically change our capabilities yes it will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition anyone who wants this is not a matter of earning power because your earning power would be vastly greater after you do it so it's just like anyone who wants can just do it in theory that's the theory and and if that's the case then and let's say billions of people do it then the outcome for humanity will be the sum of of human will the sum of billions of people's desire for the future billions of people with enhanced cognitive ability radically enhanced yes and which would be it how much different than people today like if you if you had to explain it to a person who didn't really understand what you were saying how much different are you talking about when you say radically improve like what do you mean you mean mind reading difficult it will be difficult to to really appreciate the difference um it's kind of like how much smarter are you with a phone or computer than without it's your vastly smarter actually you know you can answer any question if you connect to the internet you can answer any question pretty much instantly any calculation that your phone's memory is essentially perfect uh you can remember flawlessly your phone can remember videos pictures and everything perfectly that's the that your phone is already an extension of you you're already a cyborg you don't even well most people realize they are already a cyborg it that phone is an extension of yourself it's just that the the data rate the rate at which of the communication rate between you and the cybernetic extension of yourself that is your phone and computer is slow it's very slow and and that that it's like a tiny straw of of information flow between your biological self and your digital self and we need to make that tiny straw like a giant river huge high bandwidth interface it's an interface problem data rate problem solve the data rate problem then i think i think we can hang on to human machine symbiosis through the long term and then people may decide that they want to retain their biological self or not i think they'll probably choose to retain their biological self versus some sort of ray kurzweil scenario where they download themselves into a computer you will be essentially snapshotted into a computer at any time if your biological self dies you could just probably just upload into a new unit literally pass that whiskey we're getting crazy over here this is getting ridiculous down the rabbit hole grab that sucker give me some of that this is too freaky see if i've been thinking about this for a long time by the way i believe you have if i was talking to one cheers by the way cheers hey this is a great whiskey thank you i know where this came from who brought this to us trying to remember somebody gave it to us old camp whoever it was thanks yeah it is good um this is just inevitable again going back to your when you decided to have this fatalistic viewpoint so you weren't you tried to warn people you talked about this pretty extensively i've read several interviews where you talked about this and then you just sort of just said okay it just is let's just and you in a way you're by communicating the potential fear i mean for sure you're you're getting the warning out to some people yeah yeah i mean i i was really going on the warning quite quite a lot i was warning everyone i could even met with obama and just for one reason like just talk about ai yes and what did he say so what about hillary worry about her first shh everybody crying no he listened he suddenly listened um i met with congress i met with i was at a meeting of all 50 governors and talked about just ai danger and i talked to everyone i could no one seemed to realize where this was going is it that or do they just assume that someone smarter than them has already taken care of it because when people hear about something like ai it's almost abstract it's almost it's almost like it's so it's so hard to wrap your head around it by the time it already happens it'll be too late yeah i think they didn't quite understand it or didn't think it was near term or not sure what to do about it when i said like you know an obvious thing to do is to just establish a committee government committee to gain insight you know before before you oversight before you do make regulations they should try to understand what's going on and then if you have a insight committee then once they learn what's going on get up to speed then they can make maybe some rules or propose some rules and and that would be probably a safer way to go about things it seems i mean i know that it's probably something that the government's supposed to handle but it seems like i wouldn't want the i don't want the government to handle this who do you want to i want you to handle it oh geez yeah i feel like you're the one who could ring the bell better because if if mike pence starts talking about hey i'm like shut up [ __ ] you don't know anything about ai come on man he doesn't know what he's talking about but i don't have the power to regulate other companies what am i supposed to do right but maybe companies could agree maybe there could be some sort of a there's we have agreements where you're not supposed to dump toxic waste into the ocean you're not supposed to do certain things that could be terribly damaging even though they'd be profitable maybe this is one of those things maybe you should realize that you can't hit the switch on something that's going to be able to think for itself and make up its own mind as to whether or not it wants to survive or not and whether or not it thinks you're a threat and whether or not it thinks you're useless like why do i keep this dumb finite life form alive why why keep this thing around it's just stupid it just keeps polluting everything it's [ __ ] everywhere it goes lighting everything on fire and shooting each other why would i keep this stupid thing alive because sometimes it makes good music you know sometimes it makes great movies sometimes it makes beautiful art and sometimes you know sometimes it's cool to hang out with like yeah all those reasons yeah for us those are great reasons yes but for anything objective standing outside like oh this is definitely a flawed system this is like if you went to the jungle and you watch these chimps engage in warfare and beat each other with music they're [ __ ] really mean [ __ ] mean they're real meaning i saw that movie chimpanzee yeah i thought it was gonna be like some disney things like holy cow what movie was that it's literally called chimpanzee is it a documentary yeah yeah it's kind of like a documentary i was like damn these chimps are mean they're mean yeah they're cruel yeah they're they're they're calculated yeah yeah they sneak up on each other and like i didn't realize chimps did calculated cruelty mm-hmm yeah that's pretty ah i left that meeting kind of thinking whoa this is dark right well we know better because we've advanced but if we hadn't we'd be like man i don't want to [ __ ] live in a house i like the chimp ways bro chimp ways to go this is it man chimp life i know but we in a way to the ai might be like those chimps i'm like these stupid [ __ ] launching missiles out of drones and shooting each other under water like we're crazy we got torpedoes and submarines and [ __ ] airplanes that drop nuclear bombs indiscriminately on cities we're [ __ ] yeah they might go why are they doing this it might like look at our politics look at what we do in terms of our our food system what what kind of food we force down each other's throats and they might go these people are crazy they don't even look out for themselves i don't know i mean how much do we think about chimps not much very little it's like these terms are at war these like little it's like groups of chimps just attack each other and they kill each other and they torture each other that's pretty bad um they hunt monkeys uh they're but like this is probably the most that's you know i mean when's the last time you talk about chimps me yeah all the time you do talking to them okay [ __ ] podcast dude okay people are laughing right now yeah constantly i'm obsessed i saw that david attenborough documentary on champs where they were eating those columbus monkeys and ripping them apart i saw that many many years ago it just changed how i go oh this is why people are so crazy we came from that thing yeah exactly yeah and there's the yeah they got like better philosophy yeah they're like swingers yeah yeah they really are they're they they seem to be way more even than us way more civilized they just seem to resolve everything with sex yeah the only rules they have is the mom won't bang the sun that's it okay that's it mom won't bring her sons they're good women yeah good women in the bonobo community everybody else just banging it out yeah i haven't seen the bonovo movie [Laughter] well they're disturbing just at a zoo you know you have bonobos at the zoo they're just constantly going constantly [ __ ] yeah that's all they do they just won't stop yeah and they don't care gay straight whatever let's just up these labels i haven't seen bonobos out of zero it's probably like nothing nothing not in the pg section yeah i don't think they have them at many zoos we've looked at it before it's probably pretty awkward i think that's the thing they like to keep regular chimps at zoos because bonobos are just always jacking off yeah what's that they're in san diego san diego's got some yet really interesting probably separate them yeah i mean how many are in a cage you know it's like right it's gonna be pretty intense yeah yeah yeah we're we're a weird thing you know and i've often wondered if whether or not we're you know our ultimate goal is to give birth to some new thing and that's why we're so obsessed with technology because it's not like this technology is really i mean it's certainly enhancing our lives to in a certain way but is i mean ultimately is it making people happier right now most technology i would say no in fact you and i were talking about social media before this about just not having instagram on your phone and not dealing you feel better yes i think that one of the issues with social media that's been pointed out by many people is that i think maybe particularly instagram um people look like they have a much better life than they really do right so by design yeah people are posting pictures of when they're really happy they're modifying those pictures to be better looking even if they're not modifying the pictures they're at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting the best angle so people basically seem uh they're way better looking than they basically really are right um and they're way happier seeming than they really are so if you look at everyone on instagram you might think man they're all these happy beautiful people and i'm not that good looking and i'm not happy so i'm a suck you know and that's gonna make feel sad so when in fact those people you think are super happy actually not that happy some of them are really depressed they're very sad some of the happiest seeming people actually some of the saddest people in reality um and and nobody looks good all the time doesn't matter who you are no it's not even something you should want why do you want to look great all the time yeah exactly so uh so i think i think things like that can make people quite sad just by comparison because you you sort of you people people generally think of themselves relative to to others it's it's a we are constantly re-re-baselining our expectations um and you can see this say if you watch some show like naked and afraid or you know if you just go and try living in the woods by yourself for a while and you're like the learned civilization is quite great it has a lot it's a lot of it it's people want to come back civilization pretty fast on the good and afraid wasn't that a thoreau quote the comparison is a thief of joy yeah well if happiness is reality minus expectations that's great too but the comparison is a thief of joy really holds true to people is it theodore roosevelt roosevelt fascinating um and when you're thinking about instagram because what essentially instagram is with a lot of people is you're giving them the opportunity to be their own pr agent and they always go towards the glamorous you know and when any anybody does show you know hashtag no filter i don't know if they really do do that like oh you're so brave look at you no makeup you know yeah they look good anyway you look great what are you doing oh my god you don't have makeup on you still look hot as [ __ ] you know what you're doing i know what you're doing too they're they're they're letting you know and then they're feeding off that comment section sitting there like like it's a fresh stream of love like you're getting right up to the source as it comes out of the earth and you're sucking that's a lot of a lot of emojis emojis emojis yeah a lot of emojis my my concern is not so much what instagram is is that i didn't think that people had the need for this or the expectation for some sort of technology that allows them to constantly get love and adulation from strangers and comments and and this ability to project this sort of distorted version of who you really are but i worry about where it goes like what's the next one what's the next one like where is it is it going to be augmented to some sort of a weird augmented or virtual sort of instagram type situation where you're not going to want to live in this real world you're going to want to interface with this sort of world that you've created through your social media page some next level thing yeah go live in the simulation yeah i mean in the simulation some ready player one type [ __ ] that's real that seems we have that htc vive here and i've only done it a couple times quite honestly because it kind of freaks me out sure my kids [ __ ] love it man they love it they love playing these weirdo games and and walking around with that headset on but part of me watching them do it goes wow i wonder if this is like the precursor just sort of like if you look at that that phone that gordon gekko had on the beach yeah big cell phone yeah you compare that to like a galaxy note 9. how the [ __ ] did that become that right and i wonder when i see this htc vive i'm like what is that thing going to be 10 years from now when we're making fun of what it is now what is it how i mean how ingrained and how how how connected and interconnected is this technology going to be in our life it will be at some point indistinguishable from reality where we'll lose this we lose this like you and i are just looking at each other through our eyes i see where you see me i think i hope you think so i think you probably have a regular eyes this could be some simulation it could do you entertain that well the argument for the simulation i think is quite strong because if you assume any improvements at all over time any improvement one percent point one percent just extend the time frame make it a thousand years a million years the universe is 13.8 billion years old what would a civilization if you counted if you're very generous civilization is maybe seven or eight thousand years old if you count it from the first writing this is nothing this is nothing so if you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will be indistinguishable from reality or civilization will end one of those two things will occur therefore we are most likely in a simulation or we're on our way to one right well just because we exist we could most certainly be on the road we could be on the road to that right it doesn't mean that it has to be reality it could be in base reality we could be here now on our way to the road or on our way to the destination where this can never happen again where we are completely ingrained in some sort of an artificial technology or some sort of a symbiotic relationship with the internet or the next level of sharing information but right now we're not there yet that's possible too right it's possible that a simulation is one day going to be inevitable that we're going to have something that's indistinguishable from regular reality but maybe we're not there yet that's also possible so we're not quite there yet that this is real when i touch that it feels very real maybe that's why everybody's like into like mason jars and [ __ ] amazing suede shoes people are going to like craft restaurants and they want raw wood everyone says everyone wants to see metal people it seems like people are like longing towards some weird log cabin type nostalgia reality yeah like holding on like clinging just dragging their nails through the mud like don't take me yet yes but then but then people go get a mason jar with a wine stem or a handle that's dark makes me lose faith in humanity wine stem and a handle they have those yes oh those dirty people that's just [ __ ] that's like people make pet rocks rough right some people are just [ __ ] they take advantage of our our generous nature it was made with a wine stem made with a handle they made it that way yes so the the it wasn't like well on to the mason ah that would be fine if there was they glued it on or something right white trash chic oh this is disgusting look at this it is right there yep this is terrible yeah that's like fake breasts that are designed to be hard like fake breasts from the 60s it's like if you really along for the ones with ripples here we go yeah that's almost what that is yeah what are you going to do man there's not nothing you know something you do stop certain terrible ideas from propagating yeah um anyway i don't sound like things are too dark because i think like you kind of have to be optimistic about the future there's no point in being pessimistic it's just too negative it doesn't help you know i think you want to be i mean my theory is like you'd rather be optimistic i think i'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right right at least or on that side right yeah because if you're pessimistic it's going to be miserable yeah yeah nobody wants to be around you anyway if it's the end of the world you're like i told you bro yeah the world's ending yeah it is what it is for all i mean enjoy the journey right if you really want to get morose i mean it is what it is for all of us anyway we're all going to go unless some something changes yeah i mean ultimately you know even if we just sort of existed as humans forever we'd be would still eventually be like the heat death of the universe right a zillion years from now right even if we get it past the sun if we figure out a way past the sun running out of juice eventually it's going to end it's just a question of when right so it really is all about the journey hmm or transcendence from whatever we are now into something that doesn't worry about death the universe as we know it will dissipate into a fine mist of cold nothingness eventually and then someone's going to bottle it and put a fragrance to it sell it to french people in another dimension it's just a very long time so i think it's really just about how can we make it last longer are you a proponent of the multi-universes theory do you believe that there are many many universes and that even if this one fades out that there's other ones that are starting fresh right now and there's an infinite number of them and they're just constantly in this never-ending cycle of birth and death i think most likely this is just about probability there are many many simulations these simulations are you might as well call them reality or you could call them multiverse these simulations you believe are created like someone has manufactured running on the substrate so that substrate is probably boring boring how so well when we create a simulation like a game or a movie it's a distillation of what's interesting about life you know it takes take a year to shoot an action movie and then that's all to slow down into two or three hours so let me tell you if you see an action movie being filmed it's freaking it's boring super boring it takes there's like lots of takes there's everything's in a green screen looks pretty goofy doesn't look cool but once you add the cgi and have great editing it's amazing so i think most likely if we're a simulation it's really boring outside the simulation because why would you make a simulation that's boring it makes simulation way more interesting than the base reality that is if this right now is a simulation yes and ultimately inevitably we're if as long as we don't die or get hit by a meteor we're going to create some sort of simulation if we continue on the same technological path where we're on right now yes but we might not be there yet so it might not be a simulation here but it most likely is you feel other places this notion of place or where is is a flawed yes flawed like that if you have this sort of that uh vive you know which that's made by valve and st and it's really valve that made it htc did the hardware but it's really a valve thing um makers of half-life yes wow great company great company um uh when you're in the in that some in that your virtual reality which is only going to get better where are you where are you really right you aren't anywhere well where is the computer what what you know what defines where you are exactly right it's your perception is it your perceptions or is it you know a scale that we have under your butt you're right here i've measured you you're the same weight as you were when you left but you meanwhile you're experiencing why do you think you're where you are right now you might not be i'll spark up a joint if you keep talking your manager's gonna come in here we might have to lock the door right now you think you're in a studio in l.a that's what i heard you might be in a computer oh listen man i think about this all the time yeah i mean it's unquestionable that one day that'll be the case as long as we keep going as long as nothing interrupts us and if we start from scratch and you know we're single-celled organisms all over again and then millions and millions of years later we become the next thing that is us with creativity and the ability to change its environment it's going to keep monkeying with things until it figures out a way to change reality to change i mean to almost like punch a hole through what is this thing into what what it wants it to be and create new things and then those new things will intersect with other people's new things and it'll be this ultimate pathway of infinite ideas and expression all through technology yeah and then we're one we're gonna wonder like why are we here what are we doing let's find out well i i mean i think we should take the actions the set of actions that are most likely to make the future better yes right yeah right right and then we evaluate those actions to make sure they're they're that it's true well i think there's a movement to that i mean in terms of like a social movement i think some of it's misguided and some of it's exaggerated and there's a lot of a lot of people that are fighting for their side out there but it seems like the general trend of like uh social awareness seems to be much more heightened now than has ever been in any other time in history because of our ability to express ourselves instantaneously to each other through facebook or twitter or what have you and that the trend is to uh abandon preconceived notions abandon prejudice abandon discrimination and promote kindness and happiness as much as possible look at this knife somebody gave it to me sorry yeah what is this the [ __ ] did you do my friend donny he brought this with him and it just stayed here i have a real samurai sword if you want to play with that i know you're into weapons that's from the 1500s samurai at the end of the table yeah that's cool i'll grab it hold on yeah that's a legit samurai sword from an actual samurai from the 1500s if you pull out that blade that blade was made the old way where a master craftsman folded that metal and hammered it down over and over again over a long period of time and honed that blade into what it is now what's crazy is that more than 500 years later that thing is still pristine i mean whoever took care of that and passed it down to the next person who took care of it and you know until it got to the podcast room it's pretty [ __ ] crazy yeah one day someone's going to be looking at a tesla like that these [ __ ] back doors they pop up sideways like a lamborghini you should see what tesla can do uh you didn't you should i'll show you afterwards well i've driven one i love them yeah but most people don't know what it can do in terms of like ludicrous mode in terms of driving super fast and irresponsibly on public roads is that what we're saying well any call can do that yeah what can it do that that i need to know about i mean the model x can do this like ballet thing to the trans-siberian orchestra it's pretty cool where it dances yes legitimately moves around why would you program that into a car seemed like fun that's what i get about you that's what's weird like when you showed up here you were all smiles and you pull out a [ __ ] blow torch and not a blow torch but i'm like look at this dude a flamethrower not a flamethrower like you want to be clear it's definitely not playing you're having fun like this is uh like this thing when you know you program a car to do a ballet dance it's very fun how do you have the time to do that i don't understand why you're digging holes under the earth and centered rockets into space and and powering people in australia like how the [ __ ] do you have time to make the car dance ballet well i mean in that case there were some engineers at tesla that said you know what if we make this car dance and play music i was like that sounds great please do it let's try to get it done in time for christmas we did is there a concern about someone just losing their mind and making it do that on the highway no it won't do that what if it's in bumper-to-bumper traffic nope no won't do it nope it's actually you have to it's an easter egg oh it's an easter egg yeah that's why people don't know about it including people have the car well it's like it can do lots of things lots of things once reddit gets a hold of it everyone's oh you just have to it's everyone if you search for it on the internet you will find out but people don't know that they should even search for it oh well they do now yes yes there's so many things about the model x and the model s and the model 3 that people don't know about we should probably do a video or something and explain it because i have close friends of mine and i say do you know the call can do this and they're like nope do you want to do a video though do you like the fact that some people don't know no i think it's probably not we should tell people yeah probably yes that would help your product i mean it's not like you don't sell enough of them you sell almost too many of them right the i mean i think a tesla is the most fun thing you could possibly buy ever that's what it's meant to be well our goal is to make it's it's not exactly a car it's actually a thing to maximize enjoyment electronic like big screen laptop ridiculous speed handling all that stuff yeah do you you have going to put video games in it you are yeah is that wise well you won't be able to drive while you're playing the video game but we're like for example we just we're just putting the the atari emulator raw emulator in it so you'll be able to play missile command and lunar lander and a bunch of other things yeah that sounds cool it's pretty fun i like that yeah and we improved the interface and missile command because it's too hard with the old trackball so this is this is a touchscreen version of missile command so you have a chance [Laughter] do you you have an old car don't you don't you have like an old jaguar yeah how do you know that that's that's what another uh 61 series one e-type jaguar i love cars it's great yeah i love old cars that's one of the only yeah the only two got only two gasoline cars i have of that and an old like a ford model t that a friend of mine gave me that's those are only two gasoline cars is the ford model t all stock well oh there's your car ooh look i have the convertible that is a cool car god that's a good looking car yes is that yours that is it's not mine it's extremely close to mine that i don't have a friend's license plate on mine oh it's a beautiful car they nailed it that's that's mine looks like that god they nailed that that's what mine looks like maybe that is mine there's certain iconic shapes yes and there's there's something about those cars too they're not as capable not nearly as capable as like a tesla but there's something really satisfying about the mechanical aspect of like feeling the steering and the grinding of the gears and the shifting there's something about those that's extremely satisfying even though they're not that competent like i have a 1993 porsche 964 it's like a lightweight it's not it's in the rs america it's not very fast it's not like in comparison to a tesla or anything like that but the thing about it is like it's mechanical you feel it everything's like it's like it gives you this weird thrill like you're on this clinky ride and there's all this feedback there's something to that yeah yeah absolutely i mean yeah my e-type is like basically no electronics yeah um you like that but you also like electronics yes like your tesla is supe it's like the far end of electronics yes drives itself it's driving itself better every day yeah it's like we're about to release the software that will enable you to just turn it on and it'll drive from highway on-ramp to highway exit do lane changes to overtake other cars jesus go from one interchange to the next if you get on say the 405 and get on get off 300 miles later and go through several highway interchanges and just overtake other cars and hook into the nav system and then uh and you're just meditating home yeah your car's just traveling very it's kind of eerie it's kind of eerie what did you think when you saw that video that dude falling asleep behind the wheel i'm sure you've seen it the one in san francisco he's like right outside of san jose dudes out cold like this and the car is in bumper to bumper traffic moving along yeah have you seen it right yeah yeah we changed the software we changed the software that's i think an old video we changed software if if you don't touch the wheel it will gradually slow down and put the emergency lights on and wake you up oh that's hilarious yeah that's hilarious yeah can you choose what voice wakes you up well it's sort of more of a it sort of honks oh it honks this should be like wake up [ __ ] face well you're endangering your fellow humans we could we could gently wake you up with a sultry voice ah that would be good like uh something with a southern accent hey why can't we wake up sunshine hey sweetie exactly why don't you wake up you're like pick you could pick your right like what do you want yeah i choose the australian girl for siri yeah i like her voice do you want to seduce my favorite i like australian what flavor of do you want to be angry could be anything you want those australian prison lady jeans now when you um when you program something like that in is this in response to a concern or is it your own yeah if you do you look at it and go hey um they shouldn't just be able to fall asleep let's wake them up yeah yeah we it's like you know we're like well you know people are just falling asleep we're about to do something about that right but when you first released it you didn't consider it right you're just like well no one's gonna just sleep people fall asleep in cars all the time all the time and crash yeah at least our car doesn't crash that's better it's better not to crash imagine if that guy had fallen asleep in a in a gasoline car they do it all the time for sure yeah they would crash into somebody yeah and in fact the thing that really you know got me to it's like man we better get autopilot going get it out there it was a guy was in an early tesla driving down the highway and he fell asleep and he ran over a cyclist and killed him and it's like i was like man if we had autopilot wouldn't run out of one we might have fallen asleep but at least he wouldn't run over that cyclist so how did you implement it like did you just use cameras and yeah programmed with the the system so that if it sees images it slows down and how much time do you give is the person who's in control of it allowed to program how fast it goes yes yeah you can program it to be more or less like more conservative like more aggressive driver um and you can say what speed you want it to what what speed is okay i know you have ludicrous mode do you have douchebag mode well it just cuts people off well for lane changes it's tricky because if you're in like la like unless you're pretty aggressive right it's pretty it's hard to change lanes it's hard to be sat nam it's hard to be namaste out here in l.a yeah you get if you want to hit that santa monica boulevard off-ramp i mean you got to be a little pushy you got to be a little pushy yeah especially angry yeah a little angry they don't want you in they speed up sometimes you know i think people like overall are pretty nice on the highway even in la but sometimes they're not do you think the neural link will help that probably everybody be locked in together this hive mind tunnels will help it won't have traffic that'll help a lot yeah how many of those can you put in there because thinking about traveling buddy nice thing about tunnels is you can go 3d so you can go many levels right so until you hit hell yeah but you could go you could have a hundred levels of tunnel no bombs jesus christ i don't want to be on 99. that'll be the 99th negative 99 floors whoo this is one of the fundamental things people don't appreciate about tunnels is that it's not like roads the fundamental issue with roads is that you have a 2d transport system and a 3d living and workspace environment so you got all these tall buildings or concentrated work environments and and then then you want to go into this like 2d transport system which is hugely inefficient pretty low density because cars are spaced out pretty far and and so that obviously is not going to work you're going to have traffic guaranteed but if you can go 3d on your transport system then you can solve all traffic you can either go 3d up with a flying car or go 3d down with tunnels you can have as many tunnel levels as you want and you can arbitrarily relieve any amount of traffic you can go further down with tunnels than you can go up with buildings you're ten thousand feet down if you want i wouldn't recommend it but what was that movie with uh what's his face bradley coote not bradley cooper uh christian no what the [ __ ] his name who is batman christian bale where he they fought dragons him and matthew mcconaughey they went down deep into the earth how how how deep can you go yeah it was it was batman fought dragons batman but it was christian rain of fire rain of fire okay ever saw that no yeah earth is a giant ball of lava with a thin crust on the top which we think of as like the surface this thin crust and it's mostly just a big bowl of lava that's earth but ten thousand feet's not a big deal have you given any consideration whatsoever to the flat earth movement i think that's a troll situation oh it's not no it's not you would like to think that because you're a super genius but i as a normal normal person i know there's people way dumber than me and they really really believe they watch youtube videos which go on uninterrupted and spew out a bunch of [ __ ] fake facts very eloquently and articulately and they really believe these people really believe i mean if it works for them sure fine fine it's weird though right that this age where you know there's ludicrous mode in your car goes 1.9 seconds 0 to 60. 2.2 2.2 which one's 1.9 the road the next generation roadster okay standard edition yeah i'm on top of this [ __ ] that's just that's that's what the standard edition yeah so it's about the performance package what performance package yeah what what the [ __ ] do you need to put rocket thrusters on it for real yes what are they to burn nothing uh high ultra high pressure compressed air whoa just call gas thrusters do you have to have air tanks or they just suck in the air out of okay yeah i just have electric pump whoa pump it up to like ten thousand psi and how fast are we talking zero to sixteen how fast you wanna go i'm so i'm gonna go we could make it just fly i wanna go back in time make it fly you make it fly sure do you anticipate that as being i mean you were talking about the tunnels and then flying cars do you really think that's going to be real too noisy and there's too much air flow so the fundamental issue with flying cars i mean if you get like one of those like toy drones think of how much how loud those are and how much air that they how much air they blow now imagine if that's like a thousand times heavier this is not going to be make your neighbors happy your neighbors are not going to be happy if you land a flying car in your backyard it will be very helicopters helicopter or on your roof they're just really going to be like what the hell that was annoying yeah you can't even like if you want a flying car just put some wheels on a helicopter is there a way around that like what if they figure out some sort of magnetic technology like all those bob lazar type characters were thinking that was a part of the ufo technology they were doing it area 51 remember didn't they have some some thoughts about magnetics nope no [ __ ] yes really yeah there's a fundamental momentum exchange with the air so you must uh you you must accelerate you there's there's like there's there's a certain you have a mass and you have gravity gravitational acceleration and mass mass times your mass times gravity must equal the mass of airflow times the acceleration of that air flow to have a neutral force so it's impossible and then you won't move but if okay if mg is greater than m a you will go down and if ma is greater than mg you will go up that's how it works there's just no way around that there is definitely no way around it there's no way to create some sort of a magnetic something or another that allows you to technically yes you you could have a strong enough magnet but that magnet would be so strong that you would create a lot of trouble we just suck cars up into your car just pick up i mean you'd have to rappel off of either material on the ground or in a really nutty situation off of earth's gravitational field and somehow make that incredibly light but that magnet would cause so much destruction you'd be better off with a helicopter so if there was some sort of magnet road like you have two magnets and they repel each other if you had some sort of a magnet road that was below you and you could travel on that magnet road that would work hahaha yes yes you could have a magnet road a magnet road is that too ridiculous no it would work so you could do that ridiculous too right i would not recommend it there's a lot of things i don't recommend i would super not recommend that not good not wise i think no roads no no that no definitely not definitely it was good that would cause a lot of trouble so you've put some time and consideration into this other than uh you know instead of like my foolishly rendered thoughts so you think that tunnels are the way to do it oh it'll work for sure that'll work yes and your these these tunnels that you're building right now these are basically just like test versions of this ultimate idea that you have you know it's just a hole in the ground right we played videos of it where you just your idea is that you're going to drop that hole in the ground there's a sled on it and the sled goes very fast like 100 miles an hour plus yeah you can go real fast you know fast as you want and then if you want to go long distances you can just draw the air out of the tunnel make sure it's real straight draw the air out of the tunnel yeah it's a vacuum tunnel um because the then and then depending on how fast you want to go you need these wheels or you could use air bearings depending upon the ambient pressure in the tunnel or you could mag levitt if you want to go super fast um so magnet road yes but underground magnet roads underground manual otherwise you're going to really create a lot of trouble with because there's metal things ah so magnet road's the way to go just underground if you want to go really fast underground you would be in you would be maglev in a vacuum tunnel mag in a vacuum tunnel magnetic levitation in a vacuum tunnel one with rocket launchers no i would not recommend putting any exhaust gas in the tunnel oh okay i see what you're saying you're going to pump it out right you'll have to pump it out and you probably have a limited amount of air in the first place like how much can you breathe do you have to pump oxygen into these cubicles you'd have a pressurized pot to be like like a little tiny underground spaceship basically like an airplane because you have air in the airplane it's not getting new air in it is it is yes they have like a little hole yeah they have a pump really yeah it gets it from the outside yes wow i didn't know that it's like it's the air is airplanes have it have it easy because they essentially you can they're pretty leaky uh but jesus yeah so long as they as long as the air pump is working at a decent speed they have backup pumps oh still have like you know three pumps or four pumps or something and uh and then that then there's like there's an ex it exhausts through the outflow valve and and through whatever seals are not sealing quite right usually the door doesn't seal quite right on a plane this is a bit of leakage around the door and uh and but the pumps uh exceed the outflow rate and then that sets the pressure in the in the cabin now have you ever looked at planes and gone i could fix this i just don't have time how does it make it design for a plane you do yes a better design i mean probably i think it is yes who have you talked to about this and i've talked to friends friends friends and i'm your friend girlfriends you can tell me what do you got what's going on well i mean the exciting thing to do would be some sort of electric vertical takeover landing supersonic jet of some kind of vertical takeoff and let it be no need for a runway just shoot up straight in the air and then how would you do that when they do that and some military aircrafts correct yes the trick is that you have you have to transition to level flight um and then you the the the thing that you'd use for vertical tail for takeover landing is not suitable for high-speed flight so you have two different systems i thought about this quite a lot i've thought about the screen quite a lot the interesting thing about an electric plane is that you want to go as high as possible but you need a certain energy density in the battery pack um because you have to overcome gravitational potential energy once you've overcome gravitational potential energy and you're at at a high altitude the energy you use in cruise is very low and then you can recapture a large part of your the gravitational potential energy on the way down so you really don't need any kind of reserve fuel if you will because you have the the energy of height gravitational potential energy this is a lot of energy so so once you can get high at high you the the like the way to think about a plane is it's a force balance so the force balance so a plane that is not accelerating um is a neutral force balance yeah the force of gravity you have the lift force of the wings then you've got the force of the whatever thrusting device the the propeller or turbine or whatever it is and you've got the resistance force of the air now the higher you go the lower the air resistance is air density drops exponentially but drag increases with the square an exponential beats a square the higher you go the faster you will go for the same amount of energy at a certain altitude you will you can go supersonic with less energy per mile quite a lot less energy per mile than an aircraft at 35 000 feet because it's just a force balance i'm too stupid for this conversation it makes sense though no i'm sure it does now when you think about this new idea of of of designing it i mean when when you have this idea about improving planes are you going to bring this to somebody or you just chuck i have a lot on my plate right that's what i'm saying i don't know i don't know how you do what you do now but if you keep coming up with these but it's got to be hard to pawn these off on someone else either hey go do a job good job with this vertical take off and landing system that i want to implement to regular planes the airplane electric airplane isn't necessary right now electric cars are important solar energy is important stationary storage of energy is important these things are much more important than creating electric supersonic fetal also the planes naturally you really want that gravitational energy density for an aircraft and this is improving over time so you know it's important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable energy that's why electric cars it matters whether electric cars happen sooner or later you know we're really playing the crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans we're taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this putting this knee in the atmosphere this is crazy we should not do this it's very dangerous so we should we should accelerate the transition to sustainable energy i mean this the bizarre thing is that obviously we're going to run out of oil in the long term you know we're gonna there's only so much oil we can we can mine and burn it's total logical we must have such a sustainable energy transport and energy infrastructure in the long term so we know that's the end point we know that so why run this crazy experiment where we take trillions of tons of carbon from underground and put it in the atmosphere and oceans this is an insane experiment it's the dumbest experiment in in human history why are we doing this it's crazy do you think this is a product of momentum that we started off doing this when it was just a few engines a few 100 million gallons of fuel over the whole world not that big of a deal and then slowly but surely over a century it got out of control and now it it's not just our fuel but it's also i mean fossil fuels are involved in so many different electronics so many different items that people buy there's just this constant desire for fossil fuels constant need for oil without consideration of the sustainability the things like oil oil coal gas it's the easy money right it's easy money so have you heard about clean coal the president's been tweeting about it's got to be real clean coal all caps did you see he used all caps clean coal um well you know it's very difficult to put that co2 back in the ground it doesn't like being in solid form it takes a lot of energy like that like some sort of a filter giant building sized filter sucks carbon out of the atmosphere no no it doesn't it's not possible no no no no definitely in [ __ ] no we're not [ __ ] i mean this is quite a complex question right you know we're really just when we're the more carbon we take out of the ground and add to the atmosphere and and a lot of it gets permeated into the oceans the more dangerous it is like i i don't think right now i think we're okay right now we can probably even add some more but the momentum towards sustainable energy is too slow like the there's a vast base of industry vast transportation system like this there's two and a half billion cars and trucks in the world so and and the the new car and truck production if it was a hundred percent electric that's only about a hundred million per year so it would take if you could snap your fingers and instantly turn all old cars and trucks electric it would still take 25 years to change the transport base to electric makes sense because how long does a truck car truck last before it goes into the junkyard and gets crushed about 20 to 25 years is there a way to accelerate that process like some sort of subsidies or some encouragement from the government financially well the thing that is going on right now is that there's a an inherent subsidy in any oil burning device any any power plant or car is fundamentally uh consuming the carbon capacity of the oceans and atmosphere or just say atmosphere for short so like you can say okay there's a certain probability of something bad happening past a certain carbon concentration in the atmosphere and so there's some uncertain number where if we put too much carbon in the atmosphere things overheat oceans warm up ice caps melt ocean real estate becomes a lot less valuable something's underwater and and but it's not clear what that number is but it's definitely a scientist with all it's really quite the scientific scientific consensus is overwhelming um overwhelming i mean i don't know any serious scientists actually zero literally zero who who don't think that you know that that we were have quite a serious climate risk that we're facing and so there's fundamentally a subsidy occurring with every fossil fuel burning thing power plants aircraft car frankly even rockets i mean rockets use up you know they burn they burn fuel but there's just you know with rockets there's just no other way to to get to orbit unfortunately so it's the only way but with cars there's definitely a better way with electric cars and to generate the energy do so with photovoltaics because we've got a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky called the sun it's great it shows up every day very reliable so if you can generate energy from solar panels stored with batteries you can have energy 24 hours a day um and then you can you know concentrate to the poles or near to the north uh with uh you know high voltage lines also the north northern part parts of the world tend to have a lot of hydropower as well but anyway all fossil fuel powered things have an inherent subsidy which is their consumption of the carbon capacity of the atmosphere and oceans so people tend to think like why why should electric vehicles have a subsidy but they're not taking into account that all fossil fuel burning vehicles fundamentally are subsidized by the cost the environmental cost to earth but nobody's paying for it we are going to pay for it obviously in the future we will pay for it it's just not paid for now now what is the bottleneck in regards to electric cars and trucks and things like that is it battery capacity yeah i've got to scale up production got to make the car compelling make it better than gasoline or diesel cars make it more efficient in terms of like the distance it can travel yeah you're going to be able to go far far enough recharge fast and your roadster you're you're anticipating 600 miles is that correct yeah yeah what is it 600 miles is that right now like have you driven one 600 miles now no we could totally make one right now that would do 600 miles but the thing is too expensive so it's like the car much more so well you know just have a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack and you can go 600 miles what do you have now 330 mile range so that's really 30 miles what is that in terms of kilowatts well that would be for a model s 100 kilowatt hour pack will do about 330 miles maybe 335 but some people have hypermiled it to 500 miles hyper mild it would yeah i just like go on 45 miles an hour or something yeah they're like 30 miles an hour or something it's like on level ground with you pump the tires up really well and go on a smooth surface and and you can go for a long time um but do you like definitely comfortably do 300 miles is fine for most people uh usually 200 or 250 miles is fine 300 miles is you don't even think about it really is there any possibility that you could use solar power that solar powered one day especially in los angeles i mean as you said about that giant nuclear reactor a million times bigger than earth just floating in the sky is it possible that one day you'll be able to just power all these cars just on solar power i mean we don't ever have cloudy days if we do there's three of them well the surface area of a car is without making the car like really blocky um or having some like a g wagon yeah like and just like having like a lot of surfs area where like maybe like solar panels fold out or something like your e-class that's what we needed uh the e-type yeah that the e-jaguar e-type with a giant long hood that could be a giant solar panel well at the beginning of tesla i did want to have this like unfolding solar panel thing that you'd press a button and it would just like unfold these solar panels and like charge recharge your car in the parking lot ah yeah we could do that but i think it's probably better to just put that on your roof right and yeah and then it's going to just be facing the sun all the time because like what car otherwise your car could be in the shade you know covering the shade in a garage or something like that yeah didn't a fisker have that on the roof the fiskar karma new generation for i believe it was only for the the radio is that correct yeah i mean i think it could like recharge like two miles a day or something did you laugh when they started blowing up when they got hit with water do you remember what happened they got the what yeah they when they had a a dealership or oh yeah the fisker karmas were parked was that like that with a flood in jersey yes yes when the the hurricane came in they got overwhelmed with water and they all started exploding this [ __ ] great video of it did you watch the video i i didn't watch the video but i didn't see that picture of the ass being naked lubed up watched that video laughed my ass off they all blow up they got wet and they blew up that's not good yeah we made our battery waterproof so that doesn't happen smart move yeah there's a guy in kazakhstan that um i think it was kazakhstan that he he just boated through a tunnel under an underwater tunnel like a flooded tunnel and just turn the wheels to steer and press the accelerator and it just floated through the tunnel and he's wow steered around the other cars you're like that's amazing it's on the internet what happens if your car gets a little sideways like if you're driving in snow like what if you're driving if your auto pilot is on and you're in like denver and it snows out and your car gets a little sideways does it correct itself oh yeah it's got great traction control but does it know how to like correct do you know how like oh yeah your ass end kicks out you know how to counter steer oh yeah no it's really good it knows how to do it yeah wow it's pretty crazy that's pretty crazy yeah so like if you're going sideways it knows how to correct itself it generally won't go sideways it won't no why not it will correct itself before it goes sideways even in black eyes yeah this video is where you could see the car be uh try it alone traction control system is very good it makes you feel like superman it's great you like you feel like you can like this it will make you feel like this incredible driver i believe it yeah now how do you program we do our testing on like an ice lake in sweden oh really yeah and like norway and canada and a few other places porsha does a lot of that too new zealand as well they do a lot of their they do some of their driver training school on these frozen surfaces so you're just you the car's going sideways whether you like it or not and you have to learn how to slide into corners and how to adjust well electric cars have really great traction control because the reaction time is so fast right so with the gasoline car you've got a lot of latency uh it takes a while for the and the engine to react and for the you know but for elec electric motors incredibly precise um that's why you like you can imagine like like if you had like a printer or something uh you would only you wouldn't have a gasoline engine printer that would be pretty weird um or or like a surgical device it's gonna be an electric motor on the surgical device on the printer gasoline engine's gonna be just chugging away it's not going to have the reaction time but to an electric motor it's operating at the millisecond level so it can turn on track on and off traction within like inches of getting on the honest like let's say drive a patch of ice it'll turn traction off and then turn it on a couple inches right after the ice like it's a little patch of ice because in in the frame of the electric motor you're moving incredibly slowly you're like a snake it's you're a snail you're just moving so slowly because it's it's it can see at a thousand frames a second and so it's say one mississippi it it just thought about at things a thousand times so it's realized that your wheels are not getting traction it understands there's some slippery surface that you're driving on yes and it makes adjustments in real time yes in milliseconds that would that would be so much safer than a regular car yes it is just that alone for loved ones you'd you'd want them to be driving your car yes i'm on dude board regular motors the the s x and three are have the lowest probability of injury of any cars ever tested by the us government wow this is yeah but it's pretty funny it's pretty crazy like we you know people still sue us like they'll have like some accident at 60 miles an hour where they'd like twisted an ankle and they sleep they like they'll be dead in another car they still sue us but that's to be expected it is to be expected do you take that into account with like the same sort of fatalistic uh you know undertones just sort of just go uh you gotta just let it go this is what people do tell you i've got it that's what it is quite a lot of respect for the justice system judges are very smart and they see they've like i haven't so far i've found judges to be very good at justice because i like like what like and juries are good too like they're actually quite good um you know people you know you read about like occasional errors in the justice system let me tell you most the time they're very good um and like you know the guy i mentioned that who fell asleep in the car and he he rode over a cyclist and you know and and that was what encouraged me to get autopilot out as soon as possible that guy sued us he sued you for falling asleep yes he i i'm not kidding he blames it on the new car smell what yes he blamed him falling asleep on your new car smell there's someone there's a lawyer this is a real thing somewhere there's a lawyer that thought that through in front of his laptop before he wrote that up yes he got a lawyer and he sued us and the judge was like you're this is crazy stop bothering me no thank god yes thank god thank god there's a judge out there with a brain i'll tell you judges are judges are very good some of them what about that judgment a lot of boys up up the river in pennsylvania who is selling those kids out you know about that story yeah judge was selling young boys to prisons he was like literally yeah literally under bribes for he was was this an elected judge or he was like somebody said you have a judge that's like actually a politician no he's elected judge this is a very famous story who he's in jail right now i think for the rest of his life and he put away he he would take like a young boy would do something like steal something from a store and he would put him in detention for you know five years something ridiculously egregious and they investigated his history and they found out that he was literally being paid off um was it by private prisons is that what the the deal was there was some sort of uh but anyway this judges two judges two judges kids for cash scandal is what it's called 2008 yeah um common please judges so i think they are elected and who is paying them oh um someone it was proven to the point where they're in jail now that someone was paying them to uh put more asses in the seats in these private prisons a million dollar payment to put him in the youth centers builder a million dollar payment yeah i do think it's this private prisons thing is creating a bad incentive right yes um but i mean that judge is in prison um thank god yes but i i for people who think perhaps the justice system consists entirely of judges like that i want to assure you this is not the case the vast majority of judges are very good i agree and they care about justice and they could have made a lot more money if they wanted to be a trial lawyer and instead they cared about justice and they made less money because they care about justice and that's why they're judges i feel that same way about police officers i feel like there's so many interactions with so many different people with police officers that the very few that stand out that are horrific we we tend to look at that like this is evidence that police are all corrupt and i think that's crazy no most most police are are are very honest yes um and uh and and and and like the military evidence military personnel that i know are very honorable ethical people yes and much more ethical than the average person that's my impression that's my impression as well but and that's not to suggest that we be complacent and assume everyone's honest and ethical and obviously if somebody is is given a a trusted place in society such as being a police officer or a judge and they are corrupt then we must be extra vigilant against such situations yes and take action uh but but we should not think that this is somehow broadly descriptive of people in that profession i couldn't agree more i think there's also an issue with um one of the things that happens with police officers prosecutors and and anyone that's trying to convict someone or arrest someone is that it becomes a game and in games people want to win and sometimes people cheat yes yes i mean if you know if you're a prosecutor you should not always want to win there are times when you should like okay i just should not want to win this case um and then you know like just pass on that case sometimes people want to win too much that is true um i think also the it becomes tough if you're if you're like a district attorney you know you you tend to sort of see a lot of criminals and then your your view of the world can get negatively yes you know have a negative you know you have a negative view of the world because you know you're just interacting with a lot of criminals but actually most of society is not consistent criminals right um and i actually had this conversation at dinner several years ago with district attorney i was like man it must sometimes seem pretty pretty dark because you know man there's some some terrible human beings out there and he was like yep and he was like dealing with some case which consisted of a couple of old ladies that would run people over somehow for insurance money it was rough i was like wow that's that's that's pretty rough it's like it's like hard to maintain faith in humanity if you're a district attorney but but you know it's only a few percent of society that are actually bad and then if you go to the worst say point one percent of society or the worst one in a thousand one in a million you know like how bad is the millionth worst person in the united states pretty damn bad like damn evil like the the millionth like the millionth well one in a million of evil is so evil people cannot even conceive of it but there's 330 million people in the united states so that's 330 people out there somewhere but by the same token there's also 330 people who are incredible angels and unbelievably good human beings yeah on the other side but because of our fear of danger we tend to our thoughts tend to gravitate towards the worst case scenario yes and we want to frame that and it's one of the real problems with prejudice we want whether it's prejudice towards different minorities or prejudice towards police officers or anything it's like we want to look at the worst case scenario and say this is an example of what this is all about and you see that even with people how they frame genders some some men frame women like that they get ripped off by a few women and they decide all women are evil some women get [ __ ] over by a few men all men are [ __ ] and and this this is very toxic and it's also it's a very unbalanced way of viewing the world and it's very emotionally based and it's based on your own experience your own anecdotal experience and it can it can be very influential to the people around you and it's just it's a dangerous way it's a dangerous thought process and pattern to promote it is it is a very dangerous pattern i really think you know people should give other people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're good until proven otherwise and i think really most people are actually pretty good people nobody's perfect they have to be if you think of the vast numbers of us that are just interacting with each other with each other constantly yeah we have to be better than we think we are yeah there's no way like there's no other way i mean hear all these weapons like but how many times like nobody's presumably trying to murder you and you're nobody yes nobody's like putting that's right it's right there fake flamethrower here it's not not a flamethrower now we got a real problem i'm gonna put it on that side too i'm gonna leave it for the guests yeah i'm like look man if i say something that [ __ ] up it's right there so we'll liven things up for sure it's guaranteed to make any party better yeah well that's i mean that's the armed uh civilization theory right that a an armed uh community is a safe and polite community yeah texas it's kind of true yeah i mean people in texas are super polite and everyone's got a gun yes don't make somebody angry yeah i don't know don't know what's going to happen yeah it's not a good move yeah piss people off when everybody can have a gun yeah off to just let that guy get in your lane yeah yeah uh you know we got a big uh test site in central texas near waco oh beautiful yeah spacex uh in mcgregor um it's about 15 minutes away from wake up that's close to where ted nugent lives shout out to ted nugent okay cool yeah um yeah they're you know we have luck lots of fire and loud explosions and things and people like that they're cool with it they don't give a [ __ ] out there they're very supportive yeah that you can buy fireworks where you know your kids go to school yeah it's you know it's dangerous yeah but it's free it's free there's something about texas that's very enticing because of that it is dangerous but it's also free right yeah yeah i kind of like texas actually well i prefer it over places that are more restrictive but more liberal because you could always be liberal like just because things are free and just because you have a certain amount of you know right wing type characters it doesn't mean you have to be that way you know and and honestly there's a lot of those people that are pretty [ __ ] open-minded and let you do whatever you want to do right you don't bother them yeah exactly that's my hope right now with um the way we're able to communicate with each other today and how radically different it is than generations past is that we all just the dust settles and we all realize like like what you were saying that most people are good most people are good the vast majority yes i think you should give people the benefit of that for sure i think you're right yeah you know who can help that what mushrooms don't you think they're delicious yeah right yeah they're good for you too yeah all of them all kinds of them um what do you see in terms of like when you think about the future of your companies what do you see as like bottlenecks you want some more of those uh sure thank you what do you see in terms of like bottlenecks of things that are that are holding back innovation is it regulatory commissions and and people that don't understand the technology that are influencing policy like what what what could potentially be holding you guys back right now is there anything that you would change yeah that's a good question you know i wish i wish politicians were better at science that would help a lot that's a problem yes there's no incentive for them to be good at science there isn't um actually you know they're pretty good at science in china i have to say yeah the mayor of beijing is i believe in environmental engineering degree and the deputy mayor as a physics degree i met them and uh mayor shanghai is really smart and you're up on technology what do you think about this government policy of of stopping use of huawei phones and there's there's something about the the the worry about spying is i mean from what i've understand from real tech people they think it's horseshit oh i like phones i don't know i don't know um like the government say don't you buy huawei phones does that do are you up on that at all no should we just abandon this idea well i think like i guess if you're if you're uh if you have like top secret stuff um then you want to be pretty careful about what hardware you use uh but you know like most people do not have top secret stuff right and like nobody really cares what porn you watch you know right like it's like nobody actually cares you know so and if they do that's kind of on them like national spy agencies do not care do not give a rat's ass what porn you watch they do not care so like what secrets does a national spy agency have to learn from the average citizen nothing well that's the argument against the the narrative and the argument by a lot of these tech people is that the real concern is that these companies like huawei are innovating at a radical pace and they're trying to stop them from integrating into our culture and letting this like right now they're the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world okay samsung's number one huawei is number two apple is now number three they surpassed apple's number two and the idea is that this is all taking place without them having any foothold whatsoever in america there are no there's no carriers that have their phones you have to buy their phones unlocked through some sort of a third party and then put it okay so and the the worry is you know that these are somehow another controlled by the chinese government the communist chinese government is going to distribute these phones and i don't know if it's the worries economic influence that they'll have too much power i don't know what it is are you are you paying attention on any of this not really you know i don't think we should worry too much about huawei phones uh you know maybe you know our national security agencies shouldn't have huawei phones maybe that's a question mark uh but uh i think for the average citizen it doesn't matter doesn't doesn't like no they're not i'm pretty sure the chinese government does not care about the goings-on of the average american citizen is there is there a time where you think that there will be no security will be impossible to hold back information that whatever bottleneck we'll we'll let go we're gonna we're gonna give in that whatever bottleneck between privacy and ultimate innovation will have to be bridged in order for us to achieve the next level of technological proficiency that we're just going to abandon it and there'll be no no security no privacy do people want privacy because they seem to put everything on the internet well right now they're confused but when you're talking about your neural link and this this idea that one day we are going to be able to share information we're going to be some sort of a thing that's symbiotically create uh symbiotically connected yeah i think we really need to worry about security in that situation and for sure that's like a security paramount sure yeah but also what we will be is will be so much different our concerns about money about status about well all these things will seemingly go by the wayside if we really become enlightened if we really become artificially enlightened by some sort of an ai interface where we have this symbiotic relationship with some new internet type connection to information what you know what happens then what what is important what is not important is privacy important when we're all gods i mean i think the things that we think are important to keep private right now right we probably will not think are shame right information right what do you what do you hide emotions what are we hiding i mean i think like i don't know maybe it's like embarrassing stuff right embarrassing stuff but there's actually like i think people there's like not that much that's kept private that people that is actually relevant right that's people what other people actually care about and we think other people care about it but they don't really care about it and certainly governments don't well some people care about it but then it gets weird when you when it gets exposed like jennifer lawrence when those naked pictures of her got exposed like i think in some ways people liked her more they realized like she's just a person just a girl who likes sex and is just alive and has a boyfriend and sends them messages and now you get to look into it and you probably shouldn't of but somebody let it go and they put it online and all right she seems to be doing okay she's a person she's just you and me and it's the same thing she's just in some weird place where she's on a 35 foot tall screen with music playing every time she talks yeah i i i i mean i'm sure she's like not she's not happy about it but she's but she's clearly doing fine but once this interface is fully realized where we really do become something far more powerful in terms of our cognitive ability or our ability to understand irrational thoughts and and mitigate them and that we're all connected in some sort of an insane way what i mean how what our thoughts on wealth our thoughts on social status like how many of those just evaporate and our need for privacy maybe our need for privacy will be the ultimate bottleneck that we'll have to substitute that we'll have to surpass i think the things that we think are important now will probably not be important in the future but there will be things that are important what would be more different things i know there might be some more of ideas potentially i don't think darwin's going away right no one's going to be there no one dawn will be there forever forever yeah it would just be a different a different arena different arena a digital arena different arena darwin's not going away what keeps you up at night well it's quite hard to run companies yeah especially car companies i have to say it's quite challenging the car business is the hardest one of all the things you do yes because it's a consumer-oriented business as opposed to like spacex and not that spacex spacex there's no walk in the park but but a car company it's very difficult to keep a car company alive it's very difficult you know there's only two car companies in the history of american car companies that haven't gone bankrupt and that's ford and tesla that's it yeah ford rode out that crazy storm huh they're the only ones the skin of their teeth shout out to the mustang yeah yeah by the skin of their teeth that is interesting right same with tesla we barely survived how close did you get to folding very close we uh for 2008 is not a good time to be a car company especially a startup car company and especially an electric car company that was like stupidity squared and this is when you had those cool roadsters with the t-top yeah with the um target top yeah we had like uh he was a highly modified elise chassis the body was all completely different by the way that was a super dumb strategy that we actually did was dumb it was based on two false premises uh one false premise was that we'd be able to cheaply convert the lotus elise and use that as a car platform and that we would be able to use technology from this little company called ac propulsion for the electric drivetrain and the battery problem is the ac propulsion technology did not work in production and we ended up using none of it in the long term none of it we had to redesign everything and then the once you add a battery pack an electric motor to the car it got heavier got 30 heavier invalidated the entire structure all the crash structure everything had to be redone nothing like i think it had less than seven percent of the parts were common with any other device including cars or anything that's the seven percent yes everything including tires and wheels bolts brakes yeah even the steering wheel see the steering wheel was i think the steering wheel was almost the same yes the the windscreen when it's different no i think the windscreen is the same same yes i think i think we were able to keep this last seven percent so that's right basically every body panel is different the entire structure was different the uh we couldn't use the h like the hvac system the you know the air conditioner was a belt-driven air conditioner so now we needed uh something that was electrically driven we need a new ac compressor and all that takes away from the battery life as well right yeah we needed a small highly efficient air conditioning system um that fit in a tiny car and was electrically powered not belt driven it was very difficult how much did those weigh the those cars the roadster i think it was about twenty seven hundred pounds that's still very sound depending on which version twenty six fifty to twenty seven fifty pounds something like that and what was the weight distribution um it was about fifty well there were different versions of the car um so it was about 55 on the rear because it was rear biased right but not bad like considering like a 911 which is like one of the most popular sports cars of all time heavy rear end bias well i mean yeah the 911 i think the joke is like they managed to despite newton not being on their side yeah if you're fighting newton it's very difficult well it's like you've got those the moments of inertia on a 911 don't make any sense they do once you understand them once you understand you don't want to hang the engine off the ass this is not a wise move you don't want to let up on the gas when you're in a corner the problem with whether with with something that's where the engine is mounted over the rear axle or off the rear axle towards the rear is that your moment of inertia is fundamentally screwed you cannot solve this it's unsolvable you're screwed you're screwed right like essentially if you spawn the car like a top that's your problem moment of inertia you're just i promised i wouldn't swear on this show by the way really to who because it was my friend tell that friend to go [ __ ] himself who told you not to swear afraid i'm not a good friend yes definitely realize you're [ __ ] elon musk you can do whatever you want man if you ever get confused call me i'll swear in private swear up a storm just say fricken it's a fun way there's like old house moms [Laughter] wives and [ __ ] that have children oh this freaking thing yeah but anyway like like the porsche is kind of incredible how well porsche handle is given that uh it's the physics yes the moments of inertia are so messed up uh to actually still make it work well is is incredible well if you know how to turn into the corner once you get used to the feeling of it there's actual benefits to it you know there are some benefits i enjoy i the car i had before tesla was a 911. oh okay that was 997 or six yeah 997 yeah yeah um great car man yeah i mean particularly with on the porsche when they had the variable vanes uh the turbo and you didn't have the turbo lag that was great yeah that was really great the turbo lag was is like you know if you floor it like phone home call your mom the older one about an hour later the car accelerates and super dangerous too because then the real wheels start spinning yeah yeah there's something fun about it though like feeling that rear weight kicking around you know and again it's quite efficient a good feel to it yeah yeah i agree but that's that's what i was talking about earlier about that little car that i have the 93 911 it's just there's it's not fast it's not it's not the best handling car but it's more satisfying than any other car i have because it's so mechanical it's like everything about it like crackles and bumps and it gives you all this feedback and i take it to the comedy store because when i get there i feel like my brain is just popping and it's on fire it's like a strategy for me now that i i really stopped driving other cars there i drive that car there just for the brain juice just for the the the inner the interaction i mean you should try model s p 100 d i'll try to blow your mind your skull okay yeah tell me what to order i'll order it model sp 100d okay jamie that's the best car that i drive okay okay i'll get with the car you drive okay it will blow your mind out of your scope i believe you how far can i drive how far about 300 miles that's good for la regular days you will never notice the battery never never how hard is it to get like one of them crazy plugs installed in your house that difficult no it's super easy it's like yeah it's like a dryer plug it's like a dryer outlet didn't you come up with some crazy tiles for your roof that are solar paneled yeah yeah we're i have it on my roof right now actually i'm just trying it out it's like it's the thing it takes a while to like test roof stuff because roofs have to last a long time right so like you want your roof to last like 30 years over a regular groove now so there's two versions there's like the solar panels you put on a roof so like depending on whether your roof's new or old so if your roof's new you don't want to replace the roof you want to put like solar panels on the roof right um so that's like retrofit you know and then we're trying to make the retrofit panels look real nice um and then but then the new product we're coming out with is if you if you have a roof that's either you're building a house or you're gonna replace your roof anyway then you make the site the tiles have solar solar cells embedded in the tiles and then it's quite a tricky thing because you want to not see the solar cell behind the like the glass tile uh so you have to really work with like the glass and and the various coatings and layers so that you don't see the solar cell behind the glass otherwise it doesn't look right right so it's really tricky there it is jamie put it up there yeah and that looks good see is there a uh see like if you look closely you can see if you're zooming like you can see the so you can see the cell but if you zoom out you don't see the cell right well it looks cool though like that's that's hard visible it's really hard because you have to have sunlight go through right but where to cut when this when it gets reflected back out it doesn't it it hides the fact that there's a cell there now are those available to the consumer right now well we have uh i think those on that roof right there yes that's amazing oh that looks good yeah oh i like that that one's hard oh so you got that kind of fake spanish looking thing i like that that's french slate that's white people in connecticut smoking pipes look at that one yeah that's badass dude so those all actually work i believe you so the the the the solar panels that are on that house that we just looked at is that sufficient to power the entire home it depends on your energy on how yeah yeah so um generally yes i would say it's probably for most it's going to vary but anywhere from more than you need to uh maybe half like call it a half to 1.5 of the energy that you need depending on how much roof you have relative to living space and how ridiculous you are with the tv tv is no problem air conditioning air conditioning okay air conditioning is the problem if you have an efficient air conditioner and you don't and depending on how like are you air conditioning rooms when they don't need to be air conditioned which is very common because it's a pain in the neck it's like programming a vcr it's like right you know it's just the blinking 12 and so people just like hell with that i'm just going to make it this temperature all day long right you don't have a smart home where if you're in the room then it stays cool right yeah it should predict when you're going to be home and then cool the room the rooms that you're likely to use with a little bit of intelligence we're not talking about like genius home here we're just talking like elementary basic stuff um you know like if you could hook that into the car like it knows you're coming home like there's no point in cooling the home keeping the comb keeping the whole the home really cool when you're not there right but it can tell that you're coming home it's going to cool it to the right temperature right you have an app there that works with your solar panels or anything like that yeah yeah we do and we need to hook it into the air conditioning to really make the air conditioning work have you thought about creating an air conditioning system i know you have a trick question cannot answer questions about future potential okay let's just let it go we'll move on to the next thing that would be an interesting idea yeah i would say radiant heating all that good ideas now when you when you think about the efficiency of these homes and you think about implementing solar power and battery power and is there anything else that people are missing is there any other like i just saw a smart watch that is powered by the heat of the human body it's some new technology it's able to fully power that way i don't know if it's fully or if it's like this watch right here this is a casio okay um it's called a uh pro-tec and it's in like an outdoors watch and it's solar-powered okay and so it has the ability to operate for a certain amount of time on solar yeah so if you have it exposed it could function for a certain amount of time on solar yeah well you know um like there's the self-winding watches where you know it's just got a weight in the watch and as you move your wrist the weight moves from one side to the other and it winds the watch up that's a pretty cool thing yeah yeah well it's amazing that like rolex is that it's all done mechanically there's no batteries in there there's no nothing yeah you could do the same thing create a little charger that's based on uh wrist movement it really depends on how much energy your watch uses you know what's [ __ ] up about that though we accept a certain amount of like [ __ ] with those watches like i brought my watch i have a rolex that my friend lorenzo gave me and i brought it to um the watch store and i said this thing's always fast i said it's always like after a couple months it's like five minutes fast and they go yep they go yeah really it's just what it does and i go hold on i go so you're telling me that it just is always going to be fast it's like yeah it's just like every few months you gotta like reset it seems like they should recalibrate that thing they can't they tried they say every few months whether it's four months or five months or six months it's gonna be a couple of minutes fast okay it seems like they should really uh recalibrate that because if it's always fast you can just you know delete those minutes you need to [ __ ] kick down the door at rolex and go you [ __ ] are lazy [Laughter] it's kind of amazing that you can keep tie mechanically on a wristwatch with these tiny little gears it's amazing yeah i mean the the whole luxury watch market is fascinating i i'm i'm not that involved in in terms like i don't buy them i bought them as gifts i don't buy them for myself but when i look at them online like there's million dollar watches out there now that are like they have like little rotating moons and stars and they they live like look at this thing how much is that one jamie these are [ __ ] preposterous i like gears i love them yeah i think they're beautiful but there's some of these people that are just taking it right in the ass they're buying these watches for like 750 000 i'm like yo that's a timex sun nobody knows it's not any better than some casio that you could just buy online like look at that though well here's the thing if you're a person that doesn't just want to know the time you want craftsmanship you want some artisans touch you want innovation in terms of like a person figuring out how gears and cogs all line up perfectly to every time it turns over it's basically a second i mean that's just there's there's art to that that's it yeah it's not just telling time i like this watch a lot but if it got hit by a rock i wouldn't be sad yeah it's just a watch it's a it's a mass-produced thing that runs on some quartz battery but those things that's there's art to that no i agree it's beautiful yeah yeah i love it yeah there's something there's something amazing about it it's because it represents the human creativity it's not just it's not just uh electronic innovation there's something there's there's a person's work in that yes but you don't have a watch on no ever i used to have a watch what happened mike my phone tells the time so good point what if you lose your phone do you wait hold on true let me guess you are a no case guy that's correct living on the edge looking on the edge without a case tyson neil degrasse tyson was in here last week i i marveled at his ability to get through life without a case that's right you know he takes his phone and he flips it in between his fingers like like a like a a a soldier would do with his rifle right he just rolls that [ __ ] in between his fingers okay marvelous wow he says that's the reason why they do it he said will you look at someone who has a rifle why would they do that why would they flip it around like that right so that when it goes to drop they have it in their hand they catch it quickly so that's what he does with his phone he's just flipping his phone around all the time i got that in mexico i was hoping it holds joints does it do anything it seems to open oh it's just a hole just a hole good storage storage in there but like try to put a joint in there close it you put like one one blunt one but it seems pretentious you know that's the idea behind it i bought it when i was in mexico because i figured it would be a good size to hold joints restaurant so is that a joint or is it a cigar no okay it's um marijuana inside of uh tobacco okay so it's like posh plot tobacco you never had that yeah i think i tried one once come on man you probably can't because stockholders right i mean it's legal right it's totally legal okay how does that work do people get upset at you if you do certain things there's tobacco and marijuana in there that's all it is the the combination of tobacco and marijuana is wonderful first turned onto it by charlie murphy and then reignited by dave chappelle there you go plus whiskey exactly perfect balances it out alcohol alcohol is a drug it's been grandfathered in well it's not just a drug it's a drug that gets a bad rap because you just have a little it's great fine yeah a little sip here and there and you just your inhibitions are relaxed and it shows your true self and hopefully you're more joyous and friendly and happy and and everything's good the real worry is the people that can't handle it like the real worry about people who can't handle cars that can go zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds or anything have you ever considered something that like imagine if one day everyone has a car that's on the same at least technological standard as one of your cars and everyone agrees that the smart thing to do is not just to have bumpers but to perhaps have some sort of a magnetic repellent device something some electro magnetic field around the cars that as cars come close to each other they automatically radically decelerate because of magnets or something well i mean our cars break automatically break yeah yeah when they see things yes but like a physical barrier like uh well the wheels work pretty well the wheels do yeah yeah they work pretty well decelerated that's you know 1.1 to 1.2 g's that kind of thing is there a concern that one day all your cars will be on the road and then they'll still be regular people with regular cars 20 30 years from now that'll get in the mix and be the the main problem yeah i think it'd be sort of like it was a time of transition where there were horses and gasoline cars on the road at the same time it's been pretty weird oh that'd be the weirdest yeah i mean horses were tricky you know back in uh manhattan had like 300 000 horses you figure like a horse lives 15 years you've got 20 000 horses dropping dead every day or every year i should say every year 20 000 horses if there's 300 000 horses in 15-year lifespan back in the gangs in new york days that movie yeah yeah it's a lot of dead horses and you need a horse to move the horse right and they'll probably get pretty pretty freaked out if they have to move a dead horse do you think they know what's going on yeah i mean it's going to be like pretty weird no i would imagine am i dragging this dead you know horse around and i'm a horse do you ever stop and think about your role in civilization do you ever stop and think about your role in the culture because me as a person who never met you until today when i think of you you know i've always thought of you as being this weirdo super inventor dude who just somehow or another keeps coming up with new [ __ ] but there's not a lot of you out there like everybody else seems to be i mean obviously you make a lot of money and there's a lot of people that make a lot of money you like that clock yeah pretty dope right this is a great clock yeah you want one i'll get you one sure okay done i like weird things like this oh this is the coolest it's tgt promotion what is this tgt studios tgt studios yeah yeah um it's a gentleman who makes all this by hand yeah it's really cool my study is filled with weird devices well get ready for another one all right i'm sending it your way cool you want a werewolf too i'll hook you up all right i'll take one one werewolf and one clock coming up do you think about your role in the culture because me as a person who never met you until today i i've always looked at you and like wow like how's this guy just keep inventing [ __ ] like how do you how do you keep coming up with all these new devices and what do you ever consider how on you like i had a dream once that there was a million teslas instead of like one tesla there was a million teslas okay not chesley the car but nicola oh yeah sure and that in his day there was a million people like him who were radically innovative it was a weird dream man it was so strange and i've had it more than once result in very rapid technology innovation that's for sure it's one of the only dreams in my life i've had more than one time okay like where i've woken up and it's in the same dream i'm in the same dream and in this dream it's 1940s 1950s but everyone is severely advanced there's flying blimps with like lcd screens on the side of them and everything's bizarre and strange and it stuck with me for whatever obviously this is just a stupid dream but for whatever reason all these years that stuck with me like it takes one man like nikola tesla to have more than a hundred inventions that were patents right i mean he had some pretty great pretty [ __ ] amazing ideas yes but there was in his day there was very few people like him that was true what if there was a million like what in the end advanced very quickly right but there's not a million elon musks there's one [ __ ] do you think i'm about that please try to not hmm [Laughter] i don't think i don't think you'd necessarily want to be me well what's the worst part about you people would like it that much well most people wouldn't but they can't be you so that's like that's like some superhero type [ __ ] you know you wouldn't want to be spider-man rather just sleep tight in gotham city i hope he's out there doing his job it's very hard to turn it off yeah what's the hardest part it might sound great if it's turned on but what if it doesn't turn off now i showed you the isolation tank and you've never experienced that before yeah i think that could help you turn it off a little bit just for the night yeah just give you a little bit of sleep a little bit of perspective magnesium that you get from the water as well that makes you makes you sleep easier because the water has epsom salts in it but maybe some sort of strategy for uh sacrificing your biologi or not sacrificing but enhancing your biological recovery time by figuring out a way whether it's through meditation or some other ways to shut off that that thing at night like you must have like a constant stream of ideas that's running through your head all the time you getting text messages from checks no uh i'm getting text messages from from friends saying what the hell are you doing smoking weed is that bad for you it's legal yeah it's kind of unapproved it's not you know uh i'm not a regular smoker of weed how often you smoke it almost never i mean it's it's i don't actually notice any effect well there you go there was a time where i think it was ramdas or someone gave some buddhist monk a bunch of acid okay and he ate it and it had no effect on him i doubt that i would say that too but i've never meditated to the level that some of these people have where they're constantly meditating all day they don't have any material possessions and all of their energy is spent trying to achieve a certain mindset i would like to cynically deny that i'd like to cynically say they just [ __ ] think the same way i do they just hang out with flip-flops on and make weird noises but maybe no you know i i i know a lot of people like weed and that's fine uh but i don't find that it is very good for productivity for you not for me yeah i mean i would imagine that for someone like you it's not someone like you it would be more like a cup of coffee right you want you have a mate yeah it's more like the opposite of a cup of coffee like a cup of coffee in reverse oh wheat is yeah no i'm saying you would like more more like what would be beneficial to you would be like coffee i like to get things done i like to be useful that is one of the hardest things to do is to be useful when you say you like to get things done like in terms of like what satisfaction when you complete a project when something something that you invent comes to fruition and you see people enjoying it that feeling yes doing something useful for other people that i like doing that's interesting for other people yes so that do you think that that is maybe the way you recognize that you have this unusual position in the culture where you can uniquely influence certain things because of this i mean you essentially have a gift right i mean you would think it was a curse but i'm sure it's been fueled by many many years of discipline and learning but you essentially have a gift and that you have this radical sort of creativity engine when it comes to innovation and technology it's like you're just you're going at a very high rpms all the time what is that doesn't stop i don't know what would happen if i got into a sensory deprivation tank let's try it sounds were concerning it's like running the engine with no resistance that's just is that what it is though maybe it's not maybe it's fine i don't know i'll try it i'll try it have you ever experienced experimented with meditation or anything yes what do you do or what have you done rather i mean just sort of sit there and be quiet and then repeat some mantra which acts as a focal point it's distill the mind it distill the mind but i don't find myself drawn to it frequently do you think that perhaps productivity is maybe more attractive to you than enlightenment and like or even the concept of whatever enlightenment means like what are you trying to achieve when you're meditating all the time with you it seems like almost like there's a franticness to your creativity that comes out of this this burning furnace and for in order for you to like calm that thing down get through you might have to throw too much water on it it's like a never-ending explosion like what is it like i try to explain it to a dumb person like me what's going on never-ending explosion it's just constant ideas just bouncing around yes damn yeah so when everybody leaves it's just elon sitting at home brushing his teeth just bunch ideas bouncing around your head yeah all the time when did you realize that that's not the case with most people i think when i was i don't know five or six or something i thought i was insane why did you think you were insane because it was clear that other people did not what their mind wasn't exploding with ideas all the time they weren't expressing it they weren't talking about it all and you realized by the time you were five or six like oh they're probably not even getting this thing that i'm getting no it was just strange it was like hmm i'm strange that was my conclusion i'm strange but did you feel diminished by it in any way like knowing that this is a weird thing that you really probably couldn't commiserate with with other people they wouldn't understand i hope they wouldn't find out because they might like put me away with something you thought that for a second yes when you were little yeah i knew they put people away what if they put me away like when you were little you thought this yes wow like you thought this is so radically different than the people that are around me if they find out i got the stream coming in yeah wow but you know i was only like five or six so like do you think this is like i mean there's there's outliers biologically you mean there's people that are seven foot nine there's people who have giant hands there's people that have eyes that are 2015 vision there's always outliers um do you feel like you like caught this like you've got some you're like on some weird innovation creativity sort of wave that's very unusual like you you tapped into i mean just think of the the various things you've been able to accomplish in a very short amount of time and you're constantly doing this that's a weird you're a weird person right i agree yeah like what if there's a million elon musks well that would be very very weird yeah it'd be pretty weird like right real weird definitely yeah what if they're a million joe rockets oh there probably is probably two million [Laughter] i mean i think that's the case with a lot of folks i mean but like uh you know my goal is like try to do useful things try to maximize it probably the future is good um make the future exciting something you look forward to you know you know with uh you know with tesla we're like trying to make things that people love you know it's like not i think how many how many things can you buy that you really love that really give you joy so rare so rare i wish there were more things that's what we try to do just make things that somebody loves when you when you think about making things that someone loves like do you specifically think about like what things would improve people's experience like what what would change the way people interface with life that would make them more relaxed or more happy you really think like when you're thinking about things like that is that like one of your considerations like what what could i do that would help people that maybe they wouldn't be able to figure out yeah like like what are the set of things that can be done to make the future better like you know like so i think that a future where we are space faring civilization and out there among the stars this is very exciting this makes me look forward to the future this makes me want that future you know the things they need to be things that make you look forward to waking up in the morning you wake up in the morning look forward to the day look forward to the future in a future where we are space-faring civilization and out there among the stars i think that's very exciting that is a thing we want whereas if if you knew we would not be a spacefaring civilization but forever confined to earth this would not be a good future that would be very sad i think it would be so sad future of the the just the the finite lifespan of the earth itself and the solar system itself that even though it's possibly you know i mean how many how long do they feel like this sun and the solar system is going to exist how many hundreds of millions of years well it's probably if you're saying the when does the sun boil the oceans right about 500 million years so is is it sad that we never leave because in 500 million years that happens is that what you're saying no i just think like if there are two futurists and one futurist we're out there among the stars and the things we read about and see in science fiction movies the good ones are true we have these starships and we're we we're going to see what other planets are like and we're a multi-planet species and the scope and scale of consciousness is expanded across many civilizations and many planets and many star systems this is a great future this is a wonderful thing to me and that's what we should strive for hmm but that's biological travel that's cells traveling physically to another location yes do you think that's definitely where we're going no yeah i don't think so either i used to think so and now i'm thinking more likely less than ever like almost every day less likely we can definitely go to the moon and mars yeah everything we will go to the asteroid belt and we can go to the moons of jupiter saturn you can even get to pluto that'd be the craziest place ever if we colonized mars and re-terraformed it and turned it into like a big jamaica just i think i think turn the whole thing into cancun well i mean over time it wouldn't be easy but yes right you could just you could warm it up yeah you can warm it up you could add air you get some water there i mean over time hundreds of millions of years or whatever it takes it could be a multi-planet species that would be amazing the multi-planet species that's what's ultimately like air conditioning saturn i'm pro-human me too yeah i love humanity i think it's great we're glad as a robot that you love humans because we we love you too and we don't want you to kill us and eat us and uh i mean you know strangely i think a lot of people don't like humanity and see it as a blight but i do not well i think one of those i think part of that is just they've been you know they've been struggling when people struggle they associate their struggle with other people they never internalize their problems they look to other people as holding them back and people suck and [ __ ] people and it's just it you know it's an evil never-ending cycle but not always again most people are really good most people vast majority this may sound corny it does sound cool but love is the answer it is the answer yep yeah it is it sounds corny because we're all scared you know we're all scared of trying to love people being rejected or someone taking advantage of you because you're trying to be loving sure but if we all could just relax and love each other wouldn't hurt to have more love in the world it definitely wouldn't hurt yeah it'd be great yeah we should do that yeah i agree man really how do you fix that you have a love machine [Laughter] no but uh probably spend more time with your friends in less time on social media now deleting social media from your applications from your phones and that give you uh 10 boost of happiness was what do you think the percentages i think probably something like that yeah good 10 yeah i mean i mean the only thing i've kept is twitter because i kind of like need some means of getting a message out you know right [Music] that's about it so far so good well what's interesting with you you actually occasionally engage with people on twitter yeah it's what percentage of that is a good idea [Laughter] good question right it's hard it's mostly i think it's unbalanced more good than bad but there's definitely some bad so do you ever hopefully the good outweighs the bad do you ever think about how odd it is the weird feeling that you get when someone says something shitty to you on twitter and you read it the weird feeling this weird little negative jolt it's like a subjective negative jolt of energy that you don't really need to absorb but you do anyway like well [ __ ] this guy [ __ ] him i mean there's a lot of negativity on twitter it is but it's a weird it's in in its form like the way if you ingest it as if you're like you try to be like a little scientist as you're ingesting it you're like well how weird is this and i'm even getting upset at some strange person saying something mean to me it's not even accurate i mean the there are a vast number of negative comments uh so the vast for the vast majority of i just ignore them the vast majority yeah but every now and again you get drawn in it's not good it's not good make mistakes yes you can make mistakes you can make some mistakes we're all human we can make mistakes yeah it's hard and people love it when you say something and you take it back they're like [ __ ] you we saved it forever [ __ ] screenshot that [ __ ] [ __ ] you had that thought you had that thought like well i deleted it not good enough you had the thought i'm better than you i never had that thought you had that thought you piece of [ __ ] look i saved it i put it on my blog yeah i'm not sure why people think that that anyone would think that deleting a tweet makes it go away it's like hello been the internet for a while yeah well it's even like the thing is they don't want you to be able to delete it because the problem is if you don't delete it and you don't believe it anymore it's really hard to say hey that thing above i don't really believe that anymore i change the way i the way i view things yes because people go well [ __ ] you all right i have that over there i'm gonna just take that i'm not gonna pay attention that [ __ ] you wrote it's on your permanent record it's forever bro we'll put this on your permanent record yeah it's like a tattoo you keep it oh yeah yeah well it's it's this thing where there's it's it's a there's a lack of compassion it's a lack of compassion issue people just like intentionally shitty to each other all the time online and trying to catch me it's they're more trying to catch people doing something that's arrestable like a cop trying to like get you know arrests on his his record it's like they're trying to catch you with something more than they're logically looking at it thinking it's a bad thing that you've done or that it's an idea they don't agree with so much they need to insult you trying to catch you yeah i i mean it's way easier to be mean on social media than it is to be mean in person yes way easier yeah yes it's weird it's it's not a normal way of human interacting it's cheating we're not supposed to be able to interact so easily but people are not looking at yes you would never do that you'd never be so mean to somebody looking in their eyes and if you did you'd feel like [ __ ] most people yeah unless your sociopath you'd feel terrible yes elon musk this has been a pleasure yeah likewise it really has been it's been an honor thank you for having me um thanks for doing this because uh i know you don't do a lot of uh long-form stuff like this i hope i didn't weird you out and i hope you don't get mad that you smoke weed i mean not bad it's legal we're in california this is just as legal as this whiskey we've been drinking exactly this is all good right cheers thank you um is there any message you would like to put out other than love is the answer because i think you really nailed it with that no i think you know i think people should be nicer to each other and give people and give give more credit to others and don't assume that they're mean until you know they're actually mean you know just it's easy to demonize people you're usually wrong about it people are nicer than you think give people more credit i couldn't agree more and i want to thank you not just for all the crazy innovations you've come up with and your constant flow of ideas but that you choose to spread that idea which is it's uh it's very vulnerable but it's very honest and i it resonates with me and i believe it i believe it's true too so thank you and all you [ __ ] out there be nice be nice [ __ ] all right thank you everybody thank you very much thank you good night everybody

https://youtu.be/kzlUyrccbos

We we met a number of years ago in part I was writing a movie I was going in to pitch a movie called interstellar at the time Steven Spielberg was the director and he wanted to do a grounded Movie about the future of space travel so I came in to my pitch was very short I said the movies gonna be 10 minutes long because it's not happening it was about 10 years ago We're not going there's no money left This is not a priority for us anymore And then in the course of and somehow. I got the job in the course of Writing the movie working with Kip Thorne a physicist invited me in a physics conference one night And I got seated next to Ilana We've been friends ever since the irony of that being I wound up becoming friends with a guy who I think personally is moving the needle back in the other direction And up by himself at this point More than more than anyone. I can think of so the net result is I think we are going back to the moon I think we are going to Mars, and I think a lot of it is because of you So one of the questions we got here today One of the questions that you guys have submitted the night that I love is simple Mars how can we help? What see so In the short term Mars is really about getting a spaceship built We're we're making good progress on this on the on the ship and the booster Codenamed PFR What is this tan for again well, it's like sort of a roar shy yes an acronym form And It is very big and I gave a presentation on this at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia last year And that design is evolving rapidly we're actually building that That should but that ship right now The I Think right now that like the biggest thing. That would be helpful is just general support and encouragement and a good goodwill I Think once we build it there will be Well it will have a a Point of proof something that the Companies and countries can then go and do like they currently don't think it's possible so if we show them that it is then I think they will Fill up their game, and they will build Interplanetary transport vehicles as well Now once that has been built, and there is a There's a means of getting. I'll go and people to and from Mars as well as turn from the moon other places in the solar system and I think That's that's really where There's a matter of entrepreneurial entrepreneurial resources that are needed because you got to build out the entire base of Industry everything that allows your human civilization to exist and it's gonna be harder a Lot harder in a place like Mars or the moon We need some volunteers to be colonists do we have any comments pollen tears here? I'm actually not many hands raised by the way I Mean the moon of Mars often thought of is like is this some escape ski escape hatch for rich people but I it won't be that at all, it's In anyone who look for the only people that go to Better Mars. It'll be far more dangerous. I mean really it's it kind of reads like Shackleton's ad full Antarctic explorers, you know it's like Difficult dangerous good chance you will die Excitement for those who survive That kind of thing and I think there's not many people who actually want to go in the beginning because all those things I said are true but there'll be some who will for whom the excitement of the frontier and exploration exceeds the concern of danger and And it will start off building the first elementary infrastructure just a base to create propellant a power station Blast domes in which to grow crops All the sort of fundamentals without which we you cannot survive and then and then really there's gonna be an explosion of entrepreneur opportunity because mas will need everything from Iron foundries to pizza joints to like pizza joints Like oh, I should really have great bars The Mars bar right Like I would love dad What do you think the timeline for this is so I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the timeline although I'm I can't be a little sometimes my timelines are a little you know People have told me that My timelines historically have been optimistic and So trying to recalibrate to some degree here But I can tell you what what I know currently this case is that where we are building the first ship the first Mars Orange over interplanetary ship Right now, and I think we'll be able to be able to do short flights short sort of up and down flights Probably sometime in the first half of next year. This is a very big Booster in ship the liftoff thrust of this would be about twice that of a seven-five So it's it's capable of doing 150 metric tons to to orbit it and be fully reusable So the the expendable payload is around around double that number so What it'll what's amazing about the ship assuming we can make Pulling wool and rapid reusability work is that we can reduce the cost marginal cost per flight? Dramatically by orders of magnitude compared to where it is today But this this question of reusability is so fundamental to rocketry it is the it is the fundamental fundamental breakthrough that's needed if you consider aircraft for example the You can Lease a 747 and do a return flight from Cal Bullock. Ah go from California to Australia For half a million dollars, that's what it cost to Lisa 747 fully round trip to Australia which is far To buy a single agent to have a prop plane a good one would Would be about one and a half million dollars, and that can't even reach, Australia and it's and it's tiny compared to a 747 so what that means is like a it cost less to - take it - use a giant plane with huge cargo for a long trip then at Night that costs way less than buying a small plane for a short trip in the aircraft world and the same actually is true of rocketry the be a VFR flight will actually cost less then then our Falcon one flight bit back in today that Was about a five or six million dollar marginal cost per flight they were confident that VFR will be less than that So that that's profound and that is what will enable the creation of a affirmative base on the moon any city on Mars And that's the Equality of like the Union Pacific Railroad or or having Ships that work across the oceans Until you can get there, there's no way for all of the entrepreneurial energy to Do you can't you can't do anything there's no way for the flowers to bloom Once you can get there the opportunity is immense and So we're gonna do our best to get you there, and then make sure that there's an environment in which Entrepreneurs can Laura, SH and And then I think it'll be it'll be amazing a big part of that and we've talked about this is Inspiring people to look again like this. You know we talked about this yesterday It was our grandparents who went to the moon, and we have not gone back since you know in my lifetime No one's gone to the moon You and I were having a conversation last year about what to put in Falcon Heavy? and and the kind of What's the cargo? And the idea was to to use that as an opportunity to inspire people again Carl Sagan had a beautiful thought many many years ago there if you just get enough people to look at the Earth from a distance that if we get them to focus on the problems here and on the possibilities of space exploration I Was fortunate enough to be with you at launch control when Falcon Heavy? Launched a few weeks back and we made a little movie. We've called it a trailer That that sums up that experience we have it we have it here. We thought we'd play it you guys again This is two minutes that that does a pretty good job of giving you the feeling of what it was like To be there when fucking everyone Yeah We really want we wanted to get the public year to warranty of getting excited about the possibility of something new happening in space of the space frontier getting pushed forward the goal of this was to inspire you and Make you believe again. Just as people believed in the Apollo era that anything is possible That picture at the end is a picture of one of the circuit boards inside the Roadster window But we tried confused the aliens as much as possible As if you look carefully there's also a little Hot Wheels version of the Roadster With a tiny little astronaut in the hot wheels roadster on the dashboard How was just by a basketball Nora Norse just that and so if you guys have any suggestions let us know I Think for me watching those two boosters Come down side by side it felt like a transformative moment it felt like a oh we can do anything and that's the culmination I was really struck there by the culmination of you know a singular vision and hundreds or thousands of very talented people working together to make sure Every sitting in launch control and looking at the sheer amount of variables that you guys are clocking in those moments before the launch Wind speed at different altitudes and the status of all the different 27 engines and then How do you manage how do you? Your very hands on with the details, but you're also looking at the bigger bigger picture How do you manage your time? How do you how do you how do you parse you know? How do you zoom in and zoom out and make sure that all these things are coming together? Well at at SpaceX almost all my time is spent on Engineering and design, it's probably 80 and 90% And then Gwynne Shotwell who's president chief operating officer takes care of the business operations the company, which is what allows me to do that? Yeah, I think in order to make the right decisions you have to understand something you need to understand something you add a detailed level You cannot make good decision So But I'd like to just probably like the you know where you saw there as a result of an incredible team and that's base X Super talented people who really work like crazy. They make that happen you Know I think my role is to make sure that they have an environment where they can they can really where the talents can really come to the floor and You know and but I can't tell you how honored and grateful I am to work with such a great team Everyone in this room is inspired by you. Who are you inspired by what Kanye West obviously? Today Me too fred astaire fred astaire. You know you should see my dance moves We may we may see some dance moves unless you love Fred Astaire. He's amazing if you haven't watched his movies. They're amazing. Yeah, I Think for me when I look at all of all of the things you've undertaken to do the the commonality is With Tesla with SpaceX shoulder city now with the boring company It feels like you're seeing a firmly established a mature Industry That is ripe for sort of a quantum shift that there's there's an opportunity there for you know in the case of cars its electrification Which drastically changes? You know the complexity of an automobile and potentially down down the line the? Expense of it with rockets it's the usability of it With with solar it's about a firmly established energy system. That's about to be massively disrupted. This is having And with the boring company it's about looking at infrastructure projects would typically take decades and billions of dollars and looking to to reduce the Complexity that is that is that how you is that how you? You know is that how you see the world. Do you see the things that don't work and can be made better? No but I mean I Don't like look at things that say. Okay. What's the rank ordered? You know business opportunity From a financial standpoint or anything like that It's a it's really just like these are the there's some things that are that don't seem to be working that are important for the You know for our life and for the future to be good and I've said that if If you're before me to say like where is the One way to do or a suggestive rate or return estimate on various industry opportunities I would put Arrows like basically building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list But there would have to be the dumbest things to do just just because you know look at the auto industry and In the US auto industry the only two companies that haven't gone bankrupt At least at some point are Tesla and Ford every other company got bankrupt, or was failing and got acquired There's only two companies that have gone bankrupt, and there's a big graveyard of companies that did so and engineering up against entrenched competitors There's no III gave basically both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning a probability of less than 10% of likely likely to succeed So why do it? Well in the case of SpaceX I just kept wondering why we were not making progress towards Sending people to Mars Why we didn't have a base on the moon Here where we're at the sort of space hotels that were promised in 2001 the movie It's like You know it's uh. It. Just wasn't happening year after year. Yeah, I was getting me down. I look at the NASA website I was like Does where does it say when we go to Mars isn't? so Initially for SpaceX for example I thought well The genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company But but really had it how do we get NASA's budget to be bigger that was initially to go so? I came up with this little small philanthropic mission, which would be to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars? It's called Mars oasis and And they were one landing the seats were being dehydrated nutrient gel Hydrate upon landing, and and then you have this little greenhouse And then the money shot would be you know green plants against the right background Recently learned that money shot has a meaning that That I didn't aware of but The the you know, I think that that would get people excited about Rekindles the spirit of a follower essentially and as I thought it more more into what it would take to do that I learned that The fundamental issue is actually the cost of access to space Rockets were super expensive and the cost has per pound to kilogram to orbit had actually gone up over the years not down and it was like okay, well if you it won't matter if we are able to do this philosophic mission and It generates a lot of will to go to Mars. That's not going to matter if there's no way So at my second or third trip back from Russia I was like whoa there's got to be a way to build rockets There's gotta be a way to solve the rocket falling I missed our reading a lot of books and rockets and They're better sort of a first principles analysis of a varrock. It just broke down the materials that are in a rocket what would it cost to buy those materials what verses the price the rocket and there's a gigantic difference between the Raw material cost the rocket and the finish cost the rocket so there must be something wrong happening in Going from the constituent atoms to the final shape and Found that certainly to be true and then and then why won't people trying to make reusability work It was very difficult to make rocket reusability work and then unfortunately the the Space Shuttle ended up being a counter example of don't don't try to make reusability work because spatial data ended up costing more per flight than an expandable vehicle of equivalent capability So for a long time people used in the space shuttle as an example of why reusability is dumb You can't take a single case example and make an entire theory out of it so There's no question in my mind that if you could read the Rockets effect It has to be true reuse which means Rapid and complete reuse the problem with the space shows only a portion of the System came back like the big orange tank which was also the primary airframe was discarded every time and the parts that were used were incredibly difficult to refurbish So they kind of reached the only country reuse that matters is if it's rapid and complete It's that the only thing you're changing between flights far from scheduled maintenance is the propellant So we embarked upon that journey to create SpaceX in 2002 and In the beginning I wouldn't actually wouldn't let my friends invest because I don't want to lose their money. I thought it was like you Know I really lose my own money, so And then We almost did die at SpaceX actually so we I budgeted four or three flights I mean technically I did have a plan where I had to have the money from PayPal I had like 180 million from PayPal. I thought you know I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity and That should be fine. I'll have 90 million Lexus plots. You know But but then what happened is Things cost more and took longer than and I thought so I had a choice of either Put the rest of the money in or their companies are going to die and It's like set up putting all the money in and firing money or rent from friends 2008 was brutal if you Yeah, 2008 we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon rocket for SpaceX Tesla Almost went bankrupt. We closed our financing around 6 p.m.. Christmas Eve 2008 it was the last hour of the last day that it was possible We would have gone back up two days after Christmas otherwise And I've got divorced I was like rough, man Governor Scott yes You do wait it. It poses a question or maybe you just answer the question of why is no one else doing these things What's your pain threshold yeah, well, it's real high So yeah SpaceX is alive, but it's kind of at sea so is Tesla If things have just gone a little bit the other way Both companies would be dead, and I'd like one of the most difficult choices. I have ever faced in life was was in 2008 and I think I had I think Maybe thirty million dollars left thirty or forty one dollars left in 2008 I had two choices I Could put it all into one company, and then the other company would definitely die Or split it between the two companies and but if I split it between two companies then both might die And you know when you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something a bully something. It's like a child And so it's like which one am I gonna let one starve to death I Can bring myself to do it surprised. I split the money between two Fortunately, thank goodness they both came through We've got a question for the audience that builds on that. What was your biggest failure, and how did it change you? What was your biggest failure and how did I change you? Have to really think hard about that failure There's your answer well, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure Like I said as a support for SpaceX the first three launches failed and We were just barely able to scrape together enough Parts and and money to do the fourth launch that both launch should fail who would have been dead so multiple failures along the way I Tried very hard to get the right expertise in for for SpaceX I tried hard to to find a great chief engineer for the rocket but in that the good Chief Engineers wouldn't join and The bad ones well there was no no point in hiring him so I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket So if I could have found somebody better, then we would have maybe had less than three failures How do you how do you plan a business where you know? The rocket business, you know some of these things are gonna blow up on the launch pad How does the business plan work I? Don't really have a business plan Yeah, I haven't had it, but I had a business by her way back in the zip two days But but these things are just always wrong so I just just been father's business plans after that Yeah I mean, I think you know wishful thinking for sure is a Source of many problems and in many walks life a Business or personal business or personal wishful thinking Causes a lot of a lot of trouble you really have to ask you know whether something It is true or not that Doesn't make sense and if it ever feels like Too easy it probably is You know the yeah But for the drama of SpaceX I think Tesla's actually Been probably 2,000 might old little problem a dose of overtime Practices drama magnet, it's crazy How do you I mean a lot of people want to know you know you're managing three or four companies now each of them trying to do something revolutionary each of the a business that has historically been regarded as Impossible to challenge or disrupt. How do you how do you prioritize? How do you how do you how do you prioritize between? The different companies how do you prioritize? How do you spend your time? Yeah, absolutely actually could trouble you for a water I've got a bit of a cult my voice is a bit hoarse Too it tells a top priority For business time almost all of it is really dedicated to SpaceX and Tesla it may sound like I've got a lot of different endeavors, but It's overwhelmingly SpaceX and Tesla in terms of try of allocation So it's a and then for non-business stuff, it's Almost entirely kid stuff my kids are here here today actually put them on to South by Southwest everything a good time But they went so the West world Exhibit or it's just really amazing very haven't seen the West world What do you call it exhibit or a I don't know what you just call it. It's a theme park It's really incredibly well done, and I took the kids they yesterday to had a great time together I Think probably one the the biggest of us are standing is that I'm actually not an investor I'm so much fielding investor invested things. I don't actually don't miss anything back the only Public security that I would have any kind is Tesla and then the next biggest is SpaceX and and then The boring company Hennis Tata. It more as a joke because there will be a funny name for a company You know we put we put the zero and bring I mean it's like Doesn't make any sense When we when we talk about everyone you first told me that you were thinking about tunnels And I must tell you about that years ago, okay, it's like a long time ago. Like I thought you're joking yeah It was I was joking but It's not because of some epiphany that I had one day Driving on the 405 That's how it gets called translated, so now I was talking four tunnels for years and years for probably five years or four years at least Whenever I'd give a talk and people would ask me about what opportunities you do see in the world I'd say tunnels can someone please build tunnels so after four or five years of begging people to build tunnels and Still no tunnels. I was like okay. I wanna build a tunnel Have missing something here So Yes, I was like basically talking fuels Arizona for tunnels right for several years, and then said well let's find out what it takes to build a tunnel and Yeah, so started digging a tunnel I wanted to start the tunnel From where I could see it from my office at SpaceX it so stuff. I said well Let's just cobble for part of the parking lot across the road so I can see if it's if anything's happening or not And then we named our first boring machine Godot because I kept waiting for it no it came Finally did and and we got it going and now we're making good progress and We were finding the company for merchandise sales So, thank you for anyone who's bought a flamethrower You will not be sorry or maybe you will Won't be boring We have a video I think here of the latest vision for the boring company it turns a Howard You know this great Attitude I Think you know when we were first talking about the concept, you know tunnels feel like a resolutely old-school Solution to approach that that I invented tunnels And I always tell holding out hope for the flying car that you asked me one simple question that Answered the question for me about flying cars kind of forever Which was would you want your neighbor to have a flying car. Yes, exactly? This is exactly the question Oh you want to fly car how about everyone around you has a flying car too? Oh? That doesn't sound so good Yeah, and I think one of the interesting things about tunneling is it's one of these things that you know there's no a lot of More competition there. It's not a you know. It's it's something that's right for change, so how do you yeah? You talked about the philosophy with godot was to just keep running. It basically until you figured out. Why it can't run any faster Yes The point coming to be clear is it's a it's like literally 2 percent of my time. It's probably 20 percent of my tweets The tweets do not correlate to actual time spent The I mean, I sort of just have fun with the boring company But my time allocation is about especially about 2% Talk about your time allocation. I think one of the things you spend an awful lot of time thinking about I know Is artificial intelligence and something that you and I have a shared interest and it's something that our audience is interested in as well The question here is a lot of experts in AI don't share the same level of concern that you do about the danger off pools What what's yours last words what's what specifically do you believe that they don't? Well the biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they they think they know more than they do And they think they're smarter than they actually are in general We are all much smarter than we think we are but much less smart dumber than we think you out by a lot so This is this tends to plague plague smart people like you just can't that they define themselves by their intelligence And they they don't like the idea that a machine can be way smarter than them so they discount the idea which is Fundamentally flawed that's the wishful thinking situation I'm really quite close to I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me It's capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential But you can see this in things like alphago which went from in the span of maybe Six to nine months it went from being unable to beat even a reasonably good go player So then beating the European world champion who was ranked 600 then beating Lisa doll for five What been world champion for many years then beating the current world champion, then beating everyone while playing simultaneously then Then there was alpha zero which crushed alphago a hundred to 0 and alpha zero just learnt by playing itself and It can play basically any game that you put the rules in for if you whatever rules you give it Just literally read the rules play the game every superhuman for any game Nobody expected that great of improvement to guess those so those same experts Who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying? I think you will find that their predictions for things like go and and other AI advancements have Therefore their batting average is quite. Weak. It's not good That we'll see this also with with self-driving I think probably by intermixture self-driving will be well encompass essentially all modes driving and be At least a hundred to two hundred percent Safer than a person by the end of next year we're talking like maybe 18 months from now Netsertive study on on Tesla's autopilot version 1 which is relatively primitive and found that it was a 45 percent reduction in highway accidents And that's despite. What a pilot one being just version 1 Version 2. I think will be At least 2 or 3 times better. That's the current version that's running right now So the rate of improvement is really dramatic we have to figure out some way to ensure that The advent of digital super intelligence is one which is Symbiotic with humanity, I think that's the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one And how do we do that I? Mean if we take it that it's inevitable at this point that some version of AI is coming down the 1 How do we how do we steer through them well? I'm not normally an advocate of Regulation and oversight I mean I think it's once you generally go inside minimizing those things But this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public and it's therefore there needs to be a public body that Has insight and then oocytes on to confirm that everyone is? developing AI safely This is extremely important I think a danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads landlocked and Nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they That would be insane and mock my words AI is far more dangerous than nukes Far so why do we have no regulatory oversight, this is insane Which question you've been asking for a long time. I think it's a question That's coming to the forefront over the last year where you begin to realize that it doesn't necessarily I think if we we've all been focused in on the idea of artificial superintelligence Right which is clearly a danger, but maybe you know a little further out? What's happened over the last year is you've seen the artificial what I would be calling artificial stupidity You're talking about you know algorithmic manipulation of social media like we're in it now. It's starting. It's starting to happen How do we how do we is it what's the intervention at this point? I'm not really all that worried about the short-term stuff things that are Like narrow AI is not a species level risk It will it will result in dislocation in lost jobs and You know that sort of better weaponry and that kind of thing, but it is not a fundamental species level risk Whereas digital super intelligence is? So it's really all about laying the groundwork to make sure that if humanity collectively your science that Creating digital super intelligence is the right move then? We should do so very very carefully Very very carefully This is the most important thing that we could possibly do Building on that other other than AI and The the other issues that you're you're tackling Transportation energy production aerospace. What issues should our next generation of leaders be focused on solving what else is coming down the line Well I mean there there are other things that are on a longer time scale The obviously the things that I believe in like extending life beyond Earth making life multiplanetary No a big believer in a sort of Asimov's Foundation series or the principle that you you really want to You know I recommend reading the foundation series, but It's like if you if you know that there's a there's likely to be you don't know But there's likely to be another Dark Ages, which It seems my guess is the fall there will be at some point I'm not predicting that we're about to enter a Dark Ages But that there's some probability that we will particularly if there's a third world war Then we want to make sure that there's enough of us of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of the dark ages I Think that's why I said that it's important to get a self-sustaining base Ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough away from Earth that I caught that a Warrant earth the Mars base might survive is more likely to survive than a moon base But I think a moon base and a Mars base That That could perhaps Help regenerate life back here on earth. It would be really important, and I'd get that done before a possible World War 3 You know that's the century we had two massive world wars three if you count the Cold War I Think it's unlikely that we'll never have another The Poli will be at some point or if we have another one it'll be the last Yeah, it it. Just could be radioactive rubble. Yeah so Again, I'm not predicting This seems like well, if you say given enough time will it be most likely given him of time because this is This is has been our pattern in the past so Like you really believe in the zeroth law of Asimov zeroth law you take the set of actions most likely to support the humanity of the future But I think that sustainable energy is also obviously really important, that's tautological if it's not sustainable its unsustainable Yeah, how close early to solving that problem? Well, I think that the core technologies are are there with the wind solar with with batteries The the fundamental problem is that there's an unprocessed own allottee in the cost of of co2? The the market economics works very well, if things are priced correctly But when there's when things are not priced correctly And something that has it has a real cost that has zero cost then that's where you get distortions in the market that inhibit the progress of of other technologies so Essentially anything that That produces cop, and it will push push cotton into the atmosphere which includes rockets by the way. I'm not excluding rockets from this It has to be a price and then You sawed off with a low price but then that price and then depending upon whether that price has any effect on the past a million a Possibility of co2 the atmosphere you can adjust that price up for down But in the absence of a price we sort of pretend that digging trillions of tons of Fossil fuels from deep and Under the earth and putting it into the atmosphere who were pretending that that had that that that has no probability of a bad outcome And the entire scientific community is saying obviously It has it's gonna have a bad outcome obviously you just you're changing the chemical constituents in the atmosphere so So it's really up to people and governments to put to put a price on Carbon, and and then automatically the right thing happens It's really straightforward What do we do with the carbon Center I actually think we can manage with the current carbon level or even a little bit higher It's and this is gonna sound It sound like I'm backtracking, but there's actually an argument that More carbon in the atmosphere is is actually good, but up to a point So We might actually arguably have been a little carbon starved if you go back 200 years ago And say okay, well furio's go with like we had like turning 890 parts per million of carbon we're probably a little carbon stuff now we're about 400 just past 400 mark I think somewhere in the 400s probably okay We don't have to worry about to question carbon or anything like that But now if this momentum keeps going and we start going up to six hundred eight hundred a thousand fifteen hundred That's where things get really squirrely and The sheer momentum of the world's energy infrastructure is leading us in that direction It's very so it's just very important that the The public and the governor's pushed to ensure the correct price of carbon is paid So that that will be the thing that matters Yeah our audience is very interested in knowing how many hours of sleep you got last night. Oh I don't know about six five or six. I think right I Feel like we know part of the answer this cuz you were trapped in West well for a while But, but how do I mean on a Regular day for you, or you are you are you sleepy you're not sleeping a lot right geez do I look that bad? You look great Okay, just imagine with the amount of responsibilities with the amount of you know with what you've got going on to these problems still keep You up at night, or do you think we're on our way to solve it? Well right now the only things that are really stressing me out in a big way or AI obviously that's like boys there and and working really hard on Tesla Model 3 production and who making good progress, but it's Usually hard work, but those are the two most stressful things my life right now Yeah Our audience really wants to know What do you hope the world will look like for children born today when they're your age Right, what do you hope for the world to look like? What's the best-case scenario say? We solve these problems? What's that world look like? Let's see so I Think the a good picture would look like You know we're really substantially transferred to sustainable generation and consumption of electricity So that the Does the co2 risk and the ocean rising risk is mitigated? and we're not looking at like you know having, Florida and And sort of large portions to the world underwater, that'd be great that not But to have addressed that risk that'll be there. You know us For us to have a base on the moon face a mirage big out there exploring the solar system so welding industry on it essentially having a human civilization go out there and And and have you such that anyone can? go the moon of Mars or the solar system if they want to making it really affordable I Do think it's important that this competition of their multiple companies doing this not just a sex and And that a I risk is that I guess there's the sort of a benign AI and that were able to achieve a symbiosis with that AI Ideally the AI There's somebody who can members name but had a good a suggestion for what the Optimization of the AI should be what's its utility function? You have to be careful about this because you say maximize happiness and the AI concludes that happiness is function of dopamine and serotonin So just captures all humans and jacks your brain with large amounts of dopamine serotonin Like okay, so holy mint It sounds pretty good though. I'll you beloved Well I like the definition of like the I should try to maximize the freedom of action of humanity Maximize the freedom of action maximize freedom essentially I like that definition But we do want to close coupling between collective human intelligence Digital intelligence And a newer link is trying to help in that regard by Creating a an interface between a high bandwidth interface between AI and your and human brain There were already we're already a sidewalk in a sense that That your phone and your computer a kind of extension of you Just low bandwidth input-output exactly. It's just low bandwidth Particularly output, I mean two thumbs basically So how do we solve that problem? Give it the bandwidth bandwidth thing it's a bandwidth issue And we've all we've also come to it now We're all we're all cyborgs were just low efficiency cyborgs, so how do we how do we make it better? I think we've got above a We've got opposed interface Like we didn't evolve to have a communications Jack You know some So there's gonna be essentially the vast numbers of tiny electrodes That are able to read right for your brain of course. You know security is pretty important in the situation say the least I was just saying I'm not coming with I'm keeping my brain air-gapped. Yeah well I think a lot of people will choose to do that But it's a bit like Ian banks is new or lace, but not but in the case of relation sort of that that's there from when you're born or it's sort of it's not a Sort of I'm sorry to back them yackin over back up this would be this there's a digital extension of you That is an AI the AI extension of you a tertiary layer of intelligence So you've got your limbic system your cortex, and and the tertiary layer Which is the digital AI extension of you and that high bandwidth connection is what? achieves the tights and meiosis I think that's the best outcome I I Hope so if you know he's got better ideas And Talking about another project that you're working on that her audience wants to know a little bit more about sterling. Oh Can you tell us anything Doing Skynet hopefully not Skynet its internet in the sky Well we We don't talk that much about StarLink But essentially it's intended to provide low latency high bandwidth Internet connectivity throughout the world That actually will not be enough cognitive processing car onboard the satellite system to to in any way be a Skynet thing like it's Digital AI requires a lot of super intelligence requires a lot of big servers on the ground just to power intensity But this antenna to be to provide people with Who don't have any internet connectivity with Internet connectivity? and it's very good for sparse and sparsely populated in moderate moderate least mostly quiet populated areas and forgiving people in cities a choice of in your low-cost choice of internet access But I do think it's gonna be important the Starling system will be important in providing the funding necessary for SpaceX to develop interplanetary spacecraft And at the same time yeah helping people who have even though or super expensive connectivity and giving people in urban areas more of a competitive choice very cool I have to ask you because it's the number one question just Going back to Mars What kind of government do you envision for the first Martian colony? Blitzer and what's your title yeah? Yeah exactly Emperor Oh goddamn friar? I don't know Might be too much If you're what I should watch my jokes yeah, not everyone gets irony must remember So I think the I think most likely the the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where You vote on issues where people vote directly on issues instead of going to representative government in When the United States was formed Representative government was the only thing that was logistically feasible Because people there's no way it was or evil to communicate instantly a lot of people's didn't even have really access to Mail boxes or there wasn't even the post office is very primitive a lot of people couldn't write So you had to have some form of representative democracy Or things just wouldn't work at all. I think my mas most likely. It's gonna be people at everyone votes on every issue and That's how it goes. I've a few things. I'd recommend which is keep blowers short long laws it's like that's That's something suspicious is going on if there's long though You know if you if the size of law exceeds the word count of Lord of the Rings Which it does Amazingly, then it's like something's wrong So there should be a limit to the size of the law that I should be able to digest it like how come you can read the Constitution and all of the amendments like you can read those and maybe an hour and And and we govern so much of a civilization by that and yet modern law is this obtuse? Super boring tome. That's indecipherable to almost anyone so I think direct democracy Lowers lows that are comprehensible I think having some kind of hysteresis on Like it should be easier to remove a law than Create one because things just get to a no-show you have to have something that's gonna come inertia So probably I don't want the right number of you, maybe it's like 60/40 Maybe you require a 60% to get a law in place, but any number above 40% can remove a little Otherwise you just get lowers just accumulate over time they cure their time and it's sort of like Gulliver where you just get trapped by all these tiny strings, and you can't move You get hardening of the arteries of civilization with law with rules and rules rules rules So it should be just easier to get rid of rule then let's put one in Maybe they should even have like a some kind of sunset clause So that they just automatically expire unless there's enough of an impetus to keep them around I Know I know there's an affirmative, it's just I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about the very early days with Tesla, and how I came together brother Kimble is here, I thought we'd bring him out you guys could talk a little bit about it You guys might get lucky tonight, I noticed you have a guitar. I'm gonna ignore that It had some good guitar But I guess there are a fair number of entrepreneurs here today and a fair number of people interested looking at Tesla, which now extraordinary extraordinary success of it You know how did how did this come together and when you in when you guys were looking at I know famously? You know and you guys were you were looking at problems you could solve How those conversations look like? Yeah, so the C2e back in well, thanks coming on About the things that I thought would be most important to work on for a long time. We'll look back to college days and Electric cars are something I've been here since and so is 1819 When do you first recall here when we talk about electric cars that's correct first time was well you talk about a lot We we used to brainstorm a lot randomly even in we were 20 20 years old and the first thing. I remember us brainstorming was solving connectivity amongst doctors and we were on a road trip from We a lot of doctors in the family so we had the information But the idea was really to solve that problem where we from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia Brainstorming how you do it. This is before the internet, so we you know in our minds designing Network computers doctors talking This is all happened of course over 25 years, but it's one of the sort of the first time I remember us Really trying to solve a world problem and unless it was a world problem. That was really important. It. Just wasn't that interesting to us Electric cars you talked about for a long time, but I remember walking into your house once it this is in Polly 2002 or 2003 and You had these plans laid out that The team of Tesla had or the earlier guys had basically said you know we're gonna take this Lotus Elise We're gonna convert it in electric car and you know we sat down and talked about it for a bit And and it wasn't so much that it Could be done. I think we all believe it could be done. It was more just the attitude that it should be done And then from there Yeah, well the the first internships that I had that were Interesting were on ultra capacitors were used in electric cars, so that's what why I first came out to Silicon Valley in Like 93 or made to something that was to work at a company called political research on advanced ultra capacitors with the idea that this could be a solution to the energy storage problem in electric vehicles and then When I graduated from Penn the I was gonna be doing a PhD at Stanford in material science and and invent physics Try to figure out if there's a way to solve for an ultra high density solid-state capacitor that would have enough range to power an electric vehicle, so I said impact it so that's that's a that's a 95 and then I Wasn't sure there's one of those things where you could work in it for a long time and discover that there's no Actually, no. Good solution you you publish a paper and You get a PhD in a lab, but it would be academic in its value so In 95 I had a choice of either work on this energy storage system for electric vehicles or Try to play a role in building the internet But the internet stuff was happening right then and there Whereas the electric electric vehicle technology was going to progress slowly on its own? Whether I was there or not so I thought well put the rat studies on hold and do something To help out the internet or do something useful on the Internet and that's when I talk to Kimbo You're working in Canada at the time and Said hey, why don't we try to do this this company in Silicon Valley? pretty cool We bought that we were we were the first to see maps and door-to-door direction it had been built by a company Knapp tech they Never burn have never been on the Internet, and it was was so cool to be the first two humans to see it You can draw a map type in an address get directions Things you probably all dead about 50 times today each And we were the first to see that put it on the internet. It was really cool She was the first maps and directions Yellow pages and white pages on the internet, yeah so And then we ended up helping bring a lot of publications online So it as investors and customers the New York Times Company knight-ridder or Hearst in a number of others? and Yeah, but I always wanted to get back to electric vehicles because that that was a primary interest of mine from undergrad and grad days and And so After us up to still took one more Internet company because thought it's up to you had not achieved its its full potential We built this incredible technology, but it wasn't being used by the customers in the right way It's a bit like building you know F-22 fighter jets and then and then you selling to people and they roll them down the hill at each other Not the way to use it, okay, I Think that's that's where decide you really want to go to? The end consumer if you've got a great technology you want to go all the way to the end consumer Don't tell it this to to some bonehead legacy company that doesn't understand how to use it So yeah So with with excel comb which became PayPal That's what that's what we try to do something significant with the with the internet And and it got sort of part of the way towards its its objective after a PayPal I Went went public and and they've got bought by eBay in 2002 that actually freed up me and a bunch of other people so you go and create companies and I start debating between Either solar electric car or space I thought space was like the least likely to have somebody, but at least likely to attract Entrepreneurial times, I don't like like nobody is gonna. Be crazy enough to do space so I better do space So I started off with with space first and And Then about a year and a half later in 2003. I had lunch with JB Straubel and Hal Rosen and It was that it's like fish restaurant in El Segundo And Hal Rosen had been involved in space and electric vehicles and And jb was had just got just graduated from college was working with him and the conversation turned to electric vehicles Because Howard had done something called Rosen Motors, which was like an attempted evie startup, and I said well I've always been super interested in electric vehicles. I was gonna do my PhD on an advanced and reduced energy storage I Was gonna do grad studies on on advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles and And so JB said well have you heard of this company called AC propulsion because they had created It the t zero electric sports car as a prototype I was like wow that's great like lithium-ion batteries had really achieved a level of energy density that For the first time could allow you to have significant range in an electric car And they had a sports car that had zero to 60 in under four seconds at 250 mile range And it's pretty cool, and that was just made of it's just a kit car so it didn't have a roof or airbags or Thermal control system, and it was extremely unreliable it wasn't productized, but it was a proof of concept So I got the test drive from AC repulsion and I was like wow You guys should really commercialize this this would show people what electric cars can do and I tried for months to get AC propulsion to Go into production with the T 0 and Like they just were not interested in doing that Amazingly they wanted to do an electric Scion, you know like that boxy car But the problem is like the electric saundra could cost $70,000 or You could build a sports car for $100,000. Okay, but like nobody's gonna buy the electric silent But fuel might fight electric sports car So After hounding them for months. I finally said like look if you guys are not going to Commercialize the T zero, would you mind if if I did that? They said no no problem. Go ahead. It's like great So I'm gonna do that with JV, and I said, but if you're if you're gonna do If you're gonna go and try to productize t zero there's some other teams you should talk to that also interested in doing that So that's where Whatever hard macht hopping and Ian Wright came in and No, I think that was probably the biggest mistake of my career quite frankly I The I I think whatever you think you can have your cake and eat it, too That's something you're probably wrong So I thought I can keep running SpaceX I'll dedicate 20% of my time to Tesla and that'll be fine but actually It didn't things really melted down Went through hell we're to recapitalize the company the Kimmel was there singing time So Silicon Valley accurate or not accurate that's the show yeah The it starts to get very accurate around around Episode four So took a few episodes to kind of get get grounded the first few episodes struck me as Hollywood making fun of Hollywood's idea of Silicon Valley which is like not you know not on point But then by about but the fourth or fifth episode season one it really starts get good and then by season two it's amazing in fact reality But the truth is stranger than fiction all the crazy stuff you see in that show Silicon Valley the reality is way crazier than that Yeah, you've seen the two right yeah, I'm just like wow What will have to be a story for another time for says? We've been asked to wrap it up I got one last question for the audience. It is what is your favorite song from the movie three amigos? Well we don't need we don't need to do it if if you guys willing to sing along Okay So so Jonah actually is the dancer of the three? Of Us have been we've been playing and singing and dancing this song since we were kids And so we're gonna do that on the stage and you guys can sing along well We'll do the first verse and then you guys can sing along on the second verse This is gonna be a real bad Yeah, I said terrible I'm mixing the dancing thing Come with me when moombas hits the sky You'll walk with me along the biome bye Okay all together now Bye little boat you Smile my little buttercup, what do you say a while? Bin's me to the sky And you and I walk the wild by well, this is really winning You

https://youtu.be/smK9dgdTl40

the following is a conversation with Elon Musk part two the second time we spoke in the podcast with parallels if not in quality then an outfit to the objectively speaking great a sequel of all-time Godfather Part two as many people know Elon Musk is a leader of Tesla SpaceX your link and the boring company well maybe less known is that he's a world-class engineer and designer constantly emphasizing first principles thinking in taking on big engineering problems that many before him will consider impossible as scientists and engineers most of us don't question the way things are done we simply follow the momentum of the crowd of revolutionary ideas that change the world on the small and large scales happen when you return to the fundamentals and ask is there a better way this conversation focuses on the incredible engineering and innovation done in brain computer interfaces and neural link this work promises to help treat neurobiological diseases to help us further understand the connection between the individual neuron to the high-level function of the human brain and finally to one day expand the capacity of the brain through two-way communication with computational devices the internet and artificial intelligence systems this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube apple podcasts Spotify supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D ma M and now as an anonymous youtube commenter refer to our previous conversation as the quote historical first video of two robots conversing without supervision here's the second time the second conversation with Elon Musk let's start with an easy question about consciousness in your view is consciousness something that's unique to humans there's is something that permeates all matter almost like a fundamental force of physics I don't think consciousness permeates all matter pants I just believe that yeah there's a philosophical how would you tell that's true that's a good point I believe in scientific message don't blow your mind anything but the scientific method it's like you can't test the hypothesis then you cannot reach meaningful conclusion that it is true do you think consciousness understanding consciousness is within the reach of science of the scientific method we can dramatically improve our understanding of consciousness you know hard pressed to say that we understand anything with complete accuracy but can we dramatically improve ours that any consciousness I believe the answer is yes this Nai system in your view I have to have consciousness in order to achieve human-level or superhuman level intelligence does it need to have some of these human qualities that consciousness may be a body may be a fear of mortality capacity love those kinds of silly human things it's different you know there's this the scientific method which I very much believe in where something is true to the degree that it is test ibly so and and otherwise you're really just talking about you know preferences or full-on untestable beliefs or that you know that kind of thing so ends up being somewhat of a semantic question where we were conflating a lot of things with the word intelligence if we parse them out and say you know all we headed towards the future where an AI will be able to out think us in every way then the answer is unequivocally yes in order for an AI system that needs to out think us in every way it also needs to have a capacity to have consciousness self-awareness and Anjali will be self-aware yes that's different from consciousness I need to be in terms words that what consciousness feels like it feels like consciousness is in a different dimension but this is this could be just an illusion you know if you damnit damage your brain in some way physically you get you you damage your consciousness which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon and in my view the thing is that that I think are really quite quite likely is that digital intelligence will be able to out think us in every way and it will soon be able to simulate what we consider consciousness so to agree that you would not be able to tell the difference and from the from the aspect of the scientific method it's it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly if you can't tell the difference and this is sort of the Turing test but think of a more sort of advanced version of the Turing test if you if you're if you're talking to a digital super intelligence and can't tell if that is a computer or a human like let's say just having conversation of a phone or a video conference or something where you're you you think you're talking look looks like person makes all of the right inflections and movements and and all the small subtleties that constitute a human and talks like human makes mistakes like you're hearing like look at that and you literally just can't tell is this are you really conversing with a person or or an AI might as well wear as well be human so on a darker topic you've expressed serious concern about existential threats of AI it's perhaps one of the greatest challenges our civilization faces but since I would say we're kind of an optimistic descendants of apes perhaps we can find several paths of escaping the harm of AI so if I can give you three options maybe can comment which do you think is the most promising so one is scaling up efforts on AI safety and beneficial I research and in hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution to is becoming a multiplanetary species as quickly as possible and three is merging with AI and and riding the wave of that increasing intelligence as it continuously improves what do you think is most promising most interesting as a civilization that we should invest in I think that's this a lot that responder investment going on nai whereas a lack of investment is in AI safety and there should be in my view a cup an agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it is does not represent a public safety risk just as there is a regulatory authority for this like the Food and Drug Administration is that's the four corner automotive safety there's the FA for aircraft safety which generally comes a conclusion that it is important to have a government referee or a referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when when there's a potential danger to the public I would argue that AI is unequivocally something that has potential to be dangerous to the public and therefore should have a regulatory agency just as other things that are dangerous to the public have a regulatory agency but let me tell you problems with this is that the government was very slowly and the rate of the usually way a regulatory agency comes into being is that something terrible happens there's a huge public outcry and years after that there's a regulatory agency or rule put in place takes something like like seatbelts it was known for on a decade or more that seatbelts would have a massive impact on safety and and save so many lives in serious injuries and the car industry fought the requirements put seatbelts in tooth and nail that's crazy yeah and and honor hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that and they said people wouldn't buy cars if their seatbelts just obviously absurd you know or look at the back tobacco industry and how long they fought any thing about smoking that's part of why I helped make that movie thank you for smoking you can sort of see just how pernicious it can be when you have these companies that effectively achieve regulatory capture of government the bad people in the AG community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as a singularity that that is not to say that it is good or bad but it that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point and and that there's some probability it will be bad some probably will be it will be good or if they want you to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad well let me on the merger with AI question and the incredible work that's being done in your link there's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on so the flexible wires the robotic sewing machine that responds to brain movement everything around ensuring safety and so on so we currently understand very little about the human brain do you also hope that the work at neural link will help us understand more about our about the human mind about the brain yeah the work in your like will definitely shut a lot of insight into how the brain the mind works right now just the data we have regarding the how the brain works is very limited we've collect fMRI which is that that's kind of like putting us you know a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall and then putting it like all over the factory wall and you can sort of hear the sounds but you don't know what machines are doing really yeah it's hard you can infer a few things but it's very poor brushstroke in order to really know what's going on in the brain you really need you have to have high precision sensors and then you want to have stimulus and response like if you trigger a new one what how do you feel what do you see how does it change your perception of the world you're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain being able to measure signals on the brain yeah will give us sort of open the door and inside the factory yes being able to have high precision sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing and then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the responses in the brain so you can see the consequences of if you fire this neuron what happens how do you feel what is change it'll be really profound to have this in people because people can articulate their change like if there's a change in mood or if they've you know if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better or be able to form sentences better or worse or you know their memories are jogged or that kinda kind of thing so on the human side there's this incredible general malleability plasticity of the human brain the human brain adapts adjusts and so on so it's not that plastic to be totally Frank so there's a firm structure but there nevertheless there's some plasticity and the open question is so if I could ask a broad question is how much that plasticity can be utilized sort of on the human side there's some plasticity in human brain and on the machine side we have neural networks machine learning artificial intelligence it's able to adjust and figure out signals so there's a mysterious language that we don't perfectly understand that's within the human brain and then we're trying to understand that language to communicate both directions so the brain is adjusting a little bit we don't know how much and the machine is adjusting where do you see as they try to sort of reach together almost like with an alien species try to find a protocol communication protocol that works where do you see the biggest the the biggest benefit arriving from on the machine side or the human side do you see both of them working together I think the machine side is far more malleable and the biological side well huge around so it'll be the machine that adapts to the brain that's the only thing that's possible the brain can adapt that well to to the machine you can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as a nook another neuron because you're not just dislike the pulse and so something else is pulsing see so this there is that there is that that elasticity in the inner which we believe is something that can happen but the vast majority of malleability will have to be on the machine side but it's interesting when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface ID there might be like an emergent plasticity because it's a whole nother it's not like in the brain it's a whole nother extension of the brain you know we might have to redefine what it means to be malleable for the brain so maybe the brain is able to adjust to external interfaces there will be some adjustment to the brain because there's gonna be something reading and simulating the the brain and so it will adjust to to that thing but but well if the vast majority the adjustment will be on the machine side this is just if this is just it has to be that otherwise it will not work ultimately like we don't currently operate on two layers we have sort of lamech you like prime primitive brain layer which is where all of our kind of impulses or coming from it's sort of like we've got we've got like a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it that's that's the human brain and a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain and the computer of the cortex is constantly trying to make the Montek monkey brain happy it's not the cortex that's steering the monkey right it's the monkey brain steering the cortex you know so the cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing so we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain the cortex just like what we'll call like human intelligence you know it's like that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures like other creatures do not have either we're really they don't they don't have the computer or they have a very weak computer relative to humans but but it's just it's like it sort of seems like surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing but actually don't think it rolls this one thing so do you think some of the same kind of machine learning methods whether that's natural language processing applications are going to be applied for the communication between the Machine and the brain in to learn how to do certain things like movement of the body how to process visual stimuli and so on do you see the value of using machine learning to understand the language of the two-way communication with the brain yeah absolutely maybe we're a neural net and that you know AI is basically known that so it's like digital neural net will interface with biological neural net and hopefully bring us along for the ride yeah but the vast majority of aren't of our intelligence will be digital there's no like so like things like the the difference in intelligence between your the cortex and limbic system is gigantic your living system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing it's just literally hungry you know or tired or angry or sexy or something you know it's an ad just and then it that communicates that's that impulse to the cortex and Tails the cortex to go satisfy that then a great deal of like a massive amount of thinking like truly this stupendous amount of thinking has gone into sex without purpose without provocation without procreation which which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation it's a bit silly the one why you doing it that's because it makes the limbic system happy that's why that's why but it's pretty absurd really well the whole of existence is pretty absurd in some kind of sense yeah but I mean this does a lot of computation has gone into how can I do more of that with the co-creation not even being a factor this is I think a very important area of research for NSFW an agency that should receive a lot of funding especially after this decision if I propose the formation of a new agency oh boy what is the most exciting or some of the most exciting things that you see in the future impact of neural link both on the size engineering a societal broad impact so in your link I think that first will solve a lot of brain related diseases so creating from like autism schizophrenia memory loss like everyone experiences memory loss that at certain point in in age parents can't remember their kids names and that kind of thing so there's like mount of good that neural link can do in solving a critical critical damage to brain or the spinal cord there's a lot that can be done to improve quality of life of individuals and that will be those three steps along the way and then ultimately it's intended to address the the risk of the existential risks associated with digital super intelligence like we will not feel to be smarter than a digital supercomputer so therefore if you cannot beat them join them and released we won't have that option so you have hope that your link will be able to be a kind of connection to allow us to to merge to ride the wave of the improving AI systems I think the chances above zero percent it's nonzero yeah there's a chance and that's so what I've seen dumb and dumber yes so I'm saying there's a chance he's saying one in a billion or one in a million whatever it was the dumb and dumber you know it went from maybe one a million to improving maybe it'll be one in a thousand and then 100 then one in ten depends on the rate of improvement of neural link and how fast we're able to do make progress you know well I've talked to a few folks here quite brilliant engineers some I'm excited yeah I think it's like fundamentally good you know who you know giving somebody back full motor control after they've had a spinal cord injury you know restoring brain functionality after a stroke solving debilitating genetically orange brain diseases these are all incredibly great I think and in order to do these you have to be able to interface with the neurons at detail level and each build fire they're not write neurons read the write neurons and and then effectively you can create a circuit replace what's broken with with silicon and actually fill in them the missing functionality and then over time we can have with develop a tertiary layer so if like limbic system is a primary layer then the cortex is like a sector the second layer now and I said that you know the cortex is vastly more intelligent than the limbic system but people generally like the fact that they have a living system and a cortex I've met anyone who wants to lead either one of them there like a girl keeping both that's cool the limbic system is kind of fun tell us what the fun is absolutely and then you people generally don't lose the cortex either all right they're like having the cortex and the limbic system yeah and and then there's a tertiary layer which will be digital super intelligence and I think there's room for optimism given that the cortex the cortex is very intelligent and limbic system is not and yet they work together well perhaps they can be a tertiary layer where digital super intelligence lies and that that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex but still coexist peacefully and in the end of an EIN manner with the cortex and limbic system that's a super exciting future both on the low-low of engineering that I saw is being done here and actual possibility in the next few decades it's important that Norling solved this problem sooner rather than later because the point at which we have digital super intelligence that's when we pass the singularity and and things become just very uncertain it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad or good for the point which we passed singularity things become extremely unstable so we want to have a human brain interface before the singularity or at least not long after it to minimize existential risk for Humanity and consciousness as we know it but there's a lot of fascinating actual engineering a low-level problems here at your link that yeah quite quite exciting what the problems that we face in your like art material science Electrical Engineering software mechanical engineering micro fabrication it's a bunch of engineering disciplines essentially that's where it comes down to you have to have a a tiny electrode so so small it doesn't hurt hurt neurons but it's got to last for as long as a person so it's gonna last for decades and then you've got to take that signal you've got to process that single looks signal locally at low power so we need a lot of chip design engineers that you know cuz we're gonna do signal processing and do so in a very power efficient way so that we don't heat your brain up because the brain is very heat sensitive and then and then we're going to take those signals I'm going to do something with them and then we better stimulate interest of stimulate the back too you know so you could buy directional communication so he's good at material science software mechanical engineering Electrical Engineering trip design micro fabrication that's what those are the things we need to work on we need to a good material science so that the we can have tiny electrodes that last a long time and as the tough thing with the science problems a tough one because you're trying to read and simulate electrically in a an electrically active area your brain is very electrically active in electro chemically active so how do you have a coating on the electrode that doesn't dissolve over time and and is safe in the brain this is a very hard problem and then and then how do you collect those signals in a way that is most efficient because you really just have very tiny amounts of power to process those signals you know and then we need to automate the whole thing so it's like LASIK you know so it's just it's it's not if this is done by neurosurgeons there's no way it can scale to large numbers of people and it needs to scales large numbers of people because I think ultimately we want the future repeated to be determined by a large number of the of humans do you think that this has a chance to revolutionize surgery period so neurosurgery and Ellis yeah for sure it's gotta be like lazy like you met if LASIK had to be hand done not done by hand by a person that wouldn't be great you know it's done by a robot and they'll off the mall it just kind of just needs to make sure yo-you heads in my position and then they just press button and go it's a smart summon and soon Auto Park takes on the full beautiful mess of parking lots and their human human nonverbal communication I think it has actually the potential to have a profound impact in changing how our civilization looks at AI in robotics because this is the first time human beings people that don't own and test them Eve never seen it doesn't hurt about a Tesla get to watch hundreds of thousands of cars without a driver yeah do you see it this way almost like an education tool for the world about AI do you feel the burden of that the excitement of that or do you just think it's a smart parking feature I do think you are getting at something important which is most people have never really seen a robot or at and what what is the card that is autonomous it's a four wheeled robot yeah the it communicates a certain sort of message with everything from safety to the possibility of what AI could bring his current limitations its current challenges its what's possible do you feel the burden of that almost like a communicator educator to the world about AI we were just really trying to make fuels lives easier with autonomy but now you mention it I think it will be an eye-opener to people about robotics because they have really never seen most people never seen a robot and are hundreds of thousands of Tesla's won't be long before there's a million of them that have autonomous capability and the drive without a person in it and you use you can see the kind of evolution of the cars personality and and thinking with each iteration of autopilot you can see it's it's uncertain about this or it gets it but now it's more certain now now it's moving in a slightly different way like I can tell immediately if a car is on tells autopilot because got just little nuances of movement it just moves in a slightly different way it will cause aunt Ella for example on the highway are far more precise about being in the center of the lane than a person if you drive down the highway and look at how at where cars are the human driven cars are in within their lane that like bumper cars then like moving all over the place the car and autopilot dead center yes of the incredible work that's going into that in your network it's learning fast autonomy is still very very hard we don't actually know how hard it is fully of course you look at the most problems you tackle this one included in with an exponential lens but even with an exponential improvement things can take longer than expected sometimes so where does Tesla currently stand on its quest for full autonomy what's your sense when can we see successful deployment of full autonomy well on the highway already the the probability of an intervention is extremely low yes so for highway autonomy with latest release especially the probability of need to intervene is this query is really quite low in fact I'd say for stop-and-go traffic did its Matt as far safer than a person right now it's not forget the probability of an injury or an impact is much much lower for a pilot in a person and it was navigating change lanes take highway interchanges and then we're coming at it from the other direction which is low speed full autonomy and in a way this is like it's like how does a person learn to drive you learn to drive in parking lot you know you know first time you learn to drive probably wasn't jumping on Wolcott Street in San Francisco that'd be crazy you're driving in the parking lot get things get things right at low speed and and then the missing piece that were working on is traffic lights and stuff streets dr. Esau streets obviously actually also relatively easy because you know you kind of know where the stuff Street is was casing geocoded and then use visualization to see where the line is and stop the line to illuminate the GPS are so it actually this is probably complex traffic lights and very windy roads are the two things that need to get sold what's harder perception of control for these problems so being able to perfectly perceive everything or figuring out a plan once you perceive everything how to interact with all the agents in the environment in your sense from a learning perspective is perception or action harder and then giant beautiful multitask learning neural network the hardest thing is having a kur representation of the physical objects in vector space so transportation the visual input primarily visual input some sonar and radar and and then at creating the an accurate vector space representation of the objects around you once you have an accurate vectors based representation the flanker and control is relatively easier it is relatively easy basically once you have accurate vector representation then then you're kind of like a video game like it cars in like Grand Theft Auto or something like they work pretty well they drive down the road they don't crash you know pretty much unless you crash into them that's because they've they've got an accurate vectors based representation of where the cars are and they're just bent and then they're rendering that as the as the output you have a sense high level that Tesla's on track on being able to achieve full autonomy so on the highway yeah yeah absolutely and still no driver state as a driver sensing and we have driver sensing with talk in the wheel that's right yeah by the way just a quick comment on karaoke most people think it's fun but I also think it's a driving feature I've been saying for a long time singing in a car is really good for attention management and vigilance management uh sorry Tesla karaoke again it's great it's the one of the most fun features of the car do you think of a connection between fun and safety sometimes yeah they're both the same time that's great I just met with and ruin wife of uh Carl Sagan oh yeah directed cut cosmos I'm generally a big fan of Paul Sagan he's super cool and they had a great way of bringing things all that consciousness all civilization everything we've ever known and done is on this tiny blue dot people also get they get too trapped in there this is like squabbles amongst humans and this don't think of a big picture they take civilization and not continuing existence for granted I shouldn't do that look at the history of civilizations their eyes and they fall and now civilization is all it's globalized and so we're civilization I think now rises and falls together there's no there's not geographic isolation this is a big risk things don't always go up that should be that's an important lesson of history in 1990 at the request of Carl Sagan the Voyager 1 spacecraft which is a spacecraft that's reaching out farther than anything human made into space turned around to take a picture of Earth from 3.7 billion the way and as you're talking about the pale blue dot that picture there takes up less than a single pixel in that image you know appearing as a tiny blue dot as pale blue dot as Carl Sagan called it so he spoke about this dot of ours in 1994 and if you could humor me I was wondering if in the last two minutes you could read the words that he wrote described in this buildup sure yes finally the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old earth-like four-and-a-half billion years old you know another half billion years or so the Sun will expand and probably evaporate the oceans and make life impossible on earth which means that if it had taken consciousness temp sent longer to evolve it would never have balled it all its attempts and longer and I wonder I wonder how many dead one planet civilizations that are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguish themselves or were destroyed by external factors probably a few it's only just possible to try to travel to Mars just barely if G was 10% more wouldn't work really if it empty was 10% lower it would be easy plucking go single stage from surface of module away surface of the earth there's Mars it's 37-cent with gravity they're about a giant blue stick you know forth channeling Costigan look again at that dot that's here that's home that's us on it everyone you love everyone you know everyone you've ever heard of every human being who ever was lived out their lives the aggregate of our joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every King and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and Explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every Supreme Leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves the earth is the only world known so far to harbor life there is nowhere else at least in the near future to which our species could migrate this is not true this is Fault Mars and I think Carl Sagan would agree with that he couldn't even imagine it at that time so thank you for making the world dream and thank you for talking today I really appreciate it thank you you

https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg

- Hi, it's me Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Last night, Elon Musk updated the world on SpaceX's Starship development. Let me tell ya, the event was amazing. We learned a lot of really cool details. But, I'm still a little baffled by the pace of this program, it's unheard of. If only there was someone that could answer a few more of my questions about this program and about Starship. - That's a nice shirt. - How's it going? Thank-you, you know full flow staged conduction not a bad idea Mind mic-ing yourself up there? [Tim Voiceover] After Elon complimented my shirt, we mic-ed him up and let the cameras roll. Now, for those of you new to my channel, we're gonna get into some fairly in-depth rocket science and if it's over your head don't worry. Stick around my channel, and I promise I'll make sense of all the stuff we talk about, like full flow staged combustion cycle and aerospike engines. There were parts of this interview that I wasn't really planning to release at first but, actually think the best thing I can do is just show you the entire thing, un-cut, from a single camera, so you can feel like you're right there with us. - Yeah, first off, thank-you so much for, you know, talking to me, I mean, we're underneath your beautiful beast. - Yeah it's crazy, can you believe this is even here? - I was here a month ago, literally standing right here, well not, just over the fence, and you know you got a tube and a pointy tube, and now you've got this! I mean, how do you, how do you do that? Is it just sheer will? Is everyone that driven about the goal? - I don't, I think I've learned a lot of lessons about how to make things go fast. And then I've... propagated those lessons to the SpaceX team and there's just like an incredibly talented, hard working team at SpaceX, in fact at times I think, maybe there's too many talented people at SpaceX. We have like... you know, too many talented people, that we're cornering the market, or something. You know, but there's like this very talented group that works super hard and... The, and just have taking the general approach of, if a design is taking too long, the design is wrong and therefore, the design must be modified to accelerate progress. And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to delete parts and processes. It's incredibly important. So, this is why the switch to steel was because the advanced carbon fiber was taking too long. - Right, right, well and you're not, you're definitely not a sunk cost fallacist, you're like Mister, "This is clearly the new path forward, let's hop on it" - Yeah, is it in the future or not? If it's not in the future, who cares? - Yeah, yeah, and you did that, I mean look at last year, DearMoon, you guys were kind of in that like, awkward stage of probably figuring this out right here. You know, you had the carbon fiber mandrel... - I think we didn't even have the steel, I think we were still on the path, when was the DearMoon thing? - Almost exactly a year ago. - That was before the change to steel. - Yeah, you guys, I mean you showed the carbon mandrel and everything and you're, you know, excited about that, but then all of the sudden we see you switch- - I canceled the carbon fiber design in October last year. - Yeah, so just after that. - Yeah... - You know, what people don't understand is that you're the lead engineer, you're literally sit- - Literally, this is, I was actually at dinner with some, with a friend and he was like, "Well, who's the chief engineer at SpaceX?" Oh I go, "It's me", "No, no" he's like, "It's not you, who is it?", like okay it's either someone with a very low ego, or, I don't know, you know, but, you know that said, you know the, like, you know what I actually used to tell the team, I was like, "Everyone is a chief engineer", this is extremely important, and that everyone must understand how, the, broadly speaking, all the systems in the vehicle work. And so that, so you don't have self-system optimization, cause this is naturally what happens, you can see the organizational errors, The product errors reflect the organizational errors. So like essentially, you'll see that there's an interface at this particular, like, whatever departments you've got, that will be where your interfaces are. - Right. - Instead of like, getting rid of something, or questioning the constraints, the one department will design to the constraints that the other department has given them without calling into question those constraints and saying, "Those constraints are wrong", and you should actually take the approach that the constraints that you are given are guaranteed to be some degree wrong, guaranteed to be some degree wrong, because the counterpoint would be that they are perfect. - Right, which is never. - As you were saying like, what's the probability that this is a platonic ideal of a perfect part? Zero, okay, basically, so, question your constraints. It does not matter if the person handing you those constraints won a Nobel Prize, they are, even our own standards are wrong some of the time. So, question your constraints, this is extremely important, and, another thing that like, if you say like, "What are the mistakes that smart engineers make?", like, one of the most, one of the biggest traps for smart engineers is optimizing a thing that shouldn't exist. - Yeah, so they'll just sit there and spin on that thing that's just like, "Why do we even have this is the first place?" - Absolutely, so, When you go through college, and you're like, studying physics or engineering, I studied physics, the, you have to answer the question that the professor gives you, you don't get to say, "This is the wrong question". - Right, right, right, yeah. - But, in reality, we have far more degrees, when you're in reality, you have all the degrees of freedom of reality, and so the first thing you should say is, "This question is wrong". - Yeah, and that's what you said last year, I mean, you kinda said like, "It took us a long time to frame the question even, because we didn't necessarily know what it was". - It took ages to frame the question, I mean, it's just like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, best philosopher ever, maybe, I think, best book in philosophy ever, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but his book is so deep, people don't even understand. But like, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth is a giant computer, and the Earth, it comes up with the answer- 42. - Right, yep. - And, to the question, so what's life, the answer to life, the universe and everything? The answer's 42, and they're like, "What the hell, that doesn't make any sense". The really, the hard part is the question, the answer is the easy part, you need a much more powerful computer to tell you what the question is, and this is true, at the point in which you can properly frame the question, the answer is comparatively easy. - Right, right. I have one more question for you, I'm working on a video about aerospikes, it's gonna be about an hour long video on aerospikes and, you know, they're like the rotary engine of rocket, you know, rockets, like the rotary was, it's been advantageous in some ways, you know, like your- - Yeah, aerospikes, man, I tell you - They're cool but, what's the biggest, what's your biggest beef on them? 'Cause I'm trying to get as much insight on like, why do you think they, you know, aren't used, and obviously, I assume, you're not ever going to an aerospike for a lot of reasons... - You know, I've internally asked this question so many times, like, "Guys, don't we, shouldn't we maybe do an aerospike?", the... The challenge, so... And you're going to explain to the audience what an aerospike is? - Oh yeah, you're gonna be like the end of this thing, I've already set it all up, yeah yeah. - Otherwise you know, "What the hell are you talking about?" you know? - You gotta get your combustion efficiency, so, you know like, there's really two parts to, like, when you have a rocket engine, what're you trying to do? You're trying to shoot things out, as fast as possible, in a straight line. - Yes, yep, converting as much thermal and pressure into kinetic energy. - Yes, exactly, so you have your combustion efficiency, and so what percentage of max theoretical combustion efficiency are you, and then what's your nozzle efficiency, which is really you know, are you straightening the flow, and shooting the molecules out in a straight line, so that you go in the other direction, Newton's Third Law. - Yep. - With a traditional combustion chamber, you can get to a very high combustion efficiency, cause the molecules are all sort of bouncing around in there, they've got a time to combine and do their thing, and then when you sort of choke it through the throat, you know, it, that gives them sort of more opportunity to combine, so you can Like, we think we can probably get to 90, certainly 98.5, hopefully 99 percent of theoretical combustion efficiency. This is so if, God himself came and knitted together the molecules, you're one percent better, okay maybe one and a half percent better, that's so, that's very high efficiency. - Because of full flow staged combustion. - Full flow staged combustion, exactly, you've got a gas-gas interaction, so you've got two hot gases combining - Yeah. - And with a relatively simply reaction, the only thing that would be simpler would be hydrogen. But you've got CH4 and O2, that's pretty simple, you don't have any long chain hydrocarbons, you know, with kerosene you've got the long chains, they've gotta break down, they've gotta recombine, it's a total soup, you know. Yeah, it's a part like dinner situation. It's very hard to get high combustion efficiency with kerosene, so when you look at the, say like, "What's the theoretical value of, say a Lox kerosene engine, as compared to a methane engine?" The kerosene actually looks more compelling than it really is because you can't achieve the high combustion efficiency with kerosene that you can with methane. So, you actually want to say, "What is the actual achievable combustion efficiency times the theoretical chemical energy?", that's the real number, and this is where methane starts to look really good. - Yeah, yeah. - It's like, very hard to get to like 96 percent combustion efficiency, or even 95 percent combustion efficiency with kerosene, but with methane you can get 98 easy, 99 with a little bit of difficulty. - And, so you don't think, you're just telling me now, spoiler alert, you're probably never gonna see a full flow staged combustion cycle aerospike engine produced by SpaceX? - You know, if somebody can show that we're wrong, that would be great. If somebody can explain, "Wow, you've got a, there is a way to make your design better", this is a gift. - Right, right, right. - "Thank you for this great gift, wow, this is awesome". It's definitely like, the worst thing would be like, "We wanted to do this dumb design, and stick with our dumb design", that would be insane. - Right. - I would love it if somebody could show how an aerospike is the smart move, in which case, we'll just do an aerospike. - Yeah, then just do an aerospike; there's a reason they haven't been used. (chuckles) Period. - But maybe, that reason is not valid, you know? 'Cause there's also, there hasn't been a methane orbital engine. - Right? Or a flying full flow staged combustion, yeah. - So, there's been neither a full flow staged combustion engine that's seen flight, nor has there been a methane engine that's seen flight, certainly in a rocket scenario, I think there may have been some like, little test things or whatever, but no actual rockets. So, but I'm very confident that CH4 is the right fuel. Maybe aerospike is, is right, even though it's not been done before, but you just have to show that your combustion efficiency is not affected, and that you're, and that you're straightening the flow sufficiently. - To get your expansion ratio - Yeah - Yep, awesome. - Also, if you've got a two-stage rocket, like I think like, this is the other thing like, you've got two-stage rockets where your boost stage is primarily in atmosphere, and your upper stage is primarily in vacuum, then you can specialize the, for a vacuum nozzle and a sea level nozzle, and then you're like, "Why need the aerospike?" It's only if you do want, if you want to try to do single stage, reusable, then that's when you start like having to reach for the aerospike. - Right, yep, that's awesome. Aerospikes, with Elon Musk! Thank you so much. - I would love it if somebody could show it like, "Hey, you're missing the mark, you could do this different thing, and this would be a better move", that would be, thank you, please. - Right, yeah of course, absolutely. Hey ,thanks for your time again, see you soon, pleasure meeting you. (voices in background) Oh yeah, we might need to steal your mic, I mean, I don't know, I can bill you later. Thanks again for this - Absolutely. - I have to say, I've been to IEC 2016, seeing, that was like, it was almost like awkward back then cause it was like, - "You're insane", and now it's like, "Hey look, I'm not insane." (laughs) - Well, you know obviously I'm sane, but you know, I mean... (background chatter) Even when I am exposed to this all day, it's so like "Holy Smith!" you know, it's so mad, you know, to see it actually there, and I was up in the nose, and I mean I'm gonna post this later but... - Jack Buyer's photo, Beyer he got a photo of you like, I think like peeking out of it. - Well, like this is the, when I was inside there - Oh, shoot, no way! Aw and those are the header tanks? - Yeah. - And all the batteries got, what six... - They've got four Tesla 100 kilowatt hour batteries. - Yes! - And we just like, basically welded it on to the header tanks. - Right. - Oh we didn't even talk about that, you're doing model three motors basically, is that? - Yeah, for that, I mean, I don't love the, I think we should, we should just have electro-mechanically I think we are going to, probably with Mach three, move to a purely electro-mechanical actuators for the valves. Currently, it's electric motors powered, it's like Tesla motors and batteries that essentially pump hydraulic fluid into the accumulator and then the hydraulic piston moves the valve. But it would be simpler to just have the motors directly- - Just do it - Kind of worm drive the valve. - That's awesome. - And also the way the header tanks are done right now is crazy, we shouldn't be carrying the header tanks like cargo, I mean, we want the header tanks to be integral to the tip, so seriously, like just take the tip, use the tip of the rocket as the half of the header tank, and essentially mirror the main tanks, but in small form, in the nose. So, just have two domes - Yeah. - And have the oxygen and fuel in the tip of the rocket, not as, not carrying the tanks like cargo, but having the tanks- - Just integrated, right? - Yeah, just a mini version of the big tanks - Right, oh, and then you don't have an extra wall and everything too, it's just integrated into, yeah, yeah, yeah, gotcha. - Like in the early days of rocketry, like V2 or whatever you know, like the fuel and oxygen tanks were carried like cargo in the aeroshell. - Oh really? - Yeah. In the early days of aircraft and rockets, the propellant tanks were carried like cargo - Right. - now modern rockets, modern rockets and airplanes, like the wing is just a fuel tank in, in wing shape. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, we should do the same for the header tanks. - I love it, thanks again . - Thank you. - Thank you guys. (laughs) Sorry, I didn't mean to keep him so long I guess. - [Man] Why're you looking at me? (laughs) - [Man] Was, was I rushing you out? - (laughs) No, not at all. - [Man] With everything at the end, "Come on!" - I'm just trying to kick him outta here, you know? Wasting all my time tonight, just kidding. Uh, so that was awesome! Actually, we've still got a lot more questions to get answered, and stick around 'cause I'll have a lot of content explaining some of the topics we talk about, and sorry about the whole like, thing on aerospikes, I wasn't planning to release all that 'cause that's for a video I've been working on, but whatever, I guess you get an aerospike video spoiler today, my bad. Sorry in the interview I didn't really get much time to talk about like heat shields, or the super heavy booster, or what the interior of Starship might look like, but, maybe if we're lucky Elon will continue to update us on Twitter, or, Elon, you can always come talk to me any time about all the nerdy stuff you want, I love it, I think you did too. I owe the biggest thank you to my Patreon supporters, you guys have helped take this little passion and hobby, into a career, it wouldn't be a career without you guys, so thank you so much for your support. If you want access to more behind-the-scenes things and exclusive content and access, please consider becoming a Patreon at www.patreon.com/everydayastronaut Thank you guys. And if you want your own full flow staged combustion cycle shirt or other really cool, nerdy, aerospace stuff, I've got you covered, go over to www.everydayastronaut.com/shop, and if you work in the aerospace industry, click on the link below in the description of the apparel that you want, click on that, you can get 25 percent off as my thank you to you for inspiring me to do what I do, I wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if you weren't doing crazy things to get humans off this planet, so thank you guys. It's www.everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody, that's gonna do it for me, I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU

ladies and gentlemen last but not least let's welcome mr. Alamos the co-founder and CEO at Tesla and check my the co-chair of the UN high-level panel on digital cooperation let's give them a very big applaud [Music] don't you have both of you here with us today the session is actually much awaited we've already posted some of the keywords the bigger questions on the big screen and later on you can just click the words you're interested in to talk about now the stage is yours what are you supposed to say um just things about AI perhaps okay let's see dad AII right you had a stutter where's AI yeah it is okay great yeah yeah actually I'm told that just AI mean love it like it's not there's like a name AI it sort of sounds a bit like that yeah III I hate the word AI called artificial intelligence I call it Alibaba intelligence yeah might might end up being true you know I think generally people underestimate the the capability of AI they sort of think like it's a smart human but it's it's really much it's gonna be much more than that it'll be much smarter than the smartest human yeah it'd be like you know if like can a chimpanzee really understand humans not really you know that just we just seem like strange aliens well they mostly just care about other chimpanzees and this will be how it is more or less in a relative and to in fact if it's if the difference is only that small that would be amazing it probably it's much much greater so like the biggest mistake that I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they're intelligent yeah they're not compared to AI and so they can of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves but AI will be vastly smarter vastly so what do you do with the situation like that what do you do with situation like that I'm not sure you know hope I hope they're nice I mean I have obviously some you know I think in a situation where you if you you know that old saying if you can't if you can't beat them join them you know that's what neuro-link is about is like can we go be able to go along for the ride with AI I mean I really think that there should be other companies like neuro-link essentially to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain because the right right now we are already a cyborg we will not realize we are already a sidewalk because we are so well integrated with our phones and our computers the phone is almost like an extension of yourself if you forget your phone it's like a missing limb but the bandwidth the communication bandwidth to the phone is very low especially input so in fact input bandwidth to computers has actually gone down because of typing with two thumbs as opposed to 10 fingers is a big reduction in bandwidth input bandwidth has gone up because of video and an imagery so input bandwidth as many orders of magnitude greater than output bandwidth that at a certain points if we'll just assume it assuming a benign scenario with AI we will just be too slow to something let's say a computer that has like an exaflop of you know many x with lots of compute capability a millisecond is an eternity and to us it's nothing so you know I think I would say like human speech to a computer will sound like very slow tonal wheezing is kind of like whale sounds yep yeah because what's up bad with a few hundred vision about the technology I'm not a tech guy I think I'm all about life I think AI is going to open a new chapter of the society of the world that people try to understand ourselves better rather than the outside world and it's so difficult to predict the future 99.99% of the predictions the human being had in history about the future all wrong including that one oh yeah only you know the the 0.00% of the prediction or right there right because by accident yeah but it's also true that 80% of statistics are false yeah so my meaning come on guys buddy I'm happy about the artificial intelligence or alibaba intelligence that's going to understand a human the inside of the human better so when people worry a lot about artificial intelligence people should have more confidence in themselves because I think if a lot of solutions we don't have today the but there will be solutions tomorrow we don't have solutions for the young people will have solutions so I'm quite optimistic and I don't think artificial intelligence is a threat I don't think that if fish intelligent is something terrible but human being a smart enough to learn that and to me artificial intelligence is just like people worry a lot about this today are those people I called them called called college smartness people like us street smart we never scared of that we think it's a great fun and we want to change ourselves to embrace it I don't know man that's like famous last words this is let me tell you AI is I mean you look at sort of the rate of advancement just in general the rate of advancement of computers is insane and likely a good example would be video games you know if you go back 40 40 years ago or 50 years ago maybe you had pong that was just two rectangles in a square now you've got photorealistic real-time simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously if you assume any rate of improvement at all the I mean these games will be indistinguishable from reality you will not be able to tell the difference either that or civilization will end those are the two options but even if the rate of technology improvements slowed down by a thousand then okay advanced a thousand years yeah ten thousand years this is still very tiny I mean he civilization civilization has been around for probably you know arguably I think 7000 years or something like that if you counted from the first time there was any any writing any recorded symbols besides cave paintings this is a very tiny amount of time considering the universe is 13.8 billion years old I mean if civilization lasted for a million years we would would only increment the third decimal point after 13.8 billion years if we lasted for a million years so that seems like a long time given that we've only been around for seven thousand years it's been pretty it's been kind of a roller coaster on the civilization front I mean I'm not trying to be I'm a naturally optimistic person to be clear I'm not saying hey doom and gloom I'm just saying the these this is the apparent pattern the the rate of change of technology is incredibly fast it is outpacing our ability to understand it well I'm not sure is that good or bad I don't know I mean it seems to me some time ago with that you could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital super intelligence if you're those in order bootloader is a very tiny piece of code without which the the computer cannot start but it's like the minimal bit of code necessary for a computer to start like you couldn't evolve silicon circuits you knew they needed to be a biology to get there good yeah well let's talk about something fun I'm Adam I'd that you want to go on the Mars shall we go to the Mars yeah yes so what will the life look like on Mars are you both moving what do you think about that I actually I'm not interested on Mars I just came back from there so I'm more interested on the earth the things what's going on happening here so what why you're so curious about the Mars well I think the thing about Mars is that I think it's important for us to take the set of actions that are most likely to continue consciousness into the future what increases the probability of consciousness of continuing into the future I think we should not take it for granted that consciousness will continue because we have not encountered any aliens where are the aliens this is the Fermi paradox this is one of the most important questions how come we've not found any aliens the people out there think we've got aliens trust me I would know we have not okay people ask me you've been to area 51 okay please the SpaceX actually has area 59 it's even better I hate better than 51 so I'm among the set of actions we can take that are likely to increase the scope and scale of consciousness such that we are better able to understand the nature of the universe one of those actions is to become a multi-planet species or ensure that life is multiplanetary not because I think something but it's not not from from the standpoint of it just being an escape hatch or because I think that Earth is doomed but there's a certain probability that is irreducible that something may happen to earth despite our best intentions despite everything we try to do the there's a probability at a certain point that some either external force or some internal unforced error causes civilization to be destroyed or sufficiently impaired such that it can no longer extend to another planet it's hard to say ever like that like never put another way this is the first time in the four-and-a-half billion year history of Earth that it's been possible to extend life beyond Earth before this it was not possible how long will this window be open it may be open for a long time or it may be open for a short time I think we should it would be wise to assume that it is open for a short time and and and then let us secure the future secure the future of consciousness such that life of the light of consciousness is not extinguished and we should you try to do this as quickly as possible that's my view good it's so difficult to secure the future of the earth but we can secure the future of next 100 years I am not the person that I admire your courage for explore the Mars but I admire a lot of people spend efforts on improving the earth it's it's great to send 1 million people to the Mars but we have to care about the seven point four billion people on the earth how can we make the world's most sustainable and I'm not that fan of the Mars because I think it's easy to go to the Mars when you go on the top of the hills of all the all of the building just the ones that we go to Mars we would never be able to come back yeah that's my idea networks though I hate to go to Himalayas - I mean when you climb on them I think someday I would go there when the end of it is ready I would go they have a look but I think people spending more time on the earth think about 1/2 because no matter how long the civilization of the human beings would be like one minute or two million or have many years that we only have 100 years so we cannot solve all the problems for future but we have to be responsible for the future but we should care more about how we can enjoy better my view is that by the artificial intelligence or AI when human being understand ourselves better then we can improve the water better last 200 years human being tried to understand the other side war better understand the other people better but I think what I feel excited about AI is AI to understand people the inside of the human beings the Earth's I heard you you gotta dig eternal and deep in the earth which is amazing I think on any how every time when I read the news about your interesting the outside space I look at you it's a great respect we need a heroes like a you but we need more heroes like us working hard on the earth improving things every day that's what I want sure I mean to be clear I'm very Pro us great that sounds great if you clear are very Pro Earth when I say you know that's becoming a multi-planet species or making life multi-line yonder 'the expanding the scope and scale of consciousness from a resource standpoint i'm talking about less than 1% of earth's resources should be dedicated to making life multiplanetary while making consciousness multiplanetary so you know i think it should be like somewhere in between how much we spend on lipstick and how much we spend on healthcare like but you know things like for the preservation of consciousness which has been maybe slightly more than we spend on on cosmetics that's my you know and i'm pro cosmetics i like that great but but you know this probably worth spending i don't know some like at least half a percent of Earth's GDP on extending life to be multiplanetary maybe 1% i'd say seems like a good a good use of resources and but in nineteen oh we have like two orders 19 more resources spent on earth so it's not like it's you know somehow gonna fundamentally impair us if likes is just 1% of both resources on that order should be enough to make life multiplanetary seems like a wise investment for the future and obviously i spend a lot of my time on a sustainable energy with tesla with you know electric cars and solar and batteries and that kind of thing and i'm really excited to be here in Shanghai for the the Shanghai gigafactory which is I think that Tesla china team has done an amazing job really mind-blowing like I've just astounded by how good the job is and how much progress has been made and I think it's a good story for the world and to say like look look how much progress you can make in China this is extremely impressive like my hat is off you know you guys Rock so I've never seen anything but so fast in my life before drew totally Frank I've seen some crazy things so you know I think it's like I really think China is the future well that's very impressive and there's also some great progress on entrepreneurial rocket companies in China as well I believe to have made orbit it's very difficult very hard to make orbit achieving orbit I have great respect it was very hard yeah pick up another topic sure yeah job jobs jobs are life jobs mystery venture so what new jobs will be created because of the AI or has the change already started what do you think I think why we needed that many jobs ha ha right my view is that the jobs actually every technology revolution people start to worry right last 200 years we're worried about the new technology gonna take away all the jobs actually we made a lot of jobs second because of the Industrial Revolution job create a lot of jobs what I think is the next or 2030 years human being will live much longer the live science technology is gonna make people live probably a hundred a hundred twenty years that may not be a good thing because you get a grandfather's grandfather still working hard but the challenge is my question why should we have a lot of jobs I think people should work three days a week four hours a day when we have electricity the power of electricity is that we make people more time so you can go to the kala okay in the evening you can go to dancing partly in the evening so people because of electricity people have more time I think because of artificial intelligence people will have more time enjoy being human beings in your life in my life I think I visit to probably 300 cities in my life my graph my father visited 30 cities my grandfather will visit only three cities so my grandchildren profit probably will visit the three thousand cities always alive he's always on the Tesla is always on the robots always travelling around so I don't think we need a lot of jobs at that time the jobs we need is make people happier make people experience the life enjoy the human beings so I don't worry about the job jobs a lot first we're gonna have love jobs second we don't need a lot of jobs third there's a very interesting thing which because we will probably talk about life in the agriculture period average age is like a 3035 years old in the industry period technology revolution people can live 70 years so in the artificial intelligent period people can live a hundred to the years as I think now the problem comes when people's life is getting better people don't want to have children we're brand grandfathers there you don't want have a children at that time we are going to have a lot of jobs with nobody old guys for sure you will not be happy or you were happy because when your grandfather said all I need to work tomorrow then that's a disaster so but we should be ready that we are going to enter into the area that everybody can live 120 years and we have a new more new problems that come up so that's my view about jobs don't worry about it we will have jobs yeah I think so if you're working on something that involves people or engineering it's probably a good approach you know art of course yeah like I said I think we're gonna have to figure out this neuro-link situation otherwise we will be left behind it's very important we do this quickly I think time we don't have much time we don't have much time for what we don't have much time to solve the neuro-link yeah yeah this is anything like technology like technology and technology awareness there's like it's like if it was like a topological map of technology awareness it's mostly flat with a few short buildings and then some very tall spires very tall spires and unless you're on that very tall spire it's not obvious what the topology is yeah I never worry about the things that I cannot solve I left other people to solve it if nobody can solve it just let it be that's my life oh let's talk about education I'm quite interesting about education can we yeah so what knowledge of skills will be useful to master the future do you have any advice for young professionals who want to pursue a career in AI young professionals I don't who you will have professionals or AI in the future well I worry a lot about people worried about jobs but I worry about education all the education systems the things would teach our kids the way we teach our kids mainly designed for the industry period and I'm sure the Machine will be much cleverer than human beings in the future how can human being do better human being should be smarter human be shall be wiser so how can we be human beings to be wiser smarter I think that we should change the way of Education change the things because in the in the past we'll focus a lot about you know remember things computer can remember better than you are we want to calculate the faster computer can rep can calculus faster we want a round faster computer can run much faster than you are so human being sort of confidence by be more creative more constructive so how can we teach our kids to be more creative and constructive and I think this is the key of the education and I want spending more time on training kids or arts on painting on seeing on dancing you know all these are the creative things that make people live like a humans don't worry about machines for sure we should understand one thing that men can never make another man computer is a computer computer is just a toy man cannot even make a mosquito so we should have a confidence computer only have chips men have the heart it's the heart where the wisdom comes from so I think in the next 10 or 20 years human beings or every country every government should focus on reform the education system making sure our kids be able to find jobs in the future be able to live in a life that only working three days a week four hours a day and that is very important if we do not change the education system that we are in we are all going to be in trouble that's my view and don't worry about it we will change it yeah yeah try and learn as much as much as possible that allows you to predict the future or make the future so the thing is the best way to predict the future is to make it just and then assess whether what you're learning is enabling you to predict the future with less error are you less wrong we're all always wrong to some degree but can you reduce the error on your future predictions I think that's the way to look at education as well of course but we're both creative create the future and predict the future so that includes art and all those other things but close the loop on being less wrong about future right so that's the right way to think about education I mean down the road with the neuro-link you you can just upload any subject instantly so we like the matrix you want to fly a helicopter no problem well helicopters will fly themselves but you know if you wanted to do whatever any any given skill you just upload it to instantly and the way education works right now it's extremely low bandwidth it's extremely slow lectures are the worst really it's like very slow yeah just try to predict the future with less error this is the hot this is very hard as you were saying not sure it's 99.9 percent but it's it's not very good generally at prediction of the future but I think often people don't try it the first thing is try if you don't try okay you know got it you go to try and then and then adjust based on the error of your prior predictions yeah I think just to try is very good we should always have the confidence to try the future and I never worry about the errors and the mistakes errors and mistakes that are the best assets of human lives and humans I think the one people worry about the disasters that AI is going to bringing I think it's not the disasters it's the mistakes that human beings make and Trust human beings will be able to correct the mistakes and improve themselves and that we we need education and this is what we think net China today we have 1800 new babies born every year which which is not enough we need we need to have like much more than that but I think the best resources of the human beings on the or the best resources on the earth and not the coast not the oil not the electricity is it's the human brains how can we make the human great brains more creative constructive how can we making sure that the machines are always the toys and tools of humans rather than the control so I never in my life and especially last two years where people talk about an AI say human human being will be controlled by machines I never think about it I think it's it's it's it's impossible ah well it's impossible because because human beings they are different machines are invented by human beings and according to the size right humans never create another animal that is smarting humans especially well you have so many smart people it's impossible to make another smart people I very much disagree with that okay yeah that's good yeah but I mean the first thing you should assume is that we are very dumb and wicked that we can definitely make things smarter than ourselves I mean the didn't used to be humans right so the then that our earliest civilization was very primitive we didn't have any technology really we're just like running around you know trying to not get eaten or just trying to survive a winter now we have like heating and we grow food this is all new stuff so you know things that have obviously gotten way more smarter than the past way smarter so that's going to continue we're not the last step in evolution so the most important thing like I said the most important was mistake I see smart people making is assuming that they're smart they're not yep so give them an example what the animals or things that a human being made that is smart a human beings what computers actually are already much smarter than people on so many dimensions we just keep moving the goal posts so we used to think like for example being good at chess was an example of a smart human and then Kasparov was crushed by deep blue in 97 that was a long time ago 22 years I mean right now your cell phone could crush the world champion at chess literally go used to be thought of as something that humans were veteran than computers then Lisa Dahl was beaten for was before 1 by alpha zero then a new version of alpha zero so I sir should say alphago alphago beat Lisa Dolph Warren then is alpha 0 alpha zero crushed alphago hundred to zero now it's just pointless because it just keeps playing itself humans are trying to play a computer go is like trying to fight Zeus it's not going to work you hopeless we're hopeless hopelessly inadequate in terms of rendering and basically there's just a smaller and smaller corner of what intellectual pursuits that humans are better than computers and that every year it gets smaller and smaller and and soon we will be far far surpassed in every single way guaranteed or civilizational and does the two possibilities okay yeah my view is that computer may be clever by human being a much smarter yeah that we're not clever this very academic is knowledge-driven smarter is experience driven computer is smart is clever but it's human being we invented the computer ooh I never see a computer invented a human being this is my first point second point is that about a goal play chess it's stupid to compete with a computer on play goal just like a hundred years ago where human being created cars so human being said I can run faster than a car it's impossible it's only stupid people to compete with a car who run faster girl is designed for human to play with human right the chess is designed for human to human why should a human to fight against a computer so I never ever Li play chess or go with computer I'll be happy to see two computers fight each other I'm not interested in political with chess so I told those guys they are very sad computer will be smart they're human beings because computer can't play chess better I think you are stupid to compete with that don't do that so this is always do things we are good at sure okay well what would be an example of something that humans are better than a computer act and and then let's see if that happens well humans computer is only one of the clever tools that human created and computers us a clever but there will be more tools that human beings will created much cleverer than computers that's my view okay well let me tell you like my view on the on AI is essentially the you can view the advancement of AI as solving things with increasing numbers of degrees of with the increasing degrees of freedom so the the thing that with the thing with the most most degrees of freedom is reality but AI is steadily advanced solving things that have more and more degrees of freedom so obviously it's something like like checkers was very easy to solve that we could solve with with classical software classical computing but not really all that challenging and in fact there is a complete solution for checkers meaning it is literally literally impossible every every version of checkers is known and then then there's chess which is also which also it had many many more degrees of freedom than checkers many orders nineteen more than checkers but still really I would say a low order of magnitude lower degree of freedom game then there's go which had many over 92 more degrees of freedom than than chess so it's really just stepping through orders of magnitude of degrees of freedom this is the way to I think view the advancement of intelligence yeah yeah and it's really gonna get to the point where it just can completely simulate a person in every way possible like many people simultaneously in fact I mean obviously there's a this is a strong argument we're in a simulation right now you know so reminds you that joke of like you know if if life was a video game what would be a little review that's like well the graphics are incredible as that the plot is confusing the respawn takes a long time yeah that's a video game that's life and they flap with a video game respawn take it takes 20 years to spawn a human being and have them be fully conscious I'm worried about the birth race which which you alluded to earlier the the contrary to like most people think we we have like too many people on the planet but actually this is this is an outdated view this is the assuming that AI is fine we're assuming that the AI is a there's a benevolent future with AI I think that the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse collapse I want to emphasize this the biggest issue in 20 years we'll be population collapse not explosion collapsed the it's very easy to see what the world will look like in 20 years because humans have a 20 year boot sequence so like you said okay well who is born last year okay now you know what the world looked like in 20 years it's that easy I observe agree with that the the population problem is going to be facing huge challenge 1.4 billion people in China sounds a lot but I think next 20 years we'll see this thing will bring big trouble to China and the population decreasing of the whole the speed of population decreasing is gonna speed up now you got to collapse by accelerating closer accelerating collapse and then the commoner rebuttal is like well what about immigration like from where you know you want to go to spay you know the Mars and Mars were in the grip yeah more like with Mars these people yeah marks these people you know there's no zero people in right now so right now just a machine planet there's only some robots there this is something that we should pay special attention that's why the 18 million new babies born in China which was less than I go only like 1% of something we should have spent more time to create these people and treat life better but also I think about the AI there's another thing which alone I in my company in our company a I will call on Alibaba intelligent because we think when things with order with things with logic machine can do always do better at AI can do better but if things with an order without logic human being can do better for example when you love somebody there's no reason normally I just love him or just love her I have no reason but when I hate something body when I want to do bad things on something somebody there's a logic and with when there's a logic hey I can do better what we do on our and financing we you would teach machine all the bad things that bad guys want to do machine can learn quickly and arrest all the bad guys immediately but when you want to do good things not necessarily AI means love that's absolutely right so that is why the world the AI is if the way I can bring love which I caught in the past if you have your successful person you have to be helped and EQ and IQ right in the future if you want to survive in this world you have to be the L Q the Q of love that's important too otherwise you cannot survive in artificial intelligence time love is the answer yeah many songs about that you want to pick up the final one another topic use me gentlemen teach the time is very limited so we only have five minutes left so last question please yeah you want to pick up the last life or human being my strings so you want to talk about your car's ultimate autonomy what do you want to talk feel this feels like one of those steps in a videogame we would like pick a path a choice I choose life okay life so how much longer do you think people can live for with the helper AI can a I help with environment sustainability can you I think first of all I think humans will solve environmental sustainability I do not mean to suggest complacency or that we just take it easy in fact this is a self fulfilling one fulfilling prophecy we must we must take immediate and dramatic action and we you know we and continue the momentum towards environmental sustainability and China is actually the world leader in this in fact I'm not sure how well it is known outside of China just how much China is a world leader in environmental sustainability it's extremely impressive I mean I think half of all the electric cars in the world were made in China last year or something like that so you know I doubt it so I don't mean to suggest to suggest complacency but I do think humans can and will solve sustainability if we can if we can do the neural lace then I think or the neural link essentially the age will not matter that much you can simply save your state and restore your state like just like a saved game essentially something very close to that I do think we can we consult a biological aging if we really want it to you would have to make DNA changes but it's obviously just on a on a clock all organisms are I mean you could take a fruit fly for example and you could give it Yoda sort of have it do daily yoga and I have a very healthy diet and it's still gonna live for three weeks maybe four weeks so environmental factors on are relatively minor for extending life you have to change the DNA another question is like will people be okay with changing the DNA that's the the thing about extending life you know and probably people are a little bit reticent about that but that's essentially the thing that needs to occur to extend life you've got you've got to stuff the DNA clock somehow I don't know if we should work on this or not I think frankly you know it's it's probably a good thing that we do eventually die you know this is saying like in physics like even physicists which are generally quite objective is like saying like you know all all physicists don't change their mind they just die so maybe you know there's a it's good to have this life cycle yeah yeah well I think AI can definitely help the environmental sustainability and when human beings know themselves better human being will be smarter and will be wiser the difference between clever people and smart people or wise people smart people knows what he wants and how he can get it wise people know what he doesn't want so when human beings using artificial intelligence they will understand themselves better and I think there will be a minutes of ways people will live in a healthy earth and protect the healthier the reason why I want to stay in this earth I want to work on this earth I want to do anything I can to help this earth to better because even in a go to this space is great but if we can spend that resources just to focus on helping pick up the garbage from the oceans that thing is more difficult than to go to the Mars but artificial intelligence can help us achieving that and solve the problems and the second a human being can live better can live longer but what we need is not only lived longer we want to live healthier how can we live healthier it's to understand us better most of the disease opposed by our behavior so I think I'm 100% sure people will live longer people would live healthier but may not necessarily live happier if you want to be happier human beings you focus on a valley the vision and the mission and always have the dreams and I don't want people love to technology and put them dreams on the technology I think that technology should be with dreams it's the not technology change of the world is the dreams behind the technology that changed the world so my my hope is that anything we can do to improve this road to helping 7.5 billion people live better and live healthier and this is all about our world and I think we will be working very happily because I love your product Tesla you know making war cleaner and no noise and those such great technology I'm happy you have a de Factory in China and I think we need to do more things to improve this earth improve this world and make sure that people are happier and people care about the family people care about the house that's all we should do and trust us trust a human beings and trust young people let's take responsibility for today but let's not take away all the solutions for tomorrow it's great human being make mistakes it's great human being learn from mistakes it's great to die ha ha that's probably true thank you live long I feel like yeah thank you fight for the light of consciousness thank you thank you so much for this very inspiring and futuristic very informative dialogue it seems is the typical dialogue between the earth

https://youtu.be/WVW50KRaBd8

>> AND NOW, ELON MUSK IN CONVERSATION WITH TODD HOWARD! PLEASE WELCOME YOUR MODERATOR! >> THIS IS GOING TO BE REALLY SPECIAL. E3 I THINK IS A SHOW ABOUT CELEBRATING GAMES BUT IT'S ALSO ABOUT TALKING ABOUT THE IMPACT GAMES HAVE ON THE WORLD AND PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE TALKING ABOUT WHAT GAMES MEAN TO THEM. TODAY IT'S MY HONOR TO INTRODUCE ONE OF OUR INDUSTRY'S MOST RENOWNED DESIGNERS WITH AN INDIVIDUAL WHO IS CHARTING THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD IN SO MANY INCREDIBLE WAYS WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO BE A BIG GAMER. PLEASE WELCOME TODD HOWARD AND ELON MUSK! WELCOME TO E3! >> THANK YOU. >> WHEN WE ANNOUNCE THIS, THE BIGGEST QUESTION EVERYONE HAD WAS TO THESE GUYS KNOW EACH OTHER? YOU GUYS ARE FRIENDS, RIGHT? >> YEAH. >> HOW DID YOU GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER? >> PEOPLE TRIED TO CONNECT US OVER SEVERAL YEARS, WE FINALLY CONNECTED I THINK WHEN I BOUGHT MY TESLA. AND SOMEBODY -- I WENT INTO THE STORE, YOU DON'T BUY TESLA, YOU ORDER THEM ONLINE. I CLICK THAT BUTTON WHEN ORDERING OUR TESLA AND THEN WE CONNECTED. >> I'VE BEEN A BIG FAN OF YOUR GAMES FOR A LONG TIME AND I PLAYED "FALL OUT 3," I PLAYED THAT GAME A LOT. I EXPLORED EVERY CORNER OF THAT GAME. I DID NOT COMPLETE "SKY ROOM." AND THEN, I ASKED FOR THE DASH CAN I HAVE THAT STATUE OF THAT WEIRD LOOKING GUY WITH THE 1950s GUY? THAT GUY. LIFE-SIZED STATUE OF THIS 1950s JUMPSUIT. DO YOU HAVE THIS AT HOME? IT WAS SO WEIRD HAVING THAT WITH PARTY. TO PARTNER TO MAKE EVERYONE ELSE IS LIKE, THAT'S WEIRD. ROLLING BACK IN TIME, WHEN YOU WERE A KID, YOU PROGRAMMED A GAME, IS THAT TRUE? >> PRIMITIVE. IT I THINK I WAS PROBABLY TEN OR 11 WHEN I PROGRAMMED THAT GAME, IT'S A SIMPLE GAME. YOU ARE A SPACE FIGHTER, YOU FIGHT ALIENS. YEAH. I WROTE THAT GAME, THE GRAPHICS AND THE SOUND AND EVERYTHING. IT'S A VERY SIMPLE GAME. >> DID YOU EVER ASPIRE TO MAKE GAMES OR GET INTO MAKING GAMES? >> THAT WILL BE FUN. >> THERE WERE A FEW PLACES WHERE YOU KEPT DOING A LITTLE BIT OF GAMING STUFF. >> I WORKED AT A GAMING START UP WHICH WARILY WAS CALLED ROCKET SCIENCE. FADE TO LOVE'S IRONY. I WORKED AT ROCKET SCIENCE, IT WAS LONG TIME AGO. IT MUST HAVE BEEN '93, '94. IT WAS TRICKY. >> YOU NEVER APPLY TO BETHESDA, THOUGH? >> HE WAS DOING OTHER THINGS. >> MY ORIGINAL PLAN WAS TO GO TO GRAD SCHOOL AND DO STUDY FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES, I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO ELECTRIC CARS AND WORK ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, I CAN SORT OF TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT IT. BASICALLY, WHAT OF THE THINGS I THINK ARE IMPORTANT FOR THE FUTURE, WE HAD TO HAVE SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION OF ENERGY. SO THAT MEANS MAKING SOLAR PANELS LOW-COST AND ELECTRIC ELECTRIC CARS APPEALING. AND THEN WE WANT TO BE, MULTI-PLANET SPECIES, ROCKETS, AND THEN -- THERE IS A SOME THINGS I THOUGHT WOULD AFFECT THE FUTURE BUT I'M NOT SURE IF IT'S GOOD OR BAD, LIKE A I. THAT WORRIES ME, THAT ONE. [LAUGHTER] >> I JUST MADE A VIDEO GAMES. I WAS GOING TO DO ALL THAT. BUT I ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT. >> THAT AI BASICALLY CAUSED WORLD WAR III, AS I RECALL. >> IS THERE A LINK THERE, YOU TALK ABOUT AI AND VIDEO GAMES AND THE TECHNOLOGY AND VIDEO GAMES, IS THERE ANYTHING THERE THAT SORT OF HELPS PUSH TECHNOLOGY THAT YOU THINK? YOU LOOK AT SELF-DRIVING CARS OR OTHER THINGS, ARE THERE THINGS FROM VIDEO GAMES YOU THINK HELP PUSH TECHNOLOGY FORWARD? >> PART OF THE REASON I GOT INTERESTED IN TECHNOLOGY, THE REASON WAS VIDEO GAMES. VIDEO GAMES ARE A POWERFUL FORCE FOR GETTING KIDS INTERESTED IN TECHNOLOGY, IT HAS A BIGGER EFFECT THAN PEOPLE REALIZE. IF WE ARE INTERVIEWING SOMEBODY FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, MANY TIMES, HOW DID YOU START PROGRAMMING? "VIDEO GAMES." I THINK MANY OF THE BEST SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN THE WORLD ARE AT OR SPENT MUCH OF THEIR CAREER AT VIDEO GAMES HOUSES AND ESPECIALLY IF PEOPLE HAD TO TRY TO CREATE REALISTIC GRAPHICS USING VERY LITTLE COMPUTE POWER, THAT'S A HARD PROBLEM AND SO A LOT OF PEOPLE HAD TO WRITE REALLY TIGHT CODE AND COME UP WITH REALLY CLEVER IDEAS TO DO THAT. IF YOU LOOK AT SOMEONE, AND AMAZING SOFTWARE ENGINEER AND A REALLY GOOD AEROSPACE ENGINEER, IT SHOWS PROBLEM SOLVING, FIGURE OUT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, PROBLEM-SOLVING, IT TRANSFERS TO OTHER THINGS. >> THE BEST ANECDOTE BETWEEN VIDEO GAMES AND ROCKETS, GAMING AI IS SO MUCH HARDER. WHEN THE GAME CRASHES, HE PRICES REBOOT AND WHEN THE ROCKET CRASHES, A GIANT MASS SPREAD OVER SEVERAL MILES. >> THERE'S A JOKE ABOUT, IF REALITY WAS A VIDEO GAME THE GRAPHICS ARE GREAT BUT THE PLOT IS TERRIBLE. AND THE TIME IS REALLY LONG. >> HOW HAS THE STUFF ELON'S DONE INSPIRED OR AFFECTED WHAT YOU DO, TODD, IN YOUR WORLD? >> I MEAN, THE SPACE STUFF, AS WE LOOK AT STARFIELD'S, THAT'S REALLY KIND OF LOOK, OKAY, HOW ARE THESE THINGS GOING TO WORK IN THE FUTURE? GOT TO GO TO SPACE X LAST YEAR, THAT PLACE IS LIKE THE AVENGERS MEETS NASSAU. WHAT DO THOSE THINGS LOOK LIKE AS WE DO A SCIENCE-FICTION GAME? BUT THE OTHER STUFF, IN THE CARS AND SELF-DRIVING IS SOMETHING I'M PASSIONATE ABOUT BUT THAT DOESN'T AFFECT THE GAME STUFF. AND I KNOW THAT NOW YOU ARE PUTTING GAMES ON THE TESLA SO THAT'S DIFFERENT. >> YEAH. ACTUALLY, THANKS FOR HELPING OUT ON THAT, I APPRECIATE IT. >> WE TALKED ABOUT THAT, WOULDN'T IT BE PRETTY COOL? SO WE ARE WORKING TOGETHER. "SKYRIM" ON IT? WE ARE GOING TO START A LITTLE SMALLER. WE ARE WORKING ON "FALLOUT SHELTER" FOR THE CARS. IT WILL BE FREE, YOUR LITTLE DWELLERS ON THE SCREEN, THEY LIVE IN THE CAR IN SOME WAY. IT'S A GREAT STARTING POINT. >> HOW IS THIS GOING TO WORK WITH GAMES, YOU'VE TALKED ABOUT UNITY AND PORTING IT ALL, YOU HAVE TO BE PARKED WHEN YOU PLAY THESE? HOW DOES THIS WORK? >> YEAH, YOU HAVE TO PARK THE CAR. >> [LAUGHS] >> THE FUN POLICE MAKE US PARK THE CAR. WE WERE ALSO GOING TO ENABLE PEOPLE TO WATCH VIDEOS, STREAMING. THROUGH THE BROWSER, TO WATCH NETFLIX OR WHATEVER. YOUTUBE, IF THE CAR IS PARKED. A CHARGING STATION IF YOU WANT TO WATCH SOMETHING, WATCH IT ON THE SCREEN IN THE CAR. BUT THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE, WHAT CAN WE DO TO MAKE THE CAR THE MOST FUN POSSIBLE? AND WHAT DO OTHER CARS NOT HAVE? SO IT SEEMS LIKE, WELL, YOU KNOW, IF YOU ARE JUST PARKED SOMEWHERE WAITING FOR SOMEBODY, FINISH AN APPOINTMENT, ON A ROAD TRIP IT WOULD BE PRETTY COOL IF YOU JUST GO TO THE CAR SCREEN AND PLAY SOME FUN GAME. AND WE ARE EXPLORING, HOW DO WE MAKE IT AS MUCH FUN AS POSSIBLE? YOU CAN ALREADY PLAY ALL OF THE OLD ATARI GAMES IN THE CAR, YOU CAN CONNECT AN XBOX OR PS FOR CONTROLLER AND HAVE A PRETTY GOOD CONTROL FEEDBACK. AND WE HAVE GENIUS MOVES AND -- YOU CAN MAKE THE FART SOUND LIKE IT'S COMING FROM ANY SEAT. >> THAT ACTUALLY IS THE FUNNIEST EASTER EGG. AND THE NAMES OF THE FART. THE FALCON HEAVY IS ONE OF THEM, I BELIEVE. >> EXACTLY. >> WE'VE GOT SOME CLIPS, RIGHT? >> I CAN SHOW YOU SOME CLIPS OF SOME UPCOMING GAMES IN THE CAR, IT'S MEANT TO BE, WHAT ARE SOME COOL GAMES PEOPLE MIGHT LIKE TO PLAY, HOW MUCH PEOPLE PLAY THEM, ADD THEM TO -- HIGHER ON THE LIST OR MAYBE PUT IT INTO AN ARCHIVE YOU CAN TAP TO DOWNLOAD. THE SCREEN WAS NOT ORIGINALLY MEANT AS A GAME PLAYER, DOESN'T HAVE THAT MUCH STORAGE. SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE THAT MANY GAMES ON IT AT ONE TIME BUT IT WOULD BE LIKE -- WHAT DO PEOPLE ENJOY PLAYING, A GOOD WAY TO PASS TIME. >> LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT GAMES ON TESLA. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [APPLAUSE] >> WE'VE GOT A SECOND ONE, TOO? >> WE GOT A RACING GAME, SINGLE PLAYER OR TWO PLAYER. >> GAME TWO, CHECK IT OUT. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [APPLAUSE] >> THE STEERING WHEEL, I WASN'T PREPARED FOR THAT, THAT'S PRETT. >> IF YOU HAVE A RACING GAME AND YOU HAVE A STEERING WHEEL SITTING RIGHT THERE, WAITING TO BE STEERED. >> TO GAS AND BRAKE, WILL THAT WORK, TOO? >> YEAH. THE BREAK IS WIRED IN AND I THINK WE WILL PROBABLY HAVE MAYBE THE SCROLL WHEEL FOR THE GAS PEDAL SO WE DON'T ACCIDENTALLY -- STEPPING ON THE BREAK IF YOU ARE STATIONARY IS NOT A PROBLEM. >> THE GAS COULD BE. THAT'S AMAZING. THAT'S SO COOL THAT YOU'RE DOING THAT INSIDE THE CAUSE. I WANT TO ASK YOU THE IDEA, YOU ARE BOTH CERTAINLY KNOWN FOR A TON OF INCREDIBLE SUCCESSES IN YOUR CAREERS. HE SAID BEFORE, SOMETIMES YOU'RE REALLY ONLY INNOVATING IF YOU'RE READY TO FAIL OR HAVE FAILURE ALONG THE WAY, SHOWS THAT YOU ARE PUSHING RENOVATION. TODD, YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH QUITE A YEAR, CAN YOU GUYS MAY BE RARE LITTLE BIT ON SWORD OUT OF THE FOR INNOVATION AND HOW SOMETIMES FAILURE IS PART OF THAT JOURNEY? >> USUALLY WHEN YOU GET TO GAMING, THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE IT, YOU'VE GOT SUCCESSFUL AND YOU GOT THERE BY TRYING BIG NEW THINGS AND WE ARE GOING TO KEEP DOING THAT, OTHER GAME MAKERS DO THAT AND I THINK IT'S GOOD THAT THE AUDIENCES ARE WELCOMING TO THAT. THEY ARE GOING TO TRY IT OUT AND SUPPORT US AS WE GO THROUGH THAT PROCESS TO FIGURE OUT, HEY, WHAT'S GOING TO MAKE THIS TAX? WE HAD OUR UPS AND DOWNS WITH "FALLOUT 76" BUT OUR FANS ARE INCREDIBLE AND HAVE REALLY STUCK WITH US AND IT'S TURNED INTO ONE OF THE BEST ONLINE COMMUNITIES WE'VE EVER SEEN, IT'S FANTASTIC. >> THROUGH YOUR CAREER I'M SURE YOU'VE SEEN THAT, TOO, THE PROJECTS THAT TAKE TIME TO EVOLVE BUT THAT'S PART OF WHAT IT TAKES, I GUESS, HAVING THAT VISION AND PUSHING FOR IT. >> SURE, IF YOU'RE GOING TO TRY SOMETHING INNOVATIVE, YOU ARE IN UNEXPLORED TERRITORY SO THE ODDS THAT SOMETHING WILL GO WRONG ARE PRETTY HIGH. IT'S ONLY IF YOU TRY TO DO SOMETHING THAT'S WELL UNDERSTOOD THAT THERE IS A LITTLE CHANCE OF FAILURE BUT THERE WILL NOT BE INTERESTING OR INNOVATIVE. FOR SURE, UNCHARTED TERRITORY WILL RESULT IN FAILURES NECESSARILY. OR YOU'RE NOT TRYING HARD ENOUG ENOUGH. >> SPEAKING OF UNCHARTED TERRITORY, YOU MENTIONED "STARFIELD" BUT OBVIOUSLY SPACE IS GOING TO BE A PART OF THAT. I'M CURIOUS, I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT THE GAME -- I SHOULD ASK, WHAT CAN YOU TELL US? >> I DO NOT HAVE A CLIP. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE PATIENT ON THAT BUT WHAT I CAN SAY IS HOW WE APPROACH IT. THIS COULD HAPPEN. WHAT KIND OF FUEL DO THE SHIPS USE? USING HELIUM THREE, WE CAN DEBATE WHETHER THAT IS A GOOD POWER SOURCE FOR SPACESHIPS, HOW DO THE PHYSICS WORK IN SPACE AND GRAVITY AND THOSE KIND OF THING THINGS. WE HAVE TWO A GAME IF I IT SO IT'S NOT AS PUNISHING AS ACTUAL SPACE TRAVEL BUT THAT IT FEELS LIKE TRAVELING IN SPACE IN OUR GAME IS STILL -- AND IT'S DANGEROUS, IT'S STILL DANGEROUS TO GO AND EXPLORE. EVEN THOUGH LOTS OF PEOPLE DO I IT. >> SPACE IS FAR, IS THE THING. YOU HAVE TO DEFINITELY CUT THAT SHORT. FOUR LIGHT YEARS, MAN. EVEN AT LIGHT SPEED THAT'S PRETTY FAR. I MEAN, IF YOU WANT NORMAL PHYSICS, AND ANTIMATTER DRIVE WOULD BE THE BEST BUT THAT'S GOING TO LIMIT YOU TO LIGHT SPEED WHICH IS A LONG TIME. YEAH. OTHERWISE YOU'RE GOING TO BE STUCK IN ONE STAR SYSTEM. SO -- JUST HONESTLY, I FEEL LIKE WE'RE IN A PRETTY GOOD VIDEO GAME. WHY IS IT JUST POSSIBLE TO GET TO MARS? WHY ARE THE STARS OF SO FAR AWA AWAY? PUT THOSE STARS, LITTLE POINTS OF LIGHT, DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT. >> ARE YOU LOOKING AT THAT WHEN YOU ARE BUILDING "STARFIELD"? I DON'T KNOW HOW FAR IN THE FUTURE IT'S SET. >> GOING BACK TO THAT, RISKING FAILURE AND STUFF, HONESTLY, THE WORLD NEEDS MORE PEOPLE LIKE ELON WHO SAY, I'M NOT SURE HOW THAT WORKS, I'M GOING TO TRY THAT A DIFFERENT WAY. A LOT OF PEOPLE WILL DOUBT THAT. WHETHER IT'S GOING TO SPACE, SELF-DRIVING CARS, I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THOSE THINGS AND AS IT COMES TO WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SPACE X, WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF THE PHYSICS OF THE NEW ENGINES OR THINGS LIKE THAT? TALKING TO ELON, HOW FAR COULD THIS GO IN CURRENT REALITY, HOW WOULD WE MOVE BEYOND THAT IN A FICTIONAL WAY? YEAH. >> OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE YOU DOING WITH THE REALITY OF TODAY BUT SOMETHING FUTURISTIC LIKE TODD IS DOING, DOES THAT GET YOU EXCITED ABOUT WHERE IT SPACE TRAVEL CAN GO, CAN TODD'S WORLD EXPLORE THAT EVEN FURTHER ON? >> I THINK SCI-FI MOVIES AND VIDEO GAMES, REALLY I THINK IN VIDEO GAMES AND MOVIES THESE DAYS, IT CAN BE PRETTY INSPIRING, TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE WE WANT, WHAT ARE SOME IMPOSSIBLE SOUNDING TECHNOLOGIES THAT MAY BE COULD WORK SOMEHOW? THIS CONCEIVABLY THERE IS A WAY TO DO WORK DRIVE BUT IT'S SUCH ESOTERIC, SUPER OUT ON THE EDGE PHYSICS BECAUSE TECHNICALLY YOU CANNOT GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT BUT SPACE CAN TRAVEL FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. THAT'S WHAT'S MEANT BY WARP DRIVE. THE AMOUNT OF ENERGY YOU NEED TO WARP SPACES UNBELIEVABLY GIGANTIC. YOU'D HAVE TO BE CONVERTING MATTER AND ENERGY AT A RATE THAT WE CAN'T CONCEIVE, REALLY. IT CAN'T BE LIKE SOMETHING WHERE IF WE JUST CONVERT ONE JUPITER PER SECOND TO ENERGY, PROBLEM SOLVED. THERE IS A LOT, THERE'S NOT MANY JUPITER'S. YOU KNOW. SO -- THERE MIGHT BE A BIT OF RADIATION AROUND THAT. THERE ARE THINGS, TECHNICALLY THE UNIVERSE DID EXPAND FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT, THAT'S WHY WE CAN SEE LIGHT FROM ALL THESE SUPER DISTANT STARS. YEAH. IT'S A PRETTY WILD THAT SPACE EXPANDED FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. FIGURE OUT SOME STRANGE BREAKTHROUGHS AND COME TO GRIPS BETTER WITH DARK MATTER ESPECIALLY WHICH SEEMS LIKE SOMETHING FISHY IS GOING ON THERE. AND -- >> IT HAS BAD BRANDING. >> YEAH. EXACTLY. THE UNIVERSE IS MOSTLY DARK ENERGY AND DARK MATTER ACCORDING TO CURRENT PHYSICS BUT YOU KIND OF PLUG THEM IN THE EQUATIONS AND THEY SORT OF WORK. I SORT OF FIGURE, HEY, IF THIS IS A VIDEO GAME AND HAD A BUG IN THEIR SIMULATOR, OH, NO, WE HAVE TO FIGURE OUT A WAY FOR THESE MINIONS TO BELIEVE THEY ARE IN REALITY, INSERT DARK MATTER. >> THE IDEA OF A GAME AS A SIMULATION PREDICTING THINGS, OBVIOUSLY IT'S ENTERTAINMENT ON SOME LEVEL BUT THERE ARE GAMES WHERE IT'S MORE SIMULATION. OR MAYBE NOT. IS THERE VALUE IN THAT? IN TESTING THINGS AND EXPLORING IDEAS INSIDE THE GAME WORLD? >> YEAH, AT BEST SO WE HAVE A WHOLE TEAM THAT CREATES PHOTOREALISTIC WORLD, TRYING TO BE PHOTOREALISTIC. CONCRETE CURBS, SHADOWS, FADED LINES, THE REASON SELF-DRIVING IS HARD IS BECAUSE YOU HAVE ALL THESE CORNER CASES AND THINGS WHERE THE ROAD SHOULD BE A CERTAIN WAY ABOUT IT ISN'T, THERE SHOULD BE CERTAIN LINES BUT THERE ARE INTO PAINTED LINES, THEY TOOK THE PAINTED LINES AWAY, MARK THAT'S OFFSET FROM THE PAINTED LINES THAT IF IT JUST LISTENS TO THE LINE AND IT CRASHES INTO STUFF. IF YOU HAD CLEARLY PAINTED LINE LINES, SELF-DRIVING WOULD BE TRIVIAL. THE WORLD IS FULL OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT THE WAY THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE REAL TRICK WITH SELF-DRIVING AI IS TO FIGURE OUT, WHERE SHOULD I BE ON THIS ROAD THAT HAS NO PAINTED LINES OR THE LINES HAVE BEEN PAINTED WRONG. SKID MARKS AND SCRATCHES AND ROADWORK, ALL SORTS OF THINGS THAT ARE UNEXPECTED. THAT'S THE REALLY HARD PART, OTHERWISE IT WOULD BE CHILD'S PLAY. WE DO A LOT OF -- GOOD CORRELATIONS, DOES THE CAR DRIVE OFF THE CLIFF? YES. DOES IT DRIVE OFF THE CLIFF IN REALITY? CLOSE. >> I THINK YOU SAID IT ONCE, IT'S NOT THE LINES, IT'S LOOKING FOR DRIVABLE SPACE BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOUR MIND IS ACTUALLY WORKING EVEN IF THERE'S A LANE. DRIVABLE SPACE IS THE PROBLEM. >> WE HAVE A PRETTY GOOD RECOGNITION OF LINES AND WANTS TECHNICALLY DRIVABLE SPACE BUT WE NEED, WHAT IS THE ROAD AS OPPOSED TO -- WHAT IS THE MOST PROBABLY THE ROAD AS OPPOSED TO DRIVABLE SPACE AND A WHOLE SUBSET ON CURVES. WE ARE REALLY INTO CURVES RIGHT NOW. SOME CURVES ARE REALLY SUBTLE. SOME YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT, SOME YOU SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT, SOMETIMES YOU GO TO A DRIVEWAY AND THERE IS A CURVE, AND THE CAR IS LIKE, CAN'T GO OVER THAT. GOING THROUGH HER NEIGHBORHOOD AND EVERYONE'S DRIVEWAY IS DRIVE SPACE. TECHNICALLY TRUE BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO GO THROUGH EVERYONE'S DRIVEWAY, IT'S NOT GOOD. >> THINK ABOUT, A LOT OF THAT STUFF STARTED VIDEO GAME WISE, IMAGE PROCESSING AND AI AND WHAT THEY'RE DOING THERE, PEOPLE LOOK AT TECHNOLOGY NOW, THEY ALWAYS UNDERESTIMATE HOW FAST TECHNOLOGY MOVES. IN THE PRESENT DAY, I THINK THE SELF-DRIVING AND WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW IS GOING TO FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE THE WORLD IN WAYS PEOPLE CAN'T EVEN EXPECT AND -- OUR CHILDREN MIGHT NOT EVEN LEARN TO DRIVE BECAUSE THE CARS WILL ALL BE DRIVING THEMSELVES AROUND OR HOW IT AFFECTS CITYSCAPES, PARKING LOTS, ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION, ALL THESE STUDIES ARE FASCINATING. THE BEST SELF-DRIVING STOCKS, ALCOHOL COMPANIES. >> MORE GAMES TO PLAY, TOO. >> VIDEO GAMES, ALL YOU NEED A GPU FOR IS TO HELP THE GAME LOOK BETTER. THOSE SAME GPUs ENDED UP BEING VERY USEFUL, HUGE BOOST TO AI. BETTER GRAPHICS TO AI, THE SAME THING IS QUITE KEY TO SELF-DRIVING. >> I KNOW YOU HAVE OPEN AI, WHERE GAMES ARE GOING. IT YOU HAVE RPGs, SIMULATED WORLDS, EMERGENT BEHAVIOR, THINGS LIKE THAT. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHERE GAMES ARE GOING IN THE NEXT FIVE, TEN, PLUS YEARS, WHAT SORT OF HAPPENED THERE. >> I THINK THAT'S THE PART OF GAMING THAT'S GOING TO MAKE THE BIGGEST JUMP. MOST PEOPLE REACT TO INSTANTLY YOU ARE LOOKING AT A SCREENSHOT OR VIDEO. AS FAR AS HOW A GAME FEELS, A LOT OF PEOPLE, INCLUDING US HAVE STRUGGLED WITH HOW YOU MAKE THAT FEEL REAL. YOU CAN MOVE SOME OF THE PROCESSING TO THE CLOUD, THAT'S THE PART WHERE IT'S GOING TO GET SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER OVER THE NEXT GENERATION. REACTING TO THINGS YOU DID IN MORE REALISTIC MANNER, THE MORE REACTIVE TO WHAT YOU ARE DOING OR THE SITUATION AROUND THEM IS THAT YOU CAN GET THAT IN A VIDEO GAME ALL THE TIME. >> YOU GET TO A POINT WHERE THESE GAMES BECOME MORE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM REALITY. WHAT DO YOU THINK, WHERE DO YOU THINK THIS GOES AS THESE GAMES CONTINUE TO IMPROVE, GRAPHICS GET BETTER, SIMULATION GETS BETTER, DO WE REACH THIS POINT WHERE THE WORLD IS THE SAME THING? >> IMAGINE IF WE WERE TO REACH SUCH A SITUATION, THAT WOULD BE CRAZY. WE SEE THOSE CREATURES IN THE GAME SAYING WOW, IMAGINE, CAN YOU IMAGINE IF THERE IS A SIMULATION? YOU ARE IN A SIMULATION. [LAUGHS] THE SIMULATION IS ALL THE WAY DOWN. A SIMULATION IN SIMULATION, IN A SIMULATION. SEEMS LIKELY. ONE OR TWO THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN, CIVILIZATION WILL END OUR GAMES WILL BE SO REALISTIC THAT YOU CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM AND REALITY. I POSTULATE. IS -- DOES THIS SOUND CORRECT OR -- DOESN'T SOUND CORRECT? WE COULD BE SOMEBODY'S VIDEO GAME RIGHT NOW. WHOSE AVATAR ARE YOU? >> WHEN YOU THINK OF, KIND OF, YOU KNOW, WHEN YOU LOOK AT GAMES AND OF THE YOU PLAY NOW, WHATEVER THINGS YOU WANT TO SEE IN GAMES? IS THERE ANYTHING WHEN YOU PLAY A GAME YOU ARE LIKE -- I WISH IT DID THIS? YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY THINKING ABOUT LOTS OF THINGS BUT ARE YOU SATISFIED, ARE THERE THINGS THAT FRUSTRATE YOU ABOUT GAMES? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE GAMES DO IN THE FUTURE? >> I DON'T KNOW IF I SHOULD SAY. >> YOU WORKING ON A GAME, TOO? >> NO. I DON'T KNOW. A BIT MORE R-RATED, I DON'T KNOW. TRYING TO BE HONEST HERE. [CHEERS AND APPLAUSE] A POPULAR THEME. >> TODD? >> I DON'T KNOW THAT I CAN FOLLOW THAT UP. I MEAN, WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE STUFF YOU PLAY NOW, YOU TALK ABOUT TODD, YOUR KIDS PLAY GAMES, YOU PLAY GAMES, WHAT EXCITES YOU? WHAT WHAT IF YOU PLAYED RECENT? THERE ARE A LOT OF GAMES OUT THERE, WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR A GAME TO ATTRACT YOUR INTEREST? >> I HAVEN'T PLAYED A LOT OF GAMES, IT'S BEEN SUPER INTENSE, WORK, GET NOT ENOUGH SLEEP, THAT'S BEEN THE SITUATION FOR A COUPLE YEARS. SO -- JUST HAVEN'T HAD MUCH TIME. YOU KNOW, THE LAST GAME I PLAYED A LOT WAS PROBABLY "FALLOUT 4". THAT WAS A GOOD ONE. >> AND THAT HE WAS LIKE I'M DONE, I'M GOOD. >> "CYBERPUNK," I LIKE THE THEM THEME. THAT WEIRDLY WAS WHAT WE DECIDED TO HAVE OUR PICKUP TRUCK AS CYBERPUNK THEMED PICKUP TRUCK THAT WE WILL BE UNVEILING HOPEFULLY END OF SUMMER. YEAH, YEAH. IT LOOKS WEIRD, IT DOESN'T LOOK NORMAL. >> INSPIRED DIRECTLY BY THE THEME -- THE GAME A LITTLE BIT? >> I NOTICED ABOUT THE GAME AFTERWARDS, THIS IS SOMETHING OF THEM WORKING ON FOR A WHILE. I LIKE THE GENERAL IDEA. AND YEAH, SO IT'S SORT OF -- YEAH, SORT OF, SORT OF A SLIGHT RUNNER FEEL TO IT. IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A NORMAL CAR, LOOKS LIKE IT SHOULD NOT BE ON THE ROADS. BUT -- YOU KNOW, IT WON'T APPEAL TO EVERYONE BUT IT WILL BE SOMETHING THAT'S DIFFERENT AND YOU KNOW, IT WILL BE COMING YOU KNOW, PROBABLY APPEAL TO -- I THINK I WOULD BUY IT. YOU KNOW, IF YOU'RE TRYING TO WORK ON SOMETHING, IT'S REALLY HARD TO -- TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT OTHERS LOVE BUT YOU DON'T LOVE IT, IT'S REALLY HARD TO MAKE THAT GREAT. WHEN YOU'RE WORKING ON SOMETHING, IF YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH IT, THAT'S A GOOD SIGN. DON'T WORRY ABOUT IF OTHERS DO, IF YOU DO OTHERS WELL. >> ABSOLUTELY TRUE. >> PROBABLY HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT MAKING GAMES, YOU HAVE TO LOVE TO PLAY A? >> ABSOLUTELY AND IT'S NOT JUST ME, THE WHOLE TEAM. THESE ARE THE KIND OF THINGS WE WOULD LINE UP AT MIDNIGHT TO GO PLAY AND BUY. AND THAT'S WHAT DRIVES YOUR PASSION TO DO IT. YOU HAVE TO BE AROUND TASTE MAKER DAY IN AND DAY OUT, YOU OFTEN MISS THE MARK. >> ONE THING I WANT TO TALK ABOUT HIS ONLINE PLAY, A LOT IN THE NEWS RECENTLY ABOUT THE SATELLITES AND THE INTERNET AROUND THE WORLD, LOW LATENCY AND GAMING COULD BE ONE OF THE BENEFICIARIES OF THIS. CAN WE TALK A BIT ABOUT THAT PROJECT AND HOW IT WILL TIE AND POTENTIALLY TO GAMING? >> SURE. ONE OF THE CRITERIA FOR STARLIN STARLINK, IMPORTANT FOR REAL-TIME GAMING AND LATER, SORT OF SECOND-GENERATION CONSTELLATIONS ARE AIMING FOR -- THIS WOULD BE REALLY GREAT FOR ANY KIND OF REAL-TIME GAMING, YEAH. >> ACROSS THE WORLD YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO ACCESS THAT? >> ANYWHERE ON EARTH. I SPEAK ARE PRETTY AMAZING. THAT'S EXCITING, WE LOOK AT THESE CLOUD PLATFORMS, STREAMING, FROM A DESIGNER PERSPECTIVE THAT MUCH OPEN UP SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. WHERE GAMES ARE GOING TO GET IN THE FUTURE. >> I THINK IT'S ABOUT DEMOCRATIZING WHO CAN PLAY, THERE'S A LOT OF BARRIERS TO I WANT TO PLAY THAT GAME, I HAVE TO BUY THIS, BE SOMEWHERE. HAVING THAT WHERE YOU CAN APPROACH IT LIKE ANY OTHER ENTERTAINMENT, YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT IT AND THAT'S WHERE GAMES NEED TO BE, WHERE IT'S UBIQUITOUS, NOT JUST IN OUR PART OF THE WORLD WHERE PEOPLE ARE CONNECTED WELL, OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD THAT ARE GROWING AND THESE BILLIONS OF GAMERS COMING INTO THE SCENE WHO DON'T HAVE THE ACCESS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED. >> MAYBE A COUPLE AUDIENCE Q&A, MAYBE RAISE YOUR HAND, COUPLE QUESTIONS FOR THESE GUYS. A RARE OPPORTUNITY. >> HELLO, HOW ARE YOU DOING? WE ARE STREAMING ON TWITCH RIGHT NOW, BY THE WAY. I HAD A QUESTION ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF LIVING IN A SIMULATION. WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT ALL THE QUIRKS, EVERY INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY, HOW THINGS WORK ON A CELLULAR LEVEL LIKE THE UNIVERSE, EVERYTHING, DOESN'T IT START TO SEE MORE FAR-FETCHED WHEN YOU SEE HOW INTRICATE AND INDIVIDUAL THINGS ARE? >> OKAY, THE IDEA THAT -- [APPLAUSE] THANK YOU, APPRECIATE IT. NEXT QUESTION, LET'S MAYBE GO OVER HERE. >> HI. BIG FAN. THAT'S LOUD. CHARLES. WHERE ARE YOUR TUSKS? >> I'VE HEARD THAT BEFORE. >> THANKS FOR COMING, THANKS, GUYS. ELON, IF YOU WANT TO GET TO MARS, THAT'S GOING TO TAKE A LONG TIME TO GET ASTRONAUTS OUT THERE. WHAT KIND OF ENTERTAINMENT PLAN DO YOU HAVE? HOPEFULLY VOTED TO PLAY GAMES ON THEIR WAY TO MARS, WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THAT. >> ABSOLUTELY, SURE. AWESOME. >> PARTY IN SPACE. >> LET'S DO IT. >> MINE IS SIMPLE, HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO BEG TO GET A SELFIE WITH YOU? >> SURE, I'LL DO A SELFIE. SURE. ALL RIGHT. NEXT QUESTION. BACK THERE IN THE RED SHIRT. >> IT'S FOR ELON, HOW DO I SIGN UP TO TEST OUT YOUR NEURAL MAP PROGRAM? >> YOU PUT THIS U.S. BC REPORT IN YOUR HEAD. IT WILL BE FINE, MIGHT STING A LITTLE. >> ANOTHER ONE, SURE, RIGHT OVER THERE. >> QUESTION FOR TODD HOWARD. I LIVE IN ROCKFORD MARYLAND, ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ANY INTERNS BY CHANCE? >> GO TO OUR WEB SITE, THERE'S A LOT OF JOB POSTINGS THERE. >> A COUPLE MORE. SURE, RIGHT OVER THERE. >> HEY, WOW, THIS IS CRAZY. SO RIGHT NOW, I'M TRYING TO BUILD A TOKENIZED GAME ECONOMY FOR GAMERS, MY QUESTION IS, FOR TWO KARMA POINTS, CAN YOU SIGN MY CYBERPUNK HAT? >> WE WILL GET IT UP HERE FOR HIM. >> TWO AND A HALF KARMA POINTS. >> ANOTHER ONE RIGHT HERE. >> KARMA DOES SEEM REAL. >> ELON, I'M JUST WONDERING, WITH ALL THE NOISE YOU DEAL WITH, LOTS OF CRAZINESS, HOW DO YOU STAY FOCUSED? I CAN'T IMAGINE. >> YEAH, IT'S INSANE. >> HIS PROMISE WAS YOU DO STAY FOCUSED. SO MANY THINGS. >> I FEEL LIKE THE LEVELS, THE LEVEL KEEPS RATCHETING UP, CAN WE TURN THE DIFFICULTY DOWN ONE NOTCH? THAT WOULD BE REALLY HELPFUL. IT KEEPS DIALING UP THE DIFFICULTY. NIGHTMARE LEVEL. [LAUGHS] >> THIS IS A QUESTION FOR BOTH OF YOU, WHAT'S THE ACTUAL BIGGEST FAILURE YOU'VE GONE THROUGH TO GET TO WHERE YOU ARE? [APPLAUSE] >> WHO GOES FIRST? >> THAT'S A TRICKY QUESTION, IT'S FUNNY, IT'S AN INTERVIEW QUESTION I ASK PEOPLE AND I DON'T -- >> YOU DON'T KNOW YOUR RESPONSE. >> PEOPLE IN THE MILITARY HAVE THE BEST FAILURES, THEY CRASH SATELLITES AND TANKS AND THINGS LIKE THAT. I DO NOT HAVE A GOOD ANSWER FOR THAT. >> I BLEW UP THREE ROCKETS IN THE BEGINNING. [APPLAUSE] SO THAT WAS, THAT WAS BAD. I ONLY HAD ENOUGH MONEY -- ORIGINALLY, I BASICALLY TOOK ALL THE MONEY I MADE FROM PAYPAL AND PUT IT INTO SPACE X, CREATING SPACE X, TESLA, I FIGURED I'D JUST KEEP HALF OF IT AND SPEND THE OTHER HALF ON THESE CRAZY VENTURES THAT WOULD PROBABLY FAIL AND THEY UNFORTUNATELY NEEDED ALL THE MONEY. SO I HAD TO GIVE THEM ALL THE MONEY. AND THAT I DIDN'T HAVE A HOUSE OR MONEY FOR RENT, THAT WAS PRETTY DIFFICULT. THAT WAS BACK IN 2008. WE MANAGED TO SCRAPE ENOUGH SPARE PARTS TOGETHER TO A FOURTH LAUNCH AT SPACE X AND THAT WORKED. IF IT HAD NOT WORKED, SPACE X WOULD'VE DIED, PROBABLY WOULD'VE LOCKED THE CREDIBILITY TO RAISE THE REMAINING MONEY FOR TESLA, WE WOULDN'T BE HERE TODAY. NOT THIS ENDING. [APPLAUSE] >> FOR ME IT WOULD HAD TO BE SIMILAR, THE GAMES WE MADE IN THE PERIOD AFTER -- WE MADE A BUNCH OF GAMES THAT DIDN'T LAND AND THE COMPANY WAS GOING TO GO OUT OF BUSINESS. WE GOT A LIFELINE AND -- LET'S DO THIS GAME, THAT'S WHAT WE SHOULD DO AND THAT SAVED THE COMPANY. [APPLAUSE] >> ONE MORE QUESTION, LAST QUESTION. YOU WANT TO PICK? ELON, TODD? >> EVERYONE UP THERE. I CAN'T SEE THROUGH THE LIGHTS. THE HAND WAY UP THERE, YEAH. YELL OUT YOUR QUESTION. >> I WAS DRIVING WEST ON BURBANK BOULEVARD THE DAY YOUR ROCKET LAUNCHED, EVERYBODY PULLED OVER. WHEN IS YOUR NEXT LAUNCH? [INAUDIBLE] >> WE LAUNCH ALL THE TIME, WE DO 20-30 LAUNCHES A YEAR, MOST OF THEM ARE FROM CAPE CANAVERAL, SOME OF THEM ARE HERE IN CALIFORNIA. FOR PEOPLE TO REALLY SEE A LAUNCH LIKE THAT SUPER CRAZY VISIBLE, LOOKS LIKE NUCLEAR ALIEN INVASION FROM NORTH KOREA. SOME OF THE YOUTUBE VIDEOS WERE PRETTY FUNNY. YEAH, 911 LINES WENT BALLISTIC, BURPED ON THE 911 SYSTEM. FOR US, WE KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING SO IT WAS LIKE -- THIS LAUNCH. THE NEXT THING IS PROBABLY THE DOG AND HAVING LUNCH AT THE END OF THIS MONTH OUT OF CAPE CANAVERAL, THIS WILL BE THE MOST -- WE ARE PUSHING THE ENVELOPE A LITTLE BIT, SO IT'S MORE SIDE LOAD, HIGHER DYNAMIC PRESSURE. THE AIR PRESSURE WILL BE HIGHER. THAT WILL BE AN EXCITING LAUNCH TO SEE IF YOU ARE AT THE CAPE. >> AMAZING. ALL RIGHT, I THINK WE ARE UNFORTUNATELY OUT OF TIME. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING TO E3 AND BEING A PART OF THIS, THIS IS SO COOL TO HAVE YOU HERE. TODD HOWARD. THANKS, EVERYONE. APPRECIATE IT, GUYS. ♪ ♪

https://youtu.be/dEv99vxKjVI

- The following is a conversation with Elon Musk. He's the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and a co-founder of several other companies. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. This series includes leading researchers in academia and industry, including CEOs and CTOs of automotive, robotics, AI and technology companies. This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr. Musk. I accepted with full control of questions I could ask and the choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. I've never spoken with Elon before this conversation, publicly or privately. Neither he nor his companies have any influence on my opinion, nor on the rigor and integrity of the scientific method that I practice in my position at MIT. Tesla has never financially supported my research and I've never owned a Tesla vehicle, and I've never owned Tesla stock. This podcast is not a scientific paper, it is a conversation. I respect Elon as I do all other leaders and engineers I've spoken with. We agree on some things and disagree on others. My goal, as always with these conversations, is to understand the way the guest sees the world. One particular point of disagreement in this conversation was the extent to which camera-based driver monitoring will improve outcomes and for how long it will remain relevant for AI-assisted driving. As someone who works on and is fascinated by human-centered artificial intelligence, I believe that, if implemented and integrated effectively, camera-based driver monitoring is likely to be of benefit in both the short term and the long term. In contrast, Elon and Tesla's focus is on the improvement of Autopilot such that its statistical safety benefits override any concern for human behavior and psychology. Elon and I may not agree on everything, but I deeply respect the engineering and innovation behind the efforts that he leads. My goal here is to catalyze a rigorous, nuanced and objective discussion in industry and academia on AI-assisted driving, one that ultimately makes for a safer and better world. And now, here's my conversation with Elon Musk. What was the vision, the dream, of Autopilot in the beginning? The big picture system level when it was first conceived and started being installed in 2014, the hardware in the cars? What was the vision, the dream? - I wouldn't characterize it as a vision or dream, it's simply that there are obviously two massive revolutions in the automobile industry. One is the transition to electrification, and then the other is autonomy. And it became obvious to me that, in the future, any car that does not have autonomy would be about as useful as a horse. Which is not to say that there's no use, it's just rare, and somewhat idiosyncratic, if somebody has a horse at this point. It's just obvious that cars will drive themselves completely, it's just a question of time. And if we did not participate in the autonomy revolution, then our cars would not be useful to people, relative to cars that are autonomous. I mean, an autonomous car is arguably worth five to 10 times more than a car which is not autonomous. - In the long term. - Depends what you mean by long term but, let's say at least for the next five years, perhaps 10 years. - So there are a lot of very interesting design choices with Autopilot early on. First is showing on the instrument cluster, or in the Model 3 and the center stack display, what the combined sensor suite sees. What was the thinking behind that choice? Was there a debate, what was the process? - The whole point of the display is to provide a health check on the vehicle's perception of reality. So the vehicle's taking in information from a bunch of sensors, primarily cameras, but also radar and ultrasonics, GPS and so forth. And then, that information is then rendered into vector space with a bunch of objects, with properties like lane lines and traffic lights and other cars. And then, in vector space, that is re-rendered onto a display so you can confirm whether the car knows what's going on or not, by looking out the window. - Right, I think that's an extremely powerful thing for people to get an understanding, sort of become one with the system and understanding what the system is capable of. Now, have you considered showing more? So if we look at the computer vision, like road segmentation, lane detection, vehicle detection, object detection, underlying the system, there is at the edges, some uncertainty. Have you considered revealing the parts that the uncertainty in the system, the sort of-- - Probabilities associated with say, image recognition or something like that? - Yeah, so right now, it shows the vehicles in the vicinity, a very clean crisp image, and people do confirm that there's a car in front of me and the system sees there's a car in front of me, but to help people build an intuition of what computer vision is, by showing some of the uncertainty. - Well, in my car I always look at this with the debug view. And there's two debug views. One is augmented vision, which I'm sure you've seen, where it's basically we draw boxes and labels around objects that are recognized. And then there's we what call the visualizer, which is basically vector space representation, summing up the input from all sensors. That does not show any pictures, which basically shows the car's view of the world in vector space. But I think this is very difficult for normal people to understand, they're would not know what thing they're looking at. - So it's almost an HMI challenge through the current things that are being displayed is optimized for the general public understanding of what the system's capable of. - If you have no idea how computer vision works or anything, you can still look at the screen and see if the car knows what's going on. And then if you're a development engineer, or if you have the development build like I do, then you can see all the debug information. But this would just be like total gibberish to most people. - What's your view on how to best distribute effort? So there's three, I would say, technical aspects of Autopilot that are really important. So it's the underlying algorithms, like the neural network architecture, there's the data that it's trained on, and then there's the hardware development and maybe others. So, look, algorithm, data, hardware. You only have so much money, only have so much time. What do you think is the most important thing to allocate resources to? Or do you see it as pretty evenly distributed between those three? - We automatically get vast amounts of data because all of our cars have eight external facing cameras, and radar, and usually 12 ultrasonic sensors, GPS obviously, and IMU. And we've got about 400,000 cars on the road that have that level of data. Actually, I think you keep quite close track of it actually. - Yes. - Yeah, so we're approaching half a million cars on the road that have the full sensor suite. I'm not sure how many other cars on the road have this sensor suite, but I'd be surprised if it's more than 5,000, which means that we have 99% of all the data. - So there's this huge inflow of data. - Absolutely, a massive inflow of data. And then it's taken us about three years, but now we've finally developed our full self-driving computer, which can process an order of magnitude as much as the NVIDIA system that we currently have in the cars, and to use it, you unplug the NVIDIA computer and plug the Tesla computer in and that's it. In fact, we still are exploring the boundaries of its capabilities. We're able to run the cameras at full frame-rate, full resolution, not even crop the images, and it's still got headroom even on one of the systems. The full self-driving computer is really two computers, two systems on a chip, that are fully redundant. So you could put a boat through basically any part of that system and it still works. - The redundancy, are they perfect copies of each other or-- - Yeah. - Oh, so it's purely for redundancy as opposed to an arguing machine kind of architecture where they're both making decisions, this is purely for redundancy. - Think of it more like it's a twin-engine commercial aircraft. The system will operate best if both systems are operating, but it's capable of operating safely on one. So, as it is right now, we can just run, we haven't even hit the edge of performance so there's no need to actually distribute functionality across both SOCs. We can actually just run a full duplicate on each one. - So you haven't really explored or hit the limit of the system. - [Elon] No not yet, the limit, no. - So the magic of deep learning is that it gets better with data. You said there's a huge inflow of data, but the thing about driving, - Yeah. - the really valuable data to learn from is the edge cases. I've heard you talk somewhere about Autopilot disengagements being an important moment of time to use. Is there other edge cases or perhaps can you speak to those edge cases, what aspects of them might be valuable, or if you have other ideas, how to discover more and more and more edge cases in driving? - Well there's a lot of things that are learnt. There are certainly edge cases where, say somebody's on Autopilot and they take over, and then that's a trigger that goes out to our system and says, okay, did they take over for convenience, or did they take over because the Autopilot wasn't working properly? There's also, let's say we're trying to figure out, what is the optimal spline for traversing an intersection. Then the ones where there are no interventions are the right ones. So you then you say, okay, when it looks like this, do the following. And then you get the optimal spline for navigating a complex intersection. - So there's kind of the common case, So you're trying to capture a huge amount of samples of a particular intersection when things went right, and then there's the edge case where, as you said, not for convenience, but something didn't go exactly right. - So if somebody started manual control from Autopilot. And really, the way to look at this is view all input as error. If the user had to do input, there's something, all input is error. - That's a powerful line to think of it that way 'cause it may very well be error, but if you wanna exit the highway, or if it's a navigation decision that Autopilot's not currently designed to do, then the driver takes over, how do you know the difference? - Yeah, that's gonna change with Navigate on Autopilot, which we've just released, and without stalk confirm. Assuming control in order to do a lane change, or exit a freeway, or doing a highway interchange, the vast majority of that will go away with the release that just went out. - Yeah, so that, I don't think people quite understand how big of a step that is. - Yeah, they don't. If you drive the car then you do. - So you still have to keep your hands on the steering wheel currently when it does the automatic lane change. There's these big leaps through he development of Autopilot, through its history and, what stands out to you as the big leaps? I would say this one, Navigate on Autopilot without having to confirm is a huge leap. - It is a huge leap. - What are the-- It also automatically overtakes slow cars. So it's both navigation and seeking the fastest lane. So it'll overtake slow cars and exit the freeway and take highway interchanges, and then we have traffic light recognition, which introduced initially as a warning. I mean, on the development version that I'm driving, the car fully stops and goes at traffic lights. - So those are the steps, right? You've just mentioned some things that are an inkling of a step towards full autonomy. What would you say are the biggest technological roadblocks to full self-driving? - Actually, the full self-driving computer that we just, the Tesla, what we call, FSD computer that's now in production, so if you order any Model S or X, or any Model 3 that has the full self-driving package, you'll get the FSD computer. That's important to have enough base computation. Then refining the neural net and the control software. All of that can just be provided as an over-the-air update. The thing that's really profound, and what I'll be emphasizing at the investor day that we're having focused on autonomy, is that the car is currently being produced, with the hard word currently being produced, is capable of full self-driving. - But capable is an interesting word because-- - [Elon] The hardware is. - Yeah, the hardware. - And as we refine the software, the capabilities will increase dramatically, and then the reliability will increase dramatically, and then it will receive regulatory approval. So essentially, buying a car today is an investment in the future. I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you're buying an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset. - So that's a really important statement there because if hardware is capable enough, that's the hard thing to upgrade usually. - Yes, exactly. - Then the rest is a software problem-- - Yes, software has no marginal cost really. - But, what's your intuition on the software side? How hard are the remaining steps to get it to where the experience, not just the safety, but the full experience is something that people would enjoy? - I think people it enjoy it very much so on highways. It's a total game changer for quality of life, for using Tesla Autopilot on the highways. So it's really just extending that functionality to city streets, adding in the traffic light recognition, navigating complex intersections, and then being able to navigate complicated parking lots so the car can exit a parking space and come and find you, even if it's in a complete maze of a parking lot. And, then it can just drop you off and find a parking spot, by itself. - Yeah, in terms of enjoyabilty, and something that people would actually find a lotta use from, the parking lot, it's rich of annoyance when you have to do it manually, so there's a lot of benefit to be gained from automation there. So, let me start injecting the human into this discussion a little bit. So let's talk about full autonomy, if you look at the current level four vehicles being tested on row like Waymo and so on, they're only technically autonomous, they're really level two systems with just a different design philosophy, because there's always a safety driver in almost all cases, and they're monitoring the system. - Right. - Do you see Tesla's full self-driving as still, for a time to come, requiring supervision of the human being. So its capabilities are powerful enough to drive but nevertheless requires a human to still be supervising, just like a safety driver is in other fully autonomous vehicles? - I think it will require detecting hands on wheel for at least six months or something like that from here. Really it's a question of, from a regulatory standpoint, how much safer than a person does Autopilot need to be, for it to be okay to not monitor the car. And this is a debate that one can have, and then, but you need a large amount of data, so that you can prove, with high confidence, statistically speaking, that the car is dramatically safer than a person. And that adding in the person monitoring does not materially affect the safety. So it might need to be 200 or 300% safer than a person. - And how do you prove that? - Incidents per mile. - Incidents per mile. - Yeah. - So crashes and fatalities-- - Yeah, fatalities would be a factor, but there are just not enough fatalities to be statistically significant, at scale. But there are enough crashes, there are far more crashes then there are fatalities. So you can assess what is the probability of a crash. Then there's another step which is probability of injury. And probability of permanent injury, the probability of death. And all of those need to be much better than a person, by at least, perhaps, 200%. - And you think there's the ability to have a healthy discourse with the regulatory bodies on this topic? - I mean, there's no question that regulators paid a disproportionate amount of attention to that which generates press, this is just an objective fact. And it also generates a lot of press. So, in the United States there's, I think, almost 40,000 automotive deaths per year. But if there are four in Tesla, they will probably receive a thousand times more press than anyone else. - So the psychology of that is actually fascinating, I don't think we'll have enough time to talk about that, but I have to talk to you about the human side of things. So, myself and our team at MIT recently released a paper on functional vigilance of drivers while using Autopilot. This is work we've been doing since Autopilot was first released publicly, over three years ago, collecting video of driver faces and driver body. So I saw that you tweeted a quote from the abstract, so I can at least guess that you've glanced at it. - Yeah, I read it. - Can I talk you through what we found? - Sure. - Okay, it appears that in the data that we've collected, that drivers are maintaining functional vigilance such that, we're looking at 18,000 disengagements from Autopilot, 18,900, and annotating were they able to take over control in a timely manner. So they were there, present, looking at the road to take over control, okay. So this goes against what many would predict from the body of literature on vigilance with automation. Now the question is, do you think these results hold across the broader population. So, ours is just a small subset. One of the criticism is that, there's a small minority of drivers that may be highly responsible, where their vigilance decrement would increase with Autopilot use. - I think this is all really gonna be swept, I mean, the system's improving so much, so fast, that this is gonna be a moot point very soon. Where vigilance is, if something's many times safer than a person, then adding a person does, the effect on safety is limited. And, in fact, it could be negative. - That's really interesting, so the fact that a human may, some percent of the population may exhibit a vigilance decrement, will not affect overall statistics, numbers on safety? - No, in fact, I think it will become, very, very quickly, maybe even towards the end of this year, but I would say, I'd be shocked if it's not next year at the latest, that having a human intervene will decrease safety. Decrease, like imagine if you're in an elevator. Now it used to be that there were elevator operators. And you couldn't go on an elevator by yourself and work the lever to move between floors. And now nobody wants an elevator operator, because the automated elevator that stops at the floors is much safer than the elevator operator. And in fact it would be quite dangerous to have someone with a lever that can move the elevator between floors. - So, that's a really powerful statement, and a really interesting one, but I also have to ask from a user experience and from a safety perspective, one of the passions for me algorithmically is camera-based detection of just sensing the human, but detecting what the driver's looking at, cognitive load, body pose, on the computer vision side that's a fascinating problem. And there's many in industry who believe you have to have camera-based driver monitoring. Do you think there could be benefit gained from driver monitoring? - If you have a system that's at or below a human level of reliability, then driver monitoring makes sense. But if your system is dramatically better, more reliable than a human, then driver monitoring does not help much. And, like I said, if you're in an elevator, do you really want someone with a big lever, some random person operating the elevator between floors? I wouldn't trust that. I would rather have the buttons. - Okay, you're optimistic about the pace of improvement of the system, from what you've seen with the full self-driving car computer. - The rate of improvement is exponential. - So, one of the other very interesting design choices early on that connects to this, is the operational design domain of Autopilot. So, where Autopilot is able to be turned on. So contrast another vehicle system that we were studying is the Cadillac Super Cruise system that's, in terms of ODD, very constrained to particular kinds of highways, well mapped, tested, but it's much narrower than the ODD of Tesla vehicles. - It's like ADD (both laugh). - Yeah, that's good, that's a good line. What was the design decision in that different philosophy of thinking, where there's pros and cons. What we see with a wide ODD is Tesla drivers are able to explore more the limitations of the system, at least early on, and they understand, together with the instrument cluster display, they start to understand what are the capabilities, so that's a benefit. The con is you're letting drivers use it basically anywhere-- - Anywhere that it can detect lanes with confidence. - Lanes, was there a philosophy, design decisions that were challenging, that were being made there? Or from the very beginning was that done on purpose, with intent? - Frankly it's pretty crazy letting people drive a two-ton death machine manually. That's crazy, like, in the future will people be like, I can't believe anyone was just allowed to drive one of these two-ton death machines, and they just drive wherever they wanted. Just like elevators, you could just move that elevator with that lever wherever you wanted, can stop it halfway between floors if you want. It's pretty crazy, so, it's gonna seem like a mad thing in the future that people were driving cars. - So I have a bunch of questions about the human psychology, about behavior and so on-- - That's moot, it's totally moot. - Because you have faith in the AI system, not faith but, both on the hardware side and the deep learning approach of learning from data, will make it just far safer than humans. - Yeah, exactly. - Recently there were a few hackers, who tricked Autopilot to act in unexpected ways for the adversarial examples. So we all know that neural network systems are very sensitive to minor disturbances, these adversarial examples, on input. Do you think it's possible to defend against something like this, for the industry? - Sure (both laugh), yeah. - Can you elaborate on the confidence behind that answer? - A neural net is just basically a bunch of matrix math. But you have to be a very sophisticated, somebody who really understands neural nets and basically reverse-engineer how the matrix is being built, and then create a little thing that's just exactly causes the matrix math to be slightly off. But it's very easy to block that by having, what would basically negative recognition, it's like if the system sees something that looks like a matrix hack, exclude it. It's such a easy thing to do. - So learn both on the valid data and the invalid data, so basically learn on the adversarial examples to be able to exclude them. - Yeah, you like basically wanna both know what is a car and what is definitely not a car. And you train for, this is a car, and this is definitely not a car. Those are two different things. People have no idea of neural nets really, They probably think neural nets involves, a fishing net or something (Lex laughs). - So, as you know, taking a step beyond just Tesla and Autopilot, current deep learning approaches still seem, in some ways, to be far from general intelligence systems. Do you think the current approaches will take us to general intelligence, or do totally new ideas need to be invented? - I think we're missing a few key ideas for artificial general intelligence. But it's gonna be upon us very quickly, and then we'll need to figure out what shall we do, if we even have that choice. It's amazing how people can't differentiate between, say, the narrow AI that allows a car to figure out what a lane line is, and navigate streets, versus general intelligence. Like these are just very different things. Like your toaster and your computer are both machines, but one's much more sophisticated than another. - You're confident with Tesla you can create the world's best toaster-- - The world's best toaster, yes. The world's best self-driving... yes, to me right now this seems game, set and match. I mean, I don't want us to be complacent or over-confident, but that's what it, that is just literally how it appears right now, I could be wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of everyone. - Do you think we will ever create an AI system that we can love, and loves us back in a deep meaningful way, like in the movie Her? - I think AI will capable of convincing you to fall in love with it very well. - And that's different than us humans? - You know, we start getting into a metaphysical question of, do emotions and thoughts exist in a different realm than the physical? And maybe they do, maybe they don't, I don't know. But from a physics standpoint, I tend to think of things, you know, like physics was my main sort of training, and from a physics standpoint, essentially, if it loves you in a way that you can't tell whether it's real or not, it is real. - That's a physics view of love. - Yeah (laughs), if you cannot prove that it does not, if there's no test that you can apply that would make it, allow you to tell the difference, then there is no difference. - Right, and it's similar to seeing our world a simulation, they may not be a test to tell the difference between what the real world - Yes. - and the simulation, and therefore, from a physics perspective, it might as well be the same thing. - Yes, and there may be ways to test whether it's a simulation, there might be, I'm not saying there aren't. But you could certainly imagine that a simulation could correct, that once an entity in the simulation found a way to detect the simulation, it could either pause the simulation, start a new simulation, or do one of many other things that then corrects for that error. - So when, maybe you, or somebody else creates an AGI system, and you get to ask her one question, what would that question be? - What's outside the simulation? - Elon, thank you so much for talking today, it's a pleasure. - All right, thank you.

https://youtu.be/V1nQFotzQMQ

[Music] elon let's just start right with uh where where john john posed the question i mean you've spoken often in your career about how important it was for you as a young entrepreneur an innovator to come to america and you've said there's no other country where you could have achieved what you've achieved today definitely when you look at the us today in the landscape would that still apply in 2020 and are we broadly as a society doing everything we should be doing to foster that same environment that brought you yeah well i think u.s is still great with respect to innovation and fostering entrepreneurship so it's still great i think we don't want to be complacent and we want to say okay how can we make it better over time and i think we want to be um cautious about the the gradual creep of regulations and bureaucracy the rules and regulations uh are immortal and if we keep making more of a year and do not uh do something about uh removing them then eventually we will be able to do nothing this is very important and i think not well appreciate this is just sort of like the the the slow boil of the frog you know his part doesn't jump out because gets just slightly hotter each year um we should be aware of this i think particularly at the state level yeah well i want to talk about that because uh you've been running into that some in in california but let me ask in a broader sense i mean you've never been i mean you've been working with government you do business with government now uh you've expressed strong feelings about government pro and con at different times depending on the circumstances but when you think through an innovation lens in the broader sense what's the right role for government like what is the role worship government be a player and where should be hands off what's ideal in your mind sure um a lot of the time the best thing that government can do is just get out of the way um and so that i'd say that that's the default um probably best thing to do then um after that would be ensuring that uh there are not artificial monopolies that that there is a federal ground for startups um and the because what can happen over time is they can get regulatory capture by large companies where they influence the regulators and the legislators to favor uh their their situation and then you have a forest of redwoods and you just can't the the little uh little trees can't grow so we really want to have an environment that that tends to favor uh smaller companies and startups the big companies really don't need the support but they will they will generally try to work the system to establish a monopoly of some kind we should be wary of that um you know in general it's like i i think we we could consider uh changing the way we think of things from say capitalism versus communism i apologize long answer but i think this is kind of um capitalism versus communism and and think more in terms of feedback loops so is is a given organization does it give an organization governor or or a commercial have good feedback loop for the customer um whether it's the people as a whole or you know where whoever the customers are and if you've got like a duopoly or oligopoly they're generally going to be have a weak uh response to their customer um and if they're monopoly they're going to have the weakest response to the customer and the reason that that government i think is often the worst at responding to the customers being the people is that they're a monopoly that can't go bankrupt or usually cannot go bankrupt so there's not there's not really a a a cleansing process for a government short of a catastrophe um so i mean if you want to complain about the dmv what's the what's the alternative yeah so a couple things to unpack there first i do want to when you talk about redwoods dominating the uh the air and smaller companies have a challenge some people would hear that as being the situation in silicon valley today i don't think that's what you replied but is that what you see in silicon valley today well i think this is not a silicon valley problem it's just it's a general uh problem um i mean if you look at say you know how many how many candy companies are there like you know big candy is like consolidated into like three companies or something um and they also own all the dog food and the baby food so it's like when's the last time there was some good candy uh you know what's the forcing function for a new candy bar i haven't seen one in ages um so you know we gotta watch this like consolidation um that uh ends up resulting in lower responsiveness to the end customer and um like i said it's like you can think of like in the limit government is simply the largest corporation yeah so some people i think it's a false dichotomy to look at government and sort of industry as separate government is simply a corporation in the limit it is the ultimate cooperation with the monopoly so but then as you get closer to like set up monopoly as the feedback loop gets weaker and less responsive to the customer that's that's that's where you have something which does not maximize the happiness of people which should be our objective overall we had a couple of people last night at this event uh who are joining the big administration a couple of the president-elect senior advisors and clearly one of the things heavily on their mind is sort of a new national industrial policy for want of a better term they talked about spending a lot more on research and development and fostering innovation big government spending basically um is is that kind of national industrial policy a good idea is that a good use of government right now in your mind and if it is where would you focus that kind of effort well it's governor's responsibility to establish the rules of the game and then to ensure that those rules are properly enforced like sort of like the the referees on the field and you know it's like it's just like um you know football or something then you've got the rules you've got the referees you're gonna make sure the rules are the right rules and the referees are enforcing the rules that's a that's an important role for government uh to ensure that the rules are correct and that the incentives uh are what we actually want them to be for like i said the long-term maximum happiness of the people into the future um where i think government does not do a great job is when they want to not just be a referee on the field they want to be a player on the field uh this is not does not end up in a good stage picking winners and losers that kind of thing i mean effectively government incentives do fake or do favor like you're gonna say like what are the rules of the game um i don't know this is obviously an imperfect analogy but i i do think it is a pretty good one um that you you want the government to be carefully focused on ensuring the rules of the game are what we actually want them to be that we're getting rid of all rules this is very important which is not occurring um and that the the rules are enforced such that we have uh ethical behavior of companies um yeah um now there are times when you have an unpriced externality such as the co2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere so then if that is not priced in effectively then you can get behavior in industry behavior that does not that that we think is probably not good for the environment or not good for the future of the planet most of the time i mean provide pricing is correct you will see correct behavior from a private industry um so you know that's like one example where if we effectively price carbon we'll see the right behavior and then the government does not need to try to pick technology winners losers they can simply incent the outcome i think it's incredibly important that government focus on incenting the outcome not the path um you mentioned california i have to ask um are you you're in texas right now and there's been speculation and you've been vocal this year on some of your frustrations in california are you really are you relocating is it happening and can you talk a little bit about uh what's been troubling you in california uh so much this year since you since you mentioned it sure well first of all uh tesla and spacex obviously have massive operations in california in fact it's worth noting that tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in california uh spacex is the large the last aerospace company still doing significant manufacturing california so there used to be over a dozen car plants in california and california used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing my companies are the last two left i want to emphasis so that's a very important point to make um for myself yes i i have moved to texas um we've got the starship development uh here in south texas where i am right now we're hopefully going to do a launch later later today and then we've got a big factory development just outside of austin for texas but you made the move really but what why why did you why did you go there is that is it all a personal decision or was it it was partly a corporate environment decision really for the headquarters is that well i mean in my case the two biggest things that i've got going on right now um are the starship development in south texas which was done this was set in motion like five years ago um and then the the the big new uh u.s factory for for tesla which is called gigatexas uh just by austin so those are the two big projects so these necessarily um drive the use of my time here um yeah and then the other big thing for uh tesla right now is the gig of berlin so i was in berlin i spent a fair amount of time in berlin working on that um and um yeah i think there's you know there's um california is great so there's a lot of things that are really great about california it's the biggest economy in the country most number of people um i do think that uh that there's there is something that happens when um you know if it's going into the sort of sports team analogy like if a team has been winning for too long they they do tend to get a little complacent a little entitled and then they don't win the championship anymore so california's been winning for a long time um and i think they're taking them for granted a little bit yeah let's talk a little more on innovation in corporate america in general i mean innovation has always been core to who you are it's how you think about your companies and your role um in the corporate suite in america are our companies in general uh fostering and developing and innovation and are the leaders in corporate america you've got a lot of them on this call or are we do we prioritize innovation as much as we might uh or need to do you think right now well i i think there's this this innovation but then there's also just um our um ceos in corporate america focused enough on on product improvement i think the answer is no um and i think generally my advice uh to or my recommendation would really be spend less time on on finance spend less time in conference rooms less time on powerpoint and more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible um and particularly from that why why why why is that is that because uh boards or shareholders are too financed and returned focused and don't don't think enough about product as being at the heart of of value is because a certain kind of the skill is cultivated um why is that why why why is that a problem in the c-suite i think there might be too many mbas running companies um there's the mba isation of america which i think is maybe not that great um there should be more focus on on the product the service itself less time on board meetings less time on on financials the financials come as a result like you say like what's the point of a company at all and why even have companies it's like a company's assembly of people uh gather together create a product or service and deliver that product to service and sometimes people lose sight of that a company has no value in and of itself it only has value to the degree that is effective allocator of resources to create goods and services that are of greater value than the cost the inputs this thing we call profit is uh just just should just mean over time that the value of the output is is worth more than the than the inputs and and it's a reflection of the quality of the product more than uh so so the product is good presumably the profits follow rather than profits being called versus problems and yeah sometimes as people sort of have it backwards and you know if people are getting sort of the incentive structure is coming from the financial side of things i don't i just i just honestly would recommend to anyone listening uh that just spend less time in meeting rooms less time on on on powerpoint presentations less time in a spreadsheet and more time on the factory floor more time with customers and obviously a lot of people out there are already doing that but i just like i just urge people to say like hey step back a second and say is your product as awesome as it could be probably not um what could you do to make it make it great um and you know it's it's a it feel like think about innovation like maybe it has to be like breakthrough innovation i don't think it necessarily has to be breaking innovation it's just like like you know just make your product better it's this is the thing that really matters is that kind of product mindset that the kind you describe is that learnable is it is it teachable or is there is there an innate element that somebody has to have to really to do it well i mean not everybody's innovating or thinking on your scale a lot but but you you hi you look for innovative people when you hire them is it something that that is pretty easy easily learnable or is there some inequality in the people that uh succeed i think it is learnable i mean step number one would be try and any have you tried and if have you tried hard and if you haven't tried hard try hard i think it is learnable um it's not some mysterious thing it's just basically just be like an absolute perfectionist about the product that you make the service that's provided um seek negative feedback from all quarters uh you know from customers from from people who aren't customers like hey okay what can we make this how do we make this better um and you know i think that's it it's absolutely learnable and and and and just if you find yourself spending a lot of time in getting presentations and reviewing spreadsheets you're blocking up the wrong tree that's the that's the effect not the cause um so just get out there on the factory floor get out there in the stores talk to customers think about what what would what would you love to have oh and you know sometimes i think you know and i've had this conversation that tells a few times where it's like we're trying to think okay we don't it's at times like we don't love this product but we think others will love it you know that's not really how it works if you don't love it don't expect others will either [Music] now you're at a moment i want to talk about your companies in a minute but you're at a moment where both we're particularly tesla and spacex are really growing in lots of ways right now um and you've had plenty of ups and downs even at this point but but but it's a high point on your own journey in this way what are the biggest mistakes you've made that you've learned from because you talked a little bit about being willing to put yourself out there fail learn keep growing what were turning points for you that really you you you said wait a minute this is wrong or this is the wrong move either personally or or for the company and that that you learn from that have fed to where you are right now well if i had to list all the mistakes this would be a very long call um so it's too too much to even think of i'm trying to think like how could i could i classify them in some way um well i mean some of the things i mentioned just before it's like where you know i was recommending that people spend less time in a conference room less time getting presentations and and spreadsheets and that like generally that's like when when i have spent too much time in a conference room that's generally when things have gone awry and when i go and spend time on the factory floor um or you know really using the the cars um thinking about the rockets it's like that's where things have gone gone better um but does that does that risk some some people would worry that that risk sending a message to your your teams that you personally have to be involved for something to work that you can't delegate or you can't trust them i think that's one thing that makes some [Music] executives reluctant they're trying to find that line between showing their personal commitment and trusting their subordinates to do the work so yeah i mean you're known for being passionate sleeping on the factory floor but but but is that a concern for you or do you not care does this that's not an issue for you how do you think about it well there's a lot of talented people at spacex and tesla um and i think the morale is is good um uh i for sure respect them greatly and it's an honor to work with them um and i find that if if i am um engrossing the details of the issues this does not result in them feeling better but worse but feeling better like my experience more energized um you know it's like you know you think about like war it's like do you want the general in some like you know ivory tower or or on the front lines like troops gonna the troops are gonna fight a lot harder if they see the general on the front lines than if they think generals you know in some cushy situation so it's like nobody bleeds the prince in the palace get out there on the goddamn front line and and you know show them that you care and that you're not just in some plush office somewhere um yeah i mean my plush office right now actually yeah yeah well yeah um let's talk quickly about tesla um but both tesla and spacex were scaling up today in fact i mean tesla touched 600 billion i think yesterday in evaluation today you said you're going to raise 5 billion to do stock sales um i assume and i assume what those gains are really in your mind going to do is help you scale up faster be poured back into investment because now is the moment to do that is that the plan here yeah i mean i i guess there's um you know what we're kind of debating like should we raise money or should we not um it wasn't like a 100 sure thing um in the end we thought well we can retire a lot of the debt and increase the security of the company well probably a good thing uh and for less than one percent of solutions probably makes sense um but we're you know neither here here or there on that i think it's a it could have gone either way so what is so the money is for really debt retirement you're saying today uh debt retirement and like i guess to have a bit more of a war chest or you know um you know what what is money money is an entry in a database okay i want to think a couple questions uh from the audience first i want to go to a video question uh that we solicited um uh if we could play that um hello my name is catherine parsons and i'm the ceo of technology education company decoded i want to know are machines able to innovate or is innovation an inherently human capability yeah i think uh machines will well my views on ai uh i've spoken a lot about this hey i will be able to do everything better than human over time everything everything includes yeah okay uh elon here's one um uh if you could have a very quick very quick easy one if you could redo the entire transportation infrastructure of the united states how would it look michael fountain asks the entire transportation infrastructure wow um the main thing that i see missing here is uh that we need to go 3d in cities in order to alleviate traffic congestion and um i think probably the best way to do that is with uh with tunnels um it sounds it may sound a bit silly but boring company that you you started which looks at that now yeah in fact for for many years i was asked what do i see as the biggest opportunity for new companies and i kept saying can someone please build tunnels for half a decade i said this and nobody built tunnels so it's like fine we'll start a company and start building some tunnels and we've got the first tunnel that's uh going to be opening up first commercial tunnel opening up in vegas uh going from the convention center to the strip and i think who will have an opportunity to try it out and be able to see that hey if we just go 3d and cities we don't have to be stuck in gridlock those are great and so i'd recommend tunnels and then for long distance travel the you can do tunnels or tubes but if you evacuate the tunnel and and essentially remove the air or most of the air you can you can get rid of the uh air friction and you can go uh supersonic uh and do so with i mean with no um dependence on weather and with no need to get to high altitude or create any sonic boom issues so that's what i meant by sort of a hyperloop it in it's just basically a pressurized electric car in a vacuum tube um so i think this this will be our evolution in transport that would be amazing um and um hopefully others do it not just the boring company okay here's one uh elon i'm a founder of a founder and ceo of a private company in the battle one of the changes i'm seeing uh is people trying to force uh the company uh on political and social matters uh you know making demands not to sell police or not to sell the government agencies there's walkouts and protests google do you think this kind of thing is having a chilling effect or will have a chilling effect on innovation well a lot of this stuff is is centered in the san francisco bay area and i think there's the the silicon valley of the san francisco bay area has too much influence on the world in my opinion and i say that as someone who has spent most of his life in california mostly in the bay area so you're like you're like your friend peter thiel feels it's gotten more stifling up there you you that you're expressing you agree with me yes i think there's uh the the bay area has outsized influence in the world uh so is that changing is the pandemic changing that i mean is there a real chance here that with departures and people leaving the valley that we're going to see some of that scatter out into the country side for good now uh post pandemic i think we'll see some reduction in the influence of silicon valley um but the social media is still very much centered in silicon valley so i think we need to be concerned about mind viruses just you know memes that travel very quickly through social media that may or may not be correct um and we certainly want to encourage a healthy dialogue uh so you know there's some out there who just want to shut down one side of a debate or another i think we should resist that yeah we're out of time unfortunately because i could go for an hour we didn't even get to half of the questions i had but thank you for the time today it's good to see you uh and hope we can continue the conversation another time and it's always fascinating to hear what's on your mind so thanks and and good luck on your projects right now all right thank you thank you elon

https://youtu.be/AF2HXId2Xhg

foreign this is your captain speaking welcome aboard our vessel to Mars boarding is completed as all systems are set and we're sure that we don't take the coronavirus to outer space for your cooperation by the way we are ready to launch first rule don't panic cabin crew prepare for takeoff [Music] thank you [Music] 20 seconds till left off 15 seconds [Music] foreign this is your captain with an update from the cockpit we arrived in Earth's orbit safe and sound let me please especially welcome one very special passenger an extraordinary Visionary a multi-talented engineer a super smart entrepreneur and not at least the man who made this Mission to Mars possible please give a very warm welcome to Mr Elon Musk please take a look at our wonderful Planet isn't it gorgeous as curious as I am to see Mars I'm really looking forward to come back to our old Homestead [Music] South Africa in the 70s a boy from Pretoria facing childhood problems he reads 10 hours a day Star Wars and science fiction but this one's got talent for machines and for money at the age of 12 he programmed his first computer game on the good old Commodore young Elon sold blastar for five hundred dollars develop stuff Let It Grow sell it soon this is how we made his fortune and his opportunity to go even further this is the way one sentence he never wanted to hear you're in the Army now so he got himself a passport moved to Canada leaving the South African apartheid regime behind he was 16 years old after some time in Kinston he left Canada went to Pennsylvania got his Bachelor and then moved south ah Stanford University Palo Alto where all the Silicon dreams were about to come true Elon was one of those who founded the legend of the valley two thousand dollars a car and a computer and nothing more he and his brother Kimball founded zip2 a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers four years later he sold it to Compaq for 307 million dollars quite a story but just the start a typical story of those times develop and invest find allies merge disrupt rise of PayPal his first vision of making things easier for people using the digitization Elon Musk helped to change the financial industry forever PayPal was sold for 1.5 billion dollars to eBay Elon held 11.7 percent of the shares a big winner in the big game money that he uses to make the world a better place he attacks on the world's best settled Market the automotive industry we created Tesla to make a difference in the world Tesla disruption at its best not everything worked out perfect well but his long breath proved him right he is pushing all his competitors forward he is expanding Elites technology leads infrastructure and Logistics and if necessary he works in sleeps at the factory foreign ER [Music] soon very soon we've decided to put the Tesla gigafactory Europe uh in the Berlin area yeah and Tesla is just on The Cutting Edge of an idea autonomous driving is bored so for us being a little startup we had to start off with a car that was in in low production and necessarily expensive their idea of an electric car is something that doesn't look good isn't fast it doesn't have high performance we wanted to break them all of all of that that's what we sought to achieve big time for important things saving time for stuff that is fun well it is fun to drive a Tesla but on an endless Motorway even riding gets tiring it's human we're bored very soon let the car drive and get some food for the brain while it does the work and last but not least fuel it with energy that is not harmful to the planet Elon Embraces his responsibility but this is never enough much more is needed Elon can't stop thinking about the future of making things work better more efficient a Visionary a man who never gives up although there would have been a few moments when giving up would have been a more than plausible option foreign SpaceX is not only a business it's Hobby it's a passion Elon is CEO and its first spaceship designer it is all rocket science really many laughed at him NASA with its billions the Russians with their ruthless and dead serious Ambitions the whole call of SpaceX was the first space exploration technology and that's uh helping make Humanity a space Bank civilization transported Americans to the ISS UE private economy is more effective and sustainable than State economy crew dragon is a gentle slap in the face for over-the-top institutional rocketeers the Russians took it personal Elon Musk must not be quoted by them too successful Russia some things never change can one man change the world yeah sure Elon Musk did it and he doesn't stop there and I think that's one of the things that you know makes people excited about the future and we want the things that are in science fiction novels and movies not to be science fiction forever we want to be real one day what if one could help handicapped people by connecting the body with machines to reconnect neural disorders a presto neuralink what if we could get rid of traffic on our city streets dig a deep long tunnel beneath them and shoot the cars from one side of the town to the other hey Presto the boring company the name by the way is one of the best puns ever and stop if we can do that with cars why shouldn't we do it with goods and people full speed 600 kilometers in 35 minutes just do it hey Presto hyperloop but all that's Earthbound reach for the stars and planets we're already on our way to Mars [Music] [Music] this is your captain speaking well rather gasping what a trip that was and it's not over yet let's hear it from the man himself I'd kindly ask you now Elon to come on stage and join actually Springer CEO Matthias Dafna for a little chat [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well that was fun yeah I'm glad that you enjoyed it yeah it's like a ride I mean I think you could charge money for this this is great I mean yeah it's really makes a difference to have this two screens and the angle change it's like that felt great like Disney right Elon apart from this special trip to Mars this evening when do you think realistically human beings will land on Mars for the first time um I think it I feel fairly confident about six years from now so every the Mars uh Earth Mod synchronization occurs roughly every 26 months so we had one this year this summer and so that means in roughly like about two years there'll be another one um and then two years after that so I think I'd say if you say six years from now I think highly confident uh if we get lucky maybe four years and then we want to try to send a an uh uncrewed vehicle there in two years when will your first trip to orbit who will take place I don't know possibly in two or three years I mean I'm mostly concerned with developing the technology that can enable a lot of people to go to Mars and make life multi-planetary have a base on the moon a city on Mars and I think it's important that we strive to have a self-sustaining City on Mars as soon as possible I mean I'm optimistic about the future on Earth but it's important to have life insurance for Life as a whole is it going to be a business kind of tourism in in orbit or is it more a kind of plan B if things owners do not develop as well it's not exactly a plan B uh it's it's more that I think I think there's two two aspects to this uh one is that we want to have a future that is inspiring and exciting and what are the things that you find inspiring and exciting about the future I think one future where we are a space-bearing civilization and out there Among the Stars I think that's every kid gets excited about that you don't even need to teach them they just get it it's like instinctive and so it's very important for us to have reasons to like reasons to be excited about life like when you wake up in the morning it can't just be about problems okay I know everyone in this room deals with a lot of tough problems but you know it's got to be more than that so you know I think a future where you can say hey even if it's not you there's going to be people out there that can we can have a base on the moon we're going to have a you know a city on Mars maybe go further the moons of Jupiter and everything I think that's a very exciting future and and then and I think most people do um and you seriously want to be buried on Mars just not an impact [Laughter] uh yeah I mean if you're gonna listen we're all gonna die someday um so if you're gonna die someday I'm like okay do you want to be buried on a monster with I'm like Mars sounds cool born on Earth Dion was that's uh you know if you got the choice um two years ago I had a conversation with Jake Ma and we spoke about Jeff Bezos plans with regards to uh orbit and he said well let's uh Jeff Bezos take care uh for the orbit I take care for the Earth you seem to take care for both yeah basically Tesla is about trying to make sure things are good for the future on Earth and then SpaceX is about a good future beyond Earth basically um and so obviously we have to have sustainable energy uh both consumption and production of energy uh so like hazardous solar panels and batteries I think that's one of the key uh ways to have sustainable energy generation and also the batteries are useful for wind power so and then elect you then you need to Consumer via consumed electricity so electric vehicles um and um you know I think look at these things like say okay if you look back from the future and say what's the fundamental good of uh Tesla I would say it's probably should be assessed as by how many by how many years did Tesla accelerate the Advent of sustainable energy like that's like I would measure the goodness of Tesla in that in that way and then for SpaceX it's like okay to what degree did we improve the probability of humanity being a space bearing civilization I remember very well the year 2014 when we were hosting the gold steering wheel here at Oxford and you got the uh award for Lifetime Achievement and I was sitting in the first row with the then very successful and famous CEO of a very big German car company and I asked him while you were on stage isn't this guy dangerous for you I mean this looks really serious he said oh no don't worry first of all the whole idea of electric driving is never going to be a mass Market sure second These Guys these guys in Silicon Valley they have no clue about engineering about building really beautiful and great cars so we don't have to worry by then Tesla's market cap was 23 billion today it's 536 billion US Dollars the market Capital VW then was 86 and to today at 77 and you could you you are with Tesla two and a half times bigger than BMW VW and Daimler I even said it's ever too high I mean what am I supposed to do you like have you ever considered that stock is too high a long time like when it was like it 100 800 pre-split and then listen to me but you know I'll tell you in the SEC complained again I mean like you know is it a serious option to buy one of the incumbents one of the big car companies for you well I I think we're definitely not going to launch a hostile takeover so I suppose if there was a friendly one if somebody said hey we think it would be a good idea to merge with Tesla we certainly have that conversation um but you know we don't want to you know be a hostile hostile takeover sort of situation did you feel a lot of complacency uh these days that the incumbents length let you feel that you are I mean the kind of hopeless disrupter but they know how to do it or where they're very polite and nice with you do you mean back then or not then oh no no today everybody it's super nice I would not say there was a run now yeah we're difficult to characterize their responses super nice um they use a lot of adjectives um I don't think that any of them were positive so we try we really tried hard to convince a lot of companies uh honestly I was in so many panels uh but um they generally were yeah generally the sediment that was expressed that you mentioned earlier that was pretty much Universal especially uh if back in say 2008 or 2007 like when we first unveiled the roads from 2007 um yeah I mean it was just basically they just said well you're basically a bunch of fools well I mean generally they say like well who starting a car company is crazy you're going to lose all your money I was like I think I probably will lose all my money I agree I it wasn't like I thought it would be successful I thought we had maybe a 10 chance of success so then people would say you're it's gonna fail and you're going to lose lose everything it's like yeah probably true yeah what else is new a couple of years ago we we we saw each other in America and the guy asks you on a panel uh when uh autonomous driving will be approved and you said I do not care so much when it's going to be approved I care more when uh human beings in cars will be forbidden and then the guy said well that's really unrealistic it's never going to happen in uh in cars people want to do something actively and then you said well 100 years ago nobody could imagine uh uh elevator without a lift boy today nobody could imagine a lift with a lift boy yeah so when is autonomous driving really really going to happen and when when are you able to do it and when is it going to be approved okay just between us yeah it's a very discreet Circle here yeah um so well first of all I'm not I'm not against people driving to be clear uh so I think people will drive cars basically as far into the future as I can imagine it's just that it's going to be increasingly unusual to to drive your own car and while it's fun to drive a you know a well handling car on a Winding Road in beautiful terrain of course that's that's fun um but it's not fun to drive a car in a terrible gridlock traffic like you know going through extreme traffic that's no fun driving a car so I think people are unlikely to most of the time want to commute or with it with their uh and drive themselves um and you know people are typically spending hour and a half a day maybe two hours uh on average driving um especially say like California or something like that it's very common um and some people will actually commute like three hours a day sometimes it's pretty crazy so uh so I so I think I think uh um if you say fast forward to like 10 years from now I think 10 years from now almost all cars will be will have a full autonomy capability uh that all new costs produced so there's there's about two billion cars and trucks in the in the existing Fleet um and the new vehicle production is about five percent of the fleet size so about 100 million so even the point which all cars are autonomous they'll still take you know 20 years to replace all the cars assuming that the number of cars and trucks trucks in the fleet stays constant um but like say 10 years from now I would say vast majority of cars electric like maybe 70 80 percent or more uh and uh almost all cause autonomous electric autonomy is absolutely the future no question and just a question of when um but then like I said as soon as people think that that means the global Fleet gets replaced instantly and it's like nope you have to go 20 years beyond that point before 20 years from the point at which all cars are new cars are electric then the fleet will be replaced um it was just an important it's not like some people are used to like mobile phones and that kind of thing is like two year or three year replacement rate but cars are much uh more expensive asset to longer life uh anyway to actually answer your question um I'm I'm extremely confident uh of achieving full autonomy uh and releasing it to the Tesla customer base uh next year now the there's a uncertain period of time for when regulatory approval will be will take how long will it take but I think if you are able to accumulate uh billions of kilometers of autonomous driving then it's difficult to argue and look at the accident rate uh when the car is autonomous versus non-autonomous and in fact our our statistics already show a massive difference when the car is on autopilot or not on autopilot if the safety is much greater even with the current autopilot software and we are discussing level 5 autonomy so really full autonomy will Euro black behind or will it be approved here at the same time like in America or China it's hard to say uh exactly when it will be approved I I mean just to and our customers already know this but the the the the EU Regulators are the most conservative um and uh I don't know if people want that to be the case or not our customers are sort of unhappy about it but um yeah they only meet every six months maybe meet more often I don't know um so yeah but I think at least some jurisdictions will allow full self-driving next year okay exactly a year ago you were announcing In This Very building that you're planning to build a new site near Berlin yeah and a couple of months later and Junior started you want to finish it by July next year we did a little tour this morning it's impressive how advanced it is and it's almost unbelievable Germany and Piccadilly particularly Berlin is not world famous for finishing construction sites in time and in budget yeah so you've created a kind of entire Berlin airport project why Berlin why did you go to Germany and to Berlin to get that big project done sure um well first of all I'm actually a big fan of Germany I love Germany it's great I would you know um I have a lot of friends um uh German friends and I think Berlin is a very fun city um and uh I think it's there's there's also it's from a location standpoint uh people like say young people can live in apartments at a reasonable price in the city of Berlin uh but if somebody's got a family they can still have an affordable house so it's a good location offering um you know good living for people of all ages and incomes and and um I believe it's not that poor but but it's definitely sexy could you imagine so we're gonna have like uh when we open the uh you're all invited by the way uh when we have the opening for gigabolin we're gonna have uh just a big party um you know we're gonna have like start off from the day have more sort of Family Music uh and uh and then gradually get more hardcore and then go you know midnight techno Till Dawn dude do you plan to spend more time in Berlin yourself you want to partly live here in fact I yes I'll be spending a lot of time here where do you sleep tonight in the in the tonight's in the factory in the factory well technically in a conference room in the factory but yeah you sleep in a conference room in the not finished Factory tonight yeah it gives me a good feel for what's going on alone or yeah I assume so it's an invitation um yeah okay Elon you have so many projects it's not only Tesla or SpaceX it's neuraling it's the boring company so many things and when we discussed last time I asked you what is the most important project or the most important topic for you to deal with in the foreseeable future and you said that is truly the role that AI is going to play in our society could you explain why and why that is a big opportunity but also seems to worry you uh yeah I think well I mean humans have been the smallest creature on Earth for a long time and that is going to change with what's typically called artificial general intelligence uh so this is say an AI that is uh smarter than a human in every way it could even simulate a human so you know this is something we should be concerned about I think there should be a government oversight of AI developments especially super Advanced AI it's just this is anything that is a potential uh danger to the public we generally agree that this should have uh government oversight to ensure that the the public safety is taken care of because you feel that one day the mankind could serve the machines and not the other way around honestly when I see people on their phones that I think we already serve with the machine yeah it's like everyone's uh answering the questions you know every time you do a search or add information you're sort of building this the the digital group mind um but yeah uh the Advent of artificial general intelligence is called The Singularity for a reason because just like a black hole which is a single Singularity it's difficult to predict what will happen um so it's not as though the Advent of AGI is necessarily bad but it's bad is one of the possible outcomes and when is singularity in the in the definition of Ray quotes why are going to happen um well I think you're saying he he's predicting 2025. I think that's uh reasonably accurate and how can it be avoided that is then uh more a threat for Humanity than an opportunity is it a question of governance so that there is not too much power in one or in few hands or how would you how would you make sure that it goes into the right direction I think we should have a a government oversight just like we do we have uh government oversight and regulation of cars and aircraft and uh food and pharmaceuticals these are all uh you know there's a there are Regulators that oversee these developments to ensure Public Safety um and I think digital super intelligence would also be potentially a public safety risk and so it should be it's I think it's very important to for Regulators to keep an eye on that who should own the data data by then I think everyone should own their own data like individuals here on their data um and it certainly shouldn't be tricked by some terms and conditions of a website and suddenly you don't own your data that's crazy uh who reads those terms and conditions anyway so uh but I think it's just you know like we wouldn't let people develop a nuclear bomb in the backyard just for the hell of it you know that that seems crazy so digital super intelligence I think has the potential to be more dangerous than a nuclear bomb so yeah we should just somebody should be keeping an eye so we can't have the inmates running the Asylum here which is a global issue because if we do well but China has other rules and a different regulatory framework that is another uh yeah I don't I don't think college yeah I generally like that this is one of the rebuttals I get from those developing Ai and Tesla is also developing a form of AI with self-driving but it's a very narrow form of AI just like um like the car is not going to wake up Sunday one day and take over the world um so so it's uh but the rebuttal I get is like well you know China is going to have unfettered uh AI development and so if we have regulations and it slows us down then China will have it and I'm like look I from my conversations with government officials in China they are they they're quite concerned about AI as well and they uh the fact that they're probably more likely to have a good oversight than I think other countries what is the biggest uh challenge uh ahead of us in general not only with regard to AI what is the biggest problem that needs to be solved what's the biggest threat to Humanity's future [Music] well AI is certainly one of the biggest risks it could be the biggest risk um I think we need to watch out about population collapse this is a somewhat counter-intuitive to most people they think that well there's so many humans maybe too many humans but that's just because they live in a city yeah if you're an aircraft and you look down they say if you dropped a a cannibal how often would you hit a person basically never in fact the stuff falling in from space all the time natural meteorites old rocket stages all the time but nobody worries about it because the the actual in fact um there's a good a cool website called wait but why and Scott Tim Urban like he actually just did the math and and uh all humans on Earth uh could fit in the city of New York on one floor don't even need the upper floors so that's actually the cross-section of of humans as seen from Earth is extremely tiny basically vanishingly small almost nothing um so we need to watch out about population collapse low growth rates I think is a big risk and it's also not exactly top secret you can go look at the Wikipedia you know growth rate so and and this this is actually this this is this is definitely the civilization ends with the with a whimper not a bang uh because it would be a sad ending um where the the average age becomes very high and really the youth are effectively uh de facto enslaved to take care of the old people this is not a good way to go and do you have any new projects dealing with these topics that you've just addressed um well I'm trying to set a good example on the kid front six kids yes for now how much time do you spend with them I I spent about as much time as they want to spend with me yeah I mean they're not well one's just a baby and now there's a 14 and 16 and teenagers um don't usually want to hang out with their parents that much you know we just had Thanksgiving weekend so all the kids were over um so you know if they want to spend more time with me I said like oh you should I actually asked them are sure we don't want to hang out more like no so I think it's probably the right amount then since they that's about the they don't want to hang out more so I think we really should take this seriously the population collapse artificial intelligence obviously sustainable energy is important uh the faster we transition to sustainable energy the less of a gamble we're taking with climate and um I think there's going to be a lot of breakthroughs on the medical front particularly around synthetic mRNA you can basically do anything with the synthetic RNA DNA it's really it's like a computer program so I mean I think with enough with with uh with effort that's not too crazy you could probably stop aging reverse it if you weren't um these are you can basically join you can turn someone into a free and Butterfly if you want with the right DNA sequence so I mean caterpillars do it so yeah but your project neuralink is in a way empowering human intelligence versus artificial intelligence that's the purpose of it is that correct yeah so neuralink the uh in a short to medium term neuralink is really just going to help cure uh brain injuries brain and spine injuries so it's like if somebody is a in fact our first uh implanted devices in humans will be for uh quadriplegics tetraplegics allowing them to control a computer or a phone just using they might so like you can imagine like if Stephen Hawking could just talk uh and at a normal speed or even faster than normal speed looking back for the last thousands of years what is the most important invention of mankind so far in the past Thousand Years um I I guess it's millions of millions um well I think language I would be able to talk and express Concepts and um this this is a probably the biggest invention of humanities language it's an answer that we like very much in the publishing yeah absolutely you know writing is yeah exactly just incredible right writing really made a big difference that guy Gutenberg you really know what he's doing you have one thing in common with Nicolas Tesla that's a photographic memory is that only a gift or sometimes a burden because you memorize too much I have a photographic memory in some respects um for technical stuff I have a very good memory so for a human yeah you know computers are much better at memory computer is a really good memory why is music so important for you techno music in particular well it's pretty fun I think it's a you know you want to I don't know feel maximum human you know and uh so I think when people have like sort of a Rave and good music it can be like hey maximum human you know you want to really feel uh you know it's like like what really gets you to feel you know and I think that uh you know having fun with friends and you know just crazy crazy dancing is fun perhaps you know how techno music is the secret reason why you are building big projects in Berlin yeah honestly that's a it's a significant factor okay Elon last question you you celebrated your 30th birthday with a masked ball in Venice for your 40th birthday I was told you had a fight with a samurai sword fighter what is your plan for your 15th birthday next year um well so my 40th birthday was the was in Venice uh it was it was technically a post-apocalyptic masked wall uh after the apocalypse how much clothing do you really have you know it's not going to be a little ragged a little burnt you know um so um no plans for the 50th yeah the half century party um I'll have to think of something um usually go with some kind of crazy theme the the the the party where I ended up to wrestling with the world champion tumor wrestler which by the way also caused me to boast a disc in my neck so yeah five minutes of Glory for five years of pain um that was that really hurt um so that party was um Victorian Japanese steampunk so that was cool uh I have to think of something for the half century report you have a little time to think being on Earth for a half century that's okay I'm still alive wow cool one very last question when I asked you what is the meaning of life during a dinner 42 you said after a while after a while well probably this wonderful French cheese could you please explain oh well I was just saying that you know you want to take a moment to appreciate things in life and the sensations um food's incredible uh and uh like there's just so many good things that you can experience some of them cost nothing really um you know have a walk in nature or just a nice meal and it's like wow it was pretty great you know and uh we should take a moment to appreciate these These Little Things the big things um the things that move your heart I think that's probably the meaning of life was close definitions as I can think thank you very much Elon all right this is your captain speaking again thank you Elon and thank you Matthias it's a pleasure having you on board and learning so much about our future before I come back with some information about our flights I'm now honored to welcome secretary Yen span and ask him on stage and share his thoughts about Elon musk's achievements and responsibilities the vessel's floor is yours Mr secretary [Applause] thank you so a wonderful evening to all of you in the evening between the struggles on earth and the vision towards Mars and regarding Earth we are meeting here today in a very special time we are experiencing the worst pandemics since the Spanish Flu for roughly 10 months now governments but Above All citizens worldwide have been combating the virus and its consequences people are experiencing a great deal of suffering hardship and sacrifice yet today at the beginning of December we also have a reason for optimism we can be very optimistic that we will have an effective vaccine against the new virus faster than ever before in human history with a vaccine we can finally hope to have a tool that will help us beat the virus it is true that some people have misgivings about vaccination to the point of rejecting it at all costs this is an attitude I find very difficult to understand it was only vaccination that first made it possible for humankind to liberate itself from many of the Fatal diseases that had plagued our ancestors for centuries plagues that had led to fear and Superstition and then obstacle to progress vaccination is progress and today that word progress is for many synonymous with one name that of Elon Musk Mr mask I'm pleased to have the honor of paying tribute to you in these very special times you are without doubt a visionary the name mask stands for ideas that were often far ahead of their time paying online with PayPal Electro mobility and sustainable energy with Tesla and not seldom does the name mask also represent ideas that at first glance might seem a little crazy the HIPAA Loop project is one of those the vision that persons and goods can be accelerated in the double tube to speeds of up to 1 200 kilometers per hours this also includes connecting the human brain to a computer the subject of neuro links just discussed the rulings research since 2016 and of course private space travel with SpaceX is also an integral part of the mission thanks to Elon Musk seemingly crazy ideas become reality Elon Musk has realized the most powerful thing we as human beings possess is our ideas Tesla's ability to rise to become the world's most valuable car manufacturer was not primarily the result of itself's figures Tesla's worse is a reflection of an idea a vision an idea that allows many people to have faith in progress in a better future it is supported of course by business expertise Elon Musk is building his newest gigafactory in brunberg on Mark land many Germans associate bronberg with the poet teodor Fontana who once walked the sense of the mark Fontana wrote between arrogance and humility lies a third trait that is part of life and that simply put is courage should you not yet know Fontana by the way for your Douglas Adam non-digital bookshelf I hope there is one Fontana should you not yet know him Mr mask I think that fits you quite well because courage you most certainly have as at the same time your choice of Germany as the location for your factory is hardly you only a question of Courage but just as much the result of keen calculation Germany is a country of automobile automobile Pioneers Carl and better Benz Rudolph diesel Gottlieb Daimler very Nan Porsche the list of achievements by Germans are made in Germany is long Mr mask you know that Germany still possesses great Innovative strange today many well-trained creative people and a solid infrastructure great conditions for courageous entrepreneurship for tomorrow's innovators and Pioneers in the meantime you probably also recognize the word birkati in German indeed indeed constructing a factory from scratch in only a few months that is a new experience even for our country at least an experience we seem to have forgotten we need a bit more of the mass courage on our side to reduce bureaucratic obstacles and thereby promote innovation because also it is true that Innovation needs a reliable framework it also needs freedom to flourish in the 70 years since the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany we have often succeeded in Striking this balance Germany is an economically strong country Cosmopolitan and free an anchor of stability and enmity in Europe it is something we can be proud of today however at the start of the 20s of the 21st century there are a number of questions we also ask ourselves do we the 20s what do we want the 20s to look like how can we find the right answers and complicated times what Legacy do we want to leave to our children how can we maintain the German success model sustain and expand our prosperity as well as the freedom and security associated with it in times where it is under threats from many sites so we need a strong state that encourage economic activity because German firms can't some because German firms suffered some clear disadvantages when competing with monopolies from the U.S and with a state economy like China's in return our state should invest massively in education infrastructure and research and should launch support programs not for individual companies but for entire branches of the economy in the 20s we want to remain expert Champion a master of innovation push forward digitalization promote research and strenging entrepreneurial culture only progress will ensure that the next generation will have it even better it's all about making space for ideas to flourish from all that we've heard Ellen musk knows this and tries to implement it in his businesses being a Visionary does not necessarily mean always being right nor does it mean being free of contradiction it was only recently that Elon Musk and I got to meet each other personally and we're also able to talk about the pandemic situation Tesla is through the subsidiary groom and automated automation a partner of the German Dutch biotech company curac which is doing research on the coronavirus vaccine Quebec is using RNA bioreactors developed by Elon Musk companies I'm very pleased to see this commitment however I have read that Elon Musk himself does not intend to get vaccinated oh like me but still I also know that lmas takes a critical view of many of the measures that we as governments are taking to control the pandemic and to protect our citizens one of his statements struck me especially that anyone who is at risk should be in quarantine until the storm passes in connection with the observation you just met again tonight that everyone has to die sometime yes Health protection does not take precedence over all else in the pandemic it all it is always about balance no matter how we Act or do not act harm will occur we must therefore strike a balance as minister of Health I think it is only right for us to weight the Health's protection very highly I for one would have great difficult difficulty doing otherwise at the same time it is legitimate to demand a different rating such debates are an indispensable part of our free societies and it is important that we are not implacable in these discussions but we listen to each other and are willing to assume at least sometimes that the other way the other one might have a point or that their arguments could be valid debates that deteriorate into moralizing seldom reflect reality in all its diversity so it would be highly unfair to imply that Elon Musk might care too little through his private Foundation Elon Musk funds Research into renewable energy space travel child health education and Mathematics computer science natural science technology as well as safe AI in its private capacity he is consistently donating large sums of money to charity projects such as for planting 1 million trees looking at Elon Musk means repeatedly encountering a seemingly insatiable test for action and Discovery the many articles about the supposedly declining Innovative power of our Western World and societies then just seems to be Worlds Away in such instances Elon Musk stands in the Limelight he is the spare head of an entire generation of courageous entrepreneurs and bold scientists people who believe in the power of ideas and that progress is possible in spite of resistance and setbacks this gives us courage despite the great challenges that we as humans are currently facing we are living in a time of great opportunity and an economically successful environmentally responsible and socially balanced world is possible it is possible through Innovation and courage not through individual austerity or through fear experiences and encounters with Innovative and creative people such as Elon Musk we confirm my basic optimism time after time we do have the power to shape our future Elon Musk wanted to change the world a little and ended up revolutionizing it this teaches us that everything in our is in our own hands it is up to each and every one of us above all now in this often difficult time we may not lose sight of the future ahead of us with all of its alarming disastrous aspects in many areas the current pandemic strengthens precisely the willingness to shape the future it is leading us faster than ever down some appropriate and necessary path as the old saying goes crisis presents opportunity in this pandemic we are learning more on a daily base together in other words in public we are adapting our strategies we are consistently trying to act in a targeted and proportionate way starting afresh every day based on the largest knowledge this Spirit of progress this openness this willingness to learn is something we must sustain in the future I'm convinced that Germany has a great deal of this Visionary power that drives you Mr Musk we simply need to more often have the courage to believe in it ourselves in this respect you are a great example to us congratulations on the 2020 Axel Springer award I wish you the greatest possible success for the future and even more stay healthy all the best [Applause] obviously we can get closer all the best thank you Mr span this is again your captain speaking some information about the flight outside temperature is about 1600 Kelvin so I kindly ask you not to open the windows as we leave hyperspace foreign Welcome To Mars orbit we will reach our final destination Mars surface in the scheduled time the temperature will be between zero degrees Celsius and minus 100 degrees Celsius so first rule don't panic please excuse me I just got the information that we have a special delivery right now right here this is rather unusual but please let me check foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good evening good evening Elon good evening everybody I'm your captain tonight would you please hold my helmet thank you very much WoW it feels so comfortable I never felt that comfortable before thank you it's your Originals Basics overall and I will wear it many times from now on because I never felt so free I can breathe I have oxygen in my head and I've experienced that before standing on the stage it's a bit of a tear you know it does make me slim but it's it's okay it's it's it's okay for me tonight I'm really happy to be here and I'm really thankful to meet you because I'm also thankful for your work and achievement for different reasons because as you might remember we've seen it in the movie I held the microphone I was the one it was my hand holding the microphone when you announced that you're gonna build Tesla here in Berlin Brandenburg and so thanks to you I made it in every German news show not me but parts of me made it into every German you show which made me really famous my hands are now one of the most famous hands we have in Germany and my hands are holding your present now the present we were thinking about what can we I mean what can we give you as a present it's really difficult you know it's really difficult we were thinking about a spa weekend in Brandenburg not too good a helicopter flight over Berlin a fancy set of steak knives you might have it already so we were thinking about what could be nice for you and can you guess what's inside come on stage I tell you come on no it's no cake and it's no book come on stage and as we heard you are a visionaire and you're a businessman but you are also if you don't not only like to listen to music but you also do music yeah it's a record okay you compose music great there is one famous song it didn't make it to the charts but it's really famous it's really ranked on Soundcloud but the song is don't doubt your Vibe yes you recognize yeah don't dare your Vibe because it's true because it's you oh that's good it has so many possibilities to really go right through the ceiling yeah yeah um if you do enough auto-tune it works yeah yeah yeah we will when did you write it when did you compose it well actually I just woke up one morning and uh I was singing the lyrics uh they're not very complicated um and uh and then my girlfriend Grimes recorded it on her phone yeah and she said this is great we should make a song out of this yeah and so then uh we called our friend Mike uh who is a great producer and and we went to the studio uh to the the Muppet studio Jim Henson Studio yeah and uh we we made the song yeah and then um I created a fake record label label called Emoji records Emoji within a minute yeah like that um and uh on Soundcloud and then I uploaded it to SoundCloud and uh that's how it went perfect yeah on which occasion should it be played I guess if you're doubting your Vibe yeah you know or anytime did you ever doubt your vibe yeah really what was it yeah um December uh second uh I don't know 92. can we expect more can we expect not more it's very promising I mean well I do think that it would be kind of fun to do a cover of uh Barbie Girl by Aqua you know that song Barbie girl Barbie girl yeah Viagra I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world um plastic it's fantastic you know it breaks me everywhere so you know the lyrics yeah I know the lyrics right no no um but but I think it would be fun to do a cover of Barbie girl but cyber girl I'm a cyber girl yeah in a cyber world perfect yeah okay you you have to invest in you it's fantastic in the future there's no plastic you know that kind of thing yeah I I doubt that so but now hold on to your seat we have the honor to have one of the most famous DJs in the world cool he's here and he remixed your song right and we have him here so then fair to see it tonight all right Ben could you come up on stage hello he he um he did this original it's inside here Sven yes how was it to work with the material how was the material how did you yeah with this title and I made out of the best with a friend of mine and I hope you like it and but it's not just about that that's it's the it's the whole box yeah what is quite interesting who designed it who designed it my son okay my son draw the cover and his his name is Tegan is 10 years old he is by the way big fan of your work well it's an absolute original when would you play it on your DJ set would you play it it's rather beginning or more house myself so we have where would it be we have unique printed vinyls and I choose turntables in your conference room on there construction site so I actually so essential Tech note tracks from the last 30 years right Graphics included and friends of mine yeah craft work is great what's that music so is that this is unique and that's great wow only one very thoughtful thank you for you and enjoy I hope you have a turntable and I do there is a QR code inside okay thank you very much thank you thank you thank you tonight all right it's a pleasure having you yeah it's it's really uh thank you for doing this it's really fun and wow great production value um this is I feel like I'm on like a cool Disney ride or something um so um but I I do want to just say to uh acknowledge the great people at Tesla and SpaceX neurolink boring company um really I accept this award uh on on your behalf for all the great things that that you've done so um super super appreciated um but I really want to acknowledge very strongly the people at the companies who made it happen thank you very much thank you [Applause] because ladies and gentlemen we're about to land please fasten your seatbelts again [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] going down [Music] welcome Mars we just landed after this uh yeah exhausting and exciting and surprising and wonderful Journey um looks great doesn't it yes um you can follow our Assistance or Mr Daphne he's he's the tallest guy here just walk after him and uh we have a little refreshment for you and you don't even have to choose between salty and sweet or ham or or cheese you can take both tonight which is just great just have a nice evening and enjoy good night thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]

https://youtu.be/p4ZLysa9Qqg

- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. I think it's safe to do this now because we are socially distant, we are far away from everyone, we are following safety protocols, but I am here at launch complex 39A. This is at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I am standing right in front of SpaceX's crew Dragon capsule riding on top of SpaceX's gorgeous Falcon 9 rocket. You know this rocket, it can land itself. It's flown like 85 times or something, it's just this reliable workhorse rocket that SpaceX has been flying for almost 10 years now. And I'm here because this day is a really really exciting day. NASA is sending crew on top of a rocket for the first time in almost nine years. Almost nine years exactly. The last crew that took off from this exact launch pad, actually from launch complex 39A was STS-135. That was July 8th, 2011. And that was the last time the United States has put people into orbit. So this is a really big deal. Tomorrow from right here about 24 hours from right now that rocket's going to take off and it's going to be sending Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up into orbit and they're gonna be sent off to the International Space Station. Now if you need a timeline breakdown of all of the events on launch day all the way from suit-up to orbit, I've already got you covered with a video. Now if only there was someone that I could ask a couple more questions to because there's a lot of exciting stuff that I think a lot of want answers to. Who could that be? I gotta stop doing that joke. You guys have read the title of the video, it's not like you don't know what I'm doing right now. (laughing) Oh, I wonder what Tim's gonna have on camera. Hey guys. - [Both] Hey. - [Tim] How's it going? - Good, how are you? - [Tim] Fantastic. Okay I've got smorgasbord of stuff for you guys to set up. Jim if you could stand right over there along that, I would love to shake your hand, but- - I know, it's sad isn't it? - Yeah, I'll just throw you a quick peace sign. Right there is a mic, if you wouldn't mind micing yourself up, that would be fantastic. And Elon, if you wouldn't mind mixing yourself up there too. - Sure. - That'd be great. (Elon whistling) - And then rolling on that, rolling here. Hi guys, congratulations, we are basically 24 hours away from seeing humans return to space from US soil. American rockets, American soil. (laughing) - You've heard that before? - [Tim] Yeah, we've heard it - That's good. - and I think we're ready, so. - Cool. I think the biggest thing I wanna, well first off congratulations to a big 2020 for you so far, you've had a kid. - Oh yeah. (laughing) You have a rocket out there on the pad waiting to have astronauts go to space for the first time. And you're working on Starship simultaneously. You're still doing everything with Tesla, you're a very busy person. But I wanted to set a record straight straight off the bat. I want people to hear from both of you the beautiful partnership of NASA and SpaceX and how far back it goes and that it's not NASA versus SpaceX. - Oh that's right. - Absolutely. - Yeah, Elon if you don't mind just tell us the history of how SpaceX and NASA started working together in the first place. - Sure, well, I mean this actually could be quite a long story, but basically the whole reason I started SpaceX was actually to try to increase NASA's budget. Or at least the way I got interested in space was I tried to figure out why we had not gone to Mars and then I thought well maybe we need to reignite public excitement in Mars, so I initially started off with the idea of doing this philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to Mars to get the public excited about sending life to Mars. And if I got the public excited then they would tell their representatives in Congress to increase NASA's budget. (laughing) That was the goal. It was meant to be a philanthropic thing. And then I tried to buy some ICBMs in Russia to do this and ultimately came to the conclusion that there's actually plenty of will to go beyond Earth but there needs to be a way. Like, essentially NASA needs to have more affordable rockets that we need to increase the pace of innovation in space and so if we can give NASA another horse in the stable, that is moving faster and cost less and is more innovative, then that would be a way to accelerate progress in space. So I love NASA and always have. And always will. - Yeah yeah, and Jim you weren't with NASA at the beginning of the COTS program and stuff like that, or even the, yeah, the commercial resupply, but you've been around for a while to see the cherry get on the top here with the crew program actually coming together, so tell us about what you've seen so far and how you've seen the commercial partners really step up to the plate. - Yeah, so SpaceX brings a very unique capability to the mix that NASA has been lacking quite frankly. SpaceX is really good at flying and testing, even being willing to fail and then fix and then fly, test, fail, fix and they can reiterate that over and over again very very fast. And we've seen that with Starship now. The willingness to fail is something that NASA has lacked for a very long time. But it's what enables SpaceX to move so fast. To rapidly iterate and improve. NASA has this history of qualifying every component and then every sub component and then every, you know, every piece of every rocket is fully qualified and everything has to go perfect on every launch. And that slows us down. And SpaceX has been a great partner; make no mistake, they have pushed NASA, but I hope NASA has also come along and pushed them in a way that is unique as well, so this partnership has been fantastic. And you're seeing the fruits of it; you'll see it tomorrow, for sure. - Yeah, there's no question that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA. As the saying goes, we're only here because we stand upon the shoulders of giants. - Yeah and then you're wearing stilts on top of that, I feel like. (Elon and Jim chuckle) It's a high bar. I mean we're inside the actual firing room here, this is where the, and you guys flipped it the right way so everyone's looking out the windows. (Jim and Tim laughing) - That's like the biggest change. We modernized some of the decor, but most importantly we flipped the screens so everyone can look at it that way. But this glass that's been here since the 60s, you can see it in the Apollo documentaries and stuff. It's the same glass, same angle, it's been here since the 60s actually. It was modern looking. - Yeah, no, it's gorgeous. This glass has seen a lot of history. - Yeah, I mean, what an awesome view. It's incredible, like wow. - So I mean that's just gotta be the biggest honor for, SpaceX leased that pad in 2014. I was actually, that was the first mission was CRS3 for me, and Gwen was out here to release the pad. And I remember it being a big deal you know 39A, that's the launch pad. - It's like Time Square. - Yes! - It's like opening a play on Time Square, this is the best location. The best launch pad in the world, definitely. - By far and I mean obviously for those listening this where the people going to the moon every single one of them walked up, went up that tower, well a slightly different tower, but out there on that pad, went to the moon, like 80-something space shuttle missions took off from 39A, I mean- - It's a great honor that SpaceX is allowed to use that pad. - There's a lot of history there. And we're still writing the history. The history is gonna be written tomorrow yet again. - Yeah, so, tell me a little bit- - I'm trying to... - Yeah, you're in the super most awkward position, this is gonna be the most YouTube interview ever, but you know, we're rolling with it. But one of the fun things for me is watching the cargo go into the crew vessel. All of the sudden we had Dragon one, now we have crew Dragon and it's substantially different but familiar. So tell us, what's been some of the hardest parts to transition from cargo into crew. 'Cause crew is a little more important than cargo. - Yes, I mean cargo can be replaced, crew cannot. And so the level of scrutiny, the level of attention is I mean I don't know, an order of magnitude greater, it was already high for cargo. But it's just a whole nother level for crew. So, and I told the SpaceX team that, you know the this mission reliability is not merely the top priority it is the only priority right now. So we're just doing continuous insuring reviews from now, nonstop, 24 hours a day until launch. Just going over everything again and again and again. And I was out at the pad just recently just walking down the rocket; we've got a team that's just crawling over the rocket in the horizontal. Then we're gonna rotate it vertical, then we're gonna crawl all over in the vertical. And we're just looking for any possible action that could improve the probability of success no matter how small. Whether that comes from an intern or anyone, doesn't matter. - And this is just the beginning of, I mean we're seeing a lot of new things come out between partnerships with SpaceX and NASA. I think the one- - There's been a great partnership. Like I said, I love NASA. I literally had IloveNASA as my password. Technically it was IloveNASA9!. (all laughing) 'Cause it would be too easy to guess otherwise. Was the nine because of nine merlin engines? - I think yeah yeah, it was. - Nice, nice. So I want to know, you guys have dropped some surprises on us just in the past couple months we have Dragon XL flying on Falcon heavy for Gateway, I didn't see that coming at all. What is DragonXL? What's its heritage? What is it? - Well, I think probably I wanna limit this interview to what's happening tomorrow and then we can talk about other stuff later. I always love talking to you so it's like, (stammering) but we gotta stay. - We gotta stay on, okay. - Like when I said this is the only priority, this is the only priority. So other stuff is nice, this is the priority. - What I will tell you and I think this is important, this relationship between SpaceX and NASA, has been sufficiently meaningful to where we are now looking at how we do all of our business models. And that includes how we're gonna resupply the Gateway. It includes how we're gonna get to the surface of the moon. This business model has proven to be very effective. First on commercial resupply now on commercial crew. I will let SpaceX and Elon Musk talk all day long about what the details entail, but, and obviously he's not ready to talk about that today, but I will tell you that the relationship has proven to be tremendously valuable and that the business model has proven to be tremendously valuable. - Yeah, well I mean because NASA basically got a Falcon 9 and a Dragon capsule for an initial investment of $400 million. - Right. - Yeah. Nobody thought that would work, basically. I think, yeah. That was not expected. That was like, I think at the time viewed as like a maverick thing that you know to basically, to some degree, at least by a lot of the conventional people was like, oh let's just you know give those commercial guys some money to be quiet and then, you know, they'll stop bugging us, basically. - It was definitely a hail Mary. - And then it worked. - Yeah, it was a hail Mary. A commercial partner launching an orbital class rocket, I mean, rendezvous with the International Space station, it was already this huge long checklist of okay sure, yeah I have to do that, okay I'll have to do that too. And now we're just seeing the next iteration of that, we're seeing it to the point of being, you know replacing the shuttle's importance of carrying humans on top of it. I mean that's like the ultimate thing, you know? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Well, the flag has been up there since 2011. And if all goes well, Dragon will recover the flag that was last placed there by the space shuttle nine years ago. - And Doug was on that mission. Doug Hurley. So he, did he actually put the flag up there? It'd be pretty cool if- - I'm not sure, but- - It would be pretty cool. - I mean there's a certain poetry to this whole thing. - There really is. And the same launch pad. I mean the whole thing is coming full circle, so. What do you guys think as far as looking forward? I mean we have next up already, you already have another crew launch on the docket. I mean, and it's been expanded from three people to four. This mission's expanded from a two-week mission to a month plus? - Yeah, I'm not sure - Yeah. - If the final amount of time has been decided, do you know? - No, it's very flexible on the backend, I'll say that. So we wanna make sure that crew one is ready to go. We have a target date for that at the end of August. And between now and then if crew one is ready to go, Bob and Doug, we're gonna bring 'em home. If we need to extend 'em a little bit, we'll extend 'em a little bit. We wanna get as much out of the International Space Station as we can. And so that's what we intend to do. But the big three factors when we think about the flexibility on the backend of this mission, the big three factors are the solar arrays, which for this mission have about 114-day lifespan. Although we will learn on orbit- - Yeah, we'll, exactly, there's a lot to be learned. - They could last longer, we don't know yet. But we're assuming 114 days at this point. And then of course the weather and the readiness of crew one and I think if all goes well. I've been really clear with everybody on the NASA side, our number one priority is to get this thing tested and to get Bob and Doug home safely. - Absolutely. - That's the highest priority. I would also like to say, you mentioned that this is the replacement for the shuttle. I really think that that's a gross understatement. We are transforming in a very historical nature how we access space in general. We're NASA as a customer, one customer of many and we expect SpaceX as you know to go get lots of customers that are not us. And that's gonna drive down our costs. And we wanna have not just SpaceX, but other providers that are competitive on cost, on innovation, on safety, basically creating this robust marketplace in space. And then we're using, the ISS right now is being used to create the commercial markets of the future for microgravity. Whether it's pharmaceuticals, immunizations, printing of human organs in 3D, advanced materials, artificial retinas, I mean there's so many things that we're proving out on the ISS right now. And if NASA accomplishes its objectives, we're not just gonna have commercial resupply and commercial crew, we're gonna have commercial space stations, we're gonna be landing on the moon commercially, so this is the shuttle replacement, that's not what this is, this is a transformation of how we do commercial space in general. - I'm not sure if the public is actually aware that there's a giant space station zooming around earth. I think probably a lot of people don't know that this is the case. And it's enormous. - Yeah. (Elon laughing) - There's an enormous space station zooming around the earth 25 times the speed of sound, circling the globe every 90 minutes. When you see the pictures it looks like it's stationary, and it does have station in the name, but it's extremely fast, it's going I mean, it's going you know like... - 17,500 mile and hour, 27,000 kilometers, it's screaming. - Yeah. - It's screaming. - I mean, order of magnitude faster than a bullet, basically. - Right right, yeah. And that, it's so funny 'cause there's been a permanent presence on the International Space Station too for what 20 years or something now? I mean it's been a huge part of the science an the exploration of NASA currently and it's fun to be able to see now with new offerings we'll be able to get to the International Space Station cheaper and NASA will continue to push and go back into deep space which I think it a really cool way to transition into the future, so. - Yeah, as the administrator was saying, you know this is, I mean, this is really, we want this to be the dawn of a new era. Where there's a rapid increase in innovation, we're sending more and more people to orbit that we're sending both government and commercial passengers to orbit, astronauts to orbit. And generally opening up space for humanity. The ultimate goal being that anyone who wants to go to orbit or the moon or maybe even Mars can go. It's like if you want to move there you can. Like that's the ultimate goal. - So but then how is that handoff look? 'Cause if commercialization opens up and NASA's the current gatekeeper so to speak a little bit, how does, that transition's gonna be a little bit of a gray area for a little bit. You know if Tom Cruise going to the International Space Station, who has the authority to say what goes on and all that stuff currently when commercial partners are the ones selling the ride? - Well NASA, obviously. (laughing) - Well, remember, for now, right? And look, NASA, we have a job. Exploration, discovery, science, inspiration, that's our job. But there's a whole nother element of space which is development. And that's what commercial industry does. Commercial industry does development. So when we think about you know when people came to the new world and then they expanded west, right? They expanded west with a purpose, they were seeking commerce. The railroad got put into place for a purpose. It was put there for commercial reasons. And that's where we are right now at the dawn of this new era in space flight. Ultimately if the government is the only one doing things in space it will not be sustainable, it will not be successful. There has to be a commercial motive to achieve the objectives that we all hope for. - Yeah and we're literally seeing that. This is it, this is the dawn of that new era. - It is. - And that's, I mean, what history in the making. I'm so excited that everyone, the public is finally seeing this. I'm seeing this everywhere, you know, I mean SpaceX has had some big missions recently, NASA's had some big missions recently. But this is the one and I am so excited to be here. It's unfortunate a lot of the press and public aren't able to have the you know, concerning the circumstances, but it's so cool that we live in an era where we can bring this to everyone and everyone can get excited and have something forward to look, something to look forward to instead of the current state of the world, so- - I really hope this is something that like everyone, no matter what their political leanings are, how they feel can be excited, they can look at this and be excited about the future. - Yeah. - That's exactly right. Like this is a bright shining moment in a very difficult time. And we've had these in the past and this is what NASA has been historically, a signal of hope in a time of troubled circumstances. And of course we think back to the 1960s, we think about Vietnam, we think about the protests, we think about the civil rights abuses, we think about the civil rights protests, the country in turmoil, and yet, in 1968, we sent astronauts around the moon in 1969 we landed on the moon. That was probably one of the most difficult times in American history and yet we still achieved these magnificent things. And here we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and we can still do magnificent things and that's what tomorrow represents. - Yeah, that's awesome. Well thank you guys for taking some time with me. Best of luck tomorrow. - Yeah thank you. - We're all gonna be tuning in, I'm telling you the public is extremely excited, so. - Great. Thank you guys for everything, I'm gonna have to just throw you guys a peace sign and say thank you, but yeah all right, thanks guys. - Thank you, appreciate you. - Let me apologize. If you saw this in my ear, it's not because I have a producer, I just had my friend Trevor Malman helping me shoot this and that's it, that was it. There's CBS and CNN with all their big fancy cameras and stuff and then there's just me and I only brought two microphones because I didn't know Jim Bridenstine was gonna join us which was a huge surprise so it ended up being, like I'm like I'll give them the good mics, so if my audio sucks, I apologize, you're hearing iPhone headphones to the rescue. So I guess that's the joy of being a YouTuber. Well, that exceeded quite literally every expectation I've ever had in life. I was just right there in firing room number four which is literally where they commanded the Apollo missions and told the rocket that took humans to go to the moon to launch. Right there, I was there, what just happened? You should watch the Apollo 11 film, the CNN films documentary on Apollo 11 that just came out last year for the 50th anniversary. You get to see a lot of shots from that particular room. It was stuffed to the brim with computers and it was facing the wrong way where people were not looking out the window. And it's just, being in there right now I'm just totally beside myself. Wow, what an awesome day. And tomorrow's going to be even cooler. And honestly I couldn't do it if it wasn't for the help of my Patreon supporters. So I you wanna help me continue to do what I do and make awesome content about rockets and space flights, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut where you'll gain access to our exclusive sub Reddit, our exclusive Discord channel, and exclusive live streams. And if you wanna wear some really cool shirts, including a shirt where Elon's after we shut off the camera's he's like, you have arcadia planitia on your shirt? I'm like yeah, that's your prime candidate landing site for Starship with the exact coordinates and he just chuckled and was like, that's awesome. So yeah, if you want your own future martian society shirt and some reminders of the gravity and atmosphere on Mars and also a reminder not to forget to wear a space suit if you're on Mars, if you want any other cool shirt like the full flow staged combustion cycle shirt or pointy end up flame-y end down we got lots of cool nerdy space stuff for you at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody, that's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Bringing space down to earth for everyday people. (funky music)

https://youtu.be/p4ZLysa9Qqg

- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. I think it's safe to do this now because we are socially distant, we are far away from everyone, we are following safety protocols, but I am here at launch complex 39A. This is at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I am standing right in front of SpaceX's crew Dragon capsule riding on top of SpaceX's gorgeous Falcon 9 rocket. You know this rocket, it can land itself. It's flown like 85 times or something, it's just this reliable workhorse rocket that SpaceX has been flying for almost 10 years now. And I'm here because this day is a really really exciting day. NASA is sending crew on top of a rocket for the first time in almost nine years. Almost nine years exactly. The last crew that took off from this exact launch pad, actually from launch complex 39A was STS-135. That was July 8th, 2011. And that was the last time the United States has put people into orbit. So this is a really big deal. Tomorrow from right here about 24 hours from right now that rocket's going to take off and it's going to be sending Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up into orbit and they're gonna be sent off to the International Space Station. Now if you need a timeline breakdown of all of the events on launch day all the way from suit-up to orbit, I've already got you covered with a video. Now if only there was someone that I could ask a couple more questions to because there's a lot of exciting stuff that I think a lot of want answers to. Who could that be? I gotta stop doing that joke. You guys have read the title of the video, it's not like you don't know what I'm doing right now. (laughing) Oh, I wonder what Tim's gonna have on camera. Hey guys. - [Both] Hey. - [Tim] How's it going? - Good, how are you? - [Tim] Fantastic. Okay I've got smorgasbord of stuff for you guys to set up. Jim if you could stand right over there along that, I would love to shake your hand, but- - I know, it's sad isn't it? - Yeah, I'll just throw you a quick peace sign. Right there is a mic, if you wouldn't mind micing yourself up, that would be fantastic. And Elon, if you wouldn't mind mixing yourself up there too. - Sure. - That'd be great. (Elon whistling) - And then rolling on that, rolling here. Hi guys, congratulations, we are basically 24 hours away from seeing humans return to space from US soil. American rockets, American soil. (laughing) - You've heard that before? - [Tim] Yeah, we've heard it - That's good. - and I think we're ready, so. - Cool. I think the biggest thing I wanna, well first off congratulations to a big 2020 for you so far, you've had a kid. - Oh yeah. (laughing) You have a rocket out there on the pad waiting to have astronauts go to space for the first time. And you're working on Starship simultaneously. You're still doing everything with Tesla, you're a very busy person. But I wanted to set a record straight straight off the bat. I want people to hear from both of you the beautiful partnership of NASA and SpaceX and how far back it goes and that it's not NASA versus SpaceX. - Oh that's right. - Absolutely. - Yeah, Elon if you don't mind just tell us the history of how SpaceX and NASA started working together in the first place. - Sure, well, I mean this actually could be quite a long story, but basically the whole reason I started SpaceX was actually to try to increase NASA's budget. Or at least the way I got interested in space was I tried to figure out why we had not gone to Mars and then I thought well maybe we need to reignite public excitement in Mars, so I initially started off with the idea of doing this philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to Mars to get the public excited about sending life to Mars. And if I got the public excited then they would tell their representatives in Congress to increase NASA's budget. (laughing) That was the goal. It was meant to be a philanthropic thing. And then I tried to buy some ICBMs in Russia to do this and ultimately came to the conclusion that there's actually plenty of will to go beyond Earth but there needs to be a way. Like, essentially NASA needs to have more affordable rockets that we need to increase the pace of innovation in space and so if we can give NASA another horse in the stable, that is moving faster and cost less and is more innovative, then that would be a way to accelerate progress in space. So I love NASA and always have. And always will. - Yeah yeah, and Jim you weren't with NASA at the beginning of the COTS program and stuff like that, or even the, yeah, the commercial resupply, but you've been around for a while to see the cherry get on the top here with the crew program actually coming together, so tell us about what you've seen so far and how you've seen the commercial partners really step up to the plate. - Yeah, so SpaceX brings a very unique capability to the mix that NASA has been lacking quite frankly. SpaceX is really good at flying and testing, even being willing to fail and then fix and then fly, test, fail, fix and they can reiterate that over and over again very very fast. And we've seen that with Starship now. The willingness to fail is something that NASA has lacked for a very long time. But it's what enables SpaceX to move so fast. To rapidly iterate and improve. NASA has this history of qualifying every component and then every sub component and then every, you know, every piece of every rocket is fully qualified and everything has to go perfect on every launch. And that slows us down. And SpaceX has been a great partner; make no mistake, they have pushed NASA, but I hope NASA has also come along and pushed them in a way that is unique as well, so this partnership has been fantastic. And you're seeing the fruits of it; you'll see it tomorrow, for sure. - Yeah, there's no question that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA. As the saying goes, we're only here because we stand upon the shoulders of giants. - Yeah and then you're wearing stilts on top of that, I feel like. (Elon and Jim chuckle) It's a high bar. I mean we're inside the actual firing room here, this is where the, and you guys flipped it the right way so everyone's looking out the windows. (Jim and Tim laughing) - That's like the biggest change. We modernized some of the decor, but most importantly we flipped the screens so everyone can look at it that way. But this glass that's been here since the 60s, you can see it in the Apollo documentaries and stuff. It's the same glass, same angle, it's been here since the 60s actually. It was modern looking. - Yeah, no, it's gorgeous. This glass has seen a lot of history. - Yeah, I mean, what an awesome view. It's incredible, like wow. - So I mean that's just gotta be the biggest honor for, SpaceX leased that pad in 2014. I was actually, that was the first mission was CRS3 for me, and Gwen was out here to release the pad. And I remember it being a big deal you know 39A, that's the launch pad. - It's like Time Square. - Yes! - It's like opening a play on Time Square, this is the best location. The best launch pad in the world, definitely. - By far and I mean obviously for those listening this where the people going to the moon every single one of them walked up, went up that tower, well a slightly different tower, but out there on that pad, went to the moon, like 80-something space shuttle missions took off from 39A, I mean- - It's a great honor that SpaceX is allowed to use that pad. - There's a lot of history there. And we're still writing the history. The history is gonna be written tomorrow yet again. - Yeah, so, tell me a little bit- - I'm trying to... - Yeah, you're in the super most awkward position, this is gonna be the most YouTube interview ever, but you know, we're rolling with it. But one of the fun things for me is watching the cargo go into the crew vessel. All of the sudden we had Dragon one, now we have crew Dragon and it's substantially different but familiar. So tell us, what's been some of the hardest parts to transition from cargo into crew. 'Cause crew is a little more important than cargo. - Yes, I mean cargo can be replaced, crew cannot. And so the level of scrutiny, the level of attention is I mean I don't know, an order of magnitude greater, it was already high for cargo. But it's just a whole nother level for crew. So, and I told the SpaceX team that, you know the this mission reliability is not merely the top priority it is the only priority right now. So we're just doing continuous insuring reviews from now, nonstop, 24 hours a day until launch. Just going over everything again and again and again. And I was out at the pad just recently just walking down the rocket; we've got a team that's just crawling over the rocket in the horizontal. Then we're gonna rotate it vertical, then we're gonna crawl all over in the vertical. And we're just looking for any possible action that could improve the probability of success no matter how small. Whether that comes from an intern or anyone, doesn't matter. - And this is just the beginning of, I mean we're seeing a lot of new things come out between partnerships with SpaceX and NASA. I think the one- - There's been a great partnership. Like I said, I love NASA. I literally had IloveNASA as my password. Technically it was IloveNASA9!. (all laughing) 'Cause it would be too easy to guess otherwise. Was the nine because of nine merlin engines? - I think yeah yeah, it was. - Nice, nice. So I want to know, you guys have dropped some surprises on us just in the past couple months we have Dragon XL flying on Falcon heavy for Gateway, I didn't see that coming at all. What is DragonXL? What's its heritage? What is it? - Well, I think probably I wanna limit this interview to what's happening tomorrow and then we can talk about other stuff later. I always love talking to you so it's like, (stammering) but we gotta stay. - We gotta stay on, okay. - Like when I said this is the only priority, this is the only priority. So other stuff is nice, this is the priority. - What I will tell you and I think this is important, this relationship between SpaceX and NASA, has been sufficiently meaningful to where we are now looking at how we do all of our business models. And that includes how we're gonna resupply the Gateway. It includes how we're gonna get to the surface of the moon. This business model has proven to be very effective. First on commercial resupply now on commercial crew. I will let SpaceX and Elon Musk talk all day long about what the details entail, but, and obviously he's not ready to talk about that today, but I will tell you that the relationship has proven to be tremendously valuable and that the business model has proven to be tremendously valuable. - Yeah, well I mean because NASA basically got a Falcon 9 and a Dragon capsule for an initial investment of $400 million. - Right. - Yeah. Nobody thought that would work, basically. I think, yeah. That was not expected. That was like, I think at the time viewed as like a maverick thing that you know to basically, to some degree, at least by a lot of the conventional people was like, oh let's just you know give those commercial guys some money to be quiet and then, you know, they'll stop bugging us, basically. - It was definitely a hail Mary. - And then it worked. - Yeah, it was a hail Mary. A commercial partner launching an orbital class rocket, I mean, rendezvous with the International Space station, it was already this huge long checklist of okay sure, yeah I have to do that, okay I'll have to do that too. And now we're just seeing the next iteration of that, we're seeing it to the point of being, you know replacing the shuttle's importance of carrying humans on top of it. I mean that's like the ultimate thing, you know? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Well, the flag has been up there since 2011. And if all goes well, Dragon will recover the flag that was last placed there by the space shuttle nine years ago. - And Doug was on that mission. Doug Hurley. So he, did he actually put the flag up there? It'd be pretty cool if- - I'm not sure, but- - It would be pretty cool. - I mean there's a certain poetry to this whole thing. - There really is. And the same launch pad. I mean the whole thing is coming full circle, so. What do you guys think as far as looking forward? I mean we have next up already, you already have another crew launch on the docket. I mean, and it's been expanded from three people to four. This mission's expanded from a two-week mission to a month plus? - Yeah, I'm not sure - Yeah. - If the final amount of time has been decided, do you know? - No, it's very flexible on the backend, I'll say that. So we wanna make sure that crew one is ready to go. We have a target date for that at the end of August. And between now and then if crew one is ready to go, Bob and Doug, we're gonna bring 'em home. If we need to extend 'em a little bit, we'll extend 'em a little bit. We wanna get as much out of the International Space Station as we can. And so that's what we intend to do. But the big three factors when we think about the flexibility on the backend of this mission, the big three factors are the solar arrays, which for this mission have about 114-day lifespan. Although we will learn on orbit- - Yeah, we'll, exactly, there's a lot to be learned. - They could last longer, we don't know yet. But we're assuming 114 days at this point. And then of course the weather and the readiness of crew one and I think if all goes well. I've been really clear with everybody on the NASA side, our number one priority is to get this thing tested and to get Bob and Doug home safely. - Absolutely. - That's the highest priority. I would also like to say, you mentioned that this is the replacement for the shuttle. I really think that that's a gross understatement. We are transforming in a very historical nature how we access space in general. We're NASA as a customer, one customer of many and we expect SpaceX as you know to go get lots of customers that are not us. And that's gonna drive down our costs. And we wanna have not just SpaceX, but other providers that are competitive on cost, on innovation, on safety, basically creating this robust marketplace in space. And then we're using, the ISS right now is being used to create the commercial markets of the future for microgravity. Whether it's pharmaceuticals, immunizations, printing of human organs in 3D, advanced materials, artificial retinas, I mean there's so many things that we're proving out on the ISS right now. And if NASA accomplishes its objectives, we're not just gonna have commercial resupply and commercial crew, we're gonna have commercial space stations, we're gonna be landing on the moon commercially, so this is the shuttle replacement, that's not what this is, this is a transformation of how we do commercial space in general. - I'm not sure if the public is actually aware that there's a giant space station zooming around earth. I think probably a lot of people don't know that this is the case. And it's enormous. - Yeah. (Elon laughing) - There's an enormous space station zooming around the earth 25 times the speed of sound, circling the globe every 90 minutes. When you see the pictures it looks like it's stationary, and it does have station in the name, but it's extremely fast, it's going I mean, it's going you know like... - 17,500 mile and hour, 27,000 kilometers, it's screaming. - Yeah. - It's screaming. - I mean, order of magnitude faster than a bullet, basically. - Right right, yeah. And that, it's so funny 'cause there's been a permanent presence on the International Space Station too for what 20 years or something now? I mean it's been a huge part of the science an the exploration of NASA currently and it's fun to be able to see now with new offerings we'll be able to get to the International Space Station cheaper and NASA will continue to push and go back into deep space which I think it a really cool way to transition into the future, so. - Yeah, as the administrator was saying, you know this is, I mean, this is really, we want this to be the dawn of a new era. Where there's a rapid increase in innovation, we're sending more and more people to orbit that we're sending both government and commercial passengers to orbit, astronauts to orbit. And generally opening up space for humanity. The ultimate goal being that anyone who wants to go to orbit or the moon or maybe even Mars can go. It's like if you want to move there you can. Like that's the ultimate goal. - So but then how is that handoff look? 'Cause if commercialization opens up and NASA's the current gatekeeper so to speak a little bit, how does, that transition's gonna be a little bit of a gray area for a little bit. You know if Tom Cruise going to the International Space Station, who has the authority to say what goes on and all that stuff currently when commercial partners are the ones selling the ride? - Well NASA, obviously. (laughing) - Well, remember, for now, right? And look, NASA, we have a job. Exploration, discovery, science, inspiration, that's our job. But there's a whole nother element of space which is development. And that's what commercial industry does. Commercial industry does development. So when we think about you know when people came to the new world and then they expanded west, right? They expanded west with a purpose, they were seeking commerce. The railroad got put into place for a purpose. It was put there for commercial reasons. And that's where we are right now at the dawn of this new era in space flight. Ultimately if the government is the only one doing things in space it will not be sustainable, it will not be successful. There has to be a commercial motive to achieve the objectives that we all hope for. - Yeah and we're literally seeing that. This is it, this is the dawn of that new era. - It is. - And that's, I mean, what history in the making. I'm so excited that everyone, the public is finally seeing this. I'm seeing this everywhere, you know, I mean SpaceX has had some big missions recently, NASA's had some big missions recently. But this is the one and I am so excited to be here. It's unfortunate a lot of the press and public aren't able to have the you know, concerning the circumstances, but it's so cool that we live in an era where we can bring this to everyone and everyone can get excited and have something forward to look, something to look forward to instead of the current state of the world, so- - I really hope this is something that like everyone, no matter what their political leanings are, how they feel can be excited, they can look at this and be excited about the future. - Yeah. - That's exactly right. Like this is a bright shining moment in a very difficult time. And we've had these in the past and this is what NASA has been historically, a signal of hope in a time of troubled circumstances. And of course we think back to the 1960s, we think about Vietnam, we think about the protests, we think about the civil rights abuses, we think about the civil rights protests, the country in turmoil, and yet, in 1968, we sent astronauts around the moon in 1969 we landed on the moon. That was probably one of the most difficult times in American history and yet we still achieved these magnificent things. And here we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and we can still do magnificent things and that's what tomorrow represents. - Yeah, that's awesome. Well thank you guys for taking some time with me. Best of luck tomorrow. - Yeah thank you. - We're all gonna be tuning in, I'm telling you the public is extremely excited, so. - Great. Thank you guys for everything, I'm gonna have to just throw you guys a peace sign and say thank you, but yeah all right, thanks guys. - Thank you, appreciate you. - Let me apologize. If you saw this in my ear, it's not because I have a producer, I just had my friend Trevor Malman helping me shoot this and that's it, that was it. There's CBS and CNN with all their big fancy cameras and stuff and then there's just me and I only brought two microphones because I didn't know Jim Bridenstine was gonna join us which was a huge surprise so it ended up being, like I'm like I'll give them the good mics, so if my audio sucks, I apologize, you're hearing iPhone headphones to the rescue. So I guess that's the joy of being a YouTuber. Well, that exceeded quite literally every expectation I've ever had in life. I was just right there in firing room number four which is literally where they commanded the Apollo missions and told the rocket that took humans to go to the moon to launch. Right there, I was there, what just happened? You should watch the Apollo 11 film, the CNN films documentary on Apollo 11 that just came out last year for the 50th anniversary. You get to see a lot of shots from that particular room. It was stuffed to the brim with computers and it was facing the wrong way where people were not looking out the window. And it's just, being in there right now I'm just totally beside myself. Wow, what an awesome day. And tomorrow's going to be even cooler. And honestly I couldn't do it if it wasn't for the help of my Patreon supporters. So I you wanna help me continue to do what I do and make awesome content about rockets and space flights, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut where you'll gain access to our exclusive sub Reddit, our exclusive Discord channel, and exclusive live streams. And if you wanna wear some really cool shirts, including a shirt where Elon's after we shut off the camera's he's like, you have arcadia planitia on your shirt? I'm like yeah, that's your prime candidate landing site for Starship with the exact coordinates and he just chuckled and was like, that's awesome. So yeah, if you want your own future martian society shirt and some reminders of the gravity and atmosphere on Mars and also a reminder not to forget to wear a space suit if you're on Mars, if you want any other cool shirt like the full flow staged combustion cycle shirt or pointy end up flame-y end down we got lots of cool nerdy space stuff for you at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody, that's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Bringing space down to earth for everyday people. (funky music)

https://youtu.be/O3BH8edQVZ4

let's take it for a drive don't mind me i'm just driving elon musk around in tesla's new cyber truck this job is the worst isn't it i mean it feels very much like any other tesla you've got instant acceleration the greenhouse is fabulous i love how open it appears to be and how close is this to what it'll look like in production at tesla we always want to have the production car be better than the show car it always drove me crazy when manufacturers would come out with this cool looking show car and then the actual production car would be way worse right all right and you're like man you got us all excited about this sweet looking car and then the production was not terrible we won't do show cars that aren't real so i think we got the proportions here pretty close what would you change on when it were finally reached into production what do you think you would do we're five percent too big and if we just take all the proportions and drop them by about five percent oh you mean all the way around yeah so it's gotta fit in a normal garage right yeah and there's like there's lots of little details that uh you people wouldn't necessarily pick up consciously just improving visibility having the glass like this is actually quite hard because it's so sloped is that a special kind of glass is that oh yeah normal windshield glass we are going to be using um effectively a form of armored glass for the car and the door panels the car are the 300 series stainless steel and it's so tough that it's bulletproof to a handgun and why is that important to you that it'd be bulletproof i mean i just was badass super cool that's super cool but see i like that answer that's a good answer do you want your truck to be bulletproof or not yeah i guess i guess i want my drug to be bulletproof exactly but you know never know when the apocalypse comes you should be glad it's built for you we want to be a leader in apocalypse technology exactly there's your spacex headquarters right there yeah yeah the warren company tunnel starts just there next to the spacex parking garage is that right how how how long is that tunnel uh that's about a mile and a half wow the boring company is another one of elon's innovative ideas he envisions a tunnel system designed specifically for electric vehicles to help alleviate the overflow of traffic above the ground i wonder we could might be able to take the cyber truck through it that would be cool kind of nuts do you want to take the cyber truck through it maybe this will be quite interesting and see if we can actually put it down there let's try it that's what i say yeah life's an adventure all right here we go yes sir i'm in a firehawk helicopter learning how the los angeles county fire department fights those horrific wildfires and now i get to be the spotter so you're just eyes for the pilot making sure we're staying right inside the middle of that water source [Music] away and there's my smart ass producer david can't we soak him you never ever want to drop water on anybody you can seriously injure somebody with the amount of weight that's coming down here we go you got lucky this time college boy wow that's pretty amazing today i know for you guys this is your job but for me this is a list item this is one of the most amazing days thank you so much for what you do thank you yeah very cool what do we have here it looks like a 2007 eight nine yeah 2008 corvette okay it is a flood car had no motor and no interior in it for the sole purpose of building to become the world's fastest blind man building a car as a blind man how did that work i have i figured out adaptive techniques with measuring i still run my milling machine and lathe i have a talk box hooked to my caliper so i can machine something within a thousandth of an inch and so i've i've been handing hands on and building this car not just sitting on the sidelines and what do you what do you want to do what do you want to do with this car what's the record you want to try to get mike newman in england has been 200.4 miles an hour with human assistance and so my goal eventually has become the world's fastest blind man but to do it with no human assistance solely relying on my custom guidance system that gives me audible feedback so i know how to stay on course now it's kind of windy out here today do you think because of this wind it'll keep you from hitting 200 miles an hour yeah realistically today we don't think we got 200 in the in the books you know if we can go 140 150 miles an hour we'll be happy and that'll still give you a record won't it yes that'll be the world's fastest unassisted blind man all right i see a lot of equipment you wouldn't see in the standard corvette obviously you're running on pump fuel c16 you know high octane high octane racing gas 14 to 1 compression wow okay and you're making about 570 horse all right well that sounds like it can do the job yeah yeah it's amazing you built a whole you built the motor you built a car can i go for a ride with you first if you show me how all the electronics work and then uh you'll try and set the record eh let's do it let's give it a shot you can drop it dan's car is equipped with a second set of controls for the passenger seat but i'll be letting him drive i'm sure it'll be fine yeah tell us about the technology in the car tell us how you're able to accomplish this a friend of mine patrick johnson engineer boeing phantomworks builds me this guided system yeah that gives me audible feedback so it has a gyro in it gps's all kind of inertia switches and doing calculations of predictions to know where i'm at ahead of myself i'm able to correct my steering with audible feedback right oh that's amazing if you hear audible beeps left and right is that how it works no it's actually saying straight right right right straight [Music] that's why i'm hearing the whole time do people think uh it's kind of crazy a blind man going 200 miles an hour it was tough getting people to accept it but now a lot of more people's on board i'm a racer well now we're going to try the high speed run on your own so this will make you the world's fastest unassisted blind man in an automobile that's crazy all right i'd say let's see what happens but that would be inappropriate

https://youtu.be/RcYjXbSJBN8

welcome back here we go again great to see you and congratulations thank you um you will never forget what is going on in the world when you think about when your child is born you will know for the rest of this child's life you were born during a weird time that's for sure that is for sure they're probably the weirdest that i can remember uh yeah yeah um and he was born on uh may the fourth and yeah that's hilarious too yeah may the fourth be with him yeah exactly it has to be hopefully i sure hope so perfect yes i mean that was the perfect day for you and how do you say the name well uh is it a placeholder first of all my partner is the one that actually mostly came up with the name congratulations to her yeah yeah she's great at names um so i mean it's just x the letter x um and then the ae is like pronounced ash yeah and then a12 a12 is my contribution oh why a12 uh archangel 12 the precursor to the sr-71 coolest plane ever that's true i i agree with you i don't know i'm not familiar with it i know what the sr-71 is yeah yeah yeah i know what that is so the sr71 came from a cia program uh called archangel oh it's the archangel project and then archangel 12. oh wow what a dope-looking plane yeah oh okay i got it yeah well as a person who's uh very much into uh aerial travel as you are that's uh perfect that's pretty great yeah pretty great um so is it does it feel strange to have a child while this craziness is going does it feel like you've had children before is this any weirder uh it's actually i think it's better uh being older and having a kid i appreciate it more um yeah babies are awesome they are pretty awesome they're awesome yeah when i didn't have my any of my own i would see other people's kids and i didn't not like them sure but i wasn't drawn to them sure but now when i see little people's kids i'm like oh i think of them like these little love packages yeah little love bugs yeah it's just you you think of them differently when you see them come out and then grow and then eventually start talking to you like your whole idea what a baby is is very different yeah so now as you you know get older and get to appreciate it as a mature fully formed adult it must be really pretty wonderful yeah wonderful it's great but babies are awesome yeah yeah that's uh that's great um yeah um i mean also i've i've spent a lot of time on ai and neural nets and so you can sort of see the kind of the brain develop which is you know what an ai neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does basically um and you can sort of see the it learning very quickly you know it's just wow see things fire so you're talking about the neural net you're not talking about an actual baby i don't know about actually an actual baby but both of them yes but the word neural net comes from the the brain it's like a net of neurons so you know it's like the yeah humans are the you know original gangster the neural net that's a great way to put it yeah so when you're programming artificial intelligence where you're working with artificial intelligence art are they specifically trying to mimic the developmental process of a human brain in a lot of ways there's some ways that are different um you know an analogy that's often used is like you know we we don't make a submarine swim like a fish but we take the principles of of how you know what of hydrodynamics and apply them to a submarine i've always wondered as a lay person do you try to achieve the same results as a human brain but through different methods or do you try to copy the way a human brain achieves results i mean the essential elements of an ai neural net are really very very similar to a human brain neural net yeah it's having the multiple layers of neurons and you know back propagation these all these things are what your brain does you know it's sort of yeah um you have a layer of neurons that goes through a series of intermediate steps to ultimately cognition and that and then it'll reverse those steps and go back and forth and go all over the place um it's um yeah it's it's interesting very interesting yeah i would imagine like the thought of programming something that is eventually going to be smarter than us that one day it's going to be like why did you do it that way like when artificial intelligence becomes sentient they're like oh you tried to mimic yourself like this so much better process cut out all this nonsense but like there are elements that are the same but just almost like like an aircraft does not fly like a bird right yeah it doesn't flap its wings but the wings the way the wings work and generate lift is the same as bird now you're in the middle of this uh this strange time where you're selling your houses you say you don't want any material possessions and i've been seeing all that and i've been really excited to talk to you about this yeah because it's an interesting thing to come from a guy like yourself like why are you doing that i'm slightly sad about it actually but if you're sad about it why are you doing it i think i think possessions kind of weigh you down then they're kind of an attack vector you know people say hey billionaire you got all this stuff like well and now i don't have stuff now what are you gonna do attack vector meaning like people target it yeah um interesting yeah but you're obviously gonna so you're gonna rent a place yeah okay and get rid of everything except clothes no i said like almost everything so it's like keep a couple teslas yeah sure yeah kind of have to test product and stuff um yeah those things that have sentimental value for sure are keeping those here um yeah so do you feel like what's worse that could happen right you're fine yeah you could always buy more stuff if you don't like it especially yeah i mean from the money that you sell all your stuff you could buy new stuff but do you you feel like people define you by the fact that you're you're wealthy and that they define you in a pejorative way for sure i mean not everyone but right you know there's uh for sure in recent like years billionaire has become a per jar like it's in a projective so like it's like that's a bad thing um which i mean i think doesn't make a lot of sense in most cases if you've if you're done if you basically uh organized a company like see like how do how does this wealth arise it's if you organize people in a in a better way to produce products and services that are better than what existed before and you have some ownership in that company then that that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital so it's there's a conflation of consumption and capital allocation so let me say warren buffett for example and to get totally frank i'm not his biggest fan but uh you know he does a lot of capital allocation um and he reads a lot of a lot of sort of annual reports of companies and all the accounting and it's pretty boring really um and he's trying to figure out is does coke or pepsi deserve more capital i mean that's i mean it's kind of a boring job if you ask me um but uh you know it's still a thing that's important to figure out like which is a company deserving of more or less capital should that company grow or expand is it making products and services that are better than others or worse and you know should you know if a company is making compelling products and services it should get more capital and if it's not it should get less we'll go out of business well there's a big difference too between someone who's making an incredible amount of money designing and engineering fantastic products versus someone who's making an incredible amount of money by investing in companies or moving money around in the stock market or doing things along those lines it's it's a different thing and to put them all in the same category seems it's it's very simple and as you pointed out it's an attack vector yeah for sure yeah i mean i think it's it's really i i do think they're in the in the united states especially there's an over allocation of talent uh in finance and law uh basically too many smart people go into finance and law so you know this is both a compliment and a criticism we should have of i think fewer people doing law and fewer people doing finance and more people making stuff yeah yeah well that would certainly be better for all involved if they made better stuff yeah yeah absolutely um and and you know manufacturing used to be highly valued in the united states and these days it's not it's it's often looked down upon which i think is wrong yeah well i think that people are kind of learning that particularly because of this whole pandemic and this relationship that we have with china that it there's a lot of value into making things into making things here yes somebody's got to do the the real work yeah you know and um you know like making a car it's an honest days that's not honest day is living that's for sure you know or making anything really or providing valuable service um like providing you know greater entertainment good information but these are all valuable things to do um you know so yeah there should be more more of it did you have a moment where is this something that this idea of getting rid of your material possessions is something that built up over time or did you have a moment of realization where you realize that yeah i've been thinking about it for a while um you know part of it is like i like have a bunch of houses but i don't spend a lot of time in most of them and that doesn't seem like a good use of assets like somebody could probably be enjoying those houses and get better use of them than me so don't you have gene wilder's house i do that's amazing that's awesome wow exactly what you'd expect did you request that the buyer not [ __ ] it up yeah that's a requirement oh a requirement that's that's a good requirement yeah not in that case in that house yeah it'll probably sell for last but still i don't care uh he's a legend yeah he would want his soul he'd want his essence yeah in the building it's and it's there that's a real quirky quirky house yeah what what makes you say it's there like what do you get out of it um i mean all the all the cabinets are like handmade and they're like odd shapes and there's like doors to nowhere and strange like car doors and tunnels and really odd odd paintings on the wall and um yeah did you ever live in it it's very quirky i did live in it briefly yeah but why do you buy houses like if you own all these houses do you just get bored and go i think i'd like to have that well i you know had one house and then the junior wilder house right across the road from me from from my main house and it was going to get it was going to get sold and then torn down and turned into you know be a big construction zone for three years and i was like well i think i'll i'll buy it and preserve the spurt of gene water and not have a giant construction zone and then the you know this i started having like some privacy issues where like people would like less people just like come to my house and you know start climbing over the walls and stuff i feel like man um so then i saw like what a house some of the houses around my house and then i thought at one point well you know it'd be cool to to build a house so then i acquired some properties at the top of samara road uh and which is got a great view and it's like okay well these some bunch of sort of small older houses they're going to get torn down anyway i was like well you know if i collect these like little little houses then i can build something you know i don't know artistic like a you know dream house type of thing what's a dream house for elon musk like some tony stark type [ __ ] yeah definitely yeah you gotta have the the dome that opens up with the stealth helicopter and that kind of thing you know yeah for sure [ __ ] yeah yeah um but but then i was like man do i really want does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house and i'd be real you know get out like ocd on the little details and the design and or should i be allocating that time to getting us to mars i should probably do the latter so you know like what's more important mars or a house i like mars okay is that really how you think like that it'd be better off planning on a trip to mars or getting people to mars yeah yeah definitely i mean you can only do so many things right right so how you can i don't know how you do what you do anyway i don't i don't understand how you can run bull with a boring company tesla spacex all these different things you're doing constantly i just i don't understand i mean you explained last time you were here how you sort of allocate your time and and how hectic it is and insane i still don't the the productivity is uh baffling just doesn't make sense how you can get so much done well i think i do have high productivity but even with that there's still some upgraded cost of time and allocating time to building a house even if it was a really great house it still is not a good use of time relative to developing the rockets necessary to get us to mars and helping sell sustainable energy uh spacex and tesla are by far you know by the the most amount of like brain cycles um you know boring company does not take you know like less than one percent of brain cycles and um and then this neural link which is i don't know maybe it's like five percent and then five percent that's that's a good chunk it's a good chunk yeah yeah we were talking about that last time and you were trying to figure out when it was actually going to go live when it's actually going to be available are you testing on people right now no we're not testing people yet but i i think it won't be too long i think we may be able to implant a neurolink in less than a year in a person i think and when you do this is there any tests that you have to do before you do something like this to to see what percentage of people's bodies are going to reject these things is it put is it there is there a potential for rejection it's a very low potential for rejection i mean you can think of it like people put in you know heart monitors and um you know things for epileptic seizures and deep brain stimulation um obviously like you know artificial hips and right knees and that kind of thing so the probability of i mean like it's so it's well known like what will cause rejection what what will not um it's definitely harder when you've got something that is sort of reading and writing neurons that's that's generating a current pulse and reading current pulses that's that's a little harder um then then say uh passive device but it's still you know very doable and um yeah there there are people who have primitive devices in in their brains right now what kind of devices i like deep brain stimulation is i think for parkinson's is like has really changed people's lives in a big way um which is kind of remarkable because it kind of like zaps your brain um it's like kicking the tv type of thing um and you think like man kicking the tv shouldn't work it does sometimes yeah yeah the old old tvs it did my grandpa used to slap the top for sure yeah it would work sometimes yeah so this deep right simulation uh implanted devices in the brain that uh have changed people's lives for the better like fundamentally well let's talk about what you can talk about to what neurolink is because the last time you were here you really couldn't discuss it and then there was a i guess a press release or something that sort of outlined yeah that that happened quite a bit after the last time you were here so what exactly is it how do you do what what happens if someone ultimately does get a neurolink installed what will take place well for version one of the device it would be it basically implanted in your skull so but it would be flush with your skull so you basically uh take out a chunk of skull replace put the neurologic device in there um you put the the electrode you'd insert the electrode threads very carefully into the the brain and uh and then you you know stitch it up and um and you wouldn't even know that somebody has it and then and and so then it it can interface basically anywhere in any anywhere in your brain um so it could be something that uh you know helps cure say uh eyesight like give you returns your eyesight even if you've like lost your optic nerve type of thing uh really yeah yeah absolutely hearing obviously um i mean pretty much anything that where that it could in principle fix almost anything that is wrong with the brain and it could restore uh limb functionality so if you've got uh interface into the motor cortex and then an implant that's say that's like a microcontroller and near muscle groups uh you you could then create a sort of a neural shunt that restores somebody who's a quadriplegic to full functionality like they can walk around be normal whoa yeah so maybe slightly better slightly better over time yes you mean with future iterations like the you know six million dollar man although these days that would that doesn't matter yeah six billion dollars so the the hole would be small how big would the hole be that you have to drill and then replace with this piece it's only one hole well um yeah the device we're working on right now is about it's about an inch in diameter um and your skull is pretty thick by the way so skulls are mine is for sure it might actually literally um i mean if you're a big if you're a big guy your skull is actually fairly thick um skulls like it's like seven to 14 millimeters um so that's probably a couple inches a half inch you know half inch thick skull ish so um yeah yeah so that's a fair bit of like our we got quite a coconut going on here it's not it's not like some egg shell oh yeah i believe you um so the yeah you basically implant the device uh and so you would be like a one inch square one inch in diameter yeah like so an inch circle like a circular yeah i think like a like a smart watch or something like that okay yeah okay so you take this one-inch diameter like ice fishing right you ever go ice fishing um no but i'd like to it's great yeah it's really fun so you basically take an auger and you you drill through the surface of the ice yeah and you create a small hole and you can dunk your line in there so this is like that you're ice fishing on the top of your skull and then you cork it yeah and you replace that say one inch diameter piece of skull with this neural link device and that has a battery and a and a bluetooth and a inductive charger um and then you and and now then you also got to insert the electrodes uh so the electrode is very carefully inserted uh with our with a robot that we developed uh that's you know very carefully putting in the electrodes and avoiding you know and any veins or arteries uh so it's you know doesn't create trauma so through this one-inch diameter device electrodes be inserted and they will find their way like tiny wires basically tiny wires and they'll find their way to specific areas of the brain to stimulate no you literally put them where they're supposed to go oh okay yeah how long will these wires be uh i mean they usually go in like you know depending on where it is like you know two or three millimeters so they just find the spots yeah wow um and then um yeah then you put the device in and that that gets uh that that replaces the little piece of skull that was taken out uh and then you you stitch up the hole and and um and you just have it look like a little scar and that's it well this would be replaceable or reversible yes like if someone can't take it anymore i'm too smart i can't take it yeah you can totally check it out and what is the besides restoring limb function and eyesight and hearing which are all amazing is there are there any cognitive benefits that you anticipate from something like this uh yeah i mean you could for sure um uh i mean basically it's a generalized um sort of uh thing for for fixing any kind of brain injury in in principle like if you or if you've got like like severe epilepsy or something like that it could it could just it could just sort of stop the epilepsy from occurring like it could detect it in real time and then fire a counter pulse and stop the epilepsy um if um i mean there's a whole range of brain injuries like if somebody gets a stroke they could lose the ability to speak um you know that that'll stack could also be fixed so if you've got like stroke damage or if you lose say you know muscle control over part of your face or something like that i think and then when when you get old you tend to if you get like you know alzheimer's or something like that then you lose memory and this could help you with you know restoring your memory that kind of thing restoring memory and what what is happening that's allowing it to do that like the wires these small wires stimulating these areas of the brain and then is it that the areas of the brain are they're they're losing some sort of electrical force like what it what is happening yeah yeah it's it's like it's like i think it's like a bunch of circuits and there's some like circuits that are broken and we can like uh fix those circuits substitute for those circuit circuits and so a specific frequency will go through this yeah specific in that would is the process figuring out how much or how little has to be how how much these areas of the brain have to be juiced up yeah i mean there's still a lot of work to do so when i say you know we got a shot at probably putting it in in a person in you know a within a year i think that's that's what that's exactly what i mean i think we have a chance of putting input into one and having them having them be healthy and and restoring some functionality that they've lost the fear is that eventually you're gonna have to cut the whole top of someone's head off and put a new top with a whole bunch of wires if you want to get you know the real turbocharged version the p100d of brain stimulation i mean ultimately if you if you want to go with full ai symbiosis you'll probably want to do something like that symbiosis is a scary word when it comes to ai it's optional [Laughter] i would hope so yeah it's just i mean once you enjoy the dr manhattan lifestyle once you once you become a god seems very very unlikely you're going to want to go back to being stupid again i mean you you literally could fundamentally change the way human beings interface with each other yes yes you wouldn't need to talk i'm so scared of that but so excited about it at the same time is that weird yeah i mean the i think this is one of the paths to um you know i think like what like ai is getting better and better um so now let's assume it's sort of like a benign ai scenario even in a benign scenario we're kind of left behind you know we're we're not we're not along for the ride um we're just too dumb right so so how do you go along for the ride um yeah so you can't beat them join them so um and we're already we're already a cyborg to some degree right because you've got your phone you've got your laptop glasses yeah yeah guitar electronic devices and i mean today if you your phone if you if you don't bring your phone along it's like you have missing limb syndrome that's like you know it feels like something's really really missing so we're already partly um part you know partly a cyborg um or an ai symbiote essentially um it's just that the data rate to the electronics is slow so especially output like you're just going with your thumbs i don't know like what's your data rate maybe optimistically 100 bits per second that's being generous um and now the computer can communicate at like you know 100 terabits you know so so certainly you know gigabits are a trivial at this point so this this is like you know basically your computer could do a mil do things a million times faster or at a certain point it's like talk they as like talking to a tree okay it's boring you talk to a tree it's very not very entertaining um so um so if you if you can solve the the data rate issue and your especially output but input two then you can improve the symbiosis that is already occurring between mana machine so you you can improve it in what when you said you won't have to talk to each other anymore we used to joke around about that i i've joked around about that a million times in this podcast that one day in the future there's going to come a time where you can read each other's minds and well you'll be able to interface with each other in some sort of a non-verbal non-physical way where you will transfer data back and forth to each other without having to actually use your mouth and make noises exactly so when you like what happens when you when like let's say you've got some complex idea that you're trying to convey to somebody else and how do you do that well your brain spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words and there's a there's a lot a lot of loss information loss that occurs when compressing a complex concept into words and then you say those words those words are then interpreted then they're decompressed by the person who is listening and they they will at best get a very incomplete understanding of what you're trying to convey it's very difficult to convey a complex concept with precision because you've got compression decompression you may not even have heard all the words correctly and so communication is difficult you know what we have here is a failure to communicate cool and luke yes and there's a great movie yeah there's an interpretation factor too like you can choose to interpret certain series of words in in different ways and they're dependent upon tone dependent upon social cues even facial expressions sarcasm there's a lot of variables sarcasm is difficult yes yeah and so one of the things that i i've said is like that there could be potentially a universal language that's created through computers that particularly young kids would pick up very quickly like my kids do tick tock and all this jazz and i don't know what they're doing they just know how to do it and they know how to do it really quickly like they learn really quickly they show me how to edit things and yeah it's if you taught a child from first grade on how to use some new universal language i mean essentially like a rosetta stone and something that's done that interprets your thoughts and you can convey your thoughts with no room for interpretation with clear very clear that where you know what a person's saying and you can tell them what you're saying and there's no need for noises no need for mouth noises no need for these sort of accepted ways that we've uh sort of evolved to make sounds that we all agree we through our cultural dictionary right we agree or certainly we could bypass all that yeah we can still do it for for sentimental reasons right like campfires yeah yeah exactly i don't need campfires i don't need to roast marshmallows kind of fun right um so yeah um yeah i think you would in principle you would be able to communicate very quickly and with far more precision ideas and language would i'm not sure what would happen to language but you could probably within a situation like this that you would be able to just kind of like the matrix you you want to speak a different language in a problem right that's why it just downloaded the program right so at least for the first iterations first few iterations we'll just be able to use like i i know that google has uh their some of their pixel buds have the ability to interpret languages in real time sure yeah you can hear it and they'll it'll play things back to you in whatever language you choose so to be something along those lines yeah for the first few iterations well the first few iterations are i mean what i'm talking about is like in the limit over time you know with a lot of development um the first few iterations really in the first few versions all we're going to be trying to do is solve brain injuries um so so it's like don't don't worry that that's not going to sneak up on you this this will take a while how many years before you don't have to talk if the if the development continues to accelerate then maybe like five years five to ten years that's quick that's really quick that's the best case scenario no talking anymore in five years best case scenario but i'm 10 10 years more like it i've always speculated that aliens could potentially be us in the future because if you look at like the size their heads and the fact that they have very little muscle and then they don't use their mouth anymore they was tiny little i mean the archetypal alien that you see in like closing counters are the third kind they they're like if you went from like uh australopithecus or ancient hominid to us what's the difference less hair less muscle bigger head and then just keep going a thousand a million whatever you or five years whatever whatever happens when neurolink goes on online and then we slowly start to adapt to this new way of being where we don't use our muscles anymore we have this gigantic head we can talk without words you could also save state and save state save state like save your brain state like like a saved game in a video game whoa like like if you want to swap from windows 95 well yeah i think we are windows 95 right now yeah from a future perspective probably um but yeah i mean you you could save state um and restore that state into a biological being if you if you wanted to in the future in principle it's like nothing like from a physics standpoint that prevents us now you'd be a little different but then you're also a little different when you wake up in the morning from yesterday and you're a little different in fact if you say like you five years ago versus you today is quite a big difference yes um so you'd be substantially you i mean you'd be you'd certainly think you're you but the idea of saving yourself and then transforming that into some sort of a biological state like you can hang out with 30 year old you i mean the possibilities are endless that's so weird i mean these things think like how your phone can you can record videos on your phone like there's no way you could remember a video right as accurately as your phone or a camera you know could so uh now if you've got like a you know some some you know version 10 hero link whatever and far in the future you could you could remember you could recall everything but just like it's a movie concluding all the entire sensory experience emotions everything everything everything and play it back and you can enjoy it you should edit it edit it yeah so you can change your past you could change what do you think was your past yeah well so if you had like a tremendous thing right now could be a replayed memory it could be yeah it may be what's the odds of this being a replayed memory if you had a guess it's more than 50 there's no way to assign a probability with accuracy here right but roughly if you just had a just gut instinct well i don't have a neural link in my brain so i say right now zero percent but at the point at which you do have a neural link then it rises above zero percent the idea that we're experiencing some sort of a preserved memory is uh even though it's still the same it's not comforting right for some reason when we people talk about simulation theory they talk about the potential for this currently being a simulation it even though your life might be wonderful you might be in love you might love your career you might have great friends but it's not comforting to know that this experience somehow or another doesn't exist in a material form that you can knock on it feels real doesn't it feels real but but if it's not but the idea that it's not is for some strange reason disconcerting well yeah i'm sure it should be disconcerting because then if this is not real what is right um but but the you know there's that that old sort of um thought experiment of like how do you know you're not a brain in a vet you know i mean now here's the thing you are a brain an event then that fat is your skull yes and everything you see feel here everything all your senses are electrical signals everything everything is an electrical signal to up to a brain in a vat where the vat is called and all your hormones all your neurotransmitters all these things are drugs adrenaline's a drug dopamine's a drug you're a drug factory you're constantly changing your state with love and oxytocin and and beauty sure changes your state great music changes your state absolutely and yet here's another sort of interesting idea which is um because you say like where did consciousness arise well assuming you believe the belief in physics which appears to be true um then you know we the universe started off as basically quarks and leptons and it quickly became hydrogen and of helium lithium like basically elements the periodic table but it was like mostly hydrogen basically and then and then over a long period of time uh you know 13.8 billion years later that hydrogen became sentient but so where along the way that conju where is the consciousness what's the line of consciousness and not consciousness right between hydrogen and here right when do we call it when do we call it consciousness i was watching a video today that we played on a podcast earlier of a monkey riding a motorcycle down the street jumps off the motorcycle and tries to steal a baby yeah i saw that one they went apparel what is that monkey conscious it seems like it is it seems like it had a plan it was riding a [ __ ] motorcycle and then jumped off the motorcycle to try to steal a baby seems pretty the one that just strike baby down the street pretty far yeah yeah seems pretty conscious right there's definitely some degree of consciousness there yeah it's not like it's not a worm it seems to be on another level yeah and it's going to keep going and that that's the real concern when when people think about the potential future versions of human beings especially when you consider symbiotic relationship to artificial intelligence it will be unrecognizable that one day we'll be so far removed from what this is we'll look back on this the way we look back now on you know simple simple organisms that we evolved from and then it won't be that far in the future that we do have this this view back well i hope consciousness propagates into the future and it gets more more sophisticated and complex and and that it understands the questions to ask about the universe do you think that's the case as a human being as yourself you're clearly trying to make conscious decisions to be a better version of you right this is the idea of like getting rid of your possessions and realizing that you're trying to like i don't like this i will try to improve this i will try to do a better version of the way i interface with reality that this is always the way things are if you're if you're moving in a some sort of a direction where you're trying to improve things you're always going to move into this new place where you look back in the old place and go i was doing it wrong back then so this is an accelerated version of that super accelerated version of that i mean you don't always improve but you can aspire to improve you can aspire to be less wrong yeah this is like i think a good the tools of physics are very powerful like just assume you're wrong and you're asking your goals to be less wrong i don't think you're gonna if you succeed every day and being less wrong but you know if you're gonna succeed in being less wrong most of the time you're doing great that's a great way of putting aspire to be less wrong but then when you know people look back at nostalgia about simpler times there's that too it's very romantic and exciting to look back on campfires but you can still have a campfire yes yeah but will you appreciate it when you're a super nerd when you're connected to the grid and you have some uh skull cap in place of the top of your head and it's interfacing with the inter international language that the rest of the universe now enjoys communication with people and we're yeah sure i think so yeah i like empires [Laughter] i'm just worried i mean uh everyone's always scared of change but i'm scared of this monumental change where we won't we won't talk anymore i mean that thing will communicate yes but that's there's something about there's something about the beauty of the crudeness of language where when it's done eloquently it's it's it's satisfying and it it it hits us in some sort of a visceral way like ah that person nailed it i love that they nailed it like that it's so hard to capture a real thought and convey it in a way in this articulate way that makes someone except like you read a quote a great quote by a wise person it makes you excited that their mind figured something out put the words together in a right way that makes your brain pop like oh yes yeah yes it's clever compression of a concept yeah and a feeling but the fact that a human did it too yeah absolutely do you think that it'll be like electronic music like people won't appreciate it like they appreciate a slide guitar i like electronic music i do too yeah well you make it i know you liked it yeah yeah yeah um yeah i mean i hope the future is more fun and interesting and we should try to make that way i hope it's more fun and interesting too yeah i just you know i just hope you don't lose anything along the way yeah we might at least little but hopefully we'll gain more than lose yeah that's the thing right gaining more than we lose like something that makes us interesting is that we're so flawed it's not for sure right yeah i mean you look at civilizations through the ages um most of them uh you know they rose and fell yeah and uh i do think like the globalization uh that that we have at the sort of like the the meme sphere uh is uh there's not enough isolation between countries or regions um it's like if you get up if there's a mind virus that that my virus cannot infect too much of the world uh you know like i actually sort of sympathize with the anti-globalization people because it's it's like man we don't ever want everywhere to be the same for sure and then we we need some kind of like mind viral immunity so that that's it's a bit concerning mind viral immunity meaning that once something like neural link gets established the real concern is something that i mean you said it's bluetooth right or some future version of that that the idea is that something could possibly get into it [ __ ] it up no i'm talking about like uh somebody there's some cockeyed concept that um that's happened that happens right right now yeah well i know there's viruses and embedded chips right like people have they've embedded chips and then acquired viruses well when i'm talking about my verse i'm talking about like a a concept that affects people's minds oh okay okay like uh cult thinking or yeah some sort of fundamentalism yeah just wrong-headed idea that yes goes viral in a in an idea sense [Music] well that is that is a problem too right if someone can manipulate that technology to make something appear logical or rational yeah yeah that would that be an issue too with this is a very have versus have not issue right once this thing if if this really does i mean initially it's going to help people with with injuries and but you you said ultimately it could lead to this spectacular cognitive change yes but the people that first get it should have a massive advantage over people that don't have it yet well i mean it's the kind of thing where your productivity would improve i don't know dramatically maybe by a factor of 10 with it so you could definitely just you know uh i don't know take out a loan and do it and earn earn the money back real fast so you're super smart well in a capitalist society you know you could it seems like you could really get so far ahead that before everybody else could afford this thing and link up and get connected as well you'd be so far ahead they could never catch you is that a concern uh well i think the the it's not a super huge concern i mean there are huge differences in cognitive ability and and resources already yeah um i mean you can think of a corporation as like a cybernetic collective uh that's far smarter than an individual like i i can personally build like a whole rocket and and the engines and launch it and everything that's impossible uh but you know we have eight thousand people with spacex and you might you know piecing it out to different people um and using like you know computers and machines and stuff we can make lots of rockets launch and all but stuck with the space station that kind of thing you know um so that already exists where this you know where there's a corporations are vastly more capable than an individual um but the the like we should be i think less concerned about like relative capabilities between people and and more like uh having ai be vastly you know beyond us and decoupled from human will decoupled from human so this is the if you can't beat them join them yeah i mean so you feel like it's inevitable like ai sentient ai is essentially inevitable super sentient ai yeah like beyond a level that's difficult to understand and impossible to understand probably and somehow or another us so it's almost like it's a requirement for survival to achieve some sort of symbiotic existence with ai it's not a requirement it's just um if you if you want to be along for the ride then you need to do some kind of symbiosis so the the way your brain works right now you've got uh kind of like the animal brain reptile brain kind of let's say it's like the limbic system basically and you've got the the cortex um now the brain purists will argue with this definition but essentially you've got the primitive brain and you've got the the sort of smart brain or the brain that's capable of planning and understanding concepts and different difficult you know things that a monkey can't understand um now the your cortex is much much smarter than your olympic system um nonetheless they work together well so i haven't met anyone who wants to delete the olympic system or the cortex that people are quite happy having both um so you can think of the this as being like the computer the ai is like a a third layer a tertiary layer so that is like that could be symbiotic with the cortex it'd be much smarter than the cortex but you'd essentially have three layers and you actually have that right now your phone is capable of things and your computer is capable things that your brain is definitely not you know storing your terabytes of information perfectly um doing incredible calculations that you you know we couldn't even come close to doing you have that with your computer it's just like i said the data rate is slow the connection is weak why is it so disconcerting or why is it why does it not give me comfort to think about like when i think about a symbiotic connection to ai i always think of this cold emotionless sort of thing that we will become is that a bad way to look at it i don't think that's not that's not quite that's not how it would be like i said you you already are yeah symbiotic with ai or computers phones computers laptops yeah and there's there's quite a bit of ai going on you know near so artificial neural nets um increasingly neural nets are sort of taking over from regular programming more and more so you are connected um you know if you use google voice or alexa or one of those things it's using a neural net to decode your speech and try to understand what you're saying um you know if if you're trying to image recognition or improve the quality of photograph it's it's using the neural nets the best way to do that so um you are already uh sort of a sort of a cybernetic symbiote it like said you when that it's just a question of your data rate the the the communication speed between your your phone and your brain is slow when do you think you're gonna do it how long will you wait um like once it starts becoming available yeah if it works i'll do it sure right away i mean let's make sure it works how do we make sure it works we're trying on prisoners like what do you do no no you take rapists no cut holes in your head now like i said if somebody's got a serious brain injury right um and though you know people have like very severe brain injuries um and then and then you can fix those those brain injuries um and you know then you prove out that it works and you expand envelope expand and make more and more brain injuries uh sold more and more um and that you know suddenly at certain age we all are are going to get alzheimer's we're all going to get senile um and then you know moms forget the names of their kids and that kind of thing and so you know it's like you said okay well you know this would allow you to remember your names your kids and and and have a normal a much more normal life where you you you're able to function much later in life um so i think that so essentially that there would almost everyone would find a need at some point if if you get old enough to use your neural link and and and then it's like okay so we can improve the functionality and improve the communications communication speed so then you will not have to use your thumbs to communicate with the computer do you ever sit down extrapolate do you ever like sit down and think about all the different iterations of this and what this eventually leads to um yeah i mean i think sure think about a lot um there's like i said this is not something that's going to sneak up on you you know there's like getting fda approval for this stuff is not like overnight you know um and this there's i mean we probably have to be on like version 10 or something before you know it it would realistically be um you know a human ai symbiote situation so you'll see it coming you know you see it coming but what do you think it's going to be like when you sit when you're alone if you have free time i don't know if you have free time but if you just sit down and think about this iteration the next onward keep going and you you drag it out with improvements along the way and leaps and bounds and technological innovations and where do you see it what are we going to be like when 20 25 years from now what are we going to be well assuming civilization is still around um it's looking fragile right now um i think we i think we could have a in 25 years probably something i think like that could be a whole brain interface a whole brain interface sorry pretty close to that yeah how does how do you define what do you mean by whole brain interface um like almost all the neurons are connected to uh you're the sort of ai extension of yourself if you want ai extension of yourself yeah what does that mean to you like when you say ai extension of yourself well you like i said you already have a computer extension of yourself in your phone you know and computers and stuff so and now online it's like somebody dies there's this like an online ghost that they're they're still their online stuff yeah it's alive that's a good way to put it it is weird when you read someone's tweets after they're dead yeah yeah instagram and their stories and stuff yeah whatever facebook inside you know like that's a great way to put it it's like an online ghost that's very accurate yeah so yeah so there's it would just be that that more of you would be in the cloud i guess than in your body more of it more of you whoa now when you say civilization's fragile do you mean because of this covet 19 [ __ ] that's going on right now what's that i've never heard of it it's this thing yeah no it's like uh some people just get a card other people it gets much worse uh sure yeah well yeah i mean this certainly has taken over the mayan space of the world to a degree that is quite shocking yeah well out of nowhere that's what's crazy it's like you go back to november nothing now here we are december january february march april may six months totally different world so from nothing to everything's locked down there's so much uh conflicting information and conflicting opinions about how to proceed what what has happened you you find things where there was a meat packing plant i believe in missouri where 300 plus people were asymptomatic tested positive or asymptomatic and then in other places it just ravages entire communities and kills people and it's it's so weird it almost appears on the out like if you didn't know any better you'd be like what it seems like there's a bunch of different viruses it doesn't seem like it's the same thing or has a bunch of different reactions to the biological variety of of people yeah um i mean i kind of saw this whole thing play out in china uh before it played out in the us so um it's kind of like watching the same movie again but in english um so yeah um i might i think the the the the mortality rate is much less than what is then what say the world health organization said it was it's very much module assets like probably at least order of magnitude less well it seems to be very deadly to very specific kinds of people and people with specific problems yeah i mean if you're you can look at the mortality statistics you know by age and whether they have comorbid comorbidities like do they have like basically existing conditions and um by age um and uh you know if you're below 60 and and have no serious health issues the probability of death is extremely low it's not zero but it's extremely low they didn't think that this was the case though when they first started to lock down the country do you think that it's a situation where once they've proceeded in a certain way it's very difficult to correct course it's almost like people really wanted a panic that you know quite quite crazy but in some places a panic is deserved right like if you're in the icu in manhattan and people are dying left and right and everyone's on intubators and it's it's it seems like when you see all these people on ventilators and so many of them are dying and you see these nurses are dying and doctors are getting sick in some places that fear is justified but then in other places you're reading these stories about hospitals that are essentially half empty they're they're having to furlough doctors and nurses because there's no work for them most of the hospitals in the united states right now half empty in some cases they're at 30 capacity and is this because they've decided to forego elective procedures and and normal things that people would have to go to the hospital for yes i mean we're not talking about just some of these elective procedures are quite important like it's like you have about a lot of disease yeah sure and you need a you know triple bypass it's like sort of elective but if you don't get it done in time it's you're gonna die yeah it's elective is a weird word yeah elective it's not like hey i i want to it's not like plastic surgery it's more like like my my hip is i'm in extreme pain because my my hips blown out or my knee and i don't want to go to the hospital i can't go to the hospital to you know people in extreme pain people that need a kidney you know like people that have like quite serious issues that are choosing not to go out of fear um so i think it's it's a problem it's not good it seems like the state of public perception is shifting it is like people are taking some deep breaths and relaxing and because of the statistics of i mean and essentially across the board it's being recognized that it's not as fatal as we thought it was still dangerous still worse than the flu but not as bad as we thought or we feared it could be i mean objectively the mortality is is much lower like at least a factor of 10 maybe a factor of 50 lower than initially thought do you think that the current way we're handling this the social distancing the mass the locking down is it does this make sense is it adequate or do you think that we should move back to at least closer to where we used to be well i think proper hygiene is a good thing no matter what you know wash your hands and you know and if you're if you're coughing stay home or wear a mask this is not good you know um like they do that in japan that's like normal if you're if you're ill you you wear a face mask and you don't cough on people i think that that would be a great thing to to adopt in general throughout the world um washing your hands is also good well that's the speculation why men get it more than women because men are disgusting and we don't watch that disgusting it's true it's true yeah we're all my men in this room we're all gross yeah let's go to the restroom you can see us yes we're gross my daughter my nine-year-old daughter yells at me she goes did you wash your hands she makes me go back and wash my hands hmm she's right nine years old if i had a nine-year-old boy do you think he would care i wouldn't give a [ __ ] if i wash my hands true um so yeah i think that there's definitely some silver linings here than in improved uh you know uh hygiene yeah and an awareness of potential yes and i think this has shaken up the the system uh system is like somewhat more bond with la la's layers of bureaucracy and i think that we've cut through some of that bureaucracy uh and if we you know at some point there probably will be a uh pandemic with with a with a high mortality rate uh debate about like what's high but i mean like someone that's killing a lot of 20 year olds let's say like it's yeah if you had like ebola type of mortality spanish flu something that uh tax immune systems of healthy people yeah yeah um yeah but it's a yeah like like killing large numbers of young healthy people that that's you know define that as like uh uh high mortality then that this is at least practice for something like that um and i think there's this you know given it's just a matter of time that there will be eventually some some such pandemic do you think that in a sense the one good thing that we might get out of this is the realization that this is a potential reality that we we got lucky in this sense i mean in people that didn't get lucky and died of course i'm not disrespecting their death and their loss but i'm saying overall as a as a culture as a community as a human race as a community this is not as bad as it could have been this is a good dry run for us to appreciate that we need far more resources dedicated towards the the understanding these diseases what to do in the case of pandemic and much more money that goes to funding treatments and and some preventative measures yeah absolutely um and i think i think there's a good chance it's highly likely i think coming out of this that we will develop uh vaccines that we didn't have before uh for uh quran viruses and other other viruses um and and possibly cures uh for for these and our understanding of uh viruses of this nature has improved dramatically because of the attention that it's received so there's definitely some you know a lot of silver linings here um and potentially if we act correctly yeah yeah yeah there's uh i think there will be some amounts of lighting here no matter what um hopefully it can be more professive lighting than less yeah um so yeah this is this is uh it's like kind of like a practice run for something that had that that had a potential that might in the future have a serious uh like a really high mortality rate that and we kind of got to go through this with without without it being something that kills you know vast numbers of young healthy people yeah when you made a series of tweets recently uh you know uh i don't remember the exact wording but essentially you were saying free america now like let's think about that is it thank you but uh the the you know what was the how much do you pay attention to the response to that stuff and what was the response like did anybody go hey elon what the [ __ ] you doing did anybody pull you aside who does that who gets to do that to you well i mean i certainly get that there's no shortage of negative feedback on twitter you know oh yeah twitter yeah but i don't read that do you read it warzone you do sometimes though right you do read it yeah i mean scroll through the comments like as a meme warzone yeah i mean people knife you're good it's something i i enjoy about that just the there's a something about the the freedom of expression that comes from all these people that do attack you it's like well they if there was no vulnerability whatsoever they wouldn't attack you and it's like there's something about these millions and millions of perspectives that you you have to you have to appreciate even if it comes your way even if the [ __ ] storm hits you in the face sure you gotta appreciate wow how amazing is it that all these people do have the ability to express themselves you don't don't necessarily want to be there when the [ __ ] hits you sure you might want to get out of the way in anticipation of the [ __ ] storm but the fact that so many people have the ability to reach out and i think it's in a lot of ways it's uh i don't wanna say a misused resource but it's like giving monkeys guns they just start they start gunning down things that in front of them without any realization of what they're doing they have a rock they see a window they throw it whoa look at that i got elon madd look at that this guy got mad at me this this i i [ __ ] took this person down on twitter i got this lady fired oh the [ __ ] business is going under because of twitter wars it seems like there's something about it that's this newfound thing that uh i want to say abuse but just i want to say that it's almost like you know you hit the button and things blow up you're like wow this is what else can we blow up sure um i mean i've been in the twitter war zone for for a while here so put your war zone you know take it takes a lot to phase me at this point yeah that's good too right like you develop a thick skin yeah you can't take it personally these people don't like actually know you you know like yeah it's just like you know so it's like if you're if you're fighting a war and there's like some opposing soldier that that shoots shoots at you it's not like they hate you they don't even know you right yeah yeah so just think of it like that like they're firing bullets or whatever um but they don't know you so don't take it personally there's something interesting about it too it's like uh like when you write something in you know 280 characters and they write something into it it's such a crude way it's like you know someone's saying sending opposing smoke signals that refute your smoke signals it's like it's so crude and especially when you're talking about something like neural link he's talking about some future potential where you're going to be able to express pure thoughts that get get conveyed through some sort of a universal language with no ambiguity whatsoever versus you know tweets well there'll always be some ambiguity but yeah tweets are it's hard um like the maybe there should be like a sarcasm flag or something you know right right um or i'm not you know just kidding or whatever you know like don't you know it seems like it would take away some of the fun from people that know it's sarcasm like if everybody knew that the onion wasn't real if you sent people articles yeah is something about someone getting angry at an onion article wow that's amazing you know what i mean where they don't realize what it is there's something fun about that for everybody else uh yeah i know it's pretty great it might be the best news source do you know who titania mcgrath is hilario it's uh andrew boyle he's a uh a british fellow a brilliant guy who's been on the podcast before and he has this uh fictional character this uh pseudonym titania mcgrath who's like this all the ultimate social justice warrior is this like like a female avatar a female avatar that's actually a computer conglomeration of a bunch of faces okay it's not really one person so one person can't be a victim and be angry he's sort of combined these faces to make this one perfect social justice more okay but the thing like i recognized it early on before i met him sure that this was parody this is this was just fun and then i love reading the people that don't recognize that they get angry sure and then they're really really like there's a lot of people that just get really furious sure about some of some fun to that there's some fun to the not picking up on the the the true nature of the signal i find twitter quite engaging how do you have the time um well i mean it's like five minutes every couple hours type of thing it's not like i'm sitting on an old day but even five minutes every couple hours if those are bad five minutes they might be bouncing around your head for the next 30. yeah you have to you know like i said take a certain amount of distance from you read this and you're like okay it's bullets being fired by an opposing army you know don't like it it's not like they they like so it's not like they know you it's like don't take it personally um did you feel the same way when when cnn had that stupid [ __ ] about ventilators with you i i found that both confusing and the the the yeah that was annoying it was annoying but what is also annoying as a person who reads cnn and wants to think of them as a responsible conveyor of the facts i would like to think that yeah i don't think cnn is that i think he used to be he used to be yeah um like what do you think's the the best source of just like information out there that's a good question you know like let's say you're just like average citizen trying to just get the facts you know figure out what's going on like you know how to live your life and you know just looking for what what's going on in the world that it's hard to find something that that isn't you know that's that that's good yeah you know uh that you know not not trying to push some partisan angle not trying to not not sort of doing sloppy reporting and and just aiming for the most number of clicks and trying to maximize ad dollars and that kind of thing yeah you're just trying to figure out what's going on it's like i'm hard pressed where do you go i don't know i don't think there's any pure form my favorite places are the new york times and the la times and i don't trust them 100 percent you know because also there's individuals that are writing these stories exactly and that's seems to be the problems these individual biases and these individual there's purposely distorted perceptions and then there's ignorantly reported facts and there's so many variables and you got to put everything through this filter of where is this person coming from do they have political biases do they have social biases do they are they are they upset because of their own shortcomings and they are they projecting this into the story sure it's so hard yeah i think like maybe just trying to find individual reporters that you think are good and yeah kind of falling down as opposed to the publication i go with whatever matt taibbi says okay i trust him more than anybody all right matt taib he's onto something i just he's as far as investigative reporters in particular the way he reported the savings and loan crisis the way he reports everything i just i just listen to him above most above mo he's my go-to guy all right i'll check it out uh it's rolling stone's articles or his stuff on the savings alone crisis just like what in the [ __ ] and you know and he wasn't you know he's not an economist by any stretch of the imagination so he had to really sort of deeply embed himself in that world to try to understand it and to be able to report on it and was also with a humorous flair for now that's nice yeah um yeah but it's not that many of them there's it's hard and not a location where like we are no [ __ ] that's right you know we are no bullshit.com like the one place where you can say this is what we know this is what we don't know this is what we think not this person's wrong and here's why like oh god damn it you know i can't you you don't know there's a lot of stuff that is open to interpretation yeah this this particular coronavirus issue that we're dealing with right now seems to be a great illuminator of that very fact is that there's so much data and there's this so there's so much that's open to interpret there's so many thing because it's all happening in real time right and like particularly right now in california we're in stage two tomorrow or friday two days from now stage two retail stores opening up things are changing like when no one knows the correct process that needs to take place to save the most amount of lives but yet ensure that our our culture and that our our our economy survives it's a lot of speculation and guessing but if you go to certain places they'll tell you we know why and we know this and we know uh it's hard yeah i mean i in general i think that's like we should be concerned about um anything that's a massive infringement on our civil civil liberties yes you know so it's like you got to put a lot of weight on that um you know people a lot of people died to you know win independence with the country and and fight for the democracy that we have and uh you know we should treasure that and not and not give up our liberties too easily i think we've we i mean i think we probably did that actually well i like what you said when you said that it should be a choice and that to require people to stay home require people to not go to work require and to to arrest people for trying to make a living this all seems wrong and i think it's a wrong approach it's a it's uh you're you're it's an infantilization of the society that daddy's going to tell you what to do fundamentally a violation of the constitution yeah freedom of assembly and you know it's just i mean i don't think these things stand up in court really they're arresting people for protesting yeah yeah because they're protesting and violating social distancing and these mandates that tell people that they have to stay home yeah these these are these would definitely not stand up uh you know if the supreme court here i mean it's obviously a complete violation right yeah yeah and again this is not in any way um disrespecting the people who have died from this disease that's certainly a real thing to think of yeah i mean it it it just should be if if you're if you're at risk you should not be compelled to leave your house right um or leave a place of safety but you should also not be uh if you're not at risk or if you are at risk and you wish to take a risk with your life you should have the right to do that and it seems like at this point in time particularly our resources would be best served protecting the people that are at risk versus penalizing the people that are not at high risk for living their life the way they did particularly having a career and and making a living and feeding your family paying your bills keeping your store open keeping your restaurant open yes i mean there's there's a strong a strong downside to this yeah so yeah i just believe like you know if this is a free country you should be you know a lot allowed to do you know what you want as long as it does not endanger others but that's the thing right people this is the argument they will bring up like you are endangering others you should stay home for the people that that you even if you're fine even if you know you're gonna be okay there's certain people that will not be okay because of your actions they might get exposed to this thing that we don't have a vaccine for we don't have universally accepted treatment for and then we need to ca this is there's two arguments right the one argument is we need to keep going protect the weak protect the sick but let's open up the economy the other argument is stop placing money over human lives and let's shelter in place until we come up with some sort of a decision and let's figure out some way to develop some sort of universal income universal basic income plan or something like that to feed people during the during this time when we make this transition i think there's a yeah um as i said right yeah my opinion is if if somebody wants to stay home they should stay home and say something doesn't want to stay home they should not be compelled to stay home that's my opinion do you think if somebody doesn't like that well that's my opinion um so the now yeah um the the this notion though that uh you know you can just sort of send checks out everybody and and things will be fine it's not true obviously um the there's some people have this absurd like a view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty like it it just makes stuff stuff you know whatever it just there's a magic quarter plenty and the goods and services they just come from this magic corner plenty and then if um like if somebody has more stuff than somebody else's because they took more from this magic corner plenty now let me uh just break it to uh the fools out there if you don't make stuff there's no stuff yeah so if you don't make the food if you don't process the food you know transport the food and what the whether you know medical treatment getting getting your teeth fixed there's no stuff i become detached from reality you can't just legislate money and solve these things if you don't make stuff there is no stuff obviously we'll run out of the stores run out of the you know it's the whole the machine just grinds to a halt but the the initial thought on this virus the real fear was that this was going to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people instantaneously in this country it was going to do it very quickly if we didn't hunker down if we didn't shelter in place if we didn't quarantine ourselves or lock down do you think that the initial thought was a good idea based on the perception that this was going to be far more deadly than it turned out to be maybe i think briefly briefly briefly but uh i think if you know any any kind of like sensible examination of what happened in china would lead to the conclusion that that is obviously not going to occur uh this this virus originated in wuhan there's like i don't know hundred thousand people a day leaving on uh so it that that it it uh it went everywhere very fast through throughout china throughout the rest of the world um and the fatality rate was was low don't you think though it's difficult to appreciate it's it's it's difficult to filter what the information is coming out of china to accurately really get a real true representation of what happened the the propaganda machine is very strong sure what the world health organization appears to have been complicit with a lot of their propaganda the thing is that american companies have massive supply chains in china like tesla for example we have hundreds of suppliers like tier one two three four suppliers throughout throughout china so we know if they are able to make stuff or not we know if they if they have issues or not then they they're china is back back at full steam um and until many uh pretty much every u.s company has some significant number of flies in china so you know you know if they're able to you know provide things or not or if there's you know high mortality rate tesla has seven thousand people in china so zero people died um zero okay so that that's a real statistic that's coming from yeah yeah you know those people yeah we literally we're in payroll do you think there's a danger of this same folks are there yeah do you think there's a danger of politicizing this whereas becomes like opening up the country's uh donald trump's it's his goal it's his and then anything he does is sort of uh there's there's people that are going to oppose it and come up with some reasons why he's wrong particularly in this climate whereas as we're leading up november and you know the the 2020 elections do you think that this is a real danger in terms of uh public's perception that trump wants to open it up so they knee-jerk oppose it because they oppose trump i i think there has been some politician this has been politicized you know in both directions really so it's um which is not great yeah but like i said separate apart from that i think there's the question of like you know where do several civil liberties fit in this picture you know yeah and uh what what what can the government make you do what can they make you not do and what you know what's what's okay right um and uh yeah i think we went too far do you think it's one of those things where once we've gone in a certain direction it's very difficult to make a correction make a an adjustment to to realize like okay we thought it was one thing it's not it's not good but it's not what we thought it was going to be it's not what we feared so let's let's back up and reconsider let's do this publicly and say we were acting based on the information that we had initially that information appears to be faulty and uh here's how we move forward while protecting civil liberties while protecting what essentially this country was founded on which is a very agreed upon amount of freedom yeah that we respect and appreciate absolutely well i think we're we're rapidly moving towards opening up the country um it's going to happen extremely fast over the next few weeks so yeah something that would be helpful just add from an informational level is um when reporting uh sort of covet cases to separate out diagnosed with covert versus uh had covert like symptoms yes because the list of symptoms that could be covered at this point is like a mile long so it's like a hard to if you're ill at all it's like it could be covered so just just to give people better information definitely diagnosed with covert or had covered like symptoms we're conflating those two so that one that it looks bigger than it is then uh if somebody dies is was covert a a primary cause of the death or not uh i mean if i mean if somebody has kova gets eaten by a shark we find their arm their arm has covered it's gonna get recorded as a cover death is that real basically not that bad but heart attacks strokes you get hit by a bug cancer if you if you get hit by a bus go to the go to the hospital and die and then find that you have covered you will be recorded as a cover death why would they do that though well right now the so you know the road is hell is the rotel is paid with good intentions i mean he's mostly paid with bad intentions but there's you know some good intentions saving stones in there too um and the the the stimulus bill that was intended to help uh with the hospitals that were being overrun with with with code patients uh created an incentive to record something as covet that is difficult to say no to especially if your hospital is going bankrupt for lack of other patients so the hospitals are in a bind right now there's a bunch of hospitals are they're following doctors as you were mentioning they're you know they're your is half full you're it's hard hard to make ends meet so now you've got like you know if i just check this box i get eight thousand dollars put on a ventilator for five minutes i get thirty nine thousand dollars back or or i to fire some doctors so what's the what's this this is a tough moral quandary it's like what you can do that's the situation we have no what what's the way out of this what do you think is like if if you had the president's ear or if people wanted to just listen to you openly what do you think is the way out of this so let's let's clear up the data clear up the data so like i said uh something should be required as code but only if it is uh somebody has been tested uh has received a positive positive cover test not if they simply have symptoms one of like 100 symptoms and then if if it is a cover death it must be separated or was this was coveted a primary primary reason for death or did they also have stage three cancer heart disease emphysema and got hit by a bus and had covered yeah i've read all this stuff about that about them uh diagnosing people as a covet death despite other variables this is not a this is not a this is not a a question this is what is occurring and where are you reading this from where are you getting this from the public health health officials have literally said this this is not this is not a question mark right but this is never this is unprecedented right like if someone had the flu but also had a heart attack they would assume that that person died of a heart attack yes yeah so this is unprecedented is this because this is such a a popular i don't i don't want to use that word the wrong way but that's what i mean a popular subject and financial incentives yes and like so this is not some sort of it a moral indictment of of sort of hospital administrators it's just they're in it they're they're in a in a tough in a tough spot here um they actually don't have enough patience to to pay everyone for it to with without following following doctors and and firing staff and yeah they're running potentially going bankrupt so so then they're like okay well the stimulus bill says if you know we get all this you know money if we say if if they if it's a cover death i'm like okay they coughed before they died in fact they're not even diagnosed with cover they simply if you had weakness a cough uh shortness of breath but frankly i'm not sure how you die without those things yeah you yeah but there's so many different things that you could attribute to covet too there's so many symptoms there's diarrhea headaches dehydration yeah cough yes but to be clear you you don't even need to have gotten a cover diagram you simply need to have had one of many symptoms and then have died for some reason and it's covered so then it makes the death count look very high and then we're then stuck in a bind because it looks like the death count's super high and not going down like it should be and now so then we we should keep whatever you know keep you know the shelter in place stuff there and and keep people in their home you know confined people to homes so we need to break out of this this we're stuck in a loop yeah and i think the way to break out of this loop is to have clarity of information clarity of information will certainly help but altering perceptions public perception from people that are basically in a panic there's a lot of essentially well at least a month ago we're clearly in a panic i mean right where you know when you look around april 5th april 6th people were really freaking out but here we are may and may people are relaxing a little bit yes they're realizing like hey um i actually know a couple of people that got it it was just a cough and i know some people that got it where nothing happened i know a lot of people have got it i know zero people who died that i mean about no yeah a lot of people got it yeah it's it's not what we feared we feared something much worse yeah that's correct so the adjustment's difficult to make so you said first of all we need real data we need just just parse out the data don't don't lump it all together no and then if if you give if you get people just parse out the data better clear clearer information um about uh like i said was this an actual code of a diagnosis or was it a or did they get the test and the test came back positive or do they just have some symptoms just parse those two out um and then parse out just uh if somebody died did they die did they did they even have a covet test or or did they just have one of many symptoms like like like how do you die without weakness i don't know right it's impossible basically yeah it's a good point if you're gonna die you're gonna have shortness of breath weakness and you might cough a little um so so was it quantified what was it yeah that person did they actually have a covert test and and the tests come back positive and then um if if they died did they uh die where where covert was um it didn't have to be the main course but it was a significant contributor to their death or was it not a significant contributor to the death right it's not as simple as just because you had covet covet killed you definitely not right yeah yeah i mean people die all the time and they have like flu and yes you know other colds and well we don't say that they died of those flu and other colds well that's what's so weird absolutely it's so popular and i use that word in a weird way but it's so popular that we've kind of forgotten people die pneumonia every day yeah people die of the flu didn't take a break oh kovitz got this i'm gonna sit this one out i'm gonna be on the bench i'm gonna wait until kovitz done before i jump back into the game of killing people no the flu is still here killing people i mean ev every year in the world several hundred thousand people die directly of the flu yeah not not tangentially right not every 61 000 in this country last year yeah and we're only five percent of the world and then there's cigarettes so oh man cigarettes not cigarettes will really kill you that's a weird one right we're terrified of this disease that were projected it could potentially kill 100 if not 200 000 americans this year with cigarettes kill 500 000 and you don't hear a peep out of any politician there's no one running for congress is trying to ban cigarettes there's no one running for senate that wants to put some education plan in place it's going to stop cigarettes in their tracks yeah i mean a long time like several years ago i mean along with 10 10 years ago i helped make a movie cold thank you for smoking oh i saw that yeah um it it yeah um yeah it's crazy uh smoking barbecuing alongside just bad news it's not not good you know you're turning your lungs into smoke smoked beef and not great um so um yeah tylenol by the way also kills a lot of people yeah what is the number for tylenol over here um i'm not sure the exact number but i believe it until the opioid crisis i believe tylenol was the number one killer of all drugs um because wow basically it's uh if you have if you get drunk and take a lot of tylenol um acetaminophen essentially it causes liver failure so sevilla would like get get wasted and then like have a headache and then pop a tonic tylenol gardens whoa yeah curtains is a funny word yeah you know so but nobody's like you know raging against tylenol yeah it's weird except acceptable deaths are weird and that's the real the slippery slope about this uh people shaming people for wanting to go back to work you know other people are gonna die well if you drive do you drive oh well you should stop driving because people die from driving so you know you definitely should fill up all the swimming pools because like 50 people die every day in this country from swimming so let's not swim anymore yeah what is the really dangerous we need to chop down all the coconuts coconuts kill 150 people every year yes cut down all the coconut trees we need those people yes it's at a certain point in time it's like we yeah we're vulnerable and we're also we we're also we have a finite existence no matter what we do nobody lives forever right um i mean the the the i mean i think you want to look at say deaths as like the but for this uh disease whatever they would have lived x number of years yeah you know so um you know if somebody dies when they're they're they're 20 and could live till 80 they they lost 60 years but if somebody dies when they're 80 and they might live until 81 they last one year yes so it's it's like how many life years were lost uh is is a probably you know the right metric to use i don't uh read my own comments but i do read other people's comments and i was reading this one little twitter beef that was going on where someone was saying that kovid takes an average of 10 years off people's lives and we should appreciate those 10 years and then someone else said that's not true i'm sure it's not true yeah definitely it's the twitter but someone else said the average age of people who die from covid is older than the average age people die it's very let's say just say it's like it's it's about the same that's a beautiful way of looking at it i mean it's it's unfortunate it sucks but it sucks if grandpa dies of alzheimer's or emphysema or leukemia it sucks sure it sucks when someone you love dies yes but i i'm i mean actually if if this uh i think a lesson to be taken here that i think is quite important is that if um if you have you know your great grandparents and their their age and grandparents really be careful with uh with with uh you know any kind of flu or cold or something that that wouldn't is not dangerous to kids or young adults but is dangerous too to help the elderly is um if basically if your kids got a runny nose they should stay away from their grandparents no matter what it is it's it's uh the things that are where a young immune system is has no problem and an older one has has a problem yeah and um in fact a lot of the a lot of the deaths are just are literally it's tragic but they're they're intra family um it's the the the little little kid had it had a you know called or flew and give it to grandpa yeah yeah they have the family gathering and they don't know that this is a big deal but it's it's just important to remember when you get older your immune system is just not that strong and uh and and so just be be careful with your with with your you know loved ones or elderly and i think there is some true objective um understanding of the immune system and the ways to boost that immune system and i really think that that that information should be that should be distributed in a way a non-judgmental way but like look this is this is a way that we can all like this is a scientifically proven way that we can boost our immune system and it might save your life and it might save the life of your loved ones and maybe we could teach this to our grandparents and our parents and and people that are vulnerable you know vitamin c heat shock proteins all these different variables that we know contribute to a stronger immune system yeah um actually just um a thing that that is is is tough uh if like when you as you get older it's it's hard to be you pretend to put on weight you know i certainly that's happening with me you know like as the older i get i'm like damn it's harder to stay lean uh that's for sure um and and so actually being being overweight is is a big deal yeah just uh it's a fact uh well yeah the new york hospital said it was the number one factor for severe uh kovid symptoms was obesity that was number one factor it is that that's yes exactly but it's also we live in a world where people want to be sensitive to other people's feelings so yeah absolutely we don't want to bring up the fact that being fat's bad for you it's a judgment on your food's great yeah i do love food yeah and i mean i mean to be totally frank i mean speaking for myself i'd i'd rather eat tasty food and live a shorter life yeah you know yeah those moments of enjoying a great meal yeah and then even talking about they're valuable they're worth something yeah it's not we don't want to eat soylent green and live to be 160. tasty if it was great one of the best things about life it really is yeah it's an art form as well it's like fine food it's a it's a it's a it's a delicious sand castle it's temporary it doesn't last very long but there's something about it that's very pleasing yeah yeah um yeah i mean i i don't know what what advice to give like um maybe smaller have tasty food with smaller amounts of it yeah and i think regulated feeding windows really the way to go some sort of an intermittent fasting approach sure when i started doing that i i i i found myself to be quite a bit healthier when i've deviated from that i've gained weight so how what's what's uh 16 hours well 16 hours yeah so like at night or yeah yeah yeah so i get to a certain point and then i count out i usually uh hit the stopwatch on my phone and then i look at uh 15 hours and i'm like okay got an hour before i can eat yeah and so anything in between that is just water or coffee actually you know like um this may be a useful bit of advice for for people but uh eating before you go to bed is a real bad idea and actually negatively affects your sleep yeah um and it can actually cause uh it heartburn that you don't even know is happening and and that subtle heartburn uh affects your sleep because you're you're horizontal and your body's digesting so if you want to improve the quality of your sleep um and and um you know uh you know be healthier uh it's it's do not eat right before we go to sleep yeah it's like one of the worst things you could do i had some of the biggest mistakes i've ever met i've i've done that uh particularly after comedy shows i'm starving i'll come home and i'll eat and then i go to bed and i just feel like [ __ ] and i wake up in the middle of the night it's gonna it's gonna crush your sleep and it's gonna it's gonna damage your uh pilot your pyloric sphincter and your esophagus and it's it's it's so in fact drinking and then going to sleep is that's one of the worst things you could yes um so uh just try to avoid drinking and and you know um small amounts of alcohol that evidence suggests it's not it doesn't have a negative effect i put in the same category as delicious food it kind of makes things a little more fun yeah yeah i like it i mean some of the people some of the people who have left the longest you know um there's a woman in france who i think maybe has the record or close to it and she had a glass of wine every day every day you know yeah small small amounts is fine um but um yeah this is like a i i learned this like quite late in life it's like just avoid having alcohol and avoid eating at least two or three hours before going to sleep and your quality of life will your quality of sleep will improve and your general health will improve a lot for sure this is a it's a big deal and i think not widely not widely known do you have time to exercise um a little bit um do you train or anything um i do although i haven't seen for a while but um yeah especially yeah from out like uh you know say we're working on starship or something in south texas and i'm just living in my i got a little little house there in bukuchika village um and i don't have much to do so we're like i'm working and i was like dude just lift some weights or something you know um maybe uh i i i like i don't some people love running i don't love running um but what do you like to do exercise wise um too totally frank i wouldn't exercise at all if i could but if if i i'd prefer not to exercise but if i'm going to exercise and you know lift some weights and um and then kind of run on the treadmill and maybe watch a show that you know if there's a compelling show that like pulls you in right right right yeah that's a good thing to do yeah watch a good movie or yeah yeah episode of black mirror or something like that that's great man don't watch black mirror before going to bed either well don't watch black mirror today it's too [ __ ] accurate yeah exactly it's like wait this already happened in real life yeah they're too close it's too close well even didn't jamie did you say that the the guy who makes black mirror mics off uh yeah yeah he said he it's not a good time to start season six yeah he wants to hold off because reality he's nailed it is black mirror oh man it's like he's gonna have to like re reassess and and attack it from a different angle yeah you should try something that's fun to do that's not just like like learn a martial art or something like that i did martial arts when i was kid like did you would you um i did taekwondo i did karate uh kaika shrinkai all right cool and um judo um also you you really branched out yeah um so um and did brazilian jiu jitsu briefly did you yeah where i made in palo alto really yeah oh no [ __ ] i was gonna suggest that that's a great thing for people like that's a thing about jiu jitsu if you look at it from the outside you think oh a bunch of meat heads strangling each other sure but they're some of the smartest people i know or jiu jitsu fiends because they they get they first of all they get introduced to it because usually either they want to exercise or learn some self-defense but then they realize that it's essentially like a language with your body like you're having an argument with someone with some sort of a physical language and it's really complex and the more access to vocabulary and the sharper your words are sure the the more you'll succeed in these ventures that's really also an accurate analogy of what jiu jitsu is yeah i mean i kind of i mean probably like a lot of people uh for the the way uh early day uh the first mma fights and joyce gracie and he was like incredible and it was like just like technique yeah yeah it was like you know winning against people way bigger and that kind of thing it's just like oh this is cool it was what martial arts were supposed to be when we were as we were kids yeah when you saw bruce lee [ __ ] up all these big giant guys like wow martial arts allow you to beat someone far bigger and stronger than you right most of the time that's not real especially if they know martial arts too it's like oh no yes but in the ufc when hoist gracie off of his back was strangling dan severin with his legs he was like holy [ __ ] yeah this guy's being pinned by this big giant wrestler and he wraps his legs around his neck and chokes him to the point the guy has to surrender yeah amazing yeah it was amazing i mean horse got beaten up pretty bad in some of those he did well he definitely had some rough fights but he won he won yeah he's a legend and but what it showed in i mean i'm a huge lover of jiu jitsu what it showed is that there is a method for uh for diffusing these situations with technique and and knowledge yeah and i think it's also a great way to exercise too because it's almost like the exercise is secondary to the learning of the thing the the exercises like you want like and you want to develop strength and conditioning just so that you could be better at doing the thing and the analogy that i use is like if you imagine if you had a race car and you could actually give the race car better handling and more horsepower just from your own focus and effort sure that's really what it's like yeah totally yeah when am i going to have my my kids i should say i sent my kids to uh jiu jitsu uh since they were like i don't know six oh really yeah oh that's awesome yeah it's it's a great thing to learn it really is seems like a good yes yeah maybe something like i mean even if you just have someone who hits that holds the pads for you like you get a workout in and to be fun um when am i going to be able to buy one of them roadsters when's that happening well i can't you know say exactly when but uh we got to get you know those this cover thing's kind of throwing us for a loop i'm sure um so um not to blame everything in the code but um it's you know certainly set us back on on progress for you know some number of months um the i mean things we've got to get get done uh ahead of roadster are um you know ramping up model y production um that'll be a great great car it is a great car getting the berlin gigafactory built and and also building y getting expanding the shanghai factory which is going great and um get the you know there's a cyber truck semi truck roadster um roaster is kind of like dessert so like we we gotta get the you know eating potatoes and greens and stuff you know like but roaster comes before cyber truck i mean i think we should do cyber truck first before before road before started interesting i'm not mad at that some other things for roadster uh they're they're you know the tri-motor uh plaid powertrain we're gonna have that in model s uh so that's like part one of the ingredients that's needed for for roadsters the the plaid powertrain the more advanced bat you know battery vacuum kind of thing i wanted to ask you about this before i forgot what there's a company that's called apex is taking your teslas and they're giving it a wider base and wider tires and a little bit more advanced suspension sure how do you feel about that are you guys do you work with them are you cool with those people yeah i mean just i'm off yeah go ahead they're jazzing stuff up with carbon fiber and doing a bunch of interior choices you're cool with you can't [ __ ] with that you don't have time so is it good that someone comes along and has a sort of specialty operation yeah i got no problem that's what it's called right it's like jmg is it called apex yeah i gotta unplug performance as apex that's right unplug performance yeah yeah you could for sure um you know lighten the car up and uh improve to tire traction and have you seen that company's stuff what they do i don't know specifically but there's it's pretty dope yeah they make a pretty dope looking they take model s and they they widen it and give it a bunch of carbon fiber that's it right there that looks pretty nice yeah it does now the the plaid version of the model s you are you going to widen the track and doing a bunch do a bunch of different i know you guys are testing at the nurburgring can you not talk about that well i think we got to leave that for you know proper sort of product unveil i understand yeah i understand um last time you were here you convinced me to buy a tesla i bought it and it's [ __ ] insane oh great glad you like it um i don't it's not just pretty fun it's like i the way i've described it is it makes other cars seem stupid they just seem dumb like i love dumb things i love dumb cars like i love campfires yeah i love campfires i have a 1993 porsche that's air-cooled sure it's like re it's not that fast it's really slow compared to the tesla yeah really so it's really quite slow yeah but there's something engaging about the mechanical this is like the the gears and it's very it's very analog but it's so stupid in comparison to the tesla like when i want to go somewhere in the model s i hit the gas and just goes yeah it just it like violates time yeah yeah um yeah you've tried it like ludicrous plus and stuff yeah yeah cool oh yeah we did just did a software update where it'll do it like a cheetah stance so uh yeah so it's it because it's got a dynamic air suspension so it lowers the back oh jesus yeah just like uh like a sprinter basically right like what do you do if you're a sprinter you're going to hunker down and then uh so i shaved like a 10th of a second off zero six i mean like you know it is pretty fun it's so i've taken so many people and i'm like i take them for the holy [ __ ] moment i'm like you ready like hang on there and then a stomp on the gas i've never felt anything like it it's confusing yeah it really is the the instant torque the instant torque and just the sheer acceleration is baffling it's baffling it's baffling they've never felt it no it's faster than falling it's crazy it's so fast it's a roller coaster yeah and my family yells at me when i stomp the gas like um i tell my kids i'm like you want to feel it you want to feel it like do it do it do it my wife's like don't do it yeah and even if i just do it on the highway for a couple of seconds that's pretty exciting yeah it's very it's like having a roller coaster on tap you know it really is like a roller coaster on top yeah without the loopty loops but it's the the pinning to your seat it seems like you're not supposed to be able to experience that from some sort of a can you know a consumer vehicle that you can just a regular person could buy if you have the money it seems too too crazy and then the idea of this roadster is a half of a second faster than that yeah that's madness well if that roads with a roadster we're going to do some things that are kind of unfair so we're going to take some things from like you know from uh kind of like rock rocket world and put them on the car so oh i read about that explain that like what do you do well like i said we can't oh the product unveiled right here but but it's gonna do some things that aren't fair and then the the when we do the unveil of the roadster let me just say that anyone who's been waiting they won't be sorry it's they won't be sorry oh i'm sure well anything that goes zero to sixty what is it one point nine is that the zero 0-60 that's the base model that's good what's the top of the food chain model okay okay faster than that let's just say faster yeah that seems so crazy to me now what was it like when the dude threw the steel balls at the window and they were supposed to not break and it broke well yeah i mean i know any circumstances are you know you know that our demos are authentic [Laughter] so i was not expecting that and i and then i think i muttered under my breath you didn't get mad though no you didn't steve jobs it um no i i i definitely swore uh but you know i didn't think the mic would pick it up but it did um and uh but so like we practiced this you know behind the scenes yeah i would like it tesla we don't do we don't do like tons of practice for for our demos because we we work we're working on the cars like we you know we're building new technologies and and improving the the fundamental products so we're not spending it like doing like hundreds of you know practice things or anything like that we don't have time for that um but the the just hours before the demo um both franz uh you know uh is a head of design and and i were in the studio throwing steel balls at the window and it's bouncing right off um and like okay this seems pretty good seems like we got it okay um and then we think what happened was that um when we when when franz hit the the the door with the sledgehammer you know sure like like this is this is like yeah yeah yeah exoskeleton you know high strength hardened steel you can literally take wind up with a sledgehammer you know full double-handed sledgehammer and hit the door and there's not even a dent it's cool but we think that that cracked the corner of the glass at the bottom and then once you crack the corner of the glass that you just came over so uh then when you threw the bowl that that's what cracked the glass so it didn't go through though it didn't go through that's true that's true it didn't shatter the whole thing like a regular window would either which would just dissolve yeah right so in hindsight the ball should have been first sledgehammer second yeah yeah you live you learn yeah exactly listen man uh we've taken up a lot of your time you had a child yeah recently it's amazing that you had the time to come down here and i really appreciate that i appreciate everything you do man i i'm i'm glad you're out there and uh i really appreciate you coming down here and sharing your perspective well i think you got a great show thanks for having me on thank you my pleasure my pleasure elon musk ladies and gentlemen good night all right that should get a little i should get a little play that was great

https://youtu.be/riru9OzScwk

have you all here this is just so cool but this is happening and hello all right oh I'm sorry say that one more time very tiny tiny image in the corner well we can they see if I can make this bigger I need to see myself like I know what I look like what's up guys well we are yeah I think we had some attempts um okay we can see you loud and clear and we're just so glad to have you here so so thank you Ilan we're we're glad you're here on my name is Zack Lauda I'm founder of hash club I found it after I dropped out of ninth grade to move to San Francisco and to be a programmer my public school had no computer science classes and still most US public schools don't teach any technology hack Club is a non-profit lies on donations I know it's crazy 60 percent of high schools don't teach computer science hack Club is a no profit that relies on donations and it's open and free to any high school student who wants to learn to build an innovative coat so we're live right now we'll get started one second on so this interview with you I like everything a hack Club was ideated a teenager reached out to you we have a small army of teenagers managing the OBS stream to YouTube right now we even have a teenager facilitating this call so Elon if hack Club is successful in 50 years from now we're enough people running the world who actually build things so thank you for being here I would have pass it off to a mug who's the host a mode please take us away it's show time my name is a Moog and I'm a 17 year old from Connecticut and I've been with hat club for two years and two years ago I walked into my first meeting and came out with a website and a burning desire to create more and hack has connected me to my closest friends and organized events that I've never thought were possible but most importantly a club has taught me that if there's a problem out there do we need a build to fix it and that's why you Ilan are a perfect guest today because you've taken half clubs ideals and ran with them you've talked about how electric cars radhaji and uninteresting and as chief engineer you've created Tesla to be the premier electric car company for decades people have said spaceflight is just expensive affordable spaceflight is impossible but you build space I should think around up define what everybody said four decades of putting affordable space flight for honor horizons and just like all of us you were once a bold young student and you have a drive to do them when you were 12 you sold your first video game for $500 and that's an echoed through a hat club everywhere where you see so many students doing that that's why you're in for so many of our students you've taken our ideals and ran with them so with that being said we're gonna go to our first question of the day Theo who helped organize all of this do go ahead cool all right hi Ilan I'm Thea sixteen year old student in Boston and I run a hat clip here so my question is about cryonics so cryonics I've got a controversial some people think they're legit some people think it's like totally unfeasible and pseudoscience my question is do you think that yeah yeah like basically like yeah okay okay any questions so I do you think that cries at cryonics are legit um and do you think that the tech to revive people who have been preserved using cryonics will exist in like let's say a hundred years you got to take your best guess well actually I think assuming the brain is frozen quickly after death then I think you probably could extract quite a lot of information from it in the future and you might be able to create something approximating that person I mean there's gonna be a few issues obviously but the brain is very physical it's it's much less mysterious than people think well I suppose simultaneously amazing and and less mysterious it's I mean the neurons are like they're like circuits like they look like physical circuits oh yeah so so therefore if you have a physical brain you should be able to recreate those physical circuits yeah with some issues of course since you know there's gonna be some damage but and they do this right now with rats I mean if you if you look kind of like you know when they do grad experiments which are kind of gruesome but I guess maybe they've got some payback due from both you know Black Plague and stuff but they like they like dude ranch premise will you know train the rat on a maze and then they'll freeze the rat brain and know like dissect it and you can like see the maze kind of thing in the brain like nice pretty nut so can you humans - yeah cool okay thank you so much yeah pretty question so Elan so like all of us you were once like a student hacker and you had all these same interesting ideas could you share with us a story like about your first hack or something along those lines yeah you guys seem really awesome by the way I mean you know I can't tell you know all the things that I did because that probably get me in trouble but you know I think some I'd be logged out for you know I had all the basic things you know like act for school computer like the old it sort of we started with the basic stuff like third nation Harry hack you know look for the default username that's where they came with the thing okay you what's the sermon but they probably taped their password I know the best you know that kind of stuff by the way that can get you very far what's the Wi-Fi password check the router and these just stayed there so though you know then it's like you know zero day exploits where there's like a you know some code error in the driver or in a common library you know those those bunch of those you know and you know there was like when when compiling code you could pilot to be encrypted and then I had but I met with a friend of mine said oh no you there's no way you can tell me what my code is because I'm gonna compile it running and then it's is and then deleted it it's like okay well you know what actually happens is that when you you go to leap unless you just rub the entire gram of the system is still there so just like in general you just like filling the first few bites and bingo you got the whole you know here's your code just you just basically around the memory you know filling filling filling gaps the same for files of course so people think oh I deleted my file no actually the computer just like you know deleted the first few bites of the directory basically then the disk allocation of that file and you can totally just do you know just just read read all the lights on it on the disk and and pretty what you're gonna get you're gonna get most of what was allegedly deleted so much to do hardly is a full layer obviously amazingly a lot of knuckleheads still didn't realize that oh yeah I myself like didn't know about hard to eat till like two years ago so so efficient will come from Sam Yuka and reminder for everybody asking question introduce yourself your grade and wear your hat clubs located anyway same yuktah you have the floor hi everyone my name is Samyuktha I'm a sixteen year old and my hat Club is located Atlanta Georgia so my question is okay if what role do you think organizations like hack Club or generally just like high schoolers play in tech especially a lot of times like for us it seems to be really concentrated like for me I don't live on the west coast I live in Georgia so I have separated a lot of time from all the action like all the hack something whatever so what role do you think that like more remote or just like generally building this kind of movement has on the future technology well I mean you know but I write software that you know you your friends find interesting like you know is either or useful so you know like writing videogames every night alright playing video games those like well like the right one - yeah my own video game everything so it wasn't like from some sort of like your career development standpoint I was like whoa computers can do this that's incredible and so let me see if I can write a game - because I was like really admiring all these people I could write these awesome video games that's like wow would be super great if I can write one tears of wrote a few simple games and then when you referred to blastaar I mean his dad let's just say I'm at least consistent because the video game I wrote about what that particular one was a space video game like defending against aliens with your spaceship it was the last star is what it meant to be so I think just like trying to make do things that are interesting and useful to go fun with your friends and it makes you like have a good time you know and like say what draws you in like what doesn't feel like work and do that you know you know but I think it is kind of like I sort of connected most of time but kind of a weird sort of lonely pursued or not lonely but it's like it's usually not that collaborative meaning like you're up late at night typing weird symbols into a computer or all of you know usually by yourself or at least there might be someone nearby but you're not like talking to them a lot so it's like it's kind of a weird thing you know um just like does that feel - yeah sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't but yeah just I think the hardest thing is to do something useful or interesting for others and that's worth doing and like half usually ones like you know breaking into stuff which is you know within reasonable bounds I think you know kind of fun you want to be a little bit of a pirate you know it's listen to all the rules these especially okay don't listen to the rules these kids can get away with a lot more say yeah yeah absolutely yeah like hot club was really bad was exposing me to cool things and finally were like appeals to you my first hot club meeting I found literally everything will every single weird CSS thing I could do and slapped it on a website it was terrible but it was a lot of fun oh yeah question it's gonna come from Jacob take it away oh hi love my name is Jacob pop I am from Cincinnati Ohio and I was wondering so if the world is a simulation would you say there is a way that we can manipulate the simulation or sort of find a way to cheat to make everything better for ourselves yeah that's a great question well you know when I talk about the simulation hypothesis I you know this is like a falafel standpoint it's not with the post and what of like well you know we shouldn't care about things or because if you're in the simulation it's as real as reality it is reality and and then to your point like whether it's a simulation or not it's we should really strive to make it like interesting and exciting and how the future should be you know so many people look towards you and you know especially times like this it's like man we really need reasons for optimism in the future and and I think we want to you know expand the scope and scale of consciousness and got there and be a spacefaring civilization and go fine at if there's like other civilizations maybe they're out there somewhere maybe today the existed millions of years ago I mean there might be you know all these like one planet civilizations that you know have their heyday and then we hope they might be out there you know on these it's just really interesting ruin some planets far away type of thing you know and okay how do we build a positive future that people are excited about and too often like people are just like clam you know dare each other down and but attack be negative it's like too much negativity like this like stay okay drip out of this negativity but like hey let's like pull towards some positive future and be pro human you know the next ants for you know just will towards a better and brighter future that's yeah I try to you know try to understand more about the universe and why we're here and what brought us here you know we're trying to send like that was Adam said like what are the questions we should ask because like the universe is the answer one of the questions yeah absolutely I remember like one of one of the first things we did in our Hakala meetings is that I've learned about broke hoes basileus that theory we'd spent like the whole hour just going down that rabbit hole but yeah or some concern if you go down that rabbit hole yeah we'll come from like just bringing up this puzzle exactly anyway we'll come from the founder of Los Altos taxes Eliana son hi my name is Selena and I'm a college senior I taught Holly slow but six years ago I was part of the founding team at the hot club outlaw senses high in California and you have a ton of power and influence in the world how does the strike of decisions to advocate for something publicly how much of it is doing good for the sake of doing good well I mean mostly what I'm trying to do is you know build things that are useful and make the future better and you know like I said I'm like you know sometimes different times I'm quite eerily Pro human you know and I think there's love about humanity and I so like okay we need to do some things are really important like a transition to sustainable energy transport and sustainable energy production these are you know it's like a total article it's we transition to it we will run out of even without environmental things we would run out of energy and then civilization would collapse so in fact I should note that my interest in electric vehicles and solar creates the environmental concerns because I just looks like okay if we do not have sustainable energy and electric cars you know then the civilization will collapse independent of any of our environmental concerns you know actually I'm not somebody who would say like oh we must immediately stop the oil and gas industry because this would cause a civilization to collapse also but we do need to transition over time to a sustainable energy system and we want it you know probably have that in curved you know faster rather than slower and that you know that's that's like you know we need cars and solar and batteries in the kind of thing and then we want to be on a path to become multi-planet species and that's spacefaring civilization and go out there trying to understand the nature of the universe and what's going on and it's just basically I think from both preservation of civilization as well as the the adventurer and just the excitement of the future anything about like you know when you know when they went to the moon you know there's not a long time ago almost half a century I you know a small number of people went we actually all went with them vicariously and we only experienced that and it was a great moment for for Humanity though like we should have more that of stuff you know that's like that's the kind of thing that makes life worth living so you know and then they're also you know all these like social issues but I'm trying to focus my energy on like what is the thing that is definitely good and then you know people will argue about this that or the other thing but we definitely need sustainable energy and I think we definitely want to go out there and explore the universe absolutely that was a really interesting perspective and great question Selina next up we have so harsh take it away hi so my name is the hard from a high schooler I'm a 16 year old high school near Boston and I had a question about mainstream media so you've expressed your displeasure with mainstream media um I was just wondering what do you see as a replacement for mainstream media or rather an alternative to it like it's mainstream if like the current Lord is falled who you see taking their place won't there be when it just be the same like same concept but just different people I think this is a good example of what I think the future of media should be basically citizen citizen journalism this is a medium like you basically you know it's like you know this the thing to appreciate about like the several mainstream media is that this there's a feedback mechanism around advertising and click which is not healthy it's it's kind of like it's hard to sort of blame but individuals in this system it's like the system is messed up you know and and so if you're a journalist a you don't write the inflammatory article that gets tons of clicks then you might lose your job the same goes for the editor and and we're not and so this is just a tough situation like it's tough this was heads it's kind of a no-win situation to be totally Frank like I'm like you know very much sort of like and y ahora tizen like Tesla's never advertised even in 2008 we're almost dying I was like I could not bring myself to advertise I just rather put the money into making the car better and end the word of mouth um you know there's still a path through word of mouth basically under stink there's something broken with the moral structure of advertising be totally Frank it's me it's messed up you know that and that's was that's I think the root of the problem and then the answer I think is is citizen journalism that we're doing right right now because you asked way better questions frankly than the mainstream media yeah absolutely I think we've all seen like the rise to clickbait especially on YouTube like all those youtubers trying to get what you're using you're right it is a real interesting idea to talk about how it's the system overall it's like pushing everybody to do this alright next up we're gonna hear a question from Cedric Cedric are you there yeah hi um so Elon in I think it's funny that you said that you uh you didn't like advertising because in my eyes a lot of your success is in your your public representation um like everyone knows who you are and if they're not entertained if they're not endeared by your shenanigans I mean they're at least entertained by them um and you know I I mean not okay I understand again you can't bat a thousand other shenanigans but in general they're pretty fun yeah I yeah everyone likes um and the maker movement it is about shenanigans but it has it has a much a much different public representation right people don't think that they can make things um and you do a lot to make like through your efforts in STEM education you do a lot to make it more accessible um but people still can't think that they can't do it so how do we what advice would you give to us like members of the maker move to improve the public representation of making things you've got a super great point a lot of people the thing that stops them from from 18 things we're doing things is actually they're their self-limiting and they messed up there are people of much more like you know it's like you gotta try just and believe you know believe in yourself and try and people can be way more than they think and yeah I'm actually it's kind of in fact more like the sort of physical making making things to think we're getting we're getting disconnected from physicality and from the world of atoms and like a lot of people's like say like where does the catcher come from it doesn't come from the store you know it comes from the Ketchum Factory and it's quite hard and you have to figure out how to do manufacturing and supply chain and all that sort of stuff in fact I think manufacturing is really underrated it's pretty great and there's a lot of potential for innovation and it's it's just a goodness a good thing to do so you know I think we should put more weight on manufacturing and production and making physical things and and like people think make factory just like making copies of something and it's actually notice it's it's making the machine that makes the machine and it's really interesting and the transmat of innovation and creativity as far as possible in that you know I'm out here in butchie's Texas this basha production complex and by far the hard thing is making the production system we blown up a bunch of prototypes and we got zero number four now we're gonna hopefully your pressure test that tomorrow but the thing that's really hard is the production system and it's really hard people really working you know really times a team here working very hard and in that method that's work what special hard things so it's like I'd say look like designing it is a rocket it's like 1x hard then building one of it is 10x and building the production system is at least 100 X possibly a thousand X just to give you a difficulty though but I'm really hired I love the maker movement and it's just like just it's very satisfying to you know what we're making some of the big or small you know like we're you know making cars or cookies honestly just great stuff you know actually yeah absolutely like the Hat club ship channel like follows that same i0 cycle we ship anything if you make some yeah sure yeah our next question will come from Lockland hey I'm lachland Campbell I'm an eighteen year old former high club leader from State College Fund lead yeah so there's a widespread belief that solving climate change and capitalism are incompatible we've found it both SpaceX and Tesla as for-profit companies do you think we need to change capitalism or how do you see the role of for-profit corporations trying to solve climate change I think this is a really important discussion debate that we should have because actually capitalism is a good system provided that the rules are set correctly and so the the issue that we have right now is basically a none price externality in the co2 capacity of the ocean atmosphere and so we have a non-price externality then then that's when capitalism were just simply responding to market forces and other forces are simply what do people want that's basic definition capitalism is just doing what what people want it's but if the rules are if there's not a nice externality which is not that often the done that often but in the case of co2 capacity versions now spare there's an priced externality with a certain risk associated with it and as that magnitude get more you know it become the riskiest hire so the obvious solution here is a carbon tax no overtime not I'm confident we won't have this and if you just put the carbon tax replace everything to be fine and the greatly even like companies like Exxon are saying you know do do it calling tax so it's just it's the thing that that should be done and then that will rank that will reign in the system yes there's a lot I have to say on this run which if I may sort of backs on for a bit I don't probably meet your trouble but whatever the universe can really do you want to say what is the system that will result in the most amount of good for the most amount of people like what maximize is the area under the curve of population happiness that's like the best really what you know I think we should be trying to achieve and almost by definition is capitalism but we gotta fix capitalism in certain areas like I said with with the rules around to capacity of oceans to a sphere but mostly it works quite well and it's hard to think of what according what a good alternative would be like I hope you will say well the government should do it but really what is the government but a corporation in the limit you know if you stay like if you if you scale up the corporation and the government is just the biggest corporation and it has monopoly so is the government gonna do so do the right thing if when it is monopolistic corporation unlikely the govern is not is essentially not not not the solution it is and then mostly monopolistic the bigger corporation gets and the more monopolistic a corporation gets the weak of the feedback loop is for serving the customers or the population if you if you have a weak feedback loop then the responsiveness is not gonna be good that part will not be good yeah doing and how can you really complain and what's your alternative but if you have a competition then that keeps people on keeps entities honest like the two entities are competing to make your happy then that's good but if they don't have to compete to make you happy that's bad absolutely you know we could talk about this for hours and these are also discussed a lot on the slack but unfortunately we have a lot of questions and we can take two more we're going to take one quick question from a student Claire hello so my name is Claire I'm a student at Hawthorne and so I'm a question regarding your link and greenness face so you have launched rockets to Mars and I was wondering what you thought the role of like near science personally that was to go there's the goal but we have not yet in fact it's embarrassing we have not yet launched the rocket to Mars but we will yeah I mean what is the rolling yeah there's the car the person right yeah yes the yes there is a theory it's technically a time in orbit around the Earth and Mars so yes did it get to Mars itself but it's Mars jacent so I was wondering what you thought like the role in your science or PCI's would be in space travel or you think they're like unrelated entities I think that the brain computer interface is extremely important for essentially achieving symbiosis with AI because we are input outputs limited we're effectively a sidewalk right now where the you know the your phone or computer is an extension of yourself but the your your input it is is bounded by the screen and your output is bounded by your thumbs or fingers so effectively over time we would drift away from machine intelligence have a high bandwidth neural interface then we can be we can solve the the i/o problem and go along for the ride and matically just as our cortex and our limbic system happy together you know and I've not met anyone who wants to leap there cortex or the limbic system and even though the cortex system in principle much more smarter than the limbic system mostly the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy so we have a tertiary layer and we in fact like said we have a tertiary layer in silicon but but the communication bandwidth to that that's what internal air is um is very constrained it's like this point cutted you know trying a pool using a stroll it's very very thin by yes and so I think that's quite important and of course along the way with the brains pure interface we would also solve a lot of brain injuries and as well as like as you as you get old you sort of lose your memory well we could restore your memory and you know we could you could really big wall in instability and in have a stroke or if this joint congenital that all could be fixed with a big brain if your interface by creating your shutting your old shunt you also like restore functionality of limbs by you know having like selling some of a neural and and then having essentially microcontroller in in the in the muscle regions and so you could restore full the movement even with yeah sorry I mean this is really fascinating and unfortunately we do have to move on because you're on a tight time limit so our final question today is gonna come from if you want these questions are great they're waiting for me in the more time if you'd like ok well in that case we have a fun question from Jamshid I'm Jung shade I'm 19 and I ran a hat Club in the Bay Area so we all know don't doubt your vibe is super fire and the question I don't need to know is we have plans for another song and if so when is it dropping you know my head and then I go friend like recorded them and your song a song that's different I guess I was so Jesus incredibly it started for me to make a song I mean I don't know anything about music but if I get sort of inspired about something then I'll make no sign and put out there yeah we're really just looking forward to the entire album you know well you don't have to make it out one that would be a lot yeah do make a song this is crazy I mean yes yeah our next question is gonna come from Ben Abin hi um I'm really curious just to hear about something recent you've done like just solving a problem like necessarily anything large but just an interesting thing that you've done recently and how you did that been real quick can you yeah I'm Ben Albin I'm a hack club leader in the DFW area and I do a lot of programming and stuff probably the biggest issue I have is like context switching because I got like three things going on here at SpaceX and Tesla near link point company your personal stuff the fine is like quite taxing my brain is a context for chain but that's where I'm most trouble with but because there's so many problems that occurred during day and I'm actually really deep feeds on so many so many things pretty ridiculous so it seemed like like last night um and this is I don't know 2 or 3 a.m. or something I was in the tent two of the starship production complex at the barrel welding station and we were for the circumferential welds of the ship where you were seeing a little bit of pucker where the Wells puckering in a little bit you can see it on that it's pretty obvious online I used to look like Finnish limb man so it's way better than wise but we were still getting a little bit of hug her and and the world to go to bed slow and then I was out there talking with the welding team and the the I think it was like the issue was like really were we're rotating the barrel only had a 1/4 meter per minute but the barrel rotation tool is capable of 1.5 meters per minute and the welding the welding torch was not set at maximum power and so the the result was that we were eating them to steal too much and it was softening and and and and and they're just slightly collapsing under its own weight because it was it was something so when you do a well do you really want to be have a high energy density will be just right there you want your height gap behind you this high energy will you don't want to heat up the parent material because it like circuits give us solvents stop it a little bit and kind of Parker and and that's bad for buckling you don't want to have a buckling initiation point and then and then yes that's a sore was working on last night as an example then okay because they were worried about like changing the parameters and and then maybe having scrap battles these are barrels that are 90 years in diameter 30 w feet diameter basically and the two of them and it's so they're like well we don't wanna scrap the barrel we worried about changing the settings but it looks like okay but let's just have some fun here or try some experiments because otherwise nothing ventured nothing gained so they're like super excited about that and in fact right after was cool I'm headed out there to see the results and I think we kind of missed half the world but I think the house was good and so and then we'll wind up with a faster world that is less heat and produced material which causes less dimensional variation because you've got I've got you know a nursery stainless has a pretty high coefficient of thermal expansion so you when you warm it up from the gap changes like because it's been expanding so one like time gap you know a hot weld move fast and then you don't have a good joint I thought you really interesting that you're gonna see the results after this call so this is like currently on your mind yeah yeah absolutely yeah our next question will come from our founders act real question on first question is three parts one tabs or spaces to memory max 3 liner dark mode what was the first one I suppose okay tabs I generally use a basic text editor not memory Matt you know programming for game environments so I was like I can't got used to the developer studio she has issues very wide like you know most games were actually made you know using that I do you think that compilers there should be a lot we should put more work into into compilers like the compiler should really be catching a lot of these elementary errors like memory leaks and you know defining a variable wrong it's just would massively improve on tracing and yeah yeah there's two questions so by the way you should check out rust and also I'm sorry to hear that you have the wrong answer about types of spaces because spaces I mean easily secrete keystrokes so if you're trying to code fast then you reduce the tabs say when you got on this call you didn't actually get on a google meters and suddenly you found yourself teleported back to the Year 500 you don't know how you got there but somehow you realize that you've also become dictator of the world you you realize that your honor you are one of three identical Earth's in the Year 500 BC and you also why is 2020 in two thousand five hundred and twenty years from now there's gonna be a great war between these three earths and only one or it is gonna survive the question is what do you do is dictator the woman 500 BC to best increase your Earth's chance of survival there's three quick constraints one you die you only have the rest of your life to set your plans in motion so you have to hope that whatever you start during the lifetime happens during the rest of the 2500 20 years second you can start anywhere you want and assume you speak the local language but it is 500 BC in your limited accordingly is this your video game but third you the war is inevitable there's no way you can prevent it you can picture three Earth's going into a black box only one survives well I mean I must be pretty advanced if I'm in the Year Father and all these things so probably that must know some advanced technology or I think what I know about the future and all these like three years things sorry sorry you know everything you know today but you can't prepare it sorry so does like basically transporter back in time well I mean you'd want to set in motion the Enlightenment as much as possible and propagate the scientific method and you know basically teach people physics and what reality is actually about but if it's like some information theory because we've been a bull the technology faster or the alien invasion fleet's gonna take us out yeah I guess I understand the Enlightenment in motion which probably would result in not being dictator for very long it's the feral don't really like dictators in that situation I think we would honestly want to just try to advance technology at the fastest pace possible yeah and yeah that's I would do three things maybe four things um first I would build roads I think infrastructure very important invested in second everything I know today I don't know a lot of physics but I bet I can at least bring back the fundamentals of electricity and push material science further ahead pretty far third I I would try to get I think if there's one I think one thing that's worked consistently very well throughout history to to get really great innovations happening is getting really smart people together and giving them pretty close to limit resources I think you see this in Athens I think you see this with the Medici family I think you see this with Bell Labs I see it I think you see this as Xerox PARC I would do that and finally I would start Athens and I'd prevent the Peloponnesian War because I think that's such a mini back really far back yeah that one I mean generally like a lot of these civilizations seem to have done Barriss amount of infighting and their own worst enemy was for sure its own worst enemy so many times you know Antonia after Alexander was like man they just basically just kill to kill each other it was insane so I think the lesson there is like hey let's minimize the infighting and work together towards a you know common goal of like being a spacefaring civilization and we're in alignment and you know I've been ensuring that the environment is good you know just like any public here we may have a little more fun I think sometimes people forget like hey you know we should have some fun and you know be light-hearted and not get too serious you know because you could have some fun along the way yeah I love that yeah I remember when Matthew first asked me this question a while back I don't think you do P I was just like oh I'll just write down everything I know boom I'm done next up our next question will come from melody oh hey Ilan my name is melody I'm from West Philadelphia and I started one of the very first hat clubs in America so what am i clap my question for you is what was going for your mind when you smashed that window in the cybertek unveiling and how did you gain the confidence to like keep going iron bull steel ball at the window before the event so he's like quite shocking that didn't work at the time I think what happened is like when Franz sledgehammer at the door I think I think probably we cracked the bumper and that's what led to the steel wall cracking that we're new instead of the surpassing elected to in fact we were practicing that was quite startling and then irony was like you know oh the first winner doesn't work don't worry the second one will what that'll definitely work the thing was on the other side of the vehicle not the second window along but on the other side so anyway that was that was both startling I think you know in a getting a lot of attention so I guess wasn't that bad and we could always repeated again and but I mean it was quite shocking it's so difficult on me in my tracks there I was like whoa now what I think the thing that maybe saved the day at the end was driving the ATVs electric ATV up on the on the rock bed you know that was it was like yeah yeah for a while it was like is this hopefully this thing worse this could really end poorly but then it you know able to get the electric eighty beyond that on the truck bed and I think it ended on a good note but yeah I was kind of stunned and I kind of forgot where I was supposed to do that's what actually happened there it's gonna be a great great car the vines you know it's I think maybe our most fun car there's a tiger tribe yeah I know there was like a big there's like a big watching party from a club when you in build it and it also became a bit of a meme in the community but our next question is didn't come from ELISA ELISA you Nick I believe ELISA doesn't have a microphone if I remember correctly okay in that case we'll hear a question from Jack hello everyone I'm Jack and apparently a 15 year old from Cupertino high school and my question is how would you know when technology has a bent to farm and what are some of your solutions if the AI takes over the world well I resilience to social media is quite weak I think that is where you know I have sympathized with the anti-globalization protesters in in that like that our sort of my admirers community is weak this can easily be exploited by you know people with bad intentions or even an interest in AI doing their gradient side logon with with some goal and could be totally random like just maximize advertising clicks you know so it's like if you know if you're a I it's like you're in fact Facebook actually literally has the eyes with the school goes maximize advertising revenue it could create all sorts of you know crisis issue and it could start a war or something like it just be doing it's like whatever bribes the class it will do so we should be on on the lookout for and just really in fact that was my line atomic predation but AI is it's like you know we should be monitoring the social media stuff to see putting AI to manipulate be public mind space yeah it was like the and I think uh some things that you could see for something I because it would be moving very quickly like it would be responding much faster than sort of a network of trolls or boss you know oh man it was or just respond respond very quickly so you could make it like you say I to protect whether an AI is being used this is an important thing to do though yeah absolutely absolutely I know yeah you've done a lot of your work and like talked a lot about like the future of AI and like what that actually means like all different Marcus fears and ELISA as Mike is working so she's gonna wrap us up to date and then one go to Zack for everyone emphasizes from very strongly beware ai ai manipulation it's not necessarily a I going rogue by itself but it could be just somebody operating in AI yeah it like most understand just how good that can be and it's just like watch alphago playing least at all now imagine that social media ELISA are you ready hi my name's Nate look I think Tamiya kissa for this office you guys here Lisa can you speak up a little bit [Music] you type your question we're getting some audio issues okay so real quick we have a question from Austin George hi I'm Austin so I'm 18 I organized a hack Club in Long Island New York and I also directed hackathon called T Naxalite and so I guess my question is really across Tesla SpaceX and your other initiatives you led like pretty huge teams and I'm sure there's like people in those teams I think your ideas are crazy and like impossible so my question is what's the most important thing you've learned in terms of communicating your ideas and sharing your vision with the team believe in using the tools of physics very effective and the mental constructs are very effective and one of them is the you should always take the approach that you're wrong and your goal is to be less wrong sorta sizes to the team's very frequently wrong idea is current from me which obviously it will that will happen sometimes for sure then sometimes people give me too much credit and I think well he did this without us one thing that we thought was impossible so therefore even the size of this other thing that he sounds actually crazy well maybe it's true it's like no that's just wrong yeah it's like so like definitely there's taking the approach of your we're all wrong and we should be less wrong it's very important and if we could just be a little less wrong each day that really you know even you know you know just mostly being less wrong every day would be an incredible victory and this whole time we're with the technical teams and and there's very important that ever everyone take that approach we're in an amazing sense because like the counterpoint would be that you have the Platonic ideal of a perfect idea which is possible really there's some error between this platonic platonically perfect idea or approach and what you're actually doing and then that gap is much bigger than you think it is so just think of it like okay we're gonna minimize the error in the between room board what you're doing and and what is a plutonic we perfect that's a very important concept and then things like people tend to self limit and think that it will they they shouldn't question someone who's an expert yeah but this is definitely not the case you should absolutely question experts in another arena and it shouldn't mean that you should necessarily assume that that you have a better opinion than an expert in an arena but the thing that should drive the the outcome is the fundamental reasoning not a crew said it though it it should be best idea of reasoning when it's not not the prominence or stature or the first thing you said it it's very point to question authority i all kinds it just you know yes um we everyone is wrong some of the time and then so yeah probably the most important thing I was yeah that was really interesting question and also really fascinating answer so Elon real quick thank you so much I'm really sorry everybody that's all the time we have I'm gonna hand it over to Zak to close up of today but you on thank you so much on math exactly Zak what you want thank you so much for being here with us and for everyone on this corner for watching really thank you for tuning in it's an honor to have your time so some quick wrap-up items for anyone who's watching who would like to join hat club applications are open it's actually open community just go to hack Club comm we would love to have you be part of it um a couple quick wrap-up items so for everybody at the on this call um please hang around we'll be passing it over to melody Melody's gonna be announcing some upcoming events some stuff about the community and a little bit more about hat Club Elan thank you again so much for your time we are just unbelievably humbled and grateful and I think I speak for all of us when this when I say this is a really special hour that you gave us really great questions as really pushed to the questions I'm not one for false praise so just like you're just a very impressive group and this makes me feel like actually thinking about the future is having this conversation with you guys so it's not this like you guys seem great yeah right yeah getting things done shipping code thank you so much for joining in joining us today so we're gonna I'm going to talk to so for free to like please stick around for we're gonna be doing a student showcase after this call but first I wanted to yeah I wanted you all to like please check out our website at Hot Club comm if you're a high school student we have like a wonderful community waiting for you and follow us on Twitter at hat club we also next up we also have a couple of upcoming AMAs so next Thursday of next week we're gonna have Jack Conte de CEO of patreon on May 7th we're gonna have some own Gertz she is the queen of steel robots and invented the truck'll ax and on May 14th we're gonna have a gear Amol Raj he founded herself formerly site and created some of the most popular JavaScript frameworks back in the day so on top of that we also we're a hack Club is a federal one C 3 nonprofit you know this call what we canwe it's caught wouldn't be possible without our wonderful student volunteers if you loved we would love it if you could support us we rely on people like you to bring coding to the world so you would like to contribute today to help the next generation of high-school coders head to HACC club.com slash and donate all right so we're gonna bring it over to Claire who will help run a discussion and to capture first impressions from community and after that we are going to showcase some of the wonderful you using um so I was hoping we could talk about maybe like so I know a lot of questions weren't able to be answered but it would be interesting to maybe talk about um what you felt you learned or like if you've changed anything any preconceptions or ideas you had before the call um just like you know advice or something I actually you know told you what high school to go to or something um so you guys can feel free to come on Mike if that's not - wow that was really cool I found it really interesting when he was talking about like capitalism and like since we actually like we were talking about this a bit like in pre calls like about what you might think about like Capo's and versus socialism and it was very interesting to like hear him describe like government as like one monopoly I found that like his news on that were very very interesting definitely um so for those of you can do debate she was like reading all the he was reading captain links and I'm just like climate change um so yes that was pretty inspiring anyone else that his demeanor was so loose I mean usually on other interviews he's a bit more tense but I guess since he's around a maker community space with a bunch of teenagers he can be a bit less tense than he normally is yeah that's something that I noticed you'd like I don't know what I thought that a billionaire would sound like but like as aggressively normal and like aggressively normal yeah aggressive will be normal he's just like us he's a yeah yeah he's pretty grounded like we're gonna go down to earth he's so country apart for life for like other people it's because he can be so normal around other people it's just make some a better person to the coop towards like like the community that's probably what makes me such a good leader too right yeah I mean he doesn't do he doesn't like there's no um let's talk all again advertise he's against advertising and there's not a lot of PR but then he's like this good at PR sauce yeah go ahead when he was like talking about a like area under the curve of a happiness graph and just like trying to maximize that and all this projects like I thought that was really cool yeah what do you guys know Zach's like super long three years question I just came after Zach I was like really shocked I don't know how ilan like was following along with the question I forgot half of it the question was like the one about like having three parallel Earth's and then like he had the leader I think a lot people said in the chat surprised how articulate he was with the question like I think that was like pretty amazing it's especially good for all the other questions every single one was well thought out even though they were pretty much on the spot I think like kind of how do you friend Zach's answer everyone's answer were as far as what you want say was so like with so much more abstract than what I would initially think of lady I would think of something first or long lines but Zach said as far as it really concrete things like build roads but like propagate the scientific method I would never follow that but when you think about that I feel like that makes a lot more sense because if you if you think of the really concrete still you can do now if you choose to do that into really temporary but then like something like a girl on the Enlightenment or the scientific method you know that's gonna extend and that's gonna have such an effect far later on so I thought yeah that's interesting you like like understanding the theoretical side of computer science and stuff like that I feel like I've previously kind of brushed that off as far as all the abstract stuff like having a head in the clouds isn't as important as knowing how to code with the current tools right now but like I feel something like that shows how important that is having been more abstract mindset in some cases yeah I think that just comes from his more science side of things like he's very much into physics and everything so I I expected his answer would have something to do with the scientific method but that was really cool to hear it's very much like his personality oh oh I really liked the way he approached trying to tell other people his ideas because it was very logical the logic person if you do lots of physics then everyone and I thought to add on his answers really genuine and well thought out for like a short am a because in AMAs usually think it's scripted but I thought he had really good answers that were really thought out a bit longer than was originally planned so we have some context a clear statement he was scheduled for 30 minutes his team told us 30 minutes and no more and then he went for an hour his team texted our group chat you in there like up with two questions so then I was like okay we have two more thank you all so much for like the most important which is the worst answer to using cards if you want I can pay me $20 I can recreate all the punch cards and then mail them to you the highest bandwidth in the world they keep a bunch of empty planes in the air just so that if they have to get a bunch of packages from one place to another really quickly they can just lay in the plane at the point in the US where they need to pick everything out and go it's cheaper for them to keep the place and the planes in the air what attack nights like this conversation right now is very legal and

https://youtu.be/sp8smJFaKYE

(patriotic orchestral music) - [Announcer] Please welcome AFA's central Florida Martin H. Harris Chapter President Todd Freece. (audience applauding) - Thank you. Thirty-six years ago, our chapter established this great symposium and has been working closing with AFA to keep it one of the premiere professional development events for airmen. Today, it's our honor to participate in continuing that great tradition by hosting this session. I am pleased to introduce our keynote event to conclude our symposium. Lieutenant General John Thompson is responsible for approximately 6,000 airmen worldwide. He commands an annual budget of over $7 billion to support the research, design, development, launch, acquisition, and sustainment of satellites and their associated command and control systems. Accompanying General Thompson is global innovator Elon Musk. In 1980-- (crowd cheering and applauding) In 1983, he taught himself computer programming at the age of 12, sold the code for a Basic-based video game called "Blaster" for approximately $500. And in 1990, in 1995, he started Zip2, a web software company later renamed PayPal in 2001. But more recently, you might know him for for revolutionizing electric cars as CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. Development-- (crowd cheering and applauding) That's all the Tesla owners. (chuckles) Development and manufacturing advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth orbit as founder of Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX. (audience cheering and applauding) And conceptualizing high-speed transportation known as Hyperloop. (audience cheering and applauding) And if you haven't heard some of these quotes by Elon Musk, or Muskisms, let me introduce you to one. Here's my first one and when I first read it, I thought, "Well, it applies to innovation, "it's also written into the contract "of every airman in this room, "and every man and woman who has served." The quote is, "If something is important enough, "even if the odds are against you, "you should still do it." Now, looking back to our speech this morning by Dr. Roper when he talked about innovation, one of the Muskism quotes is "Failure is an option here. "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." But my favorite quote, "I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact." (audience laughing and applauding) General Thompson, Mr. Musk, over to you. Thank you and welcome. (chuckling) - Well, Elon, thanks so much for being here today. As you know, and many people in the audience know, we're reprising a fireless fireside chat that we did at Air Force Space Pitch Day back in November. I ran into General Goldfein, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, this morning and maybe I was being a little bit too confident but I said, "Hey, I think that we did such a good job together "at Space Pitch Day that Elon and I got invited back "for a much bigger audience, higher stakes, "and everything like that." And General Goldfein looked at me and went, "No, J.T., you guys are gonna do it until you get it right." (audience laughing) So we're gonna talk a little bit today about innovation. For those of you in the audience that nothing that was introduced about Elon made it to the prefrontal cortex and you're like, "I still don't know who this guy is." You may remember him from a movie role in "Iron Man II" or the TV show "The Big Bang Theory." You may remember him, if you're old like me, when you used to have to do dial-in modems, you may remember how PayPal actually worked over a dial-in modem. - Yeah. - And if, just in case you've had your head in the sand for the last decade, you absolutely have to know him for Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, a tremendous partner of the United States Air Force in the space business. And for Tesla. So, just for grins, this fastest-growing auto company on the planet, most amazing capability, and when Elon pulled up, he pulled up, he and his entourage, in three different Teslas this morning. How many Tesla owners do we have in the audience? (audience cheering) Stand up, stand up if you're a Tesla owner. (Elon laughing) All right. (audience applauding) Very nice. - (chuckling) (applause drowns out Elon) - So, Elon, you and I have talked about whether the Air Force is the most innovative service. The Department of the Air Force now, and the last time we interviewed, it was just the Air Force. Now we're the Air Force and the Space Force, that's part of the Department of the Air Force. Most of those people who stood up were in the front row, we have a lot of first adopters here in the front of the audience, apparently. Or maybe those are the folks that just make the most money. (audience laughing) Who knows? Okay, so, again, today's discussion is about innovation. And how we can make the Department of the Air Force the most innovative department within the Department of Defense and perhaps across the United States government. So, Elon, question number one. When you put a weapons system, or a product, into production, and you start delivering it to your customers, very, very frequently there is a push-back within the production organization that, "You know, we don't want to change that product too much. "It's successful." We have a lot of legacy systems that we're responsible for in the Department of the Air Force. There is a lot of reticence, at times, to incrementally improve or add new capabilities to those systems. From the context of Tesla and SpaceX, how do you motivate your workforce? How do you work with your customers? How do you work with technologists in your ecosystems, your various ecosystems, to try and make sure that products don't become stagnant, and they continue to incrementally improve over time? - Sure, well, first of all, thanks for having me here. It's an honor to be here with you and with everyone else from the Space/Air Force. (laughs) (audience laughing) And, we've obviously had a long relationship with the Air Force and very much appreciate the support over the years, so I just wanna make sure I say that. And look forward to doing a lot of interesting things in the future. I think it's actually, it's cool that there is, the creation of the Space Force is happening. I think it makes sense that there's a major branch for every domain, you know? And so the domain of space, the domain of air, are both important. I think space-based is certainly a medium of its own. (laughs) - [General Thompson] Sure. - And I think there's some very exciting things that are possible. If I may just say it, like what the public wants, I think, and I'm actually pretty confident that the public does want this, is a Starfleet Academy. You know with like (laughs) (audience laughing) Yeah, like how do we make "Star Trek" real, you know? That'd be pretty amazing. I'd love that. (laughs) (audience laughing) You know? And so I think the fastest we can make sort of Starfleet real, then, we should try to do that. (chuckles) (audience whoops) - [General Thompson] Well, so, Elon, speaking-- (audience applauding) speaking for the United States Space Force, there already is a Starfleet Academy, it's the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (audience cheering and applauding - Sure. I've been there, I've given a talk, and, you know, the first launch of Falcon 1, we had a Falcon sat from the Air Force Academy. That rocket blew up. (audience laughing) But then the funny thing is, it blew up, the thing is truth is stranger than fiction, the satellite was shot through the fairing, arced through the air a couple hundred meters, and then plunged through the roof of a tool shed and then landed on the floor. And which was actually in reasonably good shape. I mean, for crashing through the ceiling, but, you know, like, recognizable. (audience chuckling) And we gave it back and said, "We've not lost one of your satellites." (laughs) (audience laughing) - So, from a SpaceX perspective, - Just buff it out. - A partial mission success? - Well, it's like, it's not lost, I'm just saying. (both men laughing) It's a little worse for wear, but, you know, here. But then we subsequently launched a future Falcon sat to actual orbit, that was great. So, I think there's, I think we can go a long way towards making Starfleet real and making these, sort of, semi-utopian futures real but it will definitely require radical innovation. One can't get there by incrementally innovating expendable boosters, there's just no way. - Yeah. - So, the, I think we need to push for radical breakthroughs and if you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes. And that does mean taking risks. And, common sense, that if you take a big risk, in order to have a big reward, there must be a big risk. It's, most of the time, you cannot find big reward for small risk, those are rare. So you're gonna have some proportionality to the risk and reward. But if the goal is important enough, and I think increasingly the goal is important for many reasons, the goal of having the best technology in space, that is, I think, gonna become increasingly important. And it'll be increasingly important for the United States to use what I think is its greatest attribute which is invention and innovation to create space technology that is the best in the world. And in fact, I think that if the United States does not use breakthrough innovation, it will fall behind. So, I think this is not something that was a risk in times past but I think is a risk now. - Okay. So, yeah. - Do you characterize that risk in terms of peer-adversary competition around the planet? Are you suggesting that it's our adversaries that require us to be those radical innovators? Or is it just we can't become complacent and stay incrementally improving our systems, we must take those giant leaps forward as a nation regardless of the competition? - I think there's little, I have zero doubt that if the United States does not seek great innovations in space, it will be second in space. - Okay. - With, as sure as night follows day. So it is a big deal. But this is a very innovative, there's no country more innovative and inventive than the United States. So it's just important to use that attribute. That's the ace card. - [General Thompson] Okay. And since it seems like we're going down the geopolitical path here on the questions, how does the United States as a nation maintain that innovative edge? That ability to invest in things and take those risks? What kind of governmental policies or processes do we have to encourage the right kinds of behavior in your view? - Well, I think having outcome-based procurement is actually very important. - Okay. - To say like, this is the outcome that is sought and who can achieve this outcome? Or achieve this outcome to a greater degree? That company will, that's who the Air Force will do business with. And will procure the thing that is radically innovative as measured by what is important for leadership in space. So, I mean I do think it's absolutely fundamental to achieve full reusability in access to space. This is the Holy Grail of space. At the point at which you have full reusability for orbital rockets, then you have a profound advantage over anyone else. Profound. It will be like, if, in the Air Force, if you have planes that could be used once, or if you had multi-use planes, that could be flown over and over again, like normal, and all your adversaries had single-use planes. That would be no contest. It's the same thing in space. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah, this is extremely fundamental. So, the cost of propellant is typically on the order of 1% of the cost of the of the vehicle. Or less. So, if you have a vehicle that is, say, I dunno, LOX kerosine, like Falcon 9 or something like that, you know, it's, the oxygen and the fuel are, yeah, maybe a half-million dollars or something like that. But then, depending upon the mission, the mission price can be anywhere from 60 to $100 million. So, the Falcon 9 is a partially-reusable vehicle but not fully. The vehicle we're working on right now, quite difficult, is Starship. And yeah, that has the potential for full reusability. But I think it'd be great to have other companies, as well, that are doing full reusability. I think competition is a good thing. It may seem at times that shouldn't we focus all our efforts on one system and rather than divide them and have two competing systems. Like, not to cause controversy, (moans) but like, in my opinion, Joint Strike Fighter, there should be a competitor to JSF. I know that's a controversial subject but you know, I think it's not good to have one provider. It's good to have competition where that competition is meaningful and somebody can actually lose. Like, so, then, (audience chuckling) so, yeah. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - So, in radical innovation, obviously the workforce is a really key component of that. I mean as, I mean, during your PayPal days, you were actually doing coding, right? But in SpaceX and Tesla, they are so large that Elon can't do everything. What sort of things do you think about in terms of motivating a workforce like like we have in the Department of the Air Force, that will help them become more radically innovative? What sort of things do you look for in people or in processes that make the workforce better? - Sure, well, I think the massive thing that can be done is to make sure your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished. There's gotta be a carrot and a stick. So if somebody is innovating and doing, making great progress, then they should be promoted sooner. And if somebody is completely failing to innovate, not every role requires innovation, but if they're in a role where innovation is should be happening and it's not happening, then they should either not be promoted or exited. And let me tell you, you'll get innovation real fast. (audience laughing) - [General Thompson] Okay. The stick. - Yeah. It's like, how much do you want it? - Yeah. (audience cheering and applauding) So, does that carrot and stick approach help, do you think, people be more risk averse or less risk averse? - Well, when trying different things, you've gotta have some acceptance of failure, as you were alluding to earlier. Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation, things may go backwards. So, if, what you really want is you want reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek. So, if what you're seeking is innovation, then you should reward success and innovation and only, there should be minor consequences for lack of, minor consequences for trying and failing. Those should be minor. Significant rewards for trying and succeeding. Minor consequences for trying and not succeeding. And major negative consequences for not trying. - [General Thompson] Okay. - So, if you have that incentive structure, you will get innovation like you can't believe. - Okay, - Yeah. - So, you've talked at Tesla shareholder meetings and in various interviews that you consider the machine that builds the machine - [Elon] Yes. - To be just as important if not more important than the machine itself. - [Elon] Yep. - So, we talked about the workforce aspects. Are there processes that you use within your company that are parts of that machine that you think are particularly valuable for innovative, radical change? - Well, what I mean by the machine that builds the machine is that the the production, designing the production system of a new product is I think at least an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude harder than designing the initial prototype. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - I think like, in America, there's been less less importance in modern times placed on manufacturing. And I think this is a mistake. At this point, I would really classify, in fact I sent an email to SpaceX just saying this, at this point, I think designing a rocket is trivial. Just trivial. There's like tons of books that'll, you read them, you know, if you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. Real easy. (audience laughing) Yeah. If you say, like, two-stage, and 2% of your liftoff mass to orbit, to design something like that, piece of cake. Now say you wanna go into production with that. Let's say the next step is you wanna make even one of those things. Okay, now making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard. But the designing of it is not hard. The making of it, of even one, is hard. The making of a production line that builds and launches many is extremely hard. And then the next level beyond that would be creating a fully-reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch. That's super, super hard. So, that's, but by building the machine that builds the machine, I mean creating the production system and I keep emphasizing to SpaceX the hard part is making it and making lots of them - [General Thompson] Yeah. - and launching frequently. 'Cause reuse must not just be, it can't be reuse like the shuttle. It's gotta be rapid and complete reuse. So the shuttle was a case where the reuse was very slow and it was not complete. The main tank was lost every time. And refurbing the shuttle between flights was extremely expensive. It's not even clear whether it was worth recovering the booster shells from the ocean. So, just like an aircraft, the rocket must be rapidly and completely reusable. And then you need lots of them. So, just doing kind of back of the envelope, what's needed to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, these are big numbers, but I think you need on the order of a million tons to the surface of Mars, useful payload. Something like that. Because we sit on the top of a massive base of infrastructure. The economy is, you think of all the things that are mined and then refined, and then just the many steps in the refinement, and in order to produce, like, your phone, or your toaster, even, there's a vast base of industry that is required to produce even a simple household item. - Yeah. - It's very difficult. So, so you've gotta recreate that on Mars. So a million tons on Mars means, and we're just talking orders of magnitude here, and hopefully it's not 10 million tons, and hopefully, maybe it's less than a million tons, but probably not 100,000 tons. So, that means you need to get about about 5 million tons to Earth orbit, of useful payload. So we're talking like, so essentially, unless you have a launch system that is somewhere in the megaton per year range, to orbit, it's not relevant. - Okay. - Yeah. - So, Starlink. As you're scaling to build more and more Starlink satellites to go on more and more reusable rockets, what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome in Starlink production so that you can perfect that machine that builds the machine? - Yeah, Starlink production is going well, actually. That's the, that was a hard thing to get right. We made many iterations on the Starlink prototypes. And then, as I said, then building the Starlink production line was, I dunno, 1000% harder than designing the satellite to begin with. But it is important to have like, a, to design for manufacturing and have a type-B backloop between the design of the object and the manufacturing system. So, when you design the object at first, you don't realize all the parts that are really difficult to manufacture. And so having the manufacturing system and the design, bringing those up at the same time, so that you're actually in the beginning making a thing that you know is wrong but you're actually figuring out what's hard to manufacture. That's the real problem. So, we brought up the Starlink production line before we actually had the design finalized. Which is actually the right thing to do. And then we discovered, oh, there's all these things that in the design that are very difficult to make. And so therefore we must change the design. And the satellite ended up having the same capability, but just was very easy to make and launch. So, I say very easy, it's sort of hard, but, (laughing) but it's being done and the satellites are being produced at a rate now faster than we can launch them. So, and the cost of the satellite has dropped below the cost of transporting it to orbit. Even when taking a Falcon 9 in the most reused configuration, which is to get the booster back and you get the fairings back. The cost of transporting the satellite to orbit exceeds the cost of the satellite. So the satellite's in a good situation. - Okay. - And the cost of that satellite will keep coming down as we ramp up rate and make design improvements. So we really need Starship to carry Starlink in order to get the total delivered cost to orbit to be much better than it is today. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Which is still pretty good. - When you, so in terms of deciding what to build, you can take feedback from customers and let customers pull to you what they want, or you can be radically innovative within your company or, you know, a small set of individuals and develop something and push it into the industrial base. So, customer pull would be Tesla owners wanting new features on the existing fleet. Push would be, company push would be something like when Apple pushed the iPad to everybody and nobody knew what an iPad was until they touched it and went, "Wow." - [Elon] Sure. - And everybody wants an iPad now. What do you wall think about in terms of that balance between customer pull and company push? - Well, in the beginning, nobody wanted a Tesla. I can tell you that. (audience laughing) When we made the original Roaster sports car, people were like, "Why would I want an electric car? "My gasoline car works fine." I'm like, "No, an electric car's better, you should try it." (audience laughing) And it was hard to get people to do a test drive. First of all, nobody knew who we were, they never heard of this company. I'm like, "Yeah, we're named after Nikola Tesla. "You know that guy? "Nope." (laughs) (audience laughing) So, for sure we were doing push in the beginning 'cause there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car. So it was not out of, like, you know, lots of people coming up to me saying, "Hey, I really want an electric car." I heard that zero times. (audience laughing) So we were like, "It's like, man, we better "make an electric car "and show that these things can be good." And then people would want them. I think it was Henry Ford said, when we was talking about the Model T, if you asked the public what they wanted, they'd say "a faster horse." So, if you did a big survey and said, "Hey, public," before automobiles, "what would you like?" It's like, "Well, I'd like my horse "to go three miles per hour faster "and eat less food and "you know, be stronger "and live longer and that kind of thing." There will be basically a bunch of incremental improvements on a horse. 'Cause when you say, "What about an automobile? "Like a car that drives itself?" Like, "What are you talking about? "That sounds crazy." But when you actually make an automobile and give it to people and say, "Okay, now, this is a horse where "you can keep it in the barn "and if you leave for a month, it's still alive." (laughs) (audience laughing) Yeah. So, carry more weight than a horse, and go further and that kind of thing. So, it's like when it's a radically new product, people don't know that they want it because it's just not in their scope. I think when they first started making TV's, they did a nationwide survey, I think this may have in like '46 or '48, it was like a famous nationwide survey, "Will you ever buy a TV?" And it was like 96% of respondents said "No." Some crazy number. Like basically everyone's like, "Would you buy a TV?" And maybe they put a price in there or something, I dunno. But it was famously almost everyone said they would not buy a TV but they didn't know what they were talking about. - So the big game-changing stuff at the beginning is a company push kind of a thing most of the time. - [Elon] Yeah. - But then, changes to the product over time can be a lot more customer pull kind of a focus? - Yeah, changes to the product over time can be, incremental changes, then customers can certainly tell you, it's good to get customer feedback to say, "How can we improve the product?" And once they're using it, they can say, "Okay, I like this thing about it, "I don't like this other thing." And then we can improve the product over time. Customer feedback after they have the fundamental thing, is great. - Okay. - Yeah. - Okay, so, in the audience here, we have a lot of air and space warfighters, we have people who use systems, we have a lot of developmental teams on both the government and the industry side, and we have the air and space leadership of the nation. So, I've got a little Lightning Round here for ya. - Great. - To try and influence, maybe, some of those younger folks in the back who are looking for the next big thing. So, in terms of different kinds of technology, whether it's artificial intelligence or medical or batteries or whatever, in the next five years, what technology do you think will see the most advancement? - Well, it's difficult to assess most in those contexts 'cause they're very different. But I think the probably most transformative, most fundamentally transformative will be A.I. - [General Thompson] A.I.? Okay. And if you were recommending to some of the young officers and enlisted troops in the room what sort of degrees to pursue at college or what sort of education that they should prioritize for themselves in the modern era, what would you recommend? - Computer Science and Physics. - [General Thompson] Computer Science and Physics, okay. How many Computer Science people do we have out there? (a few members of the audience whooping) How many Physics people? (a few members of the audience whooping) Okay. We need more, apparently. (audience laughing) Okay-- - Wait, essentially, Information Theory and Physical Theory if you want to understand the nature of the universe, and these have very good predictive power, Physics and Computer Science. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - Okay, as a nation that is interested in radical innovation to maintain its competitive edge, what are the things that the Department of the Air Force should be investing more in, other than reusable rockets? - Right. - From your perspective. - Again, I can't emphasize enough how important reusable rockets are. (laughs) (audience laughing) You know? You'll love it. (audience laughing) It's great. So, and I think you could actually do point to point on Earth, to go long distances and be much better than aircraft. Because basically just think of like an ICBM minus the nuke, add a land, you know? So, just sort of in the option package. Just, you know, (audience laughing) uncheck "Nuke" and then add "Landing System". (laughs) (laughing) And that's definitely going to get you wherever you want to go the fastest. 'Cause that's why they made ICBM's, they get there the fastest. So, I think that's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, I think, uh, yeah, once you have dramatically lower cost access to space, then many things are enabled. You could think of like, once you got the Union Pacific Railroad, then getting to the west coast was much faster and much less dangerous. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - You're not likely to sort of end up eating your compatriots in a snowy situation. (audience laughing) So, you can just take the train. (audience laughing) (Elon laughing) So at the beginning, they thought, "Why the heck are they building that stupid railway? "There's nobody there." (laughs) And they're like, but once you build the railway, they're like, "Okay, now it's easy to get to the west coast." And now a huge portion of the Earth's population is on the west coast. Actually, California is the most populous state in the nation. But it used to be least populous, I suppose, or pretty low. So, many things are possible once the transport problem is solved. So that's why I think it's so fundamental. If you can't get there or getting there takes a long time and you can't risk, every mission's gotta work, then it's very hard to innovate. - [General Thompson] Yeah. - It's gotta be that, okay, some missions won't work and the cost of running the experiment is low, that's why I'm harping so much on the cost of transport. So, you know, once you're there, I think, like, say establishing a base on the Moon or a base on Mars, there's just a tremendous amount of work that's needed to create a self-sustaining base on the Moon or Mars. And it opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity just as the Union Pacific Railroad did by making access to the west coast much easier. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. Outside of the space realm, I think there's still a lot of opportunity in tunnels. I've been saying that for a long time. Tunnels are great. (chuckles) They're really great. And The Boring Company is about to finish its first tunnel in Vegas. I encourage people to copy, please copy The Boring Company or do better, that'd be great. There's - So in terms of domains, you have subterranean. - Yeah. - Obviously, Tesla covers the ground domain as capabilities. You've got the space domain covered with SpaceX and Starlink capabilities. I think that since this is the Air Warfare Symposium, folks in the audience might be interested in if you have any ideas for the air domain specifically. - Well, for the air domain, I think things are definitely going to go into kind of autonomous or locally autonomous drone warfare, that's where it's at, where the future will be. I'm just saying, it's not I want the future to be this. It's just, this is what the future will be. - Okay. - It's autonomous drone warfare. And at a local level, the, I can't believe I'm saying this because this is dangerous, but it's simply what will occur, is sort of drones locally being autonomous and but I think we still want to retain sort of like, you know, authority to damage or destroy anything that isn't an autonomous drone. (chuckles) We'll keep that authority back here with a person in the loop. - [General Thompson] Okay. - The fighter jet era has passed. That is, it's just, yeah, the fighter jet era has passed. - Okay. - So, it's drones, yeah. - [General Thompson] Um, let's go back to failure for a minute. (audience laughing) And the mindset that you have, you and your leadership team at Tesla and SpaceX, have on failure. I mean, the SpaceX blooper reel that you guys did in - Sure. - I think it was 2017 timeframe. Was definitely, "Hey, we embrace this learning that occurs." More recently with the Tesla truck and the ball through the window. - [Elon] Yeah. - Also, that mindset of-- - Didn't go through the window. (audience laughs) - That mindset that embraces failure, how do you personally, I mean, those kinds of failures would drive a lot of us in this room nuts. It doesn't seem to drive you nuts. Seems like you're very comfortable with it. Can you talk about the mindset that requires for you to be that accepting of that kind of failure? - Uh, sure, shall we roll the video? (laughing) Should we not? - No, we should not roll the video, not yet. - Okay, okay. (chuckles) Well, I think of these things as just, there's a certain amount of time, and within that time, you want the best net outcome. So, for all the set of actions that you can do, there's going to be, and some of which will fail, some of which will succeed, and you want the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest. So, I'd have to use a baseball analogy. You know, in baseball, they don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until you get a real easy one. They're gonna give you three shots. And then the third one, they say, okay, get off the, go back to the, put somebody else up there. So, you have three strikes on baseball. Look, you're not on bat anymore. So, what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average? You know, how you're doing on on score and there's gonna be some amount of failure. But you want your net output, that useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic. - Okay. - Yeah. - Okay. Intellectual property. Obviously, Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City have amazing capabilities that they're bringing to the public and to the government every day. How do you protect your intellectual property in a world where it seems like the cloud and servers and things are constantly under attack from people wishing to free you of your intellectual property? - Yeah, actually, at Tesla, we just open-sourced our patents some years ago. So anyone can use our patents. So we really have not been tried to protect intellectual property in that sense. We've tried to actually smooth the path because the overarching goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. And so if we created a patent portfolio that discouraged other companies from making electric cars, that would be inconsistent with our mission. So we open-sourced all the patents. - [General Thompson] Okay. - In order to help the other, anyone else who wants to make an electric car. So, I guess that's the opposite of protecting the IP. Now, the real way I think you actually achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don't need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying something that you did years ago. And that's fine, you know. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed of innovation is what matters. And I do say this to my teams quite a lot. That innovation-per-unit time, it's like innovation per year if you wanna say it like that is what matters, not innovation absent time. Because if you're wanting to make, say, a 100% improvement in something, and that took 100 years or one year, that's radically different. So, it's like what is your rate of innovation? That matters. And is the rate of innovation, is that accelerating or decelerating? A weird thing happens when companies get big is that, most companies, or organizations, the bigger they get, they tend to get less innovative. Not just less innovative on a per-person basis but less innovative in the absolute. And I think this is probably because the incentive structure is not is not there for innovation. It's not enough to use words to encourage innovation. The incentive structure must be aligned with that. That's fundamental. So. - So, taking that from a business level to a national level, in terms of, obviously, United States, largest economy in the world, China, the second-largest economy in the world currently and gaining fast, what sort of things could you share with the audience here that are your thoughts on the competition, economic or military, between the United States and China? - Sure. Well, I think China's a real interesting country, I have to say. The thing to appreciate about China is just that there's a lot of really smart, really hard-working people there. And they're gonna do a lot of great things. This is sort of independent of Chinese government policy, they're just gonna do a lot of interesting things. The thing that will feel pretty strange is that the Chinese economy is going to be probably at least twice as big as the U.S. economy. Maybe three times, but at least twice. Yeah, so, that assumes a GDP per capita still less than the U.S. But since they have about four or five times the population, then it would only require getting to a GDP per capita of half the United States for their economy to be twice the size of ours. And as I'm sure people in this room know, the foundation of war is economics. And so if you if you have half the resources, of the counterparty, then you better be real innovative. If you're not innovative, you're gonna lose. (trumpet music blaring) - I'm not sure whether that's a cyber attack that's ongoing or not here, so. (string music blaring) (audience laughing) The clock says I have 11 minutes left, is that not true? - I guess it's moot. - All right, so Smooth Jazz Elon, - Now the smooth jazz. (audience laughing) - [Announcer] It's coming through the house system, we're working to get it shut off. - Thank you. (audience laughing) - Um, yes, well, um, at any rate, (laughs) so with respect to China, China's economy is gonna be two to three times the size of the U.S. economy, at least double. Therefore, in order for the U.S. to be competitive on a military level, the innovation has to overcome a gigantic gap in economic output. - [General Thompson] Okay. - So in the absence of radical innovation, the U.S. will be militarily second. - Okay. - Basic, basic math. - What, from the standpoint of radical innovation, we already talked about workforce, we talked about processes, we talked about protecting intellectual property rights, let's talk about overall culture. That culture that you try and push into your companies that makes them successful. Any of us, and I sat right next to one of your SpaceX employees on the plane here yesterday, a young engineer, it was motivating for me just to talk to her - Yep. - About what she was doing every day and how important her job was and I just felt like the only other place I've seen that kind of culture is, frankly, in the Department of the Air Force with some of our young folks that are sprinkled around the back of the room. How do you create that culture at SpaceX and Tesla to make employees like that? - Well, wow, this smooth jazz is on us (laughing) with a vengeance. I feel like we're in a big elevator. (laughs) (audience laughing and applauding) So, first of all, when we interview people, we do ask for some evidence of exceptional ability which in most cases includes innovation. That's not to say that everyone needs to be innovative. But we certainly need those that are doing advanced engineering to be innovative. And ideally everyone is at least to some degree innovative. So, at the interview point, we select for people who want to create new technology. And then the incentive structure is set up such that innovation is rewarded, making mistakes along the way does not come with a big penalty. And but failure to try to innovate at all comes with a big penalty. You'll be fired. - [General Thompson] Okay. - Yeah. - The carrot and stick, that's the stick. - If you don't even try, or if somebody doesn't even try to innovate or their innovation aspirations are very, are not very good, then, yeah, they will no longer be at the company. - Okay, okay. - Yeah. - All right, so, we've got about five minutes left. And what I'd like to do is just turn it over to you, Elon, to talk about whatever you'd like to talk about. If you have a message for the audience here, you have a thousand-plus air and space professionals in the greatest Air and Space Force on the planet. So whaddya wanna tell 'em? - We've gotta make Starfleet happen. (General Thompson laughing) (audience laughing) Like, you know? So we want real big spaceships that can go real far places, and this will probably get me into the most trouble of all, I think there should be a new uniform. (audience laughing) That's like, I dunno, cool uniforms, cool spaceships, you know? (audience laughing) I think when the public hears "Space Force" that's what they think. It's like, okay, we're gonna have some sweet spaceships and, like, pretty good uniforms and stuff. And that'll be, that's what they'll probably want. So, we want the sci-fi futures, the good sci-fi futures, to be real and ideally to become real while we're still alive. You know, and we want to see it happen. And so I think we really need to drive the rate of innovation to be such that we would see big, big breakthroughs, big improvements in space technology in the years to come. So, yeah. Just, like, try to make Starfleet happen as soon as humanly possible and definitely while we're still alive. Yeah, so. I'm not sure about warp drive, but other stuff I think can be done. - [General Thompson] Gotcha. - Warp drive and teleportation, probably not. But big space ships that can go far places, definitely, that can be done. - [General Thompson] Understood. - All right. - Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.

https://youtu.be/J9oEc0wCQDE

welcome to the thermo Tesla podcast my name is Safi infer ball and today we have a very special guest but before I introduce our special guest I'm going to go through and introduce our crew so our regular their third row Tesla podcast recruit so today we have omar Kazi hustle truth boom we have Kristen hey hey ten thank you and we got Vincent you from Tess main Ian hi all right great and then we got Galileo Russell from hyper change what out third row and that we got viv who's falcon heavy hey okay all right Omar you want to introduce our guest please welcome the inventor of the car fart Elon Musk thank you thank you put that on my gravestone so yeah it's kind of crazy that were actually all here and thank you so much for doing this hey welcome we're all test the customers fans and it's really good that it's finally happening I remember that I was looking at your Wikipedia tweet and there's like this bizarre fictionalized version of reality yeah and I replied town like why don't you come on a podcast and like tell your fix my reality until my fictionalized and you're quite okay sure and I was kind of like taken by surprise by that and you know the way you engage and listen to your customers online it's like I've never seen anything like that from you know CEO of a public company or any executive so can you tell us a little bit where that came from why you communicate directly instead of like having this a PR strategy that most companies have sure um well I mean it started out I actually had one of the very very first Twitter accounts like when it was like less than 10,000 people and I've been and then orders tweeting at me like what kind of latte they had at Starbucks and like if this seems like the silliest thing ever so I deleted my Twitter account and then someone else took it over and so I'm tweeting in my name yeah and then a couple of friends of mine well Lee and Jason Calacanis said they both said hey you should really use Twitter to get your message out and also some somebody's tweeting in your name and they're crazy things so I'll say crazy things in my name did you have to pay them no no they they they I'm not sure who it was but it was some reason that I don't I got my account back great and and then I were just I don't know it's some grits I could just sort of I just start tweeting for fun really and when my early tweets were quite crazy as I was trying to explain like it has the arc of insanity is short if we met it's not very steep because it started off insane and so if it's still insane its you know hasn't changed that much so yeah and I don't know I it's it's in kind of fun too you know it does it I think I said this before it's like you know so we will use their hair to express myself I use Twitter why do you like to order so much I mean you could use exactly well I gotta trust Facebook you know and and and then Instagram is is fine but it's I think not exactly my style it's hard to convey a intellectual arguments on Instagram I don't know it's hard on Twitter to but it's but you can't you know it's so instagrams also in my Facebook's and I was like yeah deleted yeah yeah just leave it when I it's like I don't really need to just if I need to say something I don't really need said on one platform pretty much and that's an answer if I try that and I don't ever spent too much time in social media so was just like Al if if you're wondering what I'm saying then they can just sort of go to Twitter you know else to keep doing that as long as Twitter is good I suppose more good than bad yeah if your crypto scammers are really taking advantage of Vincent recently I know management really yeah like 10 Vincent's out they totally everything it just like change one use my avatars and then the picture and then they just post like right below yeah your tweet you know yeah I'll say Wow yeah and they block me too we fight them all the time we're always like reporting them like every day we were report like 10 people yeah yeah I have so many like yeah exactly the conversations Twitter like come on hey can you just like I think or take like three or four custom shows people to just look look at this it's crypto scam block it and it should be easy it should be easy should be it then like my wife fee and Shelley I think you'd like to treat the other day she got banned for like replying to one of your tweets and quoting like the video inside of it and that she got suspended for like a day or something I was like what the heck is going on yeah so it's just weird how the algorithm works yeah so yeah there's a lot of manipulation but you're going back to the Wikipedia page you know it's kind of interesting just what a decade you've had I remember I was reading somebody's article I think they interviewed you in 2009 or something like that and they said you know if you'd met Elon Musk in 2009 right after the recession they're like struggling with the Roadster you know you never would have thought that you are where you are today you're you know launching astronauts into space well yeah this year you know servicing the International Space Station I mean Tesla with the model the the model y you know electrification really without Tesla it would not be where to stay you see where the other legacy automakers are they're not doing great so you know looking at kind of like this like you've become this legendary figure and looking at kind of like how people kind of see you kind of the Ashley Vance biography or Wikipedia page what is it that really kind of sticks out to you or you know makes you laugh like that's just completely off-base yeah well I think I mentioned that the that I kept in referred to as an investor in yeah and like that much things in a psychic but I actually don't invest really except in companies that I helped create so I only have their only publicly traded share that I have at all is Tesla I have no diversity on publicly traded shares like us and yeah that's right quite unusual so you know almost everyone you diversify so degree and then the only stock that I have of significance outside Tesla SpaceX which is privately it was probably a private corporation and and then in order to get liquidity which is mostly to reinvest in SpaceX and Tesla and occasionally in like provide funding for much more projects like your link and boring company then I'll actually take out loans against the Tesla and SpaceX talk so the so what so what I actually have is is whatever my Tesla SpaceX talk is and then there's about a billion dollars of debt against that so word which you know it's it's that this is sort of taken to apply that I'm claiming that I have no money which I'm not claiming [Music] but is it somebody make it clear that you'll see some like number them some big number in like four or something people will think I have the talents basic stock and I have the cash mm-hmm and I'm being somehow I'm just sitting on the cash I'm sure nothing like hoarding resources like no it's you know the only alternative would be to say okay let's give the stock to the government or something and then the gum would be running things and the government it just is not good at running things that's the main thing but there's like like a fundamental sort of question of like consumption versus capital allocation that was probably getting me into trouble but I you know the the the paradigm of say communism versus capitalism I think is fundamentally what was sort of orthogonal to the reality of of actual economics it ended like in some ways so what you're actually care about is like the responsiveness of the feedback loops to the maximizing happiness of population and if if more resources are controlled by entities that have poor response and their feedback loops so if it's like a monopoly corporation or a small oligopoly or in the limit I would take the monopolistic corporation in the limit is the government so you know it's just it's it's this is not to say people work at the governor bad if you're saying people are taken put in a better sort of operating system the situation that outcome will be much better so it's really just what is the responsiveness of the organisation to maximizing the happiness of the people and and so you want to have a competitive situation where it's truly competitive where companies aren't gaming the system and and then where the rules are set correctly and and then you need to be on the alert for regulatory capture where the the referees are fact captured by the players which is you know and the player should not control the referees you know essentially it was like which which can happen you know I think like that happened for example with I think visitor efficient vehicle mandate in in California where the California was like really strict on EVs and then they the car companies managed to sort of frankly in my view trick the regulators into saying okay you don't you don't need to be so hardcore about the EVs and instead you say save fuel cells of the future but fuel cells of course many years away certainly forever this is a then citizen that they let up the rules and then you know GM recalled the ev1 and crushed him in it exactly yeah a junkyard was against the wishes the oh okay all lined up to buy them and they wouldn't let him buy him I mean Chris painted this great documentary on it and it's like the you know the owners of the of the ev1 which while there wasn't actually that great of a car but they still wanted the electric car so bad that they held a candlelit vigil at the junkyard where they were cosmic crushed oh well like it like it was like a like a prisoner being executed or so yeah that was literally you know and like a win in the last time you even a heard of that for a product right you know GM is stops to the product I mean what I mean listen man they don't doing that for any other GM product hard to get through these guys you know so anyway I think that's a very important thing so generally where you could see like these oligopolies forming or do uh please the and then they get effective price-fixing and the night they cut back an R&D budget I like it I kind of a silly one frankly it's like it like candy like there's a candy oligopoly and it's like wins the we don't see much innovation in candy so you're still working on the candy comfort gel candy is that boring boring candy it wasn't he's gonna be boring I haven't seen a Candide yet that's good enough to send out but and it's yeah but I think I think it it's it's there's like three companies or something that control the whole the candy in the world pretty much and dog food yeah there's somebody constructed like this it's this crazy conglomerate and and it's like and it's like dog food and baby food and candy and it's like all you know all the brand's arranged yeah but you hung yourself friends yeah you think you're buying for different companies but all funnels up to like three companies or something like that don't send the rendering food to the candy company yeah yeah big candy you want to have like a good competitive forcing function so that you have to make a product better or or you lose like you can make the park better and and and improve the product for the end consumer then then that company should have literally less prosperity compared to a company it makes better products another car industry you know it is actually pretty competitive mmm-hmm so that's good and yet something like that but the good thing about a competitive industries than if you make a product that's better it's gonna do better in the marketplace oh this is Gene Wilder's old house yeah it's lovely thanks for having us here well thank you really special yeah it's a good it's a cool spot has got a solar glass roof yeah right we didn't notice it but you checked it out the second time yeah I'm waiting for my three so I'm waitin for Version three well whatever is they're gonna put on I don't care emotion three yeah yeah for two it yeah we saw it at the store in Torrance actually they've got in the stores now looks really good well the night that the it's an actually designed touch that you don't notice it so he's like this like it's all hot this is like it's an old house and I'm probably fifty years old something like that and it's quite quirky so if you put something on that was like it didn't blend in that it would it would not look right it would be pretty strident and this had a black comp single roof so I was like okay let's see if we can actually have it weave in and still feel natural look good and yeah and I think it's it's achieve that goal oh yeah this is a lovely quickie little house I'll show you around afterwards it's got all sorts of weird things it's exactly what sorry is it Frank Lloyd Wright now I I don't think so I think it was just built in increments over time by probably several people but then there they would have just knocked it down and built a giant house here so it's like so glad I didn't yeah it's super cool really so Gene Wilder's were my favorite actress actually so it's great for movies so so when you come up with a product like the solar glass roof I think a lot of people misunderstand that like your goal is to bring these crazy technologies to market and really create a change in the world yeah and so I think it's fascinating that you do it through companies and it seems like the fastest way to create that feedback loop and to really like get go from inventing something to millions of people using it right away yes so lately it seems like buying a Tesla is almost like the best thing you could do to help the climate crisis because you're like turbocharging R&D and products and innovation I feel like not enough people really understand that yeah that is so I think there's lots of good things people can do for the climate but just generally anything that is moving towards sustainable energy it was sustainable energy create a generation through solar or with an electric vehicle actually just think just things like better insulation in a house because is just really effective for energy consumption but refugees morph ingratiate let's move on the motion oh I actually got him a little following a little knitted mom in the Martian you know the helmet with you I look super cute so did you always know like you know business was the way you wanted to kind of attract attack these problems versus say you know maybe a nonprofit or you know working as a college professor or something I don't know well when I was in high school I thought I most likely be doing physics at a particle accelerator so that's what as a physics and computer I mean I got distinctions in two areas in physics and computer science and those were yes I'm like two best subjects and I and then I thought okay well but I want to forget what's the nature of the universe and so you know go try to working with people banging particles together see what happens and and then it sort of things went along in the the superconducting supercollider got canceled in the US and that actually was like whoa you know what if I I'm working at a collider there's been all these years and then the gum it just cancels it Wow and then that would was like oh I can do that so um so it's like well we were all back a little like a chef record we're going to kill like I'd like this existential crisis and about 12 years older than the end and I was like well what does the world mean wait what's real about reliving some meaningless existence and then I met I made the mistake of reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and don't do that to need to build older everything now right actually lately these days I sort of reread it slowly you know it's actually another bad oh wait he's got issues got issues but you know it's anyway so but there are the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy Douglas Adams shoes which is like quite a really quite a good book on philosophy I think and I was like okay we don't really know what the answer is obviously so but the universe the universe is the answer and that really what are the questions we should be asking to better understand the nature of the universe and so then to the degree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness then we'll better be able to answer the ask the questions and understand the why we're here or what it's all about and so we should sort of take the set of actions that are most likely to result in us understanding what questions to ask about the nature of the universe so the therefore we must propagate a human civilization on earth as far into the future as possible and become a multi-planet species to again extend the scope and scale of consciousness and increase their probable I've span of consciousness which it's gonna be I think probably a lot of machine consciousness as well in the future and that's the best we can do basically you know and yeah that's best we do so yeah and think about the various problems that we're facing or what would most likely changed the future the when they were in college there were five things that I thought would be I thought these were actually the I would not regard this as a profound insight but rather an obvious one the you know the internet would fundamentally change humanity because it's it's like an even become more of a super organism because the Internet is like the nervous like nervous system um now suddenly any part of the human human isms anywhere would have access to all the information made instantly neuro-link hey well I can imagine if you didn't have a nervous system you wouldn't know what's going right fingers wouldn't know what's going on or your toes were knows what's going on it had to do it by diffusion and the way information used to work was really by diffusion one human would have to call another human or to write them like it was in a letter you would have to write let you'd have to have that letter to another human that would be carried through a bunch of things plain little person would give it to you inefficient extremely slow diffusion and if you wanted access to books if you're not did not have a library you're no you don't have it that's right so now you have access to all the books instantly and you if you can be in a remote like you know mountaintop drunkle location or something and have access to all of humanity's information if you've got a link to the internet this was a fundamental profound change so that's one thing I was on the internet burly because of it you know in the physics community that was pretty normal although it was interface was you know wasn't have e-text and hard to use but that another one via of making life multiplanetary making consciousness multiplanetary the changing human genetics obviously I'm not doing by the way is a thorny subject but it would it is being done with CRISPR and others you know it would it will it will become normal to to I think to change the human genome like what's the opportunity something that's inevitable or well you know I think for sure as far as say getting rid of diseases or propensity to various diseases than evil that that's gonna be like the first thing that do you want to head it out you know it's like if you've got like your you know the situation where you're definitely gonna die of some kind of cancer or at age 55 prefer to have that edited out yeah definitely so I think unit that out you know there's a big the Gattaca sort of extreme thing where it's not really edited out but it's like it's edited in for various enhancements and that kind of thing I which probably will come to but I was saying you know argue for or against that I'm just saying this they're more likely to come the night at down the road yeah so then and then a I really major one so these are all big motivational factors no - yeah keep our consciousness going oh and it's a sustained sustainable yes yeah so sustainable energy so sustainable energy actually was something that I thought was important before the vytal environment implications became as obvious as they they are so because if you've mined and burn hydrocarbons then you're gonna run out of them because you it's not like it's not like quite a mining sort of service a metals for example if you can if you know that we recycle steel and aluminium and because that's just it's it's not a change of energy stage whereas if you if you take fossil fuels you're taking some from a high energy state converting it to a lower energy state like co2 which is extremely stable you know so whereas and we will never run out of metals not a problem we will run out of mind hydrocarbons and then necessarily if we have got billions ultimately trillions of tons of hydrocarbons that were very deep underground in solid liquid gas form whatever but they're deep underground you say shield remove them from deep underground to the oceans the atmosphere you will have a change in the chemistry of the of the surface obviously and then there's just a sudden probably associated with well how bad will that be and the range of possibilities goes from mildly bad to extremely bad but then why would you run that experiment that seems like the crazy solution ever especially since we have to go to sustainable energy anyway why would you run that experiment this is just the maddest thing I've ever heard I'm not saying there shouldn't be some use of hydrocarbons on earth but there just should be the cover of the correct price for a place on co2 production mmm-hmm and and the obvious thing to do is have us here is a carbon tax it's a no-brainer every I don't know the 90 plus percent of economists would say this that I think physicists and it's just the you know the market system works well if you've got the right price and things it's very very simple and if you've got a price of zero effectively or very low then it's well people wave accordingly though so just that's that's the thing that needs to get done I think it will get done and and then the the if our time is you raise the price on our table and you can actually I think encourage of sequestration technologies over time and they'll be a lot of innovation in that regard and know that's a right way to do it so you had these realizations about you know areas of big value and you ain't and started zip to you sold it got you know twenty million cash you were the largest shareholder of PayPal at the time eBay acquired it I think you know you got 160 million or something like that I you know you have enough money basically for an entire lifetime why go and put your money into space X which is a huge you know risky operation or Tesla why not just kind of you know relax sure what so yeah basically you know I I graduated from from from Penn basically physics and economics and then that we rented a road trip to to Stanford with with Robin Ren who is in my physics class and now works at Tesla actually it's cool yeah you grew up in Shanghai yeah so yeah yeah this was a very smart guy he ended up continuing at Stanford and I ended up going on deferment to Cal plays into the semester but I was gonna be studying material science and the physics of high-intensity capacitors for yeast and electric vehicles so that intent was I was gonna okay I'm gonna work energy storage solutions for electric vehicles and I'd worked at a company at Cold pinnacle research for a couple summers that did high high energy density capacitors I was going to try to do a factory like a solid-state version of of what they were doing with yeah it's gonna get very complicated from a technical standpoint but they were using a routine at the ruthenium tantalum oxide lithium is extremely rare and expensive it cannot scale act so like can you find a substitute for ruthenium but we are able to get to the energy density is comparable to let us a battery but with incredibly high power density so bro I cannot go down a deep rabbit hole there but what's the purpose of a capacitor in any option Buster no I think with the advent of high energy lithium-ion batteries a capacitor is not not the right path was your thinking back then though that made you think it could be useful for v's I want to use advantage of making equipment to make capacitors that were precise at a molecular level so at the you know just a level of precision that was sort of unheard of in in capacitors like capacitors energy is a function of its area however and the separation distance so if you have if you could have very tiny separation distance and you can cook and you can have it quantum tunneling it likes it how do things get pretty esoteric so you got to inherit quantity' tunneling give very short gap and and then you could in theory get to very high energy densities you by making capacitors in the way that you would make a an x86 processor and since those there are tens of millions dollars going into chip making Rd that I thought there might be a way to make an advanced capacitor using chip making equipment instead of the conventional means so is it off the table alter capacitor it's unnecessary okay interesting it so necessary it's it's it I think I think it's it thinks probably it's physically possible it's unnecessary at this point I mean I know a lot of people were talking about Maxwell and they'd been working on some stuff with capacitors the funny thing is that when I was doing the my internships at this advanced capacitor chemical pickle research which was in Los Gatos we talked a lot about Maxwell and Maxwell was also trying to make high indigenous to capacitors no Tesla acquired Maxwell awesome yeah Wow we're looking forward to that investor day yeah it's kind of a big deal that's great great to know Maxwell has a bunch of technologies that are that the where if they're applied in the right way I think can be have a very big impact like the dry electrode stuff don't be one of them little ones we do yeah for sure okay much much bigger deal that may seem yeah there's a few other things with with the the space that takes up for the ovens that you know for the current technology you can save all that that real estate space now that's one aspect and the cost reduction the weight savings I mean there's so many pluses right yes there's many things that but I'll have to wait until you know whatever battery day sure you know hopeful in a few months but I think we got some pretty exciting things to share so Galle is very excited yeah it seems like the pace of the innovation of that the battery thing is just taken off like since you have some more capital and being able to like have the gigafactory be vertically integrated just seems like no other car companies making that many batteries so they're not even thinking about what comes next but thanks they're not you know not even come cool oh I can 201 miles not nerdy that's a joke yeah no it's really I the other car country just really when I outsource battery technology not nerdy even not even making the thickest battery module and cell but they're they're obviously out so I've seen the sales but even outsourcing modules in the packs yeah you know and and it's like they're really not thinking about fundamental chemistry improvements and there's some pretty deep wizardry it has on this run it I should say bit about like like electric vehicles and and and it's all sustainable energy in general you know I said it was free I think obvious to not not just meat to me ever to a lot of people even go back 30 years or longer that we must have a sustainable energy solution in fact it's total article if it's if it's if it's not sustainable we must at some point find an alternative to it and so even if there were no environmental impact to the sort of fossil fuel economy then it would run out of them and then we would have economic collapse and the world civilization fall apart so so that was actually my initial motivation for electric vehicles it's like okay we're going to have a solution that does not require mining hydrocarbons that is sustainable in the long term it was not actually initially from an environmental standpoint because I don't realized the gravity of the environmental situation at that time and I thought actually for sure by now we have electric cars like for sure but yeah totally why are we not back emits contain he doesn't say if he said salt something in 69 that yeah that we're not a be back on the moon and in like 2020 that would be like are you probably might even punched honestly because I feel like you're just it's it's like in so insolently route to the future like what is wrong with you it's encouraging though yeah yeah yeah so it's like we should we have a share of base on the membership send people to Mars no no that's occurred you know it's gonna those we were to make that happen yeah so this but on the society front it was really like said it not somewhat initially not so much from an environmental standpoint but from a necessity of replacing a finite resource in order to ensure that civilization could continue to grow and then the urgency of it became much more obvious like well we're just really better do something because the environmental stuff is becoming quite serious and the the the inertia of lodge and companies is just hard to appreciate it they just want to keep doing the same thing and maybe 5% different every year maybe 5% difference um big companies hit change so um so then the you know the time the Tesla universe was created or we you know there was no no one was doing electric cars no they worked really startups there weren't the big car companies weren't doing it GM and Toyota cancelled their IV programs now everybody is doing is right now like if and their mom is doing it yeah and we will all like to congratulate about the gigafactory 3.1 yeah yeah yes and I would like to know like why China is the best country to build the first form gigafactory China is the biggest consumer cars in the world so it's the basis so that that that alone would be enough to do it thank also there was a lot of uncertainty about tariffs and and you know it's like potentially would be unable to sell effectively in China if we did not have factory locally yes or at least been able to sell at prices that weren't extremely high but those are really the two two main reasons I think that book the open I think was also a third important reason that there's just so much talent and drive in China that I think it's a good place to do a lot of things um and the evidence is is there in the incredible progress in the factory which was both with very very high quality in very short period of time and the the cars coming out of of Shanghai are already very high quality I can't tell and the run rate is amazing and I love that they used the Chinese badge as well it's like a symbol of pride and a jerk you know made made in China so yes supercool how did Tesla managed to get the first wholly-owned foreign car company in China I mean a factory well I've went to China many times and they kept saying that we would have to do this you know majority local and rancher and and I said that well I ripped apart or somebody said well you know we're a little late to the dance here you know so Rudy partner with you know and nobody then we left and and and also we're just a little company so you know we've you know that like because they should get married and like we were young you know and then so then yeah but I know and they're also pointing out like you know this to me Chinese companies that are gonna you know they're establishing factories in or in the US and it's like Faraday future and that kind of thing and and that's harps on owned by them and so for me to be fair it should be allowed that an American company should be able to own its factory in China as well and so we have talked him over a number of years and they eventually said okay well which will trip will change slow and the changes law but now those other companies can't do it as well and so it's not just limited to Tesla and how much of that production he'll like learning's have really enabled because one of the I don't want like to bring up capex but one of my favorite things is the stats and the shareholder letter if it's so much cheaper not only faster but it seems like the you guys have learned so much from this the Fremont factory and that really enabled like kind of a turbocharged build for Shanghai yeah the I think the big difference is is like we are way less dumb than we were so the the fortress of cavil expenditures was very high and it's less I know [Laughter] and then with the the shanghai factory we designed out all of or as much of the the foolishness as we could think of and that exists at fremont and at in nevada so we just made a lot of decisions that weren't smart and and we designed those out so such the production line is much simpler so it's much simpler and and better implemented and then we also found like with us so it's in most cases the suppliers were more efficient in china as well than in the US so but we've also managed to get a lot more output from existing equipment in in the US as well so the model three body line in in fremont for example was only ever meant to do five thousand cars more threes a week and ensuing seven thousand Wow nice nice and and it with was turning off a bunch of unnecessary things that were being done so it did I mean there's just so there's a lot of foolish things they were doing so and were changed some of those ions and made it easier it would it's it's like a hundreds of little things to make it to make it easier to vault and and so being able to get forty percent more output of the same line obviously makes it makes a big difference and and while while reducing the cost the marginal cost of production and I and I think improving the quality of the car so it's all good good stuff was the result of a kind of hard work and a lot of people so yeah it was kind of miss it necessary in that with those we didn't really have a place to put a second military body line so it's like you either we eat to make us one go faster or we will not be able to achieve production but the model three body line in Shanghai is much much simpler than the one in and I said I said that a good way then because it has the same the same end result so if you yeah and and but but it's a much easier to understand this just getting rid of unnecessary movement there's a lot of unnecessary movement in the Fremont's body line but not in Shanghai so you guys said in the production letter that you just started battery production in Shanghai too and I heard that you guys were getting cells from cattle and LG Chem are the cells basically kind of like a commodity part that you can assemble into your battery packs there you know does it make a difference how do you see that long term I believe these cells are not yet from LG would you expect to use locally locally produce cells but I'm like I don't know it's we clear I don't always know exactly what's going on and everywhere in the 50 thousand person company so some of the things like the most most most of the things I say will be correct it's the media occasionally something that's not as to this my knowledge we were not yet using LG Chem cells we were using Panasonic cells made in Nevada but LG Chem can meet pretty much the same cells as Panasonic yes but pretty much is not the same as same so there's still a few bugs to work out with the LG Chem cells before we can use them in our module and battery pack production system the CLL cells or is this a health situation will be more of an integrative module than it will be a cell and that's so that it's it's not just it's not super easy to replace with these things but yeah we'll be we do expect to use the ATL would would expect to use LG currently is using Panasonic I'm gonna say you expect you I mean like roughly about a matter of months so by the middle of year we probably using both LG&E tail in volume so if we were talking about a lot of Tesla stuff but we kind of wanted to ask you about your personal history because we were saying you were saying how there's some misconceptions you would like to make straight and you know Ashley Vance wrote a book about you I just found a lovely book and it was really wonderful I loved it and learned a little bit more history about your family and you've um what are some of the misconceptions that you would like to correct you know most of this is just an inner being kind of water under the bridge that people didn't notice that much yeah I mean this is the sort of some stories in there or it sounds like I like fired people all of a sudden and arbitrarily which was not the case there you know it just Ashley asked somebody who at who didn't know what was going on and then that person was suddenly not there and they didn't know why yeah but you you know I definitely do not fire talented people and yeah you know unless there's no option so yeah and absolutely not know without warning like keep hearing you say we like it sounds like you're always thinking of everybody your ICU is a very selfless person I mean seriously I mean yeah it's like the age 12 that sounds like you've been thinking about how to help humanity yeah I mean I'm not trying to be sort of like some you know the sort of Savior or something like that you know I said it's really just that if it just seems like the it's just I don't know seems like obvious thing to do like I don't know why you do anything else you know we want to maximize happiness to the population and propagate into the future as far as possible and understand the nature of reality and from that I think everything else follows I saw you in Twitter like talking about how that people are having this rumor that you've been wealthy or whole life and that would be like the only reason you became successful when you've debunked that and can you like share more about your upbringing and what led you to going to North America when you're sure I was in in South Africa and it seems like wherever there was like a lot of the advanced technology in the world was being produced in America and there's a Silicon Valley especially so I wanted to be where where I could sort of be have impact on technology so that's or be involved in the creation of new technology so that's what prodded me to go to at first Canada because like he gets doesn't show up in Canada through my mom and then ultimately to the US but yeah I just left South Africa when I 17 and landed Montreal I had like I know about $2,000 Canadian and I started steady staying in a youth hostel for a few days and then there was a you could buy a ticket to go across to camp the country for her bucks and still have a long way and so I did put that and just her that Greyhound across Canada and so all these like little towns well we're getting I didn't have much so I had like a backpack Thank You Ana Pursuit casebooks move it the the the that of the bus company regret had that unloaded it in one of the cities and then the bus left without my light my stuff oh that's nice so this we had nothing all your books but your clothes - actually weirdly I think I might have had the books thing but it's priorities all you needed yeah because I knew I was sitting in the bus station reading waiting for the bus to get ready and I think out the books but not no no but no clothing so yeah but I managed to get to the Swift car Saskatchewan and then what my but it's your cousin cousin Sonja has a wheat farm there and I worked on the wheat farm for about six weeks Wow and today I turn 18 in Saskatchewan it's a town called Swift Current so that was summertime right and it's June yeah yeah June 28th so cuz I've been there in the winter and it's like minus 40 yeah yeah you don't wanna be traveling there yeah did you ice skate did you try ice skating no there was it was quite warm I was just observe for about six weeks oh you're lucky you survived that's good yes old there literally worked working on the wheat farm did a bond raising and I cleared out the wheat bins you know the grain but a grain silo is that kind of thing and I just worked the vegetable patch basically it's doing various things which are mind just thinking of what you're what you're gonna do after that yeah so I figure what I do next in order to do so then when I ended up getting back on the bus and went to Vancouver mm-hmm it had a half uncle there who is kind of in the lumber industry he like made lumber like clever equipment sounds like the Northwest yeah yeah yeah basically so I end up chain sawing logs and working on at the slumber mole and cleaning out the the way that where they boil a pulp and your second create crazy so boiler rooms and that that might be is the hardest job I've had actually because it's like crawl through this little tunnel in a hazmat suit and then I with with shovel with it and then then you shovel esteeming sand and put and mulch out of the the boilers to clean them out and it's like there's only one entrance or exit which is like a little little tunnel if you're claustrophobic you could reveal it real bad and then you could you shovel the the sand and the mulch through the tunnel and actually block the tunnel and then somebody else would reach in and shovel it out from the other side so just a big enough long enough if you have a shovel with the long handle the one person on the inside can shovel it far enough that the someone on the outside can shovel it out oh ha and then yet to rotate every 15 minutes to avoid getting hypothermia safety so just a man looking out for you there's just two people kind of paired up so if like one person's just collapses and you're gonna call somebody but it'd be really hard to drag somebody out I have to say that it does not seem safe because the photon gets blocked trying to get the automatron block that tunnel would be very difficult to in a short period of time it was the highest paying job at the employment office so I was like okay the other jobs for like under eight dollars now and this one was eighteen dollars narrow it by your clothes never gone well they give you a half a hazmat suits yeah yeah how long did you have did you do that job for like four days yeah it was like a short-term thing clean greement cleaning that the boiler rooms so what was next we were in boiler rooms and then yes yeah I met literally was like a lumberjack is chain sawing logs and just during library love her stuff basically um for a few months there and then applied for college go to Queens University in Kingston and it was there for a couple years and then somebody that's just I should reply to UPenn and I I didn't think I'd be able to go because I thank my way through University just which is actually not that hard in Canada because that the tuition system yeah the tuitions have yourselves a night in Canada so so with you know with basically some if you just sort of work during the summer and semester and take out some lumens and some get some scholarship so you can pretty much go to any college in Canada I think but I met so many whose it was at UPenn and and they said you should at least apply and I applied and they they actually gave me like quite a big scholarship so that allowed me to go there and so they did the physics and economics there and and then that thus would like to then roadtrip to Stanford with Robin rain and and and then I thought I was doing that that summer that I was like okay I can either spend several years kind of doing a PhD and another I carry out the PhD actually better Snoodle lab but I could either spend a bunch of yours working in a lab and maybe it would maybe the technology would pan out or maybe it wouldn't but the internet would it was definitely about to go supernova in 95 so it was like okay look I I can always come back to working on electric cars basically and wish I did but the Internet is not gonna wait so so then I put saffron deferment and started sup to which was really just the air we started off with maps and directions Yelp pages white pages that kind of thing and it was hurtful s my knowledge the first math and direction of the internet so and this was some like patents I have I don't know how many more of it I think that 40 laps at this point but for mental directions and your pages and advertising himself and I wrote the whole the whole initial card base I wrote personally because there wasn't any rails I just mean so and I only had a few thousand dollars and then my brother joined and he brought like five thousand dollars which was a lot yeah at least for the first few months there was literally only one computer so the website when the website wasn't working was because I was compiling code and an even chicken an internet connection was pretty hard but there was a inert service provider on the flow of Louis we're more like squatted in this office as the landlord was always like out of the country or something and nobody was using it so you've lived in there yeah I think I read that in for Higgs look you showered it the way I'm seeing then right that's right yes Martha I mean you you're thrifty but you had to do we're just like had no no money what do people think about zip to generally was it like seem is a crazy idea or like do people even understand the internet back then most people did not understand the Internet what people didn't know even on Sand Hill Road like we tried pitching people to invest in an Internet company most the VCS we pitched to had never used the Internet you remember some of the VC firms you went to on Sand Hill iris both sigh we wouldn't take a meeting and a fitter tech meeting they were pretty bored and not said like Lucifer's made money in the internet no were like no one okay but the sea change occurred when Netscape were in public yeah so but the first thing I tried to do was not start a company I try to get a job Netscape but they didn't reply to me oh no oh man so I just I tried tried hanging out and lobby at Netscape I don't know who to talk to you so that's really too shy to talk to anyone I know it so it's like okay I can't get a job at the only Internet company that you know that does the Internet software so then I try writing software so that's um kind of article what happened there yeah and America said my brother came down and joined the cycle like late 95 and then in January 95 I think it was the there was there was a lot more interest in internet stuff falling this the Netscape IPO and best the software software was more impressive I guess so then we then more debt more davidow invested so there VC from wants and Hill Road and they they invested like names like three million dollars for effectively 60% of the company Wow which we thought was crazy so like with these great from there it goes the money for nothing yeah so that seemed like like it crazy that there to keep us to give so much money for that company that consists of the time of about five people like literally I think five people at the time so but it worked out well for them in the end so we heard a lot more people we both out the service and I know but they're also ended up writing a bunch of software to bring the newspapers online so knight-ridder knew time's company Hearst role became investors and customers and at one points up to worse as possible for a significant section of the new york times company your website yeah so i got to know the media industry pretty well and it bit over over what i worked really hard with wizard to use it effectively got too much there was too much control by the existing media companies so that to me board seats and too much voting control and that they kept try to push the company down directions that made no sense okay so we exhibited actually had a really good software i tape started as comparable in some ways more advanced than say a yahoo or excite at the time but it was just not being used properly and it was a little being forced through through media companies who would they're not not use it yeah so it's like yeah it's okay we got the best technology but it's it's not being deployed properly so look we fortunately compact came along and they comp out a cat come by got acquired digital equipment and digital equipment had or at Alta Vista which the time was probably invested the search best search engine so they thought that idea was they will combine Alta Vista with a bunch of other Internet companies and try to compete create a competitor to Yahoo or excite that does the excite used to be a big thing amazingly and you have used to be a big thing a long time ago now it's like owned by Verizon or something yeah and there is a o-l Yahoo is a crazy story they you know yes they failed to acquire Google twice you know Microsoft offered them like 40 billion or something and they turned it down then Alibaba saved them out of nowhere yeah the Alibaba steak was worth more than the whole company owned by like yeah huge amount right it's basically a proxy for Alibaba sure it's training yeah exactly but at one point I mean at that time like if you go back to say 98 99 yahoo seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut yeah like true you have this company will you know there's a behemoth nobody could possibly defeat them but anyway and where's Compaq today yeah but that was their idea which is you know at least if executed well could have made sense and yeah we're recording a podcast yeah how do you want me to join um yeah sure so what do you remember about to do um yeah we remember yeah so but then the internet came along with this huge thing I mean it was always was always there but it became a big deal and then Ilan was working on working in Silicon Valley and as I remember it you know ever heard a meeting where some of the Yellow Pages companies were thinking of doing sort of online yellow pages and know what I would yeah you called me up and you said we should do you think you can do a better job so we think we can do it maybe made that up to try and get Kimball interested how would I be in a meeting with yellow pages cover I have no idea that's what I remember tonight I don't even know any yellow polish yeah I agree with you yeah but but so it was like the April of 1995 we started working on it and the I guess the idea was pretty simple to take mapping and apply it to the Internet and there were there were a few other companies trying to do it but no one with very the very cool technology of sort of what was called vector based mapping which is what we will use today where the map is actually alive you don't know not just a picture that's very head of its time I think we were the first I I know there were other people putting maps on the internet but I think we were the first to put vector based mapping which is what the kind of technology used today on the internet and daughter daughter directions so it was cool like I remember my brother and I pressing go on his server at our office and took about 60 seconds for the first daughter daughter daughter daughter directions to come up on Wow green and even 50 seconds was amazing yeah you're like this is incredible anywhere this is just amazing and definitely seen amazing at the time definitely seemed amazing you time yeah looks like now it's like a psych lab site wherever a little but this was like an impossible thing it was so cool and using Java Ilana had coded a interactive map which again all supernormal stuff today but the ability to just draw a square and zoom in or zoom out that was just unheard of technology change report square remember that it was like a little red square on the java Mara browser it was really that was unusual yes he's like yeah well we cheated if you're using Java applets yeah this is where Java sucked and there's barely yeah the most nice I think we even got some sort of recognition because it was the most advanced java application on on java at the time because it was so ridiculously hard it was it was a really crappy technology at the time this this was done on it this thing is if you if you downloaded the the Java outlet we could we could transmit the vector data not just a bitmap and this is what everyone's on a modem wears on like you know 20 kovetz modem or you know trying to download in a Mac image for take forever whereas if you had but downloading the vector data that locally rendered are you using the java applet was super was relatively speaking super fast yeah that's what made it cool smart yeah I mean yeah even like vector maps are even Google Maps losing like raster Maps a few years ago like seems like very out of its time well we were that I guess that I believe I believe we the two of us were the first humans to see maps and build little directions on the internet which amazin I think it's pretty cool well they were an internet based right so you could you could actually I don't think Garmin was even a player at this point it was NAVTEQ was the only place that we were that's where we got the data from yeah and they were building it for four Hertz never lost which came out a few years later you know those yeah things that no one uses in need the GPS systems really really bad technology but the actual mapping data was amazing and so we took that and applied it to the Internet we were 22 and 23 at the time it had cost some three hundred million dollars to build this data and they gave it to us for free with a simple contract saying if you ever make any money on this you've gotta you gotta come share it with them and that's that's how we got it that's amazing yeah you can switch what happens if you ask that's my sleeve and there's also part of it was these guys have been working so hard on the tech and no one had ever seen what they were doing yeah because it was not on the internet and was not being used for four Hertz and so it was just they were excited that someone would use the data and and would think people could see what they've been working on so how did you guys get the engineering chops to pull this off because it sounds like you were so young you didn't really have any help and then you built like cutting-edge piece of technology Damini limit ourselves er from I don't know what time what age but publisher like blast our game right yeah it was 12 did you write any other cool stuff back then yeah I wrote a bunch of games yeah and then like using the software for a few what asked for software you know you also work for a video game company yeah our family is called rocket science yeah that's funny by the way we took a SpaceX to yesterday was insane thank you for that that was amazing yeah I was so good it's like Batman's lair in there but it gives you perspective on what Tesla's doing because the technology is so advanced and that there's you know interchange of information there like the I know they used to inconel fuse right was from SpaceX when they couldn't get the the power output right it kept burning up the fuse in the the performance models mm-hmm so yeah it's awesome yeah it's pretty cool to see the SpaceX tech being applied to Tess laughing I think there's a jump there's one joint employee between SpaceX and Tesla and it's the materials is it the materials engineer because they're just not that many humans on the planet that know how to do this stuff no well sound like back in the old days it was was it just Elom doing the coding or I mean I did a little for like HTML friends not recently I know there was we're no money so you can employ a short I roll the software when you work through the night right you just amaze look II never slept I don't think I mean we lived in a little office I think this address was for 72 Sherman Way in yeah in Palo Alto it was probably leaving yeah it was probably like 15 feet wide by 30 feet long with a little closet in the back and we would we couldn't afford a place to sleep order like a fighter like a house home or apartment so we would sleep in it and it had to have caps that was a futon and it would pull out the futon take turns sleeping on the future nor the floor well though he caught it a lot of light so I used a futon at night and we had to code it at night because the server when the internet was live needed to be functional and we just had data for the Bay Area at the time so we were just kind of making sure that the people in the Bay Area could use it and then and then we added a little mini fridge with a cooking stove on it and we'd cook simple things you know clip pasta sauce and pasta and things like that that would be as cheap as dirt people think you it's expensive to eat real food is actually really cheap yeah vegetables pasta and beans stuff means super cheap and then and then we would go eat at jack-in-the-box which I can still I'm still kind of shivering probably 20 years or longer maybe 22 years and I can still probably recite the entire menu yeah we cycle through the menu a jack-in-the-box because it was like it's a few blocks away from and it was up in 24 hours open 24 hours it tried to get you know dinner in Palo Alto after 1000 yeah yeah so did they know you very well jack-in-the-box why they didn't really know I did know and I remember one time I got a milkshake and I was so tired I was like four for the morning and just needed to get some sugar for the rest of the night and it was something in it oh no I remember just flicking up and pretending it didn't exist if drinking my milkshake it was like that order that kind of like not in the zone to go back into Jacqueline argue about a milkshake but I don't want to not drink the milk shake I'm koala reason that food was like sir chief is that they had some people I think died of food poisoning right around that time when they got into a food poisoning scare and yeah so that there it was just very cheap to eat there and I figured like you know the quality of you know if taken some action because that after the food poisoning yeah hopefully yeah tastes funny stop eating if it tastes funny you run out of things to eat because they after like the 17th chicken fajita PETA you know ii can't do it the teriyaki bowl a cube okay was that one good it's actually it buried but it was it was edible so which one what the teriyaki bowl teriyaki bowl wasn't bad it was the sort of sourdough grilled grilled cheese thing that was wasn't bad yeah OC reminder that those were the good old days right I mean it was what is even good days I mean we just we were just hoping that people would let us stay in the country we were just doing everything we could to to get to get someone to support the company we didn't really understand I didn't understand a venture capital with that much so we were doing a seed round an angel round and doing our best to talk to everyone and anyone we could find we had a very good friend with us Greg curry who's now passed away who was older than us by about 10 years I think and yeah it was a wonderful mentor helped us out and put little money in as well and and then I did a lot of the work to just find just network with people I think our with our first salesman who was selling Yellow Pages ads for us I was a real estate agent who knew another person who knew this other person who helped us in to help us raise put together we end up not doing around but put together a round of like two hundred thousand dollars or something yeah and then we did like part of it or something yeah but I think once we had the Java Java map which was really quite impressive I mean if you've never seen if you're never you've never seen Google Maps or Yahoo Maps before it really is a remarkable thing to see we we started to go to we got it we got some audiences with some venture capitalist and it just went from we were starving we had no car well the car we had it broken the wheel fell off huh the wheel the wheel fell off yeah what kind of car was it I remember that an old BMW 3 Series until anyway we did a road yeah across the country yeah the one that my mom had some pictures of I think this I think there's still a there's a carve in the tin the road at page mill and I alchemy literally the wheel came off wheel fell off and the guy literally in the intersection just drove it without the wheel it's uni to the side that's pretty much time for the junkyard at that point because the whole car just falling apart so yeah it's like the point which the wheel falls off it's time to go to the junkyard know that was now that was way smaller so that's way later because we already had to deal but we were uh we were not I don't know if you were but I was not legally in America so I was illegally there I was legally there but what I was made unique student work oh yeah a student worker you were doing a Pete you were supposed to be doing a PhD in Stanford didn't ya decided not to so and that's like as loud if you work sort of supporting whatever you know I try to get a visa but this isn't there just not no visa you can get to do a startup yeah fortunately nobody was paying you anything and so so we got a deal from from from or David out and this really hot well-respected DC firm and we had to break the news to them that that that we take the bus we took the bus to get to to the offices we don't have a car and we don't have an apartment and we're illegal no you're illegal so but I was legal with my visa I was gonna run out in two years okay yeah but I was definitely reserved yeah we needed to get it sorted and so they were great I mean they're the lead investor his wife was from Canada they knew the whole challenge of being an immigrant and we have Canadian passports and so they they funded the company and they gave us some money to buy each by car and they gave us a salary so we could rent an apartment and they had we I got a visa through through the company but but the morning we were supposed to present to the partners I went to Toronto it was my mother was freaking out cuz she needed her computer fixed and but really seriously this is brutal so I I flew out there Manning to fly back on sunday and the meeting was on Monday and I get to the airport on Sunday and the the Board of Control are they there Cleve they called me out there like you're going out of work you know going down for travelens like no no I'm going out of work I explained actually no I didn't I said I'm not coming to work because I think that's what I'm supposed to say but the lawyers told me not to say anything and so they rejected me from the border oh and so I'm supposed to would do the presentation with you on the next morning and so a friend of mine came to pick me up at the airport and drove me across the border and we went to the the buffalo border and just said we're gonna go see the David Letterman Show and control I was like yeah go ahead the late night flight from Buffalo to San Francisco and we made the meeting in the morning so very good yeah we're technically you're not going out of work because that would have required we meant you of being painted something yeah I wasn't explained anything yet yeah technically we were but actually no you're right you're not actually breaking the law you're not breaking the law because we were not being paid anything yeah I should have told him that in the border control maybe it was very frustrating getting paid for something no no John that no yeah you're right exactly we were not not being paid exactly but yeah so so then they approved the deal at Monday and we started building zip to and it wasn't a business model for you know back in those days well it was kind of like a pre-cut like yet Yelp is like is but it business was similar to it sort of yeah but it was at a time when most businesses didn't didn't know what the internet was so and most people didn't have an email address or yeah we went online to them what a website was the internet was the kind of this cool thing people were using Netscape Browser and I think by the end of it we called 18,000 businesses to be on our service pay pain to be with websites and everything yeah you know a lot of the things that you can do today like automatically build websites we built a lot of those sort of tools to make it easier to build websites and we had to sell door-to-door it because that was the only way didn't hire people or is it just to you guys no no we had a team by that toe because we could hire a hire a team but I remember talking to a yellow pages guy once and it was amazing that was the hit of the Toronto Star that they owned all the yellow pages of the all pagers will never die famous last words literally we were in a joke tune to partner we said we want to part with you and unless this be one of your partners to do to put the old pages online and he picked up the yellow pages this book this big thick book that full of ads is multi-billion dollar revenue stream I mean these guys were so arrogant and like we are kings of the world and you will never and he picked up this book and right at me and he said do you ever think you're gonna replace this and I was just like I'm in my head in my head is like dude you already do this was my duty Tesla peoplewe you know gas cars will never die yeah but I mean like and we saw the growth of the Internet we saw the use of the Yellow Pages we saw even more competitors and stuff and no one was using the paper yellow pages if you had the choice yes exactly no one yes that's right and so so at that point very few people are on the internet so it was really a question of really is the internet gonna succeed which we were huge believers in and these guys were not you know they didn't even clue in yeah it was like one one foreign country after another we would say like listen put your L pays online so you're gonna cost very little you know you have still own all the content everything and they're like they're just throwing us throw us out of the office yeah if you like to know and how dare you even suggest this okay I guess we'll just build it yeah but it's been in to watch over the years where like it PayPal the competitors were not banks you know even though that should have been no that there would they were bank stopped riding feet it wasn't it eBay mostly that was the bit maybe that's a good point yeah that which but it wasn't exactly like PayPal yeah but generally they had an issue with trying to get payment for stuff like yeah like two people would have to mail checks to each other yeah that's gonna work if you don't mail a check and you receive the check and yeah how do you know the checks real then you've got a you know cash check and take you know two to five days supposed for the money to transfer so it could take two weeks before somebody had confirmed payment and then I then they would ship you the item and so that the transaction velocity was very low as a result with you at instant payment you improve transaction velocity dramatically like factor of you know maybe three to five yeah I just sort of seen that the when you when an industry is disrupted that you've worried about the major players I mean we remember when we saw the test that we were aspiring to be that GM of the 21st century four years later GM went bankrupt you're like okay we don't read and and and it's you know whoever is going to be the main competitors you know we don't know yet but it may not be that the entrenched players Maybelline I sort of other companies and so so that happened it's up to where we we tried our best to partner with the industry because that seemed like the best way to make some money and actually have a revenue model and we ended up finding the newspapers to be a better partner because they didn't have the Yellow Pages business and there I think they think we're smarter there classifies business was was getting eaten away by Craigslist you know before Craigslist classifies was the bread and butter of the newspaper and of course anyone who used use Craigslist would never use the newspaper so it was it was those folks seem to have a better least some of the players had a more more vision of the future and so our business became putting your major newspapers New York Times to all of the you know Philadelphia Inquirer Chicago Tribune or whatever all the main players all the LA Times everyone and then we started going internationally doing the same thing so if you went on to the New York Times website and you wanted to search for a restaurant of course they have all these reviews or if you wanted to search for a home that you could we tied them MLS together with maps and door-to-door directions so all of these services are we now used to take for granted ed used maps and order or directions we we did that all in the 90s to find a business model yeah well my title after - why didn't you go like straight into sustainable energy right so um gonna recall things that are not quite a while so it would've been like 98 when compact offered to acquires up to and which I think it was a good thing to put into acquired because as I mentioned it the the newspapers actually owned media companies had too much control over it too so they were not we had great technology that was not being deployed effectively and they were just generally be averse to anything that could remotely be competitive with their newspapers so so we're sort of trapped in this situation and at the breathing Compaq came along and bought the company in late 98 when the deal closed early 99 so that as a result that can when I had some capital was 20 million dollars or something out of it and I think the thing that was frustrating to me was that we're both incredible technology and it had not been used they were just sort of like it was very disappointing you know put a lot of work into this technology and just wasn't being used so I was like okay I'm gonna want to do one more thing on the Internet just to show that we can make technology that is when it's use properly can be extremely effective the souther about what what's digital essentially what's it what's what exists in the form of information and is also not high bandwidth because it in 99 people still mostly had modems so you couldn't like video is not really feasible in 99 so with money is low bandwidth and digital effectively mostly digital so it's like what can we do to make money work better and like money in my views is essentially an information system for label allocation so it hasn't power in and of itself it's a it's like a database for this for guiding people what what as to what they should do and so you can think of banks as a set of heterogeneous databases with that there are actually not very secure and certainly the the monetary system the transfer system of checks is not is very insecure still is insecure so our credit cards and and it's all as still mostly bad processing and there was an entirely batch processing that they say it was not so pay masseur the money was a secular genius high latency low security collection of databases that's what banks are and so just from an information theory standpoint there should be something that can be much better if it can be real-time secure and you know just very fast and essentially it's just one real-time database so it's like okay let's try to build that so that that's what x.com was and then at the time I also thought we should try to do is just do all the financial things as well not just payments I still think that's really what PayPal should have done but whatever it's water under the bridge at this point um and then there was a company that was phone runs same time called confetti which was here till Max Levchin and VIN look no sake David Sachs Kent how are you never was and a tech stock home there's also like Jeremy Stoppelman and that who created yell Roelof Botha who then went on to run Sequoia and and find YouTube that was it was XCOM so we just had this like to show you two companies with like a crazy amount of talent extra comic infinity and could confetti started as a Palm Pilot cryptography company back when your you could communicate by the infrared port above home pilot yeah and have my palm so it was like so you you can basically communicate crypto tokens between Palm Pilots using the infrared port and then reconcile them or on a piece or an auto PC now obviously that's there they evolved to go on the in the payments direction as well and we were both in Palo Alto or like literally a block away from each other I think at one point were briefly even in the same building that was you know yeah so we were just competing with each other like maniacs and and then we had a coffee and University Avenue and said hey when we just combine our efforts or we're just gonna bludgeon each other to death here so we merged confetti and XCOM and and raised 100 million dollars in the space of three weeks in March of 2000 yeah and then April the moth went into freefall yeah so yeah so it's like I remember that I was insane and we kind of thought it was gonna go into freefall I really better get this thing done fast or we're both gonna die so and it's so excellent was technically the acquirer of caen Finity but it was a you know fifty point one and forty nine point nine or something like that and and then was a lot of drama that those so much drama at EDX at home and the company was called XCOM for about a year and then we changed the company name to the product name the part of the product was PayPal with all the incorporation documents everything is all my incorporation documents who came up with the PayPal name I actually don't know people call you guys the PayPal mafia tío wrote that in his book you know I don't know who did the did PayPal I was never a huge fan of PayPal as a name but the reason being that I think that I thought it made sense for for the company to kind of broader it be much broader yeah exactly I mean if you don't your self to payments then necessarily if you who want to transfer money out of the system and as soon as they transfer money out of the system the efficiency of the database drops dramatically because now that you're in a traditional banking world so if you just offer all the things that if you just basically address all the reasons why people are taking money out of PayPal systems so you have to provide them with with checks so that you have a bridge to the legacy transaction system you gotta probably provide them with a debit card provide them with the ability to UM get a loan and that kind of thing and and but these are all ancillary to accelerating the velocity and accuracy and security of payments then then basically pay for with you all the money is it would just suck all the money out of the banks and there wouldn't be the banks would go away yeah so any plan you gonna do with the egg stockholm i right doesn't hope if they just executed the business plan i can have a product plan I wrote in July 2000 let's just do that but they I talked to them if there were several times but they didn't do it so why did you and PayPal kind of part ways what was really the drama that led to that you know separation ultimately well things were very dicey in 2000 you know companies were dying like all over the place so I see of the combined company and we're doing quite well from a ghost at point I'm like adding a hundred thousand users a month type of thing which back then was a lot yeah but off financially things were tough and we needed to raise financing around we were also like there are some technical questions around what what code architecture would we go with and then there's also a branding question like I said like I think we should not use PayPal as brand because this is not consistent with being where all the money is you see we want to centralized database so so I was coming against to PayPal branding and you know and I wanted basically I wanted to do a bunch of things that would that seemed extremely risky and I I'm I think those things would have worked out but at a time when companies are dropping like flies and I'm proposing it that we do all these things that sound very risky this is what this is just much too scary for the rest the team you seem to be attracted to crazy ideas that other people are like but like you know I think the autopilot one is a great example or everyone's kind of trying the spatial approach to self-driving you know they're doing way more for 10 years nobody cares and you come out and say hey we think vision is the way board and deep learning and vision you know will take us all the way there how do you find like yeah for courage inside - I mean people have to be coming up - all the time and you know thinking that you're an aviator it's never gonna happen and you know how do you find that in yourself to like go through all that resistance and still be confident in you know your thesis I mean I try to be hyper-rational so it's not you know - she's like if this is the reasoning fits a New York violating the laws of physics or something then that's the thing you should do so yeah I guess the other day if we lost a lot of money I wouldn't you know as long as we didn't lose well feels money I guess I just lost lose my money out of mine at these things to start seeing that crazier to me so like I think if if PayPal to execute the plan that I wanted to execute on I think you would probably be the most value company in the world yeah we called X but it would be the most valuable company in the world on the other hand now that's not all good though on the other hand then a lot of super talented people would have state and because because people have got good acquired by eBay not long after like you know those like the PayPal COO at the end of 2018 months later it was acquired by eBay so and and then it you know feeling of the companies that came out of PayPal so so-called PayPal mafia YouTube you know of status' Steven Chad created YouTube Gerry Solomon created Yelp you know Peter created Palantir and with a bunch of other things there's David Sachs Chris company and Reid Hoffman created LinkedIn Wow it's almost like all that market cap still exists but now it's allocated on all these other tech companies instead of XCOM yeah so in retrospect I was like it's maybe a good thing that X wasn't okay if I wasn't didn't achieve those things because all these other companies would have at least been delayed or may not have existed there's definitely been kind of resurgence and interest as we get into kind of cryptographic you know money and Bitcoin and all that if like interest in this idea you know and it's interesting like software has an e in the banking industry yet software's even a lot of industries there's something that it just hasn't and banking still there you know stripes stripes eating them slowly but they're doing pretty good job that they that they're the better banks are in trouble if it's not stripers be somebody else and you love code but you don't seem to be as bullish on Bitcoin do you have any could you break down like why cuz you're talking about this big database that's more secure for faster transactions it seems like bitcoins hitting at least some of those I'm neither here nor there on Bitcoin yeah yeah what do you think when you read like Satoshi is liked it for the first time real like oh it's pretty interesting all right that was pretty clever it's just like the things yeah as the source gets like the crypto people angry but at the critical yeah there there there are transactions that are not within the balance of the law and those in there obviously many of those in different countries and normally cash is used for these transactions but but cat but in order for illegal transactions to occur those the cash must also be used for legal transactions you need an illegal to legal bridge that's where cryptic comes in so is it kind of the darknet stuff it can't be entirely dark because otherwise how do you buy normal stuff it and cash these days is used just much rarer it's hard to take increasing it up with used cash some places you can use cash at all so there's a forcing function for transactions that are illegal quasi legal and in some cases legal but it's got to have some it's got to be both legal and illegal so it doesn't count otherwise otherwise you simply it can't just be transactions within an illegal economy because how do you buy like you know food and a house or something you know some you go you must have a legal to a legal bridge so where I secret eyes is effectively is a replacement for cash but not as a replacement for as a primary no not as I do not see crypto being the primary database so now this is this is sort of taking me like I'm being judgmental about crypto and it's actually I think there's a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn't be illegal but you know so it's not as though I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about the mission that they should and shouldn't have so many things that are illegal didn't you say like on Mars there'd be less laws hopefully yeah I think probably that's the best it I mean probably it's best thing Mars democracy you know the most like knocker see and you want to make laws super short and simple right well yeah I mean like if people can't understand Louis then how do you then what's usually gonna happen as some special interest is gonna bamboo is a little public with long laws yeah and then the Lord is like reading this Lord slow is like the size of Lord of the Rings but a very boring version of it like a dealership thing is just crazy to me you know like America supposed to be competitive free market it's weird right yeah absolutely so Eric just so you were to keep the lower short and have it given some kind of sunset period so they're just stay there forever otherwise just accumulate over time and just eventually they'll be unwieldy so the laws should have some timeframe associated with them they automatically go away so I mean it just keep a little short to avoid trick trickery and and sort of special interests the ultimately does not benefit the public and and then I think direct direct democracy is less susceptible to corruption than a representative democracy so in a crowd from just being like to what degree is this action being taken that do not serve that generated the interests of the population you know do not need to result in a net increase in population happiness as a whole and so that's that's that's why I think polite about direct is better and there's things in real time so you know if you want to vote on something you just you can vote on it real fast yeah it would probably make it eat outside make it easier to get rid of Louis than to put them in because these things tend to have a lot of inertia and to have a bias towards having laws go away and not be there you know so like maybe it'd take 60% to put a law in place but 40% to remove it something like that yeah let's try it you know see what happens the pills are extremely long that they pass no one reads them they happen to come but hardly anyone in Congress has read the bill and if you eat if they read the bill if you quiz them on the details they would know it they'll find their page yeah it was like Tony what's yeah this members no idea seems kind of alarming that that's like the status quo and everyone just accepts his plate yeah these laws tend to be written by industry groups as well so that the there they'll write the law and then and then interact with congressional staff and and and but most of the work will be done by the industry groups and so they're gonna write laws that entrench the position it's like the people are the players buying the raft like you were saying earlier that exact right so you get the regulatory capture the exactly yeah the players shouldn't be paying the ref salary everything well the referee shouldn't be thinking I'm gonna retire and get paid by the players so it's kind of amazing that it works as well as it is given all these issues yeah so then I fell I I never getting blurry and anyway in 2001 deputy - yeah 2001 yeah it's also about this the malaria thing that was he went on vacation right the average South Africa with Kimble actually yeah that's crazy and then came back and I had like near death case of malaria yeah we live grew up with laughing that we we'd go to the bush felt all the time to the what do you guys call Safari and you just reaches out a house in the bush you used to go there every every few weeks or so I don't think we ever took malaria tablets yeah Yeah right like and so we were told to and we did take malaria tablets you took em as well and and when you got back the was in Stanford and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with him our uncle who's a doctor in South Africa is like he has malaria and they said no no he doesn't malaria we checked to check again malaria kind of hides in the body and they so this was after PayPal got started oh this is 2001 so sort of after the paypal CUSOs that's all the PayPal board and I was providing you know pranks or product advice and or not but yet in December were late late December 2000 which went on a trip to South Africa came back January early January 2001 and I had a severe case of malaria almost died - now that we've just said 31 interrelated factors waiting to see it they seem to me get some some pajamas for him and I do closes store was someone please released or something so I just got in some pajamas you were sleeping I mean like your it affected your brain that that harsh yet no was proud of it's really bad does that change your perspective how do they like influence here after that no no I don't think it changed me that much would you say no anything you did yeah but how many times he'd been on being I lost like 50 pounds oh no no more vacations oh well yeah it was a I resisted took me like over six months to get back to normal and so I and then if the SN 2001 I just think about you know what do you next and and I thought the you know this is like okay sustainable energy like a basic electric cars solar space and then if I might ask me you know so what do you do next I said well you know so I would love to you swing its face but I didn't think anything if there's anything that a private individual could do in space but at least I'm gonna go on the NASA website and find out when people are going tomorrow's and I go on the network last website and it's nor to be found and so I was like well this is pretty weird yeah then I discovered that it was actually a NASA policy not to talk about it um really yeah that's why what'd I do you think what I was told is that when George first the first I was when he was elected he said it might pass now to NASA to put together a plan to send people to Mars in 90 days they came back with a plan and it was 500 billion dollars and it says all that this is like political suicide so then after that talk of manned missions to Mars were bad that's why sold yeah so that I racers like well you know maybe there's something can be done here to get the public excited about going on Mars and if I get public excited then they will vote NASA to have more funding and so the original idea for SpaceX was just to have a philanthropic mission to Mars yeah it started as a graphic of a pot plant you just need to get the pot plant to Mars you know it was like a inspiration sure just as a as a way to prove to the world that it could be done yeah there's a the mission was called Mars Oasis there was seasoned dehydrated nutrient al that would hydrate upon landing you go get this great picture of green plants I've read background be like the first sort of life as we know it on Mars and the you go Salerno you know a lot about what does it take to keep plants alive and have a little miniature greenhouse on unsocial Mars so that that's why I initially pursued as it's like a way to basically increase NASA's budget that was it wasn't let's create a space company it was how do we get NASA's budget increases so we can go some fuel to Mars and over there so I try to figure out how to get this thing launched and I've that the Rockets the European and US rockets were too expensive and I can't afford them so I went to Russia to try to buy some ICBMs in 2001 a literally and they kept raising the price on me and it was quite being quite difficult and I said I know I can afford to pay like under nine million dollars for ICBM but not not 20 because I have a range of two of these missions because odds are good that one would fail and then it could have a negative impact potentially so the house pretty weird being Moscow for by CBN's in 2001 yeah that's amazing call the military and say well you know they got a giver of these things anyway because of the arms reduction treaty so it's like you've listen if you're gonna throw it away I'll buy it a tour of your hands yeah they have to I was like ss-18 to never it was the biggest nuclear missile in the Russian fleet and but you know deaky decommission these things so why why not just tell me them instead and then they were torching the price would go off and like this is it's not good because I you know even if at once we do I deal probably gonna get shafted afterwards too and if this is the pre deal shaft it's like it's what's gonna be after all or it's you know when after I've given the money gonna be good so so that I yeah so and then I start looking into it as acquire Rockets cost so much and there's lying fundamental about why don't you have so much if you add up the materials and say if you know there's not like the raw materials cost that much I really just need to figure out a smart way to get the materials in that shape and and then do you need we need to make Rockets reusable so like a for transport if it's not reusable it's extremely expensive you know if your cars for single-use you know and you need a round trip you know bought a car for $20,000 then your round trip will cost you forty thousand dollars but it's crazy so it's the same things true for aircraft and boats and rockets everything so so there were the Rockets were expensive even as expendable things but then they're also not useful so there's no way we're gonna have a city on Mars unless we can have reasonable low-cost reliable rockets that's fundamentally the issue so so I came to get clusion that even if this Mazda ASIS mission was successful it would still not result in the GUP it would not materially further the goal of being a multi-planet species because the rocket technology was not good enough and it was not getting better in fact it was arguably getting worse so so the real thing it needed to be solved here is reusable rocketry and lowering the cost of access to space and that that's sounds like okay well I try to do that um so I was good SpaceX started in early 2002 basically NASA I was living in part at the time but most of the engineering expertise was in Southern California so that's why I moved to LA did you ever have any like even inkling of imagination that you could be doing you know dozen launches a year and being contracted with NASA is that even like it I thought those where I know I thought we had you know ten percent chance of success or something like that you ended up being chief engineer right this is like no one wanted to give up their secure jobs of you I in something yeah I exactly I actually tried to hire but it basically they've been a number of attempts at doing a sort of private rocket company or commercial rocket company in the role already they're all failed effectively and then that's to the degree that it was like a joke in the aerospace industry like how do you make a large portion large fortune in the rocket you know I just saw with it yeah how do you how do you make a small fortune in the rocket industry start with a large one that's how matrix so many times just jump to the punchline you know so yeah it was very hard to recruit people because I had not built any physical hardware before so it's and I kept being called Internet guy for longest time for ages finalists I've made for first ten years they call me Internet guy we're basically an internet entrepreneur it slash fool he's trying to start a rocky company they would have an idiot that was generally not a win so it was quite hard to recruit people and especially so he's got like a secure job at you know volume a Lockheed or something like that then trying to recruit them to the inner chief engineer of a sort of rocket company or some hopeless well so basically no no nobody nobody who who was good was willing to join and I was no point in hiring Smitty wasn't good so I ended up being chief engineer you know which is yeah hey the the the first three launches failed and probably if I'd been better than I we would have gotten too overt sooner so we're took me a while to learn all these things so from books or books enjoyed people did you go to Utah and talk to anybody like it a TA orbital oh yeah visit rate here at what autos Dulles Virginia so yeah visited ATK visited orbital and the overall had had a success with the solid rocket based Pegasus but they'd also gotten like an eight launch deal from DARPA so okay if you got you're starting off with basically an eight launch day off with our friend that's a good situation I know we did not have a large steal from anyone Pegasus is a and I mean there's some clever engineering with Pegasus but fundamentally I think launching rockets from planes is not sensible yeah it's it sounds like it would be a good idea but it's not and then even orbital went away from doing that with their as soon as you get past certain sizes they went to grad lawyers I was reading somewhere that um 88 FICO more in that called they they were doing snow cats they were doing ski lifts and they sold that to the man who made the DeLorean he really yeah I just read that and their Wikipedia I'm like oh that's fascinating what a come around so yeah okay sorry yes sir SpaceX going and that was very difficult we got the Falcon 1 rocket built it was very simple it's the simplest overall rocket that's liquid fuel so it had the potential for reusability for four useful Ria's body and then with three failures finally got to orbit at the end of 2008 that was incredible good at a quarrelin and watching they wrote it like a blog for a while yeah I actually still have it up there it's a little and it's a old blogging platform that Google still keeps alive it's called quad rockets dot blog spot.com I think it's gonna get a lot of traffic soon yeah totally sanity check it out it's all there it said photos and photos of there was one photo of Elon picking up a satellite we'd launched the rocket and the rocket exploded which was very very very sad everyone servers I think people about pouring their heart and soul into the rocket and the satellite was I think in the US Navy Air Force Academy it was Academy and it it was thrown out of the rocket and fell through the roof of the hangar business like we really think exactly it's like a like a like a stand-up tale small toolshed yeah wasn't supposed to do that but this may be the size this room I mean a rocket it had this is the first launch failure so the it had a there's a cracked limit of B nut on that they contracted during during liftoff and created it so the engine there was an engine fire the this was wound up in the end of the world but there was a one of the the helium lions was a steel mesh over aft with over the Kevlar sleeve and it melted the the sleeve the the in and so we lost pressure pneumatic pressure which caused the engine ballast to close so I about 30 seconds after liftoff the engine shut itself off due to the engine fire and then it went ballistic and basically smashed and in the rocks just a couple hundred feet offshore and when it when it's wet it was quite a big explosion actually explosion the satellite which was interfering went through a fairing on a ballistic arc back onto the island smashed through the tool shed roof and onto the floor in pretty reasonable conditions like it wasn't totally gnarled reuse it so we gave them back their satellite so like we didn't lose your satellite it may need some repair but it was so improbable that the satellite would come back we had couple more failures laughter that yeah 2008 was particularly difficult year because we had the third failure 2008 the Taser on financing around collapsed oh it's such a nightmare I got divorced and aracely's proud I think 2008 was about here really really bad you have that year yeah I don't think anyone could I think 2018 I think 2018 would was worse what's up with Anglo with the model 3 ramp right oh there were so many things that happen at 19 so trauma is insane yeah so yeah sorry so was were that were in 2002 saw X base X moved out to LA and it was pretty fun in the beginning like generally startups are pretty fun in the beginning and then you go through the you know chasm of doom yeah chasm of doom yeah awful sorrow truffula sir exactly it's rough despair yeah usually it was like it runs like super optimistic and excited for the first year or so and then when things start to go awry and there's usually many years of grief before he just finally they don't so yeah so like if 2002 and then about in 2003 was when Rosen and JB Straubel called me up and said hey everyone I have lunch I want to say how old was I think that's his name but he he weirdly had he was a pioneer in space technology and electric vehicles we're side in our crossover and he dents with rows and motors it was like sort of an electric vehicle company and but he'd also been pioneer and geostationary satellites so Eric will be open today this so it weird like lunch at Mike Smith some lowlights key of homing in pop in El Segundo at worst basic started and so it's traveling Rosen we were talking about space stuff and then start talking about electric cars and I said oh yeah you know it's gonna be working on electric cart technology at Stanford and and Jim JB said you know we should take a drive in the teaser Oh from AC Propulsion and I was like yeah you know because the timing is it was like the lithium-ion batteries was really like the critical breakthrough needed for compelling electric cars and so it's like okay I'll go try out there t0 which had specs similar to what we eventually bought to market is Tesla Roadster so then I so yeah so I got I got right in the t0 and then I tried to convince Alec Akoni and Tom gage to commercialize the t0 know the teaser and there's like lots of stuff online about it it it didn't have doors or a roof so I clearly you need to add those things or any safety systems and it was very reliable because it was just like a sort of a proof of concept basically how it was basically like and assemble you guys really had trouble scaling it hey it's a minute literally didn't have doors or a roof or any airbags or an effective cooling system for the battery and it was not safe and was very unreliable you know break down yeah it's like you'd need to be babied by an engineer or it would not you can use it so but nonetheless it did get like zero to 60 I think out of 104 seconds turn 50 mile range it was enough to convince you that it was possibly I mean I I knew it was possible because if you go from the energy density of lead acid to to lithium-ion you've got about a 4x energy density improvement so if you got if you got to say a 60 mile range with glare acid you're gonna have a battle charter forty mile range with with lithium ion for the same way so but it was it was cool to see it in action working with a solution so I tried hard to convince those guys I could really mess with them a lot to go into to commercialize the the T zero and they just did not want to do it weirdly the thing they wanted to make was an electric Scion and I'm like you guys nobody's gonna pay seventy thousand dollars for an electric silent okay that was their idea seventy thousand dollars for electric Scion I'm like this not gonna work okay you will sell like fourteen of these things you know right and like a kid you know I have like the email trails lease yeah I mean I think they're still around so in fact but III even say listen I even though I think this is the dumbest idea ever I I will I will pay I will fund one tenth of it if you can find by another people and I think the only other person I could find you were Sergei Sergei Brin yes sir it's like okay so good and I the only ones going to do this I think and so they didn't actually get it off the ground but I said it's gonna fail I can but if this is something and the answer then eventually listening if you guys are not going to commercialize the teaser do you mind if I do it and they're like no you have better be totally fine like okay so so I was gonna it's like okay so I'm go do this with j-b and we'll go commercialized create a commercial version of the T 0 and then engagement kakuni said well you know there's some other people who also want to do it do you want to maybe team up with them and so there were two other groups that wanted to do it and it's like okay sure you know this maybe this is a way that I can have my cake and eat it too you know famous last works out goddamn try to have your cake and eat it too doesn't it this one's gonna be easy no I didn't think it would be easy but it was like I thought maybe I can allocate like 20 to 30 hours a week and just work on product engineering and then other people could do those stuff I don't even like doing elf anyway so that didn't work out so so that then Tom Gage said you said there were two teams but I only ever met one and that was ever hard happening and right but like the thing it's really bugging about the mistake they ever otter particular the worst guy I've ever worked with and I want to make a note of this he's literally the worst person I've ever worked with and I've worked with some real douchebag okay to be number one takes a lot it's not easy that his version of the story is like he is that out of the blue he pitch me on on a fun on finding his electric car company and and and and he convinced me to do it totally false okay I was like I'm creating an electric car company it's like they engaged said well maybe you could team up I was like okay well that might be worth doing and and so the company ended up being basically five people this is right the top earning you know ever had struggled myself and and this was the five of us and then like talking which tries to right right right out of the history books because they had a huge battle and they made me choose which one was going to be CEO it's a right oil or ever hot and torch JBL's like which one because I really didn't know want to be CEO so they're like okay well let's both have issues but maybe right has bigger she's done toughening so JB said so maybe you know lesser of Evil's like okay fine I gotta make a choice here because the two of them would not they would not refuse to be the same bullying so I was like lot of drama but it tears out so trauma and it's like okay you know it's not like the what I said like you know you know less retrievals so it's like I said in right sorry you know not that I didn't think he had good points but I got if I got a pick one and I adore I was trying not to be CEO or gonna make this rocket company work so okay so then made you know I was like the right you know as I had to leave then anyway so we got the basically we we jammed AC propulsion power train and battery pack into a Lotus Elise with the first prototype being like really just jammed it in you know and and and in retrospect this was not a good idea because the the car ended up weighing like like 60% more than Annalise or on that order and that we didn't have enough falling you to put the battery pack and we have to meet Orion validated all of the crash tests because the weight distribution was different it was heavier so now the crash tests were valid anymore to redo the airbags the air conditioning air conditioner ran off a belt fan so we now have belt fan so we had to have a new air conditioning system sort of change the HVAC system and so basically in the end only about like I think six or seven percent of the parts ended up being in common with analyse so it and and we went through a lot of trouble trying to chew on everything in there and it immune it's a cute car but it's ten percent too small it was like and and then the car center of being crazy and yeah and then ya know there was there was an audit of the costs of the road but the production cost the Roadster by one of the investors that joined in 2007 and and then they they they called me up and said hey the the numbers that Martin is telling you that everyone's telling you about the Roadster are totally false oh boy and I was like what do you mean like says no we're just didn't ordered there it's more than twice of what do you say the maze yeah it's like we would have to sell this car for a quarter million dollars in order to make to not lose money not like this is insane so in our opinion here we obviously had to fire ever hard there was no choice about that I yeah and then it turned out he'd not only had he misled me directly be instructed others to also lie yes when I say like somebody is like the worst person ever worked with it was pretty bad so but his face X also hadn't gotten to over to that time so I was like man I said our choice so like okay I asked where's the name Harris I'm really guy interim yeah he he ran like a manufacturing company I mean he seemed pretty smart to put the problems problem that I found with Tesla was we were startup in Silicon Valley building a car that was really manufacturing and materials engineering and its really like all the talent was forever you think there was probably talent you know in Detroit or Japan but if you took any of those guys into Tesla they would run up like a car company and then it would be destroyed but no idea you can take somebody who's running not take someone from a massive company culture and have him do a start-up and yet you couldn't find anyone in Silicon Valley who knew who knew enough about making cars and so he kind of found a middle middle road one who's he was in it he was an expert in manufacturing xeo Flextronics was an investor and he he agreed to just pick up join us the interim CEO and this is 2007 yeah but I mean Tesla was a company you tried so hard not to be CEO of yes but the thing is this is misinterprets if I say it it's messenger but it's like I somehow don't love Tesla which I do it's just like try not to go insane with working yeah you can you beat CEO of a real start-up is 80 hours a week PC of to is 160 hours a week and there's only a hundred sixty nine hours for something of sleep of 168 hours a week so like you just can't physically do it yeah I mean pain levels extreme so that's yeah I mean those directors tried quite hard not to eat - yeah it had to be no there's no choice but that hotels were dying so so that yeah ever hard cut was fired in July 2007 and it was at the time we didn't know he'd instructed other people to lie so we thought he was just you know it wasn't as bad but once he left the building then which it turned out no he'd actually orchestrated this massive deception which was quite bad so I yeah yeah well he also said he came up with the name of tells Moses promoters which is false that was a created by a guy 95 and and more of a he knows this because we went to great lengths we have to buy the trademark exactly so the name is trade 195 well so is like the whole [ __ ] back story of it but the the guy we're almost it wants had to change the name of the company because the guy who owned Tesla Motors wouldn't communicate with us and so eventually we sent it with a nicest kind of company know who's weirdly Martin's best friend which I don't understand but mocked happening super nice guy I like Martin a lot actually you can't not like more it's impossible he's super nice guy so this president mark to go sit on the guy's toe step and not leave until he until I agreed to at least negotiate with us or something it talked to us and then we were in our buying the trade walk for $75,000 yeah no that was a whole different nightmare no the head to main guy that took us ten years to buy that telecom domain man it was a it is I think still like a networking engineer of Jennifer yeah so yeah there was and that cost us like 10 million dollars yeah that was crazy I just the guys just held out was he just sitting on the domain Oh was he using it for something it was impossible to know he wasn't using it for anything just holding the mean it's like Twitter handle falcon heavy is amazing we fight without one yeah man that was took us ages by the Tesla economy we were gonna have to change the name to be something else and actually I would the delete candidate was worst was Faraday as the name because it Faraday invented the electric motor and then Tesla perfected the electric motor with the AC induction motor so is so if we couldn't do Tesla we do Faraday and then ironically a competitor or Chris later created cool fire yes I start up yeah first China right yeah yeah yeah so um did you guys have a Faraday a logo or anything with you that far down no we don't really even have a Tesla logo until later because there's nine to sell or anything so the the end of the Tesla logo and the Tesla font was done by me working with basically a little foam that's why the Tesla and SpaceX yeah there are some similarities between the the fonts and that's because just don't buy the same people and ask for a lot of time on the Tesla SpaceX pots that's cool yeah it'll be much easier if the world was flat or not in front of flat situation but as soon as things are not flattened you've got look the world is like it has undulations and curves and and then your car can be at any kind of at any kind of angle and then if you if you accelerate or brake it's actually gonna tip a little bit yeah but sort of pitch in your compensation is if that's where it gets really tricky yeah I mean they're doing just amazing work it literally just blows my mind every time like there's an update like you think it's like wow I can't believe it's this good and it just gets better like the big one was the faster lane changes latest push the tortoise Orion was like like immediately it's really awesome yeah I was kind of just like before I was like okay it's not that good but it feels good because like I can't believe what computers doing this then we got the faster ones and I was like oh my god it was so bad before you know yeah it'll be able to just do crazy maneuvers like you're like a high speed chase technically because it's you don't always want to bias the thing to be conservative in any actions that it takes because there's quite a significant foundational rewrite in the telepath system that's almost complete really yeah and what it what part of the system like perception like planning or just like it's it's instead of having planning perception image recognition will be separate they're they're being combined so yeah I don't even understand what if actually like the you're the sort of neural net is absorbing more more of the problem right beyond simply the is this is if you see if an image is this a car or not oh no it's it's kind of what where does it where you do from that 3d labeling is the next big thing where the car can go through a scene with eight cameras and and and kind of paint a a would paint a path and then you can label the path in 3d this is probably two or three order of magnitude improvement in labeling efficiency and labeling accuracy you know you have to do two throwers be proven in labeling efficiency and significant improvement in labeling accuracy as opposed to having to label individual frames from eight cameras at 36 frames a second you just drive through the scene rebuild that scene as a 3d thing with it's like there might be a thousand frames that were used to create that scene and then you can label it all at once is that related to the dojo thing you mentioned a thought on Amida no doges for learning for training the neural net that's like when you're trying to build the neural net that you ship into the car dojo speeds that up by Hardware accelerating it yeah exactly are you guys does that up and running at her no it might be we might have the first one at the end of this year but next year I think it's very likely next year maybe this year but it's essentially meant to absorb massive amounts of video input and and then and then training against vast amounts of data so that can be using the inference engine in the car so it's just like a human really it's like how long does it take you to learn a subject versus do a subject you know it's like hard to learn say calculus but once you learnt it then you can you know integrate something fast or something yeah it's like it's a it's a it's really yeah same basic thing yeah I mean that'll just really tighten the feedback loop like at some point it just gets impossible to catch you guys in like the rest of the people oven or even really like started the rest of the auto industry and like the feedback loop is just getting so tight with autopilot now it's just like makes it a lot easier I think I think it will they will catch up eventually or at least they will catch it to where Tesla is now on a great things like like for example we're talking about maps and directions and how today like computer based and navigation is a trivial to consider trivial but you know back in 95 it was not dry yeah it was considered very hard and the compute power you had was was tiny so like like the code had to be super tight can't couldn't have fluffy code if you're you know trying to execute something on like a 386 you know it was like very very puny amount of memory and compute so so now it's but by now maps of directions are easy I think in the it's at some point in the future it might be a decade or something then autonomy will seem easy yeah I mean it'll obviously become audit eyes din the long term yes wrote it was will seem easy in 10 years but the real long stretch there were the if there's building vast differences between cars well I have the the order industry it is used to slow rates of improvement so you know it's this whole not really a car yet that matches the original Model S maybe you're like take a 2012 yeah if you look at like the EPA ratings here literally is just all below yeah so those 2012 and it's 2020 so it's it's all like pretty hard to get a car let's say that's there's something there's there's not a car available at the price of the Model S that has the capabilities the Model S of 2012 it's kind of exactly what you were talking about with the Elise where you're like oh we'll just put a battery in the Elise and that kind of showed you like okay we really ground up electric disk and the nursery hasn't done that like the the the sort of founding principles of Tesla what were basically completely wrong the premise going in is like it's not gonna be that hard you know we'll just take the Lotus Elise with some you know nice lightweight lightweight car and we'll take AC propulsions drive unit technology and it'll put her together and we'll have an electric car and it'd be great it sounds pretty easy yeah except the AC propulsion technology would could not be industrialised like it was like basically handcrafted electronics with an analog motor controller yeah and so depending if there was hot or cold I would respond differently or not at all and the motors were hand round it was just like it is like impossible it cannot scale is this technology you can have like finicky individually made super expensive prototypes but you could we end up using none of the AC propulsion technology so yeah it's something that looks cool and works well at an individual prototype level does not necessarily scale and then the likes that was like maybe 7% of the parts of the original roads were in common with the Lotus Elise it would have been way easier if we started from a blank slate it would have been a better car so but I think like the real test of of any given startup is how well does it respond to adversity and adapt and and and I just figure it out you know so like most things are just when they start out they're just they don't make a lot of sense but then as long as you adapt quickly then you can make the company work and you know if they like sort of con Finity you know doing doing pomp out took tokens with the infrared port made no sense but they did after quickly to online payments you know that's those close key and yeah a TEDx calm was originally a bioroid more than he could chew by trying to all the banking services and that also focused on payments it's like do all these banking things we're gonna do banking license banking license gonna slow us down we're just focus on payments we could just get a payment you know license from the state and was just like fifty bucks or something you can be a money transmitter literally and it goes so you're just gonna adapt quickly you kind of need to be naive though if you had known as much about manufacturing you might not have done it yeah yeah this would have been it would have been difficult to I guess if you know the outcomes gonna be good in the end sure it sort of depends on how much for knowledge do you have about it it manufacturing is insanely difficult it's under appreciated in its difficulty yeah no that's totally true yeah you've making the Roadster which you're really my peak made about 600 roadsters in a year but you know call it like ten a week or something like that you know 10 or 12 a week so you know if ii got made in a day that was a big day and you know Tesla's making over a thousand cars day now what I find amazing is from start to finish your car is made it within 48 hours yeah it's been worked counts so to finish me yeah depends but but you can see the roll aluminum and one section of the factory and you can see the cars coming out the other end and then these astounding and their cars have been built for a long time but but this is just astounding it's still when you you don't appreciate when you're driving a car how much goes into the level of detail of 10,000 party that come together the shaping of everything about unique parts alone is several thousand cells and it all comes together with people that are skilled but you know skills are changing as things become a little bit there's more there's more autonomy but it's not it's not perfect you you do need to have a lot of people there and and these cars have to be perfect I mean it's just just a call if given how much complexity there isn't a car it's walkable that castles the laws they do this so much that's my car so so what sort of processes do you remove like it you know first principles type thing approach from the Elise to like the model ass like was it a massive jump there yeah I mean it was gigantic that yeah Tessa had never made a car made a full car before the Louis made a non powertrain portion of the Roadster and then it has about the battery pack murderer power electronics charger and they put Porter all together at the end and that okay final assembly was actually at an old Ford dealership in Menlo Park um you can see some of the stuff in revenge of the electric car yeah see anything great okay yeah it's great just gives you crazy perspective to look back on it crazy we need a third one yeah I mean the idea of having a car like a car assembly tiny plant in Menlo Park of all places and that was just because we've managed to sublease the Ford dealership close down and we're going to get it like this deal from Stanford because it's the suburbs gonna redevelop it and they saw that and they they're we figured they're probably taking way longer than they expected to redevelop it so he said well you're not bringing it to anyone like can we pay you like 50 cents a square foot and you can create a shot kick us out whenever you want and it was actually a huge dealership and it had enough room to do final assembly of the cars so we just did finals team leader cars there Oh amazing yeah in the most absurd places to build cars on earth his Midland so no test track or anything just the road outside or something yeah would actually know the early roses were very and reliable so we're generally put about 50 miles of just drive normal driving so drive around the bay yeah with somebody following you unless the s right fancy looks from people it's like what is that yeah we're we're approaching 50 miles knit each one of those cars because there's two have a lot of things that break down in the first 50 miles so and then yeah battery production was in San Carlos yeah so man that was there's just a lot of detail when they don't want and all that but great from the road said to Wallace was a massive leap because the the Model S is quite a sophisticated sedan where we Tesla built the whole thing as opposed to splitting powertrain and yeah so here are competing against like Mercedes BMW Audi type thing so that that was those massive leap of difficulty we did get the new me plant but really that just meant we got a box yeah because they struck the plant of all the great equipment the only equipment that's herder and GM left behind was the stuff that that they could not use anywhere else Wow so the only left the most tricky broken pieces are gonna bind it we managed to use some of it but but yeah then just in the paint drop I mean some things were literally not even worth the scrap value so there's like not worth it if all the scrap metal dealer what'd you do with it we made it we made a lot of those things work oh you didn't have plastic injection molding machines Ram work Wow and the paint robots we mostly made those work that the assembly that the body production line had to be made new because they're stripped yeah there was just nothing so we made the body production line from one less was created from scratch yeah worked out but it was very difficult it was also in the beginning the the top suppliers would not work with us or we would get like their D team because like who wants you know if if they like but I got all these customers like they got yeah the big car companies they go like Toyota or you know a UW Ford as customers and and a startup who now you're in this Laplace position which team are you gonna assign to us to start up that everyone says is going bankrupt you're gonna inside assign the interns and rejects okay it's not gonna be your top two you have the same thing with are you talking is gonna go to like Toyota you know your big customers two top teams so we get the worst team usually at the supplier company if the supplier would even work with eating that influenced you to vertically integrate more it was vertically integrated or die make sense yeah and we tried out supposing the battery production originally was gonna be made at this place that made I think Bobby cute girls in Thailand yeah and I was like man they have no idea how to make a battery and and I was like this is crazy we're moving it to but back to our headquarters in st. Louis and we can't make it here because the basically once there's a massive amount of work going from a prototype to production and you need a fast feedback loop with engineering and if that feedback loop is although out in in Thailand it's just no way it's like it's not like it's if you have an existing production line that you already know how to make it or volume that you can move but you cannot create a production line it never existed that's super far away from where the engineers are it's gonna it's ready for disaster and also that the cells were coming from Japan so they go from Japan they go to Thailand they go through customs if you're waiting and that then I'd be going to battery pack then that battery pack will be sent to England then Lotus is this is these all things that got changed but the supply chain like let's say there's been a problem with the cells you're only flat this planning exchanger so long that you'd only find out that it didn't work five months later yikes yeah and then you're five months of scrap inventory so this was a recipe for disaster so that backup moved to San Carlos the cells shipped directly to San Carlos put it in a module figure out why the modules not working fix it they put into a pack like the original reason why the roasted battery pack had like he was like sixteen sort of blades was if was what modules with with if one of them didn't work you could pull it out and for another one in because that happened then we identify so you don't really need modules and my beer sure just go from cells to pack at this point but um yeah it was a very difficult thing going from Rosa to well as the fact that like the model 3 stars modules is kind of vestigial its vestige oh yeah because if the modules the model three are not actually interchangeable so there's no point in having modules really your Sabbath Jewish just have a pack was that done to just save Causton or some other reason it just sort of because it's not it's not a sensible reason the the the reason that there were cells modules in pack goes back to the earlier days where would make a module that module would have problems and so then you could swap out a module it's like a like a server rack the idea was like you know if you have a bunch of servers in a server room and one of the servers flakes out you can pull out for another in so without our interface so so you could replace a small fraction of pack instead of the whole pack then but then that concept just carried forward into Model S X and 3 but without the original logic no longer exists because the modules are not interchangeable yeah you can't just swap out a module so but these things just have a lot of inertia so we really want to move to no such thing as a module there's just sales in pack yeah yeah cuz I mean initially they have the battery swap facility right at how yes I mean and then the model three I don't think I have that capability that you could actually swap the whole pack out quickly right does not yeah right mm S&X still have the ability to do a fast pack swap but it thinks essentially evolved in the same direction that phone's evolved mm-hmm you know for a long time phones had swappable battery packs mm-hmm and now basically nobody almost nobody makes a phone with this woful battery pack definitely as soon as the range gets past a certain point then I agree yeah it doesn't make sense but but this was far from clear at the time of designing the Model S so worked a lot of trouble to make the S&X pack capable of a fast swap with quick disconnects and bolts coming in only from the bottom and that kind of thing and they were did that demo we swapped out two packs faster than some people gasp that's amazing it's kind of ridiculous to me like taking the battery out of your car just and you know Harris Ranch and they put a new battery in and you'd come back it was kind of like it's good that supercharging got a lot better yeah it was just way better to increase the range of the pack and have better faster charging so but but the this debate which seems obvious in retrospect was not obvious at the time definitely and and the air back then I think at least a lot of phones had swappable packs because this was sort of would have been designed in you know we had the first prototype out in 2010 for the more less so back in 2010 let's say the thought process going into this in 2009 would have been you know a time when under maybe most phones had solvable packs or something like that you know I thought it was like 2007 or something iPhone one and yeah so that so then it doesn't didn't make sense but but you know countries have a lot of momentum so the the snx pack is still a swappable pack yeah yeah as its I was like sterile have changed the design and well 3 still has modules even though shouldn't have modules if some degree like what you'll see in any given product is that the the errors in the structure of an organization will manifest themselves in the product so you know that's where we have module team so we have modules like we're saying you just combine the module team with the pack team and there were of your modules so generally the you yeah the errors no ization manifest themselves in the product you can see where the organizational boundaries are and then and then you'll often get like a box in a box it's like wait why is this thing you have two boxes well because DS this team wanted to have an enclosure and this team wanted to have an enclosure and so they they having a closure on enclosure this is still the case with them of them one cell is a cow what a silly thing but that's actually the case with the model 3 well 3 battery pack has a top enclosure and the car also has an underbody yep what's the point of that that doesn't make any sense because the pack the pack team wanted to have an enclosed battery pack and the body team wanted to have an enclosed body yeah that makes sense but you don't need to so yeah this is all this and putting the talk cover on the battery pack is a big pain in the neck so as mass and cost and stuff so that should definitely go away in the future but lots of brackets on brackets that kind of thing so you survived the production howl of the model 3 which was pretty intense I mean that was like it's stupendously difficult and I mean thing is sort of it has a manner of his sacrifice team might be accurate is the first company coming to reach volume production I think in an 80 80 or 90 years that in the u.s. yeah it's a harder time you do it for sure yeah the complexity of like what people expect or requirements and the minimum expectations for a car at this point are dramatically more than they were 80 or 90 years ago and the place you chose to do it - yeah and so that was a super difficult one there's like the sauce a car company startups but that's during the prototype is the easy part - building a production system is a hundred times harder yeah so I mean that's where you see the things fail like yeah but they've been over the course of the last century probably thousands of car companies startups most of which people have never heard about you know occasionally like hear about something like a DeLorean or a Tucker most of them this there's there's not even a footnote and it's it's because the difficulty of production and then you know and here's a real important point that is not well appreciated this is a point that should be advanced by short-sellers but I not T not I've not seen or articulated which it should be the the incumbent car companies make most of their money from selling spare parts to their existing fleet at high margins and they'll sell the new cars either at de facto zero margin or even at a loss it's kind of like printers and cartridges or razors and blades you sell the r8 razor at a loss celebrates or profits or in trouble SLO quatrain of profit or video game consoles you know the actual cost of say an Xbox is $600 you can buy it for three or four hundred dollars because they make it up on in the games that are bored so the this is this now so if you're a new company you do not have a fleet you use so you have no fleet with which to subsidize the sale of your new cars this is the this is the primary reason there has not been a successful car company startup in the United States this is the primary reason so because the in chemical car companies have eighty percent of their fleet outside warranty or something like that maybe it's seventy percent but approximately like if a car last for say twenty years or something like that and the warranties for four years then it's eighty percent out of warranty so even if they stopped selling new cars they would still mean the profit would increase so according to Edmunds dealerships make twenty percent of their revenue but 50 percent of their profits on service yeah exactly so and and and the cop of the car companies themselves will often make more than a hundred percent of their profit on selling spare parts Wow yeah so it's a like if the point which they're making say a hundred and ten percent of the profit from selling spare parts that means that they're actually selling in your closet at a loss so this is a this is the very difficult thing to overcome in order to overcome it the the a car has to be significantly more compelling than other than other vehicles such that people are willing to pay a premium and that you can actually be positive cash flow aspirationally profitable with selling new cars not simply selling spare parts to the fleet so I mean a for Tesla's fleet is probably ten percent of Tesla's fleet or second less than twenty percent is out of warranty whereas 80 percent of the other car makers is out of warranty so this makes it very difficult also electric cars need much less servicing so that that's another difficult thing so that this is this is the main does this should be the main argument advanced I think for why a car car in your car company cannot successful the main one and so yeah and then like I said they think that in order for that card havoc alchemy to have any chance there must be it must be compelling enough that people will pay for you otherwise there's no chance and I think there's actually in order for comedy to be successful it has to succeed on two on two fundamental technology discontinuities one being electrification the yellow and being autonomy I think not even even pure electrification by itself is not enough they say you can indicate with like system very brush line they're living to major technology step changes being electrification and autonomy and the combination of those two is the only thing is that's the only opening for a new company to make it yeah make sense of you know without autonomy you'd probably have to wait for EVs to reach price parity we thought with autonomy you can drive many more miles and bridge that gap easier and it's like well Tesla's moat in some ways are not moat I guess but um like Tesla's advantage in many ways is bigger because like these are two such different technologies that are happening at once that you've been working on well nobody else has so it's like that much harder to replicate now that it's been accomplished almost it's very hard for it's very hard for any okay any new car company to get on the market that they have to make it very compelling a product it means they have to have some significant technology advancements in the electric drive for you drivetrain and the battery pack and just generally over the car itself and then the autonomy has to be very compelling but autonomy in and of itself is enormous so the both of those things um okay County must be successful in doing or they will end up in the cemetery so that's that's the real challenge of it yeah well even with like the I mean the software updates I mean that's something that no other manufacturer can really even get right they can't do it over the air you guys take your car into you know because it doesn't work right so that's a core component of providing updates instead of getting your revenue now from the dealership and spare parts of stuff you can actually send software as a service you know we actually did a whole podcast on this well goal is to minimize service costs yeah whereas the other car countries this is Owens Haley goes to max my service costs but it's a you know to minimize well car companies also have two different businesses as the dealerships where their business is actually just service and and I don't think it's any one surprise that that people don't like going to their dealer I mean it's like it's it's because their incentives are actually not aligned with the what the customers are saying incentives they their goals bring you back as often as possible yeah they're the dealerships in Sam's also most aligned with the the car companies in the during a warranty period because the warrant the car company has to write I pay for the warranty that the service during warranty so it's it that there have a conflict of you cannot contribute to contrary to enter of interests yeah the guy car company has covered the warranty costs but the the dealership makes profit on the servicing so they want to maximize servicing even during the warranty period it's almost like the economic factors you just mentioned have created like complacency where there is no innovation because you know nobody can just start a car company yeah right I mean it's like show photos of creative destruction struction you know there's like the innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry so if there's if an industry is formed and all I could elegantly or something like that then they were the forcing function is weak for innovation because innovation tends to come from new entrants yeah this problem with rockets this does not know our new entrance so innovation forcing function is weak but it's encouraging to see your rocket booster land you and everyone else like wow we can't innovate maybe yeah it's actually surprising how little innovation has been on there and despite SpaceX showing reusable rockets landing and reflowing these Rockets many times the like come on you know is copy yet something I mean yeah yeah that works just do the same thing didn't like Chinese space companies started putting great fins on their Rockets I think there's some Chinese rocks that have launched with grid fins well you can really use any kind of fun great friends just a more predictable across a range of speeds so from hypersonic sit through you know supersonic transonic subsonic there they're just it's quite easy to predict the behavior of a Griffin and the center of pressure where Griffin doesn't change that much worse if you have a a you know fin fin like a wing looking thing that you'll see quite a big change in where the center of pressure is across a wide Mach regime they either wonderboy the shuttle didn't have Griffin's what do you think about rocket laps approach of trying to use a helicopter to recover that first stage yeah I think that's gonna be harder than it seems but the their booster is quite small so that the issue with helicopters you write into a max lowered problem like the lifting capability of helicopters not that great and that lifting capability drops with altitude and then the Ranger helicopters will so not that great so so then you end up having to helicopter on a ship and then if in that in heavy weather conditions you can't take off so that you're gonna you have to be your whether constraints at the launch point and the catch point are and up limiting your launch availability and then then you got it it's it's it's dangerous you've got somebody in a helicopter with a you know pilots try and catch this thing coming out of this guy it doesn't sound too sane there's certainly the potential for somebody you know so we go wrong whereas if you have a grown ship there's you know it smashes into the drawer trim it's not a big deal but specially into helicopter that's a big deal yeah so you know overall I bet yeah thatthat said I've been pretty impressed with rocket lab and they're made they're making we're making a go of it yeah and they're gonna you do reusability which is important it's fundamental you guys still see yourself doing that city-to-city Travel in 30 minutes one day it would be awesome yeah yeah I think they can for sure can be done yeah I'm sure gonna be done it is it is loud that's but it's really annoys is that the biggest concern they're both taking off or landing when it comes in for landing that sonic boom is loud it's like yeah there's actually two sonic booms so it sounds like somebody just discharged a double-barrel shotgun in your backyard so it's not like it's breaking windows or anything but it's like it's be pretty annoying your is happening on a regular basis that's basically what I'm about to say that you have to do offshore so I think will do but it can't be done definitely um and it's a fastest way to get anywhere based on known physics so and I think the economics can be made to work as well so that it would be competitive with international air travel today Wow I can't wait for that I travel a lot like today sure like minimum like 12 hour to 14 I'll show ya will you try to keep most the launches around the equator just or would it matter like it doesn't matter a ton it matters if you're going east to you know if you're from if you launched East you have the advantage of the Earth's rotation the closer you are the equator and more you can take advantage of with rotation if you if you fly west you're actually counteracting the Earth's rotation so your Delta blushes that you need is higher but you go neither direction I think what about whenever I upcoming launches is actually retrograde retrograde flight so it's gonna go against the Earth's rotation yeah but if starship is gonna launch so many times a day how do you gonna produce all these Raptors because we've been we've been touring the SpaceX factory North on and you're doing you're making them by hand right are you gonna automate any of this yeah I wouldn't say it's being made by hand the being assembled by hand maybe but yeah that's why I say we have a lot of metal printers with a whole yeah that's a 3d printers are crazy Reedy metal printing Wow yeah love it I mean I think SpaceX is pushing the envelope for metal printing more than anyone else oh these that's what's the splash tell us but we also have a foundry that so we do a casting of exact parts for a raptor with a lot of CNC machines it's a very complicated engine to build a moment looks like a toy or relative to your after it's very simple but we're gonna make a lot of raptors than starships those are they gonna be made in the States then yes okay they'd have to be much matter yeah yeah we can get simple ingredients from outside the US but other than that we're not we we cover know how to transmit any sort of gas I yeah yeah yeah no no no anything like is a quite a sophisticated element of a rocket engine were allowed to transfer out the awesome or yeah rocket II stuff is the weapons technology so so just a starship when it's assembled will fly there and come back so I technically there's a lot of rockets at the bottom of the ocean so if your city to city rocket travel works does that mean Tesla doesn't need to build an electric airplane man well English we are plane has a lot of difficulty associated with that or what about the VTOL jet it's a lot of difficulty associated with that I I gotta make sure well it takes a massive amount of effort to do any one of these things so you can't do them all it's not possible you say that say well oh how are you I like it the resources what's the best thing to do making a VTOL jet you can definitely be done doing electric aircraft for sure you know old transport will go electric except for rockets yeah everything I guess why it seems exciting is because if Tesla's leading an energy density and battery technology then the logical next step is like if somebody's gonna build an electric airplane it's the company with the best lightest most efficient batteries right yeah it's it's not it's just it's hard it's an entirely different regulatory regime it's like there's there are there aren't any car companies that are also aircraft companies so why don't they just make it aircraft after you know it's kind of funny there was like some conspiracy theories on Twitter because on Instagram Tesla's yeah allegory it said automotive and then somehow aircrafts is go God like at the cyber truck event or cyber charter an airplane this is like your Wikipedia I think it's incredibly hard to bring an aircraft to production and meet all of the regulatory requirements worldwide very it's a very difficult thing so it's not like we're good at something it could be used to be done we would have to not do a bunch of other things it's not like there's like a ton of unallocated resources tell so I'm like well what should we do no it's like a constant resource starvation so there's like Wendy's other thing I'll give what we were starving for resources yeah then what will you not do well it seems like that's what's so exciting is now that the business is kind of taking this next step that resource like starve is kind of changing or hopefully slowly changing okay and therefore I'm like hit another car something it's not yeah not a giant airplane so I'm just in general it seems like the financial help means you can spend more on R&D you can invest more like that's not how it works this it's not like if you just had more money you could spend it effectively an RD but if there was a if there's a factory producing excellent engineers that would be true where is this Factory it doesn't exist so it's incredibly difficult to find the right talent to integrate them into an organization and how it'd be work effectively it's not a money thing it's just hard to find that this is a short and a small number of people you know more engineers especially there's just a fundamental limitation on exceptional engineers there's just not that many so given like these constraints and all the things you have to do could you tell us like a little bit about your thinking on how you prioritize and the prioritize prioritizing has usually been out of desperation not choice but it's not like oh let's sit back and how shall we spend these resources thing isn't gonna work we're gonna if we don't make it work we're gonna go back up you know and then so we better make it work I mean the mall 3 program there were so many mistakes that were made with all three program that the entire company had to be devoted to fixing the model 3 production system so you know we would cook everyone off solar almost everyone off in a battery pack power world power pack and that kind of thing anyone who was working on you know roads the semi everyone yeah stop doing that working model 3 or there won't be any Tesla yeah it's kind of amazing you really bet the whole company to get to this next level but you know I mean I have a model 3 I couldn't afford a Model S so like I'm very thankful that you guys decided it that Thole company there was no choice it's like either you go to you got to get to volume is those chicken and egg situation you can't make the car at an affordable price unless you have high volume unless you have a high volume you can't get an affordable price so now what do you do yeah how do you brew strap this thing that you basically just kind of take a giant flying leap at high volume and hope you get to the you know grab a cliff at ledge with your fingertips it's like that Indiana Jones really like riding down the thing and this here's what it actually feels like it's like that what temple are doing what all right you know where's like there's a damn boulder chasing you down okay on the ground can you make that game you need it jump across a holographic and if you slow down the bullet is gonna crush you this is what it feels like it's like I don't shoot you'll do Boulder drill a hole in the ground and they drive across or you die so that's basically order you know get the situation you know like like at this point maybe we could say like okay what shall we do at this point you know the the biggest problem we have to solve right now is having production on each continent because it's insane to be making cars in California shell bring them to Europe and and Asia this is I mean as it is making kosnov areas pretty absurd and then you also go to ship those cars half around the world and so you got all this finished goods inventory on the waters that's very high capital carrying cost and you can finance part of it but not all of it is so but you know then there's you got the transport costs you got tariffs you got you know every time a car gets loaded or unloaded there's some potential for damage just let zero you know so it just creates a lot of cost and and and then it's hard to manage the factory complexity in California it is amplified because you've got several different regulatory regimes so you're building it seems like you're building model 3 where you're actually building several versions when well three depending upon whether it's going to china japan australia europe then you go to go down right-hand drive as I put that there every night everything's gonna go some random bureaucratic decision hundred years ago right hand dryer left arrived this is a mega pay in the end yeah absolutely and then all these different languages you know can't have like warning labels in English it wasn't they don't speak English it's like I don't know what it means so this is stickers all over the place for you know seventeen different languages or whatever it is and that's all in one factory so so so the complexity amplifies the difficulty of manufacturing and then you can't get into the cycle where in the first month in the quarter well let's say first six weeks in the quarter you build cars for Europe and Asia and you get them on the boats and then for the next say three weeks you build cars for the east coast of the US or North America and then the final three weeks you both coasts cause for the west coast so the the deliveries early in the quarter look look very very low and they spiked exponentially at the end because basically all the cars arrive at the customers at the end of the quarter and then they were like then we'll have these conversations we've got to get out of this wave like and they're like we'll hope they'll punish us very badly if we get out of the way because the financials will look horrible yeah so then we know okay we'll do the wave again and so that we so now we've got a Factory in Shanghai that should that'll go a long way towards levy ating the complexity and the cost you know we'll have far fewer goods that we need to finance better on boats we want to get the factory going in Berlin Brandenburg technically looks close to blue and then then that's this massively reduces the complexity of production and and introduces the fundamental cost of the vehicle so this will really distressed the company a lot so local production will break the wave logo production will break the wave I mean just like we've had number times that headlights have come up as an issue we have this is crazy we've had to ship cars to Europe many times where the the supplier of the headlights for the EU headlights couldn't match rate and and that or made them wrong or something and then so it may have to make cause with us headlights shove them to Europe then ship a bunch of EU headlights to Europe change them in the port because they know how to exit the port until they have the EU headlights oh my god so that was the port problems we would see that's one of the many port homes I like like the first year quarter last year was a tragedy of errors it was not a comedy but a tragedy if Alton went on strike right and you know and I like what I mean Belgium's on strike yeah coming into subversion and like okay now what do we do nothing just the cars are stuck because a good ok the theater then they're scheduled to go off strike in this other day and like ok so then we can move things great there's just so many so many things and it caused get stuck in the port of Shanghai because they had the wrong sticker oh my god yeah I know [Laughter] it's better off like just mini in China absolutely sure like totally agree you don't have to spend like two weeks three weeks on the ocean go there and roll thicker and you have to wait every place people don't appreciate Giga Shanghai yet until recently nothing not yet I don't think people have realized it awful it's extremely important yeah yeah and these like shipping times all that like like like technically as possible if your everything goes right you can get the car there in two weeks but the ships don't don't leave every single Bay and then you also have to queue you can't just instantly load the cars so the cause you have like send like two thousand cars to a lot in like you know for Oakland and for San Francisco you accumulate the cars moot then they get moved to another place then they get loaded onto the ship one at a time yeah and then finally the ship leaves and they like sometimes the ship has problems yes like the storms or something calming customs so much drama anyway to go wrong I say yeah I'm like the ship's engine broke down somewhere yeah it's great like right now like everything roll off the production line go directly to the right it's wonderful so I have another question it's like from your perspective how do Cheney's public perceive Evie well China's very Pro Evie and it's Vegas TV mark in the world I think it's it's like half of all the Eevee's or made and bought in China yes I mean like right now yeah yeah so that not that China sort of subsidies for eby's dropped conservatively so that did cause a reduction a lot but it is EBE incentives were very high in China yeah and now they're much less than like a third what they used to be or less yes so the so that's caused some decline in demand as one would expect but I still trying to instill the biggest market for EVs in the world so I think they're very positively received wow that's great yeah so talking about the incentives because you I know the the price there was a small price reduction right in the Chinese bottle three and then but then the subsidies were there balance so it's actually not it's not any impact on Tesla and then the profit right no I didn't make so yeah well you know the obviously look at if it depending on what percentage of the car is made in China the parts that are made in China are not subject to a tariff so that's with me helpful we also save on logistics and generally we found that locally sourced parts in China cost less than in the you know in the US for Europe so this all pretty helpful also the Tesla got added to the purchase tax exemption which which although the other this is I'm not sure if you like the rest just how much of an article battle Tesla has had to sell cause in China it's been a you know really we hadn't basically no access to any on subsidies and repaid a tariff and we had to shut the cars over and every single thing was set against Tesla and still we made progress and decently well so I think there will be much better a much better situation with local production they not have a Jeju shipping and tariffs and and being able to have lower cost local sourcing of components so it does make a big difference I think is that your victory dance that's a big deal huge yeah just uh there's just fundamental economics it kind of makes sense that making cars on the continent where there are we'll be a lot more efficient than making them in California and shoving them around the world no and you can get paid for the cars before paying your suppliers which seems to not be the case if you're shipping around the world that could be a huge like friction on the whole kind of cash flow situation rate has been we're sure will sure make a big difference on cash flow because yeah it's there's no way to get the cars especially to Europe but but even trying to get them to customers you know before we have to pay suppliers so if you're a rapidly growing company it's it's night and day if if you get paid by your customers before you have a failure suppliers like nine day because the faster you grow the video cash cash position is but if it's the other way around where you have to pay your suppliers before you get paid for customers to get paid by customers then the faster you grow the the faster your cash position professor all yes because he doesn't spend more money to make yes it's a growth growth actually it causes you to auger into the ground in a situation like that now tells we had a mixture of both things where we had a lot of customers in say in California and and that's that's fast for sure we would get paid by customers faster then we'd have to pay suppliers but then for cars going to Europe and Asia with theirs it's the other way around you know so we would have to pay suppliers before we got paid by customers and now we could offset some of that with an asset-backed line which was pretty helpful but only some of it not all of it and so the this is the fundamental financial health for sure improves dramatically by just having just been having a factory on the continent okay we're not talking next door but it's just how many OSHA year is it like especially Europe was logistically super hard because we're on the west coast if we run east coast then then China would be much harder but if but if you're on the west coast your charter because you got to go through the Panama Canal or even worse around said you know Tierra del Fuego because sometimes the parent Panama can all get backed up like this friggin ship is going to the Antarctic okay it's like to the end and it's stormy as hell this is good since ship around Chile are you kidding you know in the little crazy storms and then back up all the way and then like you know it is oh my god so little justic nightmare um so yeah we great to just have I have it not get on a boat and cross the Pacific and Atlantic and that kind of thing so maybe similar to Vincent's question all I what's the biggest advantage in choosing Berlin compared to other European countries Berlin has the best make those once years ago well dad I don't know I mean he looked a lot of different different locations and I mean sort of I don't know I we could we could have put it in a lot of locations we needed to move move quickly and and actually this this place you know it's like we're of the 30 minutes to the outskirts of Berlin technically in Brandenburg it actually was a place location that BMW was going to put a plant there so a ton of the environmental work all of the permits and stuff had already been done and then for some reason BMW chose a different location but there's like I guess or something on the order of a year's work worth of environmental you know paperwork and stuff that's been done on that location for an order plans so that's it made it one of the quickest places to get going and the generally like that the government local and state government was very supportive so you know I went there and it's like okay this seems like some pretty good vibes this place so this was all lovely part of this lovely place and those opportunity for like it's it's closed after Billa and that's a young people kids still you know live in an apartment in Berlin and commute to the factory it's right there's a train station actually move the train station it's a small train station but they're gonna move for the train station to where you can literally get off the train and be right at the Ganga balloon wow that's perfect you could literally just pop right off and you know walk well very near to bicycle so then it's like okay this is pretty cool and yeah so so young people career in berlin department and selects you know working here willing but if you want to have more of a family situation but backyard there's you know affordable housing available with you know houses with your arts and stuff that aren't too expensive yeah so it seems like a good good combination of factors and a lot of talent in the area so it sounds cool to grateful in it this is just sound like some get some cool nightclub I think you could definitely have any cool neckline that was cooled that view oh yeah good [ __ ] Shanghai - it sounds pretty cool new party - oh yeah yeah yeah we're like a rave cave in the you should have like your own nightclub yeah but I think that'll be a food who doesn't know what should do that I feel like I'd go fresh or work at a company way that's good tonight that sounds way more fun didn't you want to put a roller coaster into a tree manufacturing yeah you're still gonna do that I mean I think that would be pretty fun to do okay here you just like - yeah just basically have like we just needed a rail that can support like a modified - modified Tesla's and and then yeah the invention of plaid flat yeah just like zip around around the factory like five seconds doors would be booked for months yeah we should get in right now yeah we kind of actually in various pasta factory we have vehicle conveyance systems they just don't move that fast but they're kind of like roller coasters that move slowly exactly oh yeah but yeah we're feeling pretty you know work no ten feet or anything but like pretty good about where things are headed and I think this is a skull I got a lot of good things you know the model white coming out this year and some exciting announcements about batteries a lot of progress in the auto pilot yeah yeah so boolean giggle in and and then make your progress on some of the new vehicle developments I don't insulate the solar roof spoiler glass roof getting rolled out the cyber truck got received really well I think yeah did you expect that many orders I'm not no not really when I first saw the cyber truck and I in in Francis design studio I mean you know you know it had told me that this was a this was a daring design although I think you the most excited about this design than any just yeah I think it's our best product ever yeah and I saw it I was just taken aback and not not by the design so much by the pure aggression that the truck you stand in front of it you're like okay I'm afraid you know it really is like a badass truck yeah yeah well it seemed like the lot of reasons why people buy pickup trucks you know in the US was like because it's like the most badass you know like yeah like which one is the toughest truck and yes like that what stuff other truck a tank like a tank from the future so it's a good G just in case the first four are busy yeah absolutely yeah it's literally like so how you out tough a truck use bigger futuristic overstock area and that's the tougher than a truck and I feel like autonomy you'll probably be very like mature by the time it ships yeah for sure so how many cyber truck orders do we have right here raise your head I got one I ordered three I mean it's gonna be pretty special and I'd look like the other thing so you know yeah it looks so cool like the first time I showed it to my son is like daddy this is something from alien this is the first impression yes yes it is that's that's how it was designed it was like what's the you know list let's make a future futuristic armored personnel carrier you know and so the inspiration board was like literally like you know Blade Runner you know like sort of Mad Max back to the future you know aliens hideous you know they've like yeah so it's the best way it looks like like the pre-order number it's amazing what's gonna be over like 400,000 all right I think it was risky and it just like at first people were like even people who like or hardcore fans let's go and then people are like wait a minute like yeah uh-huh kind of amazing I want they could see it like there was like in person you can see it we're having really fast the reaction and then they're processing then you seeing all the features and then the range in the price those are the compelling things are really healing like just hit everybody the forty thousand was the biggest job I was like oh people are gonna be buying in that range to like it's just actually just sixty nine thousand five hundred miles 2.9 seconds like claw [Applause] he'd loved it too right he did actually yeah yeah this is one of the last things he said actually don't see ya did he have a drive in it and no he saw pictures of it but I think he was not obviously he died recently so you didn't use what you saw pictures and he said yes great and it says send us a note like loves it you know yeah so you know you wanna you wanna have these things that inspire people feels different and I like everything else is like the same it's like variations on the same theme you want to have something different yeah but if you felt like how many I wasn't sure if nobody would buy it or a lot of you know I don't know but you know I just told Tim I listen to nobody wants to buy this we can always make one that looks like the other trucks that's not like yeah yeah you don't just try it and yeah that's it was a you know GU say okay was a weird failure but no no I'll make one night looks just like the others and there you go yeah it seems to capture the whole world though like elevated Tesla and the cultural zeitgeist in a way that like is so exciting like the Travis Scott music video already happened like that was so I was the first music video I was like ever to us yes so yeah it's gonna be hard to make that by the way so it's not it's because because it's a different architecture that's an exoskeleton architecture so there isn't any cars out there that I have an extra skill in architecture so if you got to rethink how they will the internals of the car done so that you can use the external shell as as as a load-bearing structure instead of just basically thin sheet metal that is effectively that just there for aerodynamic reasons so you can take you could take the the external that make what's called a class of so soft most cars and still drive around it loose almost no structural that value a you should go very very thin sheet metal so it's a totally new scale and obviously some challenges building that it's a starships three it's a star you can use the same steel as the ship yeah I'd love one of those limited quantity once oh I don't like it Tim yeah Tim Tim would ask about that every day astronaut yeah that's cool guy is okay he really knows his ways to learn about yeah it does so yeah those this is what if you know a lot of good things undoubtedly be some you know setbacks along the way but it's looking looking pretty good should we do some closing thoughts you know I just remember when I got my model 3 it was like a difficult time in my life and it made it easier and you know you don't have to buy gas car drives you around just makes your life better all of our lives in these little ways like all this struggle you do it you know it really makes things better and just makes you hopeful and inspired and you know just can't thank you and the whole Tesla team and enough for for all the love you put into the car you know every day it's just happy because I have a model three no that's cool I'm glad you like it as I go I go so you know maximize make feel like really touch people's heart and with the product and it's a I think it like to any of these companies out there the design these things probably is sort of a spreadsheet and script marketing surveys and that kind of thing without saying do you love it you like the part that you're making you touch my heart very much I like thank you for this chance like doing interview with all of us and I'm SS shareholder and model 3 owner I remember like one time you tweaked about your money is first in and we'll be lost out yeah I was really touched to see that tweak I think it's like years ago sure like right after one of the shareholder meeting I was like like we Co would do this and like after iPod my model three I'm more believed to the company like I older motoi and then to psy was from Porsche fans before and then the Rhino like he was gonna get a take on until he saw the range yeah I I was thinking to get at a car like why not like give it a try but sure well you look at the spec the to range turn me off like yeah it's obvious we'd already 201 like who's gonna buy it for 150 K well just not talk about money just talk about range itself it's a spec it's like it's not there yet yeah so with like 150 K Plus like nobody gonna buy it yeah so thank you all and absolutely thank you very much oh yeah well I think thanks you guys for your support was really it makes difference yeah yeah I mean I don't know Tesla so I hope hopefully I will truck though yeah yeah sure yeah and your shareholders gonna call it yeah yeah I gotta save up but I will buy one and I've got to say a truck like you say no but um thank you for me I've made so many great memories just like through these cars like I've met all you guys through Tesla and this is like amazing just like what kind of community just is created through products that you love and I think that really means a lot like I don't I think I've never seen people being so excited about a product before I like having this whole family feeling that's really cool thank you so much anyways welcome yeah thank you yeah I just want to say congrats first of all because I feel like this has been it's kind of like a feel-good moment for Tesla all that's happening yeah obviously thank you because like you've inspired all of us and I think there's not many things in the world that like people get pumped about that are positive about the future like I really feel like we need that now and so Tesla like bringing us all together has been really awesome and really much-needed I think great this is really cool I think I'd have to agree with what gali said just where Tesla's going um you have a car that's actually making a difference with the clean energy changing the earth cleaning things up I mean it made me excited to see and you're so efficient and you can you actually get things the way you do it you just I don't know you get it done and and I trust you and I trust the company and I it's it's I don't know such a passion it's amazing I thought no I just don't get the words out sometimes late but we get things we get it done in the end yeah yeah yeah always deliver yes thank you you're welcome no thanks please for it well I just want to say like how I described this this podcast like we kind of kind of just grew out grassroots right and I look at you as also part of the community you're as much third row as all of us right so I I mean I'm I'm really grateful you were able to come on this and also tell these really show more people I hope we can do it again too because there's so I'm sure there's gonna be sure things that come up that we can set the record straight yeah and then maybe have some celebrations dude so yeah that sounds good yeah there's a lot of exciting things probably like said probably some you know if disasters and draw along the way so Sarah how is that good we'll be there that helps yeah it was always good to get feedback like you know and if you would be sure in my position what would you do like it a lot of times like I just don't know if something's wrong I don't even know what's wrong you know it has to have to learn it somehow you know and then I'll cure you know forgot okay how do we deal with all these different issues you know it's scaling service effectively it's very difficult for example and so that's like what are you it's like a mundane thing but it's very important definitely yeah I think the mobile service is incredible yeah I mean I've had I'm on my fifth tussel now yeah not the last because I just keep upgrading them no the last one I so I have a p100 the Model S which is outside right there and yeah I I have that I got the license plate get Tesla yeah yeah if you want it I would love to give it to you so yeah thank you again thank you cool yawn can you sign my model three oh yeah my bottle let's do all right cool [Applause] [Music] you

https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA

the following is a conversation with elon musk his third time on this the lex friedman podcast yeah make yourself comfortable oh no wow okay no no you don't do the headphone thing no okay i mean how close do i get need to get this thing the closer you are the sexier you sound hey babe yeah can't get enough of the what y'all that baby i'm gonna clip that out anytime somebody messages me about it and you think i'm sexy come right out and tell me so so good okay serious mode activate all right mode come on you're russian you can be serious everyone's serious all the time in russia yeah yeah 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 is 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 and reason to be excited about the future oh it's kind of you to say it 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 love humanity and i think we should uh make sure we do everything we can to have a good future and an exciting future and one where that maximizes the happiness of the people let me ask about uh crew dragon demo two so that that first flight with humans on board how did you feel leading up to that launch were you scared are you excited what's going through your mind so much was at stake yeah no that was extremely stressful no question 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 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 could not think of anything more and and nor could nasa and so then 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 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's for high stress situations i find it's not so much elation as relief um and um you know i think once as as we we got more comfortable and improved 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 enjoyable with the subsequent uh astronaut uh missions and i thought the the inspiration mission was was actually very inspiring um the inspiration for mission um i'd encourage people to watch the inspiration documentary on netflix it's actually really good um and it really isn't so i 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 it was the high i think the highest orbit that uh in like under 30 or 40 years or something the only one that was higher was the one shuttle sorry a 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 good 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 water mark for humanity you know and that then that's as far as we ever got and it's um it's concerning that here we are um 49 years after the last mission to the moon it's 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 what so like i think 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 based in antarctica and you know many other parts of the world and um so that that that's like i think the next big thing we've got to have like a serious like moon base um and then get people to mars and you know get get out there and be a space bearing 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 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 want 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 a moment that how many moments would 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 i think i think maybe some people know but a lot of people don't know it's 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 say oh this is a spacecraft or a rocket and this looks really cool i'm like i've like a readout of like this is the these are these are the risks these are the pro the problems that's what i see 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 yeah talk about it now if you want um but just in that same way like you said you see when you see up when you see a rocket you see a sort of a list of risks in that same way you said that starship is a really hard problem so there's 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 sasha 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 uh engine production not not the design of the engine but i've often said prototypes are are easy production is hard so we have the most advanced rocket engine that's ever been designed um the because i say currently the the best rocket engine ever is probably the rd 180 or rd-170 the um that that's 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 russian rd engines which are 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 the raptor is a a full flow uh staged combustion um engine and it's operating at a very high chamber pressure so one of the key figures america perhaps the key figure of merit is um what is the chamber pressure at which the rocket engine can operate that's the combustion chamber pressure so a raptor is 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 and the the the difficulty of the chamber pressure is increases on a non-linear basis so 10 more pressure is more like uh 50 more difficult um but that that chain of pressure is that that is what allows you to get a very high uh power density for the engine um so uh enabling um a very high thrust to weight ratio and a very high specific impulse so specific impulse is like a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine or um it's really the the the uh exhaust the effective exhaust velocity of of the gas coming out of the engine um so uh 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 exit nozzle uh and the uh throat so you know engine's got like you see a rocket just got like sort of like about 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 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 does complexity mean here's a lot of components involved there's a lot of a lot of components and a lot of uh unique materials that so we had to invent a several alloys that don't exist in order to make this engine work um materials problem too it's a materials problem and um it is in a staged combustion a full flow stage combustion there there are many uh feedback loops in the system so you uh basically you've got uh propellant and and and uh hot gas flowing um simultaneously to so many different places on the engine and they all have a recursive effect on each other so you change one thing here it has a recursive effect here it changes something over there and and 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 uh full flow is because it it has the highest uh the highest uh theoretical possible uh efficiency um so in 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 best airframe the best heat shield um extremely light uh avionics um you know very clever control mechanisms um you've got to shed mass in in any possible way that you can um for example instead of putting landing legs on the booster and chip we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing lens 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 karate kid with the fly but much bigger i mean pulling this probably won't work the first time uh and anyway so this is 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 will get starship to work um um there's a question of timing how long will it take us to do this how long will it take us to actually achieve a full and rapid reusability because it will take probably many launches before we are able to have full and rapid reusability but i can't 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 like let's say i'm very confident success is in the set of all possible outcomes 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 saying there's a chance i'm saying there's a chance exactly um uh just not sure how how how long it will take uh we're very very talented team they're working night and day to make it happen um and uh and like like i 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 oval rocket there's not even been any orbital rocket that's been fully reusable ever and this has always been the the the holy grail of rocketry and many smart people very smart people have tried to do this before and have 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 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-null set not 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 hmm i i just 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 my nature okay and i i don't care about optimism or pessimism [ __ ] that we're gonna get it done gonna 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 the different engineering and design problems is there like a systematic process you've spoken about first principles thinking but is there kind of a process to it well um you know like saying like like physics is 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 well something down to the most fundamental uh principles the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level and that sets you at 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 it's not gonna work um so uh that's you know so that's just to establish 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 do things change um well it's like tempo like in number of things you manufacture something like that and then in time yeah like let's say say the example of like um like manufacturing which i think is just a very underrated problem um and and uh likes it it's it's much harder to take an advanced technology product and bring it into volume manufacturing than it is to design it in the first place my orders magnitude so um so let's say you're trying to figure out is 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'm radically thinking about things to 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 and change the design to change changes apart to be something that is uh uh not fundamentally expensive but like that's a common thing in rocketry because the the unit volume 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 costs would be lower and like i'm like okay so let's say we skip 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 talk about resources and materials and stuff like that do you 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 uh if you've got if you look at the room raw materials in the rocket um so you're gonna have like uh aluminum steel titanium inconel especially specialty alloys um copper and and you say what are the how what what's the weight of the constituent elements of each of these elements and what is their raw material value and that sets the asymptotic limit for how low the cost of the vehicle can be unless you change 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 a like just 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 you're almost always a very low number um so then the what's actually causing these to be expensive is how you put the atoms into the desired shape yeah actually if you don't mind me taking a tiny tangent i had uh i often talked to jim keller who was somebody that worked with you oh yeah that's a fantastic job 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 guess i see that same thing at tesla and 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 teslabot we just we had an argument what is how can you reduce the cost of scale of producing a robot because i've gotten a chance to interact quite a bit um obviously in in the academic circles with humanoid robots and then boston 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 principle is thinking of how can we get the cost of manufacturing down um i suppose you do that you have done that kind of thinking for teslabot 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 mean i think if you are really good at manufacturing you can basically make at high volume you can basically make anything for a cost that asymptotically approaches the real 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 like i said for a class that asymptotically approaches raw material uh constituents plus intellectual property license rights so what will often happen in trying to design a product is people will start with the tools and and parts and methods that they are familiar with and then and try to create a product using their existing tools and methods the other way to think about it is actually imagine the try to imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology whatever it might be and so 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 it's almost like a rick and morty absurd until you start to really think about it and you really should think about it in this way because everything else is kind of uh if you if you think uh you you might fall victim to the momentum of the way things are done in the past unless you think in this way well just as a function of inertia people will 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 and then that will lead to an outcome of things that can be made with those tools and methods but it is unlikely to be the platonic idea of the perfect product um so then so that's why it's good to think of things in both directions they're 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 that that theoretical perfect part is going to be a moving target because as you learn more the definition of or or for that perfect product will change because you don't actually know what the perfect product is but you can successfully approximate a more perfect product 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 for people rarely think about it that way but it's a powerful tool i should mention that the brilliant siobhan zillis is hanging on hanging out with us 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 hmm best case is about five years worst case tenures what are the determining factors would you say from an engineering perspective or is that that not the bottlenecks uh you know it's fundamentally um you know engineering 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 orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of mars um this may seem like a mercantile objective but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized um like there is a certain cost per tonne to the surface of mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining uh city um and 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 your 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 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 need to be a multi-planet species um this may sound somewhat esoteric to to a lot of people but uh like eventually given enough time uh that's something the earth is likely to experience some calamity um that could be uh something that humans do to themselves or an external event like happen to the dinosaurs um and um but a bit of you know eventually and if nothing if none of that happens and somehow magically we keep going 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 because the current situation is really remarkable um and kind of hard to believe but uh it's been around four and a half billion years and this is the first time if one half billion years that has been possible to extend life beyond earth and that window opportunity may be open 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 window is open just in case 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 uh if it dies a demographic collapse then it's more of a whimper obviously but if it's world war three it's more of a bang but but these are all risks um i mean it's important to think of these things and just you know think of things as like probabilities not certainties um there's a certain probability that something bad will happen on earth like i think most likely the future will be good um but there's like let's say for argument's sake um a one percent chance per century of of a civilization ending event like that was stephen hawking's 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 multi-planet species just like taking out insurance for life itself like life insurance for life [Laughter] so it's turned into an infomercial real quick life insurance for life yes um and you know we we can bring the the the creatures from uh 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 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 we you know we we need the spaceships back like the ones that go to mars read 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 i'd like to come back and do another trip i mean do you think about the terraforming aspect like actually building are you so focused right now on the spaceships part that's so critical yeah tomorrow we absolutely if you can't get there nothing else matters so and like i said 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 deep space communications you need some kind of landing system so like rough approximation would be 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 than much less than a million ton but if it's not like it's got to be say if i say like what well how much can society affords 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 key threshold um the grateful to will will have been passed when the city on mars it 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 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 and it's only a matter of time you know you're going to die so so we're going to get 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 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 mars like i said you can't be missing any anything that in order to be self-sustaining you can't be missed like you need you know semiconductor fabs you need iron ore refineries like you need lots of things you know so um and mars is not super hospitable it's it's the least inhospitable planet but it's definitely a fixer-upper of a planet outside of earth yeah the earth is pretty earth is like easy yeah and also 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 hard to get there yeah way way way way too hard to say at least let me push back on that not really a pushback but a quick curveball of a question so you did mention physics as the the first starting point so um general relativity allows for wormholes uh they technically can exist do you think um those can ever be leveraged by humans to travel faster than the speed of light well are you saying the whole thing is debatable uh the that we currently do not know of any means of going faster than the speed of light uh there is like like 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's like that that's warping 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 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 towards space is so gigantic it's boggles the 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'm saying like the really the holy grail is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital system um so uh right now uh the falcon 9 is the only reusable rocket out there that but it but the the booster comes back and lands and you've seen the videos and we get the nose cone or faring back but we do not get the upper stage back so uh that means that we have a minimum cost of building up for stage um you can think of like a two-stage rocket of sort of like two airplanes like a big airplane and a smaller airplane um and we get big airplane back but not the smaller airplane and so it still costs a lot you know so that upper stage is you know at least 10 million dollars um and then the degree of the the booster is not as reused it's not as rapidly and completely reusable as we'd like in order of the fairings so you know our kind of minimum marginal cost not counting overhead for per flight is on the order of 15 to 20 million dollars 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 ton to orbit by uh a factor of a hundred but just think of it like um like imagine if you had an aircraft or something or a car oh yeah and if you had to buy a new car every time you went for a drive it would be very expensive it'll be 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 it's very difficult to make this complex machine that can go to orbit and so if you cannot reuse it and if you 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 two million dollars 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 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 brilliant break no there's no it just me you're gonna make the rocket reusable this is an extremely difficult insuring problem got it uh but no no new physics is required just brilliant engineering let me ask a slightly philosophical fun question gotta 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 the 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 it really gives people hope well it would be a new frontier and an opportunity to rethink the whole nature of government just as was done in the creation of the united states so i mean i would suggest having a direct democracy like people vote directly on things as opposed to representative democracy so uh representative democracy i think is too uh subject to a special interest 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 populist 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 cookies we have to accept cookies like always like you know there's like always like a slight amount of trepidation when you click accept cookies like i feel as though there's like perhaps like a like a very tiny chance that'll open a portal to hell or something like that that's exactly how i feel why why do they why do they keep wanting to accept that what do they want with this cookie like somebody got upset with accepting cookies or something somewhere who cares like so annoying to keep accepting all these cookies to me this is just a great exception yes you can have my damn cookie i don't care whatever you heard it from me on first he accepts all your damn cookies yeah and start asking me annoying yeah it's uh it's one example of um implementation of a good idea done really horribly yeah it's somebody was like there's some good intentions of like privacy or whatever but now everyone's just has to take accept cookies 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 world wars um the 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 one and two there were huge resets on rules and regulations now as for 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 so 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 uh done with good intentions but counterproductive sometimes not done with good intentions so um if you just if rules and regulations just accumulate every year and you get more and more of them then eventually you won't be able to do anything you're just like gulliver with you know tied down by thousands of little strings and we had we see that in um you know us and like basically all 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 that 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 because it doesn't have any garbage collection built in i think there should be i when you first said the the the metaphor of garbage collection from a coding standpoint from the colony standpoint yeah yeah i it would be interesting 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 yeah so that that's sort of it's not like somebody has to kill them they kind of die themselves they disappear yeah um not to defend java or anything but you know the c plus plus you know you could also have a great garbage collection in python and so on yeah so yeah something's good something needs to happen or or just the the civilization's arteries arteries just harden over time and and you can just get less and less done because there's just a rule against everything so yeah i think like i don't know for mars order i'd say or even for you 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 can also think of as like they're like software or lines of code for operating uh civilization that's the rules and regulations um so it's like we shouldn't have rules and regulations but you have code accumulation but no code removal um and so it just gets to 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 uh you know any given law must have a sunset you know and and and uh and require active voting to keep restoring to keep it up there you know um and i actually also say like and these just i don't know recommendations or thoughts and ultimately we'll be up to the people on mars to decide but 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's sake you need like say 60 percent vote to have a law take effect but only a 40 vote to remove it so let me be the guy you posted meme on twitter recently where there's there's like a row of urinals a guy just walks all the way across and he tells you about crypto listen i mean that's happened to me 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 dog coin that enables smart contracts somehow i never i don't quite understand this whole smart contract thing um you know i mean so it's two dumb times to have small contracts it'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 um and and just keep any kind of deal very very short and simple plain language and just make sure everyone understands this is the deal does everyone is it clear and uh and and what are the consequences if various things don't happen um but usually 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 yeah and you said that you were literally going spacex may consider literally putting uh a dosh coin on the moon is this something you're still considering uh mars perhaps do you think there's some chance we've talked about political systems on mars that uh dogecoin is the official currency of mars that's coming in the future well i think mars itself will need to have a different currency because you can't synchronize due to speed of light or not easily um so it must be completely standalone from earth well yeah because the but 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 something synchronizing you know if you could if if you've got a 20 minute speed light issue if it's got a one minute blockchain uh it's not going to synchronize properly um so mars really would i don't know if mars would have a cryptocurrency as a thing but probably seems likely but it would be some kind of localized thing on mars and you let the people decide yeah absolutely the future of mars should be up to the martians yeah so um i mean i think the cryptocurrency thing is an interesting 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 got in deep there um and right now the money system actually for practical purposes is is really a bunch of uh heterogeneous uh mainframes running uh old cobalt okay you mean literally that's literally that is literally what's happening in batch mode okay in patch mode yeah uh pretty the poor fastest who have to maintain that code okay that's a that's a pain that's pain not even for trans cobalt yep it's cobalt it's like and they still banks are still buying mainframes in 2021 and running ancient global 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 kobold mainframe and so now and 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 whenever they want and this increases the error in the database that is money so i think money should really be viewed through the lens of information theory and uh and so it's uh you're kind of like uh like an internet connection like what's the bandwidth uh you know total bit rate uh what is the latency judder uh packet drop uh you know errors in errors in the network uh communication using money like that basically um i think that's probably why i really 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 crypto is an attempt to reduce the the error uh in uh in money that is contributed by uh governments 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 information and it it does not have power in and of itself uh the like the you know again applying 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 resources to allocate except yourself so money is useless um uh if you're surrounded on desert island with no food you'd uh all the bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving yeah so um so like 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 it 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 this is 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 a transaction volume standpoint or a latency standpoint um uh so it is perhaps useful as as to search to solve an aspect of the money database problem uh which is the sort of store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations i suppose 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 information think about what kind of database what kind of infrastructure enables yeah like you're operating an economy um and you need to have some thing that allows for the efficient to have efficient uh value ratios between products and services so you've got this massive number of products and services and you need to you can't just bar barter it's like that would be extremely unwieldy so you need something that gives you the the an a a ratio of exchange between goods and services um and and then something that allows you to uh shift obligations across time like debt debt and equity shift obligations across time then what does what does the best job of that um part reason why i think there's some um merit to 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 cut like the costs of doing a transaction 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 when around 2008 or something like that um the internet connections were much worse than they are today like order of magnitude cup i mean there's the way way worse you know 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 did you know 2021 or fast forward 10 years it's like it's it's like comically 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 a currency is too deflationary or like uh or should say if if if if a currency is expected to increase in value over time there's reluctance to spend it because they're like oh i if i i'll just hold it and 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 total it but if there's some dilution of the currency occurring over time that's that's more of an incentive to use that as a currency so um those coins 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 there's there's some inflation but it's not a percentage base it's a it's so the it's a fixed number so the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time um so it just 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 i'm not would you tell us if you were yes okay uh do you think it's a feature of 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 i like i don't know exactly obviously i don't know who created bitcoin for practical purposes but the evolution of ideas is is pretty clear before that and like it seems as though like nick zabo uh is probably more than anyone else uh responsible for the evolution of those ideas so 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 involved in the evolution of ideas that led to a thing so yeah yeah it's you know and most perhaps it's sad to think about history but maybe most names will be forgotten anyway what is the 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 arose by any other name it smells sweet i gotta underquote shakespeare i feel i feel like i accomplished something today shall i compare it to a summer's day [Laughter] i'm gonna clip that uh out more tempered animal fare [Laughter] autopilot tesla [Laughter] 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 i think that's where we first like connected really with the autopilot stuff autonomy and the whole journey was incredible to me to watch i was um because i knew well part of as 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 darpa 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 yeah i thought there's no way the first one i got in i thought there's no way this car could maintain um like stay in the lane and create a comfortable experience so my intuition initially was that the lane keeping problem is way too difficult to solve oh thank you yeah that's relatively easy well yeah but like uh but not this but solve in the way that we just we talked about previous is prototype versus a thing that actually creates a pleasant experience over hundreds of thousands of miles or millions a lot of code around the mobile eye thing it doesn't just work by itself yes i mean 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 because it's such a such a difficult problem and so it was an incredible journey what i see now with um everything the hardware the compute the sensors the the things i maybe care and love about most is the the stuff that andre karpathy 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 uh you know versus the image net model of computer vision like what's in academia is like real world artificial intelligence so um andrei's awesome and obviously plays an important role but we have a lot of really talented people driving things so um and uh ashok is actually the head of autopilot engineering um uh andre is the 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 just uh you know as people people will give off will give me too much credit and they'll give andre too much credit so and people should realize how much is going on under the yeah it's just 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 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 leaped in having some sort of first principles kinds of intuitions but nobody knows how difficult the problem yeah like 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'd be easy i thought it'd be very hard but it was actually way harder than than even that so i mean what it comes down to at the end of the day is to solve self-driving uh you have to solve uh you you basically need to recreate um what you what humans do to drive which is humans drive with optical sensors eyes and biological neural nets um and so in order to that that's how the entire road system is designed to work with with uh basically passive optical and neural nets um it biologically um and now that we need to it so for actually for full-size 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 self-driving 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 car doors yeah um the the you know the fine details of car doors like what what is even an open car door man so like the the ontology of that that's the 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 and and then 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 these actually i think i think these could these sort of control 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 in this whole um beautiful complex problem so it's a lot of freaking software man a lot of smart lines of code um for sure in order to have um create an accurate vector space so like you you're coming from image space which is like this this flow of um photons you're going to camera cameras and and then uh so you have this massive bitstream um in image space and then you have to effectively compress uh the a massive bit stream uh corresponding to photons that knocked off an electron in a camera sensor uh and and turn that put stream into into vector space um i 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 auto cyberpunk um if you have accurate best vector space it's the control problem is it's i wouldn't say it's it's trouble it's not trivial but it's um like it's it's it's it's a it's not like some insurmountable thing it's a it's 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 mapping the raw photons to the vector space representation in our heads your brain is doing an incredible amount of processing um 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 cones like the cone receptors in the peripheral vision 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 this blood vessels and all sorts of gnarly things and there's a blind spot but do you see your blind spot no your your brain is painting in the missing the blind spot you're gonna 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 your brain will just fill in the the missing version the peripheral vision is so cool yes you realize all the illusions for vision sciences so 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 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 conscious it's it's it's it's like you'll see a car that's you could because you're you don't have cameras you i don't have eyes in the back your head on the side you know so you say like but you you 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 i say it's not that great okay you and i is uh 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 radio station so having arguments you know is like um so so then like say like like uh like when's the last time you look right and left and you know or and rearward 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 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 like concepts so it's not it's like it goes beyond the human mind seems to go sometimes beyond vector space to 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 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 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 a a bus and and you see that there's there's people before you drove past the bus you saw people crossing the interstate like or some just imagine there's like a large truck or something blocking site um but you before you came out 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 need to be able but you would now know okay those kids are probably gonna 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 position will be it's a really hard time of 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 i understand this yeah so some of it it's like object permanent it's like same thing happens with the humans with neural nets like when 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 just faired and now it's back again and they can't believe it and that they can play peekaboo all day long because this peekaboo is fresh every time [Laughter] but then we figure out object permanence then they realize oh no the object is not gone it's just behind your back um sometimes i wish we never did figure out objective permanence yeah so that's uh 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 card memory across both time and space um so now you can't remember like you have to say like how long do you want to remember things for and and it's it there's there's a cost to remembering things for a long time so you could you know like run out of 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 they're remember them for too long and then you also need things that are remembered over time so even if you like say have like fragrance like five seconds of memory uh on a time basis but like let's say you you're parked at light and you and you saw you use a pedestrian example that people were waiting to cross the across the road and you can't you can't quite see them because of an occlusion uh but they might wait for a minute before the light changes for them to cross the road you still need to remember 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 time-based memory should not exceed your space memory and 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 hydrogen at many parts we're changing the name to something else okay i'm sure it would be equally as yeah rick and morty like there's a lot of we've re-architected the neural net uh the neural nets in the cars so many times it's crazy oh so 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 uh array of neural nets that that that are operating in the car it kind of boggles the mind there's 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 it you know it with the c i should say we we're really primarily running c here because c plus plus is too much overhead and we have our own c compiler so to get maximum performance we actually wrote rotor and c compiler and are continuing to optimize our c compiler uh for maximum efficiency in fact we've just recently uh done a new rev on a c compiler that will compile directly to our autopilot hardware so you want to compile the whole thing down and with your own compiler yeah like so efficiency here because there's all kinds of compute there's 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 yeah it does all okay this is so that's why there's a lot of people involved there's a lot of hardcore software engineering at a very sort of bare metal level uh because we're trying to do a lot of compute that's constrained to the you know our full self-driving computer so and we want to try to have the highest frames per second um possible um within a sort of 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 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 uh doing matrix math dot products like a brazilian dot products and it's like what what are neural nets it's like compute wise like 99 dot products so you know and you want to achieve as many high frame rates like video game you want yeah full resolution high frame rate high frame rate low latency um low jitter uh so um i think one of the things we're um moving towards now is no post processing of the image through the um the image signal processor so um like for what happens for cameras is that almost all cameras is they um there's a lot of post processing done in order to make pictures look pretty and so we don't care about pictures looking pretty um we we just want the data we so we're removing just raw photon counts so the system will like the image that that the computer sees is actually much more than what you see if you're represented on a camera it's got much more data 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's about there which means that so it can see in the dark incredibly well um because it can detect these tiny differences in photon counts like much better than you'd possibly imagine um so and and then we also save uh 13 milliseconds on a latency uh so um from removing the post processing in 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 milliseconds or so maybe 1.6 milliseconds of latency um for each camera and so like uh um going to just uh basically bypassing the image processor uh gets us back 13 milliseconds of latency which is important um 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 know go through the um the various neural nets and the the c code and there's a little bit of c plus plus there as well um well i can maybe a lot but it the the core stuff is the heavy duty computers will 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 the brakes just to slow down the steering you know turn left or right um so because 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 10 hertz or something like that which is slow that's like now you lose 100 milliseconds potentially so um so then we want to update the the drivers on the like steering and braking control to have um more like uh 100 hertz instead of 10 hertz and you could have 10 milliseconds latency instead of 100 milliseconds worst case latency and actually jitter is more of a challenge than than latency because latency is like you can you can you can anticipate and predict but if you're 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 car if you have a stack up of uh of tolerances of timing tolerances then you can have quite a variable latency which is called jetter and and that makes it hard to to anticipate exactly what how you should turn the car or accelerate because you know if you got maybe 150 200 milliseconds of jitter then you could be off by you know after 0.2 seconds and this can 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 controlled decisions the again you have to uh so the jitters and 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 uh like say okay we know that uh our information is for argument's sake 150 milliseconds stale like so for um 145 milliseconds from photons taking 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 gonna 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 you've got then 150 milliseconds of latency plus 100 milliseconds of jitter that's which could be anywhere from zero to zero to 100 milliseconds on top so then your latency could be from 150 to 150 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 jitter 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 the cars will maneuver with superhuman ability and reaction time much faster than a human i mean i think over time the autopilot full self 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 um it's like an impossible maneuvers that a human couldn't do you know so well let me ask sort of uh looking back the six years looking out into the future based on your current understanding how hard do you think this is 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 can do their own they can read a book yeah so uh i mean you can see anybody who's been following the fossil driving beta closely will see that the um the rate of disengagements has been dropping rapidly so like a disengagement b where where the driver intervenes to prevent the car from doing something right uh dangerous potentially so um so the interventions you know per million miles has been dropping uh dramatically at some point the and that trend looks like it happens next year is the the 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 of course that then there's going to be a case of okay we now have to prove this to regulators and prove it to you know and and 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 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 point 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 and some fundamental improvements in creating vector space uh so there is a some fundamental like leap that really deserves the 11. i mean that's a pretty cool number yeah yeah uh 11 would be uh a single stack for all you know one stack to rule them all um and uh but but there's just some really fundamental uh neural net architecture changes that are that that will allow for uh much more capability but but you know at first they're gonna 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 it's basically taking a whole bunch of c c plus code and and deleting a massive amount of c plus plus go and replacing it with the neural net and you know andre um makes this point a lot which is like neural nets like kind of eating software you know over time there's like less and less conventional software more and more neural net we're just still software but it's you know still comes out the lines of software but uh let's just more more neural net stuff uh and less uh you know heuristics basically um if you're more more more uh matrix based stuff and less uh heuristics 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 plus plus or c and c plus plus code yeah um we call the giant bag of points yeah uh and it's like so you go to pixel and and and something associated with that pixel like this pixel is probably car the pixel is probably lane line then you've got to assemble this giant bag of points in the c code and turn it into vectors and it does a pretty good job of it but it's it's a it's we want to just we need another layer of neural nets on top of that to take the giant bag of points and distill that down to uh vector space in the neural net part of the software as opposed to the heuristics part of the software this is a big improvement um you know that's all the way down it's what you want it's not even your only realness but it's it's it's uh this will be just a ga 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 cfc plus plus uh and and have the and have a neural net just assemble those into a vector so so that the neural net is outputting um much much less data it's it's it's outputting this this is a lane line this is a curve this is drivable space this is a card this is a you know a pedestrian or a cyclist or something like that it's outputting um it's really outputting um profit vectors to the the cc plus less control control code as opposed to this sort of constructing the the vectors uh in c um which we've done i think quite a good job of but it's it's a it you're kind of hitting a local maximum on the how well the c can do this um so this is this is really this is really a 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 and all of the training needs to move to surround video and the efficiency of the training uh it needs to get better and it is and then we need to move everything to uh raw uh photon counts as opposed to um processed images okay so which is just quite a big reset on the training because the system's trained on post processed image images so we need to redo all the training uh to train against the the raw photon accounts instead of the post-processed image so ultimately it's kind of reducing the complexity of the whole thing so uh reducing reducing lines of code will actually 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 yeah well i guess we got years 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 trucks you know uh somebody like you know yelling at you or something i don't know just that there's there's a little bit of audio that needs to be incorporated as well do you need a cookie bath break yeah we listen to the trolls take a break okay honestly frankly like the ideas 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 it's 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 likes it optimizing the c compiler and 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 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 mean everything is going on with data engine uh whatever whatever it's called the whole process is just the scale of it is boggle's mind like the training the amount of work done with like we've written all this custom software for training and labeling um and to do order labeling auto leveling is essential um because especially when you've 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 order label it basically would just apply like heavy duty uh like a lot of compute to the to the video clips um to pre-assign 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 this you know chan adjust what is incorrect this this is like increasing increases productivity by effect 100 or more yeah uh so you've presented teslabot as primarily useful in the factory first of all i think humanoid robots are incredible from a fan of robotics i think uh the elegance of movement that cuba um the humanoid robots the bipedal 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 also 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 sure not replacing labor but also like i don't know being a friend or an assistant yeah i think the possibilities are you know endless yeah i mean it's it's obviously like a it's not quite in tesla's primary mission direction of accelerating sustainable energy but it is a an extremely useful thing that we can do for the world which is to make a useful humanoid robot that is capable of interacting with the world and helping in in many different ways uh so certainly in fact reason and really just 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 would 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 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 has like potential for repetitive stress injury that kind of thing um then that's really where humanoid robots would add the most value initially um so that's what we're aiming for is is to um for the human robots to do jobs that people don't don't voluntarily want to do um and then we'll have to pair that obviously with some kind of universal basic income in the future so i think um so do you see a 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 the future but 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 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 optimus i call it optimus subprime because that'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 help robot um and and basically like like the things that were basically like tesla i think um is the has the most advanced real-world ai uh for interacting with the real world which we've 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 because you know it's one thing to do neural nets if you've got a gigantic server 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 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 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 actually you know actuators um so um like like the the two like the hard things are like you basically need to make the have the rower 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 hard problem tails is very good at manufacturing and also uh has the real world ai so making the humanoid robot work is uh basically it means developing custom motors and sensors that that are different from what a car would use um but we also we have um i think with the the best expertise in developing advanced electric motors and power electronics so it just has to be for humanoid robot application on a car still you do talk about love sometimes so let me ask this isn't like for like sex robots or something i love is the answer yes uh there is something compelling to us not compelling but we connect with the humanoid robots or even lego robots like with the 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 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 a way that dogs can um do you think about that we test about it all or is it really focused on the problem of of performing specific tasks not connecting with humans um i mean 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 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 or i guess the owner uh well whatever you want to call it uh the other the companion the other half right uh the same way their friends do see i think that's a huge opportunity i think yeah no that's interesting like um the because you know like there's a japanese phrase i like the uh wabi-sabi you know uh the subtle imperfections are what makes something special 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 r2d2 or like a c-3po 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 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 very different than autonomous driving where it's a very high stakes environment you cannot mess up and so yeah it's more fun to be a robot in the home yeah in fact if you think of like c-3po and r2d2 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 there's they're 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 probably would happen um but our initial focus is just to make it useful uh so that 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 the so so yeah it's using a lot of you know it 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 and an extra module on top of the vector space uh for love oh yeah that's missing okay okay add that to the car too that's true um that could be useful in all environments like you said a lot of people argue in the car so maybe people 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 i i it does it almost doesn't really count as a podcast yeah it's it's it's more like a audiobook yeah so you were on the podcast with dan i just had to chat with him about it he said you guys want military and all that kind of stuff uh yeah it's literally uh it was basically um uh i think it should be titled engineer wars uh essentially like like when there's a rapid change in the rate of technology then uh engineering plays a pivotal role in in victory in battle um how far in back in history did you go did you go world war ii uh 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 rat hole of like studying all of the fighters and bombers world war ii and like the constant rock paper scissors game that like you know uh one country would make this plane that would make a plane to beat that and that try to make plane to beat that and then and really what matters like the pace of innovation um and also access to high quality 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 their raw materials and uh they they had a real problem with the oil and and and uh fuel basically the fuel quality was extremely uh variable so the design wasn't the bottom that goes uh yeah like the us had kick-ass fuel uh that was like very consistent like the problems if you make a very high performance aircraft engine um in order to make high performance you have to um 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'll fill up the engine and and and german just never had good access oil like they tried to get it by invading the caucasus um but that didn't work too well [Laughter] that never works well for him that's nice for you so they always was germany was always struggling with [ __ ] with basically shitty oil um and then they could not uh they couldn't count on a on high quality fuel for their aircraft so then they had to add all they have all these additives and and stuff uh so um uh whereas the u.s had awesome fuel um and that 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 and germany germany could could design the engines they just didn't have the fuel and then also the likes of the the uh the quality of the aluminum allies that they were getting was also not that great and so yeah did you is this like uh you talked about all this with dan yep awesome broadly looking at history when you look at genghis 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 there's a lot of incredible things that have been done good and bad um that they help 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 you like there's a lot of human history um 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 what nonstop war and disaster is it's those are actually just those are intermittent and rare and if they weren't then you know humans would soon cease to exist um uh but it's 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 being a villager somewhere and every now and again there's a war and i think so um and um you know what i'll say like that there aren't very many books that i where i just had to stop reading because it was just too too dark but uh the book about stalin the court of the reds are i could have stopped reading it was just too too bad dark rough yeah um the 30s uh there's a lot of lessons there to me in particular that it feels like humans like all of us have that as the old soldier knits in line um that the line between good and evil runs to 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 and to others and so it's like our responsibility to do good 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 memed about the quality of life was way worse back in the day and keeps improving over time through innovation to 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 i mean really for most of human history 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 five percent this year that was uh yeah it was a good year you know that would be par for 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 food to last through the winter and not get in our freezer or whatever so [Music] um now food is is plentiful if 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 now it looks cool so uh well it's it's you know it's it's a it takes a moment to read cyrillic um once you know what the sort like 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 [Laughter] um and uh so find the words that are exactly the same and now you start to understand cyrillic yeah if you can if you can sound it out then yeah it's much there's at least some commonality of words what about the culture you uh you love great engineering physics there's a tradition of the sciences there sure you look at the 20th century from rocketry so you know some of the greatest rockets 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 i 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 soviet union russia 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 so [Music] um one can cannot help but admire the impressive rocket technology that was developed um you know after the sort of fall of soviet union the there there's 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 piece that was happening before the soviet union kind of dissolved into separate republics yeah i mean i i you know there's ross cosmos the russian agency a um i look forward to a time when those countries with china are working together uh in the united states they're 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 collection of 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 because he's so excited about stuff yeah i love people like dad is real 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 part reason like uh i switched us from like rafter at one point was gonna 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 to absolute zero requires a lot of insulation it's um so it is a lot of challenges there 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 soviet union russia and ukraine uh primarily were uh actually in the process of uh switching to meth methylox um and there were some interesting tests and data for isp like they were able to get like up to like a 380 second isp with the meth lux engine and i was like whoa okay that's that's actually really impressive so um so i think we could you could actually get a much lower cost like in optimizing cost per ton to orbit cost per time to mars it's uh i think methane auction is the way to go and i was partly inspired by the russian work on the test stands uh with methodolox engines and now for something completely different do you mind doing a bit of a meme review in the spirit of the great the powerful pewdiepie let's say one to eleven just go over a few documents print it out we can try let's try this i present to you document numero uno okay vladimi paler discovers marshmallows that's so bad so you get it because uh yes are you failing things it's like i know three whatever that's not very good this is uh grounded in some engineering some history uh yeah give us an eight out of ten what do you think about nuclear power i'm in favor of nuclear power i think it's uh i i 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 chernobyl exactly um so [Music] uh i think people there's like a lot of fear of radiation and stuff um and it's i guess what the problem is like a lot of people just don't unders they didn't study engineering or physics so they don't it's just the word radiation just sounds scary you know so they don't they ha they can't calibrate what radiation means but radiation is much less dangerous than than you'd think so like for example fukushima you know um when the fukushima uh problem happened uh do the tsunami the i got people in california asking me if they should worry about radiation from fukushima i'm like definitely not not even slightly not at all that is crazy and just to show like look this is how like the dangers is so much overplayed compared to what what it really is that i actually flew to fukushima and actually i donated a a solar power system for water treatment plant and and i made a point of eating locally grown vegetables 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 the impact is greatly exaggerated it's just human nature it's people who don't know what radiation is like i've had people ask me like what about radiation from cell phones according to causing brain cancer i'm like when you say radiation do you mean photons or particles then like that i don't know what what do you mean protons particles so do you mean uh if let's say photons what what frequency or wavelength and they're like no 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 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 that you're staring right at it are you still alive yes okay amazing yeah i guess radiation is one of the words that can be used as a tool to to fear monger by certain people that's it and i think people just 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 it's like practically nothing and uh say how many people have have died from you know coal plants and it's a very big number 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 a hundred to a thousand times worse for for health than nuclear power plants uh you want to go to the next one it's really bad it's uh that uh 90 180 and 360 degrees everybody loves the math nobody gives a [ __ ] about 270. it's not super funny yeah i don't like two or three yeah um this is not a you know lol situation [Laughter] that's pretty good the united states oscillating between establishing and destroying dictatorships it's like a metro is that a matchup yeah yeah yeah it's uh on a seven out of ten it's kind of true oh yeah this is uh this is kind of personal for me next one oh man this is leica yeah well no is this or it's like referring to like or something as like as like a 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 vodka yeah like it 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 yeah true that one gets an 11 for me oh yeah it just keeps going on the russian theme first man in space nobody cares first man on the moon well i think people do care no i know but um there is uruguay gardens names will will be forever in history i think there is something special about placing like stepping foot onto another totally foreign land it's it's not the journey like uh people that explore the oceans it's not as important to explore the oceans is to land on a whole new continent yeah this is about you oh yeah i'd love to get your comment on this elon musk after sending 6.6 billion dollars to the u.n to end world hunger you have three hours um you know i mean obviously six billion dollars is not going to end with hunger so um so i mean the 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 to this point so where there is hunger it is almost always due to um it's like like civil war or strife or some like um it's it's not a thing that is it's extremely rare for it to be just a matter of like like lack of money it's like you know it's like some to the civil war in some some country and and like one part of the country is 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 politics geopolitics it's it's a lot of things it's human nature it's governments it's monies monetary systems all that kind of stuff yeah food is extremely cheap uh these days it's like it's um i mean the u.s at this point um you know among low-income families obesity is actually another problem it's not like obviously it's not hunger it's like too much it's 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 this is going after empires world uh where did you get those artifacts the british museum shout out to monty python we found them yeah the british museum is it's pretty great i mean yeah it admittedly britain did take uh these historical artifacts from all around the world and put them in london but uh you know it it's not like people can't go see them uh so it is 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 on balance the british museum is a net good although i'm sure a lot of countries argue about that yeah it's like you want to make these historical 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 empire is however things were done this it is the history that happened you can't sort of erase that history unfortunately you could just become better in the future that's the point yeah i mean it's like well how are we gonna pass moral judgment on these these things like it's like if uh you know uh if one is gonna judge say the rosh empire you're gonna judge you know what everyone was doing at the time and how were the british relative to everyone um and i think they would british 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 gotta look at these things in the context of the history at the time um and say what what were the alternatives and what are you comparing it against yes and i i do not think it will be the case that um britain would get a uh a bad grade in in when looking at history at the time you know if you judge history from you know from what is morally acceptable today you basically are 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's getting a passing grade basically no one and we might not get a passing grade from generations but uh that come after us uh what what does that one get uh sure uh success for the monty python maybe i always love monkey python they're great uh brian and the quest for holy grail are incredible yeah yeah yeah those serious eyebrows impressions like you know how important is facial hair to great leadership well you got a new haircut is that is that is this how does that affect your leadership i i don't know hopefully not it doesn't um yeah the second is no one there's no one competing with brush i have no one too those are like epic eyebrows so sure that's ridiculous six or seven i don't know uh i like this like shakespearean analysis of memes he had he had a flair 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 yeah that's the best thing since ripped up bread yeah because they invented they're just sliced bread am i just explaining memes at this point this is what my life has become um you know like a scribe that like runs around with the kings and just like writes down memes i mean when was the cheeseburger inventor that's like an epic invention yeah like like wow you know that was versus just like a burger or a burger i guess a burger in general it's like you know um then there's like what is a burger what's a sandwich and then you start getting as 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 or whatever 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 combined them into the same thing and yeah bite and hold it make makes it convenient it's a materials problem like your hands don't get dirty and whatever yeah it's brilliant well that is not what i would have guessed but everyone knows like you 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 were the devil but fries are awesome um and uh yeah chip pizza is incredible uh food innovation doesn't get enough love yeah i guess is what we're getting at it's great um uh what about the uh matthew mcconaughey austinite here uh president kennedy do you know how to put men on the moon yet nasa no president kennedy be a lot cooler if you did pretty much sure six six or seven i suppose that's the last one that's funny someone drew a bunch of dicks all over the walls sistine chapel boys bathroom sure i'll give it nine it's that's really true all right this is our highest ranking meme for today i mean it's true like how do they get away with that lots of nakedness i mean dick pics are i mean just something throughout history uh as long as people can draw things there's been a dick pic it's a staple of human history it's a staple consistent throughout human history you you tweeted that you aspired to comedy you're friends with joe rogan might you uh do a short stand-up comedy set at some point in the future maybe um open for joe something like that is that is that really stand-up actual just blown stand-up full-on stand-up is that in there or is that i've never thought about that um it's extremely difficult if at least that's what the 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 friends too so i don't know if if you gotta call you know like a rumor strangers are they gonna 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 is so difficult it's so you're so fragile up there it's just you and you you think you're gonna be funny and when it completely falls flat it's just it's beautiful to see people deal with like that uh you might have enough material to do standard no no 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 it 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 favorite one that's the butter robot it's great uh yeah it's a great show yeah dragon ball is awesome somebody that's exactly like you from an alternate dimension showed up there elon tusk yeah that's right that you voiced yeah rick morty suddenly explores a lot of interesting concepts i so like what's your favorite one i know the 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 toast to be like a super genius toaster it's gonna hate hate life because well it could just make us toast but if you know it's like you don't want to have like super intelligent stuck in a a very limited device um do you think it's too easy from uh if we talk about from the engineering perspective of super intelligence like with marvin the robot like is it j it seems like it might be very easy to engineer just a depressed robot like it sure it's not obvious to engineer a 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 guess if you let it evolve without tinkering then it might get sad but you can change the optimization function and have it be a cheery 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 to try to be sort of a leader for just for the sake of being a leader or whatever um a lot of time people who a lot of times the people you want as leaders are other people who don't want to be leaders so [Music] um if you live a useful life that is a good life a life worth having lived um you know and i like i said i would encourage people to [Music] use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life there are the best tools when you think about education 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 but i encourage people to read a lot of books just re like basically try to ingest as much information as you can uh and try to also just develop a good general knowledge um so you at least have like a rough lay of the land of the the knowledge landscape um like try to learn a little bit about a lot of things um because 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 exploration of broadly of of the knowledge landscape um and you talk to people from different walks of life and different uh industries and professions and skills and like what occupations like just try you know 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 would encourage people to read broadly 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 be good at something but or they may have skill at a particular thing but they don't like doing it um so you want to try to find a thing where you ha 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're both good at it you like doing it and it will actually have positive impact well you've got to learn about things somehow so re reading a broad range just really read it you know the more important one is that kid i i read through the encyclopedia uh so that's pretty helpful um and uh there's also things i didn't even know existed or a lot so obviously it's like as broad as it gets encyclopedias were digestible i think uh you know whatever 40 years ago um so um you know we read through the the condensed version of the encyclopedia britannica i'd recommend that um you can always like skip subjects or you read a few paragraphs and you know you're not interested just jump to the next one so read the encyclopedia we're just gonna 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 not a zero-sum mindset um or or like have more of a grow the pie mindset like the if you if you sort of say like when when we see people like perhaps um including some very smart people kind of uh taking an attitude of uh like like doing things that seem like morally questionable it's often because they have at a base sort of axiomatic level a zero-sum mindset um and and they without realizing it they don't realize they have a zero-sum mindset or at least that they don't realize it consciously um and so if you have a zero-sum mindset then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others if if it's like if if if the pie is fixed then the only way to have more pie is to take someone else's pie but but this is false like obviously the pie has grown dramatically over time the economic pie so in reality you can have that so overuse this analogy if you have a lot of you can have there's a lot of pi yeah it's not fixed um so you really want to make sure you don't you're not operating um without realizing it from a zero-sum mindset where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others then that's going to result in you trying to take things from others which is not not good it's much better to work on uh [Music] adding to the economic pie maybe you know so uh you know creating like i said 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-sum mindset i mean it's all walks of life i've seen that one of the one of the reasons uh rogan inspires me he celebrates oh 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 uh it actually grows that pie i mean it the 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 sum and 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 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 people don't hurt me um that's one of the great ones yes yeah you've you've earlier quoted shakespeare but that that's really up there yeah let me that was the many splendor thing uh i mean there's um it's 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 a it's a source of joy it's a source of meaning and that that's what love is friendship love i i just wonder if you think about that kind of thing when you talk about preserving the light of human consciousness right and thus becoming a multiplication multi-planetary species i mean to me at least um that that means like if we're just alone and conscious and intelligent it doesn't mean nearly as much as if we're with others right and there's some magic created when we're together the uh the friendship of it and i think the highest form of it is love which 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 a multi-planet species in a space frank 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 the human history all the people has ever lived all the people alive now it's pretty we're we're okay on the whole we're pretty interesting uh bunch yeah both things considered and i've read a lot of history including the darkest worst parts of it and uh and despite all that i think on balance 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 oh yeah well really i think what douglas adams was saying in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is that um the universe is the answer and uh what we really need to figure out are what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe yeah 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 so so therefore 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 scope 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 would be to ask the right question yes uh thereby elevating the role of the interviewer yes exactly as the most important human in the room good questions are you know it's a hot it's hard to come up with good questions uh absolutely um but yeah like it's like that that is the foundation of my philosophy is that um 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 that is the universe and um and so if we expand the scope and scale of humanity and consciousness in general which includes silicon consciousness then that you know there were that that seems like a fundamentally good thing elon like i said i'm deeply grateful that you would spend your extremely valuable time with me today and also that you are 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 conversation 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 you

https://youtu.be/jvGnw1sHh9M

so [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] [Music] these are the guys that run the show this is kyle our editor-in-chief this is creative director ethan nicole okay so i mean uh well i guess before we get started like uh maybe you guys can tell me like what's the you know how did the v get started and yeah and and uh yeah what's your deal and why do why are you in california that's way easier actually i'm much better at being interviewed so no problem yeah the view is just this little like christian humor site that we launched in 2016 and it was just like we spent 50 bucks on the domain name started writing jokes throwing them out there and it started to go big in conservative circles a couple years ago and that's just kind of where we got to where we are seth is our ceo he bought the site a few years ago from the original founder yeah he was original his name is adam ford he's in love with the company anymore uh he owns a piece of it he does not the bee now you you've seen that the you know the yeah that was unaffiliated no yeah yeah yeah okay so they do like real news but crazy it's like a backup plan it's like when satire is impossible because the world's too absurd then we just report on the absurdity over on not to be so you know plan b yeah yeah reality is we're greater than fiction yeah exactly often is so how many people at the be now yeah we've got uh probably a dozen full-timers now it's grown pretty fast a year ago it was three of us we have over we have like 25 people involved just not all full-time staff so you'd be surprised like with satire you don't have to have a writing staff like filling a room churning out articles all day long you can only handle so much satire every day you know like we're not people you don't need to publish an article every three minutes like fox news or daily wire or something like that so um we have a lot of part-time one of our writers here frank fleming is one of our writers um and he's got a full-time job he just writes for us on the side okay we'd love to have him full time yeah he lives in australia you live in austin okay yeah yeah and i'm a florida guy i have my head the headquarters are technically in south florida i'm in southeast florida yeah florida i'd love to get these guys to florida but it's hard to get people out of california it really is uh yeah it's more challenging than you think despite uh like california's the state of california doing everything it can to encourage people to leave yes yeah um i think you had one article about how gavin newsom is your whole salesman of the year yeah yeah yeah actually true that's actually true [Laughter] so you don't miss it then i know i mean there's certainly many aspects of california that i do like um most of my friends are still in california some of my best friends like california so yeah i do i do most many aspects to california especially my friends and it's beautiful and lots of cool things but increasingly difficult to get things done and california used to be the land of opportunity and now it is the has become and it's becoming more so the land of um [Music] sort of over regulation over litigation uh over taxation poop on the sidewalk and and scorn it's just that's what it's like it's not like thanks for the taxes it's like tate thanks for the texan hacksaw kicking the teeth let me flip the question though so that's kind of the story that be the bee started out as you know this little blog it took off it's kind of blown up into something like now we have a following including you like how how do we get on your radar people sharing our articles and you just saw them coming across your feed yeah um i'm not sure i saw it on twitter at one point the thoughts from the articles were quite quite funny um i wrote those okay um yeah i mean i i used to be much bigger fan of the of the onion but then the onion just seems to have gotten really politically correct um you know it's sort of gone a bit but in the sml direction it's somewhat leftist as you know it's it's basically it will it will not really make fun of anything on the left but it used to be much more even-handed than the onion um and um and then they just they just got the work mind virus yeah so uh to the point where the animal just was it used to be very funny and then it was not that funny you know snl i used to be a huge fan of snl but you know i still think they have some some occasional good stuff but it's just become i think you've written some some articles about this um you know snl had many many if not most of the snl episodes are kind of a a moral lecture on why we're bad human beings right uh instead of comedy yeah so and again uh won't make fun of anything on the left really like you know they'll beat up on ted cruz 17 000 times and you're like okay we get it and often because he's made fun of someone on the left he'll make fun of some on the left and then they jump on him for that it's like a defensive thing yeah yeah exactly so it's it's just um there are just a lot of no-fly zones uh with a lot of comedy um and uh and then and then you realize it's like wait a second is is a comedy is is the comedy getting at an essential truth or or trying to or is there is there a propaganda element or is it trying to push you in a particular direction or or getting getting to an essential truth that is humorous and when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that that is that is humorous then you know it's it's just not that funny right now see that's exactly the criticism we get from the left the criticism from the left is that that's what we're doing with our humor is that we're trying to push a narrative neglecting the truth that's literally what the new york times says that we are far right misinformation disguised as satire right right so there's a it's almost where you're standing jealousy yeah it's almost based on where you're standing but how it's based on where you're standing yeah i i mean i'd say the b is probably it's moderately right um it's not it's not but it's not certainly not far right that my my impression is not that uh i would say that the b is not probably it wouldn't be actually the b is fully centrist um but it is certainly not far right um if one is fully left and 10 is fully right the b seems to be at six 6.5 uh towards okay right that ish bernie sanders elizabeth warren babylon b hitler or somewhere on that scale yeah it's it's not but you know it's it's uh i mean the the b is i think less right than than say the onion is is left for example you know so the the i think would be more left than that the b is right right righteous or whatever yeah right no i don't know we'll have to put that on our wikipedia page righteous propaganda you know you talked about the wilk mind virus and i was wondering if you could decipher this tweet of yours for me because i'm not a programmer you wrote trace route woke underscore mind underscore virus what does that mean okay so traceroute is a networking command to so if you want to figure out a path to a particular server or domain you'd say traceroute or in windows trace rt that would show you the path to a particular source server with an ip address or domain name and and it would show basically all the hops that that it goes through um and the latency between each each hop and so i know some of those words yeah um so traceroute be yeah we like where'd it come from yeah where did the virus come from what is its origin so did this work did this command work or not did you find your comments read the comments and see and see all right it is a prevalent mind virus and um arguably one of the biggest threats to wine civilization also not having enough kids right yeah i think most people if you just have to look at the birth rate statistics um you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year um and and then you could say like is this is the birth rate trending down or up and it's been trending down basically almost everywhere so if you look at the birth rate last year you know you know how many adults will be in 20 years because that's how many babies were born the trend is like you don't have to be some master of statistician or something like that um you could just look look at kids one last year trending to well below replacement rate uh and a lot of countries have been a well-veil replacement rate for a long time well the concern is that if you have kids then they'll contribute to climate change and they'll kill the earth right that's the leftist concern is that we're overpopulating the earth and we're going to kill it are you trying to overpopulate the earth so that we can go to mars and take over and take over mars is this a deliberate strategy the earth is far from overpopulated um uh far far from overpopulated um so the you know the the thing that's necessary to minimize the chemical change to the atmosphere and oceans is to move to sustainable energy generation and consumption so the three elements of a sustainable energy future are sustainably energy generation primarily through solar wind some geothermal hydro and nuclear although they're shutting down all the nuclear power stations so yeah you can sort of cross that one of the list which they shouldn't be doing they should just keep they should keep moving um they're really unless a nuclear power plant is in a region of uh major national disasters instability or something yeah yeah you don't want to be like you know subject to massive um natural disasters because obviously that could be a problem but if you're you know like say germany or france or whatever you don't have those so the nuclear power is very safe um but anyway the the long-term um the heavy lifting on energy generation will be solar followed by wind and um and you really don't need a very large land area to generate enough power to power for example united states so it's on the order of you know roughly a little over 100 miles by 100 miles a second of land with solar solar panels would power the entire united states so like a little corner of utah or texas like um it can power the whole country so anyway so uh it's really not that hard the solar incidence is a gigawatt per square kilometer uh if for most neutrons can do some calculations most nuclear power plants yeah that's right it's it's it's a kilowatt per square per square k per square meter and there's a million square you know million square meters in a square kilometer so um it's a pretty simple uh math so and then you get you get like maybe 20 efficiency on that so call it like a net power generation of 200 megawatts per square kilometer now if you take most nuclear power plants there's usually a a pretty clear area around a nuclear power plant because people don't usually want to live right next to a nuclear power plant so um the area of most nuclear power plants that is uninhabited if if covered in solar panels would generate more power than the nuclear power plant and then you also then the second element that's needed are batteries to store solar and wind because uh the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time so the enter the intermittency of uh solar and wind requires battery storage for continuous power uh so that's the second part of the of the sort of second the second pillar of sustainable energy and the third is uh sustainable transport so that means uh electric uh cars boats planes and then ironically the one thing that you can't really make electric is rockets you know the same involved in that but but although you can over time use solar power to generate fuel by pulling co2 out of the atmosphere combining it with h2o creating ch4 which is methane and o2 oxygen and rockets are mostly oxygen by mass so over time you can make everything basically solar power so you're working on some of those problems but the problem of wokeness specifically you mentioned that's like a mind virus and it's destructive uh and why do you think wokeness is so interested in your opinions too um but you know like i mean generally i think we should be aiming for like a positive society and uh you know that it should be okay to you know be humorous uh like you know like we should we should like like workness basically wants to make comedy illegal which is not cool we've experienced that i mean chappelle like what the flower bed i mean try to shut down chappelle come on man that's crazy um so um you know so do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation uh and hate basically uh and no forgiveness right yeah [Music] at its heart awokeness is divisive um exclusionary um and hateful it's it's it basically gives mean people a reason a a a a it gives them a shield to be to be mean and cruel armored and false virtue what do you think i'd agree with that yeah yeah i mean we've obviously seen that from the left you know just ourselves you know the left is almost this religion now where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them you know for them it's like you're making fun of god or salvation you know so they're almost the new religious right in our view yeah he agreed with me [Laughter] well you were pretty mean to uh senator warren though on twitter recently you slammed her man please don't call the manager on me senator karen she struck first yeah obviously right yes she did actually called me a freeloader yeah um anna grifter doesn't pay taxes basically um and i'm literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year ever and she doesn't pay taxes basically at all and her tax and her salary is paid for by the taxpayer like me could you even use could you use turbo attorney would that even work if you could die by irony she would be she would be dead fiery could kill what would happen if you walked into an h r block to file your taxes like could they handle your case my taxes are actually not that complicated um i do not have any offshore accounts i don't have any uh tax shelters uh uh i i have a i have basically a tesla and spacex stock um and um tesla's publicly traded so information is public and spacex is you know ac corp that is audited uh you know it has outside orders so it these it's it'll with that uh outside investors so it is they're also it's everything is extremely transparent um there are there is no uh there are no elaborate sort of tax avoidance schemes or or anything like that so hr block could could easily do my taxes you know i don't need a html block i could do it yeah you know it would like probably take me a few hours to do my taxes it's very basic did you sell that stock in tesla because of the twitter poll uh in part you made up your mind that you're already going to do that before the twitter poll um there i i have some test options that are expiring next year that so i needed to exercise those options no matter what and and i was like okay i'll move forward and exercise those options um so that that's only would be part of it uh no matter what uh but then over and above that i sold incremental stock uh to uh try to get up to the 10 level so just the option exercise loan would not get to 10 so i sold a stock that should be roughly make my total uh tesla share sale roughly 10 is the most annoying thing in the world people asking you questions like this about your personal finances no one ever asks me what stock i'm selling or or why i made so much money last year i mean i'm the third richest man on my street which is which is pretty good pretty good i mean i'm not sure it's it's all that productive or interesting you know essentially all of my net worth is uh it's just in spacex and tesla stock these two companies that that i helped create uh and have run for now almost 20 years um have done a lot of useful things um spacex is the launch is more paleo to orbit than the rest of the world combined and has a global internet system called starlink and and is the primary provider well the only us provider of uh astronaut transport to the space station um we publish six to eight satire articles a day some of them are funny i mean pretty good so so spacex uh yeah it transports us and as well as non-us astronauts to the space station that was previously the u.s was dependent on on russia uh who's doing a good job but charging kind of crazy money proceed so as with spacex the the cost per astronaut dropped dramatically and and the money was you know went to jobs in the us so that's what why people you know think spacex is valuable uh tesla uh i mean the annoyance though of like people uh holding it against you that you've had success holding it against you that you have wealth um you know viewing billionaires as evil and you know you're not doing enough to give back you know you have like the elizabeth warren thing that you haven't paid your fair share i mean that's you know it's that's got to be kind of aggravating yeah i think it's just important to understand like like what is this wealth uh it's not like some it's not like i've got like some some mashup massive cash balance uh i've my cash balances are very very low and at least until i sold stock which is really the first time i've actually sold stock in any meaningful way was this quarter i simply had loans against my my stock so i i i if tesla spacex went bankrupt i would go bankrupt too immediately so um it's not realized this is what you're saying yeah it's not no it's like people it's just like it's like you know i built these two companies and it was extremely difficult to build them like massively painful and difficult rewarding too but also but massively painful difficult um and uh and and i didn't i didn't sell the stock in the companies um you know i i you know my my sort of impression was that you know you you shouldn't take money off the table or you shouldn't you shouldn't take stock off the table and de-risk things that a captain should go down you know with their ship so so it's like okay like you know i don't want to take money off the table and then then if the companies fail then i will be i'll be sort of enriched while investors suffer and that does not seem right so anyway so i that's the reason i didn't sell is is i could easily have diversified and protected myself financially if if spacex would tell them went bankrupt but i did not and spacex and tesla came very close to bankruptcy many times even when bankruptcy was literally weeks away i did not sell stock uh and then the companies became valuable not tesla's value is basically because value is not it's not up to me it's up to investors and they decided it was worth tesla's worth trillion dollars in the public market so and i own twenty percent of the company so so you're not apologizing right now you're not going to look into the camera and say i'm so sorry in the camera right now i'm just trying to explain like i don't think people necessarily understand they don't yeah yeah that uh this this is not you know that some function of sort of hoarding or something it's it's simply that you know i'm 20 company that became very valuable as decided by external investors and so twenty percent of a trillion dollar evaluation is 200 billion dollars um and i i've you know i've said at various times that i think the stock price is too high but the investors just ignored that i'm like okay i literally said it's too high um and they just kept making that price higher so i'm like tell them our value is too high so anyway so just that's uh but like i said this is not like uh my so-called wealth is it's not some it's not some deep mystery it's simply what is my ownership percentage of spacex and tesla multiply that by the valuation that's my worth it's super simple and my taxes are super simple and i have no like i said no offshore accounts no sort of clever tax evasion or anything like that and i don't i don't draw a salary or any cash salary or bonus from the companies at all so um again i thought that was like morally good to not do that um and so there were there were like there was one year i think 2018 where where i i didn't pay any tax uh but but that's because i didn't have any income um and and and i did have a little bit of income but i'd actually overpaid taxes i think in 2017. so i paid too much tax and so i got like i basically netted that out in in 2018 because i paid too much tax in 2017. accidentally unless you sell stock there are no realized gains so uh so then i was like well should i sell like i i like what am i supposed to do why send shares to the government somehow i don't know if you can even do that yeah um so there was like well like unless i sell shares there's not there's no there's no actual mechanism to pay tax so then i was like well should i sell 10 percent you know to in order to pay tax and and i sort of asked twitter and they're like on balance they said yes and so i um so i i sold enough stock to get to around ten percent plus the option exercise stuff and uh i very i try to be extremely literal um so you don't generally need to read between lines you can just read the lines [Music] so that's it as the as the fattest guy here i i want to know what's when are you gonna make the candy company because you said on twitter that you're making a candy company and you're the closest thing to willy wonka that this culture has it could be willy wonka i didn't say it would you say that he said i'm starting a canadian company it's going to be warren buffett um but you did say i am super super serious i think if you put two supers before sirius that makes sense and that's like you're probably not serious you know just uh for satire writers out there yeah um i thought that locked him in is like definitely syria he's explaining jokes to it yeah yeah yeah it's just a guy said let me tell you how jokes accept our words um you know i was just obviously i was just like making fun of warren buffett who's like really he's got this like candy company and stuff so um and um that was my one question now i i i did actually i did actually experiment with um trying to find some compelling candy that would be like i don't know maybe much better than other candy um we tried various candy options but i didn't find any i couldn't figure out a candy that was like just way better than other candy um like a little bit better but not a lot better and so it was like unless it's like really a great product then you looked into this yeah yeah we tried a whole bunch of different candies and uh and it was like there's not anything like that's obviously just way better uh so um i don't want to just have like a pretty good candies if there's like a great candy yeah some aces some candy that's aces um but you know we don't need another sort of like pretty good candy yeah yeah there's plenty of the south yeah yeah what does that look like when you like suddenly get an idea like we should make candy you like you just call somebody like how does what what are the steps that suddenly take place when you're like because you do so many things i'm just fascinated by the what that process looks like rockets tell them you got a guy you call jim i want to make candy make it happen um i think i did ask for you know people on twitter to send me candy that they thought was good it's deployed and i was like well what if some of those candy is like you know it's poisonous or something but whatever like you know candy from strangers on the internet yeah it could go wrong that's just not 100 safe um but uh i did try a whole bunch of candy scent from strangers what's your favorite candy well there was like a a pretty good like peanut like some pretty good peanut brittle ones or like that peanut butter with a bunch of other stuff in it and some pretty good chocolates but but nothing that was like blew me away so um and and then there were people at spacex and tesla that sent me some candy options but not nothing that was it's not like i care about starting companies like if there's like there are if there's a very compelling product or service then that's the thing that is important not the company your company is just an assemblage of people to create a compelling product or service and if a company does not provide great products and services it should not exist there's no point in the company for the sake of being a company that's pointless companies should only exist to provide great products and services a company is just just literally a group of people so do we have to close or stay open i think there's a lot of there's a lot of companies out there that probably should just be disbanded because they don't make uh compelling products and services they're spoilers and those people better that those people do something else i think on that topic i mean the question that i just like really i feel so unqualified to be interviewing you right now i think we all do why are we here like what what are you doing okay i'm not the one who asked for the podcast you guys did just to be clear i'm not pushing the podcast on you you guys came here we just we were like i will stop by you know texas yeah just to be clear who was asking her i'm not i'm not like you know i know i know exactly hold a gun to your head for this podcast you could be on cnn right now yeah you know john a real news organization yeah i'm just throwing it out there i don't know unfortunately i just you know haven't um you know i guess uh you know what what was it you said the the requirement for being a cnn driver cnn is uh are you are you a pervert yeah i'm not perverted enough yeah i guess i don't know not a big pedophile fan you know bad mommy headlines better than i do [Laughter] i think you know a lot of us fantasize about if we had lots and lots and lots of money what we do and you've done a lot of the things that like a lot of us fantasize about build cool robots gonna go to mars we're gonna fix traffic but most of us also think we've become batman have you ever thought about like what would that really look like to become or would you go batman or iron man around what because crime is on the right that's a fruit bat or an insect bat i like the dragon ball big scary you know because most bats are either fruit or they carry a lot of diseases yeah yeah they eat fruit bugs like fruit batman intake batman i need to read that spin-off comic it's a strange choice of uh creature to emulate you know you take a different animal like maybe monkeys that play pong with their brains man [Music] monkey man monkey man yeah exactly just very agile they're the smartest animal right they can just uh swing monkey man that batman is more is more like monkey man really yeah because he's like he's swinging around and very agile um climbing up things and yeah throwing a battering is more likely for batman like why can't he fly if he's batman that's gonna fly yeah that's right he just yeah he glides very effectively though okay so he's really yeah but that's like a frank's more like flying [Laughter] less intimidating i guess yeah oh no squirrel man we're he's going to get us not squirrel man again yeah without making the grappling hook he has that thing's sweet we need those you can make probably make that yeah yeah sure you can make a grappling hood um i i mean like like when you it's like they sort of skip the parts where like batman's always on the top of the building but like once you get to the ground floor how do you get back to the top of the building yeah it's like you're going to huffing and puffing you know yeah yeah you never see how do you get the top of a skyscraper even if you've got a grappling hook i mean how big is your grappling hook like 50 stories like how big is that cable you know it's not really feasible um so you just got to like run up the stairs or take the elevator so it's like how do you get back up to the top of the skyscraper in gotham city it's always like tough with some tall buildings so iron man then he'd be like iron man yeah iron man because you're good at calculating the cost of things and stuff like that so like would it be cheaper to become batman iron man or just pay every criminal that you encounter a salary to just stop being a criminal i think they're trying to have to be um irony man irony man um i just defeat villains using the power of irony it's like oh too much irony i can't stand it please no stop the irony i can't handle it anymore i give up i give up too much irony that'd be rough that'd be awesome that'd be totally awesome that would be awesome yeah don't make me use irony again cheaper too what are your thoughts on the metaverse which takes technology to the next level and puts us in like a virtual world like do you see that as being dangerous hopeful for humanity like what's your view on that maybe we're in the metaverse right now it's just mata versus all the way down um i don't know if i necessarily buy into this metaphor stuff although people talk to me a lot about it web 3. sure you can put a tv on your nose i'm not sure that makes you in the metaverse you know um it's like weird like you know when i grew up it's like don't sit too close to tv it's going to ruin your eyesight right and now we got like tv is like literally right here i'm like uh what is that good for you i mean have you tried these games you know the art oculus stuff yeah they're okay you know but like it gives you motion sickness if you try to walk around like you can do a video game on your sort of computer console or whatever and and you can you can be in a like a first person game and and uh and move rapidly and not get set motion sickness but if you try to do that in a beat with vr goggles you get motion sickness it's like weird so you have to like teleport around with it's okay so that doesn't it doesn't feel like like that's the answer necessarily um into the brain so you don't have to have the glasses there you go yeah a neurolink long-term sophisticated neural link could um put you fully fully in a virtual reality thing um so i guess what i'm getting at is yeah exactly what could go wrong like the the negative implications the kind of dystopian implications that some are drawing out like i think it was i think jack dorsey was really critical of the whole metaverse idea you see problems with people i don't know living in a virtual world and leaving a physical world for for that and i don't see someone strapping a friggin t you know screen to their face all day uh and not wanting to ever leave there seems no way i mean does it feel like that to you it doesn't seem like that to me yeah it's like it gets uncomfortable to have this thing strapped to your head the whole time it definitely needs to be lighter yeah even if the weight i mean if it was like super light it will still be like i don't know it's not so like you won't be there all day so you know i think we're far from disappearing into the metaverse uh this sounds just kind of buzz wordy and you know i don't feel like hit like okay is this you know i've just gotten too old and like am i like one of those people who was like dismissing the internet whatever 95 as being like some fad or something that's never going to amount to anything although i didn't i was like saying like 95 was literally the internet is going to be transform humanity and going to be like you know prior information basically just went by osmosis like unless a person called another person or carried a letter physically to another person like how did you get information around the vast majority of information was literally person to person then they had like the fax machine and stuff but it's just like the way the metaverse is being sold right now is so underwhelming it's like you're going to be in it's like zoom meetings but there's an avatar for the person next to you you know and you maybe maybe get to design your avatar like i said i don't i don't feel like you know someone some old codger sort of dismissing the internet in 95 is not amounting to anything so there's some danger of that that's the case but uh i i currently am unable to see a compelling metaverse situation or web 3 sounds like more marketing than reality i don't get it you know and maybe i will so but i don't get it yet let me put that away it's definitely not monkeys playing pong let's just put it that way yeah i just like to advertise for white chloe yeah quite quote real men drink white clothes can we get our guys on the phone with white club sponsor after the fact if you want us to leave that in yeah then you won't pay us was it you know this is the first white call the first white claw ever drunk on the babylon v podcast so that's great you hit a point in your life where you you know you made plenty of money and you could do whatever what drives you to this campaign yeah it could be slipping my ties on right on a tropical island uh i've been wrong all this time why am i working 90 hours a week this is crazy because i'm always passing me the idea of like i've made it people always want to say be able to say i've made it i've arrived yeah and like how do you you know you hit those little islands in your life and you actually have to break yourself up that mindset and what are ways that you break yourself of that mindset and keep on going i didn't put all this effort into building spacex and tesla because i thought there were easy ways to make money i mean anyone who starts a car company thinking it's easy way to make money as a fool there are only two car companies that have not gone bankrupt in the history of the united states and that's ford and tesla and tesla came within inches of going bankrupt multiple times as does spacex so right and like who starts rocket company think it's going to be successful um i thought about i mean both both those companies i i thought had less than a 10 chance of success and i thought it was overwhelmingly likely that i would lose the money that i made from paypal you know i came to north america when i was 17 just by myself um and i had like like a few thousand dollars in in traveller's checks back when travelers tracks were a thing you know um in canadian dollars i landed in montreal um i have some family in canada uh and my mom's uncle lived in montreal but like we did we didn't know his phone number so i landed montreal and my mom says i just got a letter back from my uncle he's in minnesota or something so i'm like okay i don't know what to do now so i just stayed in youth hostel and like bought a bus take it across canada and i worked in various like odd jobs and stuff worked on my on my mom's cousin's farm wheat farm in saskatchewan for six weeks that's where i had my 18th birthday actually i worked in the lumber mall chainsawed logs and did various on jobs and and then went to college in canada for a couple years i paid my own way through college by the way so but in canada it's like easier because the college is more subsidized and i was a canadian citizen through my mom so and i got some scholarships and loans and stuff and and then i applied to the university of pennsylvania and uh didn't think i'd be able to go because tuition is really high but they gave me a scholarship and loans and stuff so i was able to go there i graduated with about a hundred thousand dollars in student debt and um i was going to do grad studies at stanford and decided to put that on hold to try starting an internet company um i actually i tried to get a job at netscape but they didn't i'd send my resume and i get a response so i was like okay i guess i should i can't get a job at the there are only a few internet companies and that can get a job at any of them so i was like i guess i want to do something internet got to start my own company but i ended up writing the first maps and directions on the internet i wrote personally the maps directions yellow pages white pages on a puny computer like with hardly any so you had to be like the code had to be super tight i even have some patents on like maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and stuff from from ages ago they're lapsed now but that that company ended up getting bought by by compact for about 300 million dollars i own seven percent of the company so i got like 20 million from that put most of it into uh x.com which merged with confinity to create paypal and then i got about 180 million dollars from that and i put all of that into spacex tesla and solarcity i just basically kept you know kept all the chips on the table and just like let's play another round but most people take the trips off the table or at least some of their chips and uh and then spacex and tesla ended up being valuable and that's where i am but the the reason for spacex and tesla is you know tesla if you say like what is what is the how would you assess the historical good of tesla i'd say it's the degree to which tesla accelerated sustainable energy and i've been interested in electric cars for a long time um since maybe high school or certainly early college my original interest in electric vehicles was not so much due to environmental concerns but rather from the uh concern that we'd run out of oil eventually and or become extremely scarce and expensive and then a civilization would collapse because we can drive cars or you know run power plants and stuff so so we needed some form of sustainable energy generation and consumption or where civilization is going to collapse so that was my original interest in electric vehicles and solar energy and and then i do think there's um some risk of uh negatively affecting the climate uh you know as you increase the co2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere this you increase the risk of something uh going wrong um i i i'm not like in the camp of of the super alarmist uh global warming i like you know like i think like i don't think we're like um screwed because of like the the current parts per million of co2 in the ocean's atmosphere i think like this is actually not not a terrible level however the there's so much inertia in the direction of mining and burning hydrocarbons that you know the the world is still over overwhelmingly dependent on mining and burning hydrocarbons um so you know if this continues and you start really driving up the co2 in the oceans and atmosphere then there's this increased risk of accelerating climate change basically warming up the oceans and um and raising the sea level so so i think that's like it's just i think that's probably just not a wise risk to take since we will in any case uh have to transition to sustainable energy long term because we will eventually run out of oil and coal to minor burn uh then why run the experiment to see if you know to see if something bad will happen with a high co2 concentration in the ocean's atmosphere like it's a pointless experiment like we know we have to get to some uh sustainable energy economy it's total logical like so i think there's we should try to get there sooner so as not to run the risk of climate change it would not climate change would not be catastrophic for civilization but it would be very disruptive humans love living right on the ocean so it's like we're almost like a like a thermometer it's like it's like if we were living right on the beach okay so uh this is like so even small changes in the sea level in sea level will put a lot of houses underwater against little little changes not enough to be vague we just we've just inherently created civilization as highly sensitive to changes in temperature a lot of politicians who are alarmist about this stuff buy homes right on the water though don't they that's true yeah i mean i i'm not sort of into like vilifying the oil and gas industry because i think i think the the reality is like if uh if we don't have oil and gas right now civilization would collapse and everyone will be starving so we obviously need oil and gas right now it'd be absurd to just stop it like it's not not feasible um but but i do think we should be trying to accelerate progress towards a sustainable energy future uh not slow it down you know i think it's just a sensible thing to do to to try to move faster to a sustainable energy economy uh rather than slower um because that reduces the risk of the climate experiment and like i said since we know we have to get to a sustainable energy economy anyway why run this experiment it's it's just not smart anyway so so the fundamental good of tesla i think is by you know should be measured by how by how many years did tesla accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy um 10 years 20 years you know that's like the fundamental good of the company but to ethan's point he's asking like why not like is that is that your is that your answer for why you keep going is because these are these things make a difference they make a difference ultimately for the flourishing of humanity for the longevity of humanity is that why you're not on a beach somewhere sipping my ties or white claws yeah i don't actually drink a lot of white qualifier this is not about like trying to enrich myself um i do not live a life of conspicuous consumption i work you know very long hours and but i think i think what tells us is doing is important to the future and that's that's why i keep doing it and i think you know it's it's something i think is uh tesla increases the probability that the future will be good for humanity and and then for spacex um i think i think uh it's important that we take the actions like that we become a space bearing civilization and a multi-planet species this is an exciting inspiring future you know you need to have things that when you wake up in the morning you're like you're excited about the future why live if it's all about solving problems of being miserable like why live um so they've got to be things that are that are inspiring that like you know get you in the heart and i think space is one of those things so you know look at the apollo program and you know sending people to the moon in 69 and wasn't that a great thing for all of humanity great thing and if you ask people like one of what are some of the greatest things that humanity's ever done that would be one of them i think er you know around the world people would agree with that you know if you believe it really happened yes i do get that question this is um yeah we we went to the moon not just once but but several times and um i think the russians would have called us out on that one if it wasn't true you know uh to say the least among among this is like the yeah it's we went to the we went to the moon the russians didn't like us at the time yeah but so you know it's not a huge fan of it they wouldn't have like they were looking at us through telescopes like is this real or why you know uh they would have a bubblegum if it wasn't that's for sure there's a huge you know victory you know ideological victory for the united states and western civilization so but anyway the the point is like we we want to have an exciting inspiring future and and one where we are space spring civilization and multi-planet species i think is a much more exciting and inspiring future than one where we are forever confined to earth and never go back to the moon and and the moon was our high water mark and that's all we ever did that's depressing and and there's also from a long-term basis if we're a multi-planet species it's like life insurance for life itself not just for humans but for for all the creatures on earth um because we bring them with us and and they can't build spaceships so you know we are we're in effect the steward of life um and you know we can make a we can make mars like a you know another planet with life on it um you know it is you know uh it's probably a dangerous analogy to use but it it's a bit like noah's ark but you know we bring more than two of every creature because it's a little incestuous frankly um yeah i mean like how's this work you know second generation and did he hate the dinosaurs like what's uh [Laughter] why why was it like after the dinosaurs it's like pro-incest battle dinosaurs i don't get it and it would have to be a very big vote so but there's you know it's a metaphor perhaps i don't know um yeah but so anyway so like there's there's some some risk especially over a long period of time that so many calamities would happen to earth and if we're just in one planet that would be the end of life itself and certainly the the sun the sun is slowly expanding so uh you know the earth are roughly four and a half billion years old some people might disagree with that but it appears to be that way um uh and um in roughly half a billion years the sun will expand to big make earth probably uninhabitable in a billion years definitely uninhabitable so basically if intelligent life had take taken 10 percent longer to evolve on earth then it would never evolved at all because it would be destroyed because the oceans would boil and and they would we wouldn't be able to exist so i mean no matter what the universal end in heat death though right eventually so it's all futile to some extent if you go far enough um yeah i mean i think the if if heat death is the outcome of the universe it really all is all about the journey like you know they said like you know the journey is is is uh half the fun is the journey or whatever well if he death is the end of the universe the journey is all the fun you know can we just evolve heat resistance become like lava beings it's not it's not it's cold it cools eventually with entropy and i'm not a scientist entropy the ultimate he thought the devil was bad try entropy yeah okay try getting away from that but yeah i mean the yes i mean technically the being a multi-planet species would increase the probable lifespan of of civilization and and life as we know it um so i mean we humans don't live forever so but just because we don't live forever does not mean that civilization cannot live much longer than we do a civilization lives much longer than any individual human so this is not about like escaping to mars this is simply i mean i i will die probably long before moz is a self-sustaining civilization it's just i think something we should we should do in order to have a much longer probable lifespan of civilization and it's interesting and exciting and and mars is like us it's like an essential next step to like there are these like you know uh filters they're called like the great filters and because you have to say like where are the aliens you know it's like the fermi paradox where are the aliens if the universe is 13.8 billion years old shouldn't they be everywhere by now and i'm not aware of any evidence for aliens people ask me about that too uh we're the aliens i'm like man if anyone would know about evidence of aliens it would be me and i i've seen nothing so i think it may have been called sagan who said you know there's like we're either alone in in the galaxy or there are a lot of aliens and and each answer is arguably equally terrifying um it's like it's like hey we found it aliens are on their way uh too bad it's the invasion fleet um you know um so i i don't know it's like where are they where are the aliens like maybe there aren't any endless galaxy um and maybe the what we have here is a very very rare situation um you know a belief a brief flickering of consciousness in the die like a little candle in a vast darkness and we should not let that little candle go out so my dad's a rocket scientist at bowling and he had a question engineer well whatever when people say rocket scientists they really mean rocket engineer okay yeah so he's a rocket engineer and he says at what mach number does starship endure max q maximum dynamic pressure how much pressure is that does that make any sense to you uh yeah so uh yeah max q maximum dynamics pressure is is when you're at um a combination of speed and atmospheric density such that the uh the wind force on the rocket is is the highest and so as you climb higher and higher the atmospheric density decays exponentially um and so you hit this point of the combination of velocity and air density which is maximum dynamic pressure maximum q um and uh this this is mostly a function of thrust to weight so if you have a low thrust weight rocket you will have a typically a lower max q um and if you have a high thrust weight rocket you'll have a higher max q if you do not throttle down and so uh and it also kind of depends on on what trajectory you're flying are you flying a low with over trajectory uh single burn insertion or or eight eight uh say a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a lower perigee then you'll have a higher a higher max q because you will spend you'll spend more time going uh sort of horizontal instead of vertical um getting to orbit is mostly about you what getting to what it is is about your your velocity parallel to the other surface so around mark 23 to mark 25 uh you're you know so roughly 23 ish times the speed of sound is when you reach uh orbit orbital velocity roughly 17 000 miles an hour so um and and that's that's what it means to go up and stay up you only need height in order to get out of the high density portion of the atmosphere so that you don't slow down um none of that was correct i disagree yeah i disagree i agree i give a totally different answer i don't have time to get into it [Laughter] yeah so i mean typically um a rocket is going to hit max q uh somewhere between mach 1.4 and 1.8 and um and and that q level is going to be maybe 400 to 800 pounds per square foot um uh now a starship is intended to have a higher a higher thrust weight because with a fully reusable rocket the the cost of propellant starts to become significant whereas if you have an expandable rocket or a partially reusable rocket the cost of propellant is is tiny compared to the cost of the rocket so you actually want a higher thrust to weight to minimize cost per ton to orbit with a fully reusable rocket than you would for an expendable so probably starship will have at least a 1.3 if not closer to a 1.5 thrust to weight which would uh if without throttling down which aspirationally we would not throw down uh would would have a quite a high q um maybe as high as uh a thousand uh or even 1200 pounds per square foot um so that's uh and probably probably you know uh at work velocity i mean i guess uh mach 1.4 to 1.5 something like that okay well my dad very much enjoyed that answer i'm sure i think as a male feminist though one thing about the rockets is the phallic symbology what would it take to get some more vaginal shaped rockets just you know for well equality um can we make that happen aerodynamics dynamics is going to give you a serious answer share similar properties whether biological or mechanical okay good answer that's all i got on a rocket science uh robots yeah teslabot so you're creating robots have you ever seen a sci-fi movie in your life never okay i thought maybe not you know like because things came out what's the worst that could happen yeah um the robots are not the the scary part the scary part is uh agi or artificial general intelligence digital super intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence um and um you know if if if there's a digital super intelligence that is just vastly smarter than the smartest human um we could lose control of it and then it it could it could just it could do something bad potentially um these things are just probabilities they're not certainties um so it's not the road like it's not the robots it's the digital super intelligence to be concerned about i think this is definitely one of the issues that we need to be concerned about as an existential risk i think we should have a regulatory agency that oversees uh advanced ai um because you know generally like i do think there are important roles for the government and and one of those roles is in regulation of industry to make sure that any any that the company is not making short cuts that endanger the public so you know the faa does has done done generally a great great job of ensuring that aircraft are safe you know it's literally safer to fly on an american airline or any any sort of airline overseen by the faa uh than it is to live in your house just to give people a sense of well you're more likely to die your probable lifespan is less if you lived your entire life in your house or than if you lived on a plane because in your house you can get murdered by a spouse get bitten by a laos but if you live in a plane in afghanistan that's not maybe that's the case well if it's not if if it's not overseen by um a a uh regulator that like the faa then then then it's not necessarily gonna meet the same safety standards what if your spouse is on the plane well i think so the planes have you know they have means of stuffing like you can't it's hard to bring a gun on a plane yeah um and uh even a knife or even a bottle of lotion at this point you know so your spouse couldn't bring any of those things let me just punch you with it or stab you with a sport you know plastic spoke you know it's like hard to kill someone with a spork um so yeah and then planes also have like the flight attendants are trained in first aid they've got like uh they can do cpr they've got defibrillators uh if if somebody's having medical issues they'll immediately land the plane and the ambulance will meet you at the airport so uh and you're not gonna like you know drown the bathtub or get electrocuted by a toaster or you know have your house burned down or because of the toaster by the way toasters cause a lot of houses to burn down yeah it's one of the one of the main causes of house burning down are like toasters and dryers there's also a decent chance there's a doctor on the plane at any given time right that happens all the time like a doctor is like treating somebody on a plane in your house you know yeah so planes are very safe and and i mean generally speaking the fda does a good job of overseeing uh food and drugs you know this might be a bit of a conservative bias on you know where uh at times there's an asymmetry with the fda where um something that that could help a lot of people is not approved because it it might hurt a small number of people so that there's a sort of like a a bit of a a bit of an asymmetry uh like so regulators the in general can have a bit of an asymmetry uh where they are they're punished a lot for something going wrong but not rewarded enough for going something going right um so that's just a general uh challenge with the the punishment and reward of regulators they can be a little conservative so but i think there should be a regulatory agency to oversee um you know anything that is a danger to the public um so and i think agi could be an interest in public so therefore should should have some oversight um and normally regulatory agencies are very reactive um so like for seat belts for example which lack of seatbelts caused i don't know 10 million deaths worldwide i mean a massive number and the car industry fought seat belts for a very long time and uh and eventually after many deaths the defender department of transport nitsa which oversees his regulatory body for cars said all cars have to have seat belts but you can't just not have a seat belt but that i know it took 15 years or something or maybe longer uh maybe 20 years before seat belts were mandated so and then you know baby seats are a lot a lot of kids and babies died because they're just like sitting on this you know on a seat with nothing i mean i i kind of grew up sitting on a seat with nothing yeah we'd ride in the bed of the truck yeah seriously running the better build pickup truck survivor bias or something i was fine but yeah i was fine but if there was an accident it was game over you know yeah um so so you do see some good in government with when it comes to regulation and stuff like that but you don't generally think the government can spend your money more effectively than you can yeah i mean i would say like generally i'm like i think pretty moderate i'm not like sort of an extreme libertarian um i think there are roles for the government uh that makes sense like i don't think we necessarily want like a private army uh or private police force or private yeah i think there's you know uh certain things that that are probably the the right role for the government but anything done by the government is going to be inefficient um because the government is a monopoly like people that don't like corporations should not somehow think that the government is much is much better because the government is a corporation in the limit it is the ultimate corporation with a monopoly on violence so um it's like i think you know the right role for the government is is like to be uh acting a regulatory capacity um and but we should aspire to have the government be be a a limited actor in the economy um so you know you could say like what percentage of economic output should be uh governed you know um and maybe maybe a third or something like that you know once you start getting above 50 government i think that's problematic so um you can look at countries like east eastern west germany north and south korea and there's you know there was essentially an arbitrary line drawn out to divide the countries and east germany was like kind of 100 government west germany was i don't know probably at least 40 government they're like you know relatively socialist and yet the gdp per capita of that you know of west germany was i think five times higher than east germany so that just shows you just how big of a difference it is if if you have like something that's close to half government versus 100 government uh private sector is probably a factor of 10 more efficient than the government um and this like this is sort of this is also true of just just generally if you have like a monopolistic private corporation then the forcing function for serving the customer is weak but at least private corporations can go bankrupt and the government cannot go bankrupt unless the people go bankrupt like basically unless it exhausts extracting money from the population so well they're trying their best so yeah it's just you know so just you want to just knowing that the government is as inefficient as any large monopolistic corporation would be and it is the ultimate large monopolistic corporation we should minimize how much the government does um keep it to what is essential um and and not go beyond that yeah i mean i guess you know the conservative concern with that is you start to give them you know you give them a foothold and then they're just going to keep going like you give them a regulatory capacity over something like agi and then they're just gonna start to you know overreach more and more because that's what we've seen in the past you you know you give them an inch and they take a mile yeah but i i mean does anyone realistically want to delete the faa or the fda probably somebody okay [Music] like we've got an anarchist in the corner i mean usually if you go to the store like you you buy some whatever steak or or some something from the store and ask like it's like poisonous you know and or or you know the like we take for granted that with the food we buy is is uh at the stores it is not going to kill us you know actually you know uh because some company cut costs and decided that you know having e coli and salmonella is you know who cares type of thing um so so i think you know like like we take ground that the food we buy at the stores is is um is not poisonous um and that uh the drugs we buy like that is extremely unlikely like the drugs will be consistent and they will do what they say they're going to do which except for by the the sort of vitamin supplements industry which can basically is unregulated and so they can say things that are not true and feel so still by it um anyway so it's like i think you know you really want like you can think of like the you want some kind of referee on the field so like you know for um you know like it's like a if you're watching say a football game or something like basketball there's referees okay so would the games be better or worse without a referee that'd be worse you know um so i think like the role of referee and and games is important um and so the government's role as a referee i think is also important um you just don't have the government be kind of on the field as a player it would be weird if the referees just suddenly started playing ball you know probably not the game would not be as good well and other things that make me think you've never seen a sci-fi movie before you have a neural link so you can like put things in people's brain or something and what's that like what's that like is it what is it cool do you like it well try it you might like it okay yeah with neural link uh neural link is in part um well but in fact the the the sort of the reason i created neural link was um long term as a risk mitigation for digital super intelligence in that if we are able to effectively achieve symbiosis with digital intelligence then we're sort of the collective human well is better able to steer things in the direction that we'd like or even with benign ai at least go along for the ride so because even with the benign super intelligence if it's so much smarter than us that you know that it really can't even communicate effectively because it's so fast um and and then like talking to us is like turning to a tree you know because if you look if you do a stop motion on like a tree a tree is communicating with its environment just very slowly it looks right now it's looking for water the tree is looking forward to the the ranch is looking for sun and and the tree has movement it's just very slow um and so um and we're already at this point uh partially a cyborg uh we're de facto uh sort of a sidewalk in in that our phones and computers and applications are a digital extension of ourselves at this point like if somebody leaves their phone behind it's like missing limb syndrome you know like uh the phone is almost like a part of you um and uh but the the issue with that symbiosis is that the the data rate is extremely slow so like how fast can you can you communicate with your phone using uh two thumbs you know 10 bits per second it's very low at the data rate and if if computers can and which they can communicate at you know a billion bits per second or more and and we're communicating with them at 10 bits per second then that's just an extremely slow communication link and it inhibits symbiosis without sort of tertiary digital layer like so we've got sort of basically like a a primal layer which is like a limbic system basically it's our instincts and a lot of our emotions and it's kind of like the reptile brain the situation and then you've got the cortex which is like the the thinking part of the brain planning and whatnot uh and um so it's like the second layer and then then our phones and computers are our tertiary layer but there's a just a bound with limitation i would we're very slow to communicate so but with uh with a neural link you can increase the communication bandwidth by many orders of magnitude maybe by a thousand or more so you're talking about output from the brain to other devices yeah primarily yeah not input to the brain uh it would be both ways uh our input is much less constrained than our output because of vision so you know like rough approximation is like our input because of vision is like maybe a million times uh roughly some people are online not going to argue with this but it's the input to input is many orders of magnitude uh higher than output because of vision um you know picture a picture says a thousand words and a video says i don't know hundred thousand words like there's just you know there's um this is why like a meme can communicate so much more than a few words now this is obviously very esoteric and like i'm not sure this will resonate you know with a lot of people like oh we need to increase the the bandwidth between our cortex and our digital tertiary layer uh by many orders of magnitude in order to not lose symbiosis with digital intelligence so this is quite esoteric but um but that's the long-term existential risk mitigation of neurolink which we may or may not achieve i'm not saying we will achieve this but it's least an attempt to solve that then um along the way neural link uh can solve a lot of uh brain issues like if you got uh and you know if you've got like a a severed spine or something so like one of the first application we're looking to solve is uh implanting neural link in someone who has a quadriplegic tetraplegic um so like they have no they can't move their arms and legs or maybe not even really uh move most of their face like like maybe blink or something like that you know like stephen hawking or they didn't have to have several spine but like there are various diverse mechanical and other like mechanical breakages or diseases that break the link between your brain and body um and neurolink um can solve that it can certainly we're confident neural link can can enable someone who uh is a tetraplegic um to operate a phone uh or a computer faster than someone who has hands working hands and uh we're showing this for example with the monkey being able to play video games so you can play a bunch of games not just pong pong is currently its favorite game i don't even know monkeys can play pong but yeah in the first place yeah monkeys can play pong uh with their hand good um yeah they're good monkeys have good reflexes uh so um and that's how that starts off you the monkey we try and then we look at the signals that the monkey's brain is sending and then we read those signals and and then we uh try we transfer the signals directly to the game and uh you know so and then then we take the joystick away and the monkey's just playing basically to let telepathic wow that's wild yeah so um and we recently got uh what we think is a world record in bits per second from uh from any uh neural neural device like we're starting to approach 10 bits per second which is not actually well not that big but it's more than anyone else has achieved in a useful way 10 10 like close to 10 useful bits per second is where we are and we'll we'll increase that dramatically over time so um so anyway so we're we also want to make sure the device is extremely safe um and and extremely well tested um our standards go far beyond what is required from a regulatory stand standpoint and uh but we're hoping to do our first neurolink into a human uh next year and um and likes to enable someone who um you know has has almost no no movement capability to um operate a phone um as fast or or we think faster over time than someone who has has working hands so i think that that would be quite a significant thing and help a lot of people and and there are many such applications um and i'm increasingly confident that um we can implant a second neurolink device so one one that accesses the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex and then a a second one that is uh past where the injury is uh so if you've got a service you know we're basically where where are the neurons still functional um and implant a second uh neural link device uh and uh act have the two devices talk to each other and just transfer the signals across that where wherever it broke yeah because it's like a broken circuit right so you've got a broken circuit you just you basically just do a signal transfer between the two and you don't necessarily even need to to know what all those signals are um you just need to transfer the signals um so just like if you have like a an ethernet cable you don't need to know what's on the ethernet cable for the cable to work or a wireless ethernet from one wireless ethernet you know wi-fi box to another wireless ethernet wi-fi box you don't need to know what the contents of the signal are in order to transfer the signal so i am confident that that such thing is possible um i'm not saying we will do it i don't know i set unreasonable expectations but i'm i'd say i'm certain that it is possible and we will try to make it happen which would then enable people to walk again and use their hands and i think long term probably restore full body functionality to somebody who um has none did you know that we created an elon musk subscription tier at one point on the b did you ever see that no you didn't know that we did that we were because you were gonna pay a lot of money or something yeah you had interacted with us a couple of times and so we were like wooing you as a subscriber come subscribe but we created our own tear for you what was the uh fee on the tier i don't remember what it was i think it was like it was the highest payments it was like 99999 dollars a month or something but people were signing up for it people were actually signing up for it though every time i would check i'd be like is it him is it him it was random people who picked it thinking it was a joke and it was actually charging their credit cards we had like we had all these angry people like my wife is gonna kill me if you don't refund this charge so we had to take the elon musk tear down so we took it down i guess before you could before you could find it but it was there we had it there for you so well thanks i guess that's a compliment i think all right very eloquently put well shall we land the plane here with the 10 question so we uh this is podcast started in kyle's garage we asked every guest the same 10 questions at the end of the interview we never anticipated we would be asking elon musk these 10 questions these are rapid fire so you can answer them as quick as you want yeah or you can go on forever yeah your call uh have you ever met christian rap artist carmen um i i mean the only common musician i'm aware of is um common miranda uh you know she would like dance with like a like a fruit ball on her head yeah yeah um and you never met her no she she died okay a while ago all right cool look him up are you more of a calvinist or an armenian or an armenian yeah like a predestination [Music] i i guess my my mind would say um determinism and my heart says very well yeah i mean when i grew up i was funnily enough um i went to anglican sunday school uh you know church of england basically um and uh but i was also sent to hebrew preschool although i'm not jewish but nonetheless i was singing having to gillard one day and jesus along the next and you know it's fine if you're a kid you know and and santa claus and like uh you know um so um [Music] yeah yeah that answers the question uh yeah so uh you get to add one book to the bible what is it you guys have never people have never updated these questions to like apply more broadly nope at any point they're unchangeable yeah they're like the ten commandments at this point um i mean a little bit lower i remember we could have a chapter past revelations like is there a happy ending here like um the revelations part two the happy ending well you know if there's like a really good book you think everyone should read because it would be in the back of the bible everyone should read this book you know okay how many people have actually read the bible fewer than probably say they have but oh yeah i mean do you have a reason i mean at one point i you know when i was a kid i was like i had this existential crisis and i was trying to figure out what's the meaning of life and i was like oh it all means nothing it's all and i and i you know read like a whole bunch of religious books including the bible and i'm like there's a bunch of things in there they didn't teach you in sunday school uh sonoma gomorrah dark um yikes um you know god sure changes his mind from the old testament to the new testament i'm like whoa that's pretty vengeful in the old testament what was the question you get to pick a book to add to the bible yeah a book uh the attraction to the galaxy oh god yeah it's a great book yeah cigars are pipes um you know i'm not sure i've ever really smoked a pipe um my grandfather did it kind of looks cool but i have smoked cigars and i think like you know for a celebratory occasion like cigars and whiskey that's a pretty good combo you get to hang out with any three people living or dead who are they it's always hard to think of like three yeah people ethan kyle seth you're hanging you got three right here that's true jeff bezos uh necessarily like uh i think there's a lot of people that would be interesting to talk to but um you know i don't know uh is it living or dead you said yeah living or dead this is this is just you know a stream of consciousness not like a carefully thought out yeah uh answer but it would be like uh i don't like shakespeare ben franklin maybe newton or einstein okay it's a good group bunch of white men yeah i was drinking white clothes cleopatra sounds fun [Laughter] whiskier beer or i guess he went right for the whiskey so nice all right uh what would be the first thing you would do as president well the presidency in the u.s is designed to be a weak position a relatively weak position um because you know obviously the founders of the of the country did not want to create a monarch you don't want to avoid like a king situation um so the the sort of the presidency in the u.s is is meant to be weak weaker than saying a parliamentary system where the majority essentially the speaker that the house would be the the prime minister or president um so you say like what what can you do as the president um in the in the u.s there's a lot of limitations um unless you have the support of congress you obviously cannot change the laws but i would i probably aspire to reduce the size of government and you know and take a look at the regulatory situation and just make sure there's there's a good garbage collection of regulations so if they're outdated as there are many outdated unnecessary regulations uh but but you know there's a there's a strong forcing function for creating new laws and regulations but a weak forcing function for getting rid of of of bad laws and regulations um and and and i think this is just generally a problem as civilization ages without war where there are new laws and regulations created every year and so there's like more and more constraints on what you can do but there's there's very little effort put to remove laws and regulations and so this is like hardening of the arteries of civilization and eventually it'll be like oh look elvis travels where you're just tied down by you know thousands of little strings and it's not like any one string is the issue but there's so many strings that you can't get anything done um you know that's one part part big part of why i moved to texas it's just like there's just fewer strings tying you down um so yeah um i i think like the the uh the value of of someone just being a a very competent executive officer is um is under undervalued in a president uh just like how good are you at running things and getting things done um because if you're the president you're kind of like the ceo of the country um and uh and so are you good at doing things are you effective and pretty productive yeah you said a ceo is a meaningless title would that mean i'm just curious how that like well ceo is not not like a legal title okay um i was just saying that that there are all these titles and cooperations that are kind of made up um and you can see what is actually uh required for a corporation when you fill out the form to create one and so you need a a president a secretary and a treasurer same thing as like if you're performing a chess club or a glee club or something like that same same thing um and and actually technically all three can be the same person so that's what's legally required if you don't have those three things you cannot function as a corporation uh everything else like a general counsel cfo ceo these are all made up like that they're no legal no no meaningful legal bearing so uh you only need those the president's secretary treasurer um so there's all these like cxo titles which you know just are somewhat like resume inflators um i was just making a point that like people think ceo is a real title but it's not it's not it's not a legally meaningful title you need someone who is defined as the as the president but that's that's um that's it so um for now you have like chief marketing officer chief information officer chief everything officer you know i i sort of think like you should have like this is our svp of sorcery all right question number eight the master general um oh yeah have you ever punched anyone or have you ever been punched you got any cool punching stories if you don't have an answer for that we have a follow-up it's even worse i don't know about cool punching stories but i um where i grew up was extremely violent um i never i never started a fight except with my brother actually one exception yeah i did i'd be my brother up which i'm either just i don't know if that's how it goes but uh [Music] south africa when i was growing up was just an inherently very violent place i punched the face many times i always got beaten to death once so many times i think if you have not been punched in the face with a fist you don't know what you have no idea what it's like shocking sensation shocking sensation have you been punished ethan yeah just by like high school kids yeah not right still it's just like your face never touches anything and then suddenly yeah they punch their nose like you can't even see straight um so yeah um it's funny that people think words are they're so sensitive to words it's like man you're even punched in the face words don't mean nothing all right question number nine uh you get to go to one concert any band in history who do you go see anybody i don't know maybe the rolling stones are there you know when they're only peak rolling stones seems like and hey day yeah yeah nitpick all right final question to close our time out here yeah i mean we're here we're you know the babylon b is a christian organization you know and uh we're a ministry well how come we're doing this show on a sunday night why wasn't your church gathered why aren't you heathens and church exactly so we have to make a church supposed to be a day of rest we did zoom church like god said don't work on sundays okay let's go ahead guys are going to straight down for this one get into the whole jesus that's rest thing okay straight to hell this is true this is true i it's okay so to make this church we have to do we have to make sure just we're wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept jesus as your lord and savior on the show um personal awards you know it's a quick prayer [Music] i mean let's just say like i agree with the principles that jesus advocated um and that the you know there's some some there's great wisdom in what in the teachings of of jesus uh and i agree with those teachings um and things like tone the other cheek are very important because as opposed to an eye for an eye an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind so forgiveness you know is important and treating people as you would wish to be treated love that neighbor as myself very important so it's like a 60 70 yes yes as einstein would say [Music] i believe in the god of spinoza [Music] um so um but hey if um you know if if jesus is uh saving people i mean i i wouldn't stand in his way you know like i'll be sure i'll be safe why not sweet we did it yeah i think he just said yes we got it all right we got them to be exciting sounds good the whatever blood and water christ it was kind of weird you know if you're a kid like you get to give you some weird tasting you know just getting a wine yeah i'm like what the hell is this i'm like isn't this kind of just cut it off when he said yes i'm like is this some like fading metaphor for cannibalism or something i don't get it like what uh what the hell i remember thinking that was just crazy uh when i was a kid um and i like this to like whoa you know i mean even as a metaphor it's kind of odd but you know yeah so it's like should i be doing alcohol to minors i was like we do grape juice okay yes i think it's unusual to even be thinking about that as a kid like as a kid you just go through the motions and then later on that you think wait a minute what does this actually represent what am i doing when i was a kid i was like like is this actually blood and body what you know i don't i don't know if i want to eat somebody and then i was like why this is i mean i did it anyway i'm like this seems like okay man i don't know if this is just pretty odd you know i remember thinking that even at age five so i was like you know and i was definitely like you know sunday school there like when they were telling me all the stories and i was like asking questions and like and i really were upset that i was asking questions and i was like you know jesus like fed the crowd with like five loaves of bread and three fish and i'm like how big was the crowd and and like where did the fish and bread come from did like from his cloak or something like because i was like reading books and i was like this is like they'd materialize like am i like i don't know where'd it come from you know like how did would you like take a bite of the bread and it would just the bread would just come back to being a full brand yeah you look away it's kind of a mechanic background they left out the details where did the universe come from um [Music] well yeah i'm not saying i know all the answers here i'm just you know it's just uh and like jesus was obviously very pro-alcohol you know because one of his miracles was turning water into wine yeah and that was like they were having a party they ran out of wine and they're like let's keep this banner going good stuff who can who can solve this problem we're at a white cloth the friggin store's closed and jesus is like i gotcha okay water now i like party on you know so you know accurate pro partying without all eyes literally it was one of the miracles bible story time you are the it's like you're definitely you're the savior you're scared you kept the party going with lots of wine that's great um so um yeah well thank you i appreciate you coming here talking to us very much very welcome pleasure to meet you in person and uh you know we'll uh we'll continue to throw out the satire that we hope you'll respond to and you know keep that going a little bit oh we didn't ask onion or the bee but i guess that was kind of answered earlier you mentioned earlier yeah yes we already covered that yeah i mean i i think the onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time um it's just it just seems to have been you know in recent years somewhat infected by the world my virus so that just makes everything less funny yeah that's true workman virus is a world without humor yeah i'm hoping neurolink can solve that move thank you thank you appreciate it thank you thanks so much thanks so much

https://youtu.be/jvGnw1sHh9M

so [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] [Music] these are the guys that run the show this is kyle our editor-in-chief this is creative director ethan nicole okay so i mean uh well i guess before we get started like uh maybe you guys can tell me like what's the you know how did the v get started and yeah and and uh yeah what's your deal and why do why are you in california that's way easier actually i'm much better at being interviewed so no problem yeah the view is just this little like christian humor site that we launched in 2016 and it was just like we spent 50 bucks on the domain name started writing jokes throwing them out there and it started to go big in conservative circles a couple years ago and that's just kind of where we got to where we are seth is our ceo he bought the site a few years ago from the original founder yeah he was original his name is adam ford he's in love with the company anymore uh he owns a piece of it he does not the bee now you you've seen that the you know the yeah that was unaffiliated no yeah yeah yeah okay so they do like real news but crazy it's like a backup plan it's like when satire is impossible because the world's too absurd then we just report on the absurdity over on not to be so you know plan b yeah yeah reality is we're greater than fiction yeah exactly often is so how many people at the be now yeah we've got uh probably a dozen full-timers now it's grown pretty fast a year ago it was three of us we have over we have like 25 people involved just not all full-time staff so you'd be surprised like with satire you don't have to have a writing staff like filling a room churning out articles all day long you can only handle so much satire every day you know like we're not people you don't need to publish an article every three minutes like fox news or daily wire or something like that so um we have a lot of part-time one of our writers here frank fleming is one of our writers um and he's got a full-time job he just writes for us on the side okay we'd love to have him full time yeah he lives in australia you live in austin okay yeah yeah and i'm a florida guy i have my head the headquarters are technically in south florida i'm in southeast florida yeah florida i'd love to get these guys to florida but it's hard to get people out of california it really is uh yeah it's more challenging than you think despite uh like california's the state of california doing everything it can to encourage people to leave yes yeah um i think you had one article about how gavin newsom is your whole salesman of the year yeah yeah yeah actually true that's actually true [Laughter] so you don't miss it then i know i mean there's certainly many aspects of california that i do like um most of my friends are still in california some of my best friends like california so yeah i do i do most many aspects to california especially my friends and it's beautiful and lots of cool things but increasingly difficult to get things done and california used to be the land of opportunity and now it is the has become and it's becoming more so the land of um [Music] sort of over regulation over litigation uh over taxation poop on the sidewalk and and scorn it's just that's what it's like it's not like thanks for the taxes it's like tate thanks for the texan hacksaw kicking the teeth let me flip the question though so that's kind of the story that be the bee started out as you know this little blog it took off it's kind of blown up into something like now we have a following including you like how how do we get on your radar people sharing our articles and you just saw them coming across your feed yeah um i'm not sure i saw it on twitter at one point the thoughts from the articles were quite quite funny um i wrote those okay um yeah i mean i i used to be much bigger fan of the of the onion but then the onion just seems to have gotten really politically correct um you know it's sort of gone a bit but in the sml direction it's somewhat leftist as you know it's it's basically it will it will not really make fun of anything on the left but it used to be much more even-handed than the onion um and um and then they just they just got the work mind virus yeah so uh to the point where the animal just was it used to be very funny and then it was not that funny you know snl i used to be a huge fan of snl but you know i still think they have some some occasional good stuff but it's just become i think you've written some some articles about this um you know snl had many many if not most of the snl episodes are kind of a a moral lecture on why we're bad human beings right uh instead of comedy yeah so and again uh won't make fun of anything on the left really like you know they'll beat up on ted cruz 17 000 times and you're like okay we get it and often because he's made fun of someone on the left he'll make fun of some on the left and then they jump on him for that it's like a defensive thing yeah yeah exactly so it's it's just um there are just a lot of no-fly zones uh with a lot of comedy um and uh and then and then you realize it's like wait a second is is a comedy is is the comedy getting at an essential truth or or trying to or is there is there a propaganda element or is it trying to push you in a particular direction or or getting getting to an essential truth that is humorous and when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that that is that is humorous then you know it's it's just not that funny right now see that's exactly the criticism we get from the left the criticism from the left is that that's what we're doing with our humor is that we're trying to push a narrative neglecting the truth that's literally what the new york times says that we are far right misinformation disguised as satire right right so there's a it's almost where you're standing jealousy yeah it's almost based on where you're standing but how it's based on where you're standing yeah i i mean i'd say the b is probably it's moderately right um it's not it's not but it's not certainly not far right that my my impression is not that uh i would say that the b is not probably it wouldn't be actually the b is fully centrist um but it is certainly not far right um if one is fully left and 10 is fully right the b seems to be at six 6.5 uh towards okay right that ish bernie sanders elizabeth warren babylon b hitler or somewhere on that scale yeah it's it's not but you know it's it's uh i mean the the b is i think less right than than say the onion is is left for example you know so the the i think would be more left than that the b is right right righteous or whatever yeah right no i don't know we'll have to put that on our wikipedia page righteous propaganda you know you talked about the wilk mind virus and i was wondering if you could decipher this tweet of yours for me because i'm not a programmer you wrote trace route woke underscore mind underscore virus what does that mean okay so traceroute is a networking command to so if you want to figure out a path to a particular server or domain you'd say traceroute or in windows trace rt that would show you the path to a particular source server with an ip address or domain name and and it would show basically all the hops that that it goes through um and the latency between each each hop and so i know some of those words yeah um so traceroute be yeah we like where'd it come from yeah where did the virus come from what is its origin so did this work did this command work or not did you find your comments read the comments and see and see all right it is a prevalent mind virus and um arguably one of the biggest threats to wine civilization also not having enough kids right yeah i think most people if you just have to look at the birth rate statistics um you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year um and and then you could say like is this is the birth rate trending down or up and it's been trending down basically almost everywhere so if you look at the birth rate last year you know you know how many adults will be in 20 years because that's how many babies were born the trend is like you don't have to be some master of statistician or something like that um you could just look look at kids one last year trending to well below replacement rate uh and a lot of countries have been a well-veil replacement rate for a long time well the concern is that if you have kids then they'll contribute to climate change and they'll kill the earth right that's the leftist concern is that we're overpopulating the earth and we're going to kill it are you trying to overpopulate the earth so that we can go to mars and take over and take over mars is this a deliberate strategy the earth is far from overpopulated um uh far far from overpopulated um so the you know the the thing that's necessary to minimize the chemical change to the atmosphere and oceans is to move to sustainable energy generation and consumption so the three elements of a sustainable energy future are sustainably energy generation primarily through solar wind some geothermal hydro and nuclear although they're shutting down all the nuclear power stations so yeah you can sort of cross that one of the list which they shouldn't be doing they should just keep they should keep moving um they're really unless a nuclear power plant is in a region of uh major national disasters instability or something yeah yeah you don't want to be like you know subject to massive um natural disasters because obviously that could be a problem but if you're you know like say germany or france or whatever you don't have those so the nuclear power is very safe um but anyway the the long-term um the heavy lifting on energy generation will be solar followed by wind and um and you really don't need a very large land area to generate enough power to power for example united states so it's on the order of you know roughly a little over 100 miles by 100 miles a second of land with solar solar panels would power the entire united states so like a little corner of utah or texas like um it can power the whole country so anyway so uh it's really not that hard the solar incidence is a gigawatt per square kilometer uh if for most neutrons can do some calculations most nuclear power plants yeah that's right it's it's it's a kilowatt per square per square k per square meter and there's a million square you know million square meters in a square kilometer so um it's a pretty simple uh math so and then you get you get like maybe 20 efficiency on that so call it like a net power generation of 200 megawatts per square kilometer now if you take most nuclear power plants there's usually a a pretty clear area around a nuclear power plant because people don't usually want to live right next to a nuclear power plant so um the area of most nuclear power plants that is uninhabited if if covered in solar panels would generate more power than the nuclear power plant and then you also then the second element that's needed are batteries to store solar and wind because uh the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time so the enter the intermittency of uh solar and wind requires battery storage for continuous power uh so that's the second part of the of the sort of second the second pillar of sustainable energy and the third is uh sustainable transport so that means uh electric uh cars boats planes and then ironically the one thing that you can't really make electric is rockets you know the same involved in that but but although you can over time use solar power to generate fuel by pulling co2 out of the atmosphere combining it with h2o creating ch4 which is methane and o2 oxygen and rockets are mostly oxygen by mass so over time you can make everything basically solar power so you're working on some of those problems but the problem of wokeness specifically you mentioned that's like a mind virus and it's destructive uh and why do you think wokeness is so interested in your opinions too um but you know like i mean generally i think we should be aiming for like a positive society and uh you know that it should be okay to you know be humorous uh like you know like we should we should like like workness basically wants to make comedy illegal which is not cool we've experienced that i mean chappelle like what the flower bed i mean try to shut down chappelle come on man that's crazy um so um you know so do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation uh and hate basically uh and no forgiveness right yeah [Music] at its heart awokeness is divisive um exclusionary um and hateful it's it's it basically gives mean people a reason a a a a it gives them a shield to be to be mean and cruel armored and false virtue what do you think i'd agree with that yeah yeah i mean we've obviously seen that from the left you know just ourselves you know the left is almost this religion now where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them you know for them it's like you're making fun of god or salvation you know so they're almost the new religious right in our view yeah he agreed with me [Laughter] well you were pretty mean to uh senator warren though on twitter recently you slammed her man please don't call the manager on me senator karen she struck first yeah obviously right yes she did actually called me a freeloader yeah um anna grifter doesn't pay taxes basically um and i'm literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year ever and she doesn't pay taxes basically at all and her tax and her salary is paid for by the taxpayer like me could you even use could you use turbo attorney would that even work if you could die by irony she would be she would be dead fiery could kill what would happen if you walked into an h r block to file your taxes like could they handle your case my taxes are actually not that complicated um i do not have any offshore accounts i don't have any uh tax shelters uh uh i i have a i have basically a tesla and spacex stock um and um tesla's publicly traded so information is public and spacex is you know ac corp that is audited uh you know it has outside orders so it these it's it'll with that uh outside investors so it is they're also it's everything is extremely transparent um there are there is no uh there are no elaborate sort of tax avoidance schemes or or anything like that so hr block could could easily do my taxes you know i don't need a html block i could do it yeah you know it would like probably take me a few hours to do my taxes it's very basic did you sell that stock in tesla because of the twitter poll uh in part you made up your mind that you're already going to do that before the twitter poll um there i i have some test options that are expiring next year that so i needed to exercise those options no matter what and and i was like okay i'll move forward and exercise those options um so that that's only would be part of it uh no matter what uh but then over and above that i sold incremental stock uh to uh try to get up to the 10 level so just the option exercise loan would not get to 10 so i sold a stock that should be roughly make my total uh tesla share sale roughly 10 is the most annoying thing in the world people asking you questions like this about your personal finances no one ever asks me what stock i'm selling or or why i made so much money last year i mean i'm the third richest man on my street which is which is pretty good pretty good i mean i'm not sure it's it's all that productive or interesting you know essentially all of my net worth is uh it's just in spacex and tesla stock these two companies that that i helped create uh and have run for now almost 20 years um have done a lot of useful things um spacex is the launch is more paleo to orbit than the rest of the world combined and has a global internet system called starlink and and is the primary provider well the only us provider of uh astronaut transport to the space station um we publish six to eight satire articles a day some of them are funny i mean pretty good so so spacex uh yeah it transports us and as well as non-us astronauts to the space station that was previously the u.s was dependent on on russia uh who's doing a good job but charging kind of crazy money proceed so as with spacex the the cost per astronaut dropped dramatically and and the money was you know went to jobs in the us so that's what why people you know think spacex is valuable uh tesla uh i mean the annoyance though of like people uh holding it against you that you've had success holding it against you that you have wealth um you know viewing billionaires as evil and you know you're not doing enough to give back you know you have like the elizabeth warren thing that you haven't paid your fair share i mean that's you know it's that's got to be kind of aggravating yeah i think it's just important to understand like like what is this wealth uh it's not like some it's not like i've got like some some mashup massive cash balance uh i've my cash balances are very very low and at least until i sold stock which is really the first time i've actually sold stock in any meaningful way was this quarter i simply had loans against my my stock so i i i if tesla spacex went bankrupt i would go bankrupt too immediately so um it's not realized this is what you're saying yeah it's not no it's like people it's just like it's like you know i built these two companies and it was extremely difficult to build them like massively painful and difficult rewarding too but also but massively painful difficult um and uh and and i didn't i didn't sell the stock in the companies um you know i i you know my my sort of impression was that you know you you shouldn't take money off the table or you shouldn't you shouldn't take stock off the table and de-risk things that a captain should go down you know with their ship so so it's like okay like you know i don't want to take money off the table and then then if the companies fail then i will be i'll be sort of enriched while investors suffer and that does not seem right so anyway so i that's the reason i didn't sell is is i could easily have diversified and protected myself financially if if spacex would tell them went bankrupt but i did not and spacex and tesla came very close to bankruptcy many times even when bankruptcy was literally weeks away i did not sell stock uh and then the companies became valuable not tesla's value is basically because value is not it's not up to me it's up to investors and they decided it was worth tesla's worth trillion dollars in the public market so and i own twenty percent of the company so so you're not apologizing right now you're not going to look into the camera and say i'm so sorry in the camera right now i'm just trying to explain like i don't think people necessarily understand they don't yeah yeah that uh this this is not you know that some function of sort of hoarding or something it's it's simply that you know i'm 20 company that became very valuable as decided by external investors and so twenty percent of a trillion dollar evaluation is 200 billion dollars um and i i've you know i've said at various times that i think the stock price is too high but the investors just ignored that i'm like okay i literally said it's too high um and they just kept making that price higher so i'm like tell them our value is too high so anyway so just that's uh but like i said this is not like uh my so-called wealth is it's not some it's not some deep mystery it's simply what is my ownership percentage of spacex and tesla multiply that by the valuation that's my worth it's super simple and my taxes are super simple and i have no like i said no offshore accounts no sort of clever tax evasion or anything like that and i don't i don't draw a salary or any cash salary or bonus from the companies at all so um again i thought that was like morally good to not do that um and so there were there were like there was one year i think 2018 where where i i didn't pay any tax uh but but that's because i didn't have any income um and and and i did have a little bit of income but i'd actually overpaid taxes i think in 2017. so i paid too much tax and so i got like i basically netted that out in in 2018 because i paid too much tax in 2017. accidentally unless you sell stock there are no realized gains so uh so then i was like well should i sell like i i like what am i supposed to do why send shares to the government somehow i don't know if you can even do that yeah um so there was like well like unless i sell shares there's not there's no there's no actual mechanism to pay tax so then i was like well should i sell 10 percent you know to in order to pay tax and and i sort of asked twitter and they're like on balance they said yes and so i um so i i sold enough stock to get to around ten percent plus the option exercise stuff and uh i very i try to be extremely literal um so you don't generally need to read between lines you can just read the lines [Music] so that's it as the as the fattest guy here i i want to know what's when are you gonna make the candy company because you said on twitter that you're making a candy company and you're the closest thing to willy wonka that this culture has it could be willy wonka i didn't say it would you say that he said i'm starting a canadian company it's going to be warren buffett um but you did say i am super super serious i think if you put two supers before sirius that makes sense and that's like you're probably not serious you know just uh for satire writers out there yeah um i thought that locked him in is like definitely syria he's explaining jokes to it yeah yeah yeah it's just a guy said let me tell you how jokes accept our words um you know i was just obviously i was just like making fun of warren buffett who's like really he's got this like candy company and stuff so um and um that was my one question now i i i did actually i did actually experiment with um trying to find some compelling candy that would be like i don't know maybe much better than other candy um we tried various candy options but i didn't find any i couldn't figure out a candy that was like just way better than other candy um like a little bit better but not a lot better and so it was like unless it's like really a great product then you looked into this yeah yeah we tried a whole bunch of different candies and uh and it was like there's not anything like that's obviously just way better uh so um i don't want to just have like a pretty good candies if there's like a great candy yeah some aces some candy that's aces um but you know we don't need another sort of like pretty good candy yeah yeah there's plenty of the south yeah yeah what does that look like when you like suddenly get an idea like we should make candy you like you just call somebody like how does what what are the steps that suddenly take place when you're like because you do so many things i'm just fascinated by the what that process looks like rockets tell them you got a guy you call jim i want to make candy make it happen um i think i did ask for you know people on twitter to send me candy that they thought was good it's deployed and i was like well what if some of those candy is like you know it's poisonous or something but whatever like you know candy from strangers on the internet yeah it could go wrong that's just not 100 safe um but uh i did try a whole bunch of candy scent from strangers what's your favorite candy well there was like a a pretty good like peanut like some pretty good peanut brittle ones or like that peanut butter with a bunch of other stuff in it and some pretty good chocolates but but nothing that was like blew me away so um and and then there were people at spacex and tesla that sent me some candy options but not nothing that was it's not like i care about starting companies like if there's like there are if there's a very compelling product or service then that's the thing that is important not the company your company is just an assemblage of people to create a compelling product or service and if a company does not provide great products and services it should not exist there's no point in the company for the sake of being a company that's pointless companies should only exist to provide great products and services a company is just just literally a group of people so do we have to close or stay open i think there's a lot of there's a lot of companies out there that probably should just be disbanded because they don't make uh compelling products and services they're spoilers and those people better that those people do something else i think on that topic i mean the question that i just like really i feel so unqualified to be interviewing you right now i think we all do why are we here like what what are you doing okay i'm not the one who asked for the podcast you guys did just to be clear i'm not pushing the podcast on you you guys came here we just we were like i will stop by you know texas yeah just to be clear who was asking her i'm not i'm not like you know i know i know exactly hold a gun to your head for this podcast you could be on cnn right now yeah you know john a real news organization yeah i'm just throwing it out there i don't know unfortunately i just you know haven't um you know i guess uh you know what what was it you said the the requirement for being a cnn driver cnn is uh are you are you a pervert yeah i'm not perverted enough yeah i guess i don't know not a big pedophile fan you know bad mommy headlines better than i do [Laughter] i think you know a lot of us fantasize about if we had lots and lots and lots of money what we do and you've done a lot of the things that like a lot of us fantasize about build cool robots gonna go to mars we're gonna fix traffic but most of us also think we've become batman have you ever thought about like what would that really look like to become or would you go batman or iron man around what because crime is on the right that's a fruit bat or an insect bat i like the dragon ball big scary you know because most bats are either fruit or they carry a lot of diseases yeah yeah they eat fruit bugs like fruit batman intake batman i need to read that spin-off comic it's a strange choice of uh creature to emulate you know you take a different animal like maybe monkeys that play pong with their brains man [Music] monkey man monkey man yeah exactly just very agile they're the smartest animal right they can just uh swing monkey man that batman is more is more like monkey man really yeah because he's like he's swinging around and very agile um climbing up things and yeah throwing a battering is more likely for batman like why can't he fly if he's batman that's gonna fly yeah that's right he just yeah he glides very effectively though okay so he's really yeah but that's like a frank's more like flying [Laughter] less intimidating i guess yeah oh no squirrel man we're he's going to get us not squirrel man again yeah without making the grappling hook he has that thing's sweet we need those you can make probably make that yeah yeah sure you can make a grappling hood um i i mean like like when you it's like they sort of skip the parts where like batman's always on the top of the building but like once you get to the ground floor how do you get back to the top of the building yeah it's like you're going to huffing and puffing you know yeah yeah you never see how do you get the top of a skyscraper even if you've got a grappling hook i mean how big is your grappling hook like 50 stories like how big is that cable you know it's not really feasible um so you just got to like run up the stairs or take the elevator so it's like how do you get back up to the top of the skyscraper in gotham city it's always like tough with some tall buildings so iron man then he'd be like iron man yeah iron man because you're good at calculating the cost of things and stuff like that so like would it be cheaper to become batman iron man or just pay every criminal that you encounter a salary to just stop being a criminal i think they're trying to have to be um irony man irony man um i just defeat villains using the power of irony it's like oh too much irony i can't stand it please no stop the irony i can't handle it anymore i give up i give up too much irony that'd be rough that'd be awesome that'd be totally awesome that would be awesome yeah don't make me use irony again cheaper too what are your thoughts on the metaverse which takes technology to the next level and puts us in like a virtual world like do you see that as being dangerous hopeful for humanity like what's your view on that maybe we're in the metaverse right now it's just mata versus all the way down um i don't know if i necessarily buy into this metaphor stuff although people talk to me a lot about it web 3. sure you can put a tv on your nose i'm not sure that makes you in the metaverse you know um it's like weird like you know when i grew up it's like don't sit too close to tv it's going to ruin your eyesight right and now we got like tv is like literally right here i'm like uh what is that good for you i mean have you tried these games you know the art oculus stuff yeah they're okay you know but like it gives you motion sickness if you try to walk around like you can do a video game on your sort of computer console or whatever and and you can you can be in a like a first person game and and uh and move rapidly and not get set motion sickness but if you try to do that in a beat with vr goggles you get motion sickness it's like weird so you have to like teleport around with it's okay so that doesn't it doesn't feel like like that's the answer necessarily um into the brain so you don't have to have the glasses there you go yeah a neurolink long-term sophisticated neural link could um put you fully fully in a virtual reality thing um so i guess what i'm getting at is yeah exactly what could go wrong like the the negative implications the kind of dystopian implications that some are drawing out like i think it was i think jack dorsey was really critical of the whole metaverse idea you see problems with people i don't know living in a virtual world and leaving a physical world for for that and i don't see someone strapping a friggin t you know screen to their face all day uh and not wanting to ever leave there seems no way i mean does it feel like that to you it doesn't seem like that to me yeah it's like it gets uncomfortable to have this thing strapped to your head the whole time it definitely needs to be lighter yeah even if the weight i mean if it was like super light it will still be like i don't know it's not so like you won't be there all day so you know i think we're far from disappearing into the metaverse uh this sounds just kind of buzz wordy and you know i don't feel like hit like okay is this you know i've just gotten too old and like am i like one of those people who was like dismissing the internet whatever 95 as being like some fad or something that's never going to amount to anything although i didn't i was like saying like 95 was literally the internet is going to be transform humanity and going to be like you know prior information basically just went by osmosis like unless a person called another person or carried a letter physically to another person like how did you get information around the vast majority of information was literally person to person then they had like the fax machine and stuff but it's just like the way the metaverse is being sold right now is so underwhelming it's like you're going to be in it's like zoom meetings but there's an avatar for the person next to you you know and you maybe maybe get to design your avatar like i said i don't i don't feel like you know someone some old codger sort of dismissing the internet in 95 is not amounting to anything so there's some danger of that that's the case but uh i i currently am unable to see a compelling metaverse situation or web 3 sounds like more marketing than reality i don't get it you know and maybe i will so but i don't get it yet let me put that away it's definitely not monkeys playing pong let's just put it that way yeah i just like to advertise for white chloe yeah quite quote real men drink white clothes can we get our guys on the phone with white club sponsor after the fact if you want us to leave that in yeah then you won't pay us was it you know this is the first white call the first white claw ever drunk on the babylon v podcast so that's great you hit a point in your life where you you know you made plenty of money and you could do whatever what drives you to this campaign yeah it could be slipping my ties on right on a tropical island uh i've been wrong all this time why am i working 90 hours a week this is crazy because i'm always passing me the idea of like i've made it people always want to say be able to say i've made it i've arrived yeah and like how do you you know you hit those little islands in your life and you actually have to break yourself up that mindset and what are ways that you break yourself of that mindset and keep on going i didn't put all this effort into building spacex and tesla because i thought there were easy ways to make money i mean anyone who starts a car company thinking it's easy way to make money as a fool there are only two car companies that have not gone bankrupt in the history of the united states and that's ford and tesla and tesla came within inches of going bankrupt multiple times as does spacex so right and like who starts rocket company think it's going to be successful um i thought about i mean both both those companies i i thought had less than a 10 chance of success and i thought it was overwhelmingly likely that i would lose the money that i made from paypal you know i came to north america when i was 17 just by myself um and i had like like a few thousand dollars in in traveller's checks back when travelers tracks were a thing you know um in canadian dollars i landed in montreal um i have some family in canada uh and my mom's uncle lived in montreal but like we did we didn't know his phone number so i landed montreal and my mom says i just got a letter back from my uncle he's in minnesota or something so i'm like okay i don't know what to do now so i just stayed in youth hostel and like bought a bus take it across canada and i worked in various like odd jobs and stuff worked on my on my mom's cousin's farm wheat farm in saskatchewan for six weeks that's where i had my 18th birthday actually i worked in the lumber mall chainsawed logs and did various on jobs and and then went to college in canada for a couple years i paid my own way through college by the way so but in canada it's like easier because the college is more subsidized and i was a canadian citizen through my mom so and i got some scholarships and loans and stuff and and then i applied to the university of pennsylvania and uh didn't think i'd be able to go because tuition is really high but they gave me a scholarship and loans and stuff so i was able to go there i graduated with about a hundred thousand dollars in student debt and um i was going to do grad studies at stanford and decided to put that on hold to try starting an internet company um i actually i tried to get a job at netscape but they didn't i'd send my resume and i get a response so i was like okay i guess i should i can't get a job at the there are only a few internet companies and that can get a job at any of them so i was like i guess i want to do something internet got to start my own company but i ended up writing the first maps and directions on the internet i wrote personally the maps directions yellow pages white pages on a puny computer like with hardly any so you had to be like the code had to be super tight i even have some patents on like maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and stuff from from ages ago they're lapsed now but that that company ended up getting bought by by compact for about 300 million dollars i own seven percent of the company so i got like 20 million from that put most of it into uh x.com which merged with confinity to create paypal and then i got about 180 million dollars from that and i put all of that into spacex tesla and solarcity i just basically kept you know kept all the chips on the table and just like let's play another round but most people take the trips off the table or at least some of their chips and uh and then spacex and tesla ended up being valuable and that's where i am but the the reason for spacex and tesla is you know tesla if you say like what is what is the how would you assess the historical good of tesla i'd say it's the degree to which tesla accelerated sustainable energy and i've been interested in electric cars for a long time um since maybe high school or certainly early college my original interest in electric vehicles was not so much due to environmental concerns but rather from the uh concern that we'd run out of oil eventually and or become extremely scarce and expensive and then a civilization would collapse because we can drive cars or you know run power plants and stuff so so we needed some form of sustainable energy generation and consumption or where civilization is going to collapse so that was my original interest in electric vehicles and solar energy and and then i do think there's um some risk of uh negatively affecting the climate uh you know as you increase the co2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere this you increase the risk of something uh going wrong um i i i'm not like in the camp of of the super alarmist uh global warming i like you know like i think like i don't think we're like um screwed because of like the the current parts per million of co2 in the ocean's atmosphere i think like this is actually not not a terrible level however the there's so much inertia in the direction of mining and burning hydrocarbons that you know the the world is still over overwhelmingly dependent on mining and burning hydrocarbons um so you know if this continues and you start really driving up the co2 in the oceans and atmosphere then there's this increased risk of accelerating climate change basically warming up the oceans and um and raising the sea level so so i think that's like it's just i think that's probably just not a wise risk to take since we will in any case uh have to transition to sustainable energy long term because we will eventually run out of oil and coal to minor burn uh then why run the experiment to see if you know to see if something bad will happen with a high co2 concentration in the ocean's atmosphere like it's a pointless experiment like we know we have to get to some uh sustainable energy economy it's total logical like so i think there's we should try to get there sooner so as not to run the risk of climate change it would not climate change would not be catastrophic for civilization but it would be very disruptive humans love living right on the ocean so it's like we're almost like a like a thermometer it's like it's like if we were living right on the beach okay so uh this is like so even small changes in the sea level in sea level will put a lot of houses underwater against little little changes not enough to be vague we just we've just inherently created civilization as highly sensitive to changes in temperature a lot of politicians who are alarmist about this stuff buy homes right on the water though don't they that's true yeah i mean i i'm not sort of into like vilifying the oil and gas industry because i think i think the the reality is like if uh if we don't have oil and gas right now civilization would collapse and everyone will be starving so we obviously need oil and gas right now it'd be absurd to just stop it like it's not not feasible um but but i do think we should be trying to accelerate progress towards a sustainable energy future uh not slow it down you know i think it's just a sensible thing to do to to try to move faster to a sustainable energy economy uh rather than slower um because that reduces the risk of the climate experiment and like i said since we know we have to get to a sustainable energy economy anyway why run this experiment it's it's just not smart anyway so so the fundamental good of tesla i think is by you know should be measured by how by how many years did tesla accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy um 10 years 20 years you know that's like the fundamental good of the company but to ethan's point he's asking like why not like is that is that your is that your answer for why you keep going is because these are these things make a difference they make a difference ultimately for the flourishing of humanity for the longevity of humanity is that why you're not on a beach somewhere sipping my ties or white claws yeah i don't actually drink a lot of white qualifier this is not about like trying to enrich myself um i do not live a life of conspicuous consumption i work you know very long hours and but i think i think what tells us is doing is important to the future and that's that's why i keep doing it and i think you know it's it's something i think is uh tesla increases the probability that the future will be good for humanity and and then for spacex um i think i think uh it's important that we take the actions like that we become a space bearing civilization and a multi-planet species this is an exciting inspiring future you know you need to have things that when you wake up in the morning you're like you're excited about the future why live if it's all about solving problems of being miserable like why live um so they've got to be things that are that are inspiring that like you know get you in the heart and i think space is one of those things so you know look at the apollo program and you know sending people to the moon in 69 and wasn't that a great thing for all of humanity great thing and if you ask people like one of what are some of the greatest things that humanity's ever done that would be one of them i think er you know around the world people would agree with that you know if you believe it really happened yes i do get that question this is um yeah we we went to the moon not just once but but several times and um i think the russians would have called us out on that one if it wasn't true you know uh to say the least among among this is like the yeah it's we went to the we went to the moon the russians didn't like us at the time yeah but so you know it's not a huge fan of it they wouldn't have like they were looking at us through telescopes like is this real or why you know uh they would have a bubblegum if it wasn't that's for sure there's a huge you know victory you know ideological victory for the united states and western civilization so but anyway the the point is like we we want to have an exciting inspiring future and and one where we are space spring civilization and multi-planet species i think is a much more exciting and inspiring future than one where we are forever confined to earth and never go back to the moon and and the moon was our high water mark and that's all we ever did that's depressing and and there's also from a long-term basis if we're a multi-planet species it's like life insurance for life itself not just for humans but for for all the creatures on earth um because we bring them with us and and they can't build spaceships so you know we are we're in effect the steward of life um and you know we can make a we can make mars like a you know another planet with life on it um you know it is you know uh it's probably a dangerous analogy to use but it it's a bit like noah's ark but you know we bring more than two of every creature because it's a little incestuous frankly um yeah i mean like how's this work you know second generation and did he hate the dinosaurs like what's uh [Laughter] why why was it like after the dinosaurs it's like pro-incest battle dinosaurs i don't get it and it would have to be a very big vote so but there's you know it's a metaphor perhaps i don't know um yeah but so anyway so like there's there's some some risk especially over a long period of time that so many calamities would happen to earth and if we're just in one planet that would be the end of life itself and certainly the the sun the sun is slowly expanding so uh you know the earth are roughly four and a half billion years old some people might disagree with that but it appears to be that way um uh and um in roughly half a billion years the sun will expand to big make earth probably uninhabitable in a billion years definitely uninhabitable so basically if intelligent life had take taken 10 percent longer to evolve on earth then it would never evolved at all because it would be destroyed because the oceans would boil and and they would we wouldn't be able to exist so i mean no matter what the universal end in heat death though right eventually so it's all futile to some extent if you go far enough um yeah i mean i think the if if heat death is the outcome of the universe it really all is all about the journey like you know they said like you know the journey is is is uh half the fun is the journey or whatever well if he death is the end of the universe the journey is all the fun you know can we just evolve heat resistance become like lava beings it's not it's not it's cold it cools eventually with entropy and i'm not a scientist entropy the ultimate he thought the devil was bad try entropy yeah okay try getting away from that but yeah i mean the yes i mean technically the being a multi-planet species would increase the probable lifespan of of civilization and and life as we know it um so i mean we humans don't live forever so but just because we don't live forever does not mean that civilization cannot live much longer than we do a civilization lives much longer than any individual human so this is not about like escaping to mars this is simply i mean i i will die probably long before moz is a self-sustaining civilization it's just i think something we should we should do in order to have a much longer probable lifespan of civilization and it's interesting and exciting and and mars is like us it's like an essential next step to like there are these like you know uh filters they're called like the great filters and because you have to say like where are the aliens you know it's like the fermi paradox where are the aliens if the universe is 13.8 billion years old shouldn't they be everywhere by now and i'm not aware of any evidence for aliens people ask me about that too uh we're the aliens i'm like man if anyone would know about evidence of aliens it would be me and i i've seen nothing so i think it may have been called sagan who said you know there's like we're either alone in in the galaxy or there are a lot of aliens and and each answer is arguably equally terrifying um it's like it's like hey we found it aliens are on their way uh too bad it's the invasion fleet um you know um so i i don't know it's like where are they where are the aliens like maybe there aren't any endless galaxy um and maybe the what we have here is a very very rare situation um you know a belief a brief flickering of consciousness in the die like a little candle in a vast darkness and we should not let that little candle go out so my dad's a rocket scientist at bowling and he had a question engineer well whatever when people say rocket scientists they really mean rocket engineer okay yeah so he's a rocket engineer and he says at what mach number does starship endure max q maximum dynamic pressure how much pressure is that does that make any sense to you uh yeah so uh yeah max q maximum dynamics pressure is is when you're at um a combination of speed and atmospheric density such that the uh the wind force on the rocket is is the highest and so as you climb higher and higher the atmospheric density decays exponentially um and so you hit this point of the combination of velocity and air density which is maximum dynamic pressure maximum q um and uh this this is mostly a function of thrust to weight so if you have a low thrust weight rocket you will have a typically a lower max q um and if you have a high thrust weight rocket you'll have a higher max q if you do not throttle down and so uh and it also kind of depends on on what trajectory you're flying are you flying a low with over trajectory uh single burn insertion or or eight eight uh say a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a lower perigee then you'll have a higher a higher max q because you will spend you'll spend more time going uh sort of horizontal instead of vertical um getting to orbit is mostly about you what getting to what it is is about your your velocity parallel to the other surface so around mark 23 to mark 25 uh you're you know so roughly 23 ish times the speed of sound is when you reach uh orbit orbital velocity roughly 17 000 miles an hour so um and and that's that's what it means to go up and stay up you only need height in order to get out of the high density portion of the atmosphere so that you don't slow down um none of that was correct i disagree yeah i disagree i agree i give a totally different answer i don't have time to get into it [Laughter] yeah so i mean typically um a rocket is going to hit max q uh somewhere between mach 1.4 and 1.8 and um and and that q level is going to be maybe 400 to 800 pounds per square foot um uh now a starship is intended to have a higher a higher thrust weight because with a fully reusable rocket the the cost of propellant starts to become significant whereas if you have an expandable rocket or a partially reusable rocket the cost of propellant is is tiny compared to the cost of the rocket so you actually want a higher thrust to weight to minimize cost per ton to orbit with a fully reusable rocket than you would for an expendable so probably starship will have at least a 1.3 if not closer to a 1.5 thrust to weight which would uh if without throttling down which aspirationally we would not throw down uh would would have a quite a high q um maybe as high as uh a thousand uh or even 1200 pounds per square foot um so that's uh and probably probably you know uh at work velocity i mean i guess uh mach 1.4 to 1.5 something like that okay well my dad very much enjoyed that answer i'm sure i think as a male feminist though one thing about the rockets is the phallic symbology what would it take to get some more vaginal shaped rockets just you know for well equality um can we make that happen aerodynamics dynamics is going to give you a serious answer share similar properties whether biological or mechanical okay good answer that's all i got on a rocket science uh robots yeah teslabot so you're creating robots have you ever seen a sci-fi movie in your life never okay i thought maybe not you know like because things came out what's the worst that could happen yeah um the robots are not the the scary part the scary part is uh agi or artificial general intelligence digital super intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence um and um you know if if if there's a digital super intelligence that is just vastly smarter than the smartest human um we could lose control of it and then it it could it could just it could do something bad potentially um these things are just probabilities they're not certainties um so it's not the road like it's not the robots it's the digital super intelligence to be concerned about i think this is definitely one of the issues that we need to be concerned about as an existential risk i think we should have a regulatory agency that oversees uh advanced ai um because you know generally like i do think there are important roles for the government and and one of those roles is in regulation of industry to make sure that any any that the company is not making short cuts that endanger the public so you know the faa does has done done generally a great great job of ensuring that aircraft are safe you know it's literally safer to fly on an american airline or any any sort of airline overseen by the faa uh than it is to live in your house just to give people a sense of well you're more likely to die your probable lifespan is less if you lived your entire life in your house or than if you lived on a plane because in your house you can get murdered by a spouse get bitten by a laos but if you live in a plane in afghanistan that's not maybe that's the case well if it's not if if it's not overseen by um a a uh regulator that like the faa then then then it's not necessarily gonna meet the same safety standards what if your spouse is on the plane well i think so the planes have you know they have means of stuffing like you can't it's hard to bring a gun on a plane yeah um and uh even a knife or even a bottle of lotion at this point you know so your spouse couldn't bring any of those things let me just punch you with it or stab you with a sport you know plastic spoke you know it's like hard to kill someone with a spork um so yeah and then planes also have like the flight attendants are trained in first aid they've got like uh they can do cpr they've got defibrillators uh if if somebody's having medical issues they'll immediately land the plane and the ambulance will meet you at the airport so uh and you're not gonna like you know drown the bathtub or get electrocuted by a toaster or you know have your house burned down or because of the toaster by the way toasters cause a lot of houses to burn down yeah it's one of the one of the main causes of house burning down are like toasters and dryers there's also a decent chance there's a doctor on the plane at any given time right that happens all the time like a doctor is like treating somebody on a plane in your house you know yeah so planes are very safe and and i mean generally speaking the fda does a good job of overseeing uh food and drugs you know this might be a bit of a conservative bias on you know where uh at times there's an asymmetry with the fda where um something that that could help a lot of people is not approved because it it might hurt a small number of people so that there's a sort of like a a bit of a a bit of an asymmetry uh like so regulators the in general can have a bit of an asymmetry uh where they are they're punished a lot for something going wrong but not rewarded enough for going something going right um so that's just a general uh challenge with the the punishment and reward of regulators they can be a little conservative so but i think there should be a regulatory agency to oversee um you know anything that is a danger to the public um so and i think agi could be an interest in public so therefore should should have some oversight um and normally regulatory agencies are very reactive um so like for seat belts for example which lack of seatbelts caused i don't know 10 million deaths worldwide i mean a massive number and the car industry fought seat belts for a very long time and uh and eventually after many deaths the defender department of transport nitsa which oversees his regulatory body for cars said all cars have to have seat belts but you can't just not have a seat belt but that i know it took 15 years or something or maybe longer uh maybe 20 years before seat belts were mandated so and then you know baby seats are a lot a lot of kids and babies died because they're just like sitting on this you know on a seat with nothing i mean i i kind of grew up sitting on a seat with nothing yeah we'd ride in the bed of the truck yeah seriously running the better build pickup truck survivor bias or something i was fine but yeah i was fine but if there was an accident it was game over you know yeah um so so you do see some good in government with when it comes to regulation and stuff like that but you don't generally think the government can spend your money more effectively than you can yeah i mean i would say like generally i'm like i think pretty moderate i'm not like sort of an extreme libertarian um i think there are roles for the government uh that makes sense like i don't think we necessarily want like a private army uh or private police force or private yeah i think there's you know uh certain things that that are probably the the right role for the government but anything done by the government is going to be inefficient um because the government is a monopoly like people that don't like corporations should not somehow think that the government is much is much better because the government is a corporation in the limit it is the ultimate corporation with a monopoly on violence so um it's like i think you know the right role for the government is is like to be uh acting a regulatory capacity um and but we should aspire to have the government be be a a limited actor in the economy um so you know you could say like what percentage of economic output should be uh governed you know um and maybe maybe a third or something like that you know once you start getting above 50 government i think that's problematic so um you can look at countries like east eastern west germany north and south korea and there's you know there was essentially an arbitrary line drawn out to divide the countries and east germany was like kind of 100 government west germany was i don't know probably at least 40 government they're like you know relatively socialist and yet the gdp per capita of that you know of west germany was i think five times higher than east germany so that just shows you just how big of a difference it is if if you have like something that's close to half government versus 100 government uh private sector is probably a factor of 10 more efficient than the government um and this like this is sort of this is also true of just just generally if you have like a monopolistic private corporation then the forcing function for serving the customer is weak but at least private corporations can go bankrupt and the government cannot go bankrupt unless the people go bankrupt like basically unless it exhausts extracting money from the population so well they're trying their best so yeah it's just you know so just you want to just knowing that the government is as inefficient as any large monopolistic corporation would be and it is the ultimate large monopolistic corporation we should minimize how much the government does um keep it to what is essential um and and not go beyond that yeah i mean i guess you know the conservative concern with that is you start to give them you know you give them a foothold and then they're just going to keep going like you give them a regulatory capacity over something like agi and then they're just gonna start to you know overreach more and more because that's what we've seen in the past you you know you give them an inch and they take a mile yeah but i i mean does anyone realistically want to delete the faa or the fda probably somebody okay [Music] like we've got an anarchist in the corner i mean usually if you go to the store like you you buy some whatever steak or or some something from the store and ask like it's like poisonous you know and or or you know the like we take for granted that with the food we buy is is uh at the stores it is not going to kill us you know actually you know uh because some company cut costs and decided that you know having e coli and salmonella is you know who cares type of thing um so so i think you know like like we take ground that the food we buy at the stores is is um is not poisonous um and that uh the drugs we buy like that is extremely unlikely like the drugs will be consistent and they will do what they say they're going to do which except for by the the sort of vitamin supplements industry which can basically is unregulated and so they can say things that are not true and feel so still by it um anyway so it's like i think you know you really want like you can think of like the you want some kind of referee on the field so like you know for um you know like it's like a if you're watching say a football game or something like basketball there's referees okay so would the games be better or worse without a referee that'd be worse you know um so i think like the role of referee and and games is important um and so the government's role as a referee i think is also important um you just don't have the government be kind of on the field as a player it would be weird if the referees just suddenly started playing ball you know probably not the game would not be as good well and other things that make me think you've never seen a sci-fi movie before you have a neural link so you can like put things in people's brain or something and what's that like what's that like is it what is it cool do you like it well try it you might like it okay yeah with neural link uh neural link is in part um well but in fact the the the sort of the reason i created neural link was um long term as a risk mitigation for digital super intelligence in that if we are able to effectively achieve symbiosis with digital intelligence then we're sort of the collective human well is better able to steer things in the direction that we'd like or even with benign ai at least go along for the ride so because even with the benign super intelligence if it's so much smarter than us that you know that it really can't even communicate effectively because it's so fast um and and then like talking to us is like turning to a tree you know because if you look if you do a stop motion on like a tree a tree is communicating with its environment just very slowly it looks right now it's looking for water the tree is looking forward to the the ranch is looking for sun and and the tree has movement it's just very slow um and so um and we're already at this point uh partially a cyborg uh we're de facto uh sort of a sidewalk in in that our phones and computers and applications are a digital extension of ourselves at this point like if somebody leaves their phone behind it's like missing limb syndrome you know like uh the phone is almost like a part of you um and uh but the the issue with that symbiosis is that the the data rate is extremely slow so like how fast can you can you communicate with your phone using uh two thumbs you know 10 bits per second it's very low at the data rate and if if computers can and which they can communicate at you know a billion bits per second or more and and we're communicating with them at 10 bits per second then that's just an extremely slow communication link and it inhibits symbiosis without sort of tertiary digital layer like so we've got sort of basically like a a primal layer which is like a limbic system basically it's our instincts and a lot of our emotions and it's kind of like the reptile brain the situation and then you've got the cortex which is like the the thinking part of the brain planning and whatnot uh and um so it's like the second layer and then then our phones and computers are our tertiary layer but there's a just a bound with limitation i would we're very slow to communicate so but with uh with a neural link you can increase the communication bandwidth by many orders of magnitude maybe by a thousand or more so you're talking about output from the brain to other devices yeah primarily yeah not input to the brain uh it would be both ways uh our input is much less constrained than our output because of vision so you know like rough approximation is like our input because of vision is like maybe a million times uh roughly some people are online not going to argue with this but it's the input to input is many orders of magnitude uh higher than output because of vision um you know picture a picture says a thousand words and a video says i don't know hundred thousand words like there's just you know there's um this is why like a meme can communicate so much more than a few words now this is obviously very esoteric and like i'm not sure this will resonate you know with a lot of people like oh we need to increase the the bandwidth between our cortex and our digital tertiary layer uh by many orders of magnitude in order to not lose symbiosis with digital intelligence so this is quite esoteric but um but that's the long-term existential risk mitigation of neurolink which we may or may not achieve i'm not saying we will achieve this but it's least an attempt to solve that then um along the way neural link uh can solve a lot of uh brain issues like if you got uh and you know if you've got like a a severed spine or something so like one of the first application we're looking to solve is uh implanting neural link in someone who has a quadriplegic tetraplegic um so like they have no they can't move their arms and legs or maybe not even really uh move most of their face like like maybe blink or something like that you know like stephen hawking or they didn't have to have several spine but like there are various diverse mechanical and other like mechanical breakages or diseases that break the link between your brain and body um and neurolink um can solve that it can certainly we're confident neural link can can enable someone who uh is a tetraplegic um to operate a phone uh or a computer faster than someone who has hands working hands and uh we're showing this for example with the monkey being able to play video games so you can play a bunch of games not just pong pong is currently its favorite game i don't even know monkeys can play pong but yeah in the first place yeah monkeys can play pong uh with their hand good um yeah they're good monkeys have good reflexes uh so um and that's how that starts off you the monkey we try and then we look at the signals that the monkey's brain is sending and then we read those signals and and then we uh try we transfer the signals directly to the game and uh you know so and then then we take the joystick away and the monkey's just playing basically to let telepathic wow that's wild yeah so um and we recently got uh what we think is a world record in bits per second from uh from any uh neural neural device like we're starting to approach 10 bits per second which is not actually well not that big but it's more than anyone else has achieved in a useful way 10 10 like close to 10 useful bits per second is where we are and we'll we'll increase that dramatically over time so um so anyway so we're we also want to make sure the device is extremely safe um and and extremely well tested um our standards go far beyond what is required from a regulatory stand standpoint and uh but we're hoping to do our first neurolink into a human uh next year and um and likes to enable someone who um you know has has almost no no movement capability to um operate a phone um as fast or or we think faster over time than someone who has has working hands so i think that that would be quite a significant thing and help a lot of people and and there are many such applications um and i'm increasingly confident that um we can implant a second neurolink device so one one that accesses the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex and then a a second one that is uh past where the injury is uh so if you've got a service you know we're basically where where are the neurons still functional um and implant a second uh neural link device uh and uh act have the two devices talk to each other and just transfer the signals across that where wherever it broke yeah because it's like a broken circuit right so you've got a broken circuit you just you basically just do a signal transfer between the two and you don't necessarily even need to to know what all those signals are um you just need to transfer the signals um so just like if you have like a an ethernet cable you don't need to know what's on the ethernet cable for the cable to work or a wireless ethernet from one wireless ethernet you know wi-fi box to another wireless ethernet wi-fi box you don't need to know what the contents of the signal are in order to transfer the signal so i am confident that that such thing is possible um i'm not saying we will do it i don't know i set unreasonable expectations but i'm i'd say i'm certain that it is possible and we will try to make it happen which would then enable people to walk again and use their hands and i think long term probably restore full body functionality to somebody who um has none did you know that we created an elon musk subscription tier at one point on the b did you ever see that no you didn't know that we did that we were because you were gonna pay a lot of money or something yeah you had interacted with us a couple of times and so we were like wooing you as a subscriber come subscribe but we created our own tear for you what was the uh fee on the tier i don't remember what it was i think it was like it was the highest payments it was like 99999 dollars a month or something but people were signing up for it people were actually signing up for it though every time i would check i'd be like is it him is it him it was random people who picked it thinking it was a joke and it was actually charging their credit cards we had like we had all these angry people like my wife is gonna kill me if you don't refund this charge so we had to take the elon musk tear down so we took it down i guess before you could before you could find it but it was there we had it there for you so well thanks i guess that's a compliment i think all right very eloquently put well shall we land the plane here with the 10 question so we uh this is podcast started in kyle's garage we asked every guest the same 10 questions at the end of the interview we never anticipated we would be asking elon musk these 10 questions these are rapid fire so you can answer them as quick as you want yeah or you can go on forever yeah your call uh have you ever met christian rap artist carmen um i i mean the only common musician i'm aware of is um common miranda uh you know she would like dance with like a like a fruit ball on her head yeah yeah um and you never met her no she she died okay a while ago all right cool look him up are you more of a calvinist or an armenian or an armenian yeah like a predestination [Music] i i guess my my mind would say um determinism and my heart says very well yeah i mean when i grew up i was funnily enough um i went to anglican sunday school uh you know church of england basically um and uh but i was also sent to hebrew preschool although i'm not jewish but nonetheless i was singing having to gillard one day and jesus along the next and you know it's fine if you're a kid you know and and santa claus and like uh you know um so um [Music] yeah yeah that answers the question uh yeah so uh you get to add one book to the bible what is it you guys have never people have never updated these questions to like apply more broadly nope at any point they're unchangeable yeah they're like the ten commandments at this point um i mean a little bit lower i remember we could have a chapter past revelations like is there a happy ending here like um the revelations part two the happy ending well you know if there's like a really good book you think everyone should read because it would be in the back of the bible everyone should read this book you know okay how many people have actually read the bible fewer than probably say they have but oh yeah i mean do you have a reason i mean at one point i you know when i was a kid i was like i had this existential crisis and i was trying to figure out what's the meaning of life and i was like oh it all means nothing it's all and i and i you know read like a whole bunch of religious books including the bible and i'm like there's a bunch of things in there they didn't teach you in sunday school uh sonoma gomorrah dark um yikes um you know god sure changes his mind from the old testament to the new testament i'm like whoa that's pretty vengeful in the old testament what was the question you get to pick a book to add to the bible yeah a book uh the attraction to the galaxy oh god yeah it's a great book yeah cigars are pipes um you know i'm not sure i've ever really smoked a pipe um my grandfather did it kind of looks cool but i have smoked cigars and i think like you know for a celebratory occasion like cigars and whiskey that's a pretty good combo you get to hang out with any three people living or dead who are they it's always hard to think of like three yeah people ethan kyle seth you're hanging you got three right here that's true jeff bezos uh necessarily like uh i think there's a lot of people that would be interesting to talk to but um you know i don't know uh is it living or dead you said yeah living or dead this is this is just you know a stream of consciousness not like a carefully thought out yeah uh answer but it would be like uh i don't like shakespeare ben franklin maybe newton or einstein okay it's a good group bunch of white men yeah i was drinking white clothes cleopatra sounds fun [Laughter] whiskier beer or i guess he went right for the whiskey so nice all right uh what would be the first thing you would do as president well the presidency in the u.s is designed to be a weak position a relatively weak position um because you know obviously the founders of the of the country did not want to create a monarch you don't want to avoid like a king situation um so the the sort of the presidency in the u.s is is meant to be weak weaker than saying a parliamentary system where the majority essentially the speaker that the house would be the the prime minister or president um so you say like what what can you do as the president um in the in the u.s there's a lot of limitations um unless you have the support of congress you obviously cannot change the laws but i would i probably aspire to reduce the size of government and you know and take a look at the regulatory situation and just make sure there's there's a good garbage collection of regulations so if they're outdated as there are many outdated unnecessary regulations uh but but you know there's a there's a strong forcing function for creating new laws and regulations but a weak forcing function for getting rid of of of bad laws and regulations um and and and i think this is just generally a problem as civilization ages without war where there are new laws and regulations created every year and so there's like more and more constraints on what you can do but there's there's very little effort put to remove laws and regulations and so this is like hardening of the arteries of civilization and eventually it'll be like oh look elvis travels where you're just tied down by you know thousands of little strings and it's not like any one string is the issue but there's so many strings that you can't get anything done um you know that's one part part big part of why i moved to texas it's just like there's just fewer strings tying you down um so yeah um i i think like the the uh the value of of someone just being a a very competent executive officer is um is under undervalued in a president uh just like how good are you at running things and getting things done um because if you're the president you're kind of like the ceo of the country um and uh and so are you good at doing things are you effective and pretty productive yeah you said a ceo is a meaningless title would that mean i'm just curious how that like well ceo is not not like a legal title okay um i was just saying that that there are all these titles and cooperations that are kind of made up um and you can see what is actually uh required for a corporation when you fill out the form to create one and so you need a a president a secretary and a treasurer same thing as like if you're performing a chess club or a glee club or something like that same same thing um and and actually technically all three can be the same person so that's what's legally required if you don't have those three things you cannot function as a corporation uh everything else like a general counsel cfo ceo these are all made up like that they're no legal no no meaningful legal bearing so uh you only need those the president's secretary treasurer um so there's all these like cxo titles which you know just are somewhat like resume inflators um i was just making a point that like people think ceo is a real title but it's not it's not it's not a legally meaningful title you need someone who is defined as the as the president but that's that's um that's it so um for now you have like chief marketing officer chief information officer chief everything officer you know i i sort of think like you should have like this is our svp of sorcery all right question number eight the master general um oh yeah have you ever punched anyone or have you ever been punched you got any cool punching stories if you don't have an answer for that we have a follow-up it's even worse i don't know about cool punching stories but i um where i grew up was extremely violent um i never i never started a fight except with my brother actually one exception yeah i did i'd be my brother up which i'm either just i don't know if that's how it goes but uh [Music] south africa when i was growing up was just an inherently very violent place i punched the face many times i always got beaten to death once so many times i think if you have not been punched in the face with a fist you don't know what you have no idea what it's like shocking sensation shocking sensation have you been punished ethan yeah just by like high school kids yeah not right still it's just like your face never touches anything and then suddenly yeah they punch their nose like you can't even see straight um so yeah um it's funny that people think words are they're so sensitive to words it's like man you're even punched in the face words don't mean nothing all right question number nine uh you get to go to one concert any band in history who do you go see anybody i don't know maybe the rolling stones are there you know when they're only peak rolling stones seems like and hey day yeah yeah nitpick all right final question to close our time out here yeah i mean we're here we're you know the babylon b is a christian organization you know and uh we're a ministry well how come we're doing this show on a sunday night why wasn't your church gathered why aren't you heathens and church exactly so we have to make a church supposed to be a day of rest we did zoom church like god said don't work on sundays okay let's go ahead guys are going to straight down for this one get into the whole jesus that's rest thing okay straight to hell this is true this is true i it's okay so to make this church we have to do we have to make sure just we're wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept jesus as your lord and savior on the show um personal awards you know it's a quick prayer [Music] i mean let's just say like i agree with the principles that jesus advocated um and that the you know there's some some there's great wisdom in what in the teachings of of jesus uh and i agree with those teachings um and things like tone the other cheek are very important because as opposed to an eye for an eye an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind so forgiveness you know is important and treating people as you would wish to be treated love that neighbor as myself very important so it's like a 60 70 yes yes as einstein would say [Music] i believe in the god of spinoza [Music] um so um but hey if um you know if if jesus is uh saving people i mean i i wouldn't stand in his way you know like i'll be sure i'll be safe why not sweet we did it yeah i think he just said yes we got it all right we got them to be exciting sounds good the whatever blood and water christ it was kind of weird you know if you're a kid like you get to give you some weird tasting you know just getting a wine yeah i'm like what the hell is this i'm like isn't this kind of just cut it off when he said yes i'm like is this some like fading metaphor for cannibalism or something i don't get it like what uh what the hell i remember thinking that was just crazy uh when i was a kid um and i like this to like whoa you know i mean even as a metaphor it's kind of odd but you know yeah so it's like should i be doing alcohol to minors i was like we do grape juice okay yes i think it's unusual to even be thinking about that as a kid like as a kid you just go through the motions and then later on that you think wait a minute what does this actually represent what am i doing when i was a kid i was like like is this actually blood and body what you know i don't i don't know if i want to eat somebody and then i was like why this is i mean i did it anyway i'm like this seems like okay man i don't know if this is just pretty odd you know i remember thinking that even at age five so i was like you know and i was definitely like you know sunday school there like when they were telling me all the stories and i was like asking questions and like and i really were upset that i was asking questions and i was like you know jesus like fed the crowd with like five loaves of bread and three fish and i'm like how big was the crowd and and like where did the fish and bread come from did like from his cloak or something like because i was like reading books and i was like this is like they'd materialize like am i like i don't know where'd it come from you know like how did would you like take a bite of the bread and it would just the bread would just come back to being a full brand yeah you look away it's kind of a mechanic background they left out the details where did the universe come from um [Music] well yeah i'm not saying i know all the answers here i'm just you know it's just uh and like jesus was obviously very pro-alcohol you know because one of his miracles was turning water into wine yeah and that was like they were having a party they ran out of wine and they're like let's keep this banner going good stuff who can who can solve this problem we're at a white cloth the friggin store's closed and jesus is like i gotcha okay water now i like party on you know so you know accurate pro partying without all eyes literally it was one of the miracles bible story time you are the it's like you're definitely you're the savior you're scared you kept the party going with lots of wine that's great um so um yeah well thank you i appreciate you coming here talking to us very much very welcome pleasure to meet you in person and uh you know we'll uh we'll continue to throw out the satire that we hope you'll respond to and you know keep that going a little bit oh we didn't ask onion or the bee but i guess that was kind of answered earlier you mentioned earlier yeah yes we already covered that yeah i mean i i think the onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time um it's just it just seems to have been you know in recent years somewhat infected by the world my virus so that just makes everything less funny yeah that's true workman virus is a world without humor yeah i'm hoping neurolink can solve that move thank you thank you appreciate it thank you thanks so much thanks so much

https://youtu.be/T_Fa50Zc_3Y

it's hardcore history so my apologies if um today's show sounds a little like you're joining a conversation that's already in progress but this has happened with me before where i'll be talking with someone about something usually over a long period of time messaging back and forth or whatever it might be and i'll think to myself usually a little too late in the game wow you know should have thought about making this a podcast i mean more people than just yours truly might want to hear what's being said here and that's how today's show got started just an ongoing discussion that at a certain point um you look at it and you go well i should have started recording a long time ago but uh so if it sounds like you're picking up the conversation in the middle of it you might be i've never been that good in the conversations or the interviews as you probably know if you've heard me i've really liked setting it up and starting at ground zero and building from a from a place of no knowledge and eventually getting somewhere in the conversation that's interesting we just go right to the interesting and i hope we can all i hope it all makes sense without having all the background but that's what today's program will be like so i had a conversation that was ongoing about of all things um military aircraft especially military aircraft in the second world war at times it got very specific you know the p-38 american fighter plane in the second world war um but i was having a discussion with elon musk and um we were talking about uh the role of engineers in warfare and that's a famous history right go back to archimedes supposedly killed by the roman soldier when he's doodling in the sand and he didn't want to be interrupted and he'd made all those supposedly i think mythbusters well in their own way figured out that some of this stuff probably wouldn't work but you know they're not archimedes either but you know the history of warfare with these engineers creating weapons and of course in the modern world those people are monumentally more important than they were in primitive times although somebody invented a bow and arrow someday the early military engineers um but mr musk and i were talking about this and at a certain point i thought okay this is a pretty good thing to just have a podcast about now my worry was that we were going to get into the minutia of like turbo supercharged engines and the performance of different aircraft at different altitudes based on the octane rating in the fuel and i'm not saying we didn't do any of that i'm just saying it turned out to be more interesting than i thought it was going to be when we did get there i want to issue a little disclaimer at the outset i am the worst person in the world to talk to about engineering if there's any sort of engineering knowledge required in the conversation on my end i'm a guy that can't you know hammer a nail into a board so i'm an idiot so um if i don't look like i know what i'm doing here well you know not only that but if you wanted to say which of the three branches of service in the 20th century militaries you know land scenario that i was least confident uh that i wouldn't look like an idiot talking about it would be aircraft so we're just gonna hold on and see if we can keep up with a guy who loves this stuff and understands it at a level i'll never be able to um appreciate and just in case his own knowledge wasn't enough he brought in uh one of the best engineers at spacex mr bill riley to come in and back him up on this stuff so um one way or another we should get this stuff right i would think with the three of us in any case um i hope you enjoyed this discussion with elon musk talking about well i guess it started off with him saying that engineers don't get enough credit in um warfare and well you know we'll touch upon a little high octane fuel and turbo supercharged engines along the way without further ado elon musk and mr bill riley from spacex so what i thought was i'll give the background about how the hell this even you know got started in terms of our conversation and then what i thought maybe we could start off with you know you had talked a lot about how this was an engineer's war and i thought to myself that the second world war of course was not the first engineers war you can go back into history and you can find these moments the famous uh the romans inventing the corvu device to help them win the naval war in the first punic wars all those kind of things but those are so rare because of the pace of technological change being so much more slow and then you get to something like the franco-prussian war maybe but certainly in the first world war where aircraft development becomes a race and that if you develop the next new thing you might control the skies for the next four or five months until the other side catches up so maybe you could tell me a little bit about this whole engineer's war kind of concept yeah absolutely um so for a lot of books on strategy on war actually don't address technology or address it in a tangential manner but obviously if there is an overwhelming technology advantage that side will win even if the odds are dramatically stacked against them from a numerical standpoint or that they are even if the other side has better general ship and is very smart if there is a big technology discontinuity then the the side with the advanced technology will wear and as you alluded to most battles in history because technology moved very slowly uh it was more about maneuvering and about tactics and strategy and and whatnot but uh to use sort of an extreme example if for example you can shoot lasers from space to at to any point on the ground by just by like pointing at it um it would not matter if you're fighting julius caesar uh you know uh heinz gadarian napoleon they just got lasered from space so there's no it's it's sort of uh you know when there's a technology discontinuity it that just fundamentally flips flips the whole situation and in the in the wars in the modern era we were very much a technology race war like they were just how fast can we uh uh innovate the technology that i mean obviously an extremely good example of that would be uh perhaps the best example would be uh the nuclear bomb if you if you go anyone who got nuclear bombs that you now win that's it end of story and the reason for the us manhattan project which i'd like to emphasize was very much a function of the uh the physics community more than it was the government people think that like this was a government thing the government certainly supported it but it was a decision by the physics community without which this it certainly would not have happened and and and the physics community simply came to the conclusion that we cannot have let let hitler have the bomb obviously and so we must make it first and be certain of it so the but that's that's an example of like okay you've just got some super weapon that anyone who gets it wins uh no better example than uh nuclear reference so but but i think these technologies played a much stronger role in a war than is generally um understood and technology is to be viewed in the broadest sense you could you also think of it in the sense of say do you have a a better phalanx do you have uh spheres that are bronze or iron or steel that's a big difference and one of the things that the romans had were um they had actually quite good metallogy so they they had their swords there's two general general phases uh still uh uh smart and martensite their swords were more martensitic uh and so that source that did not bend as much and so they're something that often be fighting others who had swords that were much more ductile um and basically banned over a roman sword so obviously if you've got if you're in a sword fight and your sword just bends like like a noodle it doesn't work as well after that so the romans actually i think won their wars through technology uh obviously the internal wars they were they were more you know equal technology footing but when fighting outside uh the roman empire they would when they were or sometimes lose their wars for technology uh so when the romans fought the scibians or sibbians the they really did not have a good counter to the mounted war archer and especially if they get lured into terrain that is flat and easy to maneuver for uh horses then uh they're pretty much helpless against the technology of a mounted war [Music] um archer mounted archer and genghis khan took full advantage of the of the whole mounted arch thing obviously as like most people who study anything about this now but looking at say um the world war ii and fighter plane advancement bomber advancement it's perhaps uh interesting to go into how things started out and then how fast things innovated uh and the the the war of uh specifically going into the um fighters and certainly bombers of world war ii and uh i'd like to say that you know i think there's those very impressive design work around fighters done by many countries so japan the u.s germany uk russia and others had had some very impressive fighter designs and then and then the us obviously completely questioned on the bomber front so but but things didn't quite start out that way at the beginning of world war ii when there would be fights between say in the pacific theater between u.s aircraft and japanese aircraft there would sometimes be case there were cases where the entire u.s squadron was shut down for zero losses on the japanese side it was just you know total ko and uh because the u.s fighters really began world war ii were were not very good um and nor were the tactics and nor was the training so it's basically uh the tactics terrible the aircraft are terrible and uh and the training is not not correct well wait you bring up something interesting though because i mean you brought up lasers earlier and i think we can all agree that if you go to some primitive planet where everyone's in caveman type times and you have lasers it's game over yeah but there's but there are smaller levels of technological discrepancy right bronze weapons versus iron weapons or or the latest aircraft versus the aircraft from five minutes ago right or you mentioned a second ago tactics well you know one of the things that you know there's so much that you learn when you first start learning about the the world wars for example and then as you delve farther into it you learn many of the of the more intricate things like tactics so for example how american fighter pilots would have tactics to try to overcome the fact that they're flying inferior machines right um um the thatch weave and all these sorts of things where they try to take advantage of the best weave is a great example exactly um the you know the theft tree is it was a great example of improvement in tactics um if you've got if you're fighting a nimble business was developed in in the us in response to the japanese fighters which were very uh uh agile nimble very nimble yeah nimble and so if you're fighting if you're if you're in a thing that's sort of more like a tank and but you're fighting something which is you know extremely nimble but but you're not nimble but you've got better armor then the the if you basically want to just let the the nimble fighter get on your tail and then let your squad squadron mate come back and come behind you and and and shoot that plane down while it's trying to shoot you down but it takes a long time to shoot you down because you've got a lot of armor so so that's like a in a nutshell the fast wave and you could do that back and forth uh it's um it made a big difference well and you also have the stuff that always drives me crazy that i was always so worried you were gonna take me into this territory when we talked and i was gonna look like an idiot but i mean for example things like uh super turbochargers and being able to take the enemy to altitudes where your plane's better than their plane i mean the intricacies and all this stuff yeah okay so so so let me ask you this then because we were just talking about um choices in warren if you have the laser beam and the other guy doesn't they're through but i mean one of the things and and it's funny that i could be a history major and all these things for years but it took a video game to make me really think about some of the production trade-offs right the stuff that's not so that's not so sexy for a war gamer things like is it better or where's the sweet spot to build a lot of one design where you already have the production line geared up to build sherman tanks or t34 tanks or is it better to to build a much smaller amount of much more sophisticated things so hitler making multiple choices on jet fighters and jet bombers or maybe would you rather have twenty thousand t-34s or eleven hundred tiger twos how does one how does one if if i put you in charge if i said elon come in here in second world war help us make these trade-off decisions um do you have any thoughts on those kinds of trade-offs well i think it's going to be kind of like in a war game you know so if you've got let's say you have something with a particular kill ratio but if your kill ratio is three and the thing costs twice as much then you should still do that thing because you're going to be better off you get it you it only costs twice as much but it has a three-to-one kill rate sure so what about something like then um adjustments so like when i think of um you know one of the things they used to teach us in in the military history classes was that if you're facing another opponent the side that has the technological advantage is that its greatest um disparity at the very beginning of the conflict and that the longer the conflict goes on the more time the adversary has to adjust and come up with counter measures so that's how tribal peoples in afghanistan maybe adjust to being the technologically inferior side um could one make a case today that there are examples of that you know the u.s still i would i would assume correct me if i'm wrong the technological leader there in military technology but if you're uh the russians or the chinese and we end up in a war in 20 years are there ways that they can compensate for the fact that they're behind on certain i mean is an electromagnetic pulse attack something that helps compensate for a satellite discrepancy um i know we're jumping around here that's how i'm jumping around i i do think if i could jump in though i think there's there's an interesting thing here too which is your rate of innovation might be the key after the first opening salvos because if you're able to innovate faster you can make up ground for example you know the first mustangs had the allison engines and they weren't good at altitude but you put a rolls royce turbo supercharged and then you get a really good all-around fighter so it might be that the rate of innovation and ability to adapt to like the basically the game of rock paper scissors that elon and i often talk about like when there's a better scissors out there you need a better rock or the butter battle book by dr seuss but you know you're always chasing the next widget rate of innovation is the key um okay so what about the reverse engineering aspect then so famously one of the stories from the second world war is the u.s getting their hands on a relatively intact zero fighter i think it was in the aleutian islands and being able to take that apart and maybe maybe gain six months of time that they wouldn't have had before in the development phase um any thoughts on those kinds of things the ability to to maybe uh learn from your adversary yeah um i i i if we sort of put ourselves in the position of like hey it's our job to design advanced spiders for sure we'd love to see uh you know get say an enemy fighter or even allied fighter and take it apart and take a look at the the small engineering decisions that we think would be interesting what materials they use what joining methods like you know if it's a circulating engine how you know you know what what pressure were they running the cylinders at uh what what are they using for o-rings it's a ton of things like that but for example something like just like material properties that you can count on make a big difference so if you're using say a high-strength uh aluminum uh sheet for a stress skin wing you may have material properties depending on how that alloys made that could be ver it could be variable and then that that forces you to use the the lower end of what that variable strength might be and thus make the skins thicker this makes the plane heavier and then you've got a knock-on effect where if the wings are heavier now that landing gear needs to be heavier energy needs to be more powerful you get this recursive effect of mass so on the other hand if you can count on very tight material specs now you can you can design the plane to use uh thinner wingscans because you don't have to account for the fact that maybe this this bachelor of aluminum was was not that good i think things like that actually make a big deal are a big deal in world of two with the fighter situation a big factor was what what octane rating could you count on uh for for the the engine the fuel yeah the americans had the high octane stuff yeah really um so if you you know you're going to like that adam two's book we were talking about because one of the things that he focused on that i'd never heard about in terms of second world war importance was he was talking about the rare materials the tungsten type stuff and all the all the sorts of things i couldn't tell you five little things about and they were talking about what a huge deal it was for i mean the germans would invent this wonderful new weapon like a something like a cone bore gun for example but required tungsten to make it work so the scientists have created this wonderful new weapon but the the state does not have the the ability to get the basic materials you need to have that weapon work and the huge part of the whole war thing was who has the the rare materials and where do you get them from and how do you how do you jury rig it when you don't have it you know domestically um that's fascinating stuff yeah that's right up your alley yeah absolutely germany and and i think japan as well we're really operating from a position of really not having good access to access to um high quality fuel and limited access to rare materials but i think it's not so much the rare materials that that matter is just like if you if you need that you really want a plane's body and frame going to be primarily aluminum and a simple thing like can you count on on what what's your what's your what are your a basis material allowables b basis basically do you have to make attempt the skin 10 thicker to account for variability in the quality of the aluminum or aluminium as it should be called uh that's if your plate is now 10 heavier at a structural level because of of strength variation in the in the aluminum that you've been sent then that will actually have a knock-on effect on everything else the the recursive effect sure speed maneuverability everything yeah but there's a recursive effect of mass so it's a massive it gets mass as we say right yes massba gets mass so you know if your primary structure is 10 heavier because you have to take 10 knock down because of variable materials now everything's going to have to be a heavier two you need a more powerful engine to to go at the same speed and especially the climate stain speed you need bigger landing gear you need more fuel uh because you're carrying a heavier plane all these things amplify the mass of any one so you increase fast in one area it actually causes mass of everything else to increase as well and um uh germany actually did a ton of clever things to try to improve the the the octane rating of fuel like tons of additives and all sorts of things because they would they would just get random fuel that was pretty bad whereas the us had awesome fuel and so they really took took it to the very very high octane and um as bill was saying the the merlin engine and really the the the best millennium was the one made in the u.s that was the turbo supercharged merlin made in the u.s for the p-51 with such a kick-ass engine it's insane i mean and quite frankly that's kind of thing where uh i'm sure that the germans captured uh some aircraft that had um just the sort of state-of-the-art you know a p-51d uh you know uh that would have been late war though 44-45 yeah yeah but but it like that's the case where you could you could hand it to them and the blueprints and it wouldn't matter because that engine is it is is is actually so difficult to make that it's irrelevant isn't that a british is that a british engine originally it's originally a british engine which was then uh enhanced uh uh in the u.s okay okay and so the actual best one the best one was the the the in my opinion maybe different opinions out there but the best one was the the the british militant engine sign and but but then further enhanced uh uh with the us turbo supercharging um which led to a the the mustang being the incredible long-range high altitude fighter and uh but but you you couldn't if you got low octane fuel-ed engine you'd have real problem so okay but let me talk about that because this is something most people yours truly included don't understand and you might have to use small words with me elon for a minute so but but but like if if dan carlin looks at the aircraft performance i'm gonna look at the the the the firepower i'm gonna look at the armor i'm gonna get the turn radius i'm gonna look at the top speed i'm gonna look at the climb rate and i'm not gonna look at the octane level but the americans had the extreme octane fuel which i was reading that as the war went on and the and the out and the axis fuel got worse and worse quality that this advantage became more and more pronounced what does it mean to have higher octane fuel if you're a pilot what can you do that the guy with a lower octane fuel can't so if if you have the lower octane fuel you you get pre-combustion so basically get knocking so uh reminds me of the old gasoline commercials the knocking and the pinging yeah exactly the the the air fuel mixture ignites before you're ready for it and in a non-optimal way that robs power and can lead to mechanical failure essentially okay so so is your so if you're the if you're the other pilot with the lower octane fuel besides the knocking and the pin pinging and the lower power does that mean you lose you know so if conceivably your plane should be able to go 400 miles per hour but you're using inferior fuel does that lower your top speed i'm trying to figure out how it works for the pilots involved when they're trying to make their calculations yeah you would see it show up as power and then your power as you go to different altitudes yeah and then you you can so what's the role of that what's the role of the supercharger then is that a high altitude low oxygen thing um yeah the the two charges on supercharges are increasing the the the combustion pressure so uh like basically in enabling you you're you're basically if you go up high you're you're you're there it's very thin so if you're just taking air with a normal carburetor you're gonna be oxygen stopped just as a human as oxygen stock so you've got to pressurize that air coming in and feed the engine very high pressure air so that it can it can uh continue to produce high power at altitude and you're also going to have a major cooling problem that's the why the mustang had that that gigantic uh cooling thing on the uh under the fuselage which is then also made dual use of as kind of like a jet it has a slight jet effect that's named for i forget but um even the meredith effect meredith effect exactly so it offset the drag of the gigantic radiator basically that's um that was done to the fuselage of p51 but but frankly if the octane is is is not high enough you you will get mechanical damage to the engine and the plane will break you know so the engine will fail so it's not just a hey it's not as good it's like uh also it might clunk out on you while you're over the pacific or over you know enemy territory and that will be not great so octane is a super big deal this is this reminds me of another conversation you and i had and it's made me think ever since and it had to do with uh with the plane i think is one of your favorites the p-38 lightning and and and this is another this is another problem that happens to you when you study this like i do as opposed to flying these planes like other people do which is you had said to me having the two engines would be really important if you lost one of them and i remember thinking for sure yeah but but i mean that's not the kind of thing when you're thinking about this in a wargaming sense or an overall strategic sense you're not thinking about an individual pilot or whatnot but that was that was a revelation for me um so for those who don't know the p-38 is the one that looks like it's two planes sort of fused together uh it's a classic american design we ended up making with the p61s like that too i think um tell me a little about that plane because you you waxed eloquently on that for a while to me before um came out in like what 38 39 the design yeah it didn't really get good until a couple years later and and i think they actually could have taken the p-38 lightning much further than they did like if you put for example state-of-the-art uh mullet engines uh like like the p51 got like the mustang got man that would be an epic plane insane uh but yeah p38 was it's worth noting like i believe um most mostly top american aces if not all were flew p38s and um now the p38 is is is not like was as designed it was not great in any theater for it was but it was great in the pacific theater but it was ultimately superseded by the uh f6f health gap which you know this is an interesting bit of trivia if you say what was the most effective fighter plane in world war ii and the actual answer is the hellcat because what was the criteria you used for that the the the kill ratio so okay okay well that has a there's a lot of other variables though that go in there yeah but i mean if you're in a battle that's what that's the thing that matters so uh yeah but what about but you got pilot skill we just talked about octane fuel there's uh tactics as i mean i can think of a lot of things that might go into what what accounts for kill ratio besides just the i mean would you rather have a a hellcat than a a corsair or a mustang uh well you couldn't really have a mustang unless you've got a not a carrier aircraft it's a land-based plant no it's a land-based yeah yeah so first of all like if you're if on on a carrier you're constrained in volume um like you can't have like a giant plane or you're playing there's some locations on plane size you've got to fold the wing so you're going to lose you're going to have them right weight added because you've got a folding wing but the the soul speed has to be super low so that you can land this thing on on a very tiny runway that's in the wind it's carrier like there's not long so as you say you're gonna have to have a slow slow speed or slow landing speed that also impedes the design of the vehicle but really i mean for for its day uh there was no better plane in the pacific theater than the f6 the hellcat it was just crushingly good like it it was it did the best at the rock paper scissors situation and i believe had uh something like a 13 to one kill ratio so that's that that's a 90 number it's just nutty and this is this is a pilot skill uh is is not i would say there was not a significant factor in this because most of the pilots of of those planes had never been in combat or had been come back to a very very limited degree the hellcat was actually intentionally designed so that someone who had a small number of flight hours would be able to fly it safely because besides being shut down by an enemy aircraft there's also landing on the carrier and not scratching which is yeah it's a subtle point yes yeah these things are land themselves um so so elon wait a minute so you talked now a couple of times about the rock paper scissors dynamic when it comes to aircraft now in naval development that's easy we say speed armor gunfire what does the rock paper scissors apply to in air combat or air development sure um and both if you please wait and when whatever you'd like um but you know if you take specific data for specifically for a while you have the uh the zero which is really an awesome design extremely agile and uh you know really cool in a lot of ways light light and really really effective and like i said in in the early air battles in pacific the the zero would absolutely dominate it and they had they had better pilots in the early war too though that does come into play doesn't it those are veteran pilots flying those zeros um flying in china flying you know all of that stuff yeah um i mean u.s started off with the kind of the the worst planes the worst tactics and the worst training that's true i'm not going to argue with that no i'm not going to hurt you very bad really i mean it's rough seeing some of those early battles where man those kids never stood a chance no so the you know the zero was for sure the superior thing in the beginning to the uh u.s fighters so but very very quickly uh the u.s evolved the training uh the tactics like and the technology and then the the thing is like okay so if the u.s starts up with paper and the and say japan has scissors what what's a rock in this case so the rock in this case really was the the best rock uh and this is just you know looking at actual battle stats uh was the carrier-based f6f hellcat now this is not a pretty plane and the reason they're they're not they're very few of these around is because it's it's not the best looking aircraft frankly they're bulky aren't they they're kind of bulky like p-47s are bulky the brewster buffalo was baltimore it's bulky and frankly not not a handsome plane and kind of cool but this is blocky and not like that good but it's a kick-ass uh fighter it's the it's it is then the rock to the the scissors that is the zero and so with with the f65 really great sign it's literally designed like with the intent of we're going to have a whole bunch of new pilots who've never been in combat never in combat have had that have landed very few times on a carrier and and you know some of them are just not that good there's not that good at flying really so uh they just got conscripted and they were like you know riding a tractor in kansas until not that long ago so it was designed with that in mind it's like it's like let's make this thing easy to fly easy to land so non-combat casualties low easy to maintain uh make the the wings easy to fold so you can you know stow them really real fast and and getting ready for flight real fast we're going to give them heavy guns we've got 50 cals and we're going to give this thing a lot of armor okay so it's got a lot it's got a lot of it's got a lot of power this is a big it's actually quite a big plane it says you see the size of this thing it's it's looks like a bull i think almost four times the power of the zero right so big big big ass engine and just really robust to fight air especially to uh lower caliber bullets so if it's being shot with like 303s or something like that lower caliber bullets it it it's like basically like taking a shower it doesn't care you know did they have self-sealing tanks and all that kind of stuff too the japanese were not bigger yeah okay totally so you get you get fuel tanks to steal themselves it was it was very carefully armored because it had like heavy-duty armor in the right places and so what would happen is uh zero would get on the back on the tail of uh of a hellcat and would just be peppering the thing like guns blazing pressing the fire button it's going and that's this thing is just not coming down okay so it didn't matter the hellcat was not that maneuverable so you know what though you're making me think of a whole different class of planes though and i hope you don't mind me shifting here because now you've got me thinking about um for you know one of the planes i was always kind of interested in was was something like you know henshaw was making a ground attack aircraft they had a 126 and a 129 and they were a combination of super heavily armored planes really not very maneuverable not very fast because they were they were flying tanks and then a gun that was more suited to a tank too and trying to figure out you know how you handle a massive recoil of a heavy gun in an aircraft and what not um any thoughts or any insights into into something like the ground attack aircraft because these days we would look at aircraft as being uh and all during the cold war the idea of how the u.s was going to compensate for this massive armored thrust through the fulda gap in central europe or something was going to be with aircraft that just took out all these tanks which of course is really a second world war development any thoughts on the idea of ground attack aircraft yeah um so if you it's like since it's just think of these things it's very much rock paper scissors and you know it's hard to be master of all trades so so you really want to have like the right aircraft for the right use and ground ground tech aircraft you really need to be heavily armored on the bottom and around the engine cali but because that's where the bullets are coming from and if you're wondering you're probably pretty pretty fast uh you don't want to be staying down on the deck for too long uh if you're doing spray paint runs but like for example the the p-51 was an amazing high-altitude fighter but it was not so great as a ground attack aircraft because it was vulnerable from the bottom the the armor on the bottom was was much more limited and it had the oil cooler uh that you know that well cooper is talking about that provided some thrust using the meredith effect uh was uh vulnerable from the bottom so it was it was the mustang was geared towards you know your combat with with fighter aircraft and so was was quite good in that respect very good in that respect but they had a lot of planes down because of ground attacks where they're basically at some point this weren't any more fighters to deal with so the mustangs would go down and do ground attack but but like they got shut down quite a bit in ground attack because they were just they weren't well suited for that you'd want something that's got a lot like a lot of heavy armor from the direction the bull's coming which is in the bottom and and not not you don't have too much vulnerable stuff there assuming if you're doing strengthening runs and if you think bombing is that's a whole different subject so you know i'm trying to think about the most the most impactful fighter war of all time right because you know like you said bombing's a different thing but to me i'm thinking of like when fighters and fighter development not just in terms of the development of the planes themselves but the tactics the strategies and all this stuff can you think i think the battle of britain's got to be the most impactful mostly concerned with a fighter technology sort of thing and you have spitfires and hurricanes on one side you have foca wolves and messerschmitts on the other any thoughts on the battle of britain and the whole ebb and flow of the technological rock paper scissors game going on in that one uh sure uh so yeah the britain mostly had like spitfires and hurricanes and um now the spitfires target also went through very rapid evolution so you say spitfire you say which one literally right which very a b c d they all sound like that right they were rapidly iterating versions of the spitfire hurricane so quick and fast that uh you have to like say uh which month or maybe even which part which week in which month uh what was that fighter bolt so that you know britain did actually an incredible job of rapidly evolving fire and hurricane and uh and actually did a great job too um the the [ __ ] [ __ ] wolf and president were amazing uh but they're they're really operating at a significant disadvantage uh from a range standpoint so the you know if you're doing these sort of like these maneuvers all over the place where at you know just cranking full throttle and climbing and diving you using a lot of fuel when you do that so they're climbing far certainly and the german fighters were coming over from airfields in france or midlands or basically not close and so they would they would reach uh london or something like that and only have maybe 20 minutes of combat time whereas the merge planes might have an hour of combat time and very quick to refuel and be back up from the air so you can and if you get shot down you're shot down over friendly territory yeah you shut down for any territory but but you can think of like the if you have x number of fighters but but then like here's an additional nuance is what percentage of the time can they be useful and so even if you're attacking from far away and you have 20 minutes for argument's sake 20 minutes of of uh flight time of a fighter time of combat time and your the opposition has an hour of combat time that's that's it's almost like having three times as many planes oh interesting way to look at it yeah so and very easy for them to bring up reinforcements dynamically so it's like oh uh let's let's uh because you know if if being outnumbered is uh what a great way to win like if you you know if it's like six planes against you know 20 planes the six planes are in trouble they should run away just run away so it was obviously pretty easy to see that okay these how many planes are coming where are they headed and you had radar assistance and everything and and say okay let's let's have a let's concentrate the defense fighters in this you know right right here and just and very very quickly fly up reinforcements so i think the the uh obviously battle britain was was was not a smart uh move in any way um on for you know for germany to do that that was it's just it's just it was not going to work so german strategic decision making leaves something to be desired yes for sure yes i think that i think i think their tactical abilities and their abilities in in scientific design and whatever uh uh sort of shielded them from the the the mistakes that they made strategically to some degree speaking of that i want to ask you because one of my favorite sections in any book on the development of military aircraft is the inter-war years because you get a chance to see a whole bunch of designs that eventually turned into like dead end designs and i'm fascinated by some of these experiments you see it in the soviet union a ton but even we were just mentioning the battle of britain where they unleashed the the supposedly you know game-changing messerschmitt 110s and it proves to be those those for those who don't know this is a larger fighter and the idea was it was going to use use firepower and size but it turned out to just be total meat to the smaller more nimble fighters they could get on their tail um do you have any favorite of these dead end designs or something that you wish you know that had been stuck to a little bit longer and would have maybe in your mind made more of a difference um maybe there is no dead end designs you like let's leave the door open to that possibility well i mean there's an argument that on the german side they should have perhaps focused on the focal wolf 190. it was a great plane yeah great vocal 190 was really great playing and just doubled down on that and and made that uh primary plane that wasn't that was an excellent plane they built a ton more uh of the messerschmitt 109 versions though than that ton more yeah it didn't make total sense because the uh 190 was in my my opinion a the better way to go but i mean apart from the fact that the battle burn was just a not not a wise uh strategic decision uh it if you are going to do that you should definitely have long long range fighters that have good well dwell capability and with drop tanks and that kind of thing but it was just it was just a pointless i i don't i i it's just like such a such an odd thing to do because that strategically the battle burn just i think had had uh you know not quite zero percent chance of success but pretty close that's why strategy trumps tactics for sure yeah um so so i have a star trek episode in mind that i want to involve you in um if i take you back to one of these engineering rooms whether it's in london or in washington it wouldn't be washed it'd probably be in southern california someplace like that but take you to one of the allied aircraft engineering rooms and just say okay elon you're working with whatever those people have to work with what's the what's the easiest quickest thing that you can suggest to them that they can do that will make a difference in other words you can't do anything too sophisticated they can't get from here to there but you could say something like you know you guys are missing something really obvious here that you'll discover five years from now i mean is there anything right away that you look and you just go if they'd only done this sooner or something like that uh well nuclear bombs but but a perfect but that's a perfect example of what wouldn't work in this question because nobody would have known but there might have been some i didn't know if there was some little thing that they weren't doing with aircraft that they would do later that would have made a huge difference bang for the buck wise but now you get into nuclear weapons so let's talk a little about that because we're going to go ahead and try to answer the involved variously here was there something simple yeah something they were missing you know i never understood why they didn't replace the sherman it seemed like there was time to iterate on that and come up with something better well they did with the pershing but it was just really really like last couple of months but it just i don't know i never i never delved into this but it seemed like the the sherman's just had a terrible time and iterating on that faster where you maybe they had all the energy going to the fighters i don't know it just always seemed odd to me well we were talking about this earlier was a little bit about the is it worth retooling the production lines for a new uh a new version or would it be just better to just keep cranking out the old versions and i remember somebody telling me he says yes yes yes yes yes you'd rather have a tiger ii tank for sure but if you've got 25 times as many shermans wouldn't you rather just have a tank sometimes versus no tank and so i absolutely i mean as you know as a guy who wargamed with the americans forever nothing makes you angrier than to sit there with a bunch of sherman tanks and be picked off by by german gunnery before you can even see them um but what but what one guy always said to me he goes well but you got to give yourself then 20 tanks for every one of theirs if you want to replicate what was going on in the war and then you've got to have what elon was talking about earlier the ground attack aircraft and everything else but you know what's crazy is that we ended up exporting those sherman tanks as you both probably know well for many years they upgraded them um for example in israel with a with a better gun and these things were still being used in the early um in the wars in israel i don't know how many they were called super sherman's i don't know how many they were using in the 60s in the late 60s but they these things were still rolling around you know come off the assembly lines in 43 and they're still using them 20 years later in some theaters okay that's i think pretty desperate to be using sherman 20 years later but yeah i mean if i was strategically against um you know tiger tanks or something like that in in world war ii and i had germans uh my strategy would be to just run around in a circle drive around a circle until the sherman until until the tiger breaks down or runs out of fuel usually they just and usually elon they just parked them in some wonderful zone and let them but you know what that's what art as my as my old friend used to say that's what artilleries yeah no they they they they're big i mean it was an incredible tank uh tiger but it used a lot of a lot of fuel and the reliability was it was heavy it was heavy heavy heavy it was heavy and reliability was not great i think that's right that does show the yeah the complexity and the the like the lack of parts and interchangeability and the the diver like they had so many different flavors that they couldn't service them and keep them running so clearly the the single lots of the single tank has lots of advantages yeah i would just honestly the small move just like it's just retreat and until and eventually that tire's going to run out of fuel or break down and then it's a sitting duck i had a professor who said you can compare these things to the car manufacturers for the various countries involved and they said that the the germans built fantastic tanks and a lot of them were the same companies that build fantastic german cars but they're really precision instruments and they require a lot of maintenance and you got to take care of them and you know the the combat situations just don't allow for that so while you'd much rather have a german tank than a russian tank until they break down and then you've got to have the right spirit the hearts and the right the technicians and then you'd rather have something that's just more of a tin can that works on a couple of strings you know well i think you can have like arguably the best of both worlds is most of the best of both worlds is is possible um but it it certainly is not a good idea to have you know uh 27 different or fragments say like different designs of a tank especially if you're on the eastern front and a zillion miles from where the spare ports are uh this is this is really unwise um because you know you can get you stuck because of one you know you blew a little valve in the engine and now okay now you're five five thousand miles from where the spare part is like wait a second and the allies are bombing your ball bearing plants and all that sort of stuff absolutely so uh you definitely want like field replaceable field repairable situations uh but it isn't you know in terms of like uh excellence in operation it is um if you look at world war two fire races on on wikipedia and see how long you have to scroll before you find someone that isn't german have you have you done that yes but i would argue that there's other things going into it so tell me what you think is going into that number um okay what accounts for that in your mind um well okay so part part of it is that the uh in the beginning the the russian planes were were not very good and so uh or the polish planes or the french planes or you know keep going right the czech planes yeah so i mean there's a there's a few cases where um uh german pilots were fighting battle of britain um and would have like you know um i think one of them actually had had zero zero kills in battle burton and and he was one of the top three or top five german aces uh and had 200 or some crazy number of kills um uh outside of battle britain mostly on the eastern front um so you know i think yeah it's the early planes uh uh that russia had were or so you had were were not very good and so you could really take them out um very easily uh as as the war progressed the the soviet planes obviously did get much much better and and uh and and the service had air superiority at the end i i tell you that one of the theories i like and i can't prove it and i'm not smart enough to to delve into it too deeply but i love the concept it's called it's the the idea of the non-firer and the idea that there are most most of the people in war don't even fire their weapons and that the damage is done inordinately by the people who do and the specific examples that the author that i was reading gave where he said it was most pronounced was in the air war among fighter pilots and he was talking about aces and he said that the aces he said most people would get up in the air and fly around and never shoot at anybody but he almost he almost described the people who were aces as as true killers and they went out there and caused the majority of the damage on both sides um does that does that ring i was trying to figure out because you know we're talking so much about engineering and designs and those kinds of things which seems to take out the human element i grew up next door to a fighter pilot and and he designed he was trying to design an aircraft anyway his whole life in the 1970s after he retired from lockheed but he would talk to me so much about pilot pilot pilot skill skill skill training training training how how does one i mean would you rather be the better pilot in the worst plane or the worst pilot in the better plane um i mean to totally frank the i would say the worst part in the better plane could just bear in mind also worst plane means this thing might fall out of the sky but how much worse how much worse yes biplane versus uh versus jet fighter yeah with the pacific i mean you're i mean the pacific is very big and you're flying long-range mission pacific and you and your plane is in trouble i mean they're probably never gonna see you again so no this was your p-38 extra engine argument right there if i think i'm definitely pleased the p-38 that would be my favorite by far um just because at least the probability of coming back live from engine travel is super is way better um the pizza 30 i i would have you know i think um you know obviously this is like some serious armchair contract quarterback here but the the i would have taken up the p38 and i and actually double down on that one like i said given it the turbo supercharged merlin's double the power of that plane double it and improve the fuel the fuel efficiency and allowed to fly super high there are some improvements needed to the airframe as well uh to make it more maneuverable it has some some issues um i think in dives and rolls but you it's easy you to upgrade the the uh control surfaces no no they're hard and and and they do some of that with the p61 though i mean didn't they do some of that didn't they do some of that with the the p61 black widow i mean wasn't that sort of a a super p-38 yeah i think that didn't get it was late but yeah that's that's the kind of that that basically just uh major upgrades of the the p-38 i think would have been the the yeah the black widow is basically like that uh do you think it was wasn't it or i think it might have had uh radial air cold so kind of a different kind of a different thing but yeah the double boom with the double engine and i don't know anything about the supercharger any of its power or any of those kind of things i know they used it for a night fighter i think yeah i think there's another element here which might be interesting which is uh it's the pilots obviously have a lot of respect for the pilots my great uncle bill overstreet was a with the 357th fighter group flying mustangs and had a lot of great stories but it's also interesting to look at the engineers and like the you know the mustang was designed by a german immigrant to the us imagine if he'd been over there working on german designs and so you like the p-38 was i think kelly johnson had a role in it who went on to do the srs you know later stunt works so it's also interesting to look at the folks driving the engineering design and the you know the rate of innovation like we were talking about and like the the higher the higher innovation rates are those driven by a few key folks i i don't know but it's an interesting thing to look at you know what but bill you bring up something now and maybe it's the obvious jumping off point from what we were just talking about where you and i are admiring the skill of the pilot so much i feel like we're entering the era of the pilotless plane i mean i was i was doing some heavy-duty research trying to understand the impact of the drone warfare happening over the nagorno-karabakh area of the armenian azerbaijani conflict that happened recently and it seems it seems the logical next step and you know elon you and i have talked about how the first world war was so so particularly deadly because you had all those years of development but without practical testing to see how major powers new equipment would all work and then you you know you want to lease them on each other i feel like the drones over armenia are the same kind of thing where we haven't had a major war between major powers where both sides are using cutting-edge drone technology and then we get into that dynamic we've talked about right the continually upgrading you know the variant g variant h very um what do you think about the future of the whole drone warfare um when it comes to and maybe not just aircraft but i mean one could make a case that they're working on it for armored vehicles on land too and ships yeah i mean i mean it's interesting future um there's no question like if if you wanted to have a more effective fighter bomber tank whatever the case may be the best thing to do is take the pilot out of it at this point um we're already there you think yeah um you'd rather have a computer doing it than a human being in there at this point already so bobby fischer's losing to the computer already in the chess game we're losing you know you right okay that's it but see to me right there that's fascinating yeah i mean it's something i just want to separate this stuff it's not like i want the computers to the drones to take over but if you say like if you have a well-designed unmanned fighter or something like that and uh with with you know basic ai we're talking primitive ai it's really going to crush up the best human it can go through super high g turns it can do things a human can't do um and not black out you know you can do a 10g like whatever the fuselage can handle it can handle and it has simultaneous awareness and processing of all the sensors you know like a guided missile is in some ways like like that you know where's the guard muscles sort of the computer it's a computer controlled basically kamikaze plane so you're saying if you take the meat computer out of the cockpit the performance of the mechanical systems left over are so superior yeah i mean so much of the plane is oriented towards keeping the pilot alive and allowing the pilot to interact with the plane's computer systems and one fighter jets that's fly by wire so it's it's really you're just telling the computer what to do but the plane would get dramatically lighter cheaper faster pretty much better in every way if it did not have a pilot in it i i want to emphasize i like flying planes and i i'm a pilot personally so this is not like you know it's not some anti-pilot thing it's just that this isn't the m5 computer on star trek and you're replacing captain kirk and everything no i mean i mean that works out well you want to have these you want to have like the you know uh fire control you know circle kill decisions so require a human i think you know we don't we don't computers just we don't want terminator here you know so but but i think the reality is like if you if you've got a a tank without humans or fighter without humans you're just gonna win because it's going to have it it doesn't have to go to all the trouble of trying to keep the the humans who are quite delicate and and uh easily killed alive it's very difficult to do that um yeah i'm curious what you might think you know you and i have talked about this also the idea of um of of people trying to deal with technology or integrate or come up with systems and approaches for technology in circumstances where there's no way to train for it before the circumstance breaks out so i had a conversation with a guy who's a first world war historian and he's a big fan of general douglas hague who gets called uh a butcher by some people but the but the argument for the anti-butcher crowd is that he was in a situation where there's there he's he's in a learning curve right he's a cavalry commander from the late 19th century trying to figure out how to integrate aircraft with armored battleships with tanks on the field and all these kinds of things that are that are far beyond the world he grew up in and this goes back to what we were talking about about how quickly the pace of change began to speed up how do you think the generals and and by the way they're they're a very interesting group our modern day generals in terms of continual learning and all that sort of stuff how do you think they're going to do with all the new crap that's been developed since the second world war when the last time major superpowers faced off how do you think you're going to do integrating all these new systems against another power that also possesses all these new symptoms systems when both sides have drones when both sides have computers when both sides have uh the gulf war technology that we were using yeah so so this is an interesting thing that happened like so when we obviously once we developed nukes like wars between superpowers became a decision to destroy humanity or not or destroy civilization you'd get some pushback on that from some military leaders you would no but i mean it's just like the stakes are very high like you can't just go around using nukes uh without getting getting nuked yourself basically so so like i can get wars between super super powers like serious wars or we're not going to happen because it would just be mutually short destruction uh at least there was a very there's a too much risk of such a thing to have a superpower however drones now move that completely in the other direction now you can have a drone war where very few people died or maybe no one dies in a drone war and whoever's drones are successful they won the battle and and this may actually reduce the the risk of a war sorry reduce reduce the risk of reduce the penalty of a wall and increase the risk of having any war because it it's it's you know it's it ends up being battlebots you know and and so that could be one of the things that happens is that it's just it's it's now it's now now the stakes have gone super high with nukes to actually not even having human casualties could result in potentially more wars down the road but yeah i do i think it opens up the door yes so let me ask you then because something happened this last couple of weeks uh in space you uh um and it had and you could have to correct me on this but had to do with the uh the the the russians i always want to call the soviets this is how old i am now uh it's the it's the russians shooting i believe a missile into space and blowing up something and infecting satellites and all i could think about when i was reading it was this is the this is going to be looked back in the history books as the very early stages of the first um i don't even know what you would call it uh we called it the peaceful version of it a space race i don't know what you call this but but i'd be interested in your take on uh what this means and i mean um and what a space war would look like and if something like that is a near future or long future thing i mean can you give us a little insight from you're dealing with this every day what was your reaction to that um that incident well we're certainly surprised to see that happen i think a lot of people in russia were surprised to see what happened but it was it was something that was just on the military side and russian civil space wasn't even aware of it so um i i do you know i think that is uh that was that was not not not great for russia to do that not great not great sub-optimal because there's not a bunch of debris that's going to take a a wild steel but and some of that debris potentially puts the space station in trouble which has russians on it so i think that uh that was a regrettable incident but you know clearly you know at least uh russia china and the us have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons the the us actually has extremely good anti-satellite weapons a demonstration that was done a few years ago actually was a u.s the u.s deorbited a satellite and while the satellite was de-orbiting this was coming back into the atmosphere fired anti-satellite missile at satellite and and went and hit the fuel tank of the satellite while it was de-orbiting you know this is sort of like the you know western equivalent of like flipping the the silver dollar in the air taking out the six gun and going bam shooting the whole thing with the dollar so that was cool um but but that was like a satellite was that was de-orbiting so it didn't cause orbital debris um yeah and it's this little public information so you can look at it on the internet there's also direct directed energy weapons or space to lasers and microwave lasers majors yeah um so it's basically so is that the first thing that happens elon in the next war is the first thing that the satellites get blinded and knocked out i mean is that if if you're if you're wargaming the next major superpower war and this goes back to what you and i were saying earlier in this conversation about how you how you compensate for an opponent that's technologically superior to you i mean if if we're the superior higher ground uh satellite country and someone else can knock out our satellites isn't that a great equalizer um is that the first step in the next in world war three is the knocking out of the satellites man true world war iii we never have one of those uh i'm a you know i'm a pessimist on human nature and i just think i think that that it's just what was the old line that uh bertrand russell said right expecting a man to walk a tightrope forever i mean uh the odds seem against it to me i agree that given enough time the probability of that the probability of a third world war is is high if you just give it enough time you know to extend the like how fast how far could you walk on that type rope before falling off not forever no but i think the logical thing would be to push it too i think you'd have a miscalculation where it's the old line about where um during the early phases of the nuclear era where they were talking about what if some country pushes pushes pushes in little teeny chunks so that it's never enough so you'd want to risk a nuclear exchange over but it's enough to change the map um i mean i feel like something like that's a classic human first world war type miscalculation rather than people sitting down calculating the odds of winning a third world war does that make sense yeah i guess that's that that is how these things tend to happen that's a very unsatisfying answer to be right on that i just want you to know it's very unsatisfying for the pessimist view to work yes thank you that's it i hope i'm wrong exactly but yeah i think certainly one of the things that would occur in any kind of significant world war even non-nuclear would be to take out the space assets of the of the others and this can be done with either kinetic and uh weapons like a you know muscle of some kind or an emp an emp's uh man uh you you can love the nuke into the uh upper atmosphere or above the others uh into space and basically just fire it and it actually would cause no or no no it wouldn't it would not cause uh anyone to die on the ground from the from the explosion itself but it would it would the electromagnetic pulse would probably take out any satellites in the vicinity and possibly uh power grids on the ground so that that's uh but but that's also that man that is a big move to do that stuff also emts do not discriminate so uh you know you can take out all the satellites in that area not just uh you know the enemy satellites so i don't know if they'd be gone for the emt but i think the more likely situation would be anti-satellite missiles uh or ground-based directed energy uh you know laser is light amplification to stimulate emission radiation specifically in the you know maybe 400 to 1500 nanometer range with a that 1300 nanometer being an infrared laser uh which is just sort of heated up essentially although those don't work too well if there's a if things are cloudy you're not heating the cloud instead of the you know what you're aiming at and you know when i hear you talk about that though elon i think about because i think you're probably right in terms of of emps don't discriminate and all those kinds of stuff which would seem to indicate that it would not be a smart move for uh for us a nation state uh how far because i realize there's capabilities involved here how far away are we from having terrorists have a capability like that well if terrorists can launch a nuke into the upper atmosphere that they they could also nuke whatever else that you know cities or whatever you know so but would one nuke hitting and don't get me wrong i love i love these conversations where we give terrorists ideas but i feel like all the ideas but i mean but i mean would you rather would you rather have a nuclear weapon if you're a terrorist hit an american city or would you do more damage to knock out the satellites and i don't know which is the right answer but maybe you could i mean would we be more discomforted by the satellites going out than uh than the us because if you're in new orleans you don't i mean los angeles being hit's a disaster but it doesn't affect new orleans that much whereas you take out the satellites and we're all in trouble i mean have we got that right yes i'm gonna go that that makes sense yeah for sure um bill have we left you out of this discussion has there been anything we've talked about that that prompts any thinking from you where where either we're i'm totally way off base or we're missing something really intriguing here in the last bit of conversation i think i just like to look at it back through the lens of the rock paper scissors and there's a lot of new rocks papers and scissors out there and it's just a tread development the the the rock paper scissors treadmill rock chamber so maybe maybe let's let's take it a little farther back elon cause you know you and i were talking about engineers a while back and you you you were teaching me about what an engineer does and all these kinds of things and i started to go back to you know we were talking about the importance of engineering as the pace of change speeds up but then i keep thinking about guys like archimedes or even earlier i mean the stuff in prehistory once upon a time somebody invented the bow and arrow or somebody took a bow and turned it into a compound bow or a composite bow these people lost it so talk to me a little about engineering and warfare is this just a facet of what engineers do to our whole life or is there something very specific to warfare and and the development of engineering in your mind yeah and and to be clear i i don't mean to um uh in any way downplay the value of general ship you know tactics strategy uh and like they're all integrating about or anything like that i just think that um engineering in general is underrated in its impact on the outcome of wars so it's it's it's uh you know to be clear it's just i'm just trying to adjust for the importance of technology uh in in in warfare that that is often overlooked uh as an important factor for example sun tzu are bore there is no chapter on technology i mean that's that's an interesting book i read that i've heard that many times and uh but then and lots of interesting elements to it a lot of wisdom there but i don't think clausewitz deals with it either now yeah i know exactly typically it's on classrooms onward it really isn't alludes to it but does not really uh uh there should be a chapter saying if you have a decisive technology advantage you you can you can actually win with minimal casualties to your side at least and you mentioned uh earlier in the conversation i think there's the the war with prussia against austria they had fast loading guns and an australia did not that was a made a big big difference in the in the was that the needle gun it was a i think it no this is like no 30 years a precursor to the needle gun it's something it was like 30 years ago essentially that the the firing rate for that that prussia had against the war with austria was dramatically higher right and so the effectiveness of of troops is really like in one video game you'd say for any given weapon what is the damage per second dps just boil it down to dps and um and in the uh napoleonic wars for example the uh british had rifles you know a rifle is just basically scoring the inside of the barrel to to rotate the bullet so that's what the rifling is right yeah right rifling is basically just you you put a it you you score the inside of the barrel with the rotation to put the spin uh into the bullet it's very little x here so you might have like little baby sounds um that's okay that's i like that before comedic really so uh anyway so so the british had rifles in the metallic napoleonic wars especially towards the end they had i i think that you know and it's a situation where it sounds like the rifles weren't enough to really make a difference but actually they they did uh because i think they had uh maybe a couple hundred meters extra range and the british would snipe the the french officers and the artillery pieces and there's three pieces exactly so so you don't actually need a lot of they're basically early day sniper rifles right and and they were they were given to units that were like sniper units because your average soldier carried the unrivaled musket but you're right the specialist units carry the and we did that in this country too but if i recall correct me if i'm wrong you almost had to like hammer the bullet down the barrel i mean there was a long reload process in a day when it was already a long reload process yeah the rifle had i think um it was a while before the rifle reload time was was was faster than the basic basketball reload time but i think that's the war you just talked about the austrian prussian one right i mean that's that's i think that's what part of it was it bolt action something was going on there that allowed um the rate of the the rate of reloading to go fast exactly 30 years ago that i write about it um but but it was it was it was a decisive element because it just the damage percent second or damage per minute of the prussian forces is much higher the damage permitted of the austrian forces you could also lie down where because then you didn't have to stand straight up for reloading which meant you got away from the the linear warfare of the napoleonic revolutionary war era and all that yeah i mean the whole idea the whole dispersion starts and just firing musket balls at each other seems insane to me like the death lottery and and with a high chance of winning yeah yes yeah don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes right like but anyway i just say like there's just examples of like the the british use of rifles and and towards the end of the napoleonic wars was much more decisive than it would seem based on the sheer number of rifles but because they um they specifically aimed at the uh french officers and at the artillery and so that's like that's like giving you know if you lose your officer you don't know what to do but i think and correct me bro i thought that rifles of a headshot you know i don't think anyone had a a monopoly on rifles i mean i think that's how lord nelson the famous admiral was shot when he was shot by a well that might not have been a rifle he was shot by a french guy in the uh in the rigging of an enemy ship but but you're right that's the taking out of the officers if you could kill one lord horatio nelson how many average sailors is that worth yeah um by the way i think wellington is underrated um well well is it not as an irish guy i'm going to agree with you um okay well well listen is there anything because you know you and i have been talking about doing this for a long time is there anything we didn't talk about that was part of what you wanted to get into here and this includes you too bill i don't know what what you wanted to get into but i want to make sure that during the course of the conversation we touch upon these things i mean there's so much i could still ask you about i mean i wrote down chemical warheads on v2 rockets [Laughter] did i lose you guys are you still there are you there i'm here are you guys objecting to the fact that there was no actual question in that question you guys thought you were gonna get questions i didn't know if we actually addressed the last topic change dan or if we kind of hopped around but we'll hop back well i don't know exactly where we were headed on it was kind of interesting like the idea i mean i think elon was basically saying it's it's not it's all these different aspects and the it's the generals and the bravery but the engineering it's an interesting lens to look at through and talk about it that's kind of what i was thinking back to well i mean so so maybe one could make the case that we've seen the the ratio of importance of all those various elements generalship heroism engineerings we've seen the ratio and the importance in the terms of a triage level may be changing over time maybe this gets us into a nice bow tie with the beginning of the conversation about the importance of science and engineering once you reach the late 19th early 20th century um when the rate of change of technology is high such that there is a big technology difference between one side and the other that then then technology uh dominates uh and that and you get a lopsided victory so but then what happens in afghanistan you see what i'm saying i mean i i think that that what you're saying makes sense most of the time but there are enough examples we can use that just say otherwise it would be why even fight the war right it's a foregone conclusion how come it didn't win in vietnam there's other elements right well the the us um uh is just does not engage in in unrestricted warfare so i you know i by no means so i mean suggest that the that that everything america does is is is good but um and i'll probably get a lot of flack of saying this but that's probably a lot but i i actually think america is the the greatest sort of forceful benevolent outcome of any country in history on balance that doesn't mean everything america is good you know so you can always say like america went to the moon why can't they do why can't america do everything that it's like like you know america is like a person person you know might do something brilliant but doesn't mean everything they do is brilliant so but because you know yeah you know here in america we aspire to be the good guys and may that ever continue and uh uh if if if the if if the wolf is truly allowed to be unrestricted you can just carpet bomb the enemy until they're not there anymore i mean we could use nukes but let's not but let's not pretend that that's a moral question always i mean the reason you don't nuke north vietnam is because then you're gonna risk the full-on nuclear exchange with the soviet u i mean in other words you might have wanted to turn north vietnamese uh territory into glass but it might not have been an option on the table right there's multiple there's multiple factors going into all these decisions that that that constrain your options right yeah but nukes would not have been required to defeat uh the vietcong that could have been done with conventional weapons but it would have resulted in a lot of civilians dying so then the question i saw like are you willing to kill a large number of civilians the united states is not willing to do that so therefore lost i'm thinking of korea and i think we destroyed almost all those villages um and ended up in a stalemate i just i think i think there's an interaction going on here and i think that the technology is just one aspect of this but i do believe and i think this is something you've alluded to that as the as the technological sophistication becomes so overwhelming and so dominant that it starts to shrink the importance of all those other factors that we talked about that play into the overall equation right like you said if it's laser beams versus cave men that's pretty that's a pretty that's a pretty decisive situation yeah or even yeah if you simply have air superiority and you don't you're not don't have the advantage of extreme ground cover in in sort of a heavily jungled situation there's just having your superiority that you're going to win you know so but it depends on what win means too right here's what what meant one means but yeah i mean certainly no question the united states could have won the war in via vietnam if if even if it had the will to do so and andrew is willing to be do a lot more civilian casualties but i i mean i think that that would not be a good thing but you know the united states just just doesn't believe in you know the united states cares about if lots of civilians die you know and this is actually relatively unusual in in you know they're they're in all in all the walls in all history and all the protagonists most of them did not care about killing civilians the united states does and made it be that way now you've got my brain so you got this is what i like about these conversations is you've got the wheels turning now so now you've got me wondering about technology in the second world war if the other side had developed it first so we all know the germans were working hard on jet aircraft i would say jet fighters are jet bombers but apparently they couldn't make up their minds um so let's talk about the nuclear weapons we know that they uh you know there's some rumors of the japanese working on them but we know that the germans would have liked to have gotten them um so if they had gotten them first realizing that you know there were not many bombs even when we had them um how much of a difference does that make if in 44 i don't want to say 45 because i think the war is over already but but let's imagine during a time period where there's still something going on um how decisive is something like that if the germans get the nuclear the atomic weapons first in your mind they win of course do you think so yes hmm i wonder because they got the v2 rockets right i mean no no but the damage potential i mean they put this way if they have both um long-range rockets the v2s and the and the yeah it's game the other side just lost interesting i i still wonder why they didn't i mean look when you realize that that regime was was so terrible that that nothing is beyond the pale of what they might do i don't know why in 44 they didn't just say we have all this territory we're occupying uh if if you don't want something really bad to happen to all these occupied people you know you'll come to the negotiating table right now i mean i always wonder why things didn't if a science fiction writer were having some fun with that they'd be holding you know whole countries hostage for a good deal and maybe maybe that dovetails into something you said earlier you really think it's game over if the germans get new is there a time period where they could get nuclear weapons where it's too late i mean if they get them in in january 45 is it too late or is it such a game changer it doesn't matter when they get them uh well if they've lost air superiority then i think it would be tough um so they lost that in 43 probably don't you think not fully no they still uh you know they they didn't have it over over britain or whatever but they that i don't think they lost their superiority in 43 over germany or in that area it basically it's like contested and that's either got to be a long-range bomber or a long-range missile so but you know it's you know clearly they wouldn't have bothered using troops on solingrad if they had a nuke they'd be like oh that used to be a city not anymore so okay well now i wanna now i wanna ask a question that might be a good time to wrap this up because it might be a good good so i've always it's always been my contention that the germans um of the first world war were a stronger power and a more formidable foe than the germans of the second world war and one of the reasons i always used was that the germans in the second world war deliberately got rid of a lot of the things that would have helped them in the second world war for reasons that had nothing to do with military superiority at all so for example a lot of jewish people fought patriotically for germany in the first world war a lot of those same jewish people that would have done it in the second world war were in other countries by the time the second world war was fought because of they weren't welcome at home and that's saying it mildly but you take a guy like einstein and we know that there were several besides einstein who would have been involved in um assuming that they were patriotic germans fighting for the german cause as they would have in the first world war um a guy like einstein and and his compatriots might have been helping the germans develop atomic weapons how much of a difference do you think it might have made had the people that were in the u.s atomic weapons program or the u.s space program or anything like that if they'd stayed in germany and had fought and and used their uh scientific skills for that side as opposed to our side how much of a difference does that make in your mind no i think that would have made a tremendous difference and the person you'd want is not einstein but leo zillard okay yeah yeah yeah so uh zillard was the one who really uh was pushing the nukes and and frankly i think there were others that kind of knew they're probably a fair number that knew it if this would probably work but they did not want uh to to send their mind in that direction but zillow zillard and i believe zlatan was hungarian so yeah so if if you know they literally had them right yeah guys like fuchs though claus fuchs was there i mean they're people like that exactly so you know if if they'd gotten um if if they had in fact not been been anti-semitic uh and just generally alienated a lot of people and pushed apart alienated said at least then then they there's a good chance germany i would say germany probably would have had the nuke before anyone else yeah is there anything elon and this applies to youtube bill is there anything i didn't get into and that that's an interesting piece of of of information on this subject we've been dealing with that i just either didn't ask you about or was not intelligent enough to even know it was sitting out there in plain sight um i always hate to just leave anything on the table so so what haven't we dealt with that would have been intriguing well i mean we could certainly talk for for a long time and and i'd be open to talking again in the future if you'd like um but uh man there's so much we could talk about uh well you know what you can save it for next time then this this gives us a wonderful jumping off point next time and i hope bill would be nice enough to join us as well sure we could grow maybe more into more specifics about particular battles and that kind of thing well we could we could maybe get into some of the things you guys wanted to talk about instead of my pet issues also uh yeah no i mean we're just basically trying to emphasize that um you know in in some conflicts technology and engineering these were kind of engineering wars and uh and that that is often overlooked uh as we mentioned not not in sun two not in class with its own war and um but but obviously uh extremely decisive if you have um you know a big technology advantage maybe that's the fun part to jump off next time i'll do some research and try to find out when you first start seeing discussions of technology advantages and whatnot in the in the written historical record that might be fascinating well there's that isn't whatever else matters we have the maximum gun and they've got the maxim gun and they have not yes well you know it's funny because there's um there was some stuff written and i'd have to look it up i remember reading it in arthur farrell's book on warfare where he was talking about as the roman empire is starting to decline they were starting to push some ideas or some people their versions of elon musk were starting to push ideas of secret weapons and super weapons and ways that they could somehow compensate for the other areas in warfare that they were losing whether it's territory where they could recruit soldiers from or or what have you and it was stuff like you know scythe chariots and all kinds of interesting we all know that they had greek fire and a bunch of other interesting things be fun to look at um the impact of technology in earlier warfare before we could even really recognize it as technology totally in my opinion the the romans won their wars for many reasons but one of the this decisive elements was the romans uh were the best engineers absolutely it's like assyrians were great engineers too yeah um from the chinese oh no that's about that but but the romans really were great engineers and uh i mean they'd lay down roads and it's like you're trying to march somewhere man roads are roads beat the heck out of some you know little windy path through the forest um and uh you know it's totally the non-sexy side of war too but it's so important you seriously need roads it was kind of a theme like the supply chain like the the octane high octane fuel the roads gets the legions where you need them to fight the celts the supply you know like didn't um napoleon say an army marches on its stomach right right which i think maybe actually falsely attributed to defoliation i have found that it's dangerous for me to quote anybody anymore because everybody i've ever quoted and every quote i've ever i've ever repeated seems to be wrong when people double check it so apparently nobody ever said anything that's attributed to them in history that's all i can figure it's it's right i i i end up digging deep into the etymology of things for whatever reason as as as claire knows i you own animals i literally bought etymology.com um you did not yeah yeah but i actually know a lot of i guess i judged you for buying that but then i realized you actually really do care about that i really do care about etymology that's hilarious um well listen i guess this means we have another show coming eventually whenever you know uh with your spare time and your schedule it'll be in about 25 years but we'll be right on okay we can go to the etymology of things like balls to the wall because that that's the problem that's actually super interesting nobody just say that one just say that it's so interesting it is cool okay that's a perfect thing to end up what is the etymology of balls well um these days it may be confusing when you hear balls the wall because presumably you're not suggesting that someone if they're you know have balls uh put them on the wall because why would you ever want to put your balls on a wall um but uh and so the etymology of this goes back to many different things certainly um in uh world war ii for example both the wall would be if it would be max throttle so the the tips of the um of the the throttle lever would be balls and so balls to the wall would be max throttle um however there's something that arguably predates that which is um um the way you would control a steam engine was by having uh two bulls spinning um on a cable or a rod or a i think cable and then depending upon um how um much stronger you wanted you'd you would uh either crank the balls in or crank them or crank them out um and so if you crank them out bolsterball would be again mean a full throttle for the steam engine um i don't know how we didn't start with that man the whole situation i kept going even like deeper into balls of the wallet yeah anyway uh i i sense an entirely new topic taking over okay well listen listen man i've really enjoyed this i've enjoyed having all three of you on and let's do this again soon okay yeah actually one final etymology uh yes when you say to someone give it the whole nine yards do you know what that means i don't okay well this is again a debatable etymology but the the one of the possible origins is the length of an emma belt in in world war ii was uh on the order of nine yards so giving it the whole nine yards means just emptying the entire ammo belt on it i'll tell you what you made me think of it it's the craziest thing to have cut have come from what you just said but i got a tour once of the westminster school which is attached to westminster abbey uh in london and it's been around since forever i mean like the middle ages practically so they're giving me the tour the students are giving me the tour and between classes they have it's not a handball court but it's a place where they kind of play something like handball and it's in a in a specific area that just is you know where there's walls to bounce stuff off of and everything and the guy says to me we have all these house rules like if the ball goes over there it's two points if the ball goes over there it's out of bounds and i said oh i said well when did they make these rules he said in the middle ages he said so all of the little house rules that they still played with and you said balls to the wall that's what it was it was a ball on the wall and all i could think of was here are a bunch of students today who have no idea really of history or anything like that and yet they're playing a game where the house rules that they still play under were invented centuries ago i just thought that was helpful yeah so i could go i don't know the etymology okay it's english stolen from latin about 500 years ago and it means nothing like the lack of latin phrase do we want to know what it means or is this something you'd better leave the audience hanging with well casey sri is like whatever we will be um is uh but it's it's actually technically an english phrase because it's it was bastardized from latin but the phrase in latin doesn't mean the same thing and um a lot of people think it's spanish or italian something like that but it's it's actually an english english phrase uh been used for like 500 years um and it actually it means it basically implies uh a cheery fatalism my thanks to elon musk and bill riley from spacex for coming on the program today and you know it was funny as i was listening to that during editing it reminded me of my concept of hardcore history when it first appeared in my brain before we'd done any work and it evolved in any way shape or form i thought about it as a continuation of the sorts of conversations that we used to have as history geeks when i was a history major in college and questions like would you be would you rather be the better pilot in the inferior aircraft or the inferior pilot in the superior aircraft i mean that kind of thing that in my head i thought okay this is what we'll do with this hardcore history thing now it didn't obviously go in that direction um but this is the kind of thing where i could talk about this all day this is the the light conversation i like to have which is my my sister always said you're so weird but you know there are worse things right um speaking of you know the strange and perhaps hard to purchase for for the holidays uh you know you may have a loved one or family member that you're having a hard time finding a good gift for them because they're interested in the extremes of the human experience and you just can't get that at the local big box store always uh you can't get it off our website though um the old shows that are no longer on the free feed are available from the website you can we have a new system to purchase them too if you want to use it called the glow system should make it easier for people with certain kinds of podcast players we have gift certificates for loved ones we have some new merch with new designs that is just you know dropped t-shirts hats that kind of thing so if you're interested in all that stuff it's out there dan carlin.com uh i won't go into it too deeply just to say that there are some you know some uh illnesses and infirmities in the family right now that are preventing me from getting to the big hardcore history recording which never goes as quickly as we'd like anyway so i apologize for the lateness of it all not just that but it's one of those topics that we're trying to be very careful with a little incendiary in our current um zeitgeist for lack of a better word so um apologies patience please we'll get to it and hopefully you think it's worth it when we do finally um i do want you all to know and i mean this i mean people say things all the time that are just sort of platitudes uh it's been historically speaking a hard last two years for us all i mean on a global level i don't know what the next year holds but um you know i hope it's better for all of us and i think here's the thing you know history can obviously break any number of different ways and i'm a little pessimistic usually so i always assume the worst but let's not forget that things can turn on a dime in strange directions and that means directions that are improvements for all of us as well whatever you might consider improvements to be regardless um let's remember whatever your beliefs your thoughts wherever you may live and whatever your circumstances believe it or not as strange as the sounds as much of the platitude as this sounds we're all in this together and i always um like to think that if you and i whomever you may be simply sat down over a cup of coffee or tea or something um we could have a good conversation find commonalities and ways to get along and enjoy each other and that's my story and i'm sticking to it and that's coming from a person who's basically pessimistic so if you're optimistic the sky's the limit stay safe everybody have a wonderful 2022 and i hope i'm talking to you a lot over the next year support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash dan carlin or go to our donate page at dan carlin dot com forward slash dc dash donate you may have heard me talk about battle guide virtual tours recently um it's a it's a group of folk in um in europe who were doing live tours when kovid hit and had to try to figure out like so many other people how you reimagine a business for you know during a time of of a pandemic and they came up with something that it's one of those things that you never would have thought about it if you hadn't been forced to because of something like the pandemic but because you came up with the idea it's a brilliant idea and it brings battlefield tours to all sorts of people who couldn't be expected to make it out to all those battlefields in person and even if you're lucky enough to make it to one or two um wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to 20 or 30 well maybe you could do that virtually and now with battle guide virtual tours you can it's one of those things you kind of have to see to get a sense of but basically they combine satellite and drone imagery a live historian um eyewitness accounts period footage i mean it's all blended blended together to give you a real sense of a given battle and what's going on and what the challenges are and what it was like on the ground and visually give you a real sense of of what you're seeing battles are notoriously difficult sometimes to get a real sense of this is probably the best way to do it and if you want to get a sense of what that's like um you know throwing my name around can get you 50 discount right now if you go to battleguide.co.uk forward slash dan hyphen carlin and uh and get a look at it and just see what we're talking about here there were two kinds of tours basically the live ones where if you catch it when it's going on you can participate it's a q a kind of thing um and it's happening you know while you're watching but then those things are saved to be accessed later and you can go watch all the the previous tours and and access it that way at your convenience also lots of different options including gift certificates for people you know that might be a little bit difficult to buy gifts for find something unusual maybe they'd like you know a gift certificate giving them several battlefield tours but as i said why don't you take the fifty percent offer here and check it out for yourself at battleguide.co.ukforwardslash dan hyphen carlin and take a you know virtual battlefield tour yourself at battle guide virtual tours

https://youtu.be/kr9zbPWqmhg

hi hi hi [Music] okay well welcome to our last open session of this meeting uh subject is spacex starship and we are very pleased to welcome elon musk who leads spacex tesla neuralink and the boring company as the founder and chief engineer at spacex alum the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to earth orbit in 2008 spacex falcon 1 was the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach orbit and in 2017 spacex re-flew both the falcon 9 rocket and dragon spacecraft for the first time they are also currently developing the starlink mega constellation of communication satellites and the starship heavy lift launch system and we welcome you and you can unmute yourself and all mute me great um thanks for having me um i think there may be an introductory video potentially that we can play okay andrea can you check the sound oh let me try that again i was muted okay the sound isn't essential um hi hi hi cup be uh [Music] uh great so that was uh just an introductory video regarding the starship program that was all real no cgi there so what we're aiming to develop with a starship is a generalized means of transporting uh large amounts of mass more people but just in general large amounts of mass anywhere in the solar system um the idea behind uh behind this is to have the first fully and rapidly reusable rocket um which is that's the really the holy grail of rocketry um if you can have a fully rapidly reusable rocket oval rocket uh then the cost of of transport of you know of a ton to orbit drafts by about two orders magnitude uh maybe better so um you know just as a word for uh really any mode of transport if you say had aircraft or cars that were not reusable you would see very little use of aircraft and and cars because you'd have to buy a new aircraft every time you went somewhere and if you traveled somewhere in a car that was single use you'd have to obviously tow a small car behind you just for the return journey so uh you know so i think this is quite profound if we are successful and and at least from a design standpoint uh it appears to be uh you know all of the calculations close for having a fully fully reusable 100 ton to lower orbit capability [Music] the the vehicle is very big so one of the things that helps with reusability is scale because for example the electronics that control the the brain of the vehicle if you will does not actually get any heavier if it is a big vehicle or a small vehicle so things like avionics and control initial measurements dancers and whatnot become round out to basically um almost no percentage of the mass for a big vehicle um whereas for a small vehicle obviously that would be much more of an issue so scale scale certainly helps um and then the uh we're using the most advanced uh engine cycle which from physics standpoint is the the the best you can extract the most amount of momentum for a given amount of fuel or propellant which is a full flow stage a full flow uh gas gas staged combustion uh engine now that's the raptor engine there are currently 29 of those on the base of the booster we'll be expanding that to 33. and at 33 engines and with the rafter 2 we'll be doing about 76 70 700 metric ton force of thrust on liftoff uh so it's about two two point two two point three times the thrust of a saturn v um so it's really a very big deal because the biggest rocket ever um ever designed and and and we're we're close to our initial launch um on our national orbital launch we've done several subwoofer flights and i've been able to to land the vehicle successfully um the first orbital flight we're hoping to do in in january so we've completed the the first orbital booster uh and first orbital ship and will be complete with the uh launch pad and launch tower uh later this month and then we'll do a bunch of tests in in december and hopefully launch in in january um there's a lot of risk associated with this first launch so i would not say that uh it is likely to be success uh successful but i think we'll make a lot of progress and then we've also built a factory for making a lot of these vehicles so this is not a case of just just one or two we're aiming to make a great many ultimately i think in order for life to become multi-planetary uh we'll need uh maybe a thousand ships or something like that um but the the overarching goal of spacex has been to advance space technology such that uh humanity can become a multi-planet species and ultimately a space-bearing civilization and to make true the things that we read about in science fiction and have them not always be fiction um i think this is actually quite important um uh well it's long term it's it's essential for preserving the light of consciousness um eventually something will happen to us uh hopefully not soon um but either natural man-made that would cause the end of civilization um so the probable lifespan of civilization is much greater if we are a multi-planet species and and ultimately even go beyond our solar system but the first step is is um being being multi-planet mars being the only realistic option for that um so i think from from a [Music] a standpoint of yeah like i said for stanford preserving the light of consciousness and um which i think we should regard as fragile i think it's extremely important that we try to become a multi-planet species um as quickly as possible um obviously along the way we will learn a great deal about the nature of the universe and it will be possible to have many more space-based experiments if you have a very large vehicle uh capable of transporting things to orbits on the moon or anywhere um that at um you know 100 times less than it currently costs um so it's it offers sort of profound possibilities and i think this uh you know there's there's a fundamental juncture in in the uh history of really any civilization on a single planet which is do you get to the second planet or do you not i propose we do and i think we should do it as soon as possible um the window of this opportunity is opened now for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of earth it may be open for a long time or maybe open for a short time and i think we should you know be hasty so that just in case it's only open for a short time yeah so like i said i think this is very important for the long-term preservation of the light of consciousness um and of course we'll naturally uh we'll learn a lot of science and develop a lot of technology along the way so that that's what starship's all about um and um we have an interesting project that we're working with uh seoul uh milometer at berkeley on uh which is to have a really big uh telescope this is taking a ground-based uh lens that a lens that was intended for a ground-based telescope and creating a space-based telescope with it so that could be i think pretty interesting and we would love to do other things as well so yeah and i think people may know that nasa has selected a starship for the um transport of astronauts to the lunar surface so we look forward to doing that for nasa and um and then i think you know it really could be it has the ability because of the the mass transport capabilities of transporting enough mass and people to the moon to actually have a permanently occupied i think based on the moon uh much as we have like a permanently occupied base at antarctica we could have a sort of a moon research station which i think would be amazing so yeah i think anyway this is a very profound vehicle um and um nothing really like it has uh is being developed or and i don't think anything quite like it has been even proposed but it's um it has the potential to affect human destiny in a very profound way so i'm happy to answer any any questions i'm not sure quite what you'd like to know so maybe real time questions are the best way to address what people may be thinking terrific thank you so much elon from our board members please raise your hands for questions and our first question will come from louis demaro i think you may be on mute yeah still muted there you go it's just saying uh thank you for that it's rather big vision i i i wonder you know in order to achieve this goal that that you painted what type of uh international collaboration do you see to get this done and you know what what are the possibilities of actually pulling that off well we're not assuming uh any any international collaboration uh we're building this thing right now um and we're we're really um building it from internal funds there's nasa is providing some support uh uh they'll they tend to use starship for uh transporting astronauts to the surface of the moon but this has really been an internally funded uh effort um probably at least night nights internally funded thus far um and we um expect to reach all but uh you know probably i don't forget there on the first attempt but i'm confident we'll get there next year and then we tend to have a high flight rate next year um so uh it it's difficult for us to actually have international uh involvement because of itar so i i'm not sure and uh i don't really see anyone outside the us who is um building some part of what we need um so yeah we're just doing it that's great wonderful answer next question will come from adam burroughs a fascinating vision i don't know where to begin but i will ask just a technical question uh it was surprising to many that i believe you chose a stainless steel um for the vehicle i could be wrong but what what what were the technical and engineering reasons for that and don't stint on the details i sure that's a i think a very interesting question um because uh to a lot of people intuitively they would think of steel as being heavy um and rockets need to be light so well that seems pretty a pretty odd choice picking a heavy sounding thing for rockets especially orbital rockets that need to be very light um i mean the the nature of earth's gravity being quite strong and a dense atmosphere means that you really have to have an incredibly good propellant mass percentage and you have to have very efficient engines to get anything to open at all um so since then the white deal so we started off with um uh with an advanced composite so intuitively if you ask people who understand materials they will say we want to make something incredibly light they will they'll say probably you want to use state-of-the-art uh calm fiber composite um that's usually what they'll say um and that's what we started out with which was um really a very advanced carbon fiber um and uh actually it was only made in very small quantities uh it cost uh 130 per kilogram so it was very expensive material um and um and there are some challenges if you want to make the primary structure out of uh carbon fiber which is that uh you've got to make contain uh cryogenic uh fluid and um and you need a uh gas in sort of what's called gas pressurization gas uh to pressurize the propellants in the main tanks and and feed the uh engine turbo pumps with a with a given inlet pressure so so for if you have if you have a carbon fiber tank because it tends to be porous and also um potentially uh flammable when subject to warm gaseous uh ox pure oxygen because our vehicle is autonomously pressurized so the oxygen tank is pressurized with gaseous oxygen and the fuel tank is pressurized with gaseous methane um so um the re the resin and the carbon in the carbon fiber is potentially flammable um with with hot pure oxygen gas so you'd have to have some kind of liner so when you look at the the full mass and complexity of a column fiber system you you start having um uh things that reduce the mass efficiency of carbon fiber such as having an inert liner um and being worried about uh uh gas permeating through the carbon fiber and that kind of thing so um then uh but it still would be and it's still an okay choice um however um we were having a lot of trouble making progress with uh the uh carbon fiber um because this is a nine meter diameter rocket and so you're wrapping carbon fiber um with typically in this case uh 60 or 220 plies depending upon where you are on in the tank um and you have to get all of those wrappings uh accurate and not um leave bubbles or separator sheets or all the things that typically happen um or you've got to scrap the whole thing and then you've got to to get good good master properties put it in an autoclave um and put it under you know a large pressure um and then you need a gigantic autoclave because it's a nine meter diameter with a 70 meter long boost stage so this is autoclave from hell um and we we just weren't making rapid progress with this material so then i i so then the next step the next thing the the other two materials worth considering are a uh high strength form of aluminum aluminium or uh potentially steel so for falcon 9 we use um aluminum lithium which is the highest strength to weight aluminum alloy that you can use very difficult to weld but that's what we use for the primary structure of falcon 9. then but the problem is it's very difficult as well you need to do friction still welding and also the material cost is quite high so um you know that's that's sort of a material cost arguably on the sort of 40 dollars a kilogram level um and uh like very difficult to weld but then and then there's the steel now the interesting thing about 300 series stainless steel is that uh its properties at cryogenic temperatures uh strength properties increased dramatically so if you were to look at the material properties at room temperature you'd be like well it's not that great but now go now go uh look at the temperature properties at liquid oxygen temperature oh actually much stronger also no no meaningful increase in brittleness so you have still has high toughness uh at cryogenic temperatures uh it is much stronger depending on how how cold you go up to twice as strong uh and then the um yeah so and then you can also cold work it so you get if you go sort of full hard cold work um and uh and do the final bit of cold work uh at cryogenic temperatures uh you get outstanding uh strength properties which are roughly equal to an advanced carbon fiber um and and this is in our case for for um for starship the it both the fuel and the oxygen are cryogenic so this helps helps a lot whereas for uh falcon 9 the use cryogenic oxygen but um kind of room temperature uh kerosene fuel um so anyway so we're this is a quite long explanation hopefully interesting um uh if if both fuel and oxygen are fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic now you get the strength properties in in the primary structure of both tanks um and uh so both very strong uh very tough uh and resilient uh also very easy world stainless steel um and we started off with stainless steel 301 um that that did have some some um fracture toughness issues at uh quite draining temperatures um we switched to 304 and now we have our we developed our own alloy which is 30x which is better than either 301 or three or four um so um and and anyway so now now stainless steel only costs about four dollars a kilogram so we're from 130 a kilogram uh advanced carbon fiber to four dollar a kilogram stainless steel uh from 120 plies to one ply it's just coil from the mill um and basically the same strength um and and very high toughness and resilience and don't even need to paint it which is great um so the painters you know not wait can't paint on a big vehicle weighs many tons and it's quite difficult to make big things so uh so that and but now there's another advantage so um obviously you can tell i'm a huge fan of stainless steel i understand i should get a room or something um um so the so for increa in making the vehicle reusable um so now the it's coming in very hot um so the ship is coming in at hypersonic velocities coming you know it's a kind of like a mach 25 uh entry velocity so this is just obviously melted um and um and if but if you've got steel your melting point is much much better higher than aluminum um and you can have it handle much better temperatures than the uh carbon fiber because the the resin tends to have problems like you can basically go you know you know anything much above say 200 celsius or for carbon fiber or aluminum is is you start falling off a cliff from a strength standpoint but but for steel you go 800 and it's fine even 1000 can be fine so for for the ship this means that the heat shield mass is significantly reduced because the the heat shield mass is determined by the temperature um on the back of the tile uh that and that that then transmits to the hull so the hull if the hull is steel um you can have thin uh heat shield tiles whereas the hull is carbon fiber or aluminum you have to have thick heat shield tiles and you also need no heat shielding at all on the leeward side of the ship so it is actually lighter than the most advanced carbon fiber vehicle yeah i'm very surprised at that but that was very very interesting i appreciate your long disposition on this and i'm i i thought that the steel substituting for aluminum on the re-entry made some sort of sense i i didn't realize any of the other stuff yeah the right thing and then it's just and it's it's like the cost is ridiculously low it's like four dollars a kilogram even the special alloy that we're developing although it requires like a mill run um it's not using anything super exotic we might throw a little exotic spicy something in there but it's a small it's you know it's gonna be like point two percent um so it's still gonna be like maybe four dollars a kilogram maybe 450 um and then it's just very easy to to to weld um and um uh yeah i love it it's great and then if we want to just add something to if you want to you know [Music] it's easy to repair it's if you want to um you know add a sort of something to carry some wiring or plumbing or whatever you just weld it right on it's super easy it's great it's a high-tech low-tech um wonderful our next uh question will come from howard singer elon hello i started my science career watching captain video and reading isaac asimov and you've made all that fiction real so thank you very much uh my question is uh what are you doing for radiation protection for the crews and if you uh have you explored the need for forecasts of the space weather conditions or the space weather environment sure um well um i i think there is um you know there's always there's always always some risk uh going into deep space um and and i um we definitely wouldn't want to be traveling when there's like intense solar storms or anything like that um you know for going to the moon like obviously you know the united states has done that before um and it would be great to go back and great to have a permanent base where you know um if if the costs are good enough where we can have like a significant science contingent actually you know you know on the base permanently occupied are we epic um so but once you're on the moon of course you you're protected by the the moon below you and then you can you can put a lot of lunar regolith on top of whatever um you know the research station roof uh would be um so once you're there easy to protect on the way we'll have to check the weather report but for mars it's going to be trickier you know i um obviously we don't have all the answers here but um and there may be some clever ways to reduce the rate radiation effects um but i don't think they're insurmountable all righty thanks uh our next question comes from margie kivelson uh so i'm an enthusiast for the outer planets and uh spacex is giving the europa clipper a lift out to uh jupiter i wondered if you have comments on other uh missions that you would like to enhance by providing big big lists sure um actually we're really excited and and honored to uh be flying the the clipper mission um and um you know i mean i think this there could be some incredibly exciting things to discover and hopefully are um under europa um it's uh seems like probably the best place for some strange life uh so hopefully we find some really cool things um so yeah i can't wait to launch the clipper and um that'll be on a falcon heavy um currently uh with with the starship we could like the great thing about starship is it it really should enable us to send very big things and also and also to send them uh uh fast and like need much less in the way of um sort of planetary gravity assists and that kind of thing um so um especially if we could build a propellant generation um on the moon uh then then we could really send something very to very with with very high delta b um and if we have a base on mars with uh high delta v now you could really you can basically plan it hop from mars to maybe saras to maybe one of the ruins of jupiter and ultimately all the way to the outer solar system um basically any place we can put the the gas station that that gives us a another whole leap forward so ultimately starship is designed to be a generalized transport mechanism for the greater solar system um and um and so it's it's really whatever you can imagine being um you know if you could if you could get you know 100 ton object to the surface of europa there's a lot more you can do than with a smaller object um so yeah i think it's it's very exciting um obviously we still have a lot to prove but architecturally it is capable of transporting kind of almost any arbitrary mass to to any solid surface in the solar system wow terrific thanks and margie is actually part uh leading the team building the magnetometer that you will be taking to europa on the clipper uh our next question comes from steve mackwell hi elon um thanks so much for your presentation um i was wondering um what were you what are your kind of plans for humans to mars uh in terms of time scales and uh and you know are you going to send folks there for uh kind of a shorter stay or you think a longer stay and bring them back at least initially i'm not sure i think what so the first thing we'd want to do is is confirm that we can uh land the ship safely on mars and so that might be it would want to probably land two or three i think before sending people and just confirm that that uh we can land safely um so you know and actually on those missions we could we could obviously put um a lot of scientific instrumentation that i would recommend putting the lower cost uh scientific stuff on the first mission but we'll certainly have propulsive landing very reliable on earth as we've been able to achieve with the falcon 9 booster um it's now here knock on wood so it's it's a it's no longer it's quite normal for the rocket to land uh safely and we'll do the same with starship um and and then um i'm not sure quite what would happen i mean we might be working with nasa or um maybe nasa and other uh you know other countries to send people to mars um but i i view this very much as um you know the you know what sort of actions can we take that maximize the probability that the future is good for civilization you know like what are sort of like civil civilizational risks that we can potentially mitigate um and i just think being a multi-planet species is a tremendous risk mitigation for uh human civilization and um as we know eventually the earth will become if you wait long enough both will become uninhabitable so um in the long run we are obviously all dead but but i think the um you know the technology that we we develop uh in traveling from um earth to mars i think will be just a very powerful forcing function for the improvement of space transport you know like the initial votes that cross the atlantic and across the pacific back in the sailing days were really terrible um you know so you know they were often just plain sink and but as once there was a reason to do uh large amounts of ocean trade the the the sailing shifts the wooden sailing ships got dramatically better um and and so but you kind of have to have that forcing function um so that that's what i think will happen and we'll get much better at space transport and i think this will also be very important if um you know if there's like a potential uh earth collision event from from some comets or something like that um you know the the asteroids we can predict fairly well obviously but um there's this massive cloud of um of comets out there that uh you know we we don't know the situation um so and they come in pretty fast so there's always some risk of comets like taking out a continent you know there's those places look like they talk a lot about extinction events where you know almost all life was destroyed on earth but they don't talk that much about the ones where well it was just a continent [Music] there's plenty of sort of continent level uh extinction events that occurred in the fossil record and it was like really so commonest to really not really generate a lot much attention um and and but if we've got uh large rockets that could uh potentially do something about that then then that could be you know that that could that one day save billions of people but we've been we've got to have big rockets um and much more advanced space technology in order to protect against um uh yeah a comet coming in from yeah far away okay thank you so much perfect thanks elon our next question will come from harlan spence elon thank you for uh sharing your time and your vision with us i had a question about um looking back the history of exploration human exploration as we ventured from one place to another um scientific discovery has always been an element of that and you've shared a little bit about some opportunities there um but i was hoping you could share a little bit more when you think about the aspects of scientific discovery that will accompany becoming a multi-uh planet species what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about in terms of what we would discover along the way well um i think uh being able to really um you know have heavy-duty science research uh on the moon and on mars where you could really just go anywhere you want drill core samples anywhere you want i think we'd learn a tremendous amount as compared to having to send fairly small vehicles with with limited scientific instrumentation um which is what we currently do for for mars and the moon so uh just just having people there who can dynamically decide what they're going to do um and then really being able to analyze the whole history of the planet i think would learn a tremendous amount um and uh yeah and that would obviously extend over time through at least the um the greater solar system um so you know i mean yeah um i mean i studied physics because i was just trying to find out what what's what what's the universe all about how does it work where did it come from why are we here um and um i actually kind of got sort of depressed at one point because i was like man this doesn't seem to be any meaning to life i just seems to be like you know and then i made the mistake of like reading the german philosophers as a teenager that would that made it was quite depressing um but but then i read uh douglas adams which is guide to the galaxy which is really a book in philosophy of his disguises humor and he makes point that you know uh the question is harder than the answer and um and and really basically the answer is the universe and and uh we kind of need to figure out like what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe um and that's the question of the hard part and then the answer is easier by comparison um so so i'm like i don't know like like why are we here how do we get here is this is this real is this is a simulation or something at least if we go to these other planets we'll make the simulators work harder and have to buy more computers to run the simulation or something you know um but uh yeah i mean i think it's and and if if if we are able to at least be like um a multi-fan species within the souls our solar system then um that then hopefully we can develop the technology to send probes uh to um other star systems and eventually um maybe some same people all that stuff but we could certainly send robots to um robot probes to all the nearby star systems and um yeah try to figure out what what what's what's the meaning of life and what's going on and are there any aliens out there thank you do you have a do you have time for a a question or two more uh yeah as much time as you like oh wonderful all right um i do have one question from uh from a board chair um and it's this one aspect of spacex that has distinguished it from the previous organizations has been its willingness to embrace failure as a development tool when do you think you will be able to start selling starship launches at prices significantly less expensive than falcon 9 say 5 to 10 times less sure um actually i think it's not it's not that far away i think probably um two years from now so um our rate of progress on starship is very rapid um and um like i said we're we're actually getting ready to do our first local orbital launch attempt within the next few months we're expecting uh our license pool from the faa around the end of this year and then so that probably means a launch attempt in january or perhaps february um and then um we're we're actually building the the factory to make lots of starships and make lots of engines in parallel so there will be many many vehicles um the the engine build rate is currently the biggest constraint on um how many vehicles we can make because there are currently 29 uh engines on the booster and uh there will be 33 even at a higher thrust level um so um that means yeah so 33 engines per booster and these are big engines these are um you know the raptor 2 is a roughly uh 240 ton thrust engine um so we're talking like you know five or six hundred thousand pound thrust engines the yeah so really quite quite intense um i in fact i'd say that building the production system for starship is much harder than the design of the starship itself but we have that in progress and we intend to do um hopefully hopefully a dozen launches next year um maybe maybe more and and if we're successful with it being fully reusable it means that we we build up the fleet just as we are with the falcon 9 and the falcon 9 booster which is reused we lose the upper stage every time but we almost always recover the booster so um so basically we intend to complete like the test flight program next year which means that it's probably ready for um for for valuable payloads that that are not kind of in the test not for testing basically but actual real payloads um in 2023. so quite soon great thank you so much all right next next question from ned wright ned i think you're still muted won't we all be glad when we don't say that all the time yeah so it's um you have to preserve cryogenic propellant for six to eight months to actually be able to land on mars yeah i wonder what your plan is for that um yeah so um the the landing propellant for mars would be in separate header tanks so these would be um spherical header tanks for for maws there would probably be they might might be contained inside the main tanks or there would be up in the cargo section but well insulated so um it would actually have to um uh have extremely well insulated um header tanks for landing uh that are not the main tanks so that's what we'd have for for mars great thanks uh riza what wexler is the next question yeah so um changing topic to something that's happening before we have the possibility to uh be a multi-planet species uh i i also study the universe and i'm trying to understand how it works and how it got here and as you know the satellite constellations from starlink and other sources are already having a huge impact on astronomical observations and this is really going to significantly limit the science potential of the next generation of observatories if we don't have a core shift so what role do you expect star spacex to play in working with astronomers and regulatory agencies to mitigate this well spacex already works with um uh regulatory agencies and with the the so um with the astronomers um and um generally what we see is the the the telescope um that is perhaps most sensitive to this is very rubin um and we work directly with the vera rubin team to make sure that uh their observations will not be affected by starling satellites um and my understanding is at this point they are comfortable that it will not be an interference for their urban um they have um uh there's a slight risk of capacitive coupling between uh some of the uh basically um sensors there uh but this which can create ambiguity but we we're confident that we can work around that great thanks our next question comes from john karis elon thanks uh for all your time today appreciate it kind of going back to prior question about um long-term storage of cryogenics for whatever mission but um i realized or i believe that your architecture for starship to go beyond low earth orbit to go the moon has you know cryo fuel transfers and things like that and yeah you know long-term cryofluorides you know cryo-fluid storage low boil off not easy problems yeah yeah so not easy problems so the question i have for you is is uh you know what are your plans to to mature that technology but before you have to rely on it to go to the moon like in a year or two well um yeah um so i mean there's more ways to address it um by uh having a uh launching one one uh vehicle that is very well insulated um but does not return to earth effectively a propellant depot um so if you take a ship a starship and you take take the the heat shielding off and replace that with a thermal insulation like you know a multi-layer installation um that's just very very good um at um keeping things cold um then you could have one ship up there that uh is it effective just turns into a propel depot and and then you um send tankers up there to uh dock and transfer propellant um and uh and so you should be able to be there for a while and then whatever ship you want to go to the moon you go up and dock with the the depot uh transfer propellant and and off you go so that's that's the that's rough plan we're pretty good at docking at this point we've docked with the space station a couple dozen times the space station is a very difficult thing to talk with because we don't control both sides of it um and um so it's that that is a very challenging uh docking whereas docking with our own vehicle is comparatively easier yeah but both of these technologies have really only been demonstrated on very very small scale so you're your scale's a lot larger and i think poses other problems good luck in uh solving those yeah i know i i i don't think we'll just sort of like you know it's not exactly a walk in the park um so like i think this is hard um but it is necessary and it's the only way um at least with that that i've worked with current physics to um to actually uh make things work um and then obviously you know like um aerial refueling is is used quite a lot with with aircraft um and so this is uh you know taking that concept just doing it in orbit um and um so it like we're not we know that success is one of the possible outcomes um we're not breaking any physics you know physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation um so but just because it's at least in the center possible excessive excess success is at least in the set of possible outcomes yeah great thanks very much uh next question will come from amanda hendricks hi there um so i'm a co-chair of the committee on planetary protection and our committee is concerned with preserving the validity of future uh astrobiological experiments on mars and other places in the solar system searches for life extinct or extant and i wonder if you can comment on spacex's planetary protection plans for mars sure um well i mean first of all it's not like we're launching to mars really soon i mean mars is a ways off um and the you know but there there is um you know fundamentally a choice to to be made which is we going to try to be multi-planet species um uh which would would mean like at least in one spot on mars that there is human you know human biology like that we will be you know uh we're pretty hard to avoid no no biology if you send humans there they're biological creatures um but i i i don't think this is this is going to invalidate uh research and on the rest of the planet i mean mars is a big planet and so i and they've been um uh you know rocks that have been knocked off of earth and landed on mars and that kind of thing so uh but but yeah i think we'll you know you wouldn't want to sort of spread biological debris all over mars but i think we will have to put at least somewhere if there are people going there um at least in one spot and and then just make sure we try to contain that and not have it sort of spread around um yeah and i guess it's same for the moon and other places thank you eon um we'll just take a question or two more next question from larry paxton hi thanks for your time um i have a question that was engendered by a remark you made in passing that i think is uh very interesting which is where you said that um there's a window of opportunity for us to get off the planet and the question that occurred to me was uh you you follow that up with saying that you didn't know how long that window of opportunity would be open yeah and there you mentioned in passing of course the traditional things like you know exogenous forces like uh cometary impact or near-earth object but i was wondering you know with all these compelling reasons for us to get off the planet and including the compelling reason to to have another refuge for the human race what do you see is the biggest threats and in particular we have a wide range of expertise here we've been talking about some of the problems that we think are the most important that are unresolved yet i just wonder what you felt were the most important uh issues for us as human race yeah i mean in general i i you know i've thought about this quite a lot um which is not saying that i've thought about it correctly but i thought about it a lot um you know and the you know the the the one of the bigger risks on earth would be you know if we that we need to transition to sustainable energy uh even if uh one discounts the co2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere uh eventually we'll run out of hydrocarbons to burn and so we need something that's long-term sustainable um so that that's that's sort of um you know i kind of put my time between tesla and spacex and so tesla's trying to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy um and that's you know to mitigate the the risk on earth and then spacex is intended to you know mitigate like longer-term risks um that could potentially extinguish consciousness as we know it i mean we've got the sort of delicate candle of consciousness sort of flickering in the darkness here um and i don't know if you guys have seen any evidence of aliens but i sure haven't i get asked that a lot so um i mean i think the foamy paradox is just an incredibly interesting question um and um i'm not sure who said it but the like it appear to be if they're if there's either a lot of aliens or none um and equally each those answers are equally terrifying um so anyway so i i think um but with respect to nearer term risks on earth um obviously sustainable energy and your potential non-linearities in uh the co2 inc uh ppm in the atmosphere are are a concern uh you know if we start doing things like melting the severe and tundra and that kind of thing um um i i'm probably less alarmist than most uh uh on on on climate change i i've put myself in the in the moderate category on climate change i just think it's the the amount of inertia associated with the hydrocarbon economy is so gigantic that it it will require a long time to make that transition and so it's probably better to start it sooner rather than later and that's why i describe fundamental good of tesla as the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy it will happen i think anyway but faster is better that then with s4 risks on earth um i mean there's always good old nuclear armageddon you know that's still one of one of the things um that's not out of the question there's still a lot of nuclear missiles pointed all at us in the us and many parts of the world um i don't know what what quite that risky is but it's not zero um i think there's there's maybe some counterintuitive risks or that people don't put that much attention on um if you look at the birth rate trends um there are growth rate trends are very uh negative um and so um and many countries are are seeing population decline um with no end in sight so i think there's um uh i i think the the the the very low growth rate i think is actually quite a significant risk um but an under an underappreciated one um so uh yeah um and and for population prediction i would recommend taking uh things like the number of uh babies born last year and just multiplying that by the probable lifespan and if if you do if you do that you'll i think you'll see numbers that uh are very very bad for future population and with an inverted demographic permit so you've got a lot more older people and then fewer middle-aged people and then eventually just very few youngsters and this will necessarily lead to resources being applied to taking care of the elderly instead of advancing science or advancing civilization i'm quite worried about that one because i see no reversal of the trend um and um you know that that would you know civilization will die with a bang or a whopper that would be dying with whimper then there's obviously of course uh you know a a pandemic with a with that that has that's that's like covert but which has a much higher mortality um sort of a lot long you know high contagion highly contagious long incubation period high mortality type of pandemic that's fairly a risk ai is i think maybe more risk than people realize um ironically the smart people tend to think ai is less of a risk because they think that they're so smart but actually we're just humans and we're quite dumb what are you it's amazing we got this bar frankly um so if you see the advancement of ai it's clear that uh ai will exceed human intelligence uh in every way if if these trends continue and the list of things that the human mind can do better than ai is less and less every year so [Music] you know hopefully that ai is ai is coupled to human will um but it might not be uh the the long term goal of neural link is to uh achieve sort of better symbiosis with uh ai and with the kind of human mind um in the short term neural link i think will help solve a lot of of brain injuries and diseases and spinal injuries and that kind of thing but long term uh like because one of the things that i'm getting quite esoteric here but um the uh we're we're already a sidewalk really in the sense that the our phones and computers are an extension of ourselves and you can say we arguably have um sort of the sort of the primitive kind of limbic system the cortex the higher thinking and then we've got a tertiary layer which is our which is silicon in the form of our computers and phones and everything um but um we have already somewhat merged with computers but the the the issue we have is the um the communication rate the bandwidth with the computers is low especially output if our output is two thumbs uh that's you know we're talking maybe 10 bits per second or something like that not it's maybe 100 best case it's a very slow output and as the intelligence of the computer grows if that communication link remains very tiny i think we will necessarily decouple from computers just because our rate of communication is very slow and so if we can solve the i o bandwidth question and and by you know increase it by a thousand or more maybe a million then the you could have human machine symbiosis that is much better i i mean that's at least one approach um let's see what else is there um i mean religious extremism you know if that that becomes if if that grows over time a religious extremism is is certainly a threat to um advancement of science uh so depending on how how far that goes that that could be an issue um and what do you think it's a big deal i'll only add i think that this is a fundamental question because as you said the fermi paradox there are should either be a tremendous number of alien civilizations or there is some gate that so many civilizations have failed to get past and the question is are we going to fail to get past that gate as well the great filters yeah um so i think at least one of the great filters is does a civilization become multi-planetary or not um yes if a civilization does not become multi-planetary then then eventually the sun's going to expand and and you know boil the ocean and that's game over so and and actually think about it from a percentage standpoint you know it's been around four and a half billion years and it took us one billion years to get this far um we'll probably it may be as soon as another 500 million years and the sun might have expanded by enough by that time to boil the oceans potentially it's not 500 million years it's not much beyond that which is basically means that if it took 10 percent longer for uh you know civilization to evolve it would never have evolved there's an interesting one um elon do you have time for one more question wonderful all right um jill dahlberg please so let me just say i feel lucky that you are here so thank you and not just here in our panel um you're very inspiring my question is mundane you're gonna have these rockets they're going to go up and they're going to go to two places that are going to need energy the earth needs a lot of energy as well so what are your plans for making energy i'm thinking space-based solar power or something like that does your company have plans for plethorating energy systems you're going to need well um a tesla does do solar power um and solar is actually there's a quite an amazing amount of of energy that reaches us from the sun that you know i mean really when you think about earth is almost entirely solar powered if it were not for the sun we would be a frozen dark ice ball at three degrees carbon um so so apart keeping us warm um and not super cold and frozen in dark is pretty helpful and then the almost the entire ecosystem is uh solar powered um you know plants are a solar powered chemical reaction and um there are partial chemotrophs at the bottom of the ocean it's basically you know everything's all powered um so really talking about uh just like a little bit of incremental power from the sun being used to power civilization um the uh you know as a sort of good rule of thumb is uh because you get about uh a kilowatt per square meter uh of solar energy um uh so then in a square kilometer there's a million uh square meters so now you've got a gigawatt of solar energy per square kilometer um and so if you've got like uh 25 percent efficient panels and there are maybe uh eighty percent uh uh of the area is you know panel of uh you know then you've got like basically 200 megawatts per square kilometer of solar power um and so then if you say well okay how much then you really won't need a large a very large area to power the entire united states with solar um like a little corner of utah or texas obviously you prefer it to be distributed but you can just say like okay how much is actually needed to power the us and it's you know somewhere between um a square that's roughly 150 to 200 kilometers on a side uh will power the entire entire united states um that so it's really clearly no problem to power um civilization with a um with a with solar and then of course there's wind and um you know i'm actually pro nuclear uh provision-wise um and uh there's also hydro and um geothermal so i i think we will solve earth's energy needs um and and they are being sold if you look at the growth of wind power and solar power it's it's really has a very high growth rate it needs to be paired with batteries uh in order to because of the intermittency of wind and solar but the combination of of solar plus battery will you can completely solve all of those energy needs in fact uh for satellites that are in orbit that's all they use um is solar panels and a battery and and what what what is earth but a large satellite sorry i think you're you're on here yeah i was i was thinking something more grandiose like a space-based solar power system but you have a good argument you would just use solar on earth and plethora i like that thank you works great um like because if we think civilization uses a lot of energy but it's actually very tiny compared to the amount of solar energy that reaches the earth every day um yeah it just it's just there um i get asked a lot about fusion and in my opinion like if you if you just make a very large thing of magnetically confined fusion you could absolutely make it work i don't think any any really major breakthroughs needed to uh make fusion work but but i think it's it's unnecessary to make fusion work because we've got a giant fusion reactor in the sky that just shows up every day with and doesn't require any maintenance um so it's a low maintenance fusion reactor shows up every day so if if we just just catch the energy from you know where to catch it it's just keep us lobbing all this energy at us just cash it with the photovoltaics and store it in the batteries and it'll that'll that'll solve for everything basically um yeah we need a lot of batteries but um there's also like the next question might be um is there or do we face some materials limitation with batteries and the answer is definitely not um i think most uh the vast majority of stationary storage will use an iron cathode lithium ion battery so there's obviously plenty of iron on earth no shortage of iron there's also no shortage of lithium lithium is extremely common on earth basically everywhere so um and and so if you have a basic iron phosphate uh cathode with a graphite uh anode um and uh lithium carbonate there's there's enough of that on earth to paris many civilizations but if several or easily order magnitude larger civilization than ourselves could be powered uh with with the batteries that with the veteran materials that that are that are readily available so i don't really suggest complacency here but um just that uh there is a very clear path to a sustainable energy future okay that's wonderful yvonne we just want to thank you so much the national academy of sciences is so pleased to have you here with us today paul worcester is a member of the space studies board and this is also the board on physics and astronomy and um just thank you so much for the time and the interaction with our members and answering so many questions so graciously i know it's past uh the 7 p.m hour on the east coast or wherever you are well thank you for the for the great questions and and it was an honor to speak to everyone thank you thank you all of us thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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welcome to everyone and please join us in this extraordinary conversation with john elkin and elon musk connected from south texas [Music] [Applause] thank you john and thank you good night elon hi exactly thank you [Music] john and elon they will share with us their views on the future both are industrial leaders committed to foster innovation supporting change we've transferred the power of technology in helping us to solve problems and achieve progress but before we start please take note on the side of the code number that you can type on the slider to send us questions to our extraordinary and unique guests let's start from a personal load from john john how and when did you meet with elon we met in in italy in sicily in 2014 after the world cup and we had immediately a very interesting conversation that we carried forward over the years and the themes were artificial intelligence human machine interfaces the future of our species in a multi-planet system and what's been really good over the years is to see how that conversation and what we had discussed then ended up in in actual real activities after that open ai was started eurolink was started and and many other projects and ventures that elon has achieved since and elon what memories you have of your conversation with john well um it's similar um i think um talking about those subjects and i i just thought that john was a great person and um quite insightful um but yes at that point uh we would really um you know tesla was small spacex was relatively small there was no like no boring company um so i think it was just a wide-ranging intellectual conversation and i was just impressed with uh john as a person speaking about roots there are similarities between elon musk and john alken both grew up in developing countries in south africa and brazil both have one brother and one sister strong affection for grandfather both are engineering minded elon what is the source of your inspiration that's also my inspiration i'd say is somewhat philosophical the um so i think that the uh the thing we should be aiming for is uh increasing the scope and scale of human civilization um so as to best uh ask the qu the right questions for the answer which is reality or the universe um and so if you accept that uh premise then and we should work to ensure the long-term survival and prosperity of humanity uh of consciousness and we should seek to extend that consciousness beyond earth to other planets eventually other star systems that is the nature of my philosophy john what does it mean to grow up in changing places cultures languages how that contributed to shape your character it definitely broadens one's scope in in terms of the possibility of being exposed to different cultures different countries different people and as i reflect on on the lack of my upbringing in in multiple countries uh what really stays with me is that we generally tend to compare one place to another what is better and i think that that's a mistake we really need to appreciate what's different and there's no doubt by complementing diversity we end up getting to better outcomes and i also think that having studied here in torino engineering and having been living here since the the element of roots is also important so as much as one wants to extend ourselves in in planet earth but beyond the roots roots are are important and are an important factor that i've come to appreciate more over the years exploration means moon mars and beyond but also the art of chasing curiosity elon you are committed to take humans to mars what comes after mars well i think the you know it's it's more than just exploration um it's actually uh extending the scope and scale of consciousness um and the likely present the likely um the length of time that consciousness will exist as we know it uh is greatly extended by being a multi-planet species um so it's but it is much harder to go and establish a self-sustaining city on mars than it is to simply explore mars or go for a visit i think we need to turn mars into another planet with life as we know it it's and it's the only real possible location in the in the solar system where that is possible where that can be done so only one planet really mars so if we are able to establish a self-sustaining civilization on mars i think this will go a long way towards securing long-term uh survival of humanity and as i said it would increase the scope and scale of consciousness and would drive the development of new technologies that would ultimately enable us to go further slightly further in the solar system but ultimately to go to other star systems and and just go out there and and find out what's going on you know um other other civilizations that existed perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago or a billion years ago that uh um maybe lasted for a long time it might have lasted for millions of years um whereas if you look at human civilization it has only been around for about uh five thousand years if you consider civilization to have begun from when the first uh writing existed um first writing beautiful first writing in any meaningful sense existed about five maybe six thousand years ago so it's a very short period of time considering that earth is one and a half billion years old and the universe is 13.8 billion years old so uh anyway so i think we learn a lot about the you know just kind of like what the heck is going on um where um you know just we ultimately we want to go out there and and see the other star systems in our galaxy i'm not sure we'll ever get beyond our galaxy but at least see what's happening in the great many stars that are in our galaxy maybe we'll meet them alien life that we can talk to that would be interesting we're gonna see thank you john what is your long-term ambition i mean i i think just if if we're able uh the real threshold to be able to uh to get to other other places is transportation so if one could actually invent teleportation that would allow us to travel much easier and be able to explore definitely our solar system and potentially meet with other inhabitants as elon was mentioning so definitely if teleportation was something we could invent that would be a great progress looking forward to it speaking about business you both are in charge of several businesses elon we speak about tesla's basics neuralink startling and others john stellantis ferrari and extra that means the cnh jetty reinsurance companies juventus and others elon the question for you is i mean you mostly created new companies what is your recipe for that what is my recipe yeah [Music] well i think it's quite difficult to create a new company and have it be successful and generally i do not recommend creating new companies unless you feel very compelled to do so starting a new company and making it successful like a friend of mine has a good thing for that which is it's like eating glass and staring into the abyss so that sounds like something you want to do then start a company um so it's quite difficult um but i mean the basics of starting a company are um you know you have to have an idea that is compelling or you think that could be a product that could be very valuable to the world um and then you've got to find a non-talented people and convince them to do this new thing but because challenging people are already doing something but you have to convince them to do a new thing um and that that can be quite it's very hard to do that um and then you have to build a company up and a company goes through a life cycle like a you know like just a sort of a like a human or like any animal um it starts off very simple like one cell then you get a few more cells and and then it's you get some um organ differentiation you start growing arms and legs and they become like a baby uh and then a toddler you know a child and teenager it's the life cycle of a company is very much like that of a creature and you have to reinvent the company at every stage so this is why you know some companies get to be a large size and some do not is because you actually have to reconfigure the country at the various stages of its life cycle john you mostly transformed existing companies what is your recipe i i think um i i've been mainly exposed professionally to uh two industries the uh car industry and the newspaper industry which are old industries so they come from the 19th century and i studied engineering 20 years ago here in torino where two things were very true then one was the internet and the other one was mobile and that led to incredible things that happened on the back of it whilst i was very much immersed in in two industries who were very much suffering from structural reasons and a lot of headwinds and i think that what was useful was that in parallel to what i was doing i also had the opportunity of being exposed what was happening in in other industries and as i reflect about uh company and our companies are old they have more than 100 centuries this moment in time and the decade we're in is a very exciting one for the opportunity of renewal that that it gives and and you can see that transformation is incredibly uh if if you are very committed to it which is really the difficulty in in a company which has very strong embedded habits is is able to give you great benefits having said that it is incredibly painful so i'm also happy that we're not only trying to transform 19th century companies in 21st century companies but also since 2017 with xor seeds participating in new companies and and trying to build 21st century companies thank you speaking about business we are in front of a public today of startup an audience of leaders mostly young that take risks overcome problems and look for solutions you are both roller coasters used to go from risk to successes john you have survived three different crises what does it mean for you that well to some to some extent more than only three and i think that being a an entrepreneur and taking an active role in in engaging in in an enterprise has has risk in it uh which is why it's very hard as ellen elon was mentioning before on the other hand i think that it's very important to be aware that you are on a roller coaster and one of the mistakes that one should not do is when you are on the low be depressed or when you're on the high be over excited and and if you're able to balance that and and stay very true to what you're doing and what you're doing with your organization that's extremely important i also believe that having having been very close to a very complicated situation when you really see an organization that could end its life because you don't have resources to continue or for other other troubles but generally they are they end up being financial difficulties it is very important to to have very strong conviction and and find all all kind of resourcefulness uh to go along and and and that's something i've experimented many times and i recall very well being with elon in 2019 which was definitely a tough year for him and and you were you were very calm and and and i think that's important to be very very steady yeah speaking about uh you elon 2019 and also 28 i mean 2008 when many people wrote off tesla how could you reverse the situation then yeah that was very difficult time um i think uh you know like john uh we've gone through many difficult times um the tesla has come close to bankruptcy i don't know maybe half a dozen times uh over its life um and actually probably the the most uh serious one was uh 2008 um in 2009 because tesla was just a very small company making uh in low volume um a sports car that was you know kind of expensive um and the that was basically the only electric car being built at the time so it was very difficult to get customers and very difficult to get investors and although i had money from paypal i'd actually run out of the money from paypal so i personally had no money left in fact i had to borrow money from friends to pay the rent i didn't have a house so it was pretty intense and like in that case we actually raised the money to get to keep the company going on christmas eve of 2008 and that was the last hour of the last day that it was possible to raise money and if that call had not gone well then we would have gone bankrupt that was pretty intense um and then the next most intense time was yeah that 2018-2019 when we were struggling to get the model 3 to volume production and so we were really in a very tough situation because i the thing that's i think a lot of people don't fully appreciate is that while it's actually relatively easy to come up with prototypes and show cars it is very difficult to achieve volume manufacturing the notable thing i think about tesla is not so much that tesla made electric cars because others have made electric cars but rather that tesla was able to achieve volume manufacturing i think as the first u.s company to achieve value manufacturing in 100 years after chrysler in the 20s so the difficulty of this cannot be uh overstated um it's production is staggeringly hard and i have a great deal of respect for people who companies and people that are able to do volume production and make good products and um and actually be prosperous it's very difficult um so it's just one thing after another um yeah and i'd say probably the longest extended period of pain that i've had is from 2017 to 2019 um just about three almost three years there [Music] and um actually it's great talking to john actually john was very supportive um and um so [Music] and on that manufacturing we we are very happy as komau to be part of of how you guys sorted it out yeah thank you yeah could come out was great so um yeah but very very tough um you know the thing about that's one of the things that makes cars especially difficult for manufacturing is that there are on the order of ten thousand unique uh parts or processes in vehicle production and if even one of those has a problem you cannot make the car so the production moves as fast as the slowest uh least lucky least competent of a sale at least 10 000 unique bots and processes some of which are in here or within your control and some of which are at suppliers so it's just very hard um i was sleeping in the country for quite a while there thank you lynn a crucial topic for all of us today's energy we know that electric energy is the future for cars and we know very well that we have to cut emission but how can we produce enough energy to sustain growth yeah i think the long term will get most of our energy from solar and wind in addition to geothermal and hydropower and i would say also um people should really think uh positively of nuclear energy um i'm talking about just you know traditional nuclear energy that's well engineered um and uh you know i think these days there's recently i've been surprised by a movement away from nuclear energy but i i think actually the reality is it is actually quite safe and we should have more nuclear energy or at least not shut down the nuclear power plants that we already have um you know my considered opinion is that they do not present a danger um so [Music] there's a strong movement to get rid of nuclear power plants which i think is is not good um especially if they are to be replaced with coal power plants um i think the evidence is very clear that uh there's much more of a health risk from coal power plants than those from nuclear and john how to face the challenge of the need for more energy today well i i i think that energy is is important for us to be able to continue and develop as as we have and we have two important uh issues to tackle one is price and we're seeing how energy prices are just going up uh in in gas coal uranium everything is is going up and the second one is how do we make sure that we are able to produce energy with no with no emission and so on one hand there can be mechanisms of carbon capturing but more importantly how can we produce energy without without having to emit co2 and no doubt i i agree with elon that nuclear is is a solution that exists it's one that we know it's one that it's secure and and one that we should absolutely develop uh strongly and if you think about why uranium prices are going up which means that there is nuclearization in the world it's because countries like china and india are actually nuclear rising and and that is a very strong indication of also what we should do as in parallel we do work very strongly on renewable and and i think that ultimately the sun which is the biggest source of energy is is going to be the long-term solution do you agree on that even yeah i think very much so um solar energy is uh often underestimated um but the earth would be just a cold a cold dark ice ball at three degrees above absolute zero if it was not for the sun and the sun also uh powers almost the entire ecosystem you know from the sun the sun powers the plants and the plankton and then from there the whole ecosystem above plants and plankton so you can think of really uh earth as being already almost entirely solar-powered and so to but then there's like a little bit of extra power that's needed to power human civilization uh which is small compared to the total solar incidence on this on earth you know the solar energy on earth is approx approximately a gigawatt per square kilometer and if you wanted to say power uh all of europe um with solar you would only need a fairly small piece of um land uh you know uh but like in reality it would be distributed over over many many pieces of land so you don't have to have too many long power lines but basically like as a rough um uh guide about 200 kilometers by 200 kilometers of solar would would power all of europe um maybe even a little bit less but comfortably 200 kilometers by 200 kilometers of solar would power all of europe so um you know this could be a combination of land within europe or perhaps uh just across the mediterranean um where there's a lot of sun um there's but basically there's so much solar that you could very very easily with a very small patch of land uh relatively speaking power all of or of europe all of the world in fact um so this is important to appreciate that only a very small portion of the world would need to need to have solar panels to power all of civilization and then an even smaller piece of land would be required for the batteries required to throw that some energy overnight so that you can have energy at night and during the day coming to the new horizons of life neuralink is a developing brain computer neural interfaces how can human beings interact with machine elon sure so i mean the full story of neurolink is quite complicated um the overarching goal of neuralink is to mitigate the ai control risk so that uh as ai gets smarter and smarter um we are we need to do something about to to enhance the bandwidth between ourselves and um machine extension of ourselves like we are already a cyborg to some degree in that our phones and our laptops and our computer applications are an extension of ourselves but the the bandwidth to the computers especially to the phone is very slow where we essentially are outputting with just with thumbs two slow moving thumbs this is a very low bandwidth situation so i think from an existential threat standpoint neuralink is aimed at improving human machine symbiosis with the idea of ensuring that humanity can have a good good coexistence with artificial intelligence um now in the short term uh over the next several years uh neurolink will attempt to solve a number of uh brain injuries and and brain diseases uh so our first application for example is to enable uh someone who is um a quadriplegic or tetraplegic to be able to control their computer or their phone just by thinking and we've already demonstrated this actually with a monkey that can play video games and use a mouse cursor and click on things on a computer and so we're very confident this will work and hopefully we'll have our first human trials in the next six months or so is a fascinating scenario john how do you see the cyborg world well i i think that we are in a decade where we're going to see the evolution of our smartphones which is the first application of being cyborgs change and how how will that object evolve uh you could argue that it's going to be with you know we have all these glasses that are going to allow us to use ar and vr technologies or as an extension of what neural link is doing we could actually ourselves be be enabled with technology but as i reflect on all of these evolutions and how we humans can work and cooperate more with machines what i also find very interesting and the avenue that all of this could open is that you think about our relationship with nature aren't these technologies also going to help us understand better nature and if you could actually communicate with your dog or with your trees wouldn't that open up the whole universe sure it's a window on the future opportunities that we made do you want to share the animal elon that the neuralink team is more would be most excited in communicating with well um you know i think the things that animals want to communicate with as far as we can tell tend to be fairly straightforward um probably um monkeys are the most sophisticated um but i think you could uh you could communicate with your dog i suppose um although i think i think i know what my dog would want um you know he only wants like about four different things it's like food water go outside you know and be patted um but maybe there's more to it than that maybe he has a secret life of dogs that we just don't know exists we may discover it very soon i think yeah this conference was made to inspire and empower anyone who believes in a future where technology and innovation expand human possibilities you both our father with strong relations with your kids what future do you see for them john well i'm i'm very optimistic uh about the future and i think that uh our our species has been able to overcome difficulties as as they come and the last example of it is what we all have been living through this pandemic and it's extraordinary to see the resourcefulness and and how we've come together to mitigate the risks and and finding practical solutions to be able to uh solve problems and and advance and and this is what gives me a huge amount of optimism optimism combined we're really seeing uh younger younger generations so if i think about my kids their friends also all the young uh women and men that i've interacted with yesterday and today and and how clever they are and also their ambition in in being forces of good that that gives me a lot of confidence in in our future elin yeah i i also um i believe one should be optimistic about the future um i mean i'm generally of the view philosophically philosophically that it's better to be optimistic and wrong occasionally than pessimistic and right you know i think you want to look on the right right side of things and and i'm a little worried that um uh young people today maybe sometimes are a little pessimistic about the future but like i i'd like to just assure people that as long as we are not complacent we will solve the resolve the climate crisis and we will solve these issues um we obviously need to take them seriously and work hard to solve them they will be solved um and that people should be optimistic about the future and and work to make that optimistic future real you know they say that the best way to predict the future is to create it um and so if you take the actions necessary for there to be a good future then we will have a good future um and um so i'd encourage people to be optimistic take the actions that will create a good future and we will have one thank you elon we get a few questions from the audience the first one is for you both how do you learn what is your way to the process information to make the right question and find the answer john well i i i'm very eager to to learn and have had the good fortune of being exposed to many different situations out of which i've always found that by doing you learn but more importantly i i i think that interaction with people and and going to sources of knowledge and and and there are incredible masters teachers that you can learn from and as as you have those interactions i agree that the questions like how you you ask what you ask and being generally interested now you have the risk of some people asking questions because they like to hear what they're asking but if you generally want to hear the answer that's been for me the the biggest learning opportunity i've had maurizio yeah um i i think you really want to try to learn at every opportunity and um you know it's great to read books and talk to interesting people and uh learn as much as possible um and um you know i suppose it was the on a plato or someone who said um or maybe attributed to socrates um if i if i know anything is that i know nothing um and so essentially uh just taking that attitude that um really we wish to be less bullish over time um but i think it's actually well if i'm like if you accept the premise that you were full then we are all cool to some degree then i think that and you wish to be less foolish then that's like i think that's a good approach you know and um and this this avoids does that maximize your feedback and your ability to learn um as soon as you start thinking you know too much people can't teach you things that's when you start getting very dumb um so i i yeah i always try to learn learn new things and um and and being able to talk to interesting people and and you can often learn more by the questions that are asked than the answers that are given the question for elon musk suppose to be 20 years old right now where would you start your puff forum i mean if i was literally just so if i was just a 20 year old right now in 2021 cost 21 and 21 from where would you start um hmm well i mean assuming that i'm still a technologist then i think there's a lot of opportunity in synthetic uh rna um the you know the vaccines that were developed apart from the like one the ones that were done by iron tech and moderna are really the beginning of what i call digital medicine or medicine and software and i think that's i would say what's the single biggest opportunity i see right now it's probably synthetic rna and the potential for revolutionizing medicine in that way there's also artificial intelligence there's one of my favorites that it which is tunnels we need a lot of tunnels to address the traffic in in major cities and then there's obviously because the continued electrification of transport uh it was aircrafts and boats in addition to cars um let's see many other things that will come up as well so [Music] i think we live at a very exciting time in uh you know if you look at the whole history of the world in here you know humanity this is a time of the greatest technological growth in history um and it seems to be accelerating the question for john elkin will we ever see in autonomous ferrari that would be sad to have a ferrari autonomous car as the essence of having a ferraris to be able to drive it and and i think that in a world where autonomy will will capture a bigger part of of how we move uh the value of driving will increase so if we go by analogy when we were when we had horses and carriages stallions existed too and and race horses existed but as those disappeared stallions and race forces continue to exist and are very valuable and very appreciated so to some extent that's where i think ferrari is and and should continue being yeah i agreed it's on the logo [Applause] we have time for just two short final questions um elon musk it has been reported that you consider yourself not a ceo but an engineer for the ability of problem solving how do you find these skills in your candidates people that want to work with you how do i find uh engineering skills with um the ability of problem solving oh yeah um generally um my interview generally consists of just asking people to tell me the story of their career and in particular to go into depth on some of the toughest problems that they've solved and how they solve them and then that uh that gives me pretty good insight into what they can do and then i'll generally ask them you know detailed questions about some problem that they sold technologically and that will tell me if they were really responsible or not um because whoever was actually responsible for or solving the problem they they remember it very well it's like zeroed into their brain um so um that that that's i think a good sort of filter for okay who really deserves credit for a problem or who is not uh if they can answer the small detailed questions um yeah then and then we have a very crucial question by the way about semiconductors the crisis of semiconductor production is a short term or a long term standing short term i think yes at the short term there's a lot of um chip fabrication plants that are being built um and i think we will have a good capacity for providing chips uh by next year i think i certainly hope so but it appears that way and finally ellen do you want to tell something else about your relation with italy and if you will invest in italy as one of the members of the public asking us sure well i think uh uh i i love italy it's great um in fact i asked um uh mauro who is a head of the uh heat shield technology at spacex to join and he's from italy tomorrow if you could join [Music] please introduce yourself [Applause] [Laughter] you came from a small village right yeah i came from a small village in the north of pimonte [Music] which is which is in the same region torino is in absolutely and yeah but i think it's funny like like um just think about like you grew up in i mean your family's been there for a long time yeah like 700 years several hundred years in the village yes and uh and then you but you decided you wanted to work on technology yeah and uh just decide to explore opportunities so when to university milan and went to caltech in [Music] in california and then i stayed at nasa and then i realized the rate of learning was a little slow so i'm very happy to be with the joint spacex for several years and work together can you yeah can you tell us what he does for in your team oh yeah yeah yeah yeah should mara talk that would be wonderful yes okay so i'm responsible for the development and [Music] how to create them how to use them [Applause] [Music] and also you have this uh true inspiration from ceramics is that right yes we're making these tiles hexagonal black tiles that you probably have seen on starship and we learned to see how they make tiles in imolas swallow italy also how they are painting the panels of italian kitchens and how you can reconvert [Music] facilities that were making condensed milk to recover acid that was used to purify the fibers and how to use oil tanks to grind fibers that we bought in a body so we put together many things and learnt we've learned from many years of history like recovery the system to recover acid is basically a milking like a milk condensing plant yeah that we bought in croatia used and we actually bought it in scotland but it was previously used in croatia but like for the the yeah like we're making some of the most advanced heat shield technology in the world um but we're using a lot of techniques uh they're also developed for roofing tiles yeah um and a lot of those techniques were developed in italy actually yeah absolutely learning from everybody you can learn from there is great pride in the room here of of knowing that part of italy is also with space sex and and and a lot of eagerness of being able to participate more and doing more to that end yep thank you very much [Music] now and and i i hope that you guys will come to torino next year to be able to see how ideally we can we can do more and torino is the capital of space of italy and it's also the capitoli of a capital of cars which are two important passions for elon but we had prepared also torino being the capital of chocolate and knowing you like uh chocolate we we have this very special space chocolate that will be waiting for you when when you come next time all right look look forward to being there in person very good thank you yeah thank you jonathan thank you to your student italian assistance and thank you all for having been with us today all right bye [Applause]

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- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to part three of my tour of SpaceX's Starbase factory and launch site with the ultimate tour guide, Elon Musk. Of course, if you haven't watched parts one and two, what are you doing? You absolutely have to watch those first because there's just gobs of information. But this one's a little bit different. We actually go out to the launch pad while it's being constructed and watch Elon at work and still get to ask a couple of fun questions. Just like before the YouTube play bars broken up into sections. We have links in the descriptions to those sections too. And of course we have an article version of some of the notes and key takeaways of this conversation up at everydayastronaut.com. All right, let's hop in the car and head down to the launch pad. Which week is the blast. Is the radius actually gonna change the exclusion zone a little bit when one super heavy gets a, it starts launching, or you do the full stack? - [Elon] Well, we definitely won't have people, we'll clear the whole area for orbital launches. - [Tim] Like Stargate and stuff? - [Elon] Yeah. Well, we might have a small crew with some shield, you know, like a rope and being a robust, some shielding on the roof and strong glass. But like, if something does go wrong with the over launch, it's really a much more of a fireball than it is an explosion but it is quite a big fireball. - [Tim] Will you eventually be moving the launch control and everything, or is that staying at Stargate, at the control center? - It'll be at Stargate for now. - [Tim] By the way, I haven't, I just got back into town for the first time since the booster has been up. So I have not seen this. - [Elon] Yeah, it's a lot of progress. The teams are great. - [Tim] God, it's so tall and that's not even the whole thing. - That is the pool tower. - [Tim] But I mean that the booster. - Oh yeah, exactly. - [Tim] Yeah, the tower is done now, right? As far as height. - Yeah. The full full-stack will be a little taller than the tower. - [Tim] Are you guys working on a second tower two already? - We are thinking about it. - [Tim] What's the future for Starbase here? Like, well, will you guys always be launching from here or what happens when the oil rigs go online? - I mean, as long as it's, if we're able to launch it from here without too much operational difficulties, then we will keep doing it. But it is a bit of a challenge with beach closers, like there's like some people, don't want to have the beach clothes that much, but on the other hand, we gotta be able to launch. So it's like, you know, to what degree can we operate from here effectively and still let people use the beach and stuff. - [Tim] Right. So with the oil rigs though, like, I guess how urgent is that to get the oil rigs going? Or is that kinda like, you know, we'll get those going and then, it might be two or three years before you actually start using them for launching? - We're not thinking too much about the oil rigs right now. I mean, we're demoing one rig, just, you know, cause we can just send it to a demo. Like people are really good at demolition and have them do it. So, but it's not occupying any of my insurance. - [Tim] How far out will they, when you do start launching from there? Is it going to be like hundreds of miles or is it like 10 or 15 or something from shore? - We're not thinking about it. - [Tim] This is all good for me though, because I'm so nervous that it'll be hard to watch them once they start launching from out there. - Yeah. For now we're just trying to think about the things that we have to think about. - [Tim] Yeah. Wow. So right in front of us, is that a, is that the QD Arm? This yellow thing here on the sorry, on the right now, is that the QD Arm or is that the, is that one of the catchers? - That's the QD. - Hey, how's it going? - Let me give it to you son. This one is for you. - Okay, thank you. - All right. - Thanks. - We're going to make it. - All right, cool. Hey Sam. - Cool, how's it going guys? - Actually, Taylor has a plan as of right now. - Okay. - We rolled this thing over today, so it's all in place. Those cranes are in their set location for tomorrow. - Okay. - Tonight, we are going to re-rig everything. - Do you guys mind being on camera or anything? - We are very shy. - Sam, I know you are. - It's all right for the camera, Go ahead. - Yeah, so tonight we'll create a rig, we're obviously doing that double crane, if we rig it all, our crane operators get in at 7:00 AM tomorrow, get everything finally hooked up. We do our pre-test. We use the launch spoon or the big things cause we don't want things sliding around. Then we lift it in 11 hours. - 11 hours, okay, cool, great. Awesome, exciting. - You see the flanges sticking out from the bottom of the launch pad right there, if a T, so right there is a T. You want to head up to the top and we'll show you what our game plan is over there? - Sure. - You're rightfully worried about this, but I think the guys have a pretty good plan. We went over the plan and any contingency planning. - Okay. - All of last night, six welders got all the shelves done for the jack. So the jacks are up there now actually. Hey Yuri do you want to go up with us? - Sure. - Those are the jacks on each leg. - All right. - The jacks that we got. So on top of that column right there, there's some shim plates we believe are off by half an inch. - Half an inch. - So what these guys done, they added weights where we think we're going to be high and we'll keep the crane on the whole time while we're jacking. And then Robert, you want to talk about the lap plates that you guys have? - Sure. Yeah as we're leveling we might get some gaps there that are bigger than you'd like for your weld gaps. So if that happens we got some plates to bridge that gap, so we weld that while up top. - Its a lot of steel. - Yeah. And then over here, that little thing I pointed out in the launch mount we got new plates in here. So we'll be able to go right. - Its okay, I got it. - Yeah, so this is key. This is to track them. - Sure. - Same thing on that side. So we'll get rotation and then our crane will be fixed by the six jacks, but we only need two jacks actually there, I think there are 200 ton jacks, but we have all six so we can really dial it in. - All right. Okay, sounds good. - I mean, we moved in and we add guys right back inside of it going. Again, it's all bonus time work in terms of fluids routing. And those are the hoods. So when the QDs retract on the hold-downs, the top inner phase is that hold-down hood or sorry, the QD hood. And so it clamshells back in. It's all through like just a strike, not a dynamic system on its own, but the hold down hydraulic actuator, actuates the hold down, the QD and the hood all altogether. - Well, as you can see, there's a lot going on here. - Yeah, that's why I wanted to bring you up here. We've got a handful of guys on pad D right now. Some more on pad D so that we're ready to take a ship. So we we've been out of this the whole time, but we've got a few days on that. So we do want to knock some of that out right now, so that we're ready for shift 20 when it comes out here. And then we got a bunch of people in the prop farm and then tomorrow at 5:00 AM, when the guys get in and they start rigging and lift at nine, this whole area is cleared. So all the guys that were going to be on the launch belt, all go over to the prop farm. So actually some of the guys work tonight. It's not actual physical work, but prep for the army that goes over there tomorrow so that we can be effective with like 70 people. - Got it. Great. Well, it's definitely a beehive of activity. That's good. - It is super exciting, there's a few things to be worked out. After listening to what you said about contractor stuff. I got with our supervisors here and we're trying to figure out what the right number is. And also since we have all these great individuals here right now, it's also a good time like, oh, is there anyone from here that wants to join SpaceX? So we're looking into it. We've incorrectly searched for like six months continuously without looking back into it and looking at the proper head count. - Okay. Yeah if somebody's long-term we should make them long term not temporary. - Yeah. It's easier too, because these guys come and go and then contract ends. It might be another company. - Yeah, yeah. It's not set up the right way. - No, it's better for them now that I'm in SpaceX. - Yeah. The logistic plan right now is wild. So we're also running out a lot of parts, so McGregor is shipping us a bunch of fittings and seals. We got Cape and Benny ready too to ship us stuff. We'll back-order all those other sites on the stuff we take. But we're just trying to keep, like, we're trying to keep feeding these guys with parts right now. - Okay. And that launch ring is complicated. - Yeah. I do however, like the approach of having the hold downs on the inside like that, where they fold into each other, like, I like that design, however, everything else, we need to take a look at it. Just like how thick the steel is to begin with. We obviously learned trying to bolt in and align some of the lugs is not the right path. We learned that line boring as we got good at it, we got really fast at it too. So at least for the next launch mount, We're thinking line boring is the better step. Reduction in mass is gonna be huge for us. - Yeah. It takes a long time to weld thick steel. - Yeah. I mean, this is going to be a one inch weld here all the way around, inside and outside. One pass on the inside and outside just one weld pass will get us 40 miles per hour on booster and ship. - Okay. Great, well, super impressive. If we can mount this thing in 11 hours. Frankly, even tomorrow that'll be great. - We had a hot wire that grain and then one of our new roads that we did collapsed on us. So we had to find a different route this morning, this grid weren't in place, we did lose a little bit of time having to backfill. But that went off pretty well. and the second largest grain in the world, third largest grain in the world, we have two operators for that bit. So one guy from our team, Dave, right's going to run the yellow, Giovanni is going to be on the big crane. - Okay. - They're gonna load share properly and get this thing up. - Great. - This is brilliant because we want to spend four days reconfiguring this thing. - Yep. Like the two things we really need to get good at here is toll stuff and small stuff. That's what Bill Riley would say. - [Tim] It's also pretty amazing that a project of this scale, you're still measuring things in days. You're still like a day, you know? I mean, that's impressive. What other people are like. - Yeah. - [Tim] Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's nonstop. It's just not like you're doing that because there's a launch in two days, you're doing that the whole time this place has been developed. It's been like down to the, you're counting every minute and second. - I told the crane operator as well, what would you do if there's an asteroid heading to this planet in eight days? - Yeah, exactly. - That's what they were told today. - Yeah. - And who knows, maybe there is. - Yeah, I mean, you never know. I think if we operate with extreme urgency, then we have a chance of making life multi-planetary, just a little, just a chance to know for sure. If we don't act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably zero. And the rate of innovation is not gonna be constant, this year, they're gonna we're either going to increase the rate of innovation or it's gonna slow down. If you look at a new American access to space with a crew, we were able to go to the moon in 69, then with the space shuttle we can only go to low-earth orbit and the space shuttle retired. And then for almost a decade, America had no access to space for the people. So this is a pretty bad trend, expanding to zero, We need a very strong trend in the other direction in order to have any chance whatsoever of making life ultimate multi-planetary. So that's the reason for the extreme sense of urgency. - [Tim] This is legitimate. - Yeah, I mean I'll be long dead before, you know, Mars is self-sustaining but hopefully the momentum is strong in that direction by the time I die, which probably isn't soon, but no, no. All right. - [Tim] Sam, what if right when I got to the top, I'm like, oh, by the way, I have a horrid fear of heights. No I don't, but that'd be funny. - I'll go to the tower next time then. - [Tim] Dude, it's huge. - Oh, it's very impressive. It's great to see the progress and nice work guys. (noise from work site) Yeah, I mean, it'd be amazing if we can mount this thing tomorrow, which is looking like we've got a good shot at that. (noise from work site) - Getting far more paving going. So we can get the power guys or the arms a little bit more room to work on. - [Tim] So what is the current plan for B3? Are you thinking about putting more rafters up under it still and seeing how it does? - Sorry for what? - [Tim] You offer B3, you talked once about like maybe putting nine up under there or something. - We're just gonna focus on four with some work. Like I said, it's a rapidly changing situation. I mean, its like a guided missile, like a guided missile is going in the wrong direction at any given point in time, but it costs course-corrects. - Yep. - You don't want to be a super precise canon ball when you don't even know where the target is. - [Tim] Yup. - The overarching optimization is what is the fastest time to a city on Mars and then subset, fastest time to a fully usable rocket, subset fastest time to orbit basically. So, so, well, all of the initial production is simply a learning exercise. It is not, none of the initial ones will be long term. So it's really just a question of like what knowledge can you learn in the shortest period of time? - [Tim] Do you, I mean, I feel like you didn't quite have this freedom with Falcon 9, when you were developing Falcon 9. - Actually, sorry, our car is there? No, we did not have this flexibility with Falcon 9. - So you gotta be a lot more rigid and yeah, you gotta nail it a lot more when you were developing Falcon 9 because you were flying cargo pretty much today and getting ready for commercial resupply. Like you had to pretty much be a lot like think if we could. - Technically we did have the Grasshopper program. - [Tim] Right. - You know, sharing ideas to run the Grasshopper program that we learned a lot, amazingly, the reason why Grasshopper did not blow up. So that's, you know, shocking, but we did blow up. - The F9 R? - Yeah. And ironically, that was when I, like, I was like, telling the SpaceX Board, hey, let's have a board meeting in Texas and you could see the rocket go off and land. That's the one time it blows up. - I did not know that. I did not know that. - So, man it is sweaty out here. - Yeah. Let's keep going. We'll take more people. - It sounds good. - Yeah. All right, I'm gonna sign off at this point. - [Tim] Yeah. Any last things you want to say to all the people excited about this program? - Yeah, I mean, basically just, I think it's cool too that people are getting excited about rockets and kind of finding out, how do rockets work and, thinking maybe about life becoming multi-planetary and being a space experience civilization, cause the experience makes our future inspiring, you know, that's, it might be the most inspiring thing. So it certainly is the most inspiring thing for a lot of people. And so I hope this gives people confidence about the future and that humanity will have an exciting future in space and we can make science fiction, not always fiction, but a reality one day. - [Tim] Thanks, I like that. Yep, thanks Elon. Thank you again, Elon for all of the time that you spent, for everything we got to do and for allowing us to share this with the world and thanks again to Cosmic Perspective for helping shoot this video and just all the other stuff that they help with. So find them on Patreon and on YouTube. And I owe the biggest thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make videos like this and everything we do here at Everyday Astronaut possible. Gain access to some exclusive live streams and our awesome discord community and lots of other fun stuff by heading over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut. And while you're online, be sure to check out our awesome web store where you can find shirts like this, the aero spike shirts or new Mars hats, or lots of other fun stuff like our schematics collection and our future martian society shirts. And just lots of other fun stuff for you or any other space nerd. Head on over to everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut bringing space down to earth for everyday people.

https://youtu.be/SA8ZBJWo73E

- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to part two of my tour of SpaceX's Starbase Factory with the ultimate tour guide, Elon Musk. If you haven't watched Part One, you obviously need to watch that because there's just gobs of information. And in this part, we're actually going to go inside the three main assembly tents, which is incredible! And just like last time, we have a map that will occasionally pop up, courtesy of Ring Watchers on Twitter, that'll help you understand where exactly we are in the factory. We also have the YouTube play bar broken up into certain sections. We have links to those sections below, too. And we have an article up on our website that has some key points and takeaways of this conversation. The link and the description is below for that at www.everydayastronaut.com. All right, let's go check out some Raptor engines. So, by the way, I think there's a good chance that ITAR and COMS might not want all this- - Oh, yeah, just... It just can't be any more than people are already getting from- - [Tim] That's true. - Telephoto lenses. - [Tim] That, which is pretty much everything. - And frankly, if some fool wants to copy this design, go for it. (Tim laughs) I mean, Raptor 2 is a giant improvement over this. - [Tim] What's the big simplifications you're hoping to have? - Well, maybe I shouldn't tell you all the secrets. (Tim laughs) We have funny things on the... We've got Pikachu over there. - [Tim] (laughs) I love that. - [Elon] Hello again. - [Tim] Hello again. So that probably, I assume that means it's flown. Is that a flown one? (Elon laughs) - I don't know if this one's been flown. - [Tim] Geez. This really does look like that thing with all the NK33s. Those videos of- - Yeah, yeah, exactly. Engines that came back from the cold. - [Tim] Yes, seriously. It literally looks like that. This is insane. Man, that wrap vent is big. Geez. - Yeah, I won't tell you all the secrets. (Tim laughs) You'll be able to see the difference very clearly. - [Tim] Okay. - And I guess, since the engines are... It's hard to have people not see them. - [Tim] Yeah. - They will... The Raptor 2 is visibly cleaner than Raptor 1. This sort of maze of plumbing and wiring doesn't exist on Raptor 2. - [Tim] Although, it's already slimmed down a ton from like- - Yeah, it used to look like a frickin' Christmas tree. - [Tim] (laughs) Yeah. - You couldn't even see the engine for all the stuff that was around it. - [Tim] No, you really couldn't. And now it's like, especially around the turbines and stuff, and the free burners, I mean, that used to be a whole, there's sensors every two millimeters. - [Elon] Yes. - [Tim] So, Rap-Vac or Raptor-Vac has it's own regen channel on the extension, it looks like. - [Elon] Yeah. That's a steel tube wall, raised steel tube wall. - [Tim] That looks great. And it has a different profile, too, that actually looks like the initial exit. Is there a different throat in it and everything? Or is it? - [Elon] No. Throat's the same. - [Tim] Throat's the same? - It's just the part after the throat. The diverging section has different angles. Basically it's following a rail counter for a higher expansion ratio. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah. What is the expansion ratio again? Is it like 150 or something? - No. Man, I think we were... So this is actually, I think we were around 80-ish. - [Tim] Oh, okay. - But we wanna get to, we wanna do a little bit better. Maybe 90. - [Tim] 'Cause you're already getting like, 380 ISP out of that thing, aren't you? Or I mean, sorry, yeah, 380. - 380's the aspirational number. - [Tim] Okay. - But we should be able, I think we will get like 377 or 378. - [Tim] Okay, okay. And how are those coming along? It looks like obviously you've got a third one here. You've obviously made at least three. - [Elon] Yeah. - [Tim] S-20's gonna have three. - [Elon] Yes. - [Tim] Yes. Geez. - All the engines will have the same pumps and thrust-chamber assembly. It's really just building it one, sort of one variant that has a big nozzle and one variant that doesn't have thrust vector control actuators. - [Tim] Okay, okay. And that's gonna be the difference between the R boost and the? - Yeah. I mean, it's basically the same engine, minus PVC. - [Tim] Gotcha. So, the outer shells that you're working on for the GSE are 12 meters. - There's a Raptor without the stuff; looks practically naked. - [Tim] (laughs) you're like, actually that's secretly version two. It's super simple. No. - [Elon] Version two will look a bit like that actually. - [Tim] Really? - [Elon] It's very tight. - [Tim] Really? - [Elon] Yeah. - [Tim] I mean, again, when you look at some of those Soviet engines, they were also incredibly simple looking. I'm guessing they just obviously didn't have 'em wired to the gills with electronics, though, either. You know? - They didn't. They simply didn't, back in those days, they did not have good electronics. - [Tim] Right. - So there's nothing to- - [Tim] There's nothing to wire up. - Yeah. - [Tim] Yeah. How much, I feel like you iterate this quite a bit and remind people that it's, failure kind of is an option. Why do you think people are so afraid to fail? And why do you embrace it? How do you teach that culture even, that it's okay? When you're not even trying to like... You know, SN-8 is a perfect example. You weren't trying to do a mission. You're just trying to get data out of the thing. - Yeah. We have just a fundamentally different optimization for Starship versus say, like the polar extreme would be Dragon. Dragon, there can be no failures ever. Everything's gotta be tested six ways to Sunday. There has to be tons of margin. There can never be a failure ever for any reason whatsoever. - [Tim] Yeah. - That's extreme conservatism. Then Falcon is a little less conservative. It is possible for us to have, say, a failure of the booster on landing. That's not the end of the world. - [Tim] Right. - And then for Starship, it's like the polar opposite of Dragon: we're iterating rapidly in order to create the first ever fully reusable rocket, orbital rocket. And fully and rapidly reusable. Reusable in a way that is like an aircraft. Rapidly reusable rockets. - [Tim] It's a big deal. - Yeah. That's the fundamental Holy Grail for making life multi-planetary. - [Tim] where do you think the Space Shuttle failed in being, and definitely rapidly would be a word you've got to scratch off the list- - Yeah, definitely not rapid. - [Tim] But where do you think it failed? And where do you think... What lessons have you learned that you know you're not going to be making on Starship? - The Space Shuttle had almost no room for iteration because there were people on board. So you couldn't be blowing up shuttles. So that's a big problem. - [Tim] They did very, very little. - Very little. In fact, a lack of iteration was the problem. Because a lot of the issues they were aware of, but people were too afraid to make change. - [Tim] 'Cause the design froze. - Yeah, 'cause it's like... Yeah. I mean, there was a risk/reward asymmetry. So, big punishment for, if you make a change and something goes wrong, big punishment. If you make a change and it goes right, small reward. - [Tim] Yup, yup. - So, the issues with the O-ring and then with the insulation coming off and hitting the wing, they had seen this before. - [Tim] Yeah, they were known. - They were known issues. Because it had worked before, they're like, well, it worked before. Russian roulette works before. - [Tim] Right. (chuckles) Oh God. - [Elon] Look, I've pulled the trigger so many times. There must be no bullets in this gun. - [Tim] It must be no problem. - [Elon] Yeah. Anyway, it's hard to iterate, though, when people are on every mission. You can't just be blowing stuff up 'cause you're gonna kill people. Starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up. That's really helpful. - [Tim] Do you have any considerations yet on any kind of launch escape? Are you just hoping that by the time you put people on it, you've flown it say 100, 200 times, and you're familiar with all the failure modes, and you've mitigated it to a high degree of confidence. Or what's your? - Yeah. Larger scale, I think is... Yeah, you basically just need to fly a lot and have a lot of redundancy. So if you lose an engine on the booster, it doesn't matter basically. If you lose multiple engines it shouldn't matter. And you should be able to lose an engine on the ship and everything's okay. Launch escape is basically just protecting you for the ascent phase. And actually most launch escape systems only protect you for a small part of the ascent phase. 'Cause the typical launch escape system is a solid rocket motor on the tip of the capsule, which then has to be... - [Tim] It has to be jettisoned. - It has to be jettisoned on every mission. So, if it's not jettisoned, the crew dies. - [Tim] That's a failure mode, right there. - That's a failure mode. So you have a state change post liftoff, which is bad. Then because the damn thing's so heavy, they also can't carry it all the way to orbit. So, they'll typically jettison the escape system shortly after second stage ignition or final stage ignition. So that you don't have escape all the way to orbit even. Now, at least with Dragon, we have escape all the way to orbit. So that's, I think, a safety improvement. There's no escape system coming back to Earth. That's doesn't exist. - [Tim] Right. - And then, you can't have an escape system on the Moon or on Mars. - [Tim] Or on Mars. Yep. - Yeah. You can't have something pop off and then have shoots drop. There's no atmosphere. - [Tim] Right, right, right. - And then Mars has a very low density atmosphere. So, it'll just hit the ground supersonic. Not gonna save you. So, the ship has to be safe enough for people without an escape system, because otherwise you can't go to the Moon, can't go to Mars. - [Tim] Right, right. So you might as well- - Kind of pointless to do it on Earth. Just fly it a lot. - [Tim] Right. And I never really thought about that. You're gonna be flying so much without fear of retribution of failure, that unlike the Shuttle, like you mentioned, I just never really considered that, you know? (tools whirring) - [Elon] Yeah. - [Tim] So, let's see. What? Oh, those are the vacuum mounts, aren't they? - Yeah. - [Tim] Wow, that's cool! - Yeah. I mean, this sort of stuff, it's very much version one. - [Tim] Yep. - It'll be a lot better with the next iteration. - [Tim] Well, a lot of people will ask me, hey, I want to start a YouTube video. Where do I start? And I'll be like, start, you just have to start. And I kind of feel like this is a similar philosophy. It's like, you're not going to know what's wrong or how to make it better until you do it at least once anyway, you know? - Yes. - [Tim] And you just simply have to start, you have to force yourself to start. - Yeah. - [Tim] Then you improve from there. - Exactly. - [Tim] Man. Are you pretty used to the heat? I feel like it's, it's pretty hot out here. - It is hot. I mean, this is the worst. This is like summer, you know? - [Tim] Right. - It's just the worst of it. - [Tim] Yeah. - But it's not that bad. Just pretend you're in Hawaii. - [Tim] Right, there you go. (Elon chuckles) So, speaking of Shuttle. - I mean, I think it's a cool view. - [Tim] Oh, it's a really cool view. And thermal protection, it seems like you guys have made some, I mean, it looks like S-20 is gonna pretty well decked out in the stuff. How are you feeling about the thermal protection system? You feel like that's a pretty good solution? - We'll find out. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] Has it been holding up pretty good, at least on the low altitude stuff? - Yeah. - [Tim] As far as the mounting points and stuff like that. - I mean, it's still there. I mean, you can see the videos. - [Tim] Yeah. - It takes off with the tiles and it lands with the tiles. We have, I think, a good attach mechanism. It seems like a good attach mechanism because it allows... It's just mechanically attached with some play in the tile, so the tile can move a little bit. It's quite a tricky thing with the tiles 'cause the tiles are essentially a ceramic. And they're attached to a metal substructure that is changing in temperature dramatically. It'll be a room temperature right now. Then it'll drop to cryo temperature when it's loaded with cryogenic propellants. Then it will be heated up with hot Alish gas. So, now it'll be way above room temperature. Then it'll cool down. Then the tiles will themselves will get hot on re-entry and they also have some expansion. There's a lot of expanding and contracting going on all over the place. I think one of the big questions is, are these tiles, are we gonna have a crack or a gap in the tiles? Like, if they bang into each other, they're ceramics, like a coffee cup is ceramic. So, if you bang two coffee cups together it's usually bad. - [Tim] It's not good, yeah. - If the tiles bang each other and crack, this could result in a failure on entry. So, I think there's a huge question of like, when we get the ship to orbit, is it able to make it back through Earth's atmosphere? 'Cause it's coming in like a meteor. - [Tim] Right, right. - It's like a blazing hot meteor. Will the heat shield stand up to it? Or if there's any crack in the armor, it's toast. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah. - So, hopefully we at least find out where the crack in the armor is. - [Tim] Right, right. - That would be great. - [Tim] And then if you have to, you can make some thicker or smaller, or iterate to that degree of where you find those failures again. - Yes. - [Tim] How will you know? What if something just goes... What if the first orbital attempt just goes totally, it doesn't even make it in for reentry and it's just a million pieces of the bottom of the ocean? How will you know where it failed? - We have temperature sensors. Probably need some thermal images inside the tanks. So, just like IR cameras. - [Tim] So you can see if a certain section's getting real hot. - Yeah, our cameras on the inside will show you what the backside temperature is. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah, it'll let you know if a leak propagated. - It's only gonna pop if the backside temperature... Frankly, I'm not sure. In fact, I take that back. If you just have a camera-camera- - [Tim] Yeah, you'll know. - Visual, you'll see if something's glowing white-hot, okay, that's bad. (Tim laughs) That's the bad part, right there. So, you don't even need a thermal image, frankly. The steel will glow white-hot before it melts. - [Tim] Right, right, right. (laughs) You'll know. - You'll know. It's not subtle. - [Tim] And the very first orbital test, again, it kinda seems like... There's been a lot of debate of like, is it going to orbit and deorbiting? Or is it just orbital velocity with a low perigee that's inside the atmosphere? And that's how it'll deorbit? - No, it's getting to orbital velocity. But it's not circularizing it's perigee. - [Tim] Yes. - It basically goes three-quarters of the way around the Earth, but because we didn't raise the perigee, the atmospheric drag will put it in. - [Tim] Yup, and the velocity will probably be greater, reentry velocity will be greater that way or similar. - Similar. It's not a huge difference. It could easily, if you just puff the attitude control thrusters or the aldris gas, the aldris gas alone could put it into orbit. So, raising perigee slightly is easy. - [Tim] Yeah. - It's remarkably easy. If you just wanna raise it a little bit. - [Tim] Are you hoping to actually recover the first one? - No. - [Tim] Or try to even land. I mean, is it gonna try to fire its engines? - Our goal with the first one, for the first orbital launch, our goal is to make it to orbit without blowing up. - [Tim] Yeah. - That's our goal. - [Tim] Yep. - And frankly, if the booster even does its job and something goes wrong with the ship, I'll still count that as good progress. - [Tim] Yeah. - Basically, actually, to be totally frank, if it takes off without blowing up- - [Tim] (laughs) Right. - Blowing up the stand, stage zero, which is much harder to replace than the booster, that would be a victory. But please do not blow up on the stand. That's my number-one concern. - [Tim] You keep calling it, you're calling the stand stage zero? - The launch system. - [Tim] Really? The ground, GSE, the tower and all that stuff? - Stage zero, yeah. - [Tim] Okay, yeah. I got so spoiled now with, again, Soviet nomenclature. It's like, there's zero for the boosters. - Really? - [Tim] The core is one. - Okay. - [Tim] And then what I would call the, wait. No, sorry, opposite: the boosters are one, core is two. The next upper stage, or what I would consider stage two is stage three, so it's really confusing. And I kept being like, oh yeah, third, second stage, and they're like, no, no, that's third stage. You know? - Well, stage zero, the launch system, the launch mount, flame diverter, sort of. - [Tim] Yep, sort of. - The big tower. The propellant farm. All the lines and everything, that's stage zero. And it's very hard. - [Tim] Yeah. - It's harder for us to make a stage zero than to make a booster or a ship. - [Tim] Okay. - So I hope. - [Tim] Hopefully it doesn't blow up. - Yes, that would be great. (Tim chuckles) And then, the best-case outcome for the first flight would be that the booster does its job and also is able to relight the engines, and it's gonna splash down in the Gulf. - [Tim] Only 20 miles out or something, right? - Yeah, not far. - [Tim] Relatively. - And then the ship or upper stage is gonna come in just off the coast of Hawaii, near a military base there. And so, we'll splash down in the Pacific. - [Tim] Yup, yup. So, again, to reiterate, on the first launch you won't, the booster, you're gonna just use the gas venting to orient it for re-entry. You will do boost-back burn on the first one too, right? - Let's just say it's an evolving situation. - [Tim] Yeah. - In order to be 20 miles away, we definitely would have to do some kind of boost back, otherwise it's gonna be way further. - [Tim] Yeah. - So, yeah, I mean, probably it's a boost back. Basically you want to stimulate the landing but not, not have it be too close to land, so it doesn't take out stage zero. - [Tim] Right. Yep, yep. - We want to say, basically, can we position the booster precisely such that if it had landed next to the tower, or if it come to a halt next to the tower could the arms have grabbed it? - [Tim] Yes. - Mech-zilla. - [Tim] Mech-zilla? - Mega-zilla. - [Tim] Mega-zilla? - Mecha. - [Tim] Mecha-zilla, okay. Yeah, like a giant mech. - Yeah kinda like mecha-zilla. - [Tim] What's the plan? It just comes and sits then on the grid fins and or that little arrester thing? - No, those little tiny arms. - [Tim] That tiny little T-Rex arm is gonna hold the whole- - Yes, there's two of them. But those things can take a lot of load. - [Tim] And then it's just literally a flat, a flat arm kind of like this that? - I mean, this is one of those things, it's hard to keep a secret when it's right there. People can just take zoomed up photos. Drive past it and take a high-res photo close up. So, it's not exactly gonna be top secret. - [Tim] Right, right. - This is the first real big rocket development that's been so close to a public road, that people are literally driving to the beach right past the launch site. So, it's hard to keep a secret around here. - [Tim] That brings up, I always keep wondering, we're seeing this insane pace, we're seeing all these crazy things happen. How much of that is normal, at least as far as SpaceX goes? Or how much of that is just because we're actually seeing it? Like, for instance, when you were developing Merlin and Falcon 9, were you blowing stuff up this much doing things so crazy fast paced? Or is this also fast-paced, but now we're also seeing it all so it's hard to compare? - Well, I mean, this is definitely a case where we are washing out laundry in public. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah. - There's always dirty laundry in any program. It's really a question of whether it is seen or not. Not is there dirty laundry. - [Tim] Right, right. Yeah. (Elon laughs) - Every program's got dirty laundry. But in this case, it's in public. But this is also a case where we're intentionally iterating the design rapidly. And basically, ships and boosters will either be amazing lawn ornaments- - [Tim] Right. - Which then have to be stored and they look awesome, but you know, we don't want 12 of them. It's gonna look bizarre and where will we put them? - [Tim] Yeah. - So, since we were making a rapid iterations with each... Basically every single ship and booster has had significant iterations. You either either want it to blow up or, the early ones, you want them to blow up, or you're gonna have to find a place to store them. - [Tim] Right. - So we actually want to push the envelope. And frankly, if you don't push the envelope, you cannot achieve the goal of a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. - [Tim] Yeah. - It's not possible. - [Tim] Yeah. - You have to go close to the edge on margins. - [Tim] Right, right. - And there's a recursive factor to mass. So, if you add, say an extra ton of heat shielding, now you also need more propellant to get it to orbit, and you need more propellant to deorbit it, and you need more propellant to land it. And the structure now has more load, 'cause it's carrying that extra ton of heat shield. So, this applies at any given time, there's a recursive value. So, in order to achieve the same payload, you have to... Each ton is basically almost like adding two tons, when it's fully considered. - [Tim] Definitely. - So, I think we've calculated it to be like a 1.8 factor, but I think it's probably we're forgetting something so it's closer to two. - [Tim] Yeah. - So, every one ton of mass begets an extra ton. - [Tim] Yeah, yep. For instance, what's S-20's dry mass? Kind of looking like, where are you at right now? Are you like, 120 tons? Or are you? - I actually don't know the exact mass of 20. We'll know it when we weigh it. - [Tim] Yeah. - There's a lot of parts that have not been weighed. (Elon laughs) - [Tim] Yeah. - So, what is it actually? I mean, I hope it's not too insane. Ideally it's... It's dry mass is hopefully not much more than a 100 tons. - [Tim] Really? - Yes, but then if you say dry, do you mean not counting the air inside it? - [Tim] (chuckles) Right, right. - Which by the way, the air, actually air mass is non-trivial. - [Tim] No, it's not. - (chuckles) 'Cause it's such a giant volume. And then do you mean dry? Do you mean with propellant residuals? And Alvis gas, which is at several atmospheres? - [Tim] Right. - Which mass are you referring to? - [Tim] Which dry mass, right. - Sometimes in these things, they'll play games with the, when you say thruster weight of a rocket engine, so the thruster weight of the rocket engine with or without residuals? That's a big change. - [Tim] Or with or without gimbal is something else that I've heard people debate. - Yeah. - [Tim] Yeah. - Merlin is, I'm pretty sure by any standard, you know, I think it's probably the best thruster weight of any engine. Because it's just so far, we really pushed the GG cycle engine to the... It's like A-plus for GG cycle architecture. But GG cycle architecture is not an A-plus architecture. - [Tim] Architecture, right. - Full flow stage combustion, A-plus architecture. But with the new architecture, we won't get it an A-plus within that. It's like in gymnastics, you know, you'd like to say, how hard is your program? And then what grade do you get in the program? - [Tim] In the program, yeah. - That's kind of how things work here. - [Tim] What would you say version two's gonna come in at? If you were to rate 'em? - I don't know. I'd say it's like, B-plus. - [Tim] Okay. - Something like that. - [Tim] Yeah. So, good enough for now. But of course, reiterate. - Yeah. Raptor 3, Raptor 4, Raptor 5. By Raptor 5, it'll be an A-plus. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah. Should we walk through here and check out what's going on in here? This is just a nose cone being assembled. It's not that it's showing? - [Elon] This is our new and improved nose cone. - [Tim] Oh yeah, it's just straight. There's no cross section. - If you look at that nose cone over there, that's made from stamped sections. You can see that's three rows of stamped sections. This will be made of two rows of stretch formed. - [Tim] Wow. - [Elon] And you can see it's just way smoother. - [Tim] Yeah. - This is stretched over like a big mandrel. So just take a big sheet of steel. And if you just stretch it over this giant tool. - [Tim] Right, right, right. - And then you can have things that are way bigger. Like you can't fit this in a stamping press. This is way too big. That's like basically about as long as you can fit in a stamping press. You cannot fit something this giant. Well, you can technically make some totally special case stamping machine that doesn't exist. But since you only need a single sided, it doesn't have indentations or anything. You couldn't make a car body side this way. But you can make something with this level of symmetry that is, basically you can do a one-sided die. So you can just stretch form it over a big mandrel. - [Tim] And this isn't the cargo. It's not complete yet, but it had that opening on the one side. That's not because you were working on the door. The jaws yet, right? - Yeah, I actually stopped work on the door, the faring door. - [Tim] Okay. - We're gonna focus on getting to orbit. We don't need a door. It's like, we need to be super focused on getting to orbit then super focused on getting the ship back, then we can worry about doors. - [Tim] Okay. - It's just an unnecessary complexity. Is the door necessary to solve the problem? No. Will we use this, the first 10 or more that get back from orbit, we probably won't fly them again. Or maybe once or twice, but they're not gonna be in storage. For Falcon 9, and even the Block 5, So for Block 5, which is more like version 7 really. But we don't even want to use the early Block 5s. Even those were a pain in the ass. And we prefer to retire them. So when we have a mission that requires an expandable booster, we'll put an early Block 5 because the early Block 5s are not as good as the later Block 5s. And they're more of a pain in the ass to get ready for flight. - [Tim] Wow. - Reality is, the early ones are gonna be amazing lawn ornaments. I mean, as good as a lawn ornament gets. But they will not be nearly as good as the ones that follow. So then why keep them flying? - [Tim] They're not gonna be putting any payload up. You don't even need to worry about it yet. - Yeah, so we're just gonna retire the early ones anyway. Why have a door on a thing that's never gonna fly satellites anyway. - [Tim] How is the butt to butt refueling going? 'Cause that's gotta be a pretty early consideration. 'Cause you're probably gonna want to start testing that. - No. - [Tim] No? - No, we're gonna get to orbit and back first. - [Tim] Okay. - We don't need orbital refueling. Unless you're going to the Moon, you need orbital refueling. Going to Mars, you need orbital refueling. Delivering satellites to Earth orbit, you do not need orbital refueling. - [Tim] Right, right. - So just punt that 'til later. - [Tim] Okay. - I'm not sure it'll be the butt to butt. It might be something different. We switched the propellant full drain lines to be side. So, coming from the side. - [Tim] Not up through the booster anymore? - No. It was adding a bunch of stuff to the booster. And then we're flying it every time. If you can move mass to the ground side, it's better to move mass to the ground side. - [Tim] Right, right. - That's why we took the legs off the booster and just have the tower catch it. - [Tim] Are you thinking about doing a tower catch? - Which sounds mad. - [Tim] Yeah, I know! - I know it sounds insane. But when I suggested that, people thought I lost my mind. Which I'm like, maybe I have. But I think it might take a few kicks of the can, but we'll get it right. It's just, the work that you have to do to pick up the booster and put it on the launch stand, this gigantic skyscraper thing, in high wind, windy situations; it's very windy around here. - [Tim] Yeah it is. - So, you're gonna pick up this booster, you're gonna put it onto a stand with precision. Then you've gotta pick a ship up and put it up on top of that. That means you've got to have a secondary arm to steady the booster so it's not moving around all over the place. And then while the sort of mech is armed, pick up the ship and put it on the booster. - [Tim] Okay. The mech-zilla arms are the ones that are gonna be picking up the ship, not the crane? - Okay, so... (Elon chuckles) Very important to appreciate that everything you see here is a work in progress. - [Tim] Right. - And what is said last week may be untrue next week. - [Tim] We've seen that a few times. - Yes, it could be that we're actually just literally mistaken, a miscommunication. Any one of a number of things. We just found a better, had a better idea. In the case of like for the first stacking, we're we're gonna do that with a crane. - [Tim] Yeah. - Yeah. (Tim laughs) Marvin the Martian right there. - [Tim] I love that. - The first one we're gonna stack with a crane. 'Cause otherwise we'd have to wait for all the mechanisms to work. We're assembling the arms and basically putting mech-zilla together. But in the meantime we could be launching. So let's not wait for the tower to be completed. We've got the second-biggest crane on Earth. We don't necessarily want to have the second-biggest crane on Earth just sitting there forever. But it can be there for the first stacking. And then from the first stacking, then we can figure out, you know, just like, do we have the hull downs work? Or the launch mounts, I should say. It's really quite a complicated launch mount. It's got basically 20 mount points. And you've got to line those things up and then put the booster on it and have the, you know, does it fit? Okay, it won't fit, basically. Now we gotta adjust it. That launch ring is 370 tons. - [Tim] Oh my God! - And it's gonna tweak, you move it from one place to another, it tweaks. It doesn't stay exactly the same. So we're gonna have to like jiggle it around a little bit, put in some shims and stuff and fit the booster. So, we wanna do that soon. We should be done with this booster, I don't know, next week. - [Tim] Yep. Wow. - [Elon] So then we want to mount the booster next week. - [Tim] That's gonna be insane to see. - Yeah. We're gonna try to put the ring on the stand, the launch ring on the stand tomorrow. - [Tim] Wow. - But we may not succeed, we'll see. Probably the second flight we'll use, I mean, it's probably like the second flight we'll use the tower. - [Tim] Okay. Second flight, oh, so the first flight might still just use the suborbital pad? - No, it's gonna use the, it has to use the orbital pad. The suborbital pad cannot take the full weight of the stack. It's gonna get crushed and it doesn't have enough height. So the rocket would blast itself in the face. It's too low and too weak. We gotta launch it from the super beefy stand. But we don't want to wait until everything's ready with the tower, just to stack. - [Tim] Okay, so, how will you secure it then when it's stacked? Just drop the Starship on top? - Have the crane hold it. - [Tim] Until it's launch time and then? - We do need the QD arm to work. - [Tim] Oh right. So that can be a stability thing. - Exactly, it holds it, it stabilizes it, and transports propellant. If we don't have that, we can't load a prop on the ship. - [Tim] Right, right, okay. So that has to be complete, but not necessarily the arms and everything else going on at that point. - [Elon] Yeah. - [Tim] Dang. - [Elon] Yeah, exactly. - [Tim] At this point- - I mean, like I said, there's a lot of moving pieces here. So some of this could be ready in time. It's possible that the tower could be ready in time, in which case we'll use the tower. But if the tower's not ready in time, we'll use the crane. - [Tim] Okay. - Yeah. - [Tim] So at this point in development, what things are you being kept up by at night? Like, what's the thing you're like, oh, we just need to do this or this better. Or we really, I can't sleep 'cause I'm not, we haven't figured this out yet. - I'm sorry? - [Tim] Yeah, so, what things are just totally keeping you up at night at this point? What's the thing that you feel like you still have to solve at this point? - I mean, there's a long list. - [Tim] What's at the top of that right now? For you at least personally. - This is really all just measured as, in terms of time, like, what is the time risk associated with something? The one thing you cannot replace is time. And I do have a habit of being optimistic with schedules. I mean, if I wasn't optimistic, I wouldn't be doing the crazy things that I'm doing. - [Tim] Right. - [Elon] So I must have like, I don't know just pathologically optimistic, I suppose. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] Wow, that actually, just look at that. - [Elon] Yeah, it looks like dragon scales. - [Tim] That is incredible. - [Elon] Doesn't that look cool? - [Tim] It's actually coming together a lot cleaner than- - [Elon] It totally looks like dragon scales, I think. - [Tim] It really does. - [Elon] Yeah. - [Tim] And it's so much tidier and cleaner looking than I thought. - [Elon] Yeah. There's a few broken tiles, but overall it looks cool. - [Tim] That's incredible, wow. So, I guess, the joints is one of those things that the community has always wanted to know about. I guess the good thing is the flaps, will for mostly take most of the wind from this area that you see. So, I guess you don't really have to cool the inside of the flap joint itself 'cause it's kind of already- - No, actually, unfortunately we do. I think we have significant... Take a lot of what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I often am wrong. Sometimes I'll say something and it's wrong. (Tim laughs) I think we have a design error with the, with the non-moving portion of the forward flaps. - [Tim] Okay. - Because the reason we have... The flaps and the static arrow, basically the unmoving portion of the flaps are there to do two things: to balance, rebalance the ship so it doesn't come in engines first. Otherwise, the center of mass is quite low. - [Tim] Yeah. - And it will come in engines first and burn up the engines. - [Tim] Yep. - So, first you have to rebalance it so that in a hypersonic stream, you're doing roughly sort of like, a 60 to 70-degree angle of attack. Because you're flying a trajectory that minimizes- - [Tim] Peak heat. - Peak heat. But you don't care about total heat load. You just care about minimizing your peak heat. - [Tim] Because you have a good insulator here. And you're not ablating. - Yes, exactly. So, if you have an ablative heat shield like Dragon. Technically Dragon is fairly reusable actually, 'cause it's sort of like a brake pad. You can fly it many times 'cause it's got so much margin. But PICA literally means phenolic impregnated carbon ablator. - [Tim] Yep. - That's the Dragon heat shield. So, Dragon was like, hey, let's have a, give me high-peak heating, but don't make my total heat load high because what Dragon is trying to optimize for is what is the heat pulse when it's under parachutes? The heat pulse moves through the tile and then reaches the back to where it's bonded to the carbon fiber composite sandwich structure. - [Tim] Yep. - If the heat is too high, it will melt the glue and the heat shield tiles will start falling off. And then they will potentially, you know, damage the parachute. - [Tim] Really? Okay. - You start having these things like- - [Tim] Right, flying off. - Potentially, 'cause they're low density. So they they're pretty... Intermittently it's kind of a corner case. The graying heat shield tiles are way over thick, not because of how much of the heat shield will be ablated, but because of the heat pulse that will reach the back of the heat shield that might melt the glue while it's under parachutes. - [Tim] Wow. Yeah, interesting constraint at the end of it all. - Yeah, so if you just have a lot of heat suddenly, that's actually better for Dragon. High peak, low total heating. - [Tim] Yep, yep, yep. So its reentry profile is totally different, too. - Yeah. - [Tim] It can come in steeper as opposed to this- - It's gonna come in, Dragon wants to come in real steep. The lift over drag ratio is low for Dragon. A lot of people look at it and say it doesn't have any lift but it does. If you have a gumdrop-shaped thing, and you have off-centered center of mass, then you can control it because it has a small lift vector because the gumdrop is tilting into the wind slightly. It's quite low. And actually, L over D is a function of mach number. People always go, well, quote an L over D number. But like, okay, what mach is that? And it's usually some sort of reference mach number. But your L over D is complete trash at mach 20. It's garbage, nothing basically. So it's like, L over D at what mach number? Anyway, it's got a very low L over D. But it does have a lift vector. And then because it is symmetric, or more or less symmetric, with little thrusters you can rotate the capsule as it's coming in and change that lift vector. You have a landing ellipsoid because your accuracy longitudinally is less than your accuracy left to right. So, you're changing lift vector, you say well, how do you change the point where you land? If you can turn left or right but how do you change lift point? You do a series of S turns. So, you S turn and depending upon how much you bank during the S turns, that affects your longitudinal points and then your lateral point is pretty easy to tune because you have a lift vector going left and right. - [Tim] 'Cause it's not so much, people might think, oh, you're going up and down. That really doesn't work in the grand scheme of orbital velocities and everything. It's really about your actual velocity. And where you end up arresting your velocity is where you're gonna drop it to the ground pretty much, more or less. - Yeah, I mean, I think it's just very important for people to appreciate that there's a very gigantic difference between orbit and space. - [Tim] Right. - It is actually relatively easy to get to space. But it is very hard to get to orbit. - [Tim] Right. - And then you say you want to get to orbit and come back. This is easily 100 times harder than getting to space, maybe 1000; so much harder. That hardly anyone's even, you know, only a few countries have been able to do it. - [Tim] Right. - You know, whereas Burt Rutan went to space twice. What was it, like, 12 years ago? I don't know, it was a while. What, 15 years ago? - [Tim] Yeah, 2004, 2005. - Yeah, it was like 15 years ago. He went to the border of space twice, and didn't even scorch the paint. It's really not very hot if you didn't even burn the paint. - [Tim] Right, that's true. - Yeah. - [Tim] That's true. (machine beeping) - Whereas, this needs really intense heat shielding or it's gonna get to, you know, blow up basically. - [Tim] Yeah, yeah. It's crazy to see now, honestly. So, is there some considerations to make the fixed? Can we go out this way or is it? - Yeah, I mean, just don't let anything drop on your head. - [Tim] All right, deal. So there's another barrel section of S-20. - I mean, it looks a little garage shop, to be frank. But it's like weirdly super advanced technology with garage shop. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] Well, it is very unique of you guys to basically build the rockets first and then start building a factory around it. You know? - Yeah. The production system is the actual hard thing. - [Tim] Right. - The rocket design is relatively easy compared to the factory. And these tiles are actually made in Florida at a SpaceX factory we call the Bakery. In Florida, it's next to a Ron Jon's. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] What's the future for Florida with Starship? Are you gonna get it flying 100%, get it all figured out basically? At least get orbital version ready and then start setting up shop in Florida? - Yeah, I think we wanna kind of iron out the major issues here. We'll certainly be launching Starship from the Cape. We might do more at the Cape. But we'll certainly be launching Starship from the Cape. And like I said, we make the heat shield tiles, which is actually quite a big factory to make these heat shield tiles; not a small factory. - [Tim] Next to Ron Jon's? - Well, technically it's next to a Ron Jon's distribution warehouse. Literally, I was like, is that a surf shop? Yeah, well, maybe it's a factory, I don't know, but I just got a Ron Jon's logo. But the factory, the SpaceX heat shield tile factory is quite big. It's not tiny. 'Cause you need to make a lot of these tile. - [Tim] And for the most part, I'm surprised at the taper. It looks like they're all still uniform tiles, which obviously is a huge improvement compared to the Shuttle. Instead of having 24,000 unique tiles. - [Elon] (laughs) Yeah. And you can see we're figuring it out. - [Tim] But I'm surprised, though, even as the area tapers, it's not, I would have thought- - Mara's head of heat shield engineering. It's like, I'm gonna text him like, yo man, what's going on? - [Tim] It doesn't seem like there's a ton of unique. They mostly look uniform, which obviously will help with- - [Elon] Yeah, they're not all uniform. - [Tim] A lot more than the Shuttle. What's your expected, what are you hoping to get for reuse out of these things? - Oh, I mean, no meaningful limit. As many as you want. (machines beeping) - [Tim] There we go. We got right back into camera-ception for you there for a second. Camera inside of camera. (machines beeping) - Yeah. There are different shapes of tiles. You can see some of them at the border there are square instead of hexagons. - [Tim] Yep. - And then, because the static arrow is, it's still seeing actually a lot of heat, basically the plasma is hitting the surface and then it's moving around. It's got to somehow get past it. You've got super heated plasma hitting that thing, then riding up the side of the vehicle, hitting that static arrow. So, you actually have a heat concentration there. And then you've got a hinge that's, you have to protect the hinge. This is if you said like, okay, what's highest probability of failure on reetry? It's probably the hinge of the flaps. So, the rear hinge and the forward hinge of the flaps. 'Cause you have to have a rotating thing, but you can't just make everything out of tiles. So, you have to have a seal. So we have to seal against, against the tiles. So, the tiles are ceramic, like a seal against dinner plates that are super hot. So you can't use rubber. - [Tim] Right. - So it's gotta be a metal seal, and with a torturous path. - [Tim] Have you thought about, back in the day, you talked about transpirational cooling. - Yes, so, that's one of the things you could throw at it is transpiration cool the joint. - [Tim] That would be so cool. I just want to see it bleeding methane, honestly. - It'll definitely help. - [Tim] 'Cause you can kind of purge that joint with a higher-pressure gas. As long as it's higher than the ambient air stream or the plasma stream, it will create a thermal barrier. - It's definitely one of the things, if you really want to nail the heating on the hinge, is bleed fuel gas into the thing. 'Cause actually, even the burning methane is like, with air, because air is only like, 21% oxygen. If you ask me, what are you breathing, they think they're breathing oxygen. You're breathing nitrogen with some oxygen. - [Tim] A little argon. - And some argon and some trace gases. But essentially, methane with air, which is mostly not oxygen, doesn't get that hot. So even if it burns, it's not that big of a deal. - [Tim] Right, right, 'cause it's already detached from the vehicle at that point. - It's not as hot as the plasma that's hitting it. - [Tim] Right. - Yeah. - [Tim] Wow. - All right, well, let's see. I guess the car is? (woman speaks off mic) Okay. (machines beeping) - [Tim] So, each tent's kind of a designated... One's barrel section, one's nose cones, and one's, one's just kind of the thrust pucks and stuff? - Yeah, like I said, it is a constantly evolving thing. We've changed what occurs in each production tent and in the high bay and mid bay, multiple times. But this certainly currently is focused on the nose. - [Tim] You're working on a new high bay, too, right? - Yeah, we're building a higher high bay. - [Tim] Uber high? - It's only a little bit higher than the current one, but it's much wider, and it has two gastric cranes that run full width and depth. - [Tim] Okay. - I mean, it will feel like the lap of luxury compared to our current high bay. - [Tim] Like how about tall, do you know? - Sorry? - [Tim] About how tall? - I dunno, probably, oh, like 100 meters. - [Tim] Okay, and this one's? Like 80 or something. - Yeah. This one's about 80. The booster height's about 70. Although it's kind of funny. Like technically we deleted half a barrel section from the booster, so it's technically 69 point something. (Tim laughs) Like 69 and 1/2. - [Tim] You did that on purpose. - No, it wasn't even me. I was like, the guy's like, hey, just let me know, at 70 meters you have a half barrel, which is a pain in the ass. So, they just deleted it, and I was like, cool, sounds good. I mean, I randomly set the length of 70 meters. It's not like any special about it. - [Tim] Right. - I guess fate loves, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. But these certain numbers just seem to be recurring all the time. - [Tim] Yes. - So the booster is actually 69 point something. And then it's Booster 4 and Ship 20. - [Tim] 20. (laughs) - And this is all happenstance. - [Tim] Right, right. I love that. - What the hell is going on? (Tim laughs) - [Tim] Oh yeah, someone had figured out that, oh, what was it? Oh, I don't even remember but it was something like you were 69,420 days old or minutes old or something when you went on SNL or something. - What? - [Tim] It was some ridiculous. - Are you serious? - [Tim] Yes, it was the weirdest- - You know I was born 69 days after 4/20, by the way. - [Tim] Oh yeah. (laughs) Come on! - Come on. - [Tim] This is ridiculous. - It's ridiculous. - [Tim] That's so funny. - I mean, what the hell? - [Tim] Oh man. This is insane. - It's like, am I an avatar in someone's video game? - [Tim] Yes. - Oh really? - [Tim] Statistically, yeah. - Okay. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] You're probably doing pretty good at the game, though. I bet you're like, the top ranked player. - Okay. Well, that's something. (Tim laughs) - [Tim] Do you have a name for the high-bay bar yet? - [Elon] No, I guess we've bounced around different names. We still haven't really made much use of it because it wasn't really a critical path. So it's kind of just sat there. And the elevator, we need an upgraded elevator 'cause we have this construction elevator. - [Tim] Right. - We don't yet have a name. Nor have we used it. But we're making good progress there installing the grid fin. - [Tim] Yeah, looks like the grid fin's up. And I like how they're now... Let me try and guess why you're gonna put 'em closer together and not at 90-degree intervals. Is it because you can just change your role to change whatever axis you're trying to... If you're trying to pitch the vehicle, you're really only most of the time probably either doing pitch or yaw. You're likely not doing pitch and yaw when it's coming in for reentry. - Well, actually no. We're controlling on three axes all the time. Now, technically you only need three fins to control on three axes. - [Tim] But you can also roll if need to change your yaw and roll 90 degrees, it would be pitch. - Well, the control authority you need is much more in pitch than any of the other axes. Like, the amount of control authority you need for roll is practically nothing. - [Tim] Right. - But for pitch, you've got to basically push the booster down. So, you got to push this monster thing into the wind and it doesn't want to go there. The amount of pitch force you need, that's where you need the most amount of force. So, having the two pairs of fins closer together, like more like an X-wing fighter allows them to contribute more in pitch. - [Tim] Which then allows more glide or more of the air frame hitting the sides of the booster. - You care about how much force do you have relative to how much force do you need in a given axis? So you need a lot of force in the pitch axis, so that's where you want to bias your grip fins. - [Tim] Yep, yep. - You could arguably say they should be biased even closer together than they are currently. - [Tim] Yeah. - But this is a reasonable guess. - [Tim] In between. - Yeah. - [Tim] So, this might end up pitching over more than the Falcon 9. 'Cause the Falcon 9 pitches pretty hard, but it's skinnier and of course has less control authority with the 90 degree thing. So maybe this could pitch even more and arrest more of its velocity by gliding. - It's actually, you've got various things that are better, some things that are better, some things that are worse. You can leave it like an airplane, like an empennage where you've got a rudder, a rudder and an elevator. And if your elevator is far away from your center of mass, then the amount of force you need is less to change the angle. Just think of it like a see-saw. You got a see-saw or a wrench. And if you have a long wrench, it's easier to turn than a short wrench. If you have a shorter booster, a short booster is harder to turn than a longer booster. Depending on where the control surface is relative to your center of mass. The center mass is kind of where the see-saw, like it's seesawing around that center mass and center of pressure. You have two things basically. It's like basically, it sounds more complicated than it is. But basically it's a teeter-totter or a see-saw, where there's a center of pressure and a center of mass. And it's gonna basically just rotate around that. - [Tim] Yep, yep. - So, if you've got a long stage that where the grid fins are far away from your center of mass, then you need less force to turn it. - [Tim] To turn it, yep. - Basically. - [Tim] Gotcha, gotcha. That makes sense. - Yeah, like a really short stubby thing, it would actually be quite hard to move it. - [Tim] To move it. But at least as far as the fineness ratio, this has a lot more potential since it's wider, to actually use atmospheric, to use the atmosphere to slow down before it even has to light its engines. 'Cause you know how like New Glen has those straights on the side. And it looks like they're really planning to almost fly the thing for a little bit at a pretty high angle of attack compared to the relative wind stream, to really let the atmosphere slow down the vehicle as much as possible. You guys have a pretty, compared to Falcon 9, there's a lot less fine ratio. It seems like you get a lot more lift out of the thing. - Realistically, this is gonna come in at something close to terminal velocity. - [Tim] Right, oh yeah. - 'Cause you're trying to get to a precise point. So, it's very difficult to do a fast pitch up maneuver and also get caught by the tower. - [Tim] Right. - If you've got a very big landing area, then you could do that maybe. If you want a precise landing, you can't do a sudden pitch up at the end. And then you've got pretty big moments of inertia here. Big things don't move like small things. - [Tim] Right. - You don't see a super tanker dashing around like a speed boat. - [Tim] Right, right, right. - This is like, in rocket form of a super tanker. It doesn't move fast. It's like (vocalizes). - [Tim] Yeah. - Like way bigger than a whale. - [Tim] Yeah, yes it is. - It's just not gonna move fast. - [Tim] Right. - Although, ironically, liftoff will be weirdly fast. - [Tim] Yeah. - Big rotating things always move slower than small rotating things. - [Tim] Yeah. - You know? - [Tim] Yeah. - Yeah. - [Tim] Should we head to the pad? - Yeah, there's a lot of potential improvements. I mean. Yeah. - Man, oh man, wasn't that an awesome conversation? Now, in part three, we're gonna be taking you down to the launch pad, and you're gonna be able to see Elon just walking around at work. It's super fascinating. Again, thank you, Elon, for spending so much time hanging out with me. I'm glad that you had fun and it looks like maybe we'll be able to do this again. You know I'm game for that. And SpaceX, thank you so much for allowing me to share all this awesome stuff with everyone. But I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make this and everything we do here at Everyday Astronaut possible. If you want to gain access to some exclusive live streams and also our awesome Discord community, where we talk about everything space flight all the time, head on over to www.Patreon.com/EverydayAstronaut. And while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome web store where you'll find shirts like this, the full flow stage combustion cycle shirt, and the hoodie, and the Aerospike shirt, and the rest of the schematics collection, or the future Martian collection. You'll find lots of fun stuff at www.EverydayAstronaut.com/shop. Thanks, everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.

https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to STARBASE Texas. This is where SpaceX is building testing, and even launching their mars bound rocket Star ship. Today, I'm gonna take you inside the gates and show you things that have never been shared outside of SpaceX. First of all, we have the ultimate tour guide, Elon Musk, who answers all of my questions and gives us unbelievable insights to the rockets development. We talked and walked around for over two hours. So I'll be cutting this up into three parts. The first two are at the Star Base factory and the last one is at the launch pad. Each section has a goldmine of valuable information. So make sure you're subscribed. You've got your notifications on and you've got your note pads ready to jot some notes. Now heads up, we talk about some pretty advanced concepts and subject matter that can be pretty intimidating on first listen, but don't worry, I've got you covered with lots of informational videos here on my channel. So perhaps if you are new to Star ship or really all of this stuff, consider watching my complete guide to Star ship, that'll be a really good overview for you for some of the things that we talk about here in this conversation. And I'll also be linking to some of my other videos that will help out with some of the stuff that we talk about as well. Now you might notice, we mention Soviet rocket engines quite a bit in this conversation. Maybe it's because I was wearing my new Soyuz shirt that you can get at everydayastronaunt.com/shop, or perhaps it's because I've been working on a complete history and family tree of Soviet rocket engines for almost two years now. And that video is currently in the works and it will be out when it's done. And one last thing, this video is broken up into sections and we have links in the description for those sections. We also will occasionally be putting up a little map, courtesy of ring Watchers on Twitter that will help you keep your bearings as we're walking around. I think that'll help quite a bit. And we also have an article version of kind of our conversation and some of the key points that we bring up over at everydayastronaut.com. There is a link in the description to that as well. Okay, enough talking, let's go hang out with Elon. - Is it the camera? Probably with the camera, and then somebody else for the camera. - [Tim] It's just camera envy at this point. He saw me with this and he's like listen- - I'll get my camera out. - [Tim] Yeah, you take a video of me. - So I can take a video of this, of you guys taking the video. - Make sure this is going through there. Just shoot the screen the whole time. I don't want anything else. - All right, so this is... Okay, so this is I'm being videoed here. And then the video of the video. This is the video on the video of the video. - Go back there. (laughs) - So I feel like I got here maybe at about the most exciting peak of insanity. - It's definitely a very exciting time, 'cause we are in kind of a final push to complete the launch pad system, stage zero, essentially. So we're saying that the launch system, the tower and the, you know, the chopstick arms to catch the rocket are as complex as either of the stages. - [Tim] Really? - Yeah, absolutely, if not more. We could produce boosters and ships way easier than we could make the launch site. So therefor I'll say it is harder suddenly than any single booster or ship. - I think that's one of the things people don't even realize is the manufacturing out here, that's kind of one of the things that you harp on so much is how, you know, how that's so important and that's in the long scheme, the hardest part of all of this is just manufacturing. - I think, currently a factory is underrated and design is overrated. So people generally think that, like this Eureka moment of like you come up with this idea and that's it, now it's good. But the design like this, literally a thousand percent, maybe 10000% more work that goes into the production system than the thing itself. So say like how much effort we put into say designing Raptor versus deciding the manufacturing system it's 10 to a 100 times more effort to design the manufacturing system than the engine. - [Tim] Even of a Raptor? - Oh yeah, absolutely. Especially with Raptor. Quote basically the amount of effort that goes into the design rounds down to zero. - [Tim] Right, right. - Relative to the amount of the effort that goes into the manufacturing system. And if this was not true, I'd like 1000 Raptors please. Oh, you can't make them? Oh, okay. - [Tim] Right, right. - So this is like just very fundamentally underappreciated. If people have not been in manufacturing, especially manufacturing of something that's relatively new, then they don't understand. And they think the design is the hard part, and they think production is like a copier or something like that. This is completely false. - [Tim] It's definitely not as sexy as the end thing. Like, you know, the end product is very sexy and you know, that's what draws people's attention, but the whole back end of it is what makes it possible. - I can't emphasize enough, I'm trying to correct the misperception that design is the hard part. It is not the hard part. There have been lots of great rocket engines designed. You've spend a lot of time looking at the Russian rocket engine designs. There's some amazing Russian rocket engine designs. They've been doing stage combustion for a long time. And they've done, I don't know, hundreds of different designs, literally. So the hard part is not, can you design a stage combustion engine? This has been done. Now admittedly, ours is a higher pressure than before, and it is a full flow stage combustion, but that's a relatively minor increments relative to what the Russians have already done. What is super hard about Raptor is, how do we make a Raptor where the cost per ton of thrust is under a thousand dollars? Yeah, I mean, we definitely don't wanna cut, the fundamental thing that needs to be fixed is the cost per ton to orbit. So things that address the cost per ton to orbit are good. If humanity will be a multi-planet species, if we get cost per ton to orbit to a point where we can afford to become a space race civilization and a multiplanar species. - [Tim] Right. - So this is, at it's heart, it is a fundamentally an optimization of cost per ton to orbit and then ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. - [Tim] Right. - Well, if you're working on getting the cost of, even when you're starting to think of it as dollars, dollar per ton of thrust, I don't know if anyone's ever considered that as a key metric. That's a new thing that I've never thought about, never considered, well, not even... - [Tim] Raptor is kind of unique. And now you start also thinking about instead of thrust to weight ratio, when you have a fixed diameter and fixed circle area, you're also worried about the nozzle exit to thrust ratio as being a pretty strong consideration too. - Yeah, you basically end up pulling up all the area under the rocket. So for this version, we have 29 engines. There is a lot of beeping. I'm not sure having this many things beep is actually helpful. - [Tim] It's a sensory overload. - It's like everything around you is crying Wolf. - If everything's in danger, nothing is danger - - And you're just got to turn it out. Yeah, exactly. So it's pretty silly, but- - [ Tim] So this is obviously the nose of booster 4. - [Elon] This is basically, that's the inter stage and the fuel tank of booster 4. - What are the little... So obviously that's where the grid fins go, right? And then what's the thing in between them? - that's basically, that's actually the Mount point. There are two. It's debatable whether this is the right design or not. In fact, it's like the whole design is wrong, just a matter of how wrong. But that's one of the load points for picking up the booster. It's just like tiny little, it looks small, but it's actually not that small, like close up it's this thing is just high in the air. Like all your sense of perspective is wrong. And when this lands, it has like basically the density of a beer can. An empty beer can. With like some mass, you know, with the engine is obviously- - [Tim] What is the dry mass, are you under 200 tonnes? - We should be under 200 tonnes. (machines beeping) The mass is a moving target. You often say like, what are propellant residuals when you land? That's a big deal. Like both how much margin on what you have and what are the unusable propellant. Like you can't just go to zero margin, you know? Because you're the things going to like, crater. And it should be under 200 tonnes though. But as a rough rule of thumb, like the engines, including mountain mass are roughly two tonnes. So that's 29 engines at 58 tonnes. Then the sort of the fuel tank itself, and the oxygen tank, it's probably on the order of... Well, it's a little heavy right now. So maybe it's like 80 tonnes or so. Then you've got the inner stage, we've got the grid fins, batteries and a bunch of other things. So that's around 20 tonnes, and then you got propellant residuals, which might be on the order of 20 tonnes too. All of that should come to, I don't know, call it 160 to 200 tonnes depending on the sort of final mass numbers. But like right now everything is too heavy, like avionics too heavy. - [Tim] The avionics even? - Yeah. - [Tim] I thought it was just a little- - I mean, it should be, but the grid fins are electrically powered so we have batteries that are energy optimized instead of power optimized. So like this grid fins only let things work for like two or three minutes. So it's very different from like an electric car, which you wanna have several hours of driving. So it is really, we need power optimized batteries, not energy optimized batteries. This is just a short term thing. So the battery mass can probably drop by maybe a factor of 10. So that's just one example. - [Tim] Should we back up a little bit so there's little- - Yeah, less banging. - And then we're trying to get that crane in here and do work. - [Tim] You got a lot of people on set right now. - Yeah, I mean, that residuals number is a super big deal on the mass though, because the booster is designed to have 3,600 tonnes of propelling, which is an almost 80% liquid oxygen by mass, like 78%- - [Tim] 'Cause you burn at what? Is it 3,71- - 3.5, 3.7. - [Tim] Okay, yeah. - And you wanna bias in favor of oxygen because oxygen is dancer and cheaper. So in terms of improving your payload and you know, reducing cost per ton, oxygen is basically plants make it for free and plankton. So it's basically like electricity cost of separation and distillation. - [Tim] Right. Now, remind me though. Is it like, as far as the ratio goes, fuel OF ratio having a lighter molecule. Do we kind of want that to be spewing out faster or something, 'cause it's less reaction. It can be accelerated quicker or faster. - Yeah, There's a trade off between... Well, I mean, would you tend to get limited by is you don't wanna go too close to stoichiometric 'cause the heats basically melt your engine. So that tends to limit you on trying to go to higher OF, that's the actual thing limiting you. You tend to hit the stoichiometric melting point before you rollover on ISP. - [Tim] Okay, okay. - Generally. - [Tim] That makes sense. - [Tim] And remind me of the grid fins. Do they still fold in? - No. - [Tim] No, is that gonna be permanently that way? - Yeah. I have a rule just implement rigorously is the sort of five step process. First make your requirements less dumb, your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It's particularly dangerous, if a smart person gave you the requirements, because you might not question them enough. - [Tim] Yeah, you might take it as like gospel. Like you have to do this. - Everyone's wrong, no matter who you are, everyone's wrong some of the time. So mega requirements is less dumb, then try very hard to delete the part or process. This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not leading enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards, let's add this part of the process step in case we need it. But you can basically make in case arguments for so many things, and for a rocket that is trying to achieve, try to be the first fully reusable rocket, there's never been a fully reusable rocket people don't understand. Like this is like the holy grail of rocketry, okay? And so you have to run a tight margins because if you don't run tight margins, you're gonna get nothing to orbit. So you've got to delete the part or process step, it's super important. And you can like hedge your bets. So that's why the grid fins for example, do not fold down because that's a whole extra mechanism that we don't need. - [Tim] And they just compensated for by having strong enough engine authority to steer it in the little atmosphere. - Actually our simulation show, we don't really need any extra engine authority. As long as the grid fins, you know, basically follow the flow, they're not really disturbing the flow, it's really here nor there. As long as they don't have a high angle of attack, it doesn't matter. - [Tim] A few degrees or something within a degree or two. - But in any case, it's the thing we could add later. So now these grid fins are humongous. We will go see them. But they're like, I mean, like a dinosaur bear trap. It's like you've build a bear trap or a dinosaur, that's what these things look like. And if you have a whole mechanism for folding them, that's like clearly a part that we don't need. So this is a good design decision that actually I didn't come up with it, and it was like, great. But it followed the principle of like fleet partly lead the process. I was like, great, good idea, let's not fold them. Why are we folding them, anyway? It's so random. Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. 'Cause you can't ask the departments, you have to ask a person, and that person who's putting forward, the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement. Otherwise you could have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with, off the cuff and they're not even have the company anymore. But it came from the, let's say, air loads department. They're like, actually there's no one at our current department that currently agrees with that. This has by the way it happened several times. - [Tim] So again, it could be literally thought of... - this could be, it's every department. - [Tim] It can be thought of as gospel again, but it might be something that's just totally in passing. Or someone played too much Kerbel and had fins at the top of the rocket. And then it just, you know, it did this. - These things are often just way more silly than you think. Anyway, so step one, make your requirements less dumb. Step two, delete the part or process step. If you're not deleting a part or process step, at least 10% of the time, basically if you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough. And then only the third step is simplify or optimize. The third step. The reason it's the third step is 'cause it's very common, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, your question is dumb. You will get a bad grade. You have to ask the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. I'll give you an example for way back in the day of Falcon 1. So in the original sort of like when Tom Mueller and I were like batting around, like, okay, what should this rocket look like? I think I was literally in like Tom's kitchen or something. And we had like the spreadsheet and like, okay, we need to like make minimally viable rockets, like with half a tonne or whatever something like that. And then initially the spreadsheet had, we had an NOT / MMH upper stage, so sort of hypergol, upper stage kind of like a varient of the TRW LMD. - [Tim] Which I think Tom worked on, right? - Well, we trained Tom worked on it, he's not that old. It was like a baby, you know, (laughs). A very advanced baby. But his mentors did work on the LMD. So, you know, lunar module descent engine. Basically a pintel injector- - [Tim] That's right, 'cause that's where the pintel injector comes from. - You can also deep it and everything. Now the problem with that is, how much this NTO/MMH costs. It's super expensive, okay. It's like a rare chemical. So even if you're like, you know, if Edison and Tesla had a baby and that baby was smarter than both of them combined and said, your job is to optimize an NTO/MMH Upper stage, you're screwed, okay? So like nitrogen tetroxide or monomethyl hydrazine are super expensive and they're also toxic. - [Tim] They're super nasty, yeah. It's the handling costs alone are pretty appreciable. - I mean, I do think like saving safety is over-corrected on the NTO/MMH. It went from like, nobody had any protection and breathe the fumes all day to it's cyanide. And neither of those are true, it's not cyanide. You won't die. Bill Gerstenmaier told me like this story of like, when he started at NASA, they actually, I think passed around like a cup of like hydrazine so that everyone knew what hydrazine smell. - [Tim] Nooo.... So like, 'cause it has like a lot more rotten egg smell or something like that. So he literally opened a cup of hydrazine and like, obviously he's still alive. So that's an example of like, don't optimize this thing that shouldn't exist. We should not have NTO/MMH upper stage. Now Dragon does have that, but that's because Dragon's got to do a lot of like nuanced firings of the Draco engines, you know, with very short pulse durations. And trying to have something that's not hypergolic is very difficult and it can be done, like, not hypergolic and not cryogenic. Now you options tend to suck. So, you know, they start going down the peroxide barking up peroxide tree or something like that. Or super esoteric mono props. And that's like the again back to big money. - [Tim] That's step three. - Yeah, so exactly. Thanks to these quite laborious, sorry for the laborious explanation here, and then finally you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time. You're moving too slowly, go faster, but don't go faster until you've worked on the other three things first. If you're digging and you're great, don't dig it faster, stop digging your grave. But you can always make me go faster. And then the final step is automate. And now I have personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. So I have to repeat this. - [Tim] Well on Model 3 Yes, multiple times, but on Model 3. Where literally I automated, accelerated, simplified and then deleted. But like one example I've talked about before, is like the, they were these like fiberglass mats, on top of the bottle three battery pack, they were in between the full pan and the battery. And it was one point Chuck in the battery pack production line and I was like, basically living on the battery factory production line, like probably fixed the line. 'Cause it was like choking the entire Model 3 production program. So the first mistake was we should not have... I like try to fix the automation, like make the robot better, make it like move faster, shorter path, increase the torque, delete the reverse 720 degrees on the bolt. 'Cause that's unnecessary. Just go forward fast on a 20% rate at a 100% rate. And instead of spackeling glue on the entire battery pack, just put little dabs of glue because the fiberglass mask was sandwiched between the battery pack and the floor plan anyway. So all you need is like somebody to hold it in place until put the backpack into the car. So automating was a mistake. Then accelerating was mistake. Then optimizing was a mistake. And finally I said, what the hell are these mats for? And I asked the, the battery safety team, 'cause I was like, what are these mats for? I said are they for fire protection or something? They said, "No, they are for noise and vibration. "So you don't get that." And I said, "But you're the battery department." And I asked a NVA noise vibration analysis team, what's it for, they said fire safety. So literally it was like being in a Goldberg cartoon. It was like actually, I feel like I'm in a Goldberg cartoon quite frequently. So I'm like, you know, are we in like some simulation where I'm like trapped in some like Kafka esq. / Goldberg cartoon situation, but that's what it feels like a lot. So then finally, okay, great. Let's try a car with the fiberglass mats and without, and they put a microphone in both, and see if you could tell the difference. You can not. In fact, I was like, which one is which? So we just deleted them and just bypass this $2 million robot cell as a complete pile of none sense. Another mistake that has to happen in production is too much in-process testing. So when you were first setting up a production line, you don't know where things are breaking. You don't know where things are breaking, so you'll test like working process at various steps and 'cause you wanna isolate where's the mistake occurring? So a very common issue with production lines is to not remove the end process testing after you diagnose where the problems are. So basically if you have like a very high acceptance, like if things are getting to end of line testing and are passing, then you don't need to do in-process testing. But what used to happened is they'll be like an initial development engineering team that will be like basically debugging the production line, but then they will forget to take out the in-process testing steps. So then what happens is the in-process tester will often choke the cycle time. Choke took the line production time. It'll be like the limiter and also have some number of false positives and false negatives. But they'll be like false positive, like then you're like rejecting good parts. So really in volume production, if things are working well, you're really just taking a risk, will this subsystem be rejected in the training production process or at the end. And so you just really wanna move things pretty much, almost always to just test at the end line, and that's it. Maybe there's like one or two in-process steps that are hard to test an end of line, but basically remove almost everything. And there is another thing with battery pack where, this is so crazy. Like one of the things the battery pack has to do is to resist water ingress, so it has to be leak proof. So if you drive through deep water, water doesn't come into the battery pack you're short of battery back. You might have seen some of the videos of like people driving Teslas in like extremely flooded waters, where it's like half underwater. Yeah, like there was literally a guy, I believe in Kazakhstan literally drove a model S through a submerged water tunnel. All the other cars were out and he basically steered the car with the wheels and use the wheel rotation, like a boat and drove out the tunnel. So it's important to have the battery pack resists water ingress. But then instead of us doing a pressure test on the battery pack, we were actually pressurizing the inside of the battery pack which was the wrong direction. And the battery pack lid was glued. But, you know, we basically had resin that was not cured. And so we were just blurting out the resin, which doesn't a dumb sense. 'Cause you should actually be drawing your vacuum on the front of pack and not pressurizing it. And especially not pressurizing it when there's uncured resin is what's holding down the battery pack. So the pack was failing quite often on the pressurization tests, which should have been a vacuum test. - [Tim] Oh, speaking of grid fins. - Yeah, great. - [Tim] Look at that. Man, that thing is huge. - Yeah, that's right so it's like a- - [Tim] Dinosaur bear trap? - Dinosaur bear trap. - [Tim] Oh, wait, that'd just a dinosaur trap wouldn't it? - This is a dinosaur trap. - [Tim] That's insane, honestly. - This thing could catch a T-Rex. (laughs) - [Tim] Oh my gosh, that's crazy. And of course it's got the serrated teeth, which helping the transonic regimes, right? - Yeah. - [Tim] Is there any other reason for the teeth other than that? - No it's just, well, it actually helps in transonic and subsonic, but the effectiveness is better if you've got a pointy , if it's more pointy basically. There is a lot of pointy-ness, Sorry, hey Marvin. So he just gets crushed under a... - [Tim] Wow, so how heavy are these guys? - These are, I like... actually I don't know the number off hand, but probably at least three tonnes, I'm guessing. When I say it's like a moving target, this is not the, like I wouldn't take this to the bank. Like it's not, you know... There's quite a lot of mass we can get out of this. - [Tim] It's just good enough for now. Like that's- - Yeah, it's good enough now. But like, you know, we're basically just needs to be like enough control authority to get this through the atmosphere and positioned well enough so that when the engines light, the engine can correct whatever error is left after that we couldn't take out what the grid fins. - [Tim] Man, that is crazy. Those are huge. It looks like the motor will mount to the lever arm there, is that just... - So this is, yeah... This will react to onto the dome, basically a fuel dome. So there's like kind of like a C channel around the fuel dome at the top. And there's a motor that's gonna rotate this with a gearbox and that's basically the load will agree reacted between the circular feature that you see there. And the sort of, I shouldn't say C channel, sort of a L channel on the dome. So it's just a simple sort of ring on the dome. - [Tim] And then is that so, what I'm seeing there, where there's the rope is actually a through on the end here, is that the lever arm for the thing? Or is that just... - Yeah. - [Tim] ahh I see is slides over, it's like... - Yeah. - [Tim] Okay. - That's where the motor will interact, so yeah. - [Tim] Wow. - But it's just basically, it's using like Model 3 motors basically. - [Tim] Yeah, which is so cool. - Yeah, might as well use it. - [Tim] So you mentioned, you know, really trying to simplify it. There's been talks that they're not... Did you say it on Twitter that you're gonna eliminate the cold gas thrusters or hot gas thrusters on the B4, for the first orbital test? - Yeah, well we can move to like maybe a quieter location. I'm pretty sure we can cut the weight of that in half, like that's, you know, we're not even really trying to optimize the gauge. That's just basically plate. That's just like cut plates welded together. First just got to like making that thing work and then we'll optimize it. - [Tim] Yeah, of course. Which again is some of the Soviet union was so good. It was like minimum viable product basically, get it good enough to fly and test it. And obviously you guys did that with Starship, big time with 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 was like, let's just get it out there, see what works, see what doesn't and iterate, you know? - Yeah, and if you look at like the various reasons, like why we blew up Starship is like, and you looked at the risk list, none of the reasons that blew up are on the risk list. - [Tim] Really? - Yeah, it was like, no, maybe you can argue like, one of them maybe was on somebody's risk list, but it wasn't brought up beforehand, if you can put it that way. I mean, there's a crazy amount of new technology happening here and it's all evolving simultaneously, we need to iron out like the unknowns sort of thing. Yeah, the unknown are the big ones. - [Tim] Is that the new flaps for 20 down there? - Yeah. - [Tim] So remind me the numbering scheme. 'Cause you were talking about version two Raptor, the other day, what we've seen so far, and are those original version two yet, like the green nozzles, those aren't version two yet, right? Have you started making version two? - We've made parts of version two. So we've made the thrust chamber assembly. And we have, I think pretty much finished the design of the pumps, we're gonna make the pumps. So hopefully we'll have either Raptor 2 in about a month we might be testing the first one. - [Tim] Okay, and will that be, you said it you're going to be kind of producing stuff or the prototypes are kind of gonna be always in Hawthorne that eventually gonna be moving mass production to McGregor. - Yeah, we're doing volume production of Raptor and McGregor. We will keep California factory operating basically for development engines and the Raptor vacuum version. - [Tim] So if you're reaching 230 tonne on version two, what's that gonna be at, like 330 bar? - But technically, I think 298, but I think we should come on, we've got like get two more bar out of that thing. - [Tim] Wait, wait, so even only 300, big air quotes on 300, you're getting to 230 already? - Yeah, but then we're opening the throats and reducing the area ratio. The extra thrust is like, there's a slight, I think we lose two or three seconds of ISP, but we gain a lot more in thrust. And the increase in thrust outweighs the slight drop in ISP. - [Tim] Yeah, especially on the first stage. yeah. - I mean basically any thrust to weight below one is worthless. - [Tim] It's worthless, yeah. So if we go from .4 to .5, it's a massive leap compared to even... Yeah, yeah. - [Tim] Okay, so that makes total sense. So the Rap Vac currently what that for thrust? Is it still around that same number about 200 tons? - The Raptor vacuum, or RVac as we put it We will actually be the 230 ton gross number is the thrust at sea level of the sea level version of version two of the... It's essentially it's like helpful to certainly like quibble about like, why are you talking about thrust in tonnes? That's not technically a scientific thing. It's because you can do the math in your head really easily if you have a rocket in tonnes and thrust in tonnes. - [Tim] Right, of course, - That's why, and Newton has got like divide by 10 all the time. Which is like annoying. And then you only get kilograms now you've got to like divide by 10,000 to get tons. Which is ridiculous. Okay, so you're like, this is absurd. Only a fool would use Newtons in my opinion, if you're designing a rocket. And especially big rockets, 'cause you just like have a zillion Newtons. But if you measure things in tons and you measure thrust in tons, now you know thrust weight very easily. - [Tim] Is that like the only Imperial thing you measure then? - No, these are still metric tonnes. - [Tim] Okay, that makes sense. I was getting nervous for a second. - The pressure is in bar, 'cause everybody kinda knows like what's one atmosphere. So but Pascal's another trash unit. I hate Pascals. That's why it's so tiny, it's absurd. - [Tim] We did have a whole segment of units that Elon hates and it's just (laughs). - It's like units that make understanding things more harder instead of easier. But everyone understands like a bar or an atmosphere essentially. And everyone like crew can get their mind around a tonne. Like you have an intuitive sense for a ton. Like your car is like two tons. - [Tim] You have some grasp, you have some context. - Yeah, if you got hit by a tonne, you'd know what that meant. If you got hit by a Pascal, that's like, I dunno a mouse fart. (laughs) That's like one Pascal. There's another important principle, which is that, you really want everyone to be chief engineer. So if everyone is chief engineer means that people need to understand the system at a high level to know when they are making a bad optimization. It's like, like when they are like, because we've done this many times where we've like put immense effort into reducing the engine mass, but hardly any effort into reducing proponent residuals or like order of magnitude, less evidence reducing proponent residuals. And then you land with a literal ton of unused fuel. And actually we still kind of do that with Falcon 9. It has about a tonne of unused fuel upon landing, which is pretty annoying. - [Tim] Oh, that's still not much in the grand scheme of everything. It's still not much, but that is in context. So it still is quite a bit though. - Yeah, but like we spend so much effort getting a ton out of engines, like, you know, that sort of whatever, like 130 kilograms per engine, like that's, yeah So that's like 120 ish. - [Tim] Wow, look, the sunsets out here are pretty hard to beat. That's insane. God, that's amazing. So congrats on the HLS solidify a little more today. - That was cool. The GAO was a staunch defender of good contracting. - Can we head over and check out the mock-up there? Because there's still a lot that we don't know about HLS publicly, at least. I assume that, you know, a decent amout more. - I don't know if I do, but... - Well, first off, I guess the most obvious one that I'm excited is those thrusters. - So the thrusters are a good example of running that algorithm I just mentioned, laboriously mentioned, which is, a question to the requirements, making requirements based on deleted part. When we're looking at, what does the booster actually need to do with stage separation? If you put rotation into the stack like before you turn off the main engines. So they both rotating. They're gonna rotate and just- - [Tim] Wait, sorry. Like pitching and yawing or rolling? - So like you got the integrated stack. We do this with... - [Tim] with Starlink! - with Starlink. So we rotate the stage and- - [Tim] And kind of fling it out. - Yes, but they basically have different amounts of an inertia, essentially rotational maybe to linear inertia. They basically move at different rates. So if you rotate the thing, depending on where you are, you will move at a different speed. And so it automatically separates if you rotate and then separate. So there's no actual separation mechanism for the Starlink satellites and they technically can bump into each other and occasionally do, but if they bump into each other, for like one mile an hour, doesn't matter. So there's bounce off. - [Tim] It's already made it through the pretty harsh environments of launch. - Yeah, it's fine. But like, I'm pretty sure this is like, this might be the only ride, we were like literally tussling 60 satellites off with like a hay, bundle of hay, like dry, you know? Dumping the rods that hold them down. Like a hay bale and just flinging them. And it's fine, then they just separate, split up and go to their position. So we've got to stage step, instead of asking the attitude control thrusters, the reaction control thrusters to do the booster rotation, which has a lot of force. You have the main engines initiate rotation. Now this is quite complex space ballet. 'Cause everything has got to happen in just the right way. But you basically initiate the rotation of the stack, kind of stop the main engines. Then the two will actually separate by themselves. And you need like a little bit, we have like cold gas ACS, or reaction control system. It's like, depending on who you ask, it's a reaction control system, or an attitude control system. So it's basically like small maneuvering thrusters So you fire those on the ship that gives you a little bit of maneuvering. And then on the booster, we actually have quite a lot of ullage gas, like basically you've got a lot of hot gaseous oxygen and hot methane, which actually have, you know, if you've got a big enough area, it's got decent thrust and vacuum. - [Tim] The actual- - The vents. But literally you use to vent to vent the stage. - [Tim] Yeah, so not in a separate bottle, but literally like the ullage of the main tanks. - Yes. - [Tim] Okay. - So just use the ullage as your thrusters and just control the orientation of the venting. So it is not just venting out sideways, but it is venting in a direction that will just work. Which can be sideways sometimes. Anyway, we've got like basically a lot of gas in this thing, which would have to actually just vent to vacuum anyway. 'Cause it's got too much gas. And that's just extra mass that you don't need. So if you've got basically enough control authority because of the kicking the whole stack over before main engine cut off, plus using the ullage gas to vent, you don't need a separate hot gas thruster system. You don't even need a cold gas thruster system. You already have hot gas. Question the requirements, delete the part. - [Tim] But this is only for the booster, right? - Yes. Although arguably, now you mentioned it, it might be wise to do this for the ship too. - [Tim] You'd think that- - At least mostly well- - [Tim] Because the tanks are what, six or eight bar or something? The main tanks? - Yeah, there'll be like six-ish bar. - [Tim] And so one of those would be pretty low pressure, low ISP gas thrusters. If you're only doing the gas from there, or is there some trick you can do to... - In vacuum, like it's this different in atmosphere. Like six bar in vacuum is actually decent. It's like common to have thrusters in space, thrusters that are, let's say eight bar, like the Draco thrusters for that maneuver dragon are operating around chamber pressure of around eight or nine bar. - [Tim] What? - Yeah. Like dragon is still in PSI. So it's like 120, 130 PSI. Technically it's a pressure pulse, but you know, so 120 PSI is like roughly eight bar ish, maybe eight and a half bar. So it's not that far from the tank pressure. - [Tim] Right. So you don't even need to store the gas in an even higher, like in a bottle that's like 200 bar or something. You don't even need to do that to operate RCS. - No, if you've got a hot gas, first of all it's like, we really want the ullage gas to be as hot as possible up to the point where it is impacting the strength of a hull. Like we don't wanna soften the metal so much that it pops basically. So the hotter the gas is the higher the ISP. So having hot gas is good and it's already there and you already have the pressure vessel and you're gonna choke it away anyway. So obviously you just use for attitude to control. So like, obviously... Initially you can't do this with the ship because everything's cryo, but once the ship is mostly empty and you drive to orbit, it also is in the same situation with a lot of hot gas. So actually we should really be the vast majority of our maneuverings should be with the hot gas that's in the ship. Thanks, now we are gonna fix that. - [Tim] So the thrusters on HLS that are gonna be around the ring, the renders showed like 24 or something of like- - Those are different. That's for landing on the moon. - [Tim] Okay, yeah, yeah. Are those pressure fed? Like, what are those? Do you have a name for them yet or anything? - Let's just say like, this is the tentative design right now. But with the agreement with NASA, I think we may see that design evolve and it may be better actually. Like a big question here is like, can you land on the moon with the main engines or do you need a separate thruster system that's way up there. Like basically, if you land with the main engine, you're gonna dig a big ditch in the moon and then fall over. 'Cause you landed in a ditch that you dug. It's like literally dig your own grave. That would be obviously bad. So we don't wanna dig our own grave and then fall in it. But more analysis is like, I think we could probably land with the main engine and not dig a grave and die it, but we would have to prove that, you know, get something that's like, I don't know, the consistency of like lunar regolith and like something that's like a good- - [Tim] A good analog. - Analog of that, and then like land the ship in that and see how big is the hole that we're digging. If you've got low pressure engines that have high up naturally, you're not gonna dig a hole basically. So that's kind of like the sure thing. But I think if we can prove that the main engines do not dig a giant hole, then we can land with the main engines and then not have- - [Tim] Any of those, the ring. What about the, are you gonna have any sea level Raptors on the lunar variant or we only have vacuum optimized? - [Tim] Because I assume like on a normal star ship, even at stage separation, you'll probably light all six at first, just to minimize gravity loss or something, right? So you'll still fire all six then probably shut down the sea levels and let the back of them optimize, you know, like they probably do what like, half the second stage burn time or something with sea level or if you? - Well, so the vacuum engines don't gimbal. So you'd have to have some things to provide the control authority. I mean, technically you could say like, well, if you're in a low disturbance situation, like the moon has no atmosphere. Man, this is beeping city. - [Tim] You wanna move on? - Yeah. If you're not facing like a lot of atmospheric disturbances, then you need much less control authority and you could probably land with three just by differential throttling and three engines. But if you lost any of the engines, you'd be toast. So probably make sense to, I don't know, probably keep the same config, you know? - Or like you can even just have one in the middle that would offer, you know, a decent amount of gimbal authority and all that. - It's based on how much optimization we're aiming for here. - [Tim] 'Cause you're only going to make one of these things, right? Or are you planning on like, is NASA wanting multiple or, oh, my word. So by the way, I think there's a good chance that ITAR and comms might not want all of this. Wait until you see part two is unbelievable. And I promise I'm going to get it to as soon as I can. Thank you Elon, for spending so much time with me and allowing me to ask all of the questions I had. It was amazing. And thanks to the teams at SpaceX for allowing me to share this all with you. And thanks to Cosmic Perspective for helping shoot this and just kind of helping out all the time. Find them on YouTube and on Patreon as well. And I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make this and everything else we do here at Everyday Astronaut possible. If you want access to our discord channel, where we're probably going to be talking about this conversation a lot or live streams or lots of other fun stuff, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut. And while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome web store. You can find shirts like this, the R7 / semyorka / the predecessor to Soyuz new shirt that we have that is awesome. As well as our new Mars hats. We can also find some classics like the full flow stage combustion cycle shirt and hoodie and the future martian shirts and schematics collection and lots of other fun stuff. So head on over to everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody, that's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to earth, for everyday people. (upbeat music)

https://youtu.be/RcnVTgrgThE

[Music] [Applause] ladies and gentlemen hello it is an absolute pleasure to be with you in person this afternoon and hello to all those watching online two thank you very much for joining us my name is justin springham i'm the publisher of mobile world live and i will be your moderator for this very special keynote session this is the big one right the keynote we've all been waiting for at mwc 21. this year seems particularly appropriate to welcome elon musk to mwc after defying all conventions in the banking industry the auto industry and the aerospace industry markets many felt were impossible to transform elon musk now plans to do the same with the connectivity industry spacex is leveraging its experience in building rockets and spacecraft aiming to launch the world's most advanced broadband internet system please welcome mr elon musk elon it is great to see you a very warm welcome from mwc um i would also like to start elon by wishing you on behalf of everyone here at mwc a very happy and somewhat belated 50th birthday happy birthday for yesterday elon [Applause] elon we're going to talk obviously about spacex the wider goals for spacex um before we do that i would love to focus on starlink now this is a plan to provide the world with broadband coverage via satellites you've actually compared the project to rebuilding the internet in space you're an engineer at heart elon what has driven you to take on this new challenge well uh there's a need for connectivity in places that don't have it right now or or where it is connectivity is very limited or very expensive um but uh if any possible like i said that's simply not available so uh you can think of starlink as filling in the gaps between 5g uh and fiber and um and really getting to the parts of the world that are the the hardest reach the the most difficult to reach uh three percent possibly five percent um and i think it really quite nicely complements uh fiber and uh and 5g nice complementary technologies you're saying and we'll dive a bit deeper into that um elon first of all give us a bit of a kind of high level overview as to how far progressed starlink actually is what have you done so far so uh we've launched and now have active over 1500 satellites um let's see the i mean there are a few interesting stats the the combined power of all the satellites is over five megawatts so there um there's over five megawatts of solar from all the satellites combined uh it's um they're capable of outputting about 30 terabytes per second of data and um and it's starting in uh actually next month um almost almost next month i should say starting in august uh we should have uh global connectivity uh for everywhere except the polls um i know as i said it's it's it's really meant for sparsely populated uh regions um so the uh because our our spot size taking talking in terms of cellular is uh quite big so we're well suited to low to medium density areas but but not too high density areas in the high density areas we will be able to serve a limited number of customers um and um but it is operational um we recently passed the strategically notable number of 69 420 active uh users um and we're i think on our way to having a few hundred thousand uh users uh possibly uh over 500 000 users um within uh 12 months so [Music] it's growing rapidly um and we're continuing to innovate the user terminal and the uh the satellite and the uh the ground stations and sort of gateways and points of presence um i think we're operational now in about 12 countries and more being added every month so it's like it's it's a nice compliment uh to fiverr and to 5g um and uh it's also uh although we can't talk about about those deals uh today because our partners are ready to announce them i think it can be quite useful to a lot of telcos for uh data backhoe uh so just you know if people have cellular stations in remote regions uh just uh using starlink for data backhaul to their network can be a very cost effective way of doing data backhoe and then notably for solving relative to say other satellite communication systems uh we are at around 500 kilometers uh whereas the the synchronous satellites are around 36 000 kilometers so latency for a sonic system is uh similar to latency for ground-based uh fiber and 5g so we're expecting to get latency down under 20 milliseconds so you can still do it it feels very fast like there's no lag and you can you can play for example competitive video games on a starting system this is a a very tough market elon i mean if we look back over the last couple of decades it has been littered with failure we go as far back as the 1990s there are big names um that no longer are with us they've tried to make satellite broadband as success you've also now got strong competition um the likes of uh of amazon and oneweb are also now attempting to launch new satellite broadband projects um what is it that that makes starling different to what's gone on in decades beforehand elon but also with your new competition as well what is it that makes you different yes um well when i gave a talk a few years ago about starlink i was asked what what's my goal for starlink and i said well our goal is not to go bankrupt because every as you point out um every other low-earth orbit communications constellation um erdogan has gone bankrupt uh now some of them have emerged from bankruptcy um but with the let's just say the original owners uh did not benefit from from those constellations um yeah they've either gone bankrupt after most of them went bankrupt before even uh deploying their constellation fully and and and even the ones that did this deploy their constellation they they saw it bankrupt you know um they did subsequently emerge from bankruptcy but you know um and obviously companies like iridium and opcom are are doing reasonably well today but not for the original uh owners um so step number one for starting is don't go bankrupt that is uh and you know and then we if we succeed in not going bankrupt then that'll be great and we can move on from there um but i do think from a technology standpoint uh starlink is uh quite different from prior leo constellations in that the technology that we're deploying is is very advanced uh what happens often with space-based technology somewhat ironically is that it tends to be older technology that exists on the ground uh so companies generally have been very conservative so they've said well we wanna we want technology that's proven to work on the ground and then we have to test it very you know for four years to make sure it's gonna work in the vacuum of space with you know a higher radiation load and that kind of thing and uh and so the technology that's generally been launched into orbit has been uh older technology and we took the opposite approach and said we're going to make technology that is uh in some ways at least more advanced than what is on the ground and we're just gonna take a chance and and uh so we have uh what's probably fair to say are the most sophisticated but the most advanced uh phase rate uh technologies that uh best of knowledge no one has not even it's not not even at that sort of military level uh it has this level of sophistication with phase-grade technology and that's that's sort of quite important for a fast-moving rear constellation because the the terminal which is user terminal that's also phase array uh and the terminal on these uh the tool and the satellite the antenna on the satellite they're both phased array so you can switch uh from one satellite that's moving rapidly overhead to another one and do so at the microsecond level so there's no you can't tell as as the system is switching over from one satellite to another there's no change in latency or data from one satellite to another um and a single satellite uh can illuminate many different uh user cell spots on the ground so and it's and it's a digital phase array system so uh we can continue to program import and reprogram the system uh to greater efficiency because it is digital so like since the best technology is the most uh advanced phase rate system in the world um so that's pretty cool um [Music] we also um have a advantage of a of a launch system that is capable of very high launch rate and capable of putting a lot of mass towards i believe um last year spacex delivered about two-thirds of all payload to orbit and this year we may deliver closer to eighty percent of all payloads orbit of earth just with that position you know so and off the remaining of course the remains he's seen for this year if we actually put close to 80 percent or payload forward but uh i've been remaining let's say roughly 20 percent about 12 percent would be china or their about and then eight percent is everyone else so the shared share uh master urban capability of the falcon 9 rocket is uh because it is reusable booster and the the fairing is reusable so we only have to make the upper stage uh is um that has never existed before um and the and the cost of mass orbit also is the lowest it has ever been so because of reusability so this is uh the two worlds work together quite well um but it has been quite an adventure learning how how to make these advanced satellites and learning how to make so many of them and the user terminals of the gateway and the satellites for example use a spacex developed uh krypton hole effect thruster um or which basically shoots out high speed ions of krypton it's kind of cool superman watch out for our satellites don't go close to them [Music] um and um just in general it's quite a clever satellite and then we're getting close to launching satellite 1.5 which has laser intersatellite links um and that will be used for especially for uh continuous connectivity over the uh arctic and antarctic regions uh or basically the for the high polar regions high the higher latitude regions um and then next year we'll start launching a version two of our satellite which which will be significantly more capable um and then you know all satellites from 1.5 onwards will have major satellite links and then we'll start getting our gateways and our points presence to really directly to the the major server centers so the data really goes directly from the user terminal right from user terminal directly to the server center so if somebody's using uh youtube or netflix or uh or a you know google search or xbox whatever the case may be uh amazon web services the the the the data flows in the shortest path possible thus minimizing latency in general so even if even if big chunks of the internet uh go down then you still have connectivity um so i'm pretty excited about the future it's looking you know we're confidence but it's looking quite positive uh and like i said uh just it serves as a as a great natural complement to um uh major talco fiber and 5g talk us through if you can elon the the finances of this huge project how much you investing in starting how much you prepared to invest in starlink well um i think especially depends on how you count investment uh it is sort of what's the total i mean one way to account investment is like what's the total amount of money invested before selling becomes positive cash flow um and um and do you how much of that do you include falcon 9 and everything we've done there um you know i think probably before we go to you know fully positive cash flow it might be it'll be at least five billion dollars uh and maybe as much as 10. um so it's quite a lot and um yeah and then if you say like well how much do we invest even after it goes positive cash flow i think what because you keep investing a great deal at that point in order to not be made um irrelevant by continued improvements in uh cellular and continued extensions of cellular or or or low-cost geosynchronous satellites uh which you know geosynchronized often can conserve a a very large swath of territory but but the total bandwidth they conserve is is not that great and the latency is high but still we we need to be able to offer our service at a you know a comparable or ideally lower rate than gto satellite connectivity um so anyway so it's basically total investment probably it's like at least five maybe 10 billion dollars and then um over time it's going to be made it's a multiple of that i don't know it could be 20 or 30 billion over time there's a lot basically yeah it is a lot of money um and to recruit that investment obviously you need customers and subscribers elon just in terms of the basics to get myself set up with a starlink dish and that's going to cost me what about 500 approximately to get started and then how much would the monthly subscriptions be yeah um so right now we're basically it's like five hundred dollars to uh order edition and basically it's about the same it's the same price everywhere in the world the only thing that changes from one country the next is are our taxes and import duties so it's the same price everywhere in the world um we're taking into account account sort of exchange rates and import duties and transport and stuff like that so um and then it's a hundred dollars a month um and um i mean to teletrack we are losing money on that terminal right now uh that terminal costs us more than more than a thousand dollars um so we obviously are subsidizing the cost of the terminal uh now we are working on um sort of uh next generation terminals that uh are you know provide the same level of capability roughly same level capability but it costs a lot less so that's one area of development for us um because obviously selling terminals for half price is not super compelling at scale um you know doing millions of that you know it's that's tricky um and uh and over time we would like to reduce the terminal cost from 500 to i don't know 300 or 250 or something like that um we do make it very easy to install so because we we knew that uh our customers would be all over the world in you know often in very remote regions uh and regions where some people have like installed their stalling terminal on a cabin high up in a mountain that doesn't even have electricity or just got it's got like a you know solar panels or something it's like not even connected to the grid so so it's like okay we have like a mountain climber or something to go install that if it needed a professional dollar so we designed our system to not need a professional installer uh you can literally take it out of the box uh and uh within less than five minutes uh have connectivity so the instructions are just two instructions um which is a point the terminal uh at the sky and plug it in uh and you can do that in either order it doesn't matter you can plug it in and then point it at the sky or point this guy and plug it in it's like pretty easy so anyone can basically make it work and um and does not need a professional installer elon you've got the mobile industry watching you today i'm sure when they came into the room or they started watching this uh wondering what impact starlink was going to have on on their business they probably wondered whether you were friend or foe you started off by talking about how you can be complementary to 5g and and fiber as well wondering if you see any potential for partnerships with mobile operators is this something you can work together on yeah in fact um so we have uh two two quite significant partnerships that um with a major country telcos um that uh i'd like to be able to announce now but but we obviously would defer to our partners to make any announcement um and we are in discussions with a number of other telcos uh also to provide uh styling access um and this is like so this is this is helpful for for backhaul it's also helpful because a number of countries have requirements that in order to receive a 5g license that you have to provide um rural coverage um and and a lot of cases the rural coverage just it does not mean it's very difficult to make the economic case for rural coverage uh so effectively the the urban customers end up subsidizing the rural customers sometimes to a very very significant degree and so in some cases just like well can you just take care of the um kind of the rural customers that are acquired by our 5g license um and and then we're like sure we'll we'll do that and it's it's the most like i said it's usually the most difficult to serve three to five percent of the customer base uh so um so those are the two sort of deals that we're doing is are are you know where a 5g licensee has a rural uh survey requirements uh except set by the government and uh and in some cases where they they do have 5g um cell towers but they the the difficulty is achieving backhaul well elon we will keep a very close eye on the uh identity of those two operators um let's take the conversation a little bit wider elon obviously spacex is relatively new to the satellite space but you are not new to operating in space i think spacex is is now more than 20 years old um you've been very open on your plans to return humankind to the moon um but you're not satisfied with that we will know that you want to go one step further uh landing landing humans on mars um i'm wondering how does starlink fit in with these overall ambitions with spacex yeah so spacex was really started with the goal of um trying to make life multi-planetary or making as much progress as possible towards making life multi-planetary um the uh you know in order to make life multi-planetary and become a spacefaring civilization uh in the true sense of the word uh the rock technology must be improved dramatically uh in particular there the holy grail for rocketry is a rapidly reusable reliable rockets rrr like a pirate so with with falcon 9 we've achieved think the most efficient reusability of any rocket to date um we've got uh boosters now that have flown uh 10 times and and some that will uh that are slated to fly 20 or 50 times so this is a lot of reuse that we're getting um we're also now getting quite good at catching the nose cone or fairing and so um when you look at the cost of the rocket you've got about uh about 60 of the cost uh depending how you counted about 60 of the cost in the first stage about 10 percent in the fairing so that means we're recovering about seventy percent of the cost of the rocket and then you've got about 27 of the class in the upper stage which is lost every time about 10 percent of the cost in the launch itself and the recovery and refurbishment process so this is really this is really a very good number for a rocket um but we still need to uh take us to another level with and that's why we have the starship development which is much bigger up if it's biggest rocket ever developed it will have more than twice the thrust of the saturn v moon rocket and is designed for full and rapid reusability so this is with a with a hundred ton uh to orbit capability possibly with with further refinements 150 times to orbit um and uh with the ability to launch with no zero expected reverb publishment between flights but like so like an airplane um moreover it uses a lower cost of propellant uh so it's a three and a half to one mass ratio of uh oxygen to fuel and the fuel is uh liquid methane which is the lowest cost fuel in the world and the pressure uh is uh autogenous uh oxygen and methane gas uh instead of helium with uh falcon 9. uh so bug lamp uses helium uh it's used as a rocket propellant jet fuel essentially which is actually quite expensive and helium for pressure which is quite expensive and so the the the cost of propellant for sasha even though is much bigger will be really comparable to the cost of falcon 9 but it will have full and rapid reusability so the crazy thing is that if things go as according to plan we'll have a rocket with a 100 ton to old capability that uh has a marginal cost for launch of around two million dollars which is less than a little falcon one rocket that we started out with and then was it with the rocket like with stalling or was starship i should say um uh when you add in orbital refilling um years which really means that uh two starships need to dock on orbit uh one at one for uh transferring propellant to the other sort of like like aircraft uh aerial refueling but there's orbital refilling uh primarily of oxygen then you can deliver over a hundred tons to the surface of the moon or mars possibly 200 tons so um starship is is uh the first system that will be capable of building a a base on the moon and a city on mars and when will we see starship elon you can see it's a progress online right now it's just quite followed quite rigorously on the internet um in fact often if i want to see what the latest thing is i just go on the internet because it's being developed in south texas on right next to a public road so never remembers the public have a telephoto lenses pointed at our vehicle um so we're hoping to do our first uh orbital launch attempt in the next um next few months um and we'll certainly have a booster and a ship an orbital cable booster and an oval cable ship and the uh overall launch site will all be ready within the next month or so i also understand that there may be a rocket launch later today in just a few hours yes this is a another falcon 9 launch uh this is one of our transporter missions where we do a whole bunch of small satellites from uh mostly from uh third parties so it's um but this is like this is sort of like the cone of like uh like a bus uh you know just many many small satellites from many different parts of the world that are not ours uh are being launched into orbit hopefully uh successfully understand elon we only have a couple of minutes left um just as a kind of closing thoughts and and reflections elon i mean all this week at mwc um it's obviously been great to come back to events in person we've been talking a lot about leadership this week um and as a leader you seem to be mission driven and i'm wondering what kind of criteria you look for when when you take on new challenges because you do you seem to go for challenges and not just necessarily opportunities um you know what what what kind of gets you really excited well yeah yeah i suppose so the what spacex's trying to do is to uh extend consciousness the scope and scale of consciousness beyond earth um and um and then what tesla is trying to do is to sort of ensure that life is good on earth uh you know with sustainable energy um and um your link is sort of oriented towards um long-term ai human symbiosis so i mean generally these companies are oriented towards like what uh what actions can i think of to do to maximize the probability of the future is good um and and that that future includes the expansion of the scope and scale of consciousness um and this is based on my fundamental philosophy of you know we don't really know what all the answers are or even what questions to ask but if we're able to expand the scope of scale consciousness then we are better able to know what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe with that elon sadly we are out of time it has been an absolute pleasure to talk with you today uh we've been delighted to host you at mwc thank you so much for your time i'd also like to say obviously we've been talking to you virtually the invitation is there if you would ever like to come to mwc in person perhaps february 22 we would love to host you again thank you so much for your time best of luck with the starlink project and obviously the wider spacex program ladies and gentlemen please give the biggest hand to mr elon [Music] musk thank you very much thank you thank you [Applause] elon [Music] you

https://youtu.be/Zwx_7XAJ3p0

thank you welcome everybody to the b word I am Steve Lee the lead of square crypto and I'm here today to moderate a discussion about Bitcoin that will span from what makes it special to the um its relationship with energy it the community ethos in the future of Bitcoin I'm joined by three special guests the first is Kathy Wood founder CEO and CIO of Arc invest next is Elon Musk techno king of Tesla and chief engineer of SpaceX and finally uh Jack Dorsey CEO of square and CEO of Twitter so we have a lot to talk about today so let's get to vtalk and get right to it I'm going to start off by asking each of you a question uh which is what um what's shaped and influenced your views on bitcoin and let's start with Kathy okay Steve thank you uh well the first thing was uh our focus on disruptive innovation uh so starting in 2011 Brett Winton our director of research who I know will be on the program later um he started talking about this thing called crypto well Bitcoin at the time and it was a curiosity as we were doing our brainstorms in in research but as we learn more about this open source ecosystem uh that might fulfill the role of the the payment system that the internet neglected to build into the system not expecting Commerce we thought this might be something and then I became even more interested when I realized uh that there that that my economics would come into play as well here and uh art Laffer um my mentor from from USC and a monetary scholar uh in 2014 I asked him if he would collaborate on a paper on on bitcoin uh and he he was a bit of a naysayer at first and uh but agreed to read the paper he read the paper tore it up uh and and and from an economics point of view really wanted to understand this and he said you know I think you got something here this is a rules-based monetary system I've been waiting for this for my entire career so the combination of disruptive innovation generally economics on top of that and the huge misunderstanding out there as to what this is uh that was that was intriguing and and launched our research effort thank you Elon uh what's influenced your views on bitcoin well I've I've thought about money for quite a while obviously since the PayPal days um the uh and then like the companies that preceded at x.com which I created and confinity which uh Peter Thiel next election uh Luke Howard and others created um we combined the companies and made PayPal PayPal so I've been thinking about only for a long time um and really it's it's best to think of money as an information system uh primarily an information system for a labor allocation um and uh for practical purposes it exists in a series of heterogeneous databases they're like very different databases in uh Bank mainframes around the world uh it moves quite slowly in reality it may seems to move fast sometimes and it does with PayPal which is real time but of the vast majority of the systems out there are batch processing so the actual reconciliation may take one to five uh business days uh sometimes longer um and the you have the ACH system which is ancient and still still in operation which is allows transfers uh effectively like a check would be an ACH transfer but it's it's not secure and you've got the credit card systems which also uh not secure or be like handing your username and password to a stranger in a restaurant if you buy a meal so um there's definitely an opportunity for uh something that is uh that is better from an information Theory standpoint so um and and and there you can think about like data data on a network I think is the way to view it um what has the the most throughput what has uh the least error that lost what what crops the Furious packets uh fraud for example being a source of error um and uh a government interference in currencies being a source of error um but it's fundamentally an information system so um I think it makes sense to support something that uh improves the uh the the quality of information with which we conduct the economy um and you know Bitcoin is a candidate for that uh it is it is I think some things well um and it's obviously it's evolving and there are additional things like lightning being done on top of Bitcoin um but Bitcoin per se is mostly solving for uh scarcity um or rather solving for uh essentially um having no throat to choke decentralized uh so there's no one who can be uh coerced in any way uh to uh empty that Bitcoin account well I guess that could technically Buy on an individual basis but the system is a whole cannot um and um and it has an open Ledger uh which is also quite quite good um but transaction volume is is low uh a transaction transaction cost is high uh and usability for the average person is is not is not yet very good but has a lot of potential and I should say that like I I'm not and I apologize for taking a long time but there's there certainly is a lot to say um in general I'm a supporter of uh Bitcoin um and uh the idea of corporate currency in general um uh but as I've said publicly we're doing these people to watch out for uh crypto taking uh especially Bitcoin using proof of work to maybe use energy that's maybe a bit too much uh and and not necessarily uh good for the environment so um but on balance I support Bitcoin and I I and I'm not an investor I'm the only publicly traded stock I own is Tesla um and the only significant thing I went outside of Tesla is is my SpaceX stock that that um yeah it helped create both companies so um but apart from that uh I do on bitcoin uh and Tesla's own Bitcoin SpaceX own Bitcoin um and I do personally uh I want to go to ethereum and Dogecoin of course so okay okay thank you and we'll get into some of those issues in in more depth as well um Jack how about you what shaped your views of Bitcoin um the the network and the community I you know it's uh it's deeply principled it's weird as hell it's always evolving and it just reminded me of the internet when I was a kid and you know I encountered old Cypher punks when I was fairly young and this was a topic discussion for years I didn't touch it until 2008 when we started Square um you know we'd Elon and teams at X and PayPal inspired a lot of what we were trying to do trying to bring in more to a physical world but we encountered this crazy predatory system um that was slow that was obtuse and I think you know one of the things that we tried to do which X and PayPal also tried to do is build an abstraction layer around this complication and around this predatory nature that the financial industry can tend to be and make it work for people but when I saw Bitcoin in 2009 you see a chance to replace the whole foundation and everything that Elon was talking about in terms of ACH and the credit card Networks we're built with very different agendas and a very different time frame and it's crazy that they still exist and yeah they have scaled but they they just are not relevant to today and they're certainly not relevant to the Future especially when you consider the entire world and countries like Nigeria or Ghana or India and its inner connection with countries like the United States and Canada and all over Europe so what what really drove my thinking and drives my passion around it is like if the internet gets a chance to get a native currency um what will that be and and to me it's Bitcoin because of those principles because of that creation story because of its resilience uh because of the number of tests it's been but what what inspires me the most is just Community driving it it's it just reminds me of the early Internet it's it's the only reason that I have a career because I learned so much from people like who are building Bitcoin today and I continue to learn uh in that sense and I'm so grateful for so that's a good segue into the next question I'd like to ask you jack is you you said before the Bitcoin changes everything can you speak more to that well I just I I just think that um you know our a lot of what we experience in life um when you really get down to the to the foundation a lot of our monetary policies a lot of our monetary systems cause so much distraction and so much cost and when you get to a system where you have the potential for people to truly own it um they can verify it themselves you don't have to have trust going in you don't have to trust it at all you can verify it through source code or whatever your um your appetite is and that any particular person can help Drive the future of it and at the same time it's not controlled by any state it's not controlled by any bank it's not controlled by any Corporation um and these three parties of people who participate in the network people who mine and also the developers constantly debating uh the correct roadmap and the way forward is a beautiful thing and I don't know of many other consensus-based models that have existed at that scale for this long with this amount of success and we're still fairly early so when you know I met a woman in Ethiopia two years ago and she was trying to create the lift for for Ethiopia Elon I think I reached out to you at that time as well because she really wanted some Teslas um she still has to take paper Fiat cash from her passengers and pay all of her drivers in the same way because there's no monetary system that she can utilize there's nothing digital um and Africa as a continent is hugely interconnected from a monetary standpoint but also hugely taxed in that same way so a lot of the potential that I I see you know the internet having a native currency um helps her build her business uh in a much faster way and also if you consider something like Bitcoin existing before YouTube before Twitter before Facebook a lot of the business models that we have today would not be the same we would not we would certainly not have the dependency we have upon the advertising business model if Bitcoin existed pre-twitter and I think the amount of business models that enables the amount of innovation enables going forward especially when you can consider the whole internet instead of going country by country by country by country which you have to whenever you're doing your assignment Finance um it really just opens the aperture and that that is that is what I want to see in my lifetime is is a currency that is standard and sound for the internet that everyone can use great um a Hallmark of Bitcoin is its fixed supply of 21 million coins um Elon referenced that earlier it may be the first system that humans have created that humans cannot later change Kathy I'm curious with your background in monetary history and macroeconomics what what are your thoughts on that that type of system oh well I'll just uh I'll recount the the the story uh about art laugher and and our going through the paper uh and he said as I said first rules-based monetary system Global ever this is a a very big idea once we had convinced him of the um of the ecosystem itself uh now this is uh the role that it's playing given that the rule is a quantity rule that 21 million units is really a store of value uh role so there are three rolls of money uh store of value very important uh uh uh the means of exchange so for transactions and the unit of account so uh every good priced in terms of uh of whatever the unit is so store of value is um its primary use right now the others exist unit of account Reserve currency of the crypto asset ecosystem that's being seated a little bit towards uh stable coins right now uh but the store of value is a a very big role and means of exchange with apps built on top of uh the Bitcoin blockchain uh we think is going to become more more of a reality right now high value uh high value transactions take place over over Bitcoin uh and uh and that is a very useful role so we look at those and I remember saying to Art how big could this be and he said well how big is the U.S monetary base well today it's eight trillion dollars eight trillion dollars at the time we were talking it was 4 trillion uh so we've gone through another crisis since then um and so the store of value this idea that purchasing power will go up over time uh if demand Rises relative to supply Supply ultimately fixed at 21 million units um that's that's a very good thing purchasing power going up globally around the world and this idea that it's a hedge against a confiscation of wealth uh and that can take place in in a myriad of ways but inflation and especially hyperinflation in Emerging Markets is the primary way talk about uh just destroying purchasing power so that's a very big very big idea and I'll also mention uh deflation in some ways it's a hedge against deflation I know some people are confused that um we at ARC think that we're in a deflationary environment here in the United States if that is true the odds of a hyperinflation in the rest of the world especially in Emerging Markets uh is also true so but this deflation and we learned from 0809 there's counterparty risk associated with deflation and I think Bitcoin would be a hedge against that eventuality as well so it's a very big idea right I suspect Among Us there's not a lot of debate about bitcoin's potential as a store of value but Jack you referenced earlier uh it being or or becoming the native currency of the internet can you speak more to that and also how it relates to maybe how uh institutions think about it um yeah I mean like um just a simple example if I happen to be in Ghana and my family is in Nigeria uh currently I can take anywhere from and I need to send money back anywhere from uh 10 to 30 percent off the top just to send that money back whereas if you just focus on the worldwide remittance problem um Bitcoin solves so many so many of those problems today instantly uh without having to go through any intermediaries or any slowness or complicated systems at a corporation or a state uh created so I think um you know having having sound money with that is separate from the state is the idea uh having a completely verifiable by everyone including the state including corporations including individuals including developers who want to build on top of it is quite powerful and that's what keeps it secure and strong and um I think that's you know we we need we need more of that which is why this one of the one of the reasons why this conversation is so important is as entities come into the space um it's not just buying an asset and holding on to an asset and treating it as an investment there's something special that created this and something precious and something very unique um which has to be protected and we need to do whatever we can to help our Thrive as well Elon I'm curious your opinion on this you mentioned earlier uh about bitcoin's throughput or the importance of throughput um maybe some concerns around Bitcoin uh can you speak do you do you think Bitcoin can become peer-to-peer cash um well Bitcoin does have a fundamentally a fundamental scarcity limit at the base layer um that's designed in um that doesn't mean you can't have some Layer Two System Theory like lightning um and standard lightning is doing well in in some small countries um there's there's some question mark as to whether you need a money transfer license um just a debate as to whether that's needed um given that it is not open Ledger um so it's there's and that's that's a whole separate debate of course um but Bitcoin but Bitcoin by itself simply cannot scale to be the monetary system fluid at base layer but with a second layer this is possible depending upon how that that second layer is implemented um and yeah as part of why I think there's there may be some Merit um to uh so something that may seem silly like like a theory like like Dogecoin um I think ethereum also might like some like the three the three things I I own outside of SpaceX and Tesla uh it also obviously there's a neural linking boring company but but of any significance are um Bitcoin by far and then some ethereum and some Dosh um so you know if if the price of Bitcoin goes down I I I lose money I'm not sort of you know um you know I might pump but I don't dump so uh you know it's not a case of um I I definitely do not believe in in getting the price high and selling or anything like that um so and I would like to see what coins succeed um uh I think there's there's some Merit to cons this is not a slam book or the summer to consider considering uh something that has a higher Max transaction rate um and lower transaction costs and kind of seeing how far you could take a single layer Network where the exchanges act as a de facto uh second layer um I think you can probably take that further than people realize and and as uh bandwidth increases over time uh latency decreases uh SpaceX and starlink is actually playing a role in this um and I think long term people will probably have you know access to uh worldwide access to gigabit level uh connectivity at low latency and so at low cost and so then you know your base layer could do a lot of transactions if you take that into account um so yeah but but like I said but Bitcoin with the layer 2 system um so they could scale to do a vast number of transactions uh same goes for ethereum about the um scaling at the layer one the the concern from you know the past five years of debate in the Bitcoin Community is that that would sacrifice too much of decentralization and hurt the censorship resistant properties of Bitcoin um I'm curious if you know what are your thoughts on that are you sensitive to that and are you concerned about losing some of the special properties of Bitcoin or or another cryptocurrency by scaling at layer one yeah I mean these things are helpful to like use the physics tools of thinking and say you know scale up scale down and see if it still makes sense so if scaling up the transaction block doesn't make sense why don't you scale it down and have it be uh you know so that somebody you know with a laptop from 2008 can still run a Bitcoin node one slow down oh you want to start down well maybe maybe you're at the wrong number then there's actually people there's members in the community that do want to slow it down but but I understand it's silly um the the reality is like the Irish person is not going to run um a Bitcoin node so this is this is uh and and and Bitcoin you know uh it was a lot of clever ideas but uh you know these parameters were set and I were in 2008 or something uh remember 2009 um and there's like there's been some improvements uh since then but but not a lot so um you know it's sort of like if the they're still in 2008 they were still a non-trivial number of people on modems so um you know now now it is it is quite common to get uh 100 megabits connection just for a house something some houses have gigabit connections so um and that trend is obviously in the direction of higher bandwidth and lower latency um and if somebody else doesn't do it Sterling certainly will so I have high confidence that uh you will be able to maintain a decentralized finance system while still having a much bigger blockchain AKA ASCII text text Ledger um hey hash Ledger um you can make the hash Ledger bigger without suffering from decentralization as of the average connectivity improves obviously one idea would be to run of or to put a the claimful node in in Starlight terminals that way more people will be be running uh actually I have run this by the team at one point um I had this idea which is kind of off the wall but uh like let's say you need a a little space meter um and normally your space heater would uh just be pure entropy um but what if that space heater was also a you know Bitcoin ethereum Doge Mining Node uh pick your currency um and so then you'd be heated up and uh you would also mind uh you know your crypto uh and have connectivity in one I love that idea yeah I mean rather than running a space heater absolutely are there any other um you know so you're drawn to Dogecoin a little bit are there any other gaps in Bitcoin that you see that cause you to be drawn to towards dojo oh I think um um I mean I think there's there's um there's a doge has uh the Dutch Community I think has uh some irreverent obviously and uh is uh has great memes and loves dogs and I love dogs and memes and um uh it doesn't take itself too seriously um and um you know I think the you know there's there's a there's Occam's racer which is the the the the the simplest ancestors the most likely uh it's a summary of Occam's razor the simplest answer is the most likely one then there's a friend of mine came up with a variant on that that the most ironic outcome is the most likely one um and then I have a variant on that which is the most entertaining outcome is the most likely one so if that is true then the most ironic and entertaining outcome would be that the cryptocurrency that was started as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies ends up being the lead the leading cryptocurrency that would be the most ironic outcome Jack what are your thoughts on that um is Bitcoin resilient enough to overcome that I think it's resilient but also I think like you you find I mean that's what attracts me to the to Bitcoin in the first place is the irreverence um a lot of that a lot of that uh a lot of that just brings it forward and and you know at first go it it makes it a little bit inaccessible but as people get into it it makes it more accessible and more spreadable and um I I think I I absolutely think the resilience is there um I I think it's important to have fun as well and anyway anyway folks can express themselves I think net goes back to the main idea of like how do we how do we create a native currency for the internet any anything that goes towards that path like that's whatever whatever whackness or fun we can have along the way that's going to make a lot more enjoyable and it's going to make a lot more people want to use it I'd also point out there's nothing stopping someone from creating a Bitcoin wallet that has that's like fun and has memes has dogs that's possible as well um great let's move on right now at this point um let's move on to the next topic which is Bitcoin and energy it's a really hot topic um that lots of people are talking about um let's start with uh Elon you've been vocal on this you've uh you've said that I mean you said many things about it um you've also said that uh Tesla will resume payments in Bitcoin payments if the renewable energy is approximately 50 and and sort of looks like it's on a positive future Trend um what do you think the state of things are with respect to that yeah so I I do think that um it there appears to be a positive trend um in the energy usage of Bitcoin uh actually part of this is due to the drop in bitcoin price um so um I mean what I observed or what I thought I was seeing um there may be some disagreements on this but uh from when uh Tesla announced that it had acquired Bitcoin and was doing Bitcoin transactions there there was a massive run-up in the Bitcoin price um and also a massive increase in the amount of energy used to mine Bitcoin um and I think the you know I I I understand renewable energy quite a bit I mean Ted Ted Tesla does solar and is uh interacts with a lot of wind generation uh through our mega pack because you know basically to store energy from wind and from solar so we're pretty plugged into the renewable energy industry um and there's there's just no way that you could basically double or triple the amount of energy in such a short period of time with Renewables you could shovel coal that fast and so I was like look this is this is too sketchy Tesla's mission is accelerating uh the adventure sustainable energy um we can't be the company that does that and also um not do appropriate diligence on the energy usage a Bitcoin so um so all I did was I said look we're going to suspend Bitcoin transactions for now we're not selling any Bitcoin nor am I selling anything personally or nor is SpaceX selling any Bitcoin um again I would emphasize SpaceX Tesla and and I own Bitcoin uh uh I I also own a little bit of ethereum and Doge but the companies just own Bitcoin and the Bitcoin that I own is worth much more than the ethereum or Doge so clearly if I'm uh you know if these actions negatively affect me financially if I was purely financially motivated then I I would I would not uh Express those reticence about Bitcoin energy usage um now the it looks like Bitcoin is shifting a lot more towards Renewables um and a bunch of the um heavy duty coal plants that were being used unequivocally being used this is not a question mark um have been shut down especially in the channel so uh I think it's probably uh I I wonder a little bit more diligence um to confirm uh that the who could confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely uh a sort of matter about 50 percent and that there is that that there is a trend towards increasing that number um and if so then Tesla will resume Bitcoin uh accepting Bitcoin uh yeah so I think we want to just do a little bit more diligence on on I think but most likely the answer is that Tesla would would resume accepting Bitcoin most likely yeah may I ask you a question um Elon I'm not quite sure if you saw the paper uh that square and Arc did together on um making uh Bitcoin mining a part of a utility uh you know a broad-based utility ecosystem whereby you know the overage from sunshine or wind uh uh Powers the Bitcoin mining machine thereby uh enabling uh the proliferation of Renewables uh to a much faster extent or at a faster rate than otherwise would be the case what do you think of that well the problem is that in order to operate um so-called mining or hashing rigs in order to operate a bunch of hashing rigs uh uh you if effectively you have to run them 24 7. um which means you need base load uh you can do that with uh solar and wind Plus Battery but if you only did it based on solar wind overage uh your um your your hashing regularization would be much less so you'll be at a disadvantage Hydro or geothermal are great for as renewable means I'm also a pro-nuclear I think mononuclear power plants are safe contrary to what people may think um so um I really think it's possible to make a very very extremely safe nuclear I'm talking about fission you don't need Fusion um and then of course Fusion you just got that big Fusion reactor in the sky called the sun it comes up every you know every day um so uh but I think a combination of solar and wind plus uh stationary storage uh will get you that uh base load so you can run uh hashing 24 7. okay okay Jack I'm curious you you've stated that Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy that's what we're talking about now do you have any additional thoughts on that yeah I mean every everything that uh that Elon said and Kathy Kathy mentioned but um it it's also incentivizing a lot of innovation and in Just Energy space and just like looking at unused energy um there's a there's a company called uh Great American mining that caps the methane flares on oil fields to power their their Rigs and you just imagine and you mentioned nuclear Elon as well and just imagine all the unused energy that is just being wasted every single day um and being able to get that energy and convert it converting it into a secure sound money system for the planet feels like a worthy trade-off and and that's the sort of incentive that I think is is most powerful is like how do we reuse what is being currently just dumped on the ground and wasted and and not considered and how do we do that at scale and I think that's a that's a bigger conversation that I think is is missing um but I agree with with everything that Elon has said and also um you know the paper we put forth I I'm curious if any of you have thoughts on how the industry what the industry can do to accelerate this the transition to renewable energy and like Elon specifically could vessel energy your startling play a role well um I think Tesla can play a role or I mean Tesla's um uh literal like reason for existence um I mean the reason I've I've put so much of my life energy into Tesla which is a lot um in fact it's I would say that I've had some some pretty tough life experiences and Tesla's responsible for probably two-thirds of all all personal and professional pain combined just to give you a sense of perspective there um so this is a hella hard situation um but we we do solar commercial solar soil retrofit as well as the solar roof and we make a consumer battery packs called powerwall for houses and small businesses and then the utility scale which are gigantic these we've done now a number of of gigawatt hour installations like that's a lot that's a lot um and and a lot of them actually have been for load leveling the grid but mostly they are um and and combined with like big so like the one the first really big one we did which is um 100 megawatt installation in Australia uh that's actually helped stabilize a huge portion of the South Australian grid um because it's able to react so fast in fact at first um except they've got the billing system in Australia that I think works at the sort of millisecond level and we're operating at the micro a second level so it was it was operating so fast that the measuring system couldn't see it but um so so Tesla's certainly doing doing a lot to um uh enable Renewables especially when solar um uh and in fact the limiting factor for us right now is cell production so we we need to both internally uh get out the Tesla internal internal battery cells produced as well as increased Supply from suppliers um and we generally when I talk to our suppliers and they say what how many cells would you like us so how many cells can you make um you know because sometimes they're like concerned like worse how's they're going to compete with them on sales I'm like no no if you want to make the cells Be Our Guest it's just that we need a crazy number of batteries um and they need to be done it also needs to be mined and produced and manufactured in an ethical and environmentally sound way so um you know Tesla we really do aspire to be the good guys like you know to be a company that that people can can believe in that doesn't mean we don't make mistakes but that's what we're trying so um yeah but I think generally um a hydro especially existing Hydro is is good for mining uh geothermal there's lots of places in the world that have geothermal energy um and um you know like nuclear is also good um so um yeah I think just just just I'm like I'm and like as I said earlier the expectation is not like that the the energy production must be pure as a driven snow but it it must uh it can't be using it also cannot be using the world's dirtiest coal which was for a moment there um so um you know that's that's just difficult to for Tesla to support in that situation so I think um I know but I do think long-term renewable energy will actually be the cheapest form of energy it just takes it just doesn't happen overnight um but as long as that there as long as there is a conscious and and determined and real effort by the mining Community to move towards Renewables then obviously Tesla can support that that's great um Kathy we've been talking a lot about energy but many institutions are facing questions around bitcoin's relationship with ESG um can you maybe speak a little bit more to what what is S and G in ESG and how Bitcoin might support those sure so e of course is environmental s is social and G is governance uh and there is a massive movement uh afoot in the institutional World especially uh to embrace uh ESG and and make sure that their asset managers are are doing the same uh so if if you we've just talked about environmental and I I really do believe uh that Bitcoin will be uh much more environmentally friendly certainly than traditional gold mining or the traditional Financial Services sector in many ways it already is uh and it's just going to uh get better that way in terms of social I know that um many institutions when they are thinking of social they think of diversity and Equity pay equity and all of that uh but uh if if from our point of view the disruptive innovation point of view social is uh much more than that it is saving lives of course autonomous technology that would be another topic for Elon but in this case uh allowing at access to payment technology as Jack is is saying everywhere around the world without friction if you and just back to the remittance um example I think uh if if I've got these stats correctly you know there are certain countries in the world that are dependent incredibly dependent on remittances for you know GDP uh to uh Tonga 37 El Salvador which just deemed uh Bitcoin legal currencies 24 Nepal 24 and I think the remittance industry globally and roughly 700 billion uh so uh saving people these agreed just fees you know think about it you're paying anywhere from eight percent to to as Jack said 30 percent of your hundred dollars that you're sending back to your family uh that is uh social responsibility I I would submit as is just the uh economic empowerment that Bitcoin will enabled we've talked about that already uh and I know that uh Alex gladstein is going to be talking later about um you know the 4.3 billion people in the world who are Hostage to authoritarian regimes or the 1.3 billion who are living in a double digit and and triple digit inflation if not more um saving them from the destruction of their purchasing power certainly is a noble social goal so we expand social to be much more than uh the traditional ESG community and then on governance you've got the transparency of the ecosystem uh you know uh it's completely transparent unlike uh the opaqueness of financial systems and the toll takers in uh the traditional Financial world and I think a huge part a part of governance in the Bitcoin ecosystem is the are the Bitcoin core developers now uh before I met them and I've had the pleasure and the honor of of meeting uh many of them uh you know that was that was a part of this ecosystem I didn't understand but actually getting to sit down and talk to them uh I if I if I uh have a learning curve need it certainly is on the technology side but in in terms of talking to them about economics economic theory failed monetary regimes uh historically they know economic history many of them better than anyone I've ever met so that gives me a great degree of confidence that you know they they do believe they they're on a noble Mission they could be paid a lot more than they're being paid right now if they worked at Google or or Facebook or or some of these other areas but they've chosen you know um this sense of purpose for a noble goal and uh they have incredibly strong technology backgrounds uh so as well as a good understanding of economic history especially monetary uh history and it gives me a great deal of comfort as I think about the governance of the ecosystem uh much much more so than I I think we would find in other Financial ecosystems uh and just to give you an example of that I think two years we were talking about a parent I mean not a parent there's a big debate about reorganizations I know in the ethereum that at work right now well we saw the the poor Bitcoin developers and others at work uh back in 2019 when binance tried to reorganize uh in order to uh reclaim seven thousand uh Bitcoin that were hacked and they just wouldn't allow it so we've already had some very good tests of the Bitcoin ecosystem including developers uh so that would be my answer thank you and it's a great transition to the next topic area which is Bitcoin ethos and what is bitcoin ethos I mean Bitcoin was born as open source and it's very transparent and there's also a staunch defense from the community around decentralization and a lot of the core principles of Bitcoin um so let's talk a little bit about that and what makes it special Jack um square has done a lot to support open source Bitcoin uh can you tell us a little bit about what square has done and what advice you'd have for other institutions looking to follow in its footsteps yeah I mean I was I was very skeptical of Corporations when I was a kid and I'm still skeptical of Corporations today and you know as we've used corporations to be you know they've been great great vessels for what we need to do and the idea is that we needed to bring to the world but um you know Bitcoin is not that and when we were considering Bitcoin and House Square intersected I was really concerned with um how we don't disrupt the community in a negative way how we promote what is amazing about it and how we help it grow in that way in the way there wants to so we created your team Steve which is square crypto which is hiring open source developers to work on whatever they want and whatever they think is most important to help Bitcoin um we created an organization called Coco which we gave up all of our crypto funds so that the community can use them in defense against trolls and um some some crazy characters we won't name and um we continue to find ways that like following that Bitcoin path we're going to create a hardware wallet we're probably going to do a lot more in Hardware um everything that we do in the space is going to be completely open source from the hardware design um to the software um taking in the community's push and we're building a developer platform as well in the same open development open first um and uh completely transparent so I think as institutions or companies like ours consider getting in the space um I think contribution back to the community is important Tesla did this with accepting payments for Tesla and finding security holes and improving the stock and as I said before we can't just see this as an asset that we own and and an investment vehicle and this was something that has the potential to change everything and make the lives of everyone in this planet better and some small maybe Marginal Way but um those margin those margins will be meaningful as they compound over time great um Elon you've tweeted before that any wallet that doesn't give the user their private Keys should be avoided at all costs um can you tell us more about why is that important and and you know how does it what this relationship with decentralization well it's difficult to say that if you uh own crypto in an exchange and the exchange does not give you private Keys it's not clear that you own anything I mean if if there's something if that exchange breaks or is hacked or uh you know um or or is subject to the seizure by the government or something like that uh you you don't your group your crypto is gone um so in order to actually have a properly a decentralized finance you uh which I'm a fan of um I think it makes sense uh then you you have to own your your private Keys um and you should be the only one who has your private keys so if you're the only one who has the private Keys then then you own it um if you if someone else has your private Keys effectively they own it too um and you you're the security of your crypto is then dependent upon them or any entity that can affect them so uh yeah um I I think what Jack's doing sounds like a good idea to have um you know a hardware wallet that uh that's that's the only thing that contains your private Keys um I think that that's like in in terms of sort of empowering the people which I very much believe in then I think you want to have people have the their own wallets and uh and be the only ones like that uh that have the private keys does that wallet so so called wallet the other side of the of the crypto laughs I think we'll see an emergence too of new solutions that um use multi-sig uh like like with a two or three keys where the the user has two keys and then you you get assisted custody by having an Institutional hold a third key can be a good good solution as well yeah um well you can just put your private key in in something that has dual access or or voting access as a application on an existing Network right um so the Bitcoin Community is is known for staunchly defending Bitcoins principles um some sometimes it can be rude and aggressive but I think what what it stems from is just a um a desire to not have um wealthy or powerful people or institutions uh negatively impacting Bitcoin or or sort of changing the rules in favor of of them I'm curious to hear from each of you what role you feel like you and your your own institutions your own companies um what role can you play in Bitcoin and how do you how do you positively impact it without having these negative drawbacks um Kathy maybe start with you sure uh yes well Arc um has uh stood for two things democratization and transparency uh democracies it were the closest you'll find to um Venture Capital Fund in the public Equity markets and I kind of feel that uh bit I mean that Bitcoin or we have uh bitcoin's DNA from that point of view uh so uh what one of the things in terms of democratization is education we uh have um one of our our missions values is to educate and I do believe that um that some of Yasin almandra's white papers yasin's are lead crypto analyst uh who's worked very closely with you Steve on on this conference um are are helping helping the cause we've done uh and not only for retail investors uh we've found that we had to to do a bit more when it came to institutional investors just because of the way that they invest and uh you know the way they they like to receive information so um uh just like in our investments we've been uh the retail Community has been more attracted to us first and now the institutional Community is is coming along so I I do think our transparency of research especially in the social World social media pushing our research out uh to for free to anyone uh is is part of our our way of of helping the community and I do think encouraging and this is something that Jack just said um uh I would encourage the support of the Bitcoin uh core developer Community as I said uh before it's it's amazing to me having gotten to know some of them you know how strong their sense of purpose is here and uh so we'd like to be a help of making a helpful in making that happen as well that's great um Jack how about you how do you view your own personal role and and the companies you run I I think my my own personal role through the companies I run is um to really push for more decentralization like everything that we intend to do with the wallet um being non-custodial building a developer platform focusing on non-custodial Solutions uh on the Square side is important um being completely open uh development in open source but I also think it's important on the Twitter side as well um my biggest Focus right now is on a decentralized social media protocol um we're calling it Blue Sky it's super super early but we've learned a lot from what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin and why that's important I've learned a lot in that sense as well and um I think you know just continuing to to push on that thread and show it with our actions every single day in support of of this community that's that's taught me so much and I think will benefit so many people and but let's run focus on what about letting uh uh Twitter um advertisers pay in crypto yeah I mean um I think enabling anyone I mean it as you know Elon like um if if we had Bitcoin or native currency for the internet before Twitter started like it just creates so many different business models that we want to have to be so dependent upon advertising generally and I I I do believe that you know that we have them any form of payment uh that um they want to use we should be able to take so absolutely but I'm more I'm more focused on like how do we create economic incentives in the network itself without having to rely on Advertising yeah it's just the the money has to come off of the the the in the crypto so-called coins the hash strings have to come off the and get translated into real products and services so the more uh sort of off-ramps there are to reality Services even at the institutional level although I mean there are certainly many small advertisers on on Twitter um it seems like like accepting Bitcoin maybe maybe some other cryptos uh for uh advertising payments on on Twitter would be supportive of of Bitcoin 100 and also looking at just general Commerce um [Laughter] sorry what Elon I was asking Jack if he's going to do it can we get a product announcement today um Elon how about you um you know you you obviously you're a big personality on Twitter um what are your thoughts on your your role and your company's role in um in Bitcoin and sort of preserving the ethos um yeah I mean I I generally think uh we should do things that uh benefit the people as a whole and uh increase the probability of the future is good so you know I think it to me it just it seems self-evident that we should kind of um take these set of actions most likely to make the future good um and I think probably um probably uh you know crypto or you know at least some of the cryptocurrencies uh will make the future better most likely it's not you know I always think of these things in terms of probabilities um but I think it's probably better for uh there to be a prosperous Bitcoin ethereum Dogecoin maybe some others in the future um and uh and I think it can have an empowering effect uh on for for individuals um and um increase the power of the individual relative to government it really you know if you think of government government is just a corporation in the limit so sometimes some people are like against corporations but for government it's like guys government is just a corporation in the limit it's the biggest corporation of all and it's got a monopoly on violence so if you don't like corporations you should really hate government there you go all right let's we got about um we'll we'll try to wrap up in 10 minutes so let's move on to future of Bitcoin um so Tesla and square have both put Bitcoin on the balance sheet uh Kathy I'm curious to hear from you what advice would you have for other institutions looking to put their coin on their balance sheet well I guess the first uh piece of advice is uh you know just make sure and I actually learned this after um uh after both square and Tesla put Bitcoin on their balance sheet you know the the Bitcoin is being treated as an intangible asset and so we need to get fasbi to reconsider this because with an intangible asset if the asset goes up in price it can't be marked up on their books but if it goes down it must be marked down so uh you know there's some asymmetry there which is uh you know we need to change that given give them what we believe um uh Bitcoin is um and I do believe if uh uh I'll harken back to something well it was either Elon or Jack said um you know think about it uh you know you you take away the boundaries the different currencies just think about how explosive growth could be and how wide reaching take taking the friction out of the system could be so I would encourage corporations to think about that that this ability to do business anywhere in the world ultimately obviously you know where where uh you know Paving the way here uh that's certainly a consideration it also will serve as a hedge against uh inflation especially as as I mentioned earlier there are a lot of emerging markets that are suffering from uh significant inflation in other words the the purchasing power of those populations is uh is going down so they are going to migrate to to bitcoin and other ways to preserve purchasing power uh and again uh being able to sell to them in that kind of currency would be very useful it also suggests once again this idea of deflation I think is going to be a real thing there's going to be good deflation caused by by Innovation so demand will boom because that there's going to be bad deflation because so many companies out there have not been enough investing enough in Innovation their products are going to go up obsolete as you know and they're going to be stuck trying to service the debt uh that they piled on because their their shareholders wanted profits and wanted them now you know so they leveraged up to buy back their shares and pay dividends and they so so I think that's going to be the source of bad deflation and counterparty risk and we learned from 0809 that counterparty risk can be devastating almost cataclysmic so a hedge against that as well I think uh would be another reason to do it Tesla's Bank balances in Europe have negative interest rate it drives me great yeah I mean technically if you if you've got like two percent inflation on one percent interest you're technically minus one percent uh return uh but nonetheless it is just it is quite annoying to just see your bank bank balance drop in real time in Europe it's Europe has negative interest rates this is insane it is crazy I believe Ray dalio said uh buy Bitcoin and not Bonds so there you go yeah um Jack you've talked about design being an underfunded area in in Bitcoin uh and and Elon earlier mentioned you know usability could improve a lot I don't think anyone's gonna argue with that um what do you see as the future of how can design impact Bitcoin yeah I mean I think that the Bitcoin network is is beautifully designed as a protocol in in the way it works I mean it went after a single problem and it it doesn't absolutely um astounding way but I I think the the end points of people getting into it is still a little bit confusing so I think the more energy we spend on on wallets um and making sure that the wallets are simple and accessible and they're non-custodial uh as well um but I think the best the best example of this is that I know of is probably this world called Moon um and it's just simple straightforward it's a great it it does an amazing thing with a key management um that you know my mom and friends knew that Bitcoin can understand uh does amazing in storage and it also has a very clever implementation of lightning so you can use it in a transactional way without having to think about it um just with QR codes in a way that makes sense so more work like that I think really brings us forward great um let's wrap things up with a final question for each of you um I guess what what is your hope for Bitcoin um what how it can impact the world um let's see Elon do you wanna do you want to start with that so what's your hope what's your hope for Bitcoin um well my my hopeful um I guess crypto in general uh is that it can improve the efficiency of the information system that we call money um so if the core efficiency of money is improved and the um and money has less error where like I said error is like in any kind of government interference or fraud or anything like that uh this will naturally lead to uh basically a better standard of living and more power to the to the individual which I very much agree with okay Kathy yeah and I would I would um segue from what um Elon just said is you know money has powerful Network effect uh uh qualities and uh so you know we talked about ESG earlier I think that uh uh of course that aspiration having you know the uh this money be the best from an ESG point of view that's that's really talking about solving some of the world's problems right now which we definitely want to do but I also am very excited about this idea of network effect and the convergence of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence um from a a technology point of view uh I think you know think about the internet in the earliest days we couldn't imagine what was going to happen but the but the impetus to growth uh was was pretty incredible so I am looking at uh you know the this rules-based monetary policy you know making uh for better lives around the world as we've just said but I'm also looking at the technology itself and the convergence between blockchain technology and artificial intelligence uh you know to to uh change the world in ways that we cannot imagine right now solving even more problems but creating more opportunities as well which is the history of technology and disruptive innovation Jack what's your hope for a Bitcoin oh my hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace I mean Elon Elon said it earlier like it we we have all these monopolies of violence and the individual doesn't have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems some of the some of the bigger problems that Elon is trying to solve like it just to a multi-planetary Humanity all these distractions that we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from those bigger goals that affect every single person on this planet increasingly so so I it it may sound a little bit ridiculous but like you you fix that foundational level and everything above it improves uh in such a dramatic way so I it's it's can be long term but but my hope is my hope is definitely peace that's fantastic well I'd like to thank all three of you for um giving us your time today it's been fantastic conversation thank you to the audience for tuning in um the b word is uh not just this uh discussion but we have a lineup of incredible speakers and content so I encourage everyone to check it out thank you very much all right thanks thank you all

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LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ELON MUSK! [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] ♪♪♪ >> THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. IT'S AN HONOR TO BE HOSTING "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE." I MEAN THAT. SOMETIMES AFTER I SAY SOMETHING I HAVE TO SAY "I MEAN THAT." [ LAUGHTER ] SO PEOPLE REALLY KNOW THAT I MEAN IT ALREADY THAT'S BECAUSE I DON'T ALWAYS HAVE A LOT OF INTONATION OR VARIATION IN HOW I SPEAK. [ LAUGHTER ] WHICH I'M TOLD MAKES FOR GREAT COMEDY. [ LAUGHTER ] I'M ACTUALLY MAKING HISTORY TONIGHT AS THE FIRST PERSON WITH ASPERGER'S TO HOST "SNL." [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] OR AT LEAST THE FIRST TO ADMIT IT. [ LAUGHTER ] SO I WON'T MAKE A LOT OF EYE CONTACT WITH THE CAST TONIGHT. BUT DON'T WORRY, I'M PRETTY GOOD AT RUNNING "HUMAN" IN EMULATION MODE. [ LAUGHTER ] I'D FIRST LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU MY VISION FOR THE FUTURE. I BELIEVE IN A RENEWABLE ENERGY FUTURE. I BELIEVE THAT HUMANITY MUST BECOME A MULTI-PLANET, SPACE-FARING CIVILIZATION. THOSE SEEM LIKE EXCITING GOALS, DON'T THEY? [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] I THINK IF I JUST POSTED THAT ON TWITTER, I'D BE FINE. [ LAUGHTER ] BUT I ALSO WRITE THINGS LIKE, 69 DAYS AFTER 4/20 AGAIN, HA HA. [ LAUGHTER ] I DON'T KNOW, I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY, THAT'S WHY I WROTE "HA HA" AT THE END. [ LAUGHTER ] LOOK, I KNOW I SOMETIMES SAY OR POST STRANGE THINGS BUT THAT'S JUST HOW MY BRAIN WORKS. TO ANYONE I'VE OFFENDED, I JUST WANT TO SAY, I REINVENTED ELECTRIC CARS, AND I'M SENDING PEOPLE TO MARS ON A ROCKET SHIP. [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] DID YOU THINK I WAS ALSO GOING TO BE A CHILL, NORMAL DUDE? [ LAUGHTER ] [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] A LOT OF TIMES PEOPLE ARE REDUCED TO THE DUMBEST THING THEY EVER DID. LIKE, ONE TIME I SMOKED WEED ON JOE ROGAN'S PODCAST. [ LAUGHTER ] AND NOW ALL I HEAR ALL THE TIME IS, "ELON MUSK, ALL HE EVER DOES IS SMOKE WEED ON PODCASTS." LIKE I GO FROM PODCAST TO PODCAST LIGHTING UP JOINTS. IT HAPPENED ONCE. IT'S LIKE REDUCING O.J. SIMPSON TO "MURDERER." [ LAUGHTER ] IT HAPPENED ONE TIME! [ LAUGHTER ] FUN FACT. O.J. ALSO HOSTED THIS SHOW IN '79. [ LAUGHTER ] AND AGAIN IN '96. KILLED BOTH TIMES. [ LAUGHTER ] [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] ONE REASON I'VE ALWAYS LOVED "SNL" IS BECAUSE IT'S GENUINELY LIVE. A LOT OF PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE THAT. WE'RE ACTUALLY LIVE RIGHT NOW. WHICH MEANS I CAN SAY SOMETHING TRULY SHOCKING. LIKE, I DRIVE A PRIUS. [ LAUGHTER ] "SNL" IS ALSO A GREAT WAY TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT THE HOST. FOR EXAMPLE, THIS IS MY SON'S NAME. [ LAUGHTER ] IT'S PRONOUNCED "CAT RUNNING ACROSS KEYBOARD." [ LAUGHTER ] ANOTHER THING PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW IS, WHAT WAS I LIKE AS A KID? THE ANSWER IS, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS NOW, BUT SMALLER. BUT WE CAN ALSO ASK MY MOTHER, WHO IS HERE TONIGHT. [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] HER NAME IS MAYE, LIKE THE MONTH, BUT WITH AN "E" AT THE END. >> THANKS FOR SPELLING MY NAME, ELON. [ LAUGHTER ] >> MOM, DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN I WAS 12 AND I CREATED MY OWN VIDEO GAME CALLED "BLAST STAR" ABOUT A SPACESHIP THAT BATTLES ALIENS? >> I DO. I REMEMBER THEY PAID YOU $500. BUT YOU WERE TOO YOUNG TO OPEN A BANK ACCOUNT SO I HAD TO OPEN ONE FOR YOU. >> THAT'S RIGHT, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THAT BANK ACCOUNT? >> THAT'S NOT IMPORTANT. [ LAUGHTER ] YOU TURNED THAT VIDEO GAME ABOUT SPACE INTO REALITY. >> UNLESS YOU CONSIDER THAT OUR REALITY MAY BE A VIDEO GAME AND WE'RE ALL JUST COMPUTER SIMULATIONS BEING PLAYED BY A TEENAGER ON ANOTHER PLANET. [ LAUGHTER ] >> THAT'S GREAT, ELON. [ LAUGHTER ] WELL. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT. I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. >> LOVE YOU TOO, MOM. [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] >> AND I'M EXCITED FOR MY MOTHER'S DAY GIFT. I JUST HOPE IT'S NOT DOGECOIN? >> IT IS. [ LAUGHTER ] OKAY, WE'VE GOT A GREAT SHOW FOR YOU TONIGHT. MILEY CYRUS IS HERE. [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] SO STICK AROUND AND WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK! [ CHEERS AND APPLAUSE ] ♪♪♪

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the xprize foundation runs incredible large-scale competitions around the world that set very clear measurable objective goals competitions and prices can actually bring innovation to solve not just any problem but really big challenging problems we don't care who you are or where you come from if you're able to accomplish this task you win are leveraging the genius of folks from all over the world the tinkers the entrepreneurs the engineers we're looking for something that is audacious and achievable problems that the markets have failed to solve people about setting a high bar you want to set a goal for people that's inspiring it's also hard so no matter what challenge you want to solve join us on this journey just don't be satisfied doing nothing welcome welcome everybody uh welcome to a special live stream on earth day in here we are on earth on earth in a beautiful uh by nature yeah yeah do it better for 21 earth day yeah um here to talk about the launch of the largest prize ever a hundred million dollar x prize for carbon capture and here with a very special guest uh probably one of the greatest innovators engineer of our time the ceo of tesla of spacex of a bunch of other companies uh and someone i'm proud to call a friend elon hey peter good to see you good to see you yeah it's uh it's the perfect setting for our conversation today yeah yeah we've known each other for a long time now yeah um 21 years i think it was like 2000 yeah whoa it is i think it was two thousand in like uh brazil brazil was actually a similarly nice uh sort of a setting yeah is it deo's birthday yeah florianopolis for annapolis yeah and uh you're trying to convince me not to start a rocket company i was trying to convince you to fund the original x prize well i met anusha yes but also like really advised me not to start art company because i lose all my money which i thought uh i thought you were probably right so i thought you know ten percent chance of success but anyway seems to worked out i'm sure you're glad you didn't follow yeah oh my god so we're going to um talk a little bit about the rules uh try and encourage teams around the world to register for this thing yeah there's many innovators students talking about it uh yeah i mean our goal is like basically to uh do something that uh you know to have it be sort of interesting fun and ultimately useful um and to spur uh uh creative ideas for what is actually the smartest way to take the trillions of tons of carbon that we we've removed from the ground and we'll remove from the ground um from deep deep underground and and and we've we've placed that carbon in the atmosphere and oceans which obviously changes the the chemical constituency of the surface of the earth yeah um and um you know i know i i i i should sort of um measure measure my statements in that um i think i think we the earth like i don't i don't think we're currently doomed to be clear there's a very important uh very importantly um you know there's there there are people on all parts of the spectrum from ranging from nothing to worry about uh co2 is just makes things better to uh we're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it i am somewhere in the middle um so my concern with the co2 is not kind of where we are today um or even you know the current rate rate of carbon generation but really uh if it could if we if common generation keeps accelerating and we keep getting um a uh that uh increase in the in the keeling curve you know the co2 plus million atmosphere and if if if we keep going and if we're complacent uh then i think we we could there's some risk of of um sort of non-linear climate change um so um so you know that's why we that we've seen the co2 possibly be fairly linear on on our time scale uh although it looks very exponential on uh geologic time scale um and uh but there are certain potential non-linear events like uh if we raise the temperature to the point where we um melt the siberian traps or something like that and methane escapes yeah there's just a massive amount of of sort of frozen dead plant animal matter um in um in siberia there's potentially trapped uh uh gases deep in the ocean if the ocean warms yeah that could be released so uh you know these this is just these are just risks that are not wise to take um and since we know that uh long term we're going to have to have renewable energy anyway um because we'll we'll run out of oil and gas it's not going to last forever um so we know we know where this ends up this has to end up with uh renewable sustainable energy um it's taught logical um it's really just a question of do we try to get there sooner or later you know and we should try to get there sooner it's obvious why run like why are on the ex how long do you want to run this experiment yeah it's also true that even if we stopped co2 production that's probably still not enough that we do need mechanisms for extraction of co2 from the atmosphere and the oceans that don't exist right now you know i said i i am people sort of think i'm sort of like i i'm kind of in the middle of the spectrum you know i think if we stopped co2 production today which obviously we could not do without civilization coming to a grinding halt um and mass starvation and all sorts of terrible things happening um so we could not stop co2 generation today but i think at the you know the sort of 400 possibly even 500 ppm level i think it's probably probably okay um but if uh you know as as the world industrializes and we're sort of at 8 billion people get to nine billion people um have a lot more industrial output per person um you could see the you know you know at what might be okay it's sort of four or five hundred um parts a million co2 in the atmosphere might become quite dire at a thousand yeah um and the trend is certainly in that direction if we don't do anything about it so um that's why i think it's just probably an unwise experiment to to run um even if you think that the this is this is why i think it should be a compelling argument to even those who um would assign a low probability to um increase co2 causing problems like let's say you think it's 99.9 percent likely that uh that adding all the co2 to the ocean's atmosphere is is going to be fine so so you're saying there's a point one percent chance of disaster well there's only one way right now we only got one planet even a point one percent chance of disaster why are on that risk that's crazy so um so i think what's likely to play out is that we will continue to add a lot of uh a lot more co2 to the ocean's atmosphere um and also you know ocean acidification as you know is also an issue it's you know what you don't sort of add carbonic acid to the oceans and change the ph level um because it destroys reefs and all that so which it's actively doing right now as we're watching yeah yeah yeah exactly um yes so this is a problem no i remember when i first met you elon uh you had it was about 2 000 and i remember you had two massively transformative missions it was one making the making humanity multi interplanetary yeah and the second was bringing us to a sustainable economy yeah a sustainable energy economy right exactly and i think you've done pretty damn good are you are you happy with the progress you've made um yeah i think it's uh it's hard to complain it's probably you know the outcome so far has been been great um although obviously to be you know we've we've not uh we've not yet sent anyone to mars and um and hopefully we'll in the future and um in fact just uh a few days ago or last early last late last week i guess um nasa awarded spacex awesome 2.8 2.9 billion dollars for the next lunar lander yeah so spacex a spacex craft will be the the next craft to put humans on uh on the moon i believe the first human will be a woman actually this time so uh this is great that's great yeah um so um but of course we have to actually do it um and uh and uh then we've got tomorrow we've got the uh our third asteroid launched before we dive into the to the carbon removal uh rules and so forth yeah uh i mean it's obviously a better dichotomy because our rockets do produce carbon you know true like high what a hypocrite sure no no you guys obviously just he's always just in for the money um but but let's talk about let's talk about the crew crew i feel like i should address this this is a good vibe you're watching rockets that produce carbon uh here's the problem is uh right now there is there's really no way to get around the physics of a rocket so i think it's important for the long-term uh preservation and and ultimately the expansion and extension of this the scope and scale of consciousness and the long-term uh probability of survival of humanity and life as we know it we must become a multi-planet species uh because all these risks that we can't control existential risks asteroids strikes yeah yeah yeah there's like super volcanoes and we could do it you know we have world war three uh or something you know there's um like i'm optimistic about the future but you but you can also say like okay well so how long do you think civilization will last before there's a catastrophic event if you say infinity you're this is not correct yes okay this is this is not uh history does not suggest that it's just yes we do dumb things to uh civilizations all the time you know and and you know those ancient egyptians the romans ancient romans where are they now let's do the video series where where are they now the sumerians the yeah you name it you know so um so there's been many civilizations that risen in fallen and anyway we've got to preserve we're going to become multi-planetary and right now the only way to do that is with um with rockets that do burn fuel but we do have a long-term plan for sustainability of um of even rocket flights uh by generating uh propellant uh using um sustainable energy wind and solar to generate starting first with liquid oxygen um and for our starship vehicle uh it's uh almost 80 liquid oxygen yeah and 20 uh liquid methane and the oxygen it's obviously pretty easy to create that uh you just use wind and solar electricity and um and you do air separator because you've got the oxygen already in there the plants are making the oxygen um so you can use this you can just use electricity basically remove electricity to create 80 percent of the propellant on the rocket and then for the remaining uh 20 you can use the body a process where you take you actually take co2 out of the atmosphere and you combine that with water to create ch4 and more o2 um and that's and that's in fact what we would do on mars sure to generate propellant sure so so there is a long term plan for sustainable generation of propellant for the rockets i do want to emphasize that um and if there's some if there's some other way to do that now we we certainly would yeah but i'm i'm just trying to try to sort of address this apparent inconsistency in um you know if darian carvin is bad what why why are you doing that with rockets yeah and listen i think it's a moral imperative for the human race to be able to move off earth while we have the opportunity everything we know is right here and just because it's like it's um it's it's not it's just one of the other christians so much feels like oh is this some escape hatch for rich people no no you know they think it's like so you know going to mars reads like that ad book for shackleton going to the antarctic you know it's it's dangerous uh it's uncomfortable it's a long journey you might not you know come back alive um but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be amazing an amazing experience and your name will go in history yes you might not probably won't have good food and all these things you know so if if an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive um but it's a glorious adventure sounds appealing and mars is the place and you still have thousands of volunteers if not millions of volunteers would want to go i mean honestly a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning it's it's tough sledding over there we're an exploring species yeah yeah exactly not for everyone we don't want to make anyone go so it's volunteers only you have a you have a uh a dragon capsule on the pad crew 2 is nominally or you still go for launch tomorrow yeah awesome you want to just spend two minutes uh talking about the crew 2 mission yeah so um yeah we've got hopefully a great mission plan for tomorrow uh this will be our third flight of people to the space station we have the test mission with two astronauts then the first sort of operational mission with four the second operational mission with four um there's an international crew um a great group um i was just looking online they're sort of you know picking their sort of uh you know hopefully not final meal but you know they're gonna fit whatever their favorite food is you know from their country and um so i'm actually heading over there tonight to just to um wish him wishing well i was out at pad 39a uh to see the stack yesterday uh a couple of things one pad 39a historic yeah because this is where people went to the moon yeah 11 from that pad from that pad the first space shuttle launched back in 81 sts and uh so that's it's a lot of like karmic responsibility to be operating yeah it's like times square the time square of launch pads it's amazing yeah amazing and uh and the first stage has a beautiful patina on it does it's uh this will yeah there'll be the it'll be it's a reused stage so um when the stages come back they they kind of get scorched yeah so the black there some people think is that sort of something no that's it got scorched from reentry your team said they used to wipe it off to clean it and then it's just like why bother it's kind of hard to wipe off it doesn't wipe off easily yeah because it's kind of like baked on there and it's interesting you kind of have to repaint it really we're having a discussion about is it safer to use a stage that's flown already versus a new stage yeah so um i i think what we'd say is like flight proven flight proven yes yeah so it's like election airplane uh do you want to be on the first flight of that airplane when it comes out of the factory or do you want to be on a later flight i'd say let somebody let the test pilots do their thing before you you you know if they fly a plane so you flying a plane you want to see that plane is flowing a few times before you get an i think yeah i i think it should be on balance better um and then uh and then we'll also we'll also be re-flying the start reapplying the the spacecraft the dragon yeah the dragon spacecraft beautiful so we're trying to get so reusability is obviously very important um in many arenas so reusability is important everybody's building rockets is important i remember uh being in hawthorne seeing your first your falcon one there and it was just amazing it's coming so there's some funny pictures of uh of basically the the sort of spacex as a kind of like a kindergartner um and me but being like what are 20 years younger um and uh yeah we're just in this tiny little warehouse in el segundo yeah i remember well yeah before we go to jump into the guidelines one last question update on starship because that's what i mean starship's taking us to the moon taking us to mars and it's it's the it is audacious can you compare it to the apostles compared to the apollo vehicle uh the saturn v for comparison for a second for folks to know get a sense of it sure well i think the thing that's least obvious from when it's um on the ground from the front of the videos and pictures is the size of it so it's um it's gonna be the largest flying object ever so it'll be uh twice the thrust and uh weight of the saturn v amazing so that's uh just for a sec and taller so including the launch escape tower so it's a very tall rocket um 120 meters tall and because it's so wide the proportions uh are obscure that fact how big it is yeah you can see in some of the pictures that have been released when it's landing on the moon and the the people look like ants it's very it's a big rocket this is this this rocket is uh capable of um you know at least 100 tons and probably closer to 200 tons of useful payload to the surface of the moon so and it was designed to be far in excess of nasa's requirements yeah um and so it's really intended to be something that you know that can enable a permanently occupied uh base on the moon so you know we've got obviously from the occupied base in in antarctica um and it would be great to have one one on the moon as well yeah um and you can do you know i think a lot more research if you have the scientists actually there and we could have some some very powerful telescopes no it's the moon you know there's some great sayings from uh from robert heinlein that said if you know if god had wanted humanity to have space flight they would you know she would have given us a moon right exactly it's a great staging place exactly it's sort of it's just just off the coast um mars is is much much much much further one last question uh yeah so but i think most actually more important than the size of starship is the fact that it is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable yeah so this is the fundamental holy grail breakthrough needed for for access to space uh to make humanity a true space bearing civilization we must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket now we've made some progress in that direction with falcon 9 where the booster is reusable and the uh dragon spacecraft upper portion is reusable um but the the the the second stage is not reusable um and the and i would say right now i would not say the falcon booster spacecraft and uh and fairing they're not rapidly reusable like it takes a fair bit of effort uh less effort than the much less effort than the space shuttle took yeah um but uh but it was a turnaround every year or so yeah yeah exactly and it took taking about a year a year to turn them around um you know we're getting it down to um a few months basically and soon i think probably under a month uh to turn around a booster um but uh landing out to see and then having to bring it back and then sort of uh taking a month or so to to get it ready for launches still i wouldn't call that rapid by aircraft standards um whereas um starship is intended to be both fully and rapidly usable so the the booster comes right back to the launch pad um literally is caught by the the the launch tower yep so it's it lands and is actually caught by launch tower arms aspirationally i mean there's certainly that looks like science fiction excitement guaranteed um so the booster gets it comes back about six or seven minutes later and it's called so it's uh right there and then caught by launch tower arms and placed right back onto the launch stand amazing and then the the ship is i actually want the ship also to be caught by the um the launch tower uh now the ship will take it takes at least 90 minutes to over the earth yeah and um we may take more than one it may take uh three or four orbits to get uh the ground track realigned with the um landing zone the lighting zone depending on where you are but the point is that the ship will come back and be pla be right land right by the tower and be placed right back on and so uh like a 767 just refuel and go it's it's intended to be such that the booster can be used i don't know uh a dozen times a day and the ship wow the ship could be you know like basically every couple hours and the that's mostly about reloading propellant and um and mounting the ship and then the ship could probably be used um you know probably every in theory every three hours if you can make the ground track match but certainly every say six to nine hours or twice a day for the ship and we'll make more shifts than there are boosters so and i think if once we have the uh floating space platforms we we can set the put the um position them such that the ship can come back in a single orbit amazing um so there could be like three you know let's say if you get three ship launches per day that's a thousand flights a year of each with a hundred 150 tons now now we're talking a real space program let's go to uh let's go to the questions on on the carbon removal price we'll be going to your questions at in twitter in about about 20 minutes 15 20 minutes so elon this is the largest prize ever ever uh largest incentive prize ever and i would argue for one of the most largest of uh civilization scale challenges we have sure and uh we get into the rules in a second so that folks who are looking at creating teams can understand why why we created those rules but why did you fund this let's start with the the why there yeah i think i wanted to spur ideas and thinking about the long-term need to capture carbon um and uh you know i think this is one of those things that's going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is um and especially to figure out what what the best economics are for uh for co2 removal um and uh and and all the things i think through all the consequences you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease yeah uh so uh you know sometimes people say well just plant a bunch of trees i'm like that's not so easy you know like like a trillion trees sure exactly and then you've got to like okay well how you get fertilizer are you going to water them where's the water going to come from uh what habitat are you potentially destroying where the trees used to be it's not it's not just a no-brainer if there's go crowd plan about it but it's not to say that's not a good viable option we should plant some trees i i'm in favor of planting trees it's just not a question of like okay um you know there are like vast sections of like like the sahara desert or or uh the you know the some large barren areas very dry areas in the u.s um where you couldn't very plant a lot of trees but you're gonna need a lot of water yeah and you're gonna need like like call you're gonna have to cultivate them it's not like uh they don't just throw some c's on the ground um or drop them from orbit yeah and i mean so just i think it'll be good to sort of uh kind of frame the the frame the debate and and understand okay what things are really going to move the needle how much are they going to move the needle um you know if we're talking about getting tens or hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in what form will that carbon be yeah will it be stable over time um and like i said like what is this gonna cost humanity to do however it's paid for what what is it gonna cost what's the thing that's uh gonna be take the you know be most affordable um i think there are a lot of open questions on this there are let me let me chunk the rules for uh for those listening and uh you and your team amazing team and uh marcus extravoir and xenia tata and their team work really well together so the first thing is that for a team to win this and we'll talk about the prize amount and so forth they've got to actually build something that works and demonstrate something that can extract a thousand tons per year a kiloton of carbon per year as a demo scale model yeah i think um by the way we're very much open to adjusting the rules to be clear to everyone like like meaning um if things aren't working or whatever reason like uh we need to adjust rules we'll address the rules the the the fundamental goal is to um have spent uh 100 million and actually end up being probably like 120 million or whatever with um you know cost of managing the prize and everything um so they'll be you know the other day probably something like 120 million spent um and uh hopefully this spent well and usefully um and that what comes out of it is something that um uh matters to the future um so that that's that's the goal to be clear um and so if people have you know uh ideas for adjusting the rules um yeah we're going out as guidelines yeah and uh we're gonna have i think until mid-may for get public feedback tell us if we missed something right we will turn them from guidelines to rules once we get really feedback and we've gone out to so many of the amazing clients scientists out there yeah and it's yeah unless the rules need to need to be valid uh for the for the four years of this prize duration yeah so we're super open to critical feedback um don't hesitate to you know yell and and say this this is how it should be different in some way or whatever you know um the goal is just to like let's have it be a useful exercise and and have people have a good time trying to figure out this problem i think it's sort of a it's a fun problem to try to to work on um and uh yeah we just wanted to be useful at the end of the day you know and and and have it not be sort of uh an academic exercise or something that never amounts to anything i think one of the things that you've said and i've said is you know everything works on powerpoint everything works improper that's exactly you could have a powerpoint presentation for a teleportation system to the andromeda galaxy and and even have a simulation of like look here we are boom you're in the according to this slide you're now teleported to andromeda so like uh but it doesn't actually work so to win this prize uh a team actually during the four years has to build something that can at minimum pull out a thousand tons of carbon per year yeah so they can show us that do they have to do they have to pull out a thousand times or just show that the rate it works no they have to pull out like a literal thousand times we'll weigh it on scale and we're gonna we're gonna like you know maybe we could calculate it to be a thousand bucks but the rate at which yes they'll have to run it for a year to get a thousand times out but if they run it for a month that's okay probably it's okay okay all right and i mean i mean if there's a month they have a you know like a hundred times and then it needs to fit on our weighing machine or something you know like i don't get away tomorrow we'll use what are we no ships um and you know part of the the actual physically doing it is that they can they have enough data to calculate costs which are going to be important uh but we're we're not looking for theory we're looking for practice and yeah and you know how hard it is to make something real it's very hard to make something real i think and in my view prototypes are trivial and production is hard yeah um and there's the general um generally people think it's the prototype that is the hard thing prototypes are well i mean obviously you're gonna have that one percent of inspiration but as the saying goes one percent inspiration 99 perspiration yeah um ideas are plentiful actually getting it done is very hard you could say for example what about the you know the idea of going to the moon it's easy going to the moon is hard that's why it's not the idea man there's plenty of ideas all right so the second was my idea to go to the moon i've patented it okay good see you there yeah uh the second thing is and this is a term that you that you use first is that the teams have to be able to calculate the fully considered costs of pulling out the co2 and what does that mean to you yeah so i think fully considered cost actually just means that if there are um you want to look at both the benefits and the cost actually so if uh if in um sequestering carbon removing it from the uh atmosphere oceans uh uh it has has some uh have some environmental impact uh which might be small but it's not negative that certainly needs to be taken into account um and uh uh and then a bystander token if uh what's done is in extracting carbon is a useful product sure that from which you can generate revenue then that should count too right so and i'm just sort of saying for argument's sake like let's say uh you could create um you know um construction material like you know um cement cement yeah which we just i'll talk about that later some kind of useful rocks that are rocks that are useful or sand or i don't know yeah um something that's useful for construction um then uh you could say okay well this is what we could sell it for and uh you know and then just fully consider pros and cons and and and say okay this is what you know if um if we need to pay to have it done in the future which you probably will have to do then um what's the what's the lowest net cost and and to be clear the the working teams what they do has to be net negative right it's not a break even it's not play out a thousand tons and then emit a thousand tons in fact one of the things we talked about absolutely one of the things obviously yeah one of the things we talked about this can be worse than the disease yes how how long do you need to sequester the carbon for us we had a big debate you want to share what you came up with there what the team the the rate of carbon sequestering used to far exceed the radar which say it is uh potentially dissolving back into the atmosphere yeah um so um you know like if if uh yeah um and so one of the rules is that you have to sequester for at least 100 years right so we yeah we set a target does it look forever yeah you know a year is not long enough um so we said you have to demonstrate that your methodology is gonna contain the the co2 in some fashion for a hundred years at least yeah maybe with maybe there's a small amount that that is lost maybe it's not perfect yeah i think we'll probably want to set it to you know um a hundred percent for a hundred years out but if it's like i don't know 90 for 100 years that's probably okay you know so it just needs to be something that if we scaled it up would it work yeah and that's the third part obviously and that's the third part of the common sense text test really yes and the hardest thing is that the winning team has to prove to our judges that their approach can actually scale to a gigaton level otherwise it's not going to be useful exactly it can't be a niche yeah it can't be inherently niche and if anybody knows about scaling up i i think yeah you do uh yeah scalable scaling is hard yeah so yeah i i don't know what the answer is here really um but i think if a lot of smart people work on this there could be some really creative solutions something generally useful for the world yeah in that regard absolutely um yeah and i think just be clear like looking for pragmatic solutions it doesn't need to be perfect um you know but it's got to be something that's just fundamentally if we scaled it up would it would work yeah that's it so let's talk about the prizes that are up for grabs um first place is going to be 50 million yeah which is significant our hope is that it's going to attract enough cognitive surplus out there to focus in on this yeah um 30 million split between sort of a second third and fourth place prize and one of the things that you and your team put forward is maybe it might be split into different categories right different approaches yeah i mean we want to reward people who have done great work yeah fun fundamentally i'm open to increasing the price size too over time so if it turns out like hey somebody really really kicked ass and and uh and somehow there's not a price for them we'll also add some more to the price that's that's extraordinary yeah absolutely i want somebody to have like spent like you know massive blood sweat and tears have done something useful and they get nothing for it that would be pretty bad yeah so um but i think also um you know this somebody's gonna probably get a company out of this you know because i think this will be a need long term and you know so uh and and uh so this is kind of like you can also think of it as like you know free venture money yeah you know non-diluted venture capital yeah free free money for your company and hopefully we're also creating a massive marketplace and proving to people that there is there's a there there here yeah so 50 million uh for the first 30 million split among second third and fourth in the next year we're taking 15 million dollars and distributing a million dollars to the top 15 teams that appear to be making the most progress the most real just giving some people some seed money basically yeah and then uh you've set aside five million for student teams yeah which is really important you want to talk about student teams i know you're passionate about that yeah yeah we've done a lot of student competitions for example hyperloop um he's trying to uh you know spur ideas and advanced transportation um and it's really just basically a an electric car and a vacuum tube to be precise i mean uh and we've had several of them and and um you know the the last half-life competition they actually i got like i think halfway to the speed of sound so yeah it's pretty impressive and the the thing was you had to get to the fastest speed and then and then stop without crashing yeah um so um that's pretty it's kind of exciting it's like is this thing going to you know get what speed is going to get up to are they going to slam the brakes on in time or is it going to hit the crash barrier at the end so it was pretty fun and then we kind of got to we i put that on pause and now we're doing uh tunneling competitions because nice change that yeah that technology has not changed that much in a century you know honestly i think we're we're gonna you know i mean for i don't know five or seven years i for a long time i was like people ask me what opportunities do you see i said tunneling and then i think i was joking but um i think this is the way to solve traffic in um congested cities and almost every major city is congested so and and with uh as autonomy uh gets better and better and you have robo taxis and everything um the robo taxes will be cheaper than a bus or subway and people will want it and it'll take your point to point it you know even when it's like raining and snow uh and it's uh you know so it's gonna be better also i think for you know from public health standpoint like if there's another pandemic and you know how to get around you know it's like you know it's just difficult to go into in crowded spaces so um then uh anyway so i think tunnels are gonna be really important in the future for relieving congestion in um in cities so um you know i hope others start tunnel telling companies um and just improve titling technology and um that you can have effect these warp tunnels just going all the way through you know 3d like multiple levels and um we're the first operational one in vegas that's uh it's going to go into operation i think in a few months uh you know we could sit here and talk about macaque monkeys playing pong as well link that was amazing yeah that was awesome yeah but i'm not going to go though i'm going to focus still on on our on our i played mine against the monkey he did did it no but uh what but it hadn't practiced as much yet so now it might be able to beat me monkeys have very good agility right they've got to catch the branch they can swing through the trees and we cannot not very well um yeah so i think a monkey actually could play like a fast twitch video game really well that's great better maybe better than a human you can sponsor a team yeah exactly esports it's just monkeys yeah against the best teams yeah turns out the monkeys actually love playing video games and uh and so don't mind drinking smoothies no it's just like humans i mean basically humans love snacks and video games and soda monkeys you know oh that's awesome yeah um we're about to go to questions in uh in two minutes i know we've got a stack of them i just want to hit on there are four categories that teams can can put their approaches forward first is direct air capture pull it out of the air any comment on that uh sure well i mean this you can certainly pull out there's a lot there's lots of ways to get carbon out of the air yeah um it could absorb it many different ways yeah category two is ocean sort of algae kelp plankton a lot of co2 in the oceans people don't realize that category 3 land trees i mean mark benioff has you know been backing a trillion trees project i mean that is where they're going to be planted we'll find out okay there's by the way when people say that earth is being overpopulated that's not true it's like look out the window and i know you and i have had this conversation that you're more worried about under population oh yeah yeah um earth is going to face a massive population collapse yeah uh in in a over the next 20 20 30 years massive yeah um and it's this this is definitely you know more civilization you know a question of like a civilization could die with a bang or a whimper this would definitely be dying with the whimper yeah we need birth rate is very low yeah it's been dropping right it used to be five six children per family globally it's like 2.4 below in the u.s it's below below replacement levels fourth i mean in in most of europe russia japan korea singapore um you know uh it's uh it's it's well below replacement um but i would still say are you i mean when we spoke last about this area you're still a sort of abundant optimist that the world is getting better on many levels yeah i think the the the world is generally getting better um you know i have some concerns about advanced ai like you know that that's a risk if i say like existential risks i'd say um super advanced ai is one um and and probably the second biggest risk after that is population collapse not an asteroid impact no the population collapse the thing about demographics is both ways you know what's going to happen in 20 years because you know the birth rate last year it takes like 20 years for a person to grow up yeah so we know what the adult population is going to be 20 years from now because we know what kids are born last year um i think it's we have a serious issue with population collapse um that's far bigger than people realize um and and you know just the the social networks and everything i mean that the social support networks were not really set up for a high ratio of retirees to workers somebody so so then well thank god we got robots coming in yeah the romans exactly we'll need those we'll need those robots but you don't want to have the youth effectively enslaved to take care of the elderly you know which is what would kind of happen if you have an upside-down demographic pyramid um let's get to the questions first of all if you're interested in the guidelines or to register a team go to xprize.org you can download the guidelines again up until i think may 13th we're looking for a public comment please tell us what we could do to improve it and then please register you know as a team so we can communicate with you if you're interested uh before we go to the questions and you go to uh xprize's twitter account at xprize to ask questions uh let's go to a short video from uh dr marcus extravoir we call him dr x he is the lead for us an amazing brilliant individual uh who leads our carbon and climate work um all right let's uh let's see what dr extra wars to say i'm looking for a hundred million dollar answers that can help change the course of human history and help heal our planet but what's the question in the next 100 seconds i'm going to explain i'm marcus extivor vice president of energy and climate at xprize the question is how do we take centuries of co2 emissions out of the air and oceans if you've got the skills to answer that question we'd love to hear from you today now let's start with the basics we've got to reduce our co2 emissions and get to net zero but net zero is not enough we also have to go carbon negative and we need to get there fast that means taking co2 that's currently in the air and oceans removing it and storing it for a long long time do you know how to remove co2 using the land oceans rocks or even taking co2 directly out of the air we've got to get the co2 from up here and locking it away down here we know plants and trees can do this and been doing it for a long time they're great at this but do you know how to help plants and trees sequester that co2 in the vegetation and soils in a way that's durable and can last for centuries how do we use the oceans to sequester vast amounts of co2 kelp and sea grasses are great at this and about a third of our emissions are already in the oceans do you know how to remove it and sequester it safely what about rocks and helping them remove co2 many rocks can do this naturally but the process takes thousands of years on its own do you know how to dramatically speed that up now you might already have an amazing idea in direct air capture in soil sequestration or tree planting or farming or maybe kelp farming in seagrass marine biology ocean alkalinity enhancement geologic sequestration mineralization and enhanced weathering or maybe a technique no one's heard of before we want your 100 million dollar ideas enter the largest incentive prize in history visit xprize.org to find out how to register a team and get involved together we can help balance earth's carbon cycle and protect our climate for future generations what a 100 million dollar answer look like it looks like any other crazy idea it just has to work yeah yeah it's just uh we're so we're so lucky to have amazing people which is what spacex and tesla i mean people who care about about changing the world all right we're gonna go to uh some questions um let's uh we have some over here the first one is from chuck brady in austin chuck is uh one of our innovation board members one of the earliest funders that did the background work in the climate for here and so i found this question uh super fascinating so he says if the bogey is 10 gigatons per year uh and the global economic output is 87 trillion dollars at least it has been the last year then at 200 per ton uh to sequester uh cost sequestration is two trillion or about two percent of the global gdp so it seems like a reasonable drag in overall economy uh if we could stop reverse climate change the shortcoming right now is we don't have a scalable way yet to capture and sequester co2 that's the background that seems like a reasonable estimate so here's his first question uh should competing teams prioritize scalability over cost and what lessons from tesla and spacex have you learned uh to help teams thinking about the design of their solutions well i think it's not unless the cost is affordable it's not scalable i mean i thought the prior math was was pretty sensible there um you know we could we could afford something perhaps which is um one or two percent of gdp but it would be extremely painful if it was 20 of gdp yeah um we started having to cut into health care and and all sorts of you know social care programs um and if it's 200 of gdp it's not happening at all yep um so we want to just let them know that the audio feed is coming up yeah uh uh chuck uh has a second question i also thought was really important says uh while we want the lowest cost uh that will do a gigaton per year or more inevitably they're going to be trade-offs between cost and scalability uh no actually i think um something's not scalable unless the cost is uh is low yeah so uh or at least if the cost at scale is low mm-hmm um uh yeah i mean i mean it gets tossed and scalable you could say like i could plant a tree yeah sure okay um yeah yeah but uh we just need to solve the problem and and so both uh cost and scalability need to be addressed um it's like is it gonna be remove enough carbon to matter and can we afford it as a civilization yeah those are the two things that that matter yeah and then just obviously making sure that it in in sequestering the coven we're not uh at the same time creating uh some new environmental issue um so i mean that's an important point right that we're not creating a new environmental issue at the same time that we are yeah yeah or or maybe it is but it can only be basically the cure is going to be much better than the disease yeah obviously yeah um so just like you know you take take some medication some maybe there's like slight side effects but but you generally want the medication to be much better than the disease so it just got to make sense like we can see a path to this um to working at scale and solving a problem yeah it has to have some chance of that paresh galani from los angeles one of our vision circle members says who do you think should be paying for the cost of carbon capture is it government oil industry attacks across everyone do you have a sense about that well generally the market systems work very well when prices are accurate and the problem we have right now is that we're not correctly pricing the cost per ton of co2 in the atmosphere and oceans so and there are various attempts to try to get get at this with subsidies and whatnot but but really the market system will work work well if the market systems work well if there is not a pricing error yeah and we have a pricing error in that we are not paying for this externality it's in classic economics it's just an unpriced externality in the uh we're we're not paying for our garbage removal uh so then you know so and so the the logical thing to do and i think the you know vast majority of economists would agree is to uh put a tax on coven and then you can find ways with with tax rebates and whatnot to make sure it's not an aggressive tax that it does not unfairly um you know negatively disproportionately negatively affect uh people on low incomes uh with with uh tax rebates and stuff so i think that's the way to that that's the thing that systemically i think is important to address it if you correctly price something the market system works yeah prices are just information we have the wrong information so uh giulio from dublin says uh do you expect the technologies coming out of this competition to have any uh use on on mars for example and ps thank you for what you're doing for humanity uh yeah i think so interesting thing on mars is um that mars is a primarily co2 atmosphere though it also has some nitrogen and carbon and other trace elements nitrogen and argon i should say in addition to primarily co2 so in order to produce propellant on mars uh would i we would take the co2 from the atmosphere combine that with water ice um mars has a lot of ice under the dust it's amazing that we didn't that 20 years ago that wasn't known i mean we're discovering it every place now yeah yeah mars is just it's basically covered in ice yeah um it's just got dust too so it's hard to see the ice under the dust but uh there's there's i believe um if if you warmed mars up you'd have an ocean with an average death depth i think almost a mile or something like that on the northern part of the of the planet it's like something like 40 of the planet would have an ocean potentially up to a mile mile deep or something like that extraordinary like like a big it wouldn't be like just a little lake or something like that so um so so you take uh the water ice h2o and combine that with the co2 in the atmosphere i use something like this body a process where you run it over a ruthenium catalyst and you get that basically methane yeah again methane ch4 and o2 oxygen and that's um that's actually why we designed the starship to use uh methane oxygen is because we can actually create that refrigerator sustainably yeah in fact literally by pulling the co2 out of the atmosphere that's combining with water and then uh and then using that as propellant and so uh actually by its very nature mars has to have a sustainable um sustainable energy it's a sustainable rocket propellant yeah so let's go to uh india uh rohan kumar from mumbai says why don't you simply implement the available technologies on a larger scale like which technology yeah tree planting i mean i i think there should be more trees i think the i would say that there currently does not exist technologies that can scale to the gigaton level at a reasonable cost and that's the underlying purpose of this competition is to uh to either either demonstrate existing technologies can and teams can use whatever technologies they want or to really innovate and come up with new approaches like yeah yeah it will the thing is that uh generally if if trees can grow somewhere they generally you usually do grow they they you know they like unless they generally yeah there's no one there pulling them out other than humans in the amazon yeah i mean the amazon is quite a thick quite a big big jungle i've flown over the amazon many times and that is one hell of a jungle in fact that like you would fly for long periods of time and see nothing no lights no fires no nothing um just darkness and then eventually like fly over brazilian capital and like out of nowhere there's a bunch of lights um but but there's just this you know in in order to have a big increase in uh in tree biomass we would have we would have to irrigate uh and um you know um provide manure you know like basically fertilizer and we'd have to cultivate make it have hospitable for the trees to grow yes and then you say okay well what's the energy cost of the of the fertilizer and the getting the fresh water there and um you know just making it habitable for trees it's it's you've got to factor in the you know the energy cost the fertilizer and and energy cost the water and all that so it's like okay what's the actual net carbon result it's it's not as good as people might think it's again i'm not saying i'm anti-tree i'm pro-tree but it but it would just be very difficult to blanket the sahara with trees so let's this is an important one here as teams are coming together so grant in washington dc says what is elon's and peter's process of building a strong team and ultimately i think the quality of your team is everything uh yeah sure absolutely so once you get things done how do you i mean when you start a new company like like neuralink or boring uh how do you recruit that first core team well neural link and boring are very small companies they should emphasize like these are um tiny compared to spacex and tesla which is sure well well over 90 percent of what i do is just spacex and tesla so you know near lincoln warren company i reached just a few hundred people um but how do you these teams have 80 000 people that's incredible dude yeah so it's because spacex is like over 8 000 people so but how do you recruit that your initial team to work on something i said do you put out word do you uh do you know somebody typically do you build around somebody else do you pull from your existing companies well it varies i mean um my i mean the first company way back in the day uh zip2 um what i did was um i just wrote software you know so i don't have any money so i came out to what's up two i came out to go do grad studies at stanford um i had a hundred thousand dollars in like student debt and one computer um and i was gonna actually work on um advanced capacitors for using electric vehicles i remember that you're saying that way way back in the day yeah um so and i spent a couple summers working on that before in silicon valley before going to stanford and then that that summer i was like well you know the internet's going to be something that really changes the it's going to be one of the biggest impacts on on humanity you know it's like humanity communication will go from being like osmosis to humanity having a nervous system where you could access any part of humanity's knowledge from from anywhere from any connection anywhere you could be in the middle of the amazon jungle and have access to all of humanity's information more than if somebody was living in the library of congress so it's like well i want to be part of creating that and so i just started writing software i've been writing software for a long time but um i actually wrote the first maps and directions on the internet first white pages first yellow pages by myself um and then you know we hired a few interns and then my brother joined another friend of mine greg currie has passed away and and then we got some venture funding um i thought it was crazy that these guys were gonna give us like they gave us like three million dollars and i was like this is insane it's just us and some interns uh and they're giving us three million dollars this is crazy look at that that makes me mad so i i think what i'm hearing you say is if you know the the first most critical part of the team is you as the as the founder and the passionate news useful things um let's try and squeeze in a few more well i mean i think like yeah the things you get over like for for for spacex it was just literally like okay we we we should become multi you know multi-planet species and um but these are like long answers so but i think in general if you want to recruit people that are you know really talented and driven you have to say you have to state what the what's the mission what's the problem we're trying to solve yep and and uh and just be clearly willing to you know pour a lot of blood sweat and tears into it um and have a convincing argument for why it matters um you know there's gonna say like there's three three major things for um in terms of motivation uh it's like first of all somebody's gotta look forward to coming to work in the morning like if they're like are they enjoying the the work itself intrinsically um that's very important um and uh the right work environment can really make make a big difference there i think the ideally is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive um fair uh financial compensation like that they're that you know that the financial rewards are are good and fair uh and then third for the really the best people in the world they'll want to know are they is what they're doing in a matter yeah like so uh if they spend 10 years doing this it will make a difference in the world or you know will people notice but what matter you know can i get the next question please uh lise uh from san diego says the x prize just awarded 20 million in prize money related to carbon removal uh can you explain what the difference is between that and the musk foundation's x prize uh we had a 20 million dollar uh energy cosia prize for pulling co2 out of the smokestack of a natural gas and coal plant and turning it into a product more profitable in the cost of extraction and we just the two teams that won that were creating uh concrete and uh right they're up and scaling so it's a you know now it's instead of just out of the plants right now and thank you to wyoming uh for their support there it's now can we pull it on a global global level okay um but what sort of tonnage are they able to do uh i actually don't know the answer but uh uh nandan from india says can a 17 year old register uh given that i have the resources and ideas uh yeah i think so sure i think it's not age level there's no age limit where in fact student teams are going to be important um oli from london says technology is a piece the climate change solution but how do you change behavior and habits what do you think about that i think changing people's behavior and habits is tough or basically if you're trying to convince people to make life more miserable for themselves this is a hard argument to win um so with with tesla when we created tesla we're like okay look we we got to make a car that's exciting and and fun and looks good and then people don't have to if you're trying to convince people to that in order to save the environment you have to wear a hair shirt and and make life miserable and your food is going to be terrible it's that's a this is an uphill battle okay so at tesla we're like we're just going to make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars faster yeah lower cost per million they look beautiful they're faster then they have also you know cool advanced technology they're more fun um you don't have to go to gas stations which are nasty um and so you know but you've got to solve long distance problems with superchargers um so i think it is actually you know uh gonna be way more palatable to people if if if it's uh if whatever solution is is removing carbon does not make their quality of life worse yeah one last question here from uh from godfrey in new york um i know godfrey he has got als and uh he is loving his fully self-driving model s okay what i mean it's not fully self-righteous yeah i know but but it's getting there it's getting there it's getting there and uh and so he's i mean for people who are disabled it's extraordinary technology it's coming and he's a brilliant uh brilliant human being he says hi elon big fan of your work massively and eternally grateful to you for being a powerful source of inspiration to me can you please share uh who and what inspires you and drives you to be so insanely productive uh at a superhuman level so what who and what um well i don't know i think i i i was uh i was always kind of like a crazy kid i suppose um i was just very curious about the world and um how do we come to be here what's the meaning of life and all that and i always had a really intense desire to understand things and learn um yeah i mean i had sort of an existential crisis i guess when i was 11 or 12 or something trying to figure out what it's all about you know and uh ultimately came to the conclusion that um we don't really know the answer but uh but if we increase the scope and scale of civilization then we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here or even what are the right questions to ask so therefore we should strive to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the questions to ask about the answer that is the universe yeah well on behalf of uh the human race on behalf of everybody watching elim thank you for all that you do i know you you worked 24 7 and driven by passion so thanks yeah um just uh grateful for what you've done and thank you for supporting and launching this uh this x prize it's meaningful beyond belief and hopefully now it's everybody else's turn to try and dig in and form teams yeah i hope you'll have a good time and and get some some productive stuff coming out of it that'd be great yeah that would be awesome um for everybody uh tuning in i know we have literally thousands of questions we're going to be going to uh to twitter spaces live which is twitter's new audio chat feature dr marcus extravoir and xenia tata and i will be there to engage and answer as many questions as we can about the rules just like twitter's clubhouse this is twitter's clubhouse yes yes okay awesome so um pal uh again uh i'm gonna be there tomorrow morning good luck with the launch yeah it's gonna be a late night i'll i'll be up uh all night um because launch is pretty early in the morning so yeah um i'm gonna i'm gonna tap on you for my invitation to the uh to boca chica for a uh sure a starship flight it's pretty wild seeing that that feels like the future it's pretty insane yeah yeah buck rogers here we come yeah yeah all right see you guys on twitter spaces elon all right thanks peter all right pleasure thank you thanks you

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg

hey boys and girls um we got a special treat for you today um i've gotten the opportunity to uh to meet with mr elon musk and today we're going to talk a little bit about um his aspirations we luckily got a tour through the um program here at uh and brownsville um and i i just seen it says bocachia a gateway to mars so it's it's kind of it's kind of really exciting i was really really happy that i got the chance to to see the the uh the product that's being manufactured here these rockets it's spectacular the way they're doing it and it's totally different than anything i've seen with rocket production at any other company so with that i'd like to introduce mr musk and uh and i guess we'll maybe you could answer a few questions or actually i'd rather i'd rather hear from you than than talk i i've been doing a lot of talking lately and uh um like uh i've had criticisms in the past um of uh of you know were you talking to an interview or something uh yeah no i wasn't in an interview was when i did my reports and uh and the uh and it was what it was okay and even on the the model 3 we have i wanted to show you the gaps on one side but not on the other i i don't understand how that can happen so but i thought your criticisms were were accurate yeah well and so i've got a question um we've been traveling all over the place and suddenly we're fighting we've got a sticker on the side of the car that says the mineral life and people are coming up and showing us their car and telling us about their experiences with a tesla and why not yeah these guys are really uh deep into into loving this thing and it doesn't matter whether it's that eight-year-old or six-year-old kid what that came up mister are you sandy monroe people know and and they they're deeply involved in the tesla and yet for some reason or other we have a couple of little problems with our car and then i see another car and it's a perfect build if i would have had that any any kind of comment or response or whatever from that would be greatly appreciated yeah um well it it took us a while to kind of iron out the production process especially during a production ramp um it's um that's like people like friends cannot ask me like when should they buy a tesla like well either buy it right at the beginning or when the production reaches steady state but during that like production ramp that's it's super hard to you know be like in vertical climb mode and get everything right uh on on the little details it's just a super difficult thing um so um if you really want like things to be dialed it's like actually very very early cars or once once production is leveled off that's when it's going to be best well we noticed that we have a we have a 21 at the model 321 and ours had the little problems but but but at the end of the day this guy's car was fabulous paint jar was spectacular sure but the paint was it was a big deal but now this other car i saw and it was a model 3 with white interior which i personally think is the better color than we got black but that that thing was absolutely pristine perfect that's as good as anybody anybody could possibly do i just don't understand it mine was built this month his was a month later mine had problems his is perfect yeah we actually did improve uh gap and paint quality quite a bit towards the end of last year even even in the course of december there was like um yeah it we were able to really focus on it and improve it a great deal um like one of the things that was happening when we were like ran from production was uh the paint wasn't necessarily drying enough uh so it's like well if you go faster you know it's it's like you you just discover these things like so if we knew them in advance we'd fix them in advance but but like like you ramped the ramp the line and and then uh the paint that had had an extra sort of minute to dry or two minutes or whatever now it doesn't have the two minutes and so it was more prone to uh you know have two issues that might be correct correct this is like one example yeah um and uh yeah it's it's a production as hell like the like the real the thing that's i think unique for cars for tesla is achieving volume production it was like of any american startup car company i i think tesla's like the first to achieve volume production in a hundred years basically like i think chrysler was the last one yeah um and uh so like prototypes i've said it's probably like prototypes are relatively speaking easy and they're also like fun like prototypes are easy and fun and and then reaching volume production for with a reliable product at an affordable price is is like excruciatingly difficult yeah so you've done a good job i mean uh i've seen the difference between the one we had in 2018 then the model y which was that's the first i i never recommended anybody else's but the one the model y when we tore that down um people were coming up hey which one should i buy and i said i'm not into uh doing that but if i'm going to buy an electric car and we've seen everybody's i mean we've torn every everybody's electric car apart if i was going to tell somebody to buy one and he had had to have one i would suggest the model y and lots of people did that this one this model three we've got um this may be the second one that i'm going to suggest you know you can either have one of these two and then i won't have to worry about you coming back and telling me there's something wrong with my skull or something that they they both they both work really well yeah and i have to tell you we've been we've gone about almost 6 000 whatever i can't remember 6 000 plus miles so far in a couple of days in a few days and uh the seats in your car are phenomenal absolutely phenomenal i i can't say enough about them i i i drive a jeep wrangler yeah and uh and if i had to sit in that seat for an hour uh i'd have to get a chiropractor and uh and uh and probably surgery these seats we were sitting in them for hours and hours and hours and hours and there's no fatigue they're brilliant and you make them yourself yeah yeah absolutely so um i mean what we're really trying to do there with the seat is um and we put a lot of effort into this is minimize any peaks and any pressure peaks so it like evens out the pressure yeah like if if your butt hurts it's basically going to be because there's there's some part of the seat that is um producing a a pressure peak yeah and that's that's gonna just cut off your circulation and make your butt hurt um but but there's there's been quite a few iterations in fact i mean we've the early model s's had i think probably the worst seat of any car i've ever said it's like if you wanted to sit on a snow and toadstool that was the early model s seats um now if you sat on it for an ever it barely i guess it's better than a stone toilet stove so because if you started long enough eventually your body your heart would win eventually yeah because your butt can repair itself on the seat cannot yeah so eventually it would be like um acceptably comfortable but it would be a very difficult wearing process um and so we you know we it's like we try to go from okay from stone toed stool to something that is just um i don't know lap election it just feels great you know and um yeah that you can sit in for a long time time and it doesn't it doesn't it's still comfortable that that was a long journey and a lot of effort yeah well yeah it paid off um i like i said we do a lot of work on different things and i would say without a question of a doubt the seats i never read we did no room in the back seats but um we had it filled up with junk but uh but um i would suggest that that seat is in my estimation for my body and when it is the best seat on the planet there's nothing better than that and a lot of the oems they don't they don't want to make seats because they say that's something that should be outsourced and i believe that anything you touch anything that uh that you're going to interface with yes has to be has to be made in-house because that's your profound knowledge so yeah absolutely and you can iterate on it and keep making it better and this this this particular seat um it's it has improved quite a lot from the early production model three and one you know early pressure model three two to present day it's improved a fair bit um and like one of one of the breakthroughs was like actually franz when hull thousand had a seat that the studio had done and and i sat in that seat i'm like wow this seat's great we're like okay let's figure out how to make how do we get a production seat to feel like a bespoke handmade handy tailored seat without costing a ton of money so you just can't it's very difficult to do that if you're working with a supplier you know so well near impossible because they got to get it cranked out and moving and quickly and then what they want to do is they want to take the underpinnings those weldments or castings if they haven't gone that far they want to use those over and over and over again for everybody and so consequently everybody may look different on the outside but inside uh probably not so much so that's that's good stuff but i have to tell you about the best stuff and okay so we had um we had the beta autopilot uh system and um and we did have problems but the problems weren't with your system they were with the roads people are painting either they don't paint in certain areas or they paint right in the center so how are we going to get legislation to make it so that things are consistent between states in the old days it probably didn't make much difference but now we're moving into self-driving and uh well i mean i think for self-driving even if the road is painted completely completely wrong um and a ufo lands in the middle of the road this the car still cannot crash and still needs to do the right thing so the like what really matters like the prime directive for the autopilot system is don't crash like that that really overrides everything um so no matter what lines say or how the road is done the the thing that needs to happen is minimizing the probability of impact while getting you to your destination conveniently and comfortably but but the prime directive absolute priority is minimize probability of of injury to yourself or to anyone on the road on the pedestrians or anything like that so and it's really it can't be dependent on the road markings being correct or anything like that it's just going to be no matter what it's not going to crash well um i still think that that the road commissions in one eye better shape up because like i said corey and i had an issue and luckily and luckily i got out of it but what happened was they painted all kinds of lines all over the place there was an old off-ramp and a new off-ramp and a bunch of cones and some flashing red lights it was totally i have no idea if i had to take that thing and knew i had to take it i would be totally confused as to what to do where but when the car came into it the the lions are telling it okay go here and that scared the living daylights out of me if we would have crashed if it would have been somebody i used to race and i kind of like can get out of stuff and and even though i'm old i'm kind of agile and but if we would have crashed the press would have instantly said it was all your fault and in essence the fault lies in this massive mess that that we were trying to keep up with and then quite frankly i stopped driving in the in the right-hand lane that was it i mean the car wants you to keep going back there because it wants you to follow the rules but you can change that it's a setting oh really yeah you'll have to show us that because uh i don't like uh i don't like that one but but it's it's it's following it's following the rules and that's great but you have to have the roads at the same sort of thing so i want to make sure that we've got this on tape or on whatever not tape but but video because i'm guaranteeing you somebody is going to screw up somewhere and and and people have to know it's the road that can bugger the things up as well as whether your stu your uh your autopilot thing i mean it would certainly be helpful to have roads with uh accurate markings and everything uh but like i said the really for self-driving it's got to be even if somebody tries to trick the car they do not succeed in tricking the car right um because you know people will do weird things so it's got to be maintain safety no matter what and don't let yourself get tricked that's yeah so well maybe that's the best segue ever because what i want to do is i wanted to talk about um i i actually uh john what's john's last name no no the guy that led us gave us a ride yeah okay well i'll just say john l.a silicon valley yeah la silicon valley whatever i thought anyways so anyways he um um he gave us a ride okay and and we taped it and you can hear me going you know my voice went up about three octaves i was so excited um corey said he's got a sore ear for me giggling or whatever i have nev i've sat in in f-18s i didn't fly them but i was sat in them and i saw how everything was supposed to work on the ground yeah i i flew or through a simulator i flew a c-17 i know what you can do and what you can't do what autopilot will go to and i never seen anything never ever seen anything quite like what you've got in the new self-driving thing this this is just absolutely brilliant this should get into the marketplace as fast as possible it's it's it's accurate it's much more accurate than what we have in the in the model 3. it's accurate it's it's kind of aggressive because if there's a hole it'll it'll find that hole it makes left-hand turns which i've heard from everybody can't be done i mean these are the things that this is the this will save more lives and airbags seat belts and anything else that anybody's ever ever gotten because that's correct yeah i i really i i was so impressed i i couldn't believe it and i have some videotape and i just asked you for using it i i want to put that out i want to i want the rest of the world to know what the new standard is because in the auto world some people are going to win some people are going to lose and some are going to fade away the more they fade away the worse it's going to be for the for the general population but i'm telling you that that system i don't know who you developed or how it developed but that is absolutely developed like we developed the hardware and the software um uh we've just got we've got a very talented team that we bought from scratch uh at tesla for autopilot software and autopilot hardware um and uh yeah it's uh just we've got really a lot of talented people again i gotta ask a technical question how many lines of code is in that in that thing a bazillion a trillion whatever what uh well i don't think lines of code is necessarily a metric of goodness uh well maybe but i mean it's so it's so it's so intuitive either that or it's ai and it's cognitive knowledge or something i don't know but yeah i think generally the i would consider lines of code to be i like a large number of lines of code to be bad not good um and in fact i would generally give like two points for deleting a line of code one point for adding a line of code um so uh and and then like the lines code thing when you when you have neural nets uh where you've um right i got it it's it's not you know it there's a whole whole lot of statistics going on basically a lot of dot products yeah um going on um the lines of code is becomes especially uh not a merit figure merit for when you've got a lot of complex neural nets operating um you have a lot of matrix math uh i mean that said i think we haven't actually counted it but i mean it's maybe i don't know a few hundred thousand lines of code that's amazing i'd like it to be less you know well your your philosophy about getting rid of uh lines of code i have a philosophy about getting rid of parts so the more parts you get written in fact uh a long time ago when i counted up the number of things in the in the wheel area uh i said this should all be one part and then totally agree yeah and you yeah you got it actually i can tell you how that that problem arose um and it it it was uh you know um like first of all i think you can generally see the the errors the organizational structure errors they manifest themselves in the product so um for uh the you know um the the sort of wheelhouse areas of the body uh uh there was a lot of engineering done and there were a lot of uh right answers to the wrong question um so somebody would say like well what's the best material to make this little section of the body out of and what's the right materials make this little section and and i think we've got probably the best material science team uh in the world um at tesla and then actually uh a lot of them also just do work at spacex as well yeah i know i'm coming to that question too or yeah yeah but so uh the the engineers would ask what's the best material for this this purpose best behavior for that and and they got like 50 different answers and they were all true individually but they were not true collectively right um and so and when you when you try to join all these dissimilar metal you know similar alloys and uh you you have galvanic corrosion so you cannot you've got to have better seal and you've got gaps that you've got to seal and you know i've got to join these things and some of them don't some of them need to be joined with rivets some need to be joined with spot welds something needs to be done with resin or resin and spot welds and it looks you know frankly it looks like a sort of bit of a frankenstein situation when you when you look at it um all together um and and it's uh i can i can't emphasize enough the nightmare of of ceiling in between the gaps that is like uh that might be the most painful job in the whole factory is is spackling on the the sealant yeah um and then you make you have a little if there's like if there's like a little error with curing the sealant or like like just somebody who's been working you know for several hours makes a slight mistake then you've got like it now you've got an mbh issue because you've got a little hole and you've got a leak issue and it's it's just like this is terrible so um i mean you can muscle through it and we have but it's just uh way better to have a single piece casting um and then you don't have any gaps no sealant uh you don't have dissimilar metals and you can uh reduce the size of the body shop dramatically right um so just just having the the rear body castings for model y uh allowed us to reduce the the body shop by 30 percent yeah so there's roughly a thousand robots uh on the model 3 body line which by the way is also not a figure of merit you want fewer things not more yeah um we got rid of 300 robots uh just with that rear body casting yeah and then when we go to the front body casting we'll get rid of another 300 robots right so i don't know if you well you probably don't have time for my stuff but i have in my shop for 15 years a rear casting a center casting and a front casting to make a car yeah i always totally agree thousands of engineers and i mean uh big big time uh executives walk by it hey have you ever thought of doing oh you know sandy and they don't do it and they don't do it because we got this body shop sure and and because they've continuously hung their hat on this thing they figured you know this is the way it should go but when you came up oh i will tell you i'm very disappointed i thought i was going to see a single piece casting in a model 3 as well i thought you were going to shoot the two and then glue it together but that's all right i mean at some point i'm getting over probably switched to a single piece casting uh but um it's it's like uh we i think we need to get the probably the texas factory and the berlin factory going um yeah and uh like we just we need a like we do have an issue of like it's hard to change the wheels on the bus where it's going to 80 miles an hour down the highway yeah so uh you know model 3 is like most of our or what is most about volume model y will become it will exceed model model three um but it's just we we just need basically an opportunity to kind of redo the factory without blowing up the cash flow of the company yeah i mean i understand the you've got a lot of stuff in place so uh we're looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in berlin um that that's one i'm really really interested in because quite frankly uh you're a lot closer to you know you're a lot closer to the the um the casting companies and germany has fabulous tool maker so i'm expecting to see lots of good stuff out of that are you going to have to or maybe you don't want to talk about that but are you going to have three castings then or just a two well effectively there'll be a rear casting a front casting and then the center will be a structural pack yeah so structural pack is also this is an important thing uh that i've been wanting to do for since the beginning of the company um but it was it was always tough to kind of like because it's a coupled problem so like and and when when you're in uh sort of high-speed r d you're it's you really you often want to decouple the problems can try to solve uh electrical issues in the battery uh and you're trying to solve structural issues and if you bring them together then it's it it's hard you know you're you're putting the whole the whole company at risk basically yeah but now since we have model three model y in production um we and and we have a new factory that's getting built um this is our opportunity to say okay now we're going to do a couple problem where we're going to combine the the battery pack and the basically body chassis the primary structure the primary structure and uh we're gonna transfer share uh through the the the cans of the of the cells um and just to you know shear transfer which is gives you a super stiff um you know real great moment of inertia it's like a carbon they do this with carbon fiber you know and composite sandwich like have an aluminum honeycomb with upper lower carbon face sheets um and you get incredible um sheer transfer unless you're a great moment of inertia for it you get a real stiff big plate um and so getting dual use of the the cells and like so the cells become structure um and that's like what a point i was trying to make at the um a battery drape presentation but i think a lot of people didn't quite understand why that's such an important thing um you know the the cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes they have they actually have negative uh structural value um because not only they need to be not only they don't serve to aid in the structure of the car and they um they have to be isolated from the rest you know from the rest of the car so it's isolated from you know vibration and shock loads that kind of thing so so then you've got to put mass into isolating the cells um because otherwise they'll bang against the side of the the battery casing and that's that's not good um but by essentially binding the cells in there um and where the bonding foam uh serves as both a an adhesive and a fire retardant yeah it's you you basically get you get you know two bows with one stone exactly yeah so multifunctional designs is something i really really try and uh get my the companies that i work with i try and get them to do that and uh we got a ton of people right after the the battery your battery show saying oh you can't do this you can't do that so we made one up or made a wood blocks and went down and said this is what's going to be and then we i talked a little bit about um you know what the effect is and the loading and transfer of loading and how much safer and stronger this is going to be on and on it's the highest rating i think it's the highest rated uh show we've ever put out i'm just explaining uh you know why this is such a good idea because you got you got people you know designing cars all over the planet and they're telling me why it's not a good idea and i'm saying tell me again i mean really you're an engineer that you this is the kind of stuff that that really needs to have happened yeah i think it likes to be helpful to show and tell because if you say like um you know shear transfer using a steel cancer shear transfer between upper and lower uh face sheets what does that actually mean like well let's show you uh you know this is what happens if you've got just a little floppy sheet or or you just have like a limited number of uh stringers for shear transfer you can see it's like it's still it's quite bendy um but as soon as you have a whole bunch of cans or honeycomb or anything like that and you bond an upper lower face sheet it gets crazy stiff like you can't bend like you just put them together like one thing's floppy and the other thing is stiff as hell um and that's really what you want and then um this this will give also give like um like the torsional rigidity won't be much better and so if you're like you're trying to improve like the the the ride and feel of the car you say like you know what what's the what's the frequency of this car is it like a like a sort of real bendy spring or is it like tight um and that feeling of like is this car tight really if people don't understand why does this car feel better than the other cars like well because you've got your natural frequency is high and you've got good torsional rigidity and then another factor is like what is your problem moment of inertia so like basically to what degree is like the mass group towards the center as opposed to spread out towards the outside um and like you can see this like with like an ice skater where if the ice skater holds arms out it you rotate slowly brings arms in rotate fast that's what polar that's that's what's meant by polar moment of inertia exactly so it's like can you rotate this car fast uh you can if you bring the mass to center right and and quite frankly we've had lots of people discussing you know the pros and cons here but to me you were saying well we got two for one but you really got three for one yeah because now you've got body stiffness that's gone up and all the other stuff that's going along with it right and and then on top of that you've got um i i when people say well what's it like to drive the car because again we've stopped in lots of different places and i tell them if you uh if you get a 7 series bmw and drive that that's what you're basically getting it's the same sort of a suspension feel as that and it and you don't have to you're not muscling anything around everything is tight and perfect and tight's a good and then if you when you go to the when you go to those three let's say three structural members that i mean if you put a body on top of that it's going to be a perfect build and as a as a guy who had to work in body shops and as a guy who used to make molds and dyes and whatnot it's really difficult to take a whole bunch of pieces and glue them together and there's no nothing right i'm just using fixtures and then some you're gonna have to stack up i mean that's the issue yeah it's like uh if you've got a whole bunch of separate parts and each of them has got a given tolerance um even if that tolerance is tight and it could be like you know 0.2 millimeter tolerance but you've got like 50 parts okay now yeah you know and you multiply them together yeah and you can't win exactly you're gonna also have like just variants between cars so um that's for sure like one of the reasons why it's best to just combine the parts and not have separate parts uh and then also just go for extreme levels of precision um like you know one of the examples uh uh you know we use tesla is like lego so like lego is super precise because the press fit um i think they're precise down to uh you know about a quarter millimeter or less um you know basically about ten thou and and each one is exactly the same yeah it's going to be like if the lego if lego's like two presses is is too soft or too hard like it was too soft the precipitate won't work it's too hard you can't get it on right um so uh but they can get make something to that that is like a tiny fraction of a millimeter accurate and it's a low-cost toy right you know by 20 bucks for a lego set um and um and so so like if lego can be that precise and so could a car exactly yeah actually um i i got to tell you i i applaud bmw for putting out the i3 but it ugly but the uh but the thing that we got from it was that carbon fiber body was absolutely perfect and when you have if you had the stiffness of the castings down below and you take a carbon fiber basically structure and put it over the top absolutely every door is always going to be perfect you won't have to have fixtures you won't have to have anything it just goes boom done that's ultimately what i think a perfect build is probably going to go for but most people don't want to do it because they're talking about oh carbon fire is so expensive no it's not it's not really that expensive and and at the end of the day you have to take it and look at it a total account it cost yeah how much does it cost to basically where's all the tooling and whatnot how about all the scrap that you get on and on and on yeah i mean there are some other issues with carbon fiber which is that you know carb fiber with resin has a coefficient of thermal expansion which is basically zero and if you have parts that are say aluminum or steel uh that's you know aluminum's got quite a high you know cte um stainless has it's like about halfway yes you know so it's like um so then you know if you have like a hot versus a cold environment like you can't have your doors jam yeah so having uh you know matching matching cte is pretty important for things like a door frame um all right you know so that's uh you know if so if we're using say steel we probably need to stay with a steel door because otherwise we're going to get like cte issues yeah but at the end of the day we found out the tricks that that bmw used so they've got cross car beams which is going to shrink the most and they're embedded right into the carbon fibers how is that possible this will rip free we tried this when i worked on the boeing 787 and stuff yeah and we tried that and when we you know you do the thermal expansion and contraction it rips free from everything but clever design or clever engineering on bmw's part made it so that you could do that so i'm not saying you know run out and do this right now but eventually you guys are material science experts i mean you make your own we know sure a little bit about what's inside those electric motors and and actually the the aluminum used for the for the mega castings these things all nobody has anything like that nobody's using it most people i mean they develop our own allies like so it's like some of the challenges with uh with doing like a large aluminum casting there is you don't want to have um a a a sort of a heat crate or quench step afterwards so like like uh often in order to get good properties from uh aluminum you need to you know yeah yeah well if yeah if you want to if you you want to heat heat treat it and and then the heat treating uh and any kind of like arrow certainly no water quench uh or it's it's going to cause the the things get a potato chip on you it's going to basically warp um so we had to develop a a custom alloy to make sure we could get good material properties but not require a any step after the casting that could distort the shape that was actually that's an important that's like a very important thing um for example like the model s uh and nx castings they um for the you know original model s not the new one but the for the original they required a heat treat step right afterwards and and so it was always a pain in the neck because we couldn't really expand the casting because it would it would run pretzel on us like just potato chip or pretzel it's like uh not not uh you can't scale that so yeah threatened about development alley that was okay and had good also had good elongation properties in the event of a crash there's like kind of a hard materials problem so well it worked out really well and the uh no one believes me i know a fair amount about you know casting and why not and uh no one believes when i say you know it fills up in four to six milliseconds oh that's impossible really well okay fine that that kind of stuff um is lost on most engineers because they don't take materials so i wanted to be a mental urges yeah mature science is i think one of the most useful classes you can take in engineering for sure absolutely um i mean um the the area that our department i was going to be in at stanford for grad studies before i kind of put that on hold slash dropped out basically uh was material science yeah so yeah well i'm a big fan of material science well i i am as well i think that uh i think that that's something that i saw disappear when i was at ford motor company because of the things that were going on uh in the uh late 80s and uh sorry the late 70s and early 80s and they just had to shed some stuff and that went away uh like they don't they don't invent materials there anymore and actually no one else did either or does either um so i think that those kinds of things um are the things that maybe the bigger oems should be thinking about i think bringing stuff back in especially now i mean i don't need the size of an engine plant and a transmission plant and i got a little dinky electric motor and a and basically a two-speed gearbox or one speed gearbox i mean that's uh that's that's that's going to be a big big difference i don't know what they're going to do with all that stuff i really don't know how um how they're going to start implementing this i mean you may have heard that general motors said that 2035 they're going to be nothing but electric cars that's cool well that's uh that's a pretty big step um i've been saying for a long time in fact i had a lot of inch a lot of executives come in after i gave a speech and said uh this was a couple of years ago now and i said that the crossover point for electric um over ice is 20 30. and uh basically that was because of tearing apart your car the model three majority of your car would say crossover point how you're finding it fifty percent of the vehicles are going to be are sold are going to be um or more than 50 percent are going to be a pure eevee or they're going to be hybrid and um and hybrid like you know for sure i think it probably ten years it's probably a majority ev yeah i i truly believe that but when i brought it out i mean the analysts i don't want to get too far deep into that but analysts were saying you know maybe somewhere around 20 45 there'll be about uh you know 15 percent ev's and whatever and now we're looking at california with eight percent right now and going higher and then you've got europe saying forget it you can't drive here if you've got a if you've got a nice vehicle on and on and on so a lot of people were hoping that everything was going to stay the way it was or basically go back to the good old days as it were i was not i was i i was in your camp like i say when i got your car initially and there really been i didn't care one way or another car's a car we take it apart we look inside we find out how much it costs and what the techniques and technologies are and then we must move on sure with yours um initially i don't like this i don't like that then i drove it um because i was the last one to drive that vehicle and he said you should really take this thing for a ride and see what it and i took it into a parking lot there's a college that's near us and i zipped around and whatnot and i'm i feel young again this i didn't expect that that that excitement and then we started looking at the electronics and how much better even the wiring is in well i think the wiring was so we have a lot to improve on the wiring front um i think there's a lot more that can be done to improve wiring yeah well right now also like 12 volts i mean what are we still doing with 12 volts 42 is where everybody should be but i think 48. more 48 yeah but but at the end of the day we we we need to do something that'll that'll reduce the wire diameters and stuff like that and yeah and that's just nothing but cash in the bank yeah so uh so i'm a big fan of that as well with the new sx we're also we're we're finally transitioning to a lithium-ion uh 12-volt uh so oh good yes it's an excellent idea smaller box it's got you know way more capacity and and the the the the calendar and cycle life match that of the main pack so we should have done it before now but it's great that we're doing it now also like this is one of those like you know inside baseball victories that's yeah kind of a big deal um but yeah like the 12 volts is like very much a vestigial voltage yeah and it's like absurdly low um so um i mean even like basically powered ethernet is like around 50 volts yeah um and so so you can have like powered ethernet nobody's like sweating at that like there's a power to ethernet this like phone here um nobody's worried about like powered ethernet like whatever 40 48 50 volts um that's that's really what the car the car's low voltage system should be at yeah absolutely i agree in fact when we talk about the y i was expecting to see that because you'd said that you're getting rid of weight and uh and the length of wires and whatnot and when i pulled it off the harness looked kind of similar so it is what it is you really want to you really want to put you want to put power and data over the same wires that's right and and have it be a high speed like higher speed than can bus right and so so you can like basically uh dump data on the bus instead of having all these point-to-point wires absolutely that's that's kind of like uh what i was kind of hoping i would see when we we took apart the y but again you say same thing it's hard to change the tires when you're going 80 miles an hour so i guess the the last thing is uh probably um probably the most controversial um you made comments which i've been saying for years um at monroe if you uh if you want to if you want to get your masters i'll pay for it if you want to take a course in um mechanics or something i'll pay for it if you even if you want to take a wood carving thing i'll pay for it but i will not pay for an mba i won't do it ever never so you made a comment and i uh i started tap dancing because uh people listen to you i don't get the same kind of respect but people listen to you and i really really was excited uh when you when you talked about about that uh so if you can elaborate on that a little bit that that would be great yeah i think just generally the the path to leadership should not be uh through um you know basically nba business school situation it's it's like it should be kind of work your way up do useful things and um you know and there's a bit too much of the somebody goes to a high-profile mba school and then kind of parachutes in as the as the leader but they don't actually know how things work um they you know they could be good at say powerpoint presentations or something like that um and they can present well but they don't actually know how things work because they do not um you know they're they're kind of like just not aware of what's really needed for uh you know to make to make great products um so i mean i don't want to trash mbas too much here and i actually do have a dual undergrad wharton undergrad and physics um at upenn so um you know i have like you know it's like i have direct exposure to to uh um you know to business school and i went you know to do undergrad business school with with physics but um and i was a teaching assistant for two semesters and i graded mbas and uh undergrads um so uh but i think it's just a little bit too much like like people look at mba school as like i want to parachute into being the boss instead of earning it and like i don't think that's that's good like yeah well speaking of not good and this might be the last thing i've never really been a fan of short sellers i i don't know whether you have a comment on that well i think that the you know there's there's very few areas in life where you can you can sell things that you don't own um and the short selling really really um where you can sell shares that you don't own uh when i said it was vestigial i mean it came from an era when uh stock stocks were traded by people traveling on horseback uh to exchange stock certificates and in order to have the the transaction speed not be like not take weeks somebody would say well the the stock certificate is coming on that horse i don't have the stock certificate right now but i promise you that i'm getting the stock certificate uh and the writer is going to be here i mean new york writers going to be here from chicago in three days and then and then i'll be able to give you the stock certificate that's where this whole silly thing arose um but then but then the problem is like the way short selling is used today is it's it's kind of like a uh it's frankly used against the public you know and so the most people aren't aware that short selling even exists and then the ones that are uh very few of them know how no actually how to use it it's basically like .01 of stockholders know how to use uh short positions to to get ahead and it's so it's it's like i think effectively attacks on the public i think it's immoral myself i just don't think it's right at all yeah a big group can come in and crush a company simply because well we're going to make a lot of money i haven't made my haven't made my quota this month or what have you so i i really don't care for it yeah i mean tesla was under a massive attack by the short and distort where they take a short position and then they do everything possible to trash the company in every six ways to sunday um and they were successful um and and this has now happened to tesla twice it happened in 2013 and it happened in in basically 2017 through through 2019 um and uh i mean the intensity of the attack was was was crazy and i was like man this this you know it would like cause you to lose faith in humanity the the greed of this wish this went on um and like we don't have shorting in like private companies the vast majority of companies over 90 are are private and you cannot short them and yet somehow we get you know private companies get things done so there's there's a a a a perniciously false uh effective markets argument made for a shorting and it's it but it is vice disguised as virtue well at the end of the day um we had a common uh um a common um adversary and um um i'm really hoping that now because uh he's bad on oil and uh and biden is basically clobbered oil in a lot of different directions i'm sure that um um he'll be skeptical about doing um any more trades um on a short end anyways i can't thank you enough i i'd really like to shake your hand thank you so much thank you for for giving us the time and uh i i can't say enough about a lot of stuff but i really can't say them i the most exciting thing that's happened to me in a long time was driving that uh the the self-driving uh the self-driving uh i'm telling you it's just sure it's it blows your mind are you gonna are you gonna let anybody else have that yeah of course i mean we're gonna roll out the um pulsar driving to the whole fleet and make it available to the whole fleet we're just being very careful about the testing um and um i think there's actually sort of a dangerous uh middle ground that would be careful of where the the system is is good like 99.9 of the time and and that could lead people to be uh complacent and and then uh but then that one time where it's got issues that that you know we don't want people to basically it can be so good that you you get comfortable but not not initially good enough to handle all of the corner cases um so we we want to just make sure that in that transition to full self driving it's really um we're taking as much care as possible yeah well i'm i'm i was happy with what we had on the uh on the uh autopilot um it's the first time i've ever gotten a chance to see what the scenery looks like i always just do lines now i can have a look around and feel comfortable or confident that my hands are on the wheel and if something goes wrong i can correct but i can also enjoy what's going on yeah i mean the like you know so publicly but basically the a car that does not have self-driving in the future will be about as popular as a horse horses are they're still horses people have horses and they're they're but they're they're it's a horse is not what you use for day-to-day transport no yeah but even even a horse will get you home sometimes if uh in the olden days they'd get drunk fall asleep in a buck board and no horse would take him home self-driving as far as i'm concerned we're just getting back well i think actually that's that's one of the things we're we're going to program into the car that if if you if you if you fall asleep in the car it'll just take you home yeah like it's most likely that's where you want to go yes um that's a great idea yeah um and then we're even gonna have it like so um if it detects that you're having issues it'll take you to the hospital like you say like you know just like yeah having a heart attack or something yes it'll just take you straight to emergency room well i think i mentioned this already i think that the self-driving feature is going to save more lives than seat belts airbags and every other thing that we've done to cars combined because that's that's the way to go absolutely i mean worldwide there's about a million people a year uh dying in car accidents and that's a hell of a lot and yeah so there's like 10 million people that get seriously injured so it's like you know we got to hustle on this yeah and and why not we got the technology to do it yep anyway thanks very much elon all right anyways i'm i'm so flattered i'm so happy i got a chance to meet you all right talk to you shake your hand thank you so much [Music] you

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg

hey boys and girls um we got a special treat for you today um i've gotten the opportunity to uh to meet with mr elon musk and today we're going to talk a little bit about um his aspirations we luckily got a tour through the um program here at uh and brownsville um and i i just seen it says bocachia a gateway to mars so it's it's kind of it's kind of really exciting i was really really happy that i got the chance to to see the the uh the product that's being manufactured here these rockets it's spectacular the way they're doing it and it's totally different than anything i've seen with rocket production at any other company so with that i'd like to introduce mr musk and uh and i guess we'll maybe you could answer a few questions or actually i'd rather i'd rather hear from you than than talk i i've been doing a lot of talking lately and uh um like uh i've had criticisms in the past um of uh of you know were you talking to an interview or something uh yeah no i wasn't in an interview was when i did my reports and uh and the uh and it was what it was okay and even on the the model 3 we have i wanted to show you the gaps on one side but not on the other i i don't understand how that can happen so but i thought your criticisms were were accurate yeah well and so i've got a question um we've been traveling all over the place and suddenly we're fighting we've got a sticker on the side of the car that says the mineral life and people are coming up and showing us their car and telling us about their experiences with a tesla and why not yeah these guys are really uh deep into into loving this thing and it doesn't matter whether it's that eight-year-old or six-year-old kid what that came up mister are you sandy monroe people know and and they they're deeply involved in the tesla and yet for some reason or other we have a couple of little problems with our car and then i see another car and it's a perfect build if i would have had that any any kind of comment or response or whatever from that would be greatly appreciated yeah um well it it took us a while to kind of iron out the production process especially during a production ramp um it's um that's like people like friends cannot ask me like when should they buy a tesla like well either buy it right at the beginning or when the production reaches steady state but during that like production ramp that's it's super hard to you know be like in vertical climb mode and get everything right uh on on the little details it's just a super difficult thing um so um if you really want like things to be dialed it's like actually very very early cars or once once production is leveled off that's when it's going to be best well we noticed that we have a we have a 21 at the model 321 and ours had the little problems but but but at the end of the day this guy's car was fabulous paint jar was spectacular sure but the paint was it was a big deal but now this other car i saw and it was a model 3 with white interior which i personally think is the better color than we got black but that that thing was absolutely pristine perfect that's as good as anybody anybody could possibly do i just don't understand it mine was built this month his was a month later mine had problems his is perfect yeah we actually did improve uh gap and paint quality quite a bit towards the end of last year even even in the course of december there was like um yeah it we were able to really focus on it and improve it a great deal um like one of the things that was happening when we were like ran from production was uh the paint wasn't necessarily drying enough uh so it's like well if you go faster you know it's it's like you you just discover these things like so if we knew them in advance we'd fix them in advance but but like like you ramped the ramp the line and and then uh the paint that had had an extra sort of minute to dry or two minutes or whatever now it doesn't have the two minutes and so it was more prone to uh you know have two issues that might be correct correct this is like one example yeah um and uh yeah it's it's a production as hell like the like the real the thing that's i think unique for cars for tesla is achieving volume production it was like of any american startup car company i i think tesla's like the first to achieve volume production in a hundred years basically like i think chrysler was the last one yeah um and uh so like prototypes i've said it's probably like prototypes are relatively speaking easy and they're also like fun like prototypes are easy and fun and and then reaching volume production for with a reliable product at an affordable price is is like excruciatingly difficult yeah so you've done a good job i mean uh i've seen the difference between the one we had in 2018 then the model y which was that's the first i i never recommended anybody else's but the one the model y when we tore that down um people were coming up hey which one should i buy and i said i'm not into uh doing that but if i'm going to buy an electric car and we've seen everybody's i mean we've torn every everybody's electric car apart if i was going to tell somebody to buy one and he had had to have one i would suggest the model y and lots of people did that this one this model three we've got um this may be the second one that i'm going to suggest you know you can either have one of these two and then i won't have to worry about you coming back and telling me there's something wrong with my skull or something that they they both they both work really well yeah and i have to tell you we've been we've gone about almost 6 000 whatever i can't remember 6 000 plus miles so far in a couple of days in a few days and uh the seats in your car are phenomenal absolutely phenomenal i i can't say enough about them i i i drive a jeep wrangler yeah and uh and if i had to sit in that seat for an hour uh i'd have to get a chiropractor and uh and uh and probably surgery these seats we were sitting in them for hours and hours and hours and hours and there's no fatigue they're brilliant and you make them yourself yeah yeah absolutely so um i mean what we're really trying to do there with the seat is um and we put a lot of effort into this is minimize any peaks and any pressure peaks so it like evens out the pressure yeah like if if your butt hurts it's basically going to be because there's there's some part of the seat that is um producing a a pressure peak yeah and that's that's gonna just cut off your circulation and make your butt hurt um but but there's there's been quite a few iterations in fact i mean we've the early model s's had i think probably the worst seat of any car i've ever said it's like if you wanted to sit on a snow and toadstool that was the early model s seats um now if you sat on it for an ever it barely i guess it's better than a stone toilet stove so because if you started long enough eventually your body your heart would win eventually yeah because your butt can repair itself on the seat cannot yeah so eventually it would be like um acceptably comfortable but it would be a very difficult wearing process um and so we you know we it's like we try to go from okay from stone toed stool to something that is just um i don't know lap election it just feels great you know and um yeah that you can sit in for a long time time and it doesn't it doesn't it's still comfortable that that was a long journey and a lot of effort yeah well yeah it paid off um i like i said we do a lot of work on different things and i would say without a question of a doubt the seats i never read we did no room in the back seats but um we had it filled up with junk but uh but um i would suggest that that seat is in my estimation for my body and when it is the best seat on the planet there's nothing better than that and a lot of the oems they don't they don't want to make seats because they say that's something that should be outsourced and i believe that anything you touch anything that uh that you're going to interface with yes has to be has to be made in-house because that's your profound knowledge so yeah absolutely and you can iterate on it and keep making it better and this this this particular seat um it's it has improved quite a lot from the early production model three and one you know early pressure model three two to present day it's improved a fair bit um and like one of one of the breakthroughs was like actually franz when hull thousand had a seat that the studio had done and and i sat in that seat i'm like wow this seat's great we're like okay let's figure out how to make how do we get a production seat to feel like a bespoke handmade handy tailored seat without costing a ton of money so you just can't it's very difficult to do that if you're working with a supplier you know so well near impossible because they got to get it cranked out and moving and quickly and then what they want to do is they want to take the underpinnings those weldments or castings if they haven't gone that far they want to use those over and over and over again for everybody and so consequently everybody may look different on the outside but inside uh probably not so much so that's that's good stuff but i have to tell you about the best stuff and okay so we had um we had the beta autopilot uh system and um and we did have problems but the problems weren't with your system they were with the roads people are painting either they don't paint in certain areas or they paint right in the center so how are we going to get legislation to make it so that things are consistent between states in the old days it probably didn't make much difference but now we're moving into self-driving and uh well i mean i think for self-driving even if the road is painted completely completely wrong um and a ufo lands in the middle of the road this the car still cannot crash and still needs to do the right thing so the like what really matters like the prime directive for the autopilot system is don't crash like that that really overrides everything um so no matter what lines say or how the road is done the the thing that needs to happen is minimizing the probability of impact while getting you to your destination conveniently and comfortably but but the prime directive absolute priority is minimize probability of of injury to yourself or to anyone on the road on the pedestrians or anything like that so and it's really it can't be dependent on the road markings being correct or anything like that it's just going to be no matter what it's not going to crash well um i still think that that the road commissions in one eye better shape up because like i said corey and i had an issue and luckily and luckily i got out of it but what happened was they painted all kinds of lines all over the place there was an old off-ramp and a new off-ramp and a bunch of cones and some flashing red lights it was totally i have no idea if i had to take that thing and knew i had to take it i would be totally confused as to what to do where but when the car came into it the the lions are telling it okay go here and that scared the living daylights out of me if we would have crashed if it would have been somebody i used to race and i kind of like can get out of stuff and and even though i'm old i'm kind of agile and but if we would have crashed the press would have instantly said it was all your fault and in essence the fault lies in this massive mess that that we were trying to keep up with and then quite frankly i stopped driving in the in the right-hand lane that was it i mean the car wants you to keep going back there because it wants you to follow the rules but you can change that it's a setting oh really yeah you'll have to show us that because uh i don't like uh i don't like that one but but it's it's it's following it's following the rules and that's great but you have to have the roads at the same sort of thing so i want to make sure that we've got this on tape or on whatever not tape but but video because i'm guaranteeing you somebody is going to screw up somewhere and and and people have to know it's the road that can bugger the things up as well as whether your stu your uh your autopilot thing i mean it would certainly be helpful to have roads with uh accurate markings and everything uh but like i said the really for self-driving it's got to be even if somebody tries to trick the car they do not succeed in tricking the car right um because you know people will do weird things so it's got to be maintain safety no matter what and don't let yourself get tricked that's yeah so well maybe that's the best segue ever because what i want to do is i wanted to talk about um i i actually uh john what's john's last name no no the guy that led us gave us a ride yeah okay well i'll just say john l.a silicon valley yeah la silicon valley whatever i thought anyways so anyways he um um he gave us a ride okay and and we taped it and you can hear me going you know my voice went up about three octaves i was so excited um corey said he's got a sore ear for me giggling or whatever i have nev i've sat in in f-18s i didn't fly them but i was sat in them and i saw how everything was supposed to work on the ground yeah i i flew or through a simulator i flew a c-17 i know what you can do and what you can't do what autopilot will go to and i never seen anything never ever seen anything quite like what you've got in the new self-driving thing this this is just absolutely brilliant this should get into the marketplace as fast as possible it's it's it's accurate it's much more accurate than what we have in the in the model 3. it's accurate it's it's kind of aggressive because if there's a hole it'll it'll find that hole it makes left-hand turns which i've heard from everybody can't be done i mean these are the things that this is the this will save more lives and airbags seat belts and anything else that anybody's ever ever gotten because that's correct yeah i i really i i was so impressed i i couldn't believe it and i have some videotape and i just asked you for using it i i want to put that out i want to i want the rest of the world to know what the new standard is because in the auto world some people are going to win some people are going to lose and some are going to fade away the more they fade away the worse it's going to be for the for the general population but i'm telling you that that system i don't know who you developed or how it developed but that is absolutely developed like we developed the hardware and the software um uh we've just got we've got a very talented team that we bought from scratch uh at tesla for autopilot software and autopilot hardware um and uh yeah it's uh just we've got really a lot of talented people again i gotta ask a technical question how many lines of code is in that in that thing a bazillion a trillion whatever what uh well i don't think lines of code is necessarily a metric of goodness uh well maybe but i mean it's so it's so it's so intuitive either that or it's ai and it's cognitive knowledge or something i don't know but yeah i think generally the i would consider lines of code to be i like a large number of lines of code to be bad not good um and in fact i would generally give like two points for deleting a line of code one point for adding a line of code um so uh and and then like the lines code thing when you when you have neural nets uh where you've um right i got it it's it's not you know it there's a whole whole lot of statistics going on basically a lot of dot products yeah um going on um the lines of code is becomes especially uh not a merit figure merit for when you've got a lot of complex neural nets operating um you have a lot of matrix math uh i mean that said i think we haven't actually counted it but i mean it's maybe i don't know a few hundred thousand lines of code that's amazing i'd like it to be less you know well your your philosophy about getting rid of uh lines of code i have a philosophy about getting rid of parts so the more parts you get written in fact uh a long time ago when i counted up the number of things in the in the wheel area uh i said this should all be one part and then totally agree yeah and you yeah you got it actually i can tell you how that that problem arose um and it it it was uh you know um like first of all i think you can generally see the the errors the organizational structure errors they manifest themselves in the product so um for uh the you know um the the sort of wheelhouse areas of the body uh uh there was a lot of engineering done and there were a lot of uh right answers to the wrong question um so somebody would say like well what's the best material to make this little section of the body out of and what's the right materials make this little section and and i think we've got probably the best material science team uh in the world um at tesla and then actually uh a lot of them also just do work at spacex as well yeah i know i'm coming to that question too or yeah yeah but so uh the the engineers would ask what's the best material for this this purpose best behavior for that and and they got like 50 different answers and they were all true individually but they were not true collectively right um and so and when you when you try to join all these dissimilar metal you know similar alloys and uh you you have galvanic corrosion so you cannot you've got to have better seal and you've got gaps that you've got to seal and you know i've got to join these things and some of them don't some of them need to be joined with rivets some need to be joined with spot welds something needs to be done with resin or resin and spot welds and it looks you know frankly it looks like a sort of bit of a frankenstein situation when you when you look at it um all together um and and it's uh i can i can't emphasize enough the nightmare of of ceiling in between the gaps that is like uh that might be the most painful job in the whole factory is is spackling on the the sealant yeah um and then you make you have a little if there's like if there's like a little error with curing the sealant or like like just somebody who's been working you know for several hours makes a slight mistake then you've got like it now you've got an mbh issue because you've got a little hole and you've got a leak issue and it's it's just like this is terrible so um i mean you can muscle through it and we have but it's just uh way better to have a single piece casting um and then you don't have any gaps no sealant uh you don't have dissimilar metals and you can uh reduce the size of the body shop dramatically right um so just just having the the rear body castings for model y uh allowed us to reduce the the body shop by 30 percent yeah so there's roughly a thousand robots uh on the model 3 body line which by the way is also not a figure of merit you want fewer things not more yeah um we got rid of 300 robots uh just with that rear body casting yeah and then when we go to the front body casting we'll get rid of another 300 robots right so i don't know if you well you probably don't have time for my stuff but i have in my shop for 15 years a rear casting a center casting and a front casting to make a car yeah i always totally agree thousands of engineers and i mean uh big big time uh executives walk by it hey have you ever thought of doing oh you know sandy and they don't do it and they don't do it because we got this body shop sure and and because they've continuously hung their hat on this thing they figured you know this is the way it should go but when you came up oh i will tell you i'm very disappointed i thought i was going to see a single piece casting in a model 3 as well i thought you were going to shoot the two and then glue it together but that's all right i mean at some point i'm getting over probably switched to a single piece casting uh but um it's it's like uh we i think we need to get the probably the texas factory and the berlin factory going um yeah and uh like we just we need a like we do have an issue of like it's hard to change the wheels on the bus where it's going to 80 miles an hour down the highway yeah so uh you know model 3 is like most of our or what is most about volume model y will become it will exceed model model three um but it's just we we just need basically an opportunity to kind of redo the factory without blowing up the cash flow of the company yeah i mean i understand the you've got a lot of stuff in place so uh we're looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in berlin um that that's one i'm really really interested in because quite frankly uh you're a lot closer to you know you're a lot closer to the the um the casting companies and germany has fabulous tool maker so i'm expecting to see lots of good stuff out of that are you going to have to or maybe you don't want to talk about that but are you going to have three castings then or just a two well effectively there'll be a rear casting a front casting and then the center will be a structural pack yeah so structural pack is also this is an important thing uh that i've been wanting to do for since the beginning of the company um but it was it was always tough to kind of like because it's a coupled problem so like and and when when you're in uh sort of high-speed r d you're it's you really you often want to decouple the problems can try to solve uh electrical issues in the battery uh and you're trying to solve structural issues and if you bring them together then it's it it's hard you know you're you're putting the whole the whole company at risk basically yeah but now since we have model three model y in production um we and and we have a new factory that's getting built um this is our opportunity to say okay now we're going to do a couple problem where we're going to combine the the battery pack and the basically body chassis the primary structure the primary structure and uh we're gonna transfer share uh through the the the cans of the of the cells um and just to you know shear transfer which is gives you a super stiff um you know real great moment of inertia it's like a carbon they do this with carbon fiber you know and composite sandwich like have an aluminum honeycomb with upper lower carbon face sheets um and you get incredible um sheer transfer unless you're a great moment of inertia for it you get a real stiff big plate um and so getting dual use of the the cells and like so the cells become structure um and that's like what a point i was trying to make at the um a battery drape presentation but i think a lot of people didn't quite understand why that's such an important thing um you know the the cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes they have they actually have negative uh structural value um because not only they need to be not only they don't serve to aid in the structure of the car and they um they have to be isolated from the rest you know from the rest of the car so it's isolated from you know vibration and shock loads that kind of thing so so then you've got to put mass into isolating the cells um because otherwise they'll bang against the side of the the battery casing and that's that's not good um but by essentially binding the cells in there um and where the bonding foam uh serves as both a an adhesive and a fire retardant yeah it's you you basically get you get you know two bows with one stone exactly yeah so multifunctional designs is something i really really try and uh get my the companies that i work with i try and get them to do that and uh we got a ton of people right after the the battery your battery show saying oh you can't do this you can't do that so we made one up or made a wood blocks and went down and said this is what's going to be and then we i talked a little bit about um you know what the effect is and the loading and transfer of loading and how much safer and stronger this is going to be on and on it's the highest rating i think it's the highest rated uh show we've ever put out i'm just explaining uh you know why this is such a good idea because you got you got people you know designing cars all over the planet and they're telling me why it's not a good idea and i'm saying tell me again i mean really you're an engineer that you this is the kind of stuff that that really needs to have happened yeah i think it likes to be helpful to show and tell because if you say like um you know shear transfer using a steel cancer shear transfer between upper and lower uh face sheets what does that actually mean like well let's show you uh you know this is what happens if you've got just a little floppy sheet or or you just have like a limited number of uh stringers for shear transfer you can see it's like it's still it's quite bendy um but as soon as you have a whole bunch of cans or honeycomb or anything like that and you bond an upper lower face sheet it gets crazy stiff like you can't bend like you just put them together like one thing's floppy and the other thing is stiff as hell um and that's really what you want and then um this this will give also give like um like the torsional rigidity won't be much better and so if you're like you're trying to improve like the the the ride and feel of the car you say like you know what what's the what's the frequency of this car is it like a like a sort of real bendy spring or is it like tight um and that feeling of like is this car tight really if people don't understand why does this car feel better than the other cars like well because you've got your natural frequency is high and you've got good torsional rigidity and then another factor is like what is your problem moment of inertia so like basically to what degree is like the mass group towards the center as opposed to spread out towards the outside um and like you can see this like with like an ice skater where if the ice skater holds arms out it you rotate slowly brings arms in rotate fast that's what polar that's that's what's meant by polar moment of inertia exactly so it's like can you rotate this car fast uh you can if you bring the mass to center right and and quite frankly we've had lots of people discussing you know the pros and cons here but to me you were saying well we got two for one but you really got three for one yeah because now you've got body stiffness that's gone up and all the other stuff that's going along with it right and and then on top of that you've got um i i when people say well what's it like to drive the car because again we've stopped in lots of different places and i tell them if you uh if you get a 7 series bmw and drive that that's what you're basically getting it's the same sort of a suspension feel as that and it and you don't have to you're not muscling anything around everything is tight and perfect and tight's a good and then if you when you go to the when you go to those three let's say three structural members that i mean if you put a body on top of that it's going to be a perfect build and as a as a guy who had to work in body shops and as a guy who used to make molds and dyes and whatnot it's really difficult to take a whole bunch of pieces and glue them together and there's no nothing right i'm just using fixtures and then some you're gonna have to stack up i mean that's the issue yeah it's like uh if you've got a whole bunch of separate parts and each of them has got a given tolerance um even if that tolerance is tight and it could be like you know 0.2 millimeter tolerance but you've got like 50 parts okay now yeah you know and you multiply them together yeah and you can't win exactly you're gonna also have like just variants between cars so um that's for sure like one of the reasons why it's best to just combine the parts and not have separate parts uh and then also just go for extreme levels of precision um like you know one of the examples uh uh you know we use tesla is like lego so like lego is super precise because the press fit um i think they're precise down to uh you know about a quarter millimeter or less um you know basically about ten thou and and each one is exactly the same yeah it's going to be like if the lego if lego's like two presses is is too soft or too hard like it was too soft the precipitate won't work it's too hard you can't get it on right um so uh but they can get make something to that that is like a tiny fraction of a millimeter accurate and it's a low-cost toy right you know by 20 bucks for a lego set um and um and so so like if lego can be that precise and so could a car exactly yeah actually um i i got to tell you i i applaud bmw for putting out the i3 but it ugly but the uh but the thing that we got from it was that carbon fiber body was absolutely perfect and when you have if you had the stiffness of the castings down below and you take a carbon fiber basically structure and put it over the top absolutely every door is always going to be perfect you won't have to have fixtures you won't have to have anything it just goes boom done that's ultimately what i think a perfect build is probably going to go for but most people don't want to do it because they're talking about oh carbon fire is so expensive no it's not it's not really that expensive and and at the end of the day you have to take it and look at it a total account it cost yeah how much does it cost to basically where's all the tooling and whatnot how about all the scrap that you get on and on and on yeah i mean there are some other issues with carbon fiber which is that you know carb fiber with resin has a coefficient of thermal expansion which is basically zero and if you have parts that are say aluminum or steel uh that's you know aluminum's got quite a high you know cte um stainless has it's like about halfway yes you know so it's like um so then you know if you have like a hot versus a cold environment like you can't have your doors jam yeah so having uh you know matching matching cte is pretty important for things like a door frame um all right you know so that's uh you know if so if we're using say steel we probably need to stay with a steel door because otherwise we're going to get like cte issues yeah but at the end of the day we found out the tricks that that bmw used so they've got cross car beams which is going to shrink the most and they're embedded right into the carbon fibers how is that possible this will rip free we tried this when i worked on the boeing 787 and stuff yeah and we tried that and when we you know you do the thermal expansion and contraction it rips free from everything but clever design or clever engineering on bmw's part made it so that you could do that so i'm not saying you know run out and do this right now but eventually you guys are material science experts i mean you make your own we know sure a little bit about what's inside those electric motors and and actually the the aluminum used for the for the mega castings these things all nobody has anything like that nobody's using it most people i mean they develop our own allies like so it's like some of the challenges with uh with doing like a large aluminum casting there is you don't want to have um a a a sort of a heat crate or quench step afterwards so like like uh often in order to get good properties from uh aluminum you need to you know yeah yeah well if yeah if you want to if you you want to heat heat treat it and and then the heat treating uh and any kind of like arrow certainly no water quench uh or it's it's going to cause the the things get a potato chip on you it's going to basically warp um so we had to develop a a custom alloy to make sure we could get good material properties but not require a any step after the casting that could distort the shape that was actually that's an important that's like a very important thing um for example like the model s uh and nx castings they um for the you know original model s not the new one but the for the original they required a heat treat step right afterwards and and so it was always a pain in the neck because we couldn't really expand the casting because it would it would run pretzel on us like just potato chip or pretzel it's like uh not not uh you can't scale that so yeah threatened about development alley that was okay and had good also had good elongation properties in the event of a crash there's like kind of a hard materials problem so well it worked out really well and the uh no one believes me i know a fair amount about you know casting and why not and uh no one believes when i say you know it fills up in four to six milliseconds oh that's impossible really well okay fine that that kind of stuff um is lost on most engineers because they don't take materials so i wanted to be a mental urges yeah mature science is i think one of the most useful classes you can take in engineering for sure absolutely um i mean um the the area that our department i was going to be in at stanford for grad studies before i kind of put that on hold slash dropped out basically uh was material science yeah so yeah well i'm a big fan of material science well i i am as well i think that uh i think that that's something that i saw disappear when i was at ford motor company because of the things that were going on uh in the uh late 80s and uh sorry the late 70s and early 80s and they just had to shed some stuff and that went away uh like they don't they don't invent materials there anymore and actually no one else did either or does either um so i think that those kinds of things um are the things that maybe the bigger oems should be thinking about i think bringing stuff back in especially now i mean i don't need the size of an engine plant and a transmission plant and i got a little dinky electric motor and a and basically a two-speed gearbox or one speed gearbox i mean that's uh that's that's that's going to be a big big difference i don't know what they're going to do with all that stuff i really don't know how um how they're going to start implementing this i mean you may have heard that general motors said that 2035 they're going to be nothing but electric cars that's cool well that's uh that's a pretty big step um i've been saying for a long time in fact i had a lot of inch a lot of executives come in after i gave a speech and said uh this was a couple of years ago now and i said that the crossover point for electric um over ice is 20 30. and uh basically that was because of tearing apart your car the model three majority of your car would say crossover point how you're finding it fifty percent of the vehicles are going to be are sold are going to be um or more than 50 percent are going to be a pure eevee or they're going to be hybrid and um and hybrid like you know for sure i think it probably ten years it's probably a majority ev yeah i i truly believe that but when i brought it out i mean the analysts i don't want to get too far deep into that but analysts were saying you know maybe somewhere around 20 45 there'll be about uh you know 15 percent ev's and whatever and now we're looking at california with eight percent right now and going higher and then you've got europe saying forget it you can't drive here if you've got a if you've got a nice vehicle on and on and on so a lot of people were hoping that everything was going to stay the way it was or basically go back to the good old days as it were i was not i was i i was in your camp like i say when i got your car initially and there really been i didn't care one way or another car's a car we take it apart we look inside we find out how much it costs and what the techniques and technologies are and then we must move on sure with yours um initially i don't like this i don't like that then i drove it um because i was the last one to drive that vehicle and he said you should really take this thing for a ride and see what it and i took it into a parking lot there's a college that's near us and i zipped around and whatnot and i'm i feel young again this i didn't expect that that that excitement and then we started looking at the electronics and how much better even the wiring is in well i think the wiring was so we have a lot to improve on the wiring front um i think there's a lot more that can be done to improve wiring yeah well right now also like 12 volts i mean what are we still doing with 12 volts 42 is where everybody should be but i think 48. more 48 yeah but but at the end of the day we we we need to do something that'll that'll reduce the wire diameters and stuff like that and yeah and that's just nothing but cash in the bank yeah so uh so i'm a big fan of that as well with the new sx we're also we're we're finally transitioning to a lithium-ion uh 12-volt uh so oh good yes it's an excellent idea smaller box it's got you know way more capacity and and the the the the calendar and cycle life match that of the main pack so we should have done it before now but it's great that we're doing it now also like this is one of those like you know inside baseball victories that's yeah kind of a big deal um but yeah like the 12 volts is like very much a vestigial voltage yeah and it's like absurdly low um so um i mean even like basically powered ethernet is like around 50 volts yeah um and so so you can have like powered ethernet nobody's like sweating at that like there's a power to ethernet this like phone here um nobody's worried about like powered ethernet like whatever 40 48 50 volts um that's that's really what the car the car's low voltage system should be at yeah absolutely i agree in fact when we talk about the y i was expecting to see that because you'd said that you're getting rid of weight and uh and the length of wires and whatnot and when i pulled it off the harness looked kind of similar so it is what it is you really want to you really want to put you want to put power and data over the same wires that's right and and have it be a high speed like higher speed than can bus right and so so you can like basically uh dump data on the bus instead of having all these point-to-point wires absolutely that's that's kind of like uh what i was kind of hoping i would see when we we took apart the y but again you say same thing it's hard to change the tires when you're going 80 miles an hour so i guess the the last thing is uh probably um probably the most controversial um you made comments which i've been saying for years um at monroe if you uh if you want to if you want to get your masters i'll pay for it if you want to take a course in um mechanics or something i'll pay for it if you even if you want to take a wood carving thing i'll pay for it but i will not pay for an mba i won't do it ever never so you made a comment and i uh i started tap dancing because uh people listen to you i don't get the same kind of respect but people listen to you and i really really was excited uh when you when you talked about about that uh so if you can elaborate on that a little bit that that would be great yeah i think just generally the the path to leadership should not be uh through um you know basically nba business school situation it's it's like it should be kind of work your way up do useful things and um you know and there's a bit too much of the somebody goes to a high-profile mba school and then kind of parachutes in as the as the leader but they don't actually know how things work um they you know they could be good at say powerpoint presentations or something like that um and they can present well but they don't actually know how things work because they do not um you know they're they're kind of like just not aware of what's really needed for uh you know to make to make great products um so i mean i don't want to trash mbas too much here and i actually do have a dual undergrad wharton undergrad and physics um at upenn so um you know i have like you know it's like i have direct exposure to to uh um you know to business school and i went you know to do undergrad business school with with physics but um and i was a teaching assistant for two semesters and i graded mbas and uh undergrads um so uh but i think it's just a little bit too much like like people look at mba school as like i want to parachute into being the boss instead of earning it and like i don't think that's that's good like yeah well speaking of not good and this might be the last thing i've never really been a fan of short sellers i i don't know whether you have a comment on that well i think that the you know there's there's very few areas in life where you can you can sell things that you don't own um and the short selling really really um where you can sell shares that you don't own uh when i said it was vestigial i mean it came from an era when uh stock stocks were traded by people traveling on horseback uh to exchange stock certificates and in order to have the the transaction speed not be like not take weeks somebody would say well the the stock certificate is coming on that horse i don't have the stock certificate right now but i promise you that i'm getting the stock certificate uh and the writer is going to be here i mean new york writers going to be here from chicago in three days and then and then i'll be able to give you the stock certificate that's where this whole silly thing arose um but then but then the problem is like the way short selling is used today is it's it's kind of like a uh it's frankly used against the public you know and so the most people aren't aware that short selling even exists and then the ones that are uh very few of them know how no actually how to use it it's basically like .01 of stockholders know how to use uh short positions to to get ahead and it's so it's it's like i think effectively attacks on the public i think it's immoral myself i just don't think it's right at all yeah a big group can come in and crush a company simply because well we're going to make a lot of money i haven't made my haven't made my quota this month or what have you so i i really don't care for it yeah i mean tesla was under a massive attack by the short and distort where they take a short position and then they do everything possible to trash the company in every six ways to sunday um and they were successful um and and this has now happened to tesla twice it happened in 2013 and it happened in in basically 2017 through through 2019 um and uh i mean the intensity of the attack was was was crazy and i was like man this this you know it would like cause you to lose faith in humanity the the greed of this wish this went on um and like we don't have shorting in like private companies the vast majority of companies over 90 are are private and you cannot short them and yet somehow we get you know private companies get things done so there's there's a a a a perniciously false uh effective markets argument made for a shorting and it's it but it is vice disguised as virtue well at the end of the day um we had a common uh um a common um adversary and um um i'm really hoping that now because uh he's bad on oil and uh and biden is basically clobbered oil in a lot of different directions i'm sure that um um he'll be skeptical about doing um any more trades um on a short end anyways i can't thank you enough i i'd really like to shake your hand thank you so much thank you for for giving us the time and uh i i can't say enough about a lot of stuff but i really can't say them i the most exciting thing that's happened to me in a long time was driving that uh the the self-driving uh the self-driving uh i'm telling you it's just sure it's it blows your mind are you gonna are you gonna let anybody else have that yeah of course i mean we're gonna roll out the um pulsar driving to the whole fleet and make it available to the whole fleet we're just being very careful about the testing um and um i think there's actually sort of a dangerous uh middle ground that would be careful of where the the system is is good like 99.9 of the time and and that could lead people to be uh complacent and and then uh but then that one time where it's got issues that that you know we don't want people to basically it can be so good that you you get comfortable but not not initially good enough to handle all of the corner cases um so we we want to just make sure that in that transition to full self driving it's really um we're taking as much care as possible yeah well i'm i'm i was happy with what we had on the uh on the uh autopilot um it's the first time i've ever gotten a chance to see what the scenery looks like i always just do lines now i can have a look around and feel comfortable or confident that my hands are on the wheel and if something goes wrong i can correct but i can also enjoy what's going on yeah i mean the like you know so publicly but basically the a car that does not have self-driving in the future will be about as popular as a horse horses are they're still horses people have horses and they're they're but they're they're it's a horse is not what you use for day-to-day transport no yeah but even even a horse will get you home sometimes if uh in the olden days they'd get drunk fall asleep in a buck board and no horse would take him home self-driving as far as i'm concerned we're just getting back well i think actually that's that's one of the things we're we're going to program into the car that if if you if you if you fall asleep in the car it'll just take you home yeah like it's most likely that's where you want to go yes um that's a great idea yeah um and then we're even gonna have it like so um if it detects that you're having issues it'll take you to the hospital like you say like you know just like yeah having a heart attack or something yes it'll just take you straight to emergency room well i think i mentioned this already i think that the self-driving feature is going to save more lives than seat belts airbags and every other thing that we've done to cars combined because that's that's the way to go absolutely i mean worldwide there's about a million people a year uh dying in car accidents and that's a hell of a lot and yeah so there's like 10 million people that get seriously injured so it's like you know we got to hustle on this yeah and and why not we got the technology to do it yep anyway thanks very much elon all right anyways i'm i'm so flattered i'm so happy i got a chance to meet you all right talk to you shake your hand thank you so much [Music] you

https://youtu.be/HL4rCFboo7o

a man whose business achievements need no introduction the founder the CEO and the chief engineer at SpaceX yes I am talking about you the CEO and the product architect of Tesla angel investor a disrupter he's also a man who's had some very interesting things to say on the theme of this conference on trust he's described himself as being obsessed with truth he believes in sunlight being the great disinfectant Elon Musk please do join me such programs oh so welcome here let me start tell us how you think about trust well I I believe in trust and transparency and the pursuit of Truth in general um but I mean first let me just take a moment to say thank you for inviting me and it's an incredible honor to be here um so uh I love no way so and um and I I just want to to thank um the leaders and the the people of Norway for their long-standing support of electric vehicles and sustainable energy and I just want you know the people of Norway to know that hey you really made a difference and uh you know so I thank you okay well thank you for joining us but I'm still going to come back to the question tell me tell me how do you think about trust well I think there's um I mean that's that's really quite a philosophical question it is and uh one could wax on at length about that um I guess um you know um we talk about Twitter I was told that's the one topic I'm not to talk about so I'm going to avoid it well they both start with a t I suppose um well I mean I do think that with respect to information um you know generally people want to know the information that they're receiving is uh accurate uh that it is a representative of the full picture um and they want to be able to believe what they read and and not feel that it's overly biased or at least understand the nature of the bias so I think um one of the key things to trust is transparency and people to really know you know if there's like a social media company or something to understand what the algorithm is so to open source the algorithms so people can look at it and critique it and it's not a black box um and then if there are any modifications done by people at that social media company that they're clear and again transparent um and so it's not hidden um and um and I end up you know I believe in the the sort of free flow of ideas um and uh and just generally urring on the side of free speech uh within the boundaries of the law within the boundaries of the law it's a great place to start isn't it yeah I think you can't go sort of beyond that without being arrested I think let's move on shall we um you've been a great disrupter of Technology technological models and energy and space where is the unexplored area for disruption well you know I'd like the word disruption um I mean I don't aim to disrupt for the sake of disrupting you know um it's more like there's um thinking about what set of actions what set of actions are most likely to lead to a better future and so um you know in order one of the things obviously in order to for Humanity to have a compelling future for civilization is that we must have a clear path to a sustainable energy future that's one of the things that I think everyone I think would agree with um now I actually I'm not someone who who tend to sort of demonize oil and gas to be clear um this is necessary uh right now or civilization could not function so I do think we actually need um and actually at this time I think we actually need more oil and gas not less um but but simultaneously uh moving as fast as we can to a sustainable energy economy I thought the words the Prime Minister were just spot on you know it's um and I'm glad to hear that there's a large effort for uh ocean wind because that's uh that that's a I think a massive untapped potential um I would say go even more than what the Prime Minister said frankly it's like that's uh you know I mean if you did 100 by 100 array um of 10 megawatt systems you'd have 100 gigawatt capability so and then you do need to combine that with a stationary storage battery packs to buffer the energy because sometimes the wind blows and sometimes it doesn't blow it just blows hard and so so you need you need to buffer it with with battery packs stationary battery packs and Tesla and other companies are also making that so that the sort of the three uh pillars of a sustainable energy future are sustainable energy generation which is a hydro geothermal wind solar I'm also Pro nuclear I mean I think it's we should really keep going with the nuclear plants I know this may be an unpopular view in some quarters but I think if you have a well-designed nuclear power plant you should not shut it down um especially right now um so um but I I try to say what I what I think is uh you know scientifically cogent even if it is not popular so um and um anyway so if the propellers are sustainable energy generation but then must also store the energy uh because many of the the two main sources of of sustainable energy wind and solar are intermittent the wind doesn't always blow the sun doesn't always shines so you must uh buffer the energy in in stationary battery packs and then the third element obviously is electric vehicles so electric cars trucks uh aircraft boats uh with the ironic exception of rockets um um but but I we do have a plan for uh sustainably producing the rocket repellent which is actually uh almost 80 percent uh liquid oxygen so liquid oxygen you can get uh from obviously from the atmosphere um and then we're going with a methane uh fuel uh which is 20 of the propellant but that you can make uh also sustainably long term uh from CO2 and uh water H2O which produces CH4 and O2 so that's the sort of sustainable long-term path for Rocket propellant generation and that's how it would have to be done on Mars for example um so not electrifying quite yet um we are we do actually have sustainable power generation for some of our propellant generation already but it's it's a small percentage now but it will be a big percentage in the future okay yeah so what do you you know you've got to say the energy in Industry here but that's probably an exaggeration you've got a you know pretty pretty significant set of the energy industry here um if you were to look ahead 5 10 15 years what is the disruption going to look like in the energy industry well I think we'll see tremendous change over the next five 10 or 15 years um I say like you've sailed by by 20 30 I would say probably half of all new cars made will be electric 20 30 half of all new cars that's my guess yeah um by 2035 it might be 80 or something like that um I think it could be even higher than those numbers but the the um the car industry is moving rapidly towards electric and uh you know one country after another and one state after another is uh making uh zero emission mandates California recently passed uh uh zero emission mandate new class sold in California I think 2035 can only be um zero emission so the UK is as well yeah yeah exactly so it's it's clearly the people of the Earth yeah people of Earth have decided this is the way to go um and so I think this is so we'll see quite a tremendous change in in that regard um and if you look at the streets of Norway you actually see an advanced version of that because Norway has it um some of the highest uh noise I believe gone to majority electric vehicles uh of new cars sold which is which is great again thank you um so um yeah so it's pretty cool so if I if I pick up on that idea so the future the biggest change you see for the energy industry is electrification electric car vehicles uh light transport maybe heavy transport um what does that mean about Supply chains so if you kind of roll that backwards what is the supply chain going to be what are you worried about if we're going to meet that rise yeah so the interesting thing is that you say like what is the what are the limiting factors governing the rate at which the world can transition to sustainable energy um and I think it's the rate at which uh one can grow uh battery production okay so then if you say what what are the constituents in the battery um in Lithium-ion batteries it's uh you've obviously got lithium um you've got a cathode which is the the main cathode materials are going to be a metal and that's uh nickel manganese and iron and on the anode side it's primarily uh carbon graphite um and um so in essential sequester sequestering a little bit of carbon in the battery um and and with some silicon added for energy density on the anode side and then there's the electrolyte and whatnot so it's it's it's it's it's and and the main limitation is actually not that these metals are except nationally rare but that there's a tremendous amount of processing equipment to take the ore and turn it into battery grade materials because the battery grade Android and cathode have to be extremely pure in order for the battery to last for a long time and so it's it's sort of processing of those elements and I'm sort of writing this sort of Master Plan part three which is what are the steps needed to scale a sustainable energy and again what are the limiting factors and and how can we potentially accelerate these so hopefully finish that in a month or two so do you want to give us a preview what you know what are the what are the you know what are the gating functions if you will that we need to get over what are the what are the big uh steps well the materials that I mentioned are are really essential it's generation it's processing yes there's actually there's not a raw material constraint so there's actually a tremendous amount of lithium lithium is almost everywhere um it's it's one of the most common elements on Earth so it's iron and so is carbon um and then on the iron you usually combine phosphorus so it's iron phosphate um so that'll probably be the the biggest uh chemistry that's used um so it's not so much the raw materials as it is converting the raw materials into um the highly purified form that can be used in batteries and so that's a tremendous amount of of processing needs to happen for that um really at this at the sort of scale that is currently uh you know comparable to the world oil and gas industry so it's a the scale is just tremendous so so this is all happening and it's happening fast it's just a question of how can we what can we do to potentially accelerate that and we can go even faster this is all happening it's just a question of when and are you going to give us the answer to that what can we do to accelerate it to make it happen even faster if we're going to be 50 new electric vehicles sold uh in what eight years you said I think I think that's actually where we're trending okay even if we if even if we just keep doing the things we're currently doing okay okay yeah so so it's pretty big you don't see a limiting function at the moment no I don't I don't see a limiting functions it's really just um how many years will it take us and all that actions we can what actions can we take to have it read faster and it's going to be increasing the rate at which we can convert the uh or into battery grade materials that will set the rate at which we can build electric vehicles and stationary battery packs to capture a solar in a wind okay um so is this all you know basically what I'm saying is is this is an optimistic and positive message um and I'm not suggesting at all complacency um but just saying that things are moving in a good direction and but obviously if we can make them go even faster that's better and a lot of this happens in China right at the moment today so yes yes so you said last year that you thought trust in China would improve prove post-covet so do you think that's happened do you see China as an investment opportunity today well Tesla is actually investing in uh production in in China so we have a large Factory in Shanghai and we are continuing to expand output and invest in that factory but we're also investing in Europe with our Factory just outside of Berlin and in the US with our new Factory just outside of Austin so and we hope to announce a location for another gigafactory perhaps later this year so we're going as fast as we can and I've always said that the I would say like when you look at Tesla the fundamental good Tesla does I think some measured by profit but rather uh by how many years will Tesla have accelerated the transition to sustainable energy this is how I think of success yes yes yes I think we have accelerated it to some degree already um you know I think it wasn't for Tesla the the car industry would have transitioned to EVS much later so exponential curve or straight line it is uh somewhat it is an exponential curve yes okay you know you're making me use my chemistry and my maths which I haven't done in yeah a few decades most people don't know what an X dimensional code means but it's a I I think most people in this room maybe this room yes yes this room they know yes yes yeah I thought so I've got a logarithmic curve look now that's optimistic can you do it uh no I think I think the the things are improving exponentially with respect to sustainable energy so okay uh but if you can make it go faster a little bit better so how do we go from exponential to logarithmic well I no I think you thought about this I know you've thought about this logarithmic is is actually fast in the beginning but slow at the end so I think we we actually what will actually happen is is a transition from uh following is following an S curve so you have an exponential increase then linear and then logarithmic um and that's that's basically how any transition large industrial transition happens I think I'm going to get off math now because I could get into trouble um approach to risk how would you talk about that I'm back to philosophy I'm safer in philosophy well I think it because I mean I I don't sort of like you know just arbitrarily uh secret um I think there's you know some things are risky but if this you know if the stakes are important enough then you take the risk because and today the stakes are important enough um yes I mean mistakes are very extremely important very fundamental to the Future yes because you take I'm guessing I'm just you know I don't know everybody in this room but my guess is is that you take significantly more risk than possibly anybody in this room but certainly more than 95 of the people in this room what what allows you to take those risks are you faster are You Smarter do you think differently what do you do differently that allows you to do something that most people hear smarter they are can't do well I think there's probably a lot of people in this room that do take a lot of risks but we've got to volunteer but but I really like no no I want to hear what Elon has to say about how he takes risks that way I literally just tried to use a scientific method frankly and uh you know consider the um you know what what is the importance of the outcome and what uh what what is one risking in order to achieve that outcome and uh but like I said if the outcome is important enough even if the probability of success is low one was I think still still do it in my view um you know some things are very important and if to in order to have a good future and if we don't do them well they're in big trouble and so I and then then how much the risk really is it because if we don't take those actions we won't have a good future um and I think the riskiest thing would be no action so it's almost as though it's really not a risk it's not a choice at all not really yeah okay I think it's wonderful that you can change the world because you really can change the world and you have you have the um ability to do what in many cases not even governments can do I mean I I as I was doing a little bit of research for this panel um one of the data points that I saw is you were able to turn on if you will the internet in Ukraine in just four hours what what kind of responsibility do you feel as a corporate leader you have when you have that kind of power how do you think well I think it was a bit bit longer than four days but uh it was it was about oh sorry for four hours about four days I think um but but we did we did well we we did have some um guess that maybe there would be something happening in Ukraine and uh and so we did pre-position uh some Starling terminals there uh just in case um so uh that was helpful for the initial uh part of the invasion and then we accelerated delivery of a lot of terminals within a few days of the invasion taking place um and uh the Ukrainian government tells me it's been very helpful um so yeah forethought is the answer perhaps I mean forethought and just moving quickly decisively um yeah so I do hope a piece some piece can be achieved in Ukraine and Russia you know that's um you know I I do think some short some thought should be should be given to you know what's the end game there um and um I think the end game will require some compromise on the part of both parties you've said the fact that there is an AI problem not a transportation problem and you talk about the next big disruption being AI what can AI do to help combat climate change particularly in this period the short-term period as we're transitioning well and a Tesla's goal from from when we started it has always been to accelerate sustainability so that is still our primary goal by far we have a secondary goal which is to solve at least real world intelligence as it applies to self-driving cars and um and then potentially you know with with the humanoid robots um but you know it's and so Tesla is in part an AI company um and increasingly an AI company but it's still primarily a sustainable energy company um I think um AI what I do I I don't think we need AI to solve sustainability that is that is happening it might help us accelerate it um but I think we should also be cautious about Ai and just make sure that as we develop AI that it is you know it doesn't get out of control and and that uh that the AI helps make the future better for Humanity and that's something I know you're working quite a lot on I think we should be more worried about AI safety than we currently are yeah especially you know the future Wars are really going to be and we're seeing a taste of that within in Ukraine uh very much uh drone Wars so if your drawings are better than their drones then you went basically it's what will happen has it always been um no that's going to be it hasn't been that but it will it will be um final question we've just got a minute what keeps you up at night and what are you doing about it or do you sleep soundly every night well there's the the two main technical I mean fundamentally a technologist it's like a kind of important engineer too so you know so much people call me like a businessman I guess I have to do business you have to have a group of people because I can't just do this in a garage by myself um but I'm fundamentally an engineer or technologist and so the two uh the two technologies I'm focused on trying to ideally get done before the end of the year are getting our Starship uh to orbit which I think is important for expanding Consciousness uh beyond Earth um and life beyond Earth and and then uh having the Tesla cars be able to do self-driving um so it have self-driving in wide release at least in the US and hopefully uh potentially in Europe depending on regulatory approval great goals to have and I wish you luck thank you so much for joining us thank you from the audience thank you please ladies and gentlemen Elon Musk thank you so much real pleasure

https://youtu.be/fXS_gkWAIs0

all right boys massive massive pod elon [ __ ] musk on the podcast we want to let you guys know fullsend.com it now has a ton of 24 7 items on it we got some full sign classics this is a shirt actually that we just dropped in honor of the episode go where no skinny can has ever gone before for the space theme for elon happy dad on the moon so these are live on fullsend.com right now and we've been stepping up the clothing a lot big time uh these t-shirts are brand new they're like super heavyweight quality so if you guys want to rep full send go to fullsend.com right now um there's a ton of items including these hats too oh [ __ ] it's not a happy dada but happy dad hats were there too yeah they're there the happy dad has you guys want them so i don't know [ __ ] it go let's get into the fight [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i don't know how we actually i do know how we landed this but we're headed hopefully to go get a podcast with elon musk pretty [ __ ] crazy we don't have exact confirmation yet because with guys like this in the podcast game too like they're busy as [ __ ] obviously it's elon musk on a monday so we don't know if it's gonna go down for sure but john our president has been emailing elon back and forth because they've known each other from when john used to work with bieber and then elon uh he said 8pm in austin texas so we're about to [ __ ] hopefully go get elon musk on the podcast is he going to flop you guys probably already know but we don't know right now [Music] ready to rock fellas new flavor of happy dad the board ape banana flavor limited edition dropping in stores one week from today the funny thing too is like you'd think banana would taste like [ __ ] but it's actually fire all right can't believe this is happening but it's going [ __ ] down going down in i guess 16 minutes elon musk is pulling up to the [ __ ] full send podcast crazy yeah round of applause this is a huge podcast you guys are fired up we're fired up elon musk john shahidi shout out to john yeah thank you but like like what a [ __ ] we're gonna tell the story too so we got saleem here we got steiny here and we got president fulson john sitting in on this episode um steve could not be here and this episode is pretty much dedicated to him too because he's a huge elon fan um his channel was [ __ ] he was too permanently deleted by youtube literally probably 12 hours ago we landed in texas and we literally found out that his channel was being [ __ ] deleted and he was so he was supposed to be on this pod and he just said yo guys i can't just can't really do it right now i'm just not in the mood but it was the ultimate mind [ __ ] because we landed we had two texts one from youtube that the channel is being permanently deleted and one from elon confirming the podcast so we're like wait a minute yeah i know freaking out here are we [ __ ] devastated we it was a mind [ __ ] shout out steve though how long did this channel run for two years three years he's been going since 20 posted it got me emotional yeah 2018 2018 three years i think he was at 4.7 something million people i'll take 5 million subs too which is crazy well i got some stats crushing the game for that long grinding steve worked [ __ ] hard you know that too on his videos yeah do whatever it takes so one thing about steve too is people just think he's all an entertainer but that guy gets [ __ ] done he doesn't make excuses no he works hard he doesn't quit he doesn't sleep he gets to the finish line right and that's why i think his channel got to where it got check out these stats i got today steve will do it and how many years two years of the channel two three years all right gave away 32 cars 52 watches three houses over one million dollars in us cash over three million dollars in pesos many cars 32 you said one of them is mine one of them's saleems yes i have one one but it got taken back no i gave that one we gave that one away but i have one one of those watches take them back too yeah i didn't do the net amount okay yeah you know but um but yeah it's just crazy i mean that was very shocking to us and we're just i just can't believe it bro like i just it's definitely pretty [ __ ] wild no that'd make me cry i'd be crying so we gotta crush this episode for steve yeah big elon fan yeah and honestly shout out to him for [ __ ] continuing to be edgy and not giving a [ __ ] like it takes balls to do that [ __ ] yeah it's like a trump episode right yeah it's the same i mean i think it's just the reality of the world now is that what's the solution kyle we got to build our own [ __ ] we're working on it pretty crazy though if you think about it man getting donald trump elon musk now i mean like if possibilities are endless like we're only at a million subs on false twice dana white twice do we know what episode number this is like ricky fowler ricky fowler was huge where he follows you ricky fowler was a huge one good land good line good land ricky's associated shout out to before we get into elon musk shout out to steini for landing ricky fowler and for the record i've had a few others that are big names that we've canceled on fair the same stanis almost made us do yk osiris oh dude why why k is funny why can't he like we cancelled on wiz khalifa cancelled on reschedule would have been good and we rescheduled wiz for this by the way yeah just for that we can't tell them a couple times but uh also uh lana rhodes which would have been good that's more youtubey yeah but still it's a full-sim pocket and i mean the list goes on i don't want to waste much time with that but those are a couple of them yes crazy john how did how did this initially go down um how'd you get his email well john john we'll tell the story we'll we'll tell it when elon gets here but i've been on elon for uh nine years now it's 2013. are you guys boys we're cool i mean he she always takes care of me we run into to each other sometimes here and there and first name basis yeah it's [ __ ] lit um no what do you mean first what else like he like does it up bro no but it does adapt you up her handshake i've seen that or is it just like a quick props and keep it moving no it's just a headache it was one time i saw him at uh delilah of all places he was at delilah in west hollywood and he saw me he jumped he came out what came out of his table i didn't want to go because i don't want to bother him he was with his family and he's like what are you doing here i was like i was there with a friend so you guys should come sit over here and we hung out and we were out to like 2 a.m you see one of his baby mamas i don't remember how long ago was this this was like maybe like 2018 2018. so how long ago you've you've had his email since you've always had him on what's that and his phone number too but you hit him over email yeah yeah so how did what when did you first hit him on email how long ago i hit him for the pod for the pod i want to say i hit him um i hit him like i think like shortly after the trump episode i sent him the trump episode that's persistent did he respond he did what'd he say he said not yet but let's he's like but let's you know some maybe i think he said like something maybe sometime in the future but i wasn't like no it was like not yet like first time you reached out to him he literally was like i'm down but not now mm-hmm and then how many times till now did you like message him in between like tell the story like five times what what what's up so i sent that one i sent him some of the press about us and you know the episode being taken down by youtube because i know he's all about censorship as well um the so you're just constantly updating him on what we're doing yeah but i think the big one actually that i sent him recently was i did the money buys happiness um podcast the new the new full send podcast and um there was a clip in there when i told the bieber story and i sent him this let yo check out this like you know story that i told in in this podcast would love to have you on ours and that's when he wrote back i forgot the wording but he wrote like we we could get that done soon and that's when i was with you i was like and you're like well tell them this weekend and i was like this weekend he's like well i don't know if i'm gonna be in texas or in florida and i said well how's monday where will he be on monday he says most likely texas so we'll be there i dropped a little sammy's birthday i was like don't no no no if you remember my brother sammy but it's his birthday that day too this would be really good i dropped a little bit of that too and he wrote back very cool text me the day of i'll give you an address you're intimidated by this guy though elon musk just because it's like low-key with someone who's so much smarter than all of us it's just [ __ ] intimidating you heard what joe rogan said no he said joe rogan said you feel like a stupid person talking to him like you feel like you're not just like on his level of smart well nobody is bro i don't know you feel stupid talking to like elon because of how intelligent he is you know who's more impressive than this guy in the world i don't think there is not many people not many he's impressive because he's all he's smart he's also funny as [ __ ] man like his twitter is so funny but one thing i didn't know about him is like he likes the party in wheels i did not know too i didn't know he had nine nine baby i feel like that's kind of common is that true i thought he was just like a pure nerd but he's like no no no no he's cool he's a beauty yeah i think the thing is when you're that successful and you're that stressed out that's kind of your getaways [ __ ] partying right yeah talk about trump yeah how was senior boy trump yeah it was dope we saw trump at live um yeah he came up to us or he's like where's the knock boys yeah live golf not live miami oh not live miami oh no live golf we saw him at live golf he's funny to see him there yeah and he's like where's the he's like where's the nilk boys come here like i want to get some fame and [ __ ] really so funny the best thing he's ever said is you didn't fold bro i didn't know like politicians said that i thought that was more of like a rapper thing it is pretty still it's still nerve-wracking talking to trump though it is like seeing him again he said the same thing though about not folding when we golfed with them in l.a a couple months ago i think we got to get we got to start being the connectors with these pod too with this pod like we could start connecting people like i feel like one day we got to get trump and elon on at the same time that'll be insane we can start lighter kodak and trump kodak and trump we need to do like a aoc and desantis no no we're good with her what happened come on bro that would that not be entertaining are you not entertaining i think we should get someone left wing on but everyone says that like why don't you get someone left-wing on we're down they won't do it but also if i'm a politician i'm left-wing my attitude is i'll come on there and destroy all three of these [ __ ] young kids you're pretty off-wing though right left-wing people don't roll like that though i think the only one that would go i think the only one that would have the balls to come on would be bernie sanders bernie sanders i think would do it because he's a really good debater yeah i'd love to go out with this with that guy like i don't agree with everything he says but you can't deny bernie sanders as a good debater yeah he's a good speaker i don't know i mean bernie sanders would be fire why not yeah it's not like we do everybody that we like yeah we have for the most pelosi that'd be huge she's attracted we should kind of have somebody on i think that we don't get along with and like get like get the fireworks a little bit aoc would be viral i just don't think she would ever do it she would never do it yeah i don't know let's try why wouldn't she i'll dm her right now you're right you [ __ ] aoc oh yeah you'd like her she's like she's she's like the leader of like wing like feminist girl we should have heard on at the same time oh my god if her and andrew tate came on it would be the craziest thing we wouldn't have to speak no it'd be insane you guys saw the [ __ ] milk video too check the milk video we did it so we're going back we're going from andrew tate on the pod which right now is at 5.5 million views in four days seven what five point seven five point seven million in four days as members and now we're going straight to elon which this one's obviously going to blow up um but yeah it's [ __ ] crazy man there's tons of people left what guess two we got bieber we gotta get we got drake kim jong-un kim jong-un tom brady tom brady steph curry would be doing steph curry curry wayne gretzky kanye west kanye west and bob used to say it too but kim jong-un is possible yeah i think it's possible too he might be the most possible on who you just listed yeah probably because outside of bieber he's like i think north korea would want to like show off what a great country it is i don't know if i would go there i'd go north korea i don't know man no like you don't just fly in yeah if they come in there no we'd go i'd go i'd go i would go how did rodman go he reached okay so i know the story kim jong-un reached out to jordan and said hey i would love to meet with you jordan denied so we reached out to pippin pippin denied and then he reached out to robin and robin said [ __ ] it i'm coming like he has his own ski resort he has his own like island like they're literally just going there and they're just if he's calling north korean chicks yeah yeah well that's dope but if he's not going to [ __ ] around then i'm down to go they wouldn't they wouldn't invite us to like keep us there and [ __ ] there is no way that he would let us he might come with us he would right yeah [ __ ] we're gonna go to north korea with trump yeah we gotta overlap we're going to north korea with trump vote trump 2024 get him in office so he could take us to north korea i i think it's it might not be available that week but the boys will go i think we got to sit back to bradley martin reflect like we've been thinking like a lot lately like shit's [ __ ] crazy bro really crazy like don't think that we don't think this is crazy guys like i'm nervous like every time it's like we think this shit's crazy and then it's like we just keep outdoing ourselves yeah and it's like we got such a great group of people like everyone here that's just like we're all pushing each other and like we're just we're just all kind of competitive and we just want to win and we just want to kill it and like you said competition it's healthy competition but we also want to make one another proud all right like i'm always thinking like how do i make you guys proud like what do i have to do how do i make steve proud you know once again shout out to steve i miss you bro crazy let's just like could have been here saying that like it's kind of it is crazy because i have elon's car the past six months have been the craziest months of all time bro i think what really started was when we did the miami trip when little dirk kodak and since then it's just been it's been a small [ __ ] trailer he's saying right when he joined the pod pretty much yeah no i was gonna agree pretty much what you said oh i didn't say that and i am grateful to be on this spot so i appreciate you guys and the fans he's just doing it because he gets started i think it's been crazy right when i joined the pod everything just [ __ ] bro i said the last six months have been insane and they have been yeah so steiny does work really hard behind the scenes on the pot too yeah i didn't know you went over questions and stuff yeah it was interesting study hard i love this [ __ ] man so you dude for me it's like how many people in the world get an opportunity to sit down with these people and if you have that opportunity like you gotta [ __ ] show up you know if you don't show up and you get to sit down at the elon musk you're not prepared it's like that's such a waste and it's unfair to people who are like trying to get that whole life no no please just say that this is gonna help you with a large graphic of women after elon musk [ __ ] yeah that's like some side like i'm stoked for that like but that's not the main reason yo he told me i i told him i was like yo elon and security asked to make sure hotel staff no one in the hotel knows elon's coming because that's usually who leaks he goes nah i told a couple he told me he told a couple girls about the pool already are you serious i had to drop one of them what are the odds elon comes and fires with us tonight that's realistically i mean dude it's you're with him at delilah until 2 a.m percentage-wise 50-50 no i'd i'd say it's like a good 10 do that i think after this we we're gonna get hammered on the pod we're gonna hop on a jet and we're gonna go to like mexico with elon or something we're going to party slam hookies we're going to gamble on steak with elon do some sweet bonanzis with elon music party i don't know and i think it's just going to be a great night i'll have fruit party with you on somebody that'd be funny going on stream oh you know what he might like jack hand with him he might play crash he might be a crash genius happy genius all right not bad boys i'm sure you have enough cameras [Music] i really appreciate you coming here we got the mic right here that's where we need gabe oh you're right in there this is our shelter it's called happy dad all right you a drinker or no i don't drink alcohol you try to give of course i drink alcohol you gotta try one sure yeah we usually do the cups if someone's drinking water elon in the house pouring a happy dad right out of the gate should we cheers to that cheers cheers thanks for coming elon we really appreciate it cheers how was your day what'd you get up to today so bad just work or like working or how was your day should i get closer to the mic yeah probably let's fix it [Laughter] we're just rolling too we just always just go straight for it [Laughter] so how did how did this all come about you guys have met what like john said like 10 years ago you've known each other for like 10 years at the super bowl thing yeah uh mayweather fight we went to a mayweather fight together yeah yeah what what was that story was it 10 years ago it was 2013. yeah oh that's crazy that was great it was the canelo mayweather fight do you remember the story about when bieber came on the plane and he brought too many people yeah and then um i forgot how many people he bought he bought like 10 12 it was like a bus that showed up yeah yeah or many banners there's like a lot of people yeah and i'm i'm freaking out and i i and i go i go to uh our boy shervin i'm like i don't know what to do bieber just rolled up way too many people and he's like just go be honest with elon so i went and let elon know i like y'all bro sorry like bieber about like a lot of people there's already your family was on the plane too yeah and elon goes don't worry i got this handled and him and his brother kimball they made like one quick phone call and like 20 minutes later another jet just rolled in right yeah we got a second plane here and then we flew to vegas how does that work elon do you just have like jets like on demand like that no that was my brother's plane your brother's plane yeah that's dope what was the link with bieber no our buddy shervin you wanted a terminator sure you know sheriff and of course you know yeah i know sheriff and well yeah actually you know sheriff is a daughter there you go yeah she's very beautiful yeah this is crazy to have you here though i mean we have our we have like one of our metacard our nfts and in the discord all they're saying all the time is just please get elon on please get you okay please what do they want me to say what's that what are they curious about a lot of everything lots space cars crypto really scarce encrypt yeah i think those are link neurolink yeah are you are you in texas like full time now because you used to be in cali right yeah i was i used to live in california but i mostly live in texas these days um tesla we built this giant factory called the texas giga texas which is the biggest factory in north america uh just outside austin so um i'm working on just bringing up that factory uh which is uh just increasing the production it's it's like a factory's giant cybernetic collective so you're gonna make the cybernet cybernetic collective work with thousands of people and machines um just a lot of like ten thousand little things to fix basically the team's doing great though so we're splitting up they're splitting up the gigatexas factory uh here in austin and um and they're building a giant rocket in south texas near brownsville so it's a starlink rocket it's called starship yeah but it will launch the starling two satellites nice yeah when i turn my head can you still [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] what's that what's that movement like from cali to texas like which one do you ever miss cali i was still in california you know a couple days uh like two or three days every couple weeks okay so um yeah so i'm in every couple weeks i'm in um la for a few days barrier for a few days basically something like that what made you move out here to texas i was basically the building the gigatexas factory in austin and then the starship program in south texas so the basically the two big new things for both tesla and spacex were in texas so ended up being that's where i needed to be when you're talking about bay area you're talking about the fremont factory that's still there right yeah so yeah that's the original one right uh sort of our original big factory yeah uh we had a tiny factory in menlo park at one point okay where we made the tesla roadster the the tesla fremont factory in the san francisco bay area is is the highest output car factory in north america it makes more cars than any other any other factory so and uh we're trying to ramp it up so it's not like tesla's leaving california it's just uh we kind of got too big for to fit in the bay area yeah you know and if you if you know that if you know the region like you're kind of sandwiched in between the ocean the bay and the mountains and there's no room yeah yeah it's real houses are crazy money yeah yeah where was our flag at when we i don't know if you know our our brand's called full send so that's like our that's like the term that we coined yeah i think that one of your guys that was a sponsorship i believe that's right yeah for some reason it's basically say that a lot too yeah so that's our beautiful you see the full send people say full standard spacex a lot really really yeah that's our brand that's right yeah but so that's like our clothing line and that's our flag like sam patel would say full sound question you see that flag right there the american one that's our that's our merch okay what context does he say full send it's kind of like uh when you're going hardcore yeah exactly yeah yeah full sound yeah yeah yeah we came up with that and that's our brand and all right so that was like when we saw that i think that's spacex hawthorne i think that was uh that was star base uh south texas oh that was south texas okay okay i thought it was author we got a trademark too and like okay even the rocket category too okay i'll have to give you a sense they'll give us a free podcast appearance so are the the starship launches those are directly with the starlink or no yeah those are sending the satellites up into orbit so the falcon 9 rocket that we launch right now is is what is able to launch the starlink version one satellites or technically around version 1.5 going to version 1.6 um and there are still pretty big satellites um before they unfold they're like the size of a sort of a small compact car and uh with installing two satellites are like what you know way bigger than a pickup truck they're like sort of seven meters long um so the strong two satellites are too big to be launched by falcon they have to be launched by starship how often are the starship launches we've not done any orbital starship launches but we we hope to start to we hope to to attempt it's an orbital launch uh in a month or two nice so it depends on how the testing goes got it you guys know what the start link is from that yeah i feel like it's not talked about enough i agree starling should be taught so starlink is a space-based internet so we've got a constellation of satellites uh we've got now well over two thousand satellites um we'll soon have about four thousand satellites so we have more satellites in operation than than the rest of earth combined really yeah than any other single company then and then the rest of earth oh my god yeah and this download speed is crazy on it it's not like is it available like now or there's a long wait list right yeah starlink is available now at starlink.com but i thought it was a long wait list there's a wait list if you're in like a high density area okay so um the starlink is really best suited if you're in like uh the sort of countryside or it's kind of like low population areas it's like you could be perfect though yeah for places that don't have internet rural america yeah basically rural america um and like relatively sparsely populated areas um but the the so the way the solid weight list is just if you're in a area that's where there's already too many starling terminals and we don't want to saturate that area because that'll um reduce people's internet speeds so um in order to be able to service more people in that area we need to launch more satellites so we launched more satellites almost every week so we're aiming the next 12 months probably do 60 70 launches maybe more wow you've been supplying uh for ukraine you've been helping the internet there right um yes it's been successful yes were you hesitant at all from any negative backlash from russia well i should probably not visit russia you tweeted something about that why not you know what i mean it's probably unwise you know i mean i mean look what they did with the basketball player yeah i know just for a vape yeah um did you see what trump said recently about her uh no but i was like man if um you know if if the president's working so hard to to sort of free someone who's in jail in russia for some some weed then should we free people in america yeah yeah absolutely there are people in jail in in america for the same [ __ ] for the same stuff shouldn't we free them too uh it's something that's legal in so many states right now as well it's not i mean i i think it's like for it's not i mean my opinion is that people should not be in jail for non-violent uh drug crimes i agree with that yeah we were just talking about that too remember when you smoked weed on joe rogan did you get like a lot of backlash for that i did get a lot of backlash because it's like still federally illegal yeah so um no it was pretty nutty actually i had to well because you know uh so i had i had to have like random drug tests and stuff after that to prove that i'm not like a drug addict really yeah by who though who gives you the rent even the federal government like like because spacex has uh federal government contracts so okay um and it's still illegal federally so like like the spacex you know competitors were like hey look at you why are you doing anything you know look at him smoking just like brazenly smoking weed on yeah even for weed yeah the drug checks me for everything randomly i'm happy that it is i couldn't like you it wasn't like you know pick a day because you know so there was like like a whole year of random drug tests did you just make that decision on the spot or did you like no like you must have known you're gonna get some backlash right i think i don't think i'd get that much backlash you know it's sort of like i thought everyone thought it was cool as [ __ ] like that if you follow elon on twitter yeah i mean the consequences for me and for spacex were actually not good uh because it's because it's federally illegal in spacex has federal contracts and then you know so uh unfortunately it wasn't just me but the whole company the all of spacex had to have random drugs oh my god bro it's hilarious so i'm like i'm sorry guys sorry i didn't realize it would be this big of a deal some people must been sweating that's so funny just over one joint like did you have to like walk into a boardroom and everyone's just grilling you and you're like yeah um yeah no it was like uh you know i think to bear in mind like you know some people are still pretty uptight about these things i know um like just older people right yeah pretty much i didn't even look like you puffed on it sorry it didn't even look like you were not even i'm like not even i don't even know how to smoke a joint obviously just look at me i'm like have no joint smoking skills yeah yeah um well that's what you acted like on camera no i mean seriously i i mean i just you know um you know i i find we is like not that good for productivity so i'm like you know i'm not gonna as i do actually have to make the rockets work and the cars work and make the factories work and stuff so um but uh yeah i think like the you know i think what we're seeing over time is that you know as as younger people are elected to office then they're more um you know less uptight about uh sort of uh drugs and stuff you know um and um you've seen like one state after another kind of like legal legalize marijuana um some tastes i think uh mushrooms are legalized and so so it's like um it seems like mushrooms is next they're decriminalizing starting in there same processes marijuana cali did recently i think colorado washington yeah washington i think yeah it's like nobody's committing crimes on russia no yeah yeah are you in support of psychedelics yeah you are i think some of the psychedelics can be pretty helpful for like um ptsd and like yeah like serious like uh psychological trauma and depression and um i'd say like my personal opinion is like psychedelics are like way better for treating depression than a lot of like the ssris and stuff that are given out absolutely yeah i mean like a lot of those sort of anti-depression drugs just turn you to a zombie they come from the ground too right which mushrooms yeah yeah well i'm saying like i'm saying like what well they're not they're not in orbit you know no but i'm saying pills are pills are coming from a lab so it's like yeah yeah no i mean i mean i think it's not necessarily that if if something is like something being natural or synthetic doesn't necessarily mean it's good or bad because you can say like like arsenic is natural it's like an element on the periodic table um so cyanide you know but this you don't want to have either of those two things right um so but they're totally natural um and in fact there are mushrooms that will that are poisonous and achilles yeah so it's not like all mushrooms are good um i always thought like back in the old days you know when they're trying to figure out which is the good mushroom yeah they're like yeah what summer poison why don't you try that mushrooms everybody like stands back see what happens okay that one's tasty that one like makes you see visions and this one kills you okay but just make sure which is which you know she's gonna have a guy designated tester yeah just one of your boys like yo dude you go first yeah totally so it like there's so many different types of mushrooms you know and so um and most russians are just you can just eat them and they're fine and then some mushrooms are you know psychedelic and some kill you yeah with that joint with that joint like incident too just doing something so cool and normal like how do you like as successful and famous as you are how do you like stay normal and doing stuff like that like i mean i don't know um i think like most people in like the corporate world are really trying to conform to uh some sort of you know behavioral thing that's like makes them seem like a i don't know like a android or drone or something you know it's like or like some npc in a video game with like a limited dialogue tree you know yeah and you're like [Laughter] what'd you say mpc like an npc you know and like a video game where where like it was with a dialogue tree that's like really only has like six options or something um that seems like most corporate ceos behave like that i'm like are you even real like how do we know you're not an npc you know um so i don't know i mean it's cool i didn't expect i mean i feel like ceo of like all like these big companies and stuff so just sort of happened that way i think compared to all the other ceos you're the most down-to-earth guy yeah that's what i was trying to say like yeah it's cool like ironically for space and you're a funny ass dude right yeah yeah how come oh yeah this is a spy chip your twitter your twitter feed is on a different level funny like it seems as if it seems as if you don't really i mean i i i strive to keep the people entertained bro do people give you a hard time or am i keeping with the people you know you're crushing like going back and forth with like people on twitter without like no lawyers or anything like that like a man i have to say i've gotten into trouble so many times on twitter it's insane how often wait wait i want to know how you're getting away with everything you say some things like give a team that approves it or do you just fire it like literally i'm the only one who's ever tweeted or who's i'm the only one who's ever had access to that twitter account do you have some go-to people that you like run [ __ ] by though like yo should i like do you think everyone else is like okay also like show this to a friend like is this too crazy to tweet or what have you done like yes and i don't know i'll save it and think about it maybe but i don't know um you know uh but i've gotten like into legal trouble legal trouble with tweets you know really anything you could say or no well no i mean some of it's like most of us like public you know um so um you've gotten into some battles though um yeah yeah i know but like like when i said i was like taking tales of private i was at 4 20. that's hilarious don't have a sense of humor it turns out um anyway i wonder like with all this [Laughter] elon's birthday is 69 days after 4 20. yeah can you even believe that yeah bro that's the funniest thing to me how is my birthday for 69 days at 4 20. that's insane that's why like we must be living in a simulation or something this is too crazy yeah that's the funniest thing to me easy to remember we to get through something yeah june 28th nice yeah 6 6 28 which is also a tower day which is two pi what did you do on your birthday i think just had dinner with friends nothing special there's nothing special this year and like um actually i'm really had a like a real party for a few years so i used to have like really big birthday parties that's what i'm saying you could be like gatsby bro i actually literally had a gas feed party at one point where is that where at my house in the bay area which i know i'll go on can you tell us about um because we weren't invited i don't know if you were you invited you weren't i no i wasn't i think post malone was post told me once you went to like one of your parties uh i don't know what was that he changed my the house oh my old house in l.a yeah but he said it was a theme party too i think right or it was a medieval theme it was something he was telling me something come to a party we had him on here like three weeks ago okay yeah he's cool um he's fine what's the elon musk house party look like well the uh the my parties generally are very high production value so um like i said i haven't held a party in several years so it's you know um with cobinhole it's like a bunch of my friends you know couldn't whatever like a lot of my friends live in other countries and they couldn't come to the us so sure um yeah so i haven't really like held a big party for maybe three years or so um but i guess we'll probably be in about uh four or five years ago um had a sort of a kind of a gastropathy party at this house at the bay area which is um like you can see it online because i sold it in people like you know uh they docked the house and whatever they so you can see pictures of it um but it's like it really is like very much like a haunted mansion situation yeah um it's like it's possibly the creepiest in fact it is the creepiest house i've ever lived in really yeah why not though why um i and i had two parties i won gatsby party and one sort of castle castlevania party you got to tell us like performers anybody yeah yeah performers and stuff like um stones uh no no it's like i don't have like a like a famous band or anything it's just high production value sort of set set design oh it's nice um that's important theme parties bro yeah just for in terms of the the sort of um the set the production value set design of the party um and the uh there are performers they're just not like uh celebrity performers you know singers and dancers how many people do you think go i mean they have like uh not super big like 100 or so people cops called her no yeah actually what about the ratio with like women and guys so so this that party was in in hillsborough oh yeah in the bay area yeah where like everyone goes to bed at 10 p.m um and so like the cost got called like four times you greet him or somebody talks to him there's somebody talk to them but like at first they can find a house you know because the house has like a weirdly long driveway like for so long that like if you take an uber there like they're convinced it's like they're just going into the woods or something so it took took a while for the police to actually even find the house but then like the whole neighborhood was calling the cops basically that's insane that literally came four times and then finally we had to like to turn the music off you know what was so creepy about the house like it was like haunted or something fell horned do you believe in ghosts i mean i i i don't believe in ghosts but sometimes it feels like they're a ghost or something you know how so uh look in the house yeah that's creepy late at night unless you know if you're like a weird house and and there's sort of strange sounds happening and um you know doors opening for no apparent reason and um it's creepy so you're in your opinion like scientifically ghosts like doesn't make sense for them to exist i've seen no actual evidence for ghosts uh but that doesn't mean you can't get creeped out late at night yeah so uh but but this house was uh this is it like i said this and i i had that house for many years uh and i tried to de-creep it as much as possible but even after a lot of de-creeping just like how do you decree sage you're like creepy stuff i guess like what paintings well furniture yeah yeah for like weird pants furniture and and like there were these um these animal figurines like yeah get those out of there yeah that's creepy as hell just feel like they didn't come alive at night yeah you know you sleep with the light on no i do no i used to when i was a kid i used to be like uh scared of the dogs bathroom like those lights yeah bathroom lights yeah somewhere you could see like if someone's coming in or anything like that yeah yeah um i mean it had this like like this like narrow stairway down into the basement that was painted red i just felt like it like the place was a bit like the shining yeah it's a shining vibe yeah sounds like a total shiny sounds like i'm not staying there but anyway grateful parties like if you have 100 people there yeah it's just creepy if you're there by yourself yeah so main home now is austin or texas state of texas main residence i actually don't really have a main residence um same as us it's kind of like us just always moving around but what's that with a boxable rumor that you actually have a box bowl yeah you do some prototype box bowl that's down in south texas yeah well that's pretty cool they reached out to us they wanted to make a happy dad bar boxable okay and um yeah and i didn't know much about it and i started looking into it more and there was like pictures of you with the boxable not in one but like like the elon musk had and i wasn't sure if it was a rumor or yeah you know but i don't have a box full um but the my my main my the house my main house if i have a main house is there's one in south texas in boca chica village um on weem street and uh it's called williams but i want i'm petitioning to change the street name to memes no wait what's up no i mean if you get enough people on the street to say yes you can change the street well if they know you're doing that or elon musk makes a call yeah so what do you think of the boxable yeah it seems seems good um aren't they like what are they like 50 grand i think so um i don't actually stay in the box full it's like so i have like the house that i bought actually cost less than it's inboxable because like 45k or something but i've done a lot with the place you know so you bought a house for 45k yeah what is it like big or is it no it's small is it very small it's a tiny house it's a great value 45k yeah no it's a tiny it's a small small house um why do you do that people have pictures of it and stuff it's like um because it was right next to the rocket factory oh got it so i can just literally walk to rocket factory it's like half a mile away you got a kitchen living room bedroom it's a one bedroom right uh technically it's technically a three bedroom but it used to be a two bedroom but the i converted the garage into a third bedroom so crazy yeah it's like it's like a a friends might come and stay in there like i can't believe i'm staying in this house yeah do you like living like that if i'm there by myself but yeah it's fine you know or just with a little axe or something you know yeah so um the family and i i actually i used to i use the box bowl as my guest house oh nice that's what i'm using for is if a friend comes to stays or something and um then they can stay in the box pool if they want nice um that should be like the full send hotboxing for all the employees the box they're boxable we should do it though they're cool they're all the employees that safe will send just i think they're around like 50 grand so yeah they're 15. well they offered they want to partner with us they said when we come to vegas they want us give us a tour of the factory and everything i think it's cool is there enough room to like party in there no i think it would be we could just have one for that anyways but i have like an outdoor area by that by back of the house where you can party uh more or less like there's like a little barbecue pit and stuff nice so if i i actually did did have my i had a small birthday party there last year which is was just some friends invited down to starbase to hang out um and um yeah that was fun yeah so yeah um but uh yeah these days i'm basically just trying to get uh starship to orbit which is pretty tough it's a very complicated rocket uh it's uh it's one double the thrust of for saturn v about twice the weight so um saturn 5's biggest rocket ever to get to orbits it's what sent people to the moon um back in the day so making a rocket that's twice as big as the next biggest rocket that's ever reached orbit is is challenging um that's why i say like we'll get to orbit maybe between 1 and 12 months from now but there definitely could be some um you know explosions along the way like it's not just going to work right away um i mean when the soviet union was competing with the united states to get to the moon they were trying to develop a rocket called the n1 which was uh similar in in size to the saturn v actually had uh more thrust than saturn v uh and they had had four launches and all four failed uh so we don't wanna end up in that boat yeah is that like a lot of pressure like there's so much pressure on you like are you like [ __ ] if this like blows up like i look bad under pressure is that all you think about like on a day-to-day basis [Laughter] can you perform under pressure i'm living pressure that's rookie [ __ ] for you yeah expectations are so high no but i can try bohemian rhapsody love queen oh yeah oh i said yes freddie mercury how long is the production on the rocket from start to end uh well right now it takes a long time um this is a very big this is the largest flying object ever made so you know um we're aiming for a production rate of one a month but right now we're at a production rate probably one every four or five months and how expensive is it just for one rocket one launch all that i don't know it's at least 50 million dollars marginal cost of launch maybe 100 million um so every explosion it's like how pissed are you boom that was 100 million dollars [ __ ] that's gambling yeah put the chips on um but anyway if we don't if we don't have a rocket like that then we we humanity can't be a space faring civilization and a multi-planet species like right if we want to go out there and um you know and make sci-fi real you know and be on other planets and go go back to the moon uh then we need big rockets why do you think we haven't been back to the moon well i think another way of thinking about it is that the the fact that we were able to go to the moon in 69 was such an anomalous situation it was like reaching into the future and bringing the technology forward that normally wouldn't be there like that was not the natural pace of technology development it's just that the united states just collectively decided that this has got to be done you know we kind of got it got to beat the soviets you know so i don't want to sound like have we not been back since then or have we there were a few trips to the moon there wasn't just one okay um landings like actually landed on the moon okay i think the last lightning was maybe 72 wow that sounds weird that we'd be so much more advanced now and we haven't gone back i agree it's totally weird well do you have just no interest in the moon at all like no we'll go to the moon we are we have spacex has an asset contract to take astronauts to the moon so nasa did choose spacex to return astronauts to the moon and we intend to do that would be like the mission well i mean starship is the objective it's gigantic compared to anything that's like ever been done before so this is not like a tiny little thing lands on the moon this is like giant-ass spaceship lands on the moon um you know it's capable of putting 100 tons of failure on the moon so a lot you could build a moon base for starship um so we can go way beyond what was done with the apollo program whether it's had a small lander that you know and they sort of were on the surface the moon for i don't know maybe some number of hours and then they got back in and took off um so the apollo program is not capable of building a moon base but the starship system is capable of building base i mean it's it's an it's designed to be capable of building a city on the moon or mars that's also that's what the system is designed to be able to do so that's insane why is the goal right now to get to mars before the moon no we'll we'll probably get to the moon first okay oh really yeah but not built would we build a city on it or or not on the moon i mean i think we should build a city on the moon and and on mars yeah it's weird it's way closer than than what martial is like nutty farts it's more convenient why do you want to colonize mars i think uh i think it's important for uh i think there's two reasons um one is kind of a defensive reason that like if something bad would happen to earth uh then um you know it could be like a meteor like whatever destroyed the dinosaurs super volcanoes uh could be world war three like we could just like nuke each other to death or something like i don't know world war iii is like seeming a little more probable these days um that might be the leading factor it might be the leading factor so um you know so there could be either some uh natural disaster or some or something where humanity just like suicides itself with it with a world war three situation and and then it would be you know good to have a second planet where so so that like you know civilization isn't wiped out so that's the kind of defensive reason it's like life insurance for life collectively and so you know not just for humans but all like the creatures that we love so um that's like the defense you're gonna pull like a noah's ark vibe and bring like animals too yeah yeah i mean sure absolutely oh wow what do you think mars is gonna look like well long term we could make it look like earth or we have to warm it up but there's a lot of um it's a lot of ice on mars this looks cold so like you just have to warm it up to have liquid water um but mars has a mars would have um an an ocean of i think about a roughly maybe a mile deep uh on 40 of the planet roughly wow um yeah so if you've watched warming up so that's a lot of water all ice right now precise 40 of the planet that [ __ ] is crazy just isis in fact a lot of the ice that you see on mars at the poles is actually uh dry ice it's a co2 frozen co2 i've always been into aliens and i remember it was like when i was a kid when they first found like ice on mars that that sparked like all the alien rumors on mars there might be life there's this massive amounts of isobars like no little it's a crazy amount well how would you warm it up then well you could use like solar reflectors or you could just create artificial suns with uh a series of uh like thermonuclear explosions um like this the sun is like a a uh a giant you'd create a sun thermonuclear reactor it's it's a like if you want to if you're worried about like well will that generate like dangerous radiation we'll have you stood in front of the sun if you you know just go out in the sun sure the sun is uh it's a through a nuclear reactor so that's what you think so obviously we can stand in front of the sun and not die it must be nerve-wracking though because it's like all tests yes so yes you could create like a permanent like sun like by mars no you'd have to do it would it just be like a heat wave and then it's kind of gone and it melts all the ice uh yeah you'd have to do kind of like a series of um like if like if you've like launched a like a missile every i don't know 10 seconds and then you know this is like fireworks but real big okay okay thermonuclear fireworks okay um but you can't have us you couldn't have a sustained reaction uh because um the the sun is a gravitationally contained thermonuclear reactor so you need a lot of gravity um the sun is well over 90 percent well over 99 of all the mass of the solar system oh so it's big it's very big what are those so fascinating yeah what are the first steps like what do you start with to start civilization on mars what's the first thing you got to do i think first thing you gotta do is is build a a base and then that base would have like the like essentials of like food production uh water like which is you know like have ice mining droids they were like go mine ice and then melt it and purify the water um and then you need a propellant uh kind of a propellant factory or propellant plant so mars's atmosphere is primarily co2 um and if you and then if you take water which is h2o uh and uh you can turn co2 and h2o into ch4 and o2 which is methane and oxygen so you that that's why starship uses methane as a fuel it's it's mostly oxygen so it's like 78 oxygen the propellant and 22 fuel so in you know in space in a vacuum you have there's no oxygen to burn so you've got to bring out oxygen and you mostly bring oxygen so uh you'd be uh you need a propellant plant to create the liquid oxygen liquid methane um and food and water and the basics essentially that's that'll be the thing to start off with um and um [Music] you'd be living in kind of like glass domes and posh the underground and stuff so it'll be hard living in the beginning on mars like not like a luxury situation so who are the first people that go live there i don't know pioneers um but i would say the you know any for for the first people that go to mars it it's like it's gonna be like dangerous like you might die uh food probably not good um you know it's gonna be a long and difficult trip it's it's like it's probably like a lot of pain and danger that's that what do you think about the population on the other hand it's going to be glorious adventure so it sounds like there's got to be something but i bet you there's still a [ __ ] long list right people that want i think once maybe there's threats to earth then the list gets huge right there's probably a huge list already yeah maybe i mean i think there's like there's people like climb mount everest and stuff so you know or like thrill sale yeah sale is cross-specific by themselves you know um so so there's i think there's then there's like you got eight billion people on earth so you don't only need a small number to want to do it how much i'm just saying it's like the beginning it's going to be like dangerous difficult and and uh you know um like not not like a it's not like a luxury resort it can be dangerous and difficult and a lot a lot of work basically but you know over time you can make it awesome all right so you're going on the list i i wouldn't do mars i would do space no chance i wouldn't do more chance you would go into space bro yeah i would no i would trust elon what do you mean so you would go into space and just chill and then come back yes i would do it i wouldn't i would go to mars because that's what i'm on the next mars is like a commitment that's like your whole life like but i would do space i don't know about that how do you how do you how are you going to filter like the water if you're going to heat up like mars and stuff like that well filtering water is actually not it's not super hard you know you can always just like evaporate it and or use various like carbon filters and stuff it's it you can purify water as a well understood uh process um so um so you just basically go you have to go mine some dusty ice and and then uh melt it and send it through a bunch of water purifiers and you could drink it yeah that's crazy what do you expect the population to be in mars like i know you said that i mean i hope it's a big population at some point um what's the number i know you're a numbers guy you have to be well i i think there's a critical threshold is how many people how many people i needed on mars for moss to be self-sustaining such that if the spaceships from earth ever stopped coming the people that it wouldn't die out you know so the other thing about it there's like if we live on earth here but we live at the top of like a vast permit of industry you know where there's always like mining of all these like elements and then there's many many steps of refining and then and these are gradually turned into a product uh but there's a massive base of industry that would need to be recreated on mars and if you're missing any any element of that then um then if the shifts from earth stopped coming it would die out you'd be like if you had everything except vitamin c um then yeah you'll be okay for a while but then you're gonna eventually die oh yeah so you got it there just can't be any any like missing critical missing ingredient so then it's like okay well how many people are needed to ensure there's no listening ingredient i don't know maybe a million people i'm guessing um i was not more than that um it's probably not much less than that and then you probably need millions of tons of cargo delivered to mars so it's a lot um i feel like better but you can say like like there's there's this thing called like the the great filters or which is um you know sort of coming from the fermi paradox very paradox is is just where are the aliens if the if the if the universe is really 13.8 billion years old shouldn't there be aliens everywhere um and if not why not um i think it was carl sagan who said that there appear to be either like if there's either there's either a lot of aliens or no aliens and that and and either either one is equally terrifying meaning if there are no aliens then what we have here is very rare and then odds are no aliens is more terrifying more terrifying i think it's more likely though right if the universe is 13.8 billion years old well this is like this is why it's called this like this this is like a great physicist enrico fumi who posed the question of where are the aliens um now a lot of people ask me like what about the islands have you seen any evidence of aliens i've seen no evidence no hard evidence what about these pentagon videos um like a little but no but there are these videos that the pentagon released during covet of course but you know like what were like well they didn't they just say that there was ufos like that doesn't necessarily mean that the ufo so like i mean there's like advanced programs that the military has which are classified and they wouldn't so you know if they had like some really fast missile or something they would even if somebody else in the military saw that then they would still not tell them what it was because it's classified sure wait didn't they release something like to the best of my knowledge i have not seen any evidence of aliens and i think i know why do you think i think there's a narrative out there that our first interaction with aliens would be violent do you think that's the case well if so i think we're in trouble because if they were able to get here and we couldn't get there then probably they've got much better technology than well we're done yeah we're told we're at the university this is so interesting it does not seem like it's always like going to be violent one and two they're more advanced than us but why can't we they're going to be way more advanced not a little bit more advanced oh why is that so we'll be i would just be totally at their mercy because if they've got spaceships that can get from other star systems to here yeah we don't have anything like that right that's true so wasn't there probably got some bad ass space lasers and [ __ ] yeah like who knows why you think we have something crazy anti-matter weapons like basically we're hopeless like we would just be like children or something you know maybe we have some area 51 though no some lasers locked in there have you been there um but you know there there are you've been area weapons i'm not very r51 um there are actually lots of areas by the way oh i think spacex technically lisa's area 59 or something like that so they're numbered i think i think spacex needs to create some [ __ ] lasers if so wait is there better we do have space lasers oh really yeah elon is there better areas than the 51 of course what do you think please i don't have one i need one how am i going to protect myself if the invasion happens yeah let's call elon oh yeah he'll answer we do have a lot of space lasers we use them to communicate between the satellites so uh those just there should be lasers should be fully operational around the end of this year so were those just rumors or or fake news about eisenhower having meetings with the aliens and like i don't know what year yeah i i do not have meetings with aliens in fact i i think it was may have been him or or there was some uh like pentagon general who who said because people kept on bugging him about aliens and stuff and he said listen if if we had any evidence of aliens if i had an alien i would drag an alien body or something i'd i'd show you the alien body because you know what if i show you that alien body we'd get our budget approved instantly yeah he's like watch out aliens we need more money yeah it's like if there was like some scary alien stuff that would be the fastest way to get the biggest possible why can't we solve your friends yeah but what do you think we'd react pretty like people go crazy like a human population would go crazy would they i mean i i feel like i don't know i feel like aliens the the general population believes in aliens i think like 20 years ago everyone's like no but now it's like if you ask anyone they're like yeah i believe in aliens yeah because i meant one no but i think everyone just like believes there's aliens because of movies probably yeah of course no but i saw that on joe's podcast too it's interesting how in like movies and like since the beginning of time or beginning of entertainment they've always been like pushing on us like aliens aliens aliens like movies like independence day yeah just everything there's life outside like earth that's the other thing like why is area 51 so secretive then i don't think it is actually all that secretive um probably yeah it just it just like answered the mythos of and and i don't know people got carried away um that's i i i don't think there's anything sort of super interesting in area 51. um like there are more advanced weapons that the us has that people don't know about but they're not like crazy alien weapons so um what's your gut feel on if they exist or not like your gut obviously there's no hard evidence but i don't think there are aliens at least in our sector of the galaxy to your guts that they don't exist not in our sector of the galaxy so there might be aliens in like a far away portion of the galaxy if by aliens i think you mean like with spaceships that could potentially travel to here or something like that no just in general i guess someone alien you could talk to like or you don't mean like microbes because that'd be a boring alien yeah true like it's like a tiny like kind of like just talking yeah like a microphone amiibo whatever yeah plankton yeah sure i guess i guess aliens we could talk to yeah so not microbes not like yeah not like okay we found a whatever i mean what's the first thing that would just ruin it like we found aliens and here they are what's the first thing you would say if you're seeing it like face to face what's the first thing you'd say to alien uh welcome i hope you come in peace come do you understand english or do i does this oh just speaking gibberish here or what um um i'm saying if they can understand english then they will have been observing us for a long time you know but anyway i don't think they're like i said i i don't think they're aliens i think the most but you should view these things as like probabilities generally you should think of things as probabilities not certainties so i think there's probably not aliens and i think that's kind of scary actually because then what it would suggest is that um consciousness civilization as we know it is extremely rare um and and a very precious thing where like our consciousness is like a small candle in a vast darkness and we must not let that small candle go out that's the theory i saw i was like they've always been kind of plugging aliens on us to make us think that we're just this little speck but actually it's like we're the only thing and it's like they kind of taught us that to not make us feel special and to not like appreciate human existence you know but it's kind of interesting when you think about that like what if humans are the only thing yeah they want us to make us feel like we're not feel small we wouldn't be smart enough yeah like you ain't [ __ ] yeah it is well i mean based on everything we know about history and archaeology and stuff you know so earth's about four and a half billion years old and the first writing is only about 5 000 years old that's basically practically yesterday so so it's taking 4.5 billion years to get to this point so the window of opportunity to make life multi-planetary and have a base on the moon or mars is open for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of earth and that may be open for a long time or maybe open for a short time but i think we should not assume it will be open for a long time and we should assume it'll be open for a short time and we should while the window of opportunity is open we should make life multiplanetary what do you think's the biggest threat to mankind right now i'd say the biggest threat right now is population collapse the super low growth rate really yeah over like nuclear war naturally don't we have an overpopulation problem no we have an underpopulation problem really yeah why why do those are the most commonly misunderstood situation yeah they definitely push that we have a overview yeah no no we i don't know it's just like i think it's like this is a holdover from like i don't know the 70s or something you know so there was a huge um baby boom like where people did have a ton of kids after world war ii but then the us has actually been at the growth rate in the us has been below replacement rate since like 71 or 72. in the u.s how about other countries um well like china's got a huge population collapse problem really yeah china china you actually get penalized if you have one kid no you're see this is like so part of it is just like we were operating on things that were true in the past but are no longer true so china did have a one child policy but um like about 10 years ago that ago they changed it to a two child policy then a few years ago they changed it to a three-child policy and birth rate kept plummeting the whole time lowest growth rate ever last year really yeah china's birth rate right now is 40 below replacement traditional women i don't wanna you know you know one can speculate us to the reasons but there's no hoes i mean like andrew tate was last week bro i know it's true bro like what you said about birth they're out there see that wow that is a very common misconception i would understand very coherent misconception what we face uh is population collapse collapse like you have no idea how fast the population is going to collapse um what are we doing japan is pretty far along in that like japan actually uh lost like 600 that went down by 600 000 people last year the japanese are not in the bedroom at all then it was not at all it would seem not what about what about the u.s we got to increase right yeah i'm going to say is the the u.s has been below replacement rates for 50 years the only reason the population is increasing like since the 70s yeah since the early 70s since like 71-72 so why are we spewed with all this bs that yo we're overpopulating but the population's growing right no it's not um so i mean i should say the the the like lifespan is increasing people are living longer that's the only reason why the population of earth isn't plummeting but it will plummet so um you know just like one thing to metric to track is the ratio of adult diapers to baby divers like at what point does a country have more adult diapers and baby diapers and like japan went past that point over 10 years ago i believe whoa what do you think happens in like the future then what's your kind of thought on that well i think people really we've got to turn this around we're going to have at least replacement rate if not more on the baby front um and by the way these this is these are not matters that are uh subjective you can just literally look at the both you know it's like it's an objective number like how many kids babies were born it's like a they record this information you know so um and um so you're saying people need to be having more kids yeah i mean i'm sure you know a lot of people who have like no kids like how many kids do you guys have i don't know i got no kids i mean now we know what none of you guys what the [ __ ] i'm 28 but i mean i'm 20. i i'm trying to get a baby mama soon but yeah yeah and i just got married last month she's over there okay hey congrats um i feel like that's kind of changing though i think like with generations our generation is have like less marriages less kids child support man a lot of guys are scared right now that's true that's not true but yeah i mean it's true man i would be scared too i mean that is that it probably is a big thing yeah give me a break social media too people get caught up on social media instead of going out and you know having fun how detrimental is that like what's what's that if we if it keeps trending this way how long does it happen before it's like yeah i guess distinct well it it's it's a it's a like a low birth rate is is a slow death for a civilization it's not a fast yeah we're chilling for a bit yeah i mean career cruising it's just like the average age just starts drifting up and then you know basically civilization will die with a whimper in adult diapers you know it kind of sucks doesn't it it's like anticlimactic you know it's not exactly i mean frankly if you say given the choice like i'd rather civilization died with a went out with a bang than a whimper in adult diapers yeah what's a bang bang with world war three [Laughter] yeah the choices are you know like it's just like sad or it's just sad if just if you just die and you know diet civilization dies of old age i think um so that's like the the most that's probably the biggest myth that exists right now is this overpopulation myth when in fact we have a population collapse problem um and i think people can see this anecdotally when they talk to friends and just like we just said like none of you guys have kids yet it's totally understandable 20 but i mean 28 yeah 28 maybe yeah um how old are you 42. 2042 you should he's not contributing see like by 42 you should have no yeah what the [ __ ] and i'm i'm the problem i know that's what i got out of this so you know that's uh i don't know i i have a lot of friends of mine especially um you know like a you know know a lot of women that have not had kids and like not planning to type of thing and i'm like man um so i'm worried about the i think that's the biggest risk to a civilization right now it's just we we got to get rid of this nonsense that we're having an overpopulation issue we have an under population why do you think that that's not being said more than if that's a huge problem different agenda i mean i think he has some kind of you know i think like maybe the sort of uh like i'm pro environment but i think the environmentalist agenda has kind of gone too far on this agenda yeah that's an environmentalist yeah well it's kind of like the yeah yeah i mean like a lot of these things it's like i'm understood i don't think it's like some sort of like like sort of nefarious mastermind situation it's just a like a dumb idea that hasn't been fixed you know as opposed to like somebody's masterminding it or something you know um yeah but i'm just saying objectively one way or another if we don't have kids is like population's going to decline we're going to average age is going to increase um when did you have your first child um when i was 29 29. wow how many kids uh nine right yeah nine children well how many baby mothers three wow wow um how old are the twins now that's who i met i met the twins they're 18. they're 18 now wow yeah go to college oh wow that's what's the oldest and youngest well young it's just a baby but um less than one uh the oldest of 18. nice so you know trying to set a good example here having a lot of kids what's it like when they get to the age like 14 yeah uh well teenagers like kids generally um want to hang out with their parents until they start hitting their you know like 13 14. by age 16 you know kid they don't want to hang out with their dad yeah that much anyway yeah so um 18 they definitely don't hang out with their parents i mean no i have dinner occasionally you know yeah i wonder what's like a day like for like elon musk like just a regular day like day to day basis like what you do because i find that very interesting yeah like what time do you wake up yeah what time do you wake up when do you make your coffee maybe you drink coffee maybe you don't i do drink coffee yeah um well i i tend to be like uh like fairly nocturnal so i like go to sleep around i don't know 3am thereabouts wow um and then i'll wake up around usually about six six and a half hours later so nine nine thirty um and um i i have a bad habit which i suspect a lot of people do of like immediately checking my phone for right away yeah right away yeah it's a terrible habit actually um just see like any emergencies happen overnight or no um so i didn't want to text you too early this morning i was like i felt bad texting you yeah i was like all right i'm gonna wait till after 12 at least yeah um well i got a lot going on running spacex and tesla and you know so there's usually some kind of thing that's happened overnight um but i think i want to change that to uh like i got to work out and be in better shape you know so um we need you around oh thanks i actually don't really like working out but um i gotta do it so i'm gonna switch from you know just immediately looking at my phone first thing i'm more as soon as i wake up to i don't know it's working out for at least 20 minutes and then looking at my phone have you ever tried pre-workout like what's the pre-workout it's like the like a powder it's got caffeine in it and like it's usually sometimes when i'm lazy like this i just feel like okay you should just you gotta get pre-workout you get the quads going on you leave it on your bed leave it on your bedside counter okay and right when you wake up just take a scoop okay and then you'll be like so jittery that you can't go to bed so you'll just you'll have no choice but to go to the gym where's it available feel like okay we have ours too no but the bedside pre is a key because you're so like you can't do anything but go to the gym you can't sit still you're just going to go in like a little energy drink okay we have one and ours is all natural too all right boys sort of interrupt this pod i know this is crazy [ __ ] elon it's fire but the pod is not sponsored by anyone manscape you're not sponsoring the pod liquid iv you suck you're not sponsoring the pod pod is sponsored by us if you guys didn't know we launched our supplements recently they're available now on supplements.com we got our protein the best and most fire tasting protein like it tastes like a [ __ ] milkshake but it's healthy we got the creatine summer's almost over it's time to start bulking the best and cleanest creatine in the game and then we got our pre i personally love our pre it's perfect for me it's sustainable it's a pre that you're never going to be able to stop taking it never like gets you to that point where you feel like you have to go to the [ __ ] hospital like other pre-workouts but i got you guys on a discount code use code podcast15 on supplements.com and you get 15 off your order so get a subscription get the [ __ ] shipped to your door every month let's get back into the pod elon i wonder with your influence do you feel as if you have i don't know how to say it like do you do you feel like you have more influence than the government at times like do you feel like you can kind of some way take over it i mean if you were an american citizen you would win presidency by a landslide yeah you know that you say the nicest things no but it's fact but also how many how many twitter followers does joe biden have do we know i don't know but you have you have a lot more than just checks i'll check i think he's got like 20 minutes up his tweets a little bit you know yeah he needs her i wonder though like when you're like sitting at the house do you ever feel like man i have way more influence than what the government has like you know what i mean um well it's pretty fair to say that i i i don't have a lot of influence 34.8 um what yeah well you've got a you've got a bigger reach then because you almost i think you have 100 million on twitter right yeah the president has 34 million yeah so you're getting to more people than he is which is pretty crazy to think about it is crazy yeah i want to know i want to know how how do you feel about that i was like might be 90 bucks though you buying followers or elon you said we can't go there we're not going there no what i don't know this i think that that there's there's a fair number of bosses i've never bought followers or anything but um but this will i might my my account gets targeted a lot by scammers because you know um like my account is by far the most interacted with account on on twitter so um so you know since my account is most interactive with account on the whole system uh that's kind of what scammers are going to target my account you know so when you say scammers wouldn't be like hacking into your account or i know just like people trying to impersonate crypto scams and oh yeah yeah that's right that's all over yeah yeah that's that's all about the internet i mean everywhere yeah yeah crypto crypto scams are yeah but there's like you know for scams of various kinds uh but cryptoscounds being number one but there's there's other scams too what about the coin the elon coin wasn't there elon coin that just blew up too yeah i mean i don't know there's like everything coin um what do you think about not really anymore though that [ __ ] coin phase kind of no but it was actually this one like took off i mean it still trades well i think i haven't looked in a while but yeah well i have nothing to do with it i bought a lot because i thought it was yours but the man what do you think of the crypto right now the future bitcoin ethereum the big ones you love doge yeah i mean i'm mainly supporting doge frankly um because i think doge is like the has the memes and dogs and and it seems like has a sense of humor and doesn't take itself too seriously but what's the potential with it um why do you think actually weirdly even though doge was just designed to be like this ridiculous joke currency um the the actual total transactional throughput capability of doge is uh much higher than bitcoin um and the fact that there's five billion dollars created every year um is is actually i think good for using it as as a transactional currency um because it where is it used as a transactional currency when you buy like tesla merch and spacex merch with doge oh nice and and you can also pay for boring company rides in vegas you pay for what like boring company has uh tunnels under vegas what yeah i know boring company with the flamethrower but i didn't know they had underground tunnels like that that's molly was see what it does so what you save time with traffic yeah the flamethrower was smart to get stuck on the strip and traffic and they're live available to use right now yeah just opened the one from like resorts world so there's tunnels under vacation you gotta rip that yeah yeah well tesla's only right all right yeah it's like tesla's gonna tunnel basically yeah what the [ __ ] yeah so you can but you own a tesla with those yeah one's a tesla tesla yeah i love your car by the way yeah who's your biggest enemy right now yeah who is your base i don't know well i i i i did challenge vladimir putin to uh one-on-one uh you know single combat what like i'm not sure he's my biggest enemy but he i did challenge him to this one what does that mean single combat mma yeah oh really we could help with that dana white dana white joe rogan commentating the pay-per-view i think it would be an interesting question because he's like good at martial odds you guys would have time to train [ __ ] too he's pretty buff i don't know so you see those pictures of him on a horse and stuff i mean putin i don't those russians are tough man yeah what's your skill set i'm not doubting you but like i'd be i'd be trying to be like i don't know look at those arms i i i do have a bit of a weight advantage but what's your game plan in the octagon though yeah are you like a ground guy or like i think you're a striker you got to use your reach you're a striker maybe but what would your game plan be against putin would you take him out he said like he has like one judo championships and stuff so oh she's pretty dude's pretty good but i i think i'm probably 50 percent higher than him so um i i could um you know kick him in the nuts just kick him yeah i mean if you've got a big weight advantage um that that can overcome a lot of technique you know um have you ever talked about like i i i have a move called the walrus the walmart what's that which i use on a friend of mine who's actually like like she's like very very agile and and whatnot but i was like let me explain to you why there are weight classes in mma i'm going to use a a move called the wall rust where i just lie on you and you can't get away you just like suffocate you said you try that on the wall you just i'm and you're stuck i'm gonna try that on steiny yeah yeah well that will win if you have size on him in a way i'm elaine you're putin yeah if you're happy advantage just use them unless you and gabriel have to try that they're just kind of you just lie on them and said that's the whole move you ever been well you see joe rogan saying that right now he's got him in the walrus you ever been in a fight like yeah what was the last fight you've been in um someone talking was a bar fight things were very violent so i wasn't i mean i never i never started a flight or anything but i had a lot of fights i didn't want to be in um and i got beaten up really badly in a few of them actually so um but uh so i've been in like real hardcore street fights really what age uh i don't know from when i was maybe six to 16 ish well like people picking on you and [ __ ] or yeah um i grew up in south africa it's a very violent place so you think that's what motivated you to become what you are i mean maybe played a role certainly toughen you up that's for sure i mean the people say like um you know they're worried about words and stuff people are worried about words it's never been punched in the face i'd say you're punching the face real hard right on the nose man you'll take any words rather than that you know yeah were you more quiet like back then 6 to 16 yeah i mean i was uh i was bookish you know so i was like uh reading a lot of books and just uh kind of nerd basically at work computers and books and stuff so um and um and i didn't i didn't get big until i like i was like a late bloomer from a size standpoint so i was like small relatively speaking it was like the youngest kid in the grade i was like almost the smallest kid in the grade so being small and and having some having violent bullies is a bad situation you know i went through that too yeah and once i got to when someone didn't bloom at all he's 20 years though yeah sort of you know got like a reasonably good size around age 15 and and then around age 16 is when they stop trying to beat me out because it didn't work out well for them then the walrus came out and knocked the guy out damn oh wow yeah wow elon do you watch like a lot of ufc yeah it's actually not that if you want one hot punch in the face you're not a guy with bear face no problem my guy yeah yeah bam you watch ufc he said you watch a lot of ufc yeah i wish you received from like you know the i i don't i mean i watched ufc occasionally these days i watched the the early uh fights with joyce gracie which was oh that show was crazy yeah crazy that was like they didn't have any rules basically i mean they had technically had some rules because you know you kind of like eye gouging kneecaps or throat you know they have the same thing if you really want to take someone out just [ __ ] punch them in the throat you know that this is a game over um pokemon or knock their kneecap off you still watch now so i i i see the occasional ones um and uh i mean there's a lot more more it's still you know interesting to watch but there's a lot more technique and yeah um but you know these days they have like like weight categories yeah because if if you have some you know 300 pound guy go against 100 pound guys it's not going to be a contest we go to a lot of fights we're good friends with dana white the okay yeah so we we love ufc yeah and we're partners with one of the fighters sugarshawn o'malley yeah i mean it's it's pretty well seeing these fights i mean it's a tough gig you know it is tough gig yeah some of the injuries are gnarly you know like i'll break a [ __ ] or something like that and just have a floppy leg or the long version for like brain effects too like i have to say it's it's yeah um like i know a lot about brains actually and you you really don't want to take a hard hit like a bunch of hard hits like your brain's like kind of like jello it's like jello in a coconut like your skull is a hard coconut and uh and your brain is like a it's like it basically has like the consistency of jello um really so yeah the thing that damages you is actually the brain hitting the sides hitting the side of your skull because skull's real hard so this is actually technically something called the subarachnoid space which is like the air the area between your brain and uh and this goes crazy yeah so you got like a little bit of i don't know like um quarter inch or so of space between your skull and your brain um and uh and then and then then you at some point like a really hard you know hit is gonna you're gonna lose some neurons you know so the guys the guys in the nfl the cte thing's real huh yeah yeah i mean just any kind of heart like a real fast jerk acceleration um is get your your brain is going to get damaged up against your skull how bad it is how bad is a concussion just one concussion hawaiian concussion is probably okay one yeah if it's not too crazy um repeated repeated concussions or repeated injuries like what's going to happen is you're going to lose you're going to lose a certain number of neurons are going to die you know so you smash you smash your brain against your skull internally just due to fast acceleration you're going to lose some number of neurons now if you keep doing that you're going to lose enough neurons to make a difference your brain can handle a lot of neuron signs but if you lose enough certain points you're going to start uh losing mental capability what does that do to you oh just you lose your ability to think uh yeah past some point you will you'll have erosion of your ability to think or you know ability like you could have damaged the motor cortex in which case you could have like jitters or numbness or um so you lose memories you know you see that with a lot of nfl players i know it's like what about what about the neurolingual brain chip talk a little bit about that yeah so the neural brain chip can can help with brain injuries the our our initial goal is to help uh people who are like uh quadriplegics or tetraplegics like basically you know can't can't move anything uh to be able to operate their phone uh or computer faster than someone who's got working hands um that's like that's the first thing we're trying to get done and and then we think it's actually possible to create like a neural shunt between so if you've got like a neural link in your skull connected to your brain your motor cortex you put another neural link your spinal cord past where the the nerves are broken and then it's just like it's like a wire like it's like um like a wireless bridge of because the neurons are kind of like wires and if you got a bunch of broken wires you can have a wireless bridge from your brain to uh where the neurons are still alive either you could you could have full body reanimation i thought the neural link downloads information though too right like can you learn like i don't know too much about it but can you learn a whole language from a knurling chip i mean down the road i think probably yes we're still like neural link version one which is very basic yeah think of it like a very early cell phone sure uh versus current cell phones do you ever worry though that at some point that's just gonna make all humans like at the same ability if everybody has a neural link they will actually even out ability yeah i mean but bear in mind like you'll be able to see this coming it's not going to happen like suddenly so we haven't even had put one in in one human yet so we're hoping to do that maybe end of this year early next in a real human yeah yeah wow holy [ __ ] man i mean we already have it's working in monkeys like we've got like a monkey that can play pong with a song i've seen that they can play what like a monkey that that can play pong like just by thinking like just it's not touching control or anything it's like playing so they made the monkey play ping-pong like with the mouse and then they stopped working the video a video game oh okay yeah video game wow so that's the most first first of all i think most people don't realize monkeys can play pong so step one monkeys can play pong um then um so you train the monkey to play pong and you know you give it like basically it just has like a banana smoothie uh that can every time it it you know hits the ball using the joystick it gets a little simple on the banana smoothie wow um and uh so then so you so first you're trying to monkey paper and then then then you uh you activate the neural link and you basically see when the monkey's moving the joystick what neural signals do you or do you read out um and then uh see so you can see when the monkey's moving the joystick up or down what you're getting a certain neural output from the neural neural link device then um then you disconnect the joysticks the monkey's still moving the joystick but joe joyce is not connected anymore that's crazy how long ago was that that was like a year ago i think is there gonna be a point where the neural link can teach a monkey how to speak english that'd be so insane we're getting some planet out of the atrium yeah i mean let's make some genius monkey and it's gonna take over the world could you don't you want to do that or like that uh rick and morty episode where they give the dog i just thought i should rewatch some of those episodes you seen curb your enthusiasm uh yeah a fan of that oh yeah that's not bad um breaking bad uh breaking bad is great better call saul uh yeah i watched a couple seasons yeah i couldn't get into house cars that much um narcos uh viki vikings and uh oh yeah last kingdom were pretty good yeah i haven't seen that i heard that's good yeah vampire diaries i haven't seen that office i've seen some episodes of the office do you like that dry humor stuff i mean i thought the office is not bad i i didn't find it like a like i was really dying to see more um office space no i haven't office space is great space oh of course the movie yeah yeah great great movie cute classic yeah you guys see that yeah it's a class why do you like that though it's just the driving right i think you're dry humans it's very funny try humor it's a guy that works in nine to five look at elon's twitter like dry humor yeah it's funny yeah i know it's really funny uh i like i like mark judge's humor in general yeah i'm like judge great leave this in butthead but with the neuralink do you what do you think like do you think there's anything ever do you think that could go wrong with it like what if what if it could ever go wrong what if the government no i mean what if the government got involved in like neuralink well i think so first of all like like i said neural links like not it's going to take a long time to advance neuralink technology so it's not like it it'll suddenly be able to do super advanced things it'll be like slowly we'll you know get you know enable people who are like quadriplegics to be able to control their phone and their you know try to live a normal you know normal life as much as possible so you're gonna start with people that yeah very like it's gonna be like uh because there's always some risk in the beginning you know because new technology so it's gotta be like the risk rewards gotta make sense it's gonna be you know this there's some risk so there's rewards gotta be big um so like if you're quite quadriplegic um and but with the neural link you can you can operate a phone even faster than someone who's working thumbs then that would be a huge life changer you know so that the reward would be worth the risk um and like i said i think we there's a way for us to actually take the motor signals from the motor cortex in the brain and have a secondary link that's past the point where the neurons are broken in your spine and then and then transmit those signals so you can move your body again crazy so you could make i think you could enable people to walk again which would be pretty like that would be like next level yeah this was like they're never getting jesus level stuff you know seriously is this all you're thinking about uh because you say you go to sleep at three a.m is what you think about like late at night like i wonder what goes on yeah sometimes uh i'm most of my thinking uh is uh like uh is on spacex and tesla so that that absorbs the vast majority of how do you say link is to me even like almost more interesting than space like that is insane it's so cool i think it's kind of scary too but it is very because how advanced can you make humans and then it's like no one there's no differentiator if like everybody can be the same level of intelligence we'd be superhuman at that point right we would be super he'd have to answer to anything these days almost everyone can have the same cell phone you know and like it's like uh so you know cell phones are a great leveler and the internet is a great leveler because like it used to be that information was very limited like in order to get learn something you'd have to go to a library and if you didn't have access to the library then you couldn't have access to information but now anyone you know in the world with like 100 phone and like internet cafe can access all the information you know learn anything essentially so the internet is a great leveler for information and education you can just learn anything online for basically for free do you see neurolink as like one day everyone will have one or or would it only be for people that have like disabilities no i think so we're just starting off with like i said like long-term vision yeah yeah so we're starting off with things where it's like um because there's like some risk you know of so we're like we're not sure things will go right so there's got to be there's some risk because new technology so the reward has to be really high like you know being able to use a phone versus not use a phone you're having your you know be able to walk or not walk is a big big reward so that's how we'll start off and then um you know i think there's like a bunch of things that um it could be addressed like extreme depression or like morbid obesity like where people like die at age 35 like that's we could like literally change the setting in your brain and and to internal hunger uh which would be pretty pretty pretty cool um you know if somebody's got like serious depression to the point where they're like suicidal if you could fix yeah fine sure why not the benefits are huge or just getting out of cancer uh we did we have a banana flavor that we're sampling and we put our board ape on there okay do you just like trolling yeah i love trolling yeah trolling rocks yeah so you know i mean that's dope if you can get like you know 100 000 likes like that on twitter you just troll people you know who else likes to troll do you ever respond to haters at all yeah you went in with aoc a little bit right you went after her well yeah i mean i don't know you went at aoc she started it you know what what was that about she was like coming after me and like i don't know some [ __ ] i don't know what pissed her off you know wait what what was that situation i don't know i thought she was like i don't know it's attacking me or something i don't know what it was but but then i was like well okay why don't we have a paul and see who do you prefer you know like wait i think my poll was like you know it's like oh she was like saying oh billionaires are evil and you're a billionaire and therefore you're evil or something like that you know and i was like um and i was like well you're a politician [Laughter] you know people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and then and then i and then i hold a poll like okay which one do you uh i don't know uh like more about politicians of billionaires and they're like bolino's worn by a lot you know so i was like okay take that aoc um and and then and then like some some someone who was like super pro aoc ran a direct poll of like uh you know who do you like more aoc or elon musk expecting like aoc to win oh my god [Laughter] like the uh meme mma you know [Laughter] you walrister on the pulse [Laughter] why you you knew you were gonna win by like a large no i mean i don't know for sure you knew my favorite billionaires she's popular she got a lot of you know she got a lot of fans um she does she has a die hard following yeah she's not about following you selene doesn't know who she is but i think you'd like her i don't really know she's much about her no no no no not her politics i think you'd think she's she's attractive oh you know what she is okay yeah she's all right she's right yeah great choice of lipstick i think great taste in lipstick because i mean that's my absolute genuine compliment were you always like publicly more like conservative i feel like that's something a little more recent am i conservative or just like i mean no no like conservative well you're like a billionaire that even even i mean what does that mean anyway i've heard that well supporting conservatives like desantis and stuff like that i think jose is like i don't know he seems like he'd be doing a good job in florida you know he wasn't he's doing his dope he's doing an amazing job yeah i think he's doing a good job in florida but just like not many billionaires come out and like i don't know i don't see it like it's mostly you know don't you get that pressure yeah definitely a lot of pressure i mean there's like people pushing me in all sorts of directions but i i would say like i i think i'm a moderate you know i don't know at least um you know i generally think like uh you know we should let people like you know the government shouldn't oppress the people and stuff you know um and shouldn't be like mandating lots of things you know telling people what to do you know um we don't want like a big brother situation where the the government's just like you know busting people around um and um you know so um we should make sure like you know freedom in america is preserved you know the craziest thing to me too how come tesla for instance is so dominant in the electric car space because i know you know fisker nicola all these others but they can't compete like at any level like why are you so far ahead of all these guys is fisker even a thing yeah i'm trying he's on his second go henry fisker well the hard problem is not making a prototype the hard problem is is making the factory so the factory is like 100 times maybe a thousand times hotter than the prototype so um and that's why i'm like working here i mean i was in the tesla factory friday saturday and sunday you said you're there i was there literally this past friday saturday sunday in the factory um all weekend basically um and uh yeah because we're working on bringing up the factory it's really hard to do production so that the issue is is like prototypes are easy production is hard you've got to have this giant factory which is like the cybernetic collective you know with 10 000 things that can go wrong and you've got to solve them all really fast if you're on solar problems fast enough factory doesn't go and if and you've got some big factory it's going to burn money like crazy if you can't make product so like manufacturing is underrated um it's really hard well do you worry about the competition or you like it i'm not worried about the competition not not from the standpoint of like oh hey that it's just not a thing it's not a like out till success or failure will not be because of competition it's like do we make a high quality product at a price people can afford and i kind of kind of feel guilty right now like our prices are kind of high you know um because we also just don't know where inflation's headed but sure inflation's like because like the waitlist for so for some tesla depending on which model it is could be like up to a year so then if you're like okay well you need to move up on that yeah yeah and if like yeah if your inflation is nine percent well we better increase have prices for you know if a car sold today delivered in a year we have to anticipate the inflation so like like our frankly our prices are embarrassingly high right now so i'm hoping inflation goes down i think it probably will actually um so it's like a little too early to tell but i think the trend is that like we're like at tesla we're seeing the prices of commodities six months out are the more more are going down than up so that's like a positive sign on the inflation front um but we'll see it's a little too early to tell is there anything you can share on the cyber truck updates yeah yeah um so we expect to be in volume production of cyber truck next year so it's it's it's a since it's like like a radically different architecture from any other car uh it's it's quite difficult to figure out how to make it you know because it's not you can't just use prior techniques to make actually cyber truck you have to invent a whole new set of manufacturing techniques for the cyber truck so um but i think at this point we feel like we've got a handle on all the issues and um we expect to start delivering them by the middle of next year we need like 20 of them we want to this is our alcohol yeah and we want to wrap them in happy dad we're going to make them more delivery i think it's a sick product i mean it's great how many people are on that all happy dad delivery channels 2020 of them and we'll be all wrapped happy dad people will instagram them like the thing about star trek is going to change the whole look of the roads we're happy to play how so we're happy to play it just looks radical it's just uh like the whole aesthetic is just it looks like cgi in real life like even when you're standing right next to it i mean imagine picking up a girl on a cyber truck yeah that would be the ultimate like it's pretty much the hard work's done like the second she gets in the car it's just kind of like over you know my tesla now my tesla now we're repopulating you know it does well it's military green does well woody what did you pull up in okay what tesla do you what's your everyday driving to model s yeah yeah it's a beauty um and uh i mean i i just i mean you know with the model size aiming for something that what is the car i want to drive more than anything and so uh since i have kids that's like these four doors and stuff you know we need to be able to put the kid's seat somewhere but i also wanted to be really good with handling and acceleration what do you have you have a model i have the model that's 2021. yeah yeah what else is the same i like the car i mean it's it's it's just it's like a perfect car like that that's great i mean it's like nice i mean i got to watch what else would you want unless you're that's what i agree mastered right this guy hits the charging stations way too long too much yeah supercharger man hey yeah getting all that money part of our content one of our guys steve the one who lost his youtube channel is giving away teslas he's giving away i think he's bought 12. 12 teslas in the last year and a half yeah tesla it's cliche but teslas are amazing no they're nice yeah what about solar panels like what's the future on that i think solar will be the single biggest source of energy in the world um so um it tells us there's quite a lot of solar and it's growing it's growing fast so solar cities you as well uh well soul city was acquired by tesla but then we we retired the solar city brand and now it's just tesla tesla okay yeah um well there's still like a lot of houses that were installed with solar city and stuff so yeah um and um yeah but like for a sustainable energy the energy future you've got solar power and then you need battery packs stationary battery packs to store the solar power because obviously sun doesn't shine at night um and uh and then uh electric vehicles and then you got a fully sustainable future so the the real value of tesla is accelerating the advent of sustainability it's like uh that that's like it's like what what's what is the real value of tesla to civilization it will be accelerating sustainability by 10 years maybe 20 years wow yeah did you use autopilot what's that oh yeah you use it yeah but you know i do like autopilot but i do like to yeah just have my hands oh i use autopilot because i'll go from la to oc yeah which one yeah well that's it nothing right you're supposed to be in your phone but but the with the but like sorry autopilot is awesome it's amazing because like in traffic you you don't have any opportunity like yeah yeah you know autopilot has changed my life straight up well yeah well not not that i don't trust you or anything but i just have to have my hand on the wheel you know i'm being very honest i mean like you know you hear the beep that's the best thing i'm going to tell you about the tesla that i've noticed is the autopilot feature just changes the game for anybody yeah it's if you're interested in if you're commuting in traffic it's amazing especially in l.a yeah i love the piano and the fire yeah oh yeah yeah and you know what you do it's like i took a check too the honks are crazy too how do you do that you just come up with that you can fart if you honk the car yeah yeah i've used that i have that on my car yeah yeah there's like there's an internal at fart app where you can make a fart sound like it's coming from any seat in the vehicle so you know it's like just using like spatial audio so uh like and people aren't expecting that you know yeah i use it when people are walking across i know who came up with that idea there's like a dive like you can the horn can make a fart sound so you can like just fart at people yeah yeah yeah i don't know and then the internal fart one is you can you can have different fart sounds and like but you can pick which seat it's it's coming from yeah yeah yeah the bat yeah yeah so you so like or someone doesn't know that's this exists uh that you can really play mess with them you know because they're just not expecting it like you can say like the fart sound should come from the right rear seat um and the speakers will just produce it from there and i feel like well no even using it outside like when i use it on people like sometimes just [ __ ] around and i just i honk and stuff people usually i would expect them to give you yeah it's funny though that's the one thing though if you want to honk at somebody and you fart at him i don't know if it's as like yo you cut me off like yo dude you cut me off but i mean it's funny they're probably laughing it's it's kind of funny you know he likes the road rage yeah you can also like make the sort of the the car can um uh the external speaker can like when you're just cruising around a parking lot or something uh you can make it play like um you know polynesian elevator music or like snake jazz um or you can make it like play the coconut sound from monty python so it's like club club club sounds like cohorts it's a pretty sick any any other features you haven't tapped into you want to launch um i mean we always like little little things that here and there um there's a whole bunch of easter eggs in the car which i think people found almost all of them online uh easter eggs yeah easter eggs mean like like little things mystery things you gotta discover yourself yeah just go to yourself or technically you just you know google it away yeah anything anything anybody hasn't discovered uh not that i know um but sometimes there's like things like the guys don't tell me they're in there yeah oh wow you know found out so i like it only recently i i found that voice command open butthole um will open the chargeboard door you tweeted that yeah we'll open it up a couple of days ago if you use voicemail open butthole then the charge four door opens wow yeah is there a supercharger is there a supercharger for the house i saw that it's just crazy because nobody else would like something like this yeah i know well no other car companies have no sense of humor no it's like they're super serious no fun they're fun yeah yeah i mean i'll go with the tails like what's the most amount of fun you can have in a car basically and the thing like why why don't you do that you know hell yeah yeah that's such a rare quality you have you on is that you're such a smart guy but you're also like you know to relate to the to the people yeah well i mean i just like i think what's the thing that i don't want like the car that's the most fun you know so yeah you definitely have comedy in you yeah i love comedy so i stand up as my side house well yeah do you have superchargers do you have superchargers for the house or is it just i know i just used charges well we gotta get supercharger in the house man i'm tired of going to those tesla's supercharging places man it's like that's what you just need a regular you know regular wool charger yeah is all you need that's true yeah um he's the guy that doesn't plug his iphone in it like you know i'm saying i'm always there yeah i will tell you that i've been on zero miles for at least 20 minutes on the road and i've gotten to a supercharger so thank you for that like i don't know yeah i mean it does have more miles than it says when it says zero it actually got more a few more miles left um so um yeah um so yeah the more more fun stuff coming down the road um we're actually just uh we're trying to get like uh steam working on tesla's so like you can play if once we get steam working then you can play any game that's on on steam on the tesla oh really yeah that's huge it's cool wow that'd be kind of fun especially if you get the self-driving thing going you know like oh yeah what are you gonna do you know like be on your phone or play a game or watch movies so then uh it's crazy it's funny because people always say yo i fell asleep but i had the autopilot yeah but during the autopilot you have to hold the steering wheel while you're there well yeah what will happen is if you do fall asleep then the car will start beeping at you and like really is going to beep at you real loud if you don't do anything so let's wakes you up it'll it'll if it'll wake you up sometimes people are like passed out so much they they don't wake up but then the car will just gradually slow down and put on the emergency blinkers wow that's way better than falling asleep oh yeah autopilot that's going to crash you know absolutely um i mean the thing that got me to really you know um giddy up on the autopilot front was in the early days um there was a guy that fell asleep at the wheel on a model s and um and he ran over cyclists and killed the cyclist oh my god the model s is going to see uh well it was just like you know this happens all the time actually you know it's like people fall asleep at the wheel and then they like run over well isn't that what the model y you kind of like just fall asleep i would think the model s is kind of like a downgraded version right no model i'm talking about early model so we're doing like 20 early okay before there was any autopilot so um there was a guy that that fell asleep with the wheel and he he veered off the road and killed cyclists oh my god this happens all the time you know so um and um i was like man if we just had autopilot then that cyclist would still be alive you know so it's like we better hurry up with autopilot get that working you know so that's nuts do you feel do you ever feel like i mean maybe or maybe not but do you ever feel guilty when someone is like sleeping behind a wheel and then something bad happens like that well i mean now with uh with autopilot that's less likely and we also have like um even if the autopilot's not on like lane departure warning to just you know beep at them which will help wake him up um and i think probably we'll just start adding the autopilot safety features like we're pretty sure you don't want to crash or run run someone over yeah you know so uh so we'll just you know steer the car in the right direction yeah even if you don't ask us on the assumption you do not want to crash is there ever going to be a time where you don't even have to touch the wheel and you can say hey i'm going to go from la to san diego put in the gps don't need to do anything i mean you can do that right now with a full self-driving beta oh you can yeah you don't have to touch the wheel let them know you're awake or anything well you touch the wheel just to confirm that you're paying attention uh but um the car is capable of doing that uh most likely without any intervention that's insane we need those asap yeah now as the product matures and we get to very high levels of reliability then uh you know we'll get to the point where you won't need to touch the wheel or pay attention you could basically just fall asleep and wake up at your destination wow um that's a mind [ __ ] that's insane yeah like jesus christ how far away from that in fact i mean really if if if you have your calendar synced with the with the car or it's just if you don't say anything the car should just default take you to work or take you home you know like if it knows or take you to the destination in your calendar you don't even say anything just get in and just get in and get out there yeah that's it yeah you think we're headed into like a big recession i don't think we're headed into a big recession um i'd say like maybe a mild recession um but it could be a mild recession that lasts for a couple years something like that you know um but the the thing that's hard to predict or like you know if if there's like you know like if there's like a war between china and taiwan or something like that that would send the world into a recession you know and you know that's always that's a possibility um you know if there's some like big big event you know um but like uh and and there there is a challenge in china right now with uh scary the taiwan china the taiwan china stuff is this worrying scary there is an independent of that there is um there's kind of there's kind of a looming um bust in the property market in in china where there's just been uh they've over built uh apartments and and buildings in general this is too many too many housing too many primary housing units in china which seems crazy because a lot of people in china but the china has over built primary housing units and people are speculated on primary housing units uh just like the us did in the lead up to 2008 so in the us lead of 2008 the us was building primary housing units at twice the rate of household formation so you if you you know if if you're making houses twice as fast as as families are forming then obviously something's got to give that's we're doing that in the u.s for a while um and so china's been doing that as well but even more so that that'll be that's a correction that's going to happen but ultimately the chinese economy will be gigantic and is gigantic and will recover from this but there's going to be probably a temporary uh recession in china driven by um an over-allocation of resources towards uh construction so yeah based off of like the primary living stuff how do you think like if we're talking about tiny houses right being sustainable stuff like that how do you persuade people who can afford to live in million dollar houses to be like you can live in this 50 000 box that might not care about the environment i i don't think everyone's gonna live in a fifty thousand dollar box uh you know that's not that you know that's fantastic i think that's a goal at some point no i mean if somebody wants to live in a tiny house just because i wanna live in a tiny house i guess i'm living in a tiny house and you know in south texas but i don't you know it's fine um um but it's not like it's necessary for people to live in a tiny house just to save the environment got it yeah how tiny is your house like how many bedrooms do you have in there how many square feet is it i don't know it's like maybe eight or 900 square feet like that what about ai stuff you ever fear about a ai revolution a rebellion yeah that is a risk um ai is advancing rapidly that'll be on my risk list how how soon do you think that is something gotta worry about an hour or ten years probably less than ten years really for what robots ais to attack the human so necessarily to attack but if you say like when is it dangerous when they become smarter than us i guess 10 years i mean the viewers already were smarter than us in in most ways but when they know hey yeah we haven't even touched on ai yet sure yeah let's go i mean those things could be hacked too well that's i think that's a big fear too more than aliens because computers like you said are smarter than us so when do they when do they become smarter to be like yo we can take over the world yeah computers are already smarter than us in most respects but but but do they have that sense of like power like it's it's ai like it like does power come from like being like human and like like consciousness like does is an ai necessarily going to like seek that power necessarily unless it's programmed to do so i mean right now there's a tremendous amount of ai technology in advertising of course so so like i guess if the you know this but like a massive amount of ai is trying to get you to click something oh yeah yeah it feels like even our phones like people are talking all the time you're talking about a topic and then you get asked they listen yeah they listen that alone i think is kind of like you see what tick-tock you give access to no you give them access to like everything really no one reads it are you on tick-tock yeah you're twitter only i always wondered why no words yeah why is that i mean i only need one means of like communicating to people you know so um do you have a secret ig account instagram account that you guys have a secret instagram of course we got like zero followers yeah i know it's just i literally just like i can click on links and stuff you just like troll people yeah you troll people for sure i don't know i don't troll actually i haven't trolled you you have burner accounts man no actually i haven't trolled anybody i don't have i feel like that's cap you have to have to have trolled somebody durant even john like yo you're kind of a pushy guy bro like no you know the crazy thing is i wasn't that pushy i've never had any twitter account except my own so why don't you just launch an instagram too yeah you'll pop off um help us out man well no i mean i wasn't instagram for a while but he can get you verified yeah i mean so the problem is like instagram man it's just a thirst trap you know yeah yeah yeah yeah instagram's next level thirst trap so um on the women's side right yeah yeah totally but like and if you're like the thing is like i found myself taking like a lot of selfies and [ __ ] and i'm like what the [ __ ] man yeah why am i doing this and then i was like listen this thing and i'm like oh i'm trying to get more likes and and do self selfies this is i'm not going to i stagger the instagram models like they just yeah but you should just make a meme page yeah like a [ __ ] jerry type but edgier yeah political your instagram would be pretty dope bro if you just had me on the page i've only seen one photo of you and that was you next to a computer that is the only photo i've ever seen of you on instagram okay i've never seen any other ones on instagram yeah like i thought it was your actual account but it wasn't i guess it was a fake oh that's probably a lot of fakes yeah as a of course yeah i mean i i find like you know there's just uh i can whatever message i'm trying to get across i can just throw it on twitter and people repost on instagram and stuff so yeah how about snapchat um uh i don't use snapchat um do you use snapchat i have it do you use it yeah okay for a little bit like like snap a few girls and then i like i actually like the the stories they have like this official one's pretty big though that's like pretty good for your movies actually too yeah we got like two million dollars there's a lot and then promoting our stuff snapchat is great too snap's just for like women snap slow key like one of the best ways to promote stuff i find too yeah because they don't unfollow you or anything it's like and you're there forever in our and our on our official page it's like only our die hards follow it you know like random you don't follow a random person on snapchat like you got to be a director but you rarely see somebody on add somebody on snapchat right that's why i think where you say like very personal too if you tell someone to do something like go like this post or go do this i find on snapchat it's very personal so they do it we have we have meetups and thousands and thousands i mean i think we did one in fort worth it was like almost five thousand we shut down texas wow yeah we shut down the helicopter fort worth pd said if we show up we're gonna get arrested for inciting a riot because there's too many people there wow that was all promoted on snapchat like we didn't even really post it anywhere else we just posted on snapchat and went viral from there can we promote a launch and have a meet up at a launch well it's actually it's easy to see launches from from florida because there's a um you can go get pretty close and we have lunches every week have you ever had a oh have you ever had a show elon should i show you wait but hold on have you ever had a violation or any problems like tweet taken down anything like that actually you know i guess that um i i've put in some some pretty borderline tweets but no problems um they've never actually they've never taken a a direct action against me but i think they might have like shadow bandit or something twitter's personal too i mean same thing as twitter probably loves having you on though i think twitter needs elon i tweeted this one this is right after we had trump on our podcast okay it got like a hundred thousand what did you say okay cool um hold on do you know what your most viral tweet is of all time like your most viral like retweeted likes what is it um it's uh next i'm gonna buy coca-cola and put the cocaine back that break a million that way that you you know oh wow how many likes did that get yeah i bet you got a million though i think you got like four million or something oh my god did it used to happen you used to have coke on twitter with likes so like getting 4 million likes is insane did he used to have coconuts yeah you're right yeah that did you know you cocaine you said coke coca-cola used to have cocaine back in the day what days was that like earlier yeah i wasn't born like 50. you have stuff in your dress that was the most probably most popular tweet of all time how long ago the most popular tweet ever made by a living person it's amazing wow your tweet the man on twitter is the second most popular one after chadwick boseman but that was use ai to predict what tweets are that may have been what i hit you up for like that was what triggered for me to call you and then then i added added coca-cola and said listen like listen to the people you know does poke this coca-cola come on does coca-cola reach out to you the people are saying put the cocaine back in clearly they want it so come on did they reach out to you about that back to your roots elon do you just tweet do you just tweet whenever like you just tweet whenever like whenever you feel like it yeah pretty much that's so savage you're the only guy that has the balls in your position to do that everybody else like has a lawyer gets approved no [ __ ] do you have to do whatever you're thinking about right now like do you have any in your dress that we could just yeah yeah yeah what's in this yes exactly what's in the dress folder um i mean a good friend of mine just did say like listen if there's something that maybe is not a wise tweet why don't you save in the dress world and see if you want to send it the next morning and i'm like okay i'm not saying what they are but there are a few in the dress folder that that i the next morning i was like okay probably i shouldn't send that um so uh but it was pretty insane for me to challenge putin to you know one-on-one combat uh how viral did that go it went pretty viral and then it even gotten like russian telegram and stuff and then i got would you ever take on kim jong-un i mean if he wants i saw you i'm going to say no what about a friendly cop i feel like kim jong-un would be down i mean you know if if he wants putin's not really about it i feel like he just chilled out but he had some people i remember he tweeted like yo if i disappear in the middle of the night you know where i went and then i think your mom got involved right yeah yeah no i mean she said that's not funny yes you just say that's not funny um yeah i mean like i don't have an assassination squad you know yeah so you've got to protect yourself though you got this one yeah that's the key differences between that's the problem though you don't ever feel scared if you go at russia or kim jong-un you know i did think like man this this could be a really this this could really backfire and resolve yeah yeah oh yeah wrestle center you worry about that you worry about like some of these people not understanding your humor and taking it are you serious britain doesn't have a great sense of humor oh [ __ ] might relax how do we set this i don't think he doesn't crack darts that often but i mean maybe he does behind the scenes he does for sure yeah he's got a secret telegram like maybe he's got a yeah maybe he's like you know um he might be pretty funny um so uh no that was a little risky you know um so uh yeah i mean probably tweeting can be hazardous to your health it sounds like times you have no fear you don't fear anybody i don't have a death wish right yeah i mean everybody's gonna die just question when so [Music] how do we create something to keep us alive i'm not worried about dying can we create something to keep us alive longer or no have you looked into that longevity and so yeah i don't know if we should have longevity because the people who who will get the longevity capability um first or probably people you wouldn't want to live that long rich people right how long would you want you know i don't know some some there's like i think a lot of people in power who you wouldn't want them to have some super longevity situation because then they never be out of power you know you think that's going to be possible though with like modern medicine and just everything we're doing some amount of longevity i think is probably certainly possible if that's possible sure um you'd think that'd be a fight i think i could probably solve some of longevity to some degree um but i don't want to what if somebody i guess it doesn't matter for you but yeah if someone approached you and said hey i need to live 150 years you're saying nowhere i think we'll definitely do that like we'll definitely be able someone's going to do that no but i mean if it takes you 10 15 years to develop at least living like 10 whatever 10 extra years yeah if the right person came to you yeah the problem is like you know uh when people get old they don't change their minds they just die so if you want to have progress in society you got to make sure that you know people people need to die because they don't they get old they don't change their mind absolutely so if if if all children lived for a long super long time i think society would get lazy right it's very stale you know very ossified pretty crazy i mean if you live forever what the [ __ ] you don't care about tomorrow yeah in a way but also yeah older people are stuck in their ways right like they've lived their whole life they're not like all people are stuck in their ways and they don't change their mind they just die some people are just ready to die yeah when yeah i mean good yeah lived enough life i think you sort of you're ready to die would neurolink be able to save people's memories like could you text me down those memories and put it in another person yeah sufficiently advanced neural link would be able to save the save state um now you wouldn't be exactly the same person but you're also not exactly the same person when you wake up every morning you're a little different from when you went to sleep so especially advanced neural link would would enable you to record and could be like a clone in a different body so to say yeah sufficiently advanced neural link you could say save game basically do you think they've cloned humans i don't know i'm not aware of any cloning of humans that has actually taken place but if you say is it possible to clone here it's very possible right of course because they've admitted to cloning sheep right well you can uh get your dog cloned right now yeah is that like literally a dog cloning service where do you do that so there's got to be clones there's even advertising for it like if you search to clone my job that's like that's like and your cat that's kind of common i don't know like it's common to clone your dog sherivan has a cloned dog doesn't he i don't want to quote it but well you gotta have ten clones and they'd be like your dog times sherman has like the most like dope that'd be pretty weird whatever they're called i don't know if i like that not pitbulls but um staffordshire i think they're cloned anyway you can literally not not only in the club that they're they're the top three links are going to be advertising for cloning your dog or cat that means there has to be there's the clone on the planet well how much does that cost a dog you know maybe not in the u.s is it expensive it's gonna be expensive it's like 50 grand 50 grand to clone a dog that's not even that crazy i'm doing that people can afford that there's people out there that can afford it that's craig yeah i'm gonna get second craig fifty girls like three cracks yeah yeah renee what do you think [Laughter] oh [ __ ] and they'll just run around i mean as long as you have to train them it might be better yeah i mean if they're already trained to go outside then [ __ ] clown might be the option well you can literally i think there's a dog cloning service here in austin oh my god yeah what is going on that's crazy that's crazy and i think it's just if you can clone a dog include a human yeah same level of difficulty wow that's scary cloning a human i mean someone's tested it somewhere i'd bet i'd bet my whole bank account like there's a lot of things that just happened though bradley martin i mean yes is this really you or what feels like me like but one of the things i think about for like neurolink that's kind of a a real mind trip is like let's say neurolink um enables a full sort of recording of memories and like and and all of your feelings and everything um feelings that's the biggest thing right there you're like everything does that but our feelings like chemical but i guess it's your everything you've ever felt all your remote everything it's all electrical signals right whoa it's all coming it's all neurons firing so that's insane so the clones will have feelings and you could record record everything oh my god that's scary that's when the ais take over though yeah i'm saying like so that is like saying yeah you could actually even recreate like a video game that's like the most real vid like very game where every sense that you feel is you're in the game like someone like this like this could be a neural link video game but so does that mean if you die in the video game you done real life type thing not necessarily but does your mind convince you of that well you could do anything it could make the brain believe anything like what you have said what what is death death is the loss of information so like if if you uh let's let's say like like if you got disintegrated but but then got you know reintegrated immediately with no pain or anything did you die well not not really because you you're still continuing so like you know we're in a video game you do that you die a lot in the video games um but but you then you just come back to a saved game state yeah and now so so you say like what is death what is what does death actually mean it's the loss of the information associated with that individual and if you no longer have lots of information associated with that individual death has no meaning i mean it could hurt i suppose gta 5 this is crazy do you do you play video games yeah what do you game i just played elden ring which was really great elton rain yeah alvin ring i've never even heard of that have you guys already is amazing what uh console i play pc really what's the game i'm sorry i haven't heard of it elven ring is a great game uh it's probably game of the year um i'm gonna get roasted by the gaming community oh yeah you're screwed it's a problem it's a from software anyway um it's like a shooter or it's like a fantasy game uh it's awesome game i highly recommend playing elden ring well now i'm gonna play it i promise you that's great it's sick um elm ring has the most beautiful art i've ever seen super advanced it's just beautiful art did you grow up artistically uh amazing did you grow up playing like video games yeah i grew up playing very prominent video games um because i'm like 51 so that's no spring chicken so like super smash nintendo yeah super smash i i played it i mean where else that's primitive to us but probably not super primitive yeah no i just you know who doesn't play i was live before there was even pong sure i had a console the console before atari for the original atari wow i only had four games um do you ever think you can even add new games you can like play full games um so you ever think about creating your own console no no no need for that what about sports yeah um so there's just no no challenge there really i'm not sure this value to be added by another console um so but the games i i play on the pc i've only played a few games on the console um but i played a lot of games on the pc is the game that you were talking about multiplayer like do you play with a headset multiplayer so have you ever played with like random people yeah i mean i played overwatch and i do you talk in the mic and let it like no okay they'll be like no that'd be why i feel like you'd have some good chirps though yeah um i've played the i've played the entire evolution of video games from like i said earl early like pong space vader stuff pac-man all the way through to uh super high resolution multiplayer online games um at one point i was quite competitive at quake um and um played what i think was maybe the first paid esports thing in the u.s it was a quake tournament and um my team came second we would have come first except the i was the second best guy on the team and the best guy his his computer glitched halfway through the game how hard did you chew out your team after you lost or did you we've we got money and stuff like this really check yeah although yeah i mean it wasn't a big check but it was so how does the team come together for playing video games like a spacex team no it's my first company's up to oh no it's a very early internet company um but i play i play a lot of games basically can you imagine if elon goes gta streaming i mean you'd break the internet in multiple ways but that'd be the most insane what are you doing gta multiplayer i'm really embarrassed to admit this i play uh okay yeah 2k is dope too i'll play two 2k 2k 20 22 2k match don't play fortnite i know it's really bad but four nights like the most advanced game it was the first like it was huge it was so big but i i i find chess is like uh it's a simple game frankly in my opinion there's there's a strategy game called polytopia which you can get on your phone which i think is probably the best strategy game um download it now polytopia you think chess is simple yeah well i mean okay sorry oh connect four is a real four is simple two very simple well very simple chess to who though no no chess just i mean you only have 64 squares there's no fog of war there's no tech tree you know um but you start adding fog a wartech tree have like 400 squares you know a very wide range of units where you can build any unit you know wide range it's then the degrees of freedom are just so much greater than channel so you're raw as [ __ ] is um jess right well are you undefeated in chess is the real question um i i was pretty good at chess as a kid um have you been beat yeah i sound like i won every game um but uh you know i guess when i i came to the conclusion that like computers are going to get better than humans oh yeah um by a lot um that's why it's important yeah i mean i just i didn't want to spend like a massive amount of effort just you know understanding you know a zillion sort of you know night bishop combinations for sure two points and game [ __ ] yeah of course um i'm i'm curious now yeah you got a great letter i am curious now best of luck yeah it's great paul terpius is great do you i need a new addition do you like yeah that's awesome yeah i'm just curious do you gamble at all like do you play poker cards nothing like that nope like video games would be like my main sort of thing to do to get away quiet my mind you know yeah i stop the demons in my mind for yelling at me are you religious at all i'm not i'm i would say i generally agree with the teachings of christianity but i am not religious like i agree with you believe in a higher power and like you know like like turn the other cheek and love the neighbor as myself and that kind of thing i think those are good the teachings of like yeah yeah yeah i think good principles but do you believe in like a god or like a higher power well something created the universe or the universe is you know here how did it come to be um you could say whatever caused the universe to come to be is god or you know god's depending on your view um i don't know uh i think as a philosophy that a philosophy i think makes sense is to go out there and is to expand consciousness so that we're better under better able to to answer the questions of like what is the meaning of life what is nature of the universe what are even the right questions to ask and if we can expand consciousness more humans and more digital intelligence than our opportunity to understand the meaning of life is is that much greater deep and so i would call like say like i have the philosophy of curiosity but to understand the nature of reality so you've never practiced any religions um oh no i was uh you know i was sent to a weirdly a hebrew preschool i'm not jewish but my dad sent me there because it was like nearby and i guess his partner is in his engineering firm they sent their kids there so um so i said hebrew preschool and then uh anglican sunday school and so i was like having a gill one day and jesus ella the next you know um and um you know somebody but i i would say that i you know was i've never been particularly religious do you uh give an answer for what the meaning of life is what your meaning in life is well i think the the the currently the thing to do is to expand the expand humanity and and consciousness to the point where we are able to answer that question um i don't think we can answer that question yet or we can't answer we can't answer what's meaning of life well yet i find that so interesting how it's like you know we're technically like the most intelligent species on the planet so to say but we can't even no one on this planet can explain like or provide evidence of like our existence or how we were created i find that so and you know what i mean like could be very no one on this planet could say how were we created that's why i feel like there has to be some sort of higher power you know it's gotta be like we're not smart enough to even explain our own existence well we can say step by step based on the archaeological evidence the fossil record and what we know physics how we came to be at this point um so but that doesn't explain how the universe came to exist in the first place um there had to be like something at some point like we can't even grasp that right or is this some well some higher dimension on which thought and emotion exist i don't know um like how do molecules have consciousness and feelings um so [Music] but you know at least like the the the chain of events from a physics standpoint from the beginning of the universe to now are quite well understood really yeah but somehow we're from a bunch of hydrogen gas to uh complex molecules and then an assemblage of complex molecules like ourselves that can feel and talk and and think so i mean just if you leave hydrogen out long enough it starts talking to itself basically it's what happened here um so so where along that path from a bunch of hydrogen molecules to humans where where did consciousness start it's crazy so maybe maybe everything's conscious um and we're a pattern of molecules like the actual atoms in our body change you know so your the cells in your body i mean some cells are stick around for a long time but most of the cells in your body are regenerated so um like i think your skin regenerates every seven years or something like that so so they're not even the same molecules they you know from one year to the next the molecules in your body have changed it's the pattern that stays relatively consistent the pattern of molecules so we're a pattern of molecules that can talk and think and feel anyway this is why i think we should expand you know we should have more kids and and grow and expand consciousness and both and probably have digital consciousness too what do you mean by expand consciousness for more people to think yeah if more people more people more thinking equals more consciousness you know like total consciousness is like how many people there are times average amount of consciousness per question per person that's like the total collective consciousness it's more like a collective group of like okay now there's like this many people so this many brains yeah exactly like more more brains is more yeah more consciousness yeah does it ever worry you that the younger generations like start to focus more on social media right so they're not going to be as educated on stuff like space you know things to keep the human civilization going because it seems like the youth now like education's not as important as it used to be i don't know i mean i'm not like super in touch with the youth of today because uh i know i'm not a youth so i mean i guess i get some exposure to kids through my kids um but it's limited um and then even if i say like there's probably gonna be a pretty big difference between say my my twins are 18 and you know like little x who's two there'll be a generational difference between them sure oh yeah there's there's definitely these big generational differences they can really see it if you like watch some some old movies like you watch a movie from like the 60s or movies from the 70s maybe from the 80s you can see all these generations a lot yeah yeah every decade like watching movie for every decade and it's like it's like damn that generational difference is significant you know so you have a favorite movie ever i suppose it would probably be like the original star wars but that's part of it is like that's the first movie i ever saw in a theater oh really yeah wow i think i saw six years old something like that well so i really made an impression maybe that's what i like when it all started right yeah maybe that's why i like space still it's interesting it's got to be that it's probably had an effect yeah yeah i remember it being like super wow at first i never like said never been in a movie theater before and uh well it's not that i can remember and and uh so imagine seeing like the first movie that you ever saw in a theater with star wars that'd be like it's kind of crazy yeah six years old do you remember it like that yeah i can remember i can visualize coming out of the theater that is insane i was like i think karate kid memory is one of the biggest intelligences that was my first one all right did you see the the the series all three yeah the series that i made oh yeah uh i saw the first season yeah yeah the first season of what uh cobra kai yeah that's a deep cut yeah you're in a couple kai it was i watched the first i think couple two seasons um i mean it is a twister knife yeah it is it is i didn't like it i mean it no it was great the show was safe but to make you uncomfortable yeah yeah exactly well i mean i'm saying you don't like daniel after loving the guy for like 30 years you know 30 plus years yeah yeah well daniel's og yeah he loved the guy yeah but you got to see it yeah yeah they make you not like them it's literally the original actors too yeah which is also crazy i've always thought too something uh with people i've known i think memory is the biggest piece for intelligence so if you have a good really good memory you're just gonna be smarter than the average sure memory memory is a big deal because if you can remember walking out of the theater at six i mean i can't remember everything at six but i you know certain things um i mean like sometimes you wonder like is it a real memory or a created memory um like so um like one of the one of the things that i remember was like kind of traumatic when i was a little kid was and i must have been like four years old or something um and i was there was a like a costume party like halloween or something like at the hebrew preschool that i was at and i was being like my parents were out of town and my grandmother was taking care of me and she's like not super sensitive to like you know religious stuff and or anyway she dressed me up as freaking santa claus uh for a halloween party for a costume party at a hebrew new preschool oh my god it's amazing yeah whoa and um how did rabbi respond to that not well yeah so not well it's not well i went to i went to hebrew school too i got pulled i got pulled out of school and i was i remember sitting there for like and not knowing what the heck was going on and like um because they thought it was like like some kind of deliberate insult you know yeah obviously not like you know it's just like oh you know it's random costume choice you know um and so so then i'm like i don't know why i'm being punished um and um so i was like is that a real thing that happened or did i just think that happened and then my mom actually found a photo of it really yeah how many how many did they pull you back and say you need to post that picture and and i just had to sit in the you know principal's office or whatever uh for a couple hours it's a long time if you're a kid and um wait for my grandmother come pick me up wow i got thrown out of school that day and i was like it's kind of traumatic and i remember that i remember what that i remember like what that sort of office looked like where i was just sitting there for a couple hours being confused about why i'm being thrown out of school how old were you then i think it must be like four or four maybe five dude how can you remember this stuff you think if you read uh like this well that's like that's what i'm saying i wasn't sure is this even real and then like and then my mom turns out she had a picture how are like memories stored in the brain it's like crazy how we can just like recall like things from i don't know how does sometimes just butchered i feel like yeah sometimes when you try to recall a memory you kind of like affect that memory as well it's kind of like what you want yeah yeah like exactly yeah really yeah like they've done these tests where like they ask people to remember things and then um like it'll be sometimes like it'll be affected even by like your mood when you're remembering the memory like yeah what's your current state of mind and like that memory you could recall that that memory will be like affected by your current state of mind so you know sometimes you have to wonder was that real or not i mean um you know like there's uh like it's like uh like an old saying with uh but i'll please a police saying like it's like whenever there's a crime there's like there's always like three stories like the victim the perpetrator and the truth so it's like you know um or or you know movie like rashomon if you've heard of rashman where there's like the same thing happens and you see four different people's perspective and it's all totally different so that could be multiple things though right yeah i'm just saying like people's experience of an event uh is um it's not always accurate do you think that if you if you read a page of a book you could recite the page i could i could train to do that yeah eventually like you read one page and you could recite it back just without reading it yes there are ways to do this um there are memory tricks that can be used to do that um so but i wouldn't say that that's a good use of your brain power no so what's the biggest thing you think to teach the brain then if if i want to teach my brain something what's the most valuable thing i could do okay well here's something that could be helpful to people who who are [Music] we watch this the with the important thing for in order to remember something you must assign meaning to it you have to say why sure just say like y is relevant and if you can say why something is relevant you probably will remember it but because your your brain is basically constantly trying to forget everything as much as possible because it's it's hard it's hard to store memories yeah so it's it's trying it's just things you care about yeah like like most of the stuff that we see in here is like not worth remembering um so in order for your brain to remember something you have to establish relevance you have to say why it's got to be in your head multiple yeah it's like either or a strong emotional event like it's like an in like a strong involuntary emotional event or you could like i guess try to generate an emotion um and and then the the the third way would be absurdity so if you want to remember an event um try try to imagine that event associated with something completely absurd it's like for you to remember it yes okay wait it makes sense like so like let's say you want to fix this event in this room just like imagine uh a a dancing elephant dressed in a tutu uh that's just dancing around the room and then visualize that and you will remember this well what if there's no employees wow how do you know that it's memory trick that's been it's a your brain remembers things that are different okay um and and different can mean like there's a strong emotional association or it's it's absurd sure it's unusual um but if if something is not unusual if it's if it's just par for the course there's nothing then why why should your brain bother remembering that well does it have to have some sort of importance i mean to you i mean like but like elephants like i don't give a [ __ ] like you know what i mean like i'm just saying i don't care about the dancing elephant or tutu that's jumping around this room no i remember it but i think what you you know it's a great way to do it yeah i think that's kind of like why we remember the first time we went to a movie but i probably don't remember what i had for breakfast on sunday you know three days ago or two days ago yeah yeah it just anything that's like that's like you just your brain's just like trying to save neurons it's like trying to save brain cells here so um it's just it's your brain is really trying to forget as much as possible so you have to give a reason to not forget and that and that reason has to be that it is different from a normal day or a normal event and that but that difference can be real or you can imagine it um so there was a trick that i that i did um for quite a while when i was a kid i just read a book on memory tricks basically and um using these these memory tricks you can memorize like uh the position of all the cards in a deck so you could say uh have you seen this before no no just wondering why he would flush a toilet paper flush yeah i'm flushed at all didn't want to ruin it royal flush don't even piss on the you know the water yeah the reason that i said that those because like if i went through school for high school college graduated from college but everything that you do is a test of your memory if you're going to go take a test it's you how well can you memorize this stuff well not every like if you say like math stuff well there's partly memory but also compute yeah um but i suppose like history geography or something like that would be mostly uh memory um creative writing not memory exactly but um i went to school with uh alexandra see boulder okay yeah with who your stepsister oh really yeah oh okay yeah yeah she's my age actually yeah yeah works more well yeah i spent a lot more time in the library she was probably out partying but okay yeah she might have sister but yeah yeah house is yours um yeah she lives in austin now she was she lives in austin oh yeah yeah no i know she's married yeah yeah has a kid and everything oh wow this year often or uh not another family events and stuff nice she was very sweet the whole time yeah elon how would you describe yourself i don't know i don't know i don't know what you think of yourself technologists uh besides you know besides what you i do technology yeah but like besides what you've done with you know all you've done i mean as a person as like elon musk as a person how would you describe yourself i suppose i would just i would just say i'm a a technologist who's curious about the future and generally i'm trying to take the actions that most likely lead to a better future for civilization i think that's like frankly the only like logical thing to do because like if you don't take the you know there's no point in having like a good future without civilization you know there's no if civilization crumbles nobody's going to have a good future so i don't know um so i think we want to take the set actions that maximize the probability the future is going to be good and interesting and then we understand more about the nature of reality in the universe more than anything else i'm curious curious about what that just like like said the nature of the universe why do you think or even what questions to ask why do you think you made this your goal though like when i guess when i was kind of growing up um i did have this like existential crisis where i was like what's the meaning of life is this all pointless is there any point in existing at all and i read the various religious texts and uh i read a bunch of the philosophers and i just couldn't really seem to find any any good answers and then i read hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is um really a book on philosophy but it's disguised as a book on humor and and the point douglas adams was making is that the that the purpose of life is to uh is it is to learn learn more to ultimately uh know what questions to to learn what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe um here's sort of making that like that's the actual point is is this figure out the point and so at least that was my interpretation and and so therefore we should take the set of actions that are likely to expand consciousness and our understanding of the universe so that we can know what the meaning of life is or or why we're here and how the universe came to be and that was kind of the what answered my existential crisis i think that's a good that's a good philosophy basically um now it's a philosophy that may i think maybe for a lot of people may be uncomfortable because it's like it's a jeep too i i think it is a a rational and logical philosophy um but it is one that that does not get that that's basically saying hey we don't know what the answer is but let's try to find out for sure do you feel like you know part of the answer yeah i think you know we as humans collectively no part of the answer um but only a small small part at this point um if we can make civilization last for i don't know like a million years or something you know that would we probably will know much more of the answer and i i i date civilization from like i said the first writing it was like 5 000 years ago just practically no time at all um so if we were to last a million more years then like we're barely at the beginning of civilization yeah that's true like if civilization does last many years we will be seen they'll think of us as like ancient ancients like it would be like cavemen and everything you know pretty much yeah yeah how probable how probable do you think that is that would last another million years i think it's probable yeah if we get to mars and start explaining even other planets if we if we if we make mars multi-planetary yeah like if we make mars a self-sustaining civilization like a city i think the probable lifespan of humanity is very long if we don't if we never expand beyond earth then i don't think the civil uh that this life span of of humanity will be long what do you think it would be do you think earth's coming to an end oh that is a certainty it's just a question of when oh my goodness how so like natural naturally or there's a lot of man-made i like believe everything this guy says there's a lot of factors he's right he knows what you're doing you know well i mean this the sun is gradually expanding and and the sun so if nothing else happens the sun will expand and boil the oceans and kill all life on earth that is a certainty that's a certainty that's certainty well how far how far are we out from wait because the sun's expanding like it's growing yeah it's expanding because it's very slowly not incrementally don't hold your breath on this one but um you know things could get a bit dicey in 500 million years um like you know so when are they predicting that this that like that growth would become like an actual threat though well it's not going to be in our lifetimes or anything close to it but i'm just saying that uh if you if you look think very long term then then the extinction of earth is a certainty if you say long-term uh certainty because of that if nothing else that and but of course that like if nothing else happens to destroy your life on earth that will definitely happen so uh now there's pro like like if you look at the fossil record it's worth looking at like the great extinction events just read it you just would like read the wikipedia page or something you know or read encyclopedia britannica like the like the great extinction events in the fossil record there are arguably five great extinction events and this is where your great extinction event would be like i don't know 70 80 percent of all species on earth are destroyed um and there was one particular extinction the permian extinction uh where it's like maybe 90 95 percent of all species were destroyed um which which frankly doesn't tell the whole story because most of what remained were like sponges and fungi and things like not you know unless you are a mushroom or a cockroach or whatever you know or something basically no large life was survived or almost no large life so permanent extinction took out almost everything what were those extinction events what was like the craziest one well like the the most amount of species death was the permian extinction um i recommend just looking at reading the great you know from what what have we found in the fossil record about great extinctions that and as like this we're generally considered to be like roughly five great extinctions now the uh that doesn't count the the many the many cases where entire continents were destroyed um that happened a lot but that that wouldn't count as a major extinction um so that happened many many times but like any time that there's a really big volcano like yellowstone for example i think is supposed to erupt every 100 000 years or so and that would destroy pretty much all life in america wow yeah um now we'll see that one coming you know most likely um but he also has a gigantic volcano never knew that yeah i didn't know that yeah have you been there i've never been to yellowstone seen last time a volcano erupted well they were up to you know there's like little eruptions quite frequently central america is like a huge one there's a big one in guatemala i think i want to say that like year maybe a year ago krakatoa was a i know this is kind of off topic but then hawaii had one a couple years ago too big island you know there's volcanic big big volcanoes eruptions will those will there's a plenty of those that'll take out a continent um earth's climate also changes pretty radically over the course of like say 10 000 years um you know it can shift from being extremely hot to extremely cold and turn across now yeah [Music] you can really go down a deep rabbit hole if you read about ice ages yeah really like the deep route hole on ice ages what's so intriguing about them the whole earth that's just been through like the whole earth is just freezing like i said this deep rabbit hole on ice ages the private hole where should we get so many i guess wait there's something wrong with this tidbit of it yeah why do you love it what i love it i mean i think it's just interesting so interesting that that how much earth's climate has changed and even where the where the magnetically where the poles are have has shifted over time so um you know anyway there's there's also been times where in the past where our galaxy is like collided with another galaxy um that probably should you know threw things for a bit of a loop at the time why is there like a conspiracy when it comes to ice ages or anything like that or is it not really no okay when was the last ice age how long ago was that well we're technically in sort of an ice age right now although it depends on what you call an ice age what happened to global warming wait but yeah how so like what defines an ice age at that point global warming is like cool anymore it's a deep rabbit hole um what do you do when you're going down a deep rabbit hole though is it youtube videos books or how do you educate yourself on wikipedia the internet and yeah books and clicking around the internet googling wikipedia you know youtube whatever um so twitter um can be interesting um so the i think there was probably something significant that happened at the um in in the last ice age because we don't see any evidence of writing when i say i'm using ice age in the colloquial timeline um of like when when was it very snowy uh and and where the glaciers came down far and where where summer was short winter was very long and that was about ten thousand years ago um so some of something happened around i think around that ice age that because we see no writing no no writing before that ice age and we we start to see writing pop up in multiple places on earth after that after the most recent colloquially termed ice age so yeah um like i said there have been times when earth has been extremely tropical and where it's been a snowball but these these tend to occur over very long periods of time the the global warming thing we're talking about here is is where we're just taking large amounts of carbon that was buried underground and we are putting it in the atmosphere and oceans and this will naturally change change the climate to some degree um i don't think it's like the end of the world or anything but it's gonna it's gonna cause drive so that's why it's good to accelerate a sustainable energy future for sure i know this is kind of off topic but i do want to ask completely off topic how expensive is it to send one human to mars if you want to break it down by human well right now it's infinity dollars yeah infinity bitcoin and dollars and everything meaning like no amount of money could you could say you could not send someone to mars for any amount of money right now now with starship you know hopefully when starship is successful sasha will be capable of sending people to mars i think long term we could get the cost of a trip to mars maybe under a hundred thousand dollars wow what wow yeah it's like let me just say that it's not physically impossible to achieve that per person or yeah oh is this a hundred thousand but that's not that crazy to go to [ __ ] different planets no that's not bad yeah why how do you how do you say like what's the if you have a fully reusable vehicle and you your propellant costs are low then then it is possible to achieve a cost per person number below 100 000. and how many people can you fit on the space shuttle order well space shuttle is not capable of going sorry beyond earth but um rocket right the current version of starship you could you could put 100 people on it um so then you know you'd have to get the cost of the flight how do you break that cost below 10 million how do you kill the cost i feel like it's got to be way more expensive than that it's like first class on emirates it's really no it's like 40k okay but 100k like that's uh you haven't flown first class when emirates have you no never but i'm saying like 100k is like a private jet from new york to europe right well we're talking about taking a rocket to mars so how how how are those costs even similar um you say like i'm saying in the in the limit of of affordability is it possible to achieve a cost of a trip to mars below 100 000 per person i'm like yes it is it is not impossible um so it basically would like like sort of for starship if you could get if you put 100 people on board and the cost per flight is uh less than 10 million dollars that's a hundred thousand dollars per person sure so is that unfair though because you got to assume rich people we're going to be the guy or the not the guys but the people that can afford that well not necessarily there'll be a labor shortage on mars so oh okay you'll probably you know take a loan and pay it back real fast um but i'm just saying like somehow we've got to get there and so now we're going to get a lot of people there so it's got to be funded by individuals but individuals governments uh or or that that's that's repaid um somehow it's like gotta pay for the rocket you know yeah i need a lot of rockets so but i'm confident that it is possible to create a self-sustaining city on mars yeah um similar to the earth eventually in terms of restaurants clubs yeah all that maybe maybe you start with like the the coolest hotel club and restaurant ever then you entice people to go there nice golf courses too yeah you got that involved yeah i mean the golf ball would go much further on on mars yeah no it's only it's only like uh like 37 38 of us gravitational so you'd be able to like kind of jump more than twice as high yeah you probably about hit that ball like 500 yards yeah there you don't go far do you think like exclusivity would make people want to go to mars even it's going to be exclusive no matter what bro there's enough people that if there's only a hundred people but it's gonna be a huge one but what i mean by like but you have to in order for it to be self-sustaining you've got to have like a million people so a million i think so i mean to have for self-sustaining build like where you don't need any comments like [ __ ] if the ships from earth stop coming for any reason does that does the city die out right that's a hard that's a hard that's a high bar you know that's why you can't be missing anything oh wow i don't know million that's crazy so i think it's probably at least a million do you got half no no um but people can live there that's before when you don't need resources from the earth right yeah yeah i'm saying in order to make it self-sustaining but in order for in order to ensure humanity's future for a long time it's got you've got to have a self-sustaining city if it's dependent on earth then you're still like okay if something bad happens to earth and mars is going to die out too sure so to make it self-sustaining is where that's that's the real threshold that matters how long when it's like when it's all said and done like how long would a trip take well right now a trip would take six months but i think you get the trip under three months six months yeah yeah i thought it was years oh no now earthenware is only a line every two years so earthenwars are only like the same called the same quadrant of the solar system every two years so you have to do that you line up every two years but then it's like a six month journey so that's the only time you could go when they're lying yeah because sometimes mars is on the other side of the sun you know unless you're gonna go through the sun so it's not gonna happen yeah so if yeah so they need to be in same quadrant taking into account the how the planets move relative to one another wow um so so you only have a short one come back this earth is zipping around the you know zips around the sun every year a mars is about every two years you gotta wait two years to come back but it is crazy you gotta spend right now you said six months on a rocket with a hundred other people right what does that look like also crazy cramped yeah you think people lose their hands yeah what it what do they do i mean they did ocean voyages back in the day that were like six months you know on a little ship in the middle of the ocean may you know admittedly a lot of people died but you know uh they're like they definitely were they were sailing journeys that were more than six months in old times on really tiny ships six months on a rocket you'd have to yeah that'd be like a mental that's a mental thing you really got to overcome six months ago was well being in a rocket feature like martin's yeah you gotta bring some chicks up in there too i mean if i go upstairs you said 100 people so if we go with 99 chicks then you're good you need you need at least more than half yeah and then i'll be in there for six years sure ah that's why you got starlink right wait do the rockets have wi-fi uh yeah although you're because the speed of light actually becomes an issue um if you start getting far away from earth um so in rough terms at closest approach mars is four light minutes away from earth okay and furthest approach maybe it's like 20 minutes roughly um so that means there could be times where like a round trip to communicate with mars takes 40 minutes [Music] best case is gonna be eight minutes ish that's not crazy how do you make sure people are repopulating you mean of earth or mars mars i don't know um hopefully they do have a lot of kids sex yeah yeah hopefully they have a lot of kids on mars yeah what would the laws be like i know it's like a whole new place banned condoms what about the currency too you should make 69 laws yeah exactly oh my imagine elon making the laws that would be awesome he's working on it if you're the first one there you get that there's so many you get that authority right i don't know i mean i just think it's like important that we make life multi-planetary while still possible to do so because we just can't count on we can't count on on humanity being able to make life multi-planetary forever like i said that window of opportunity it could be open for a long time could be open for a short time but we should assume that is open for a short time so just you know to be safe i think we should assume the window opportunity is short and you know at some point there's going to be a third world war you know yeah of course uh yeah you know and after world war three uh you know who knows what's left after world war three um i think that's what nuclear warfare it could um so there's arguably this like you know the cycle is this race between do we become a multi-planet species or world war three which one is first and if world war three is first and maybe we never get to another planet you know [ __ ] yeah [Laughter] salim's not sleeping tonight a lot of the information man you're saying that yeah i'm probably not gonna sleep yeah it's already interesting with a lot of things that you've been saying it's really really interesting it seems like it's scary but like it seems like world war iii nuclear war could happen anytime yeah you gotta live in reality right under that assumption do we have a secret rocket that's ready to go to send people to mars just in case nope no no yeah just gotta get a boxable in the middle of nowhere right i mean spacex we're trying to hustle with the rocket and get it get get working but we you know we're going to make it we got to get to orbit in the first place and then we got to make it reusable like so that's really important um if rockets are expandable then the cost is crazy yeah um so you got to have to be reusable like an airplane like you know it comes back you re re-fuel it and go again type of thing how much of the rocket can you reuse well starship the whole thing is designed to be reused really holy [ __ ] that's crazy if sasha will really be quite a big breakthrough if it's the first fully reusable rocket orbital rocket i mean that's a profound breakthrough the destiny of humanity will fundamentally change uh at the point of which starship demonstrates full and rapid reusability correct me if i'm wrong but spacex is the first that made the reusable rocket right like nasa no one ever fully usable yeah fully reusable well i mean the space shuttle was partially reusable um you know the orbiter the aircraft looking thing came came back but the the big external tank the you know big orange tank that which was also the primary airframe or the like the prime primary load bearing structure uh to which the solid rocket boosters attached that that did not come back which is very expensive yes they thought it wouldn't be expensive but it turned out to be very expensive um so the shuttle also the parts of the shuttle that were reusable were very difficult to reuse so um like the orbiter the aircraft looking thing um that took a lot of effort to refurbish between flights and the solar rocket booster shells it's not clear that those error made sense to reuse um so the thing that matters is is full and rapid reusability um but like basically where you don't do anything between flights except refill the tanks um now with falcon 9 um what spacex has done with falcon 9 that's notable is that [ __ ] 9 is the first case where reusability actually made any sense like where the reusability was um you know economically sensible um so the the falcon 9 boosters we've reflown those a lot at this point we've landed them a lot like over a hundred times of and and individual boosters have flown i think 13 times this point and the nose cone or the fairing we've gotten the fairing back now over 100 times so we've achieved reusability of everything except the upper stage with falcon 9 and we've demonstrated economically viable reusability so that's the most significant thing that spacex has done now the starlink global internet system will also be very significant um and that is intended to generate enough revenue to pay for the marshes so if with assuming starlink is successful it should generate enough revenue to pay for enough ships to get humanity to mars and the moon as well um yeah a lot of knowledge man it's crazy yeah so that's the intent um really like we had a long way to go so it's not like so likes in the bag or anything so either we get to mars or if putin gets out of hand we send elon in to walrusom yeah we got the dana white connect we can make it happen yeah the walrus i think that's probably our best our best channel yeah i think we're good elon we really appreciate this i mean you're so much the best it's been a blast yeah yeah we really appreciate it yeah it's good hanging out you want to go thank you thank you really appreciate it thank you so much [Music] thank you great conversation great yeah great question that was like three hours that was crazy watch him come compete with the new zelter all right everyone thank you for watching that pod i seriously can't believe we got [ __ ] elon on the pod honestly shout out to all our metacard holders uh if you guys don't know if you guys are new here we dropped our metacard which is our nft project earlier this year we basically have the best community out of any project we're in the discord all the time i'm in there a few times a week we're always dropping exclusive info about nell what we're working on our business videos just anything new the best way to kind of interact with us is to join the meta card project and get in the discord and it's only available to holders so if you guys want to join and be in that exclusive community grab a metacard they're still available on openc we'll put the link in the description so go to openc grab a metacard join the best community the exclusive community and we have a ton a ton a ton of big stuff we're working on this year um discord we [ __ ] love you boys and thank you seriously everyone elon [ __ ] musk on the podcast life is crazy it's only going to get crazier we love you boys [Music]

https://youtu.be/rQI2Ls32b80

this is getting stoned it's a podcast about gems and minerals and i am not your host this is getting stone a podcast about all things gems and minerals and i am your host donna kreider on today's episode we have a very special guest thank you elon musk for joining me all right so elon i always find it inspiring when you talk about the light of consciousness so what is the what consciousness mean to you the best about knowledge um the the only sort of uh conscious life that we're aware of is on earth i'm conscious in the sense of at least thinking that uh it has uh self-awareness like i mean i think of mental i think i think that where i am or whatever you know descartes um so you know there's that we've never found microbial life in the rest of the solar system but it's possible that we may find microbial life or something maybe even sea life under the ice of europa that's you know an interesting open question mark but at least thus far we've seen no no signs of life whatsoever not even microbial outside of earth and uh according to um geological record uh as best scientists can as best as science can determine earth is about four and a half billion years old the universe is about 13.8 billion years old this is this suggests that um like it it's odd that there's not if the universe is this old if if um the solar system is this old it's odd that only now um very recently uh have has life evolved that can can talk and write and communicate ideas uh sophisticated way and only now have has uh civilization got to the point where it is possible to send uh life to uh another planet or people to the moon although it's been a while since we last did that um a lot of people think moon landings are fake they're not fake i might just work there i don't think they're fine yeah um they've actually brought back some cool minerals from the moon and i kind of have one in my collection yeah i actually have a um a slice of a moon a meteor a chunk of moon that was where that a meteor hit the moon smashed a bunch of moon rocks and some of the moon rocks landed on earth and i've got a segment of one of them yeah the apollo mission brought back some tranquility right and up until 2011 um it's called that because of the sea of tranquility yeah and there was none found on earth and then in 2011 some deposits were found in australia so i have a friend of mine sent me uh some deposits and it broke oh yeah and so it had big chunks and two little pieces so i made the other two little pieces into uh art so well but i mean it's crazy how old the rock is you know yeah it's like billions and that shungite i just gave you that's over two billion years old they have their own long time you know there's no source it came from i mean it's hard to even you can't if you can't wrap your mind around you know that kind of time time scale yeah really a billion years i mean i mean our life spans are a flash in the pan that's true i mean just like that you know shorter than a flash and a band compared to the galactic time scales um so so there's much things that one could that will say uh or or at least um appear to be likely which is that it appears that uh consciousness is rare um and it takes a long time for it to arise and and and so uh and like i said to the best of our knowledge we are alone and so we have to accept the possibility that um that we we may be it um at least in this sector of the galaxy or or in the milky way paths um and and if we're it and and this is this is the only little candle in a vast darkness of you know a little lighter consciousness that got us lit um then we should really try to make sure uh that can't that life does not go out um and we can't take it for granted that it won't so we want to try to make it last as long as possible and i think we also want to try to understand the nature of the universe meaning of life where is it going you know what what does the future hold just find out what's going on in the universe um and uh you know so the so that means like the more that we can expand the the scope and scale of consciousness the more we're likely to understand the fundamental questions around the meaning of life and nature of the universe and so i think that's a good goal to have um and and so it's a goal that i think can unite humanity um you know because it's a common goal um as opposed to sort of in fighting and you know i want this big field of eyes i want this piece of land no i want this piece of land well you know there's a lot of land out there yeah there's a lot of planets with nothing you know how about those ones why fight over the little pieces when there's entire planets out there you know and solar systems and stuff so um so i think it is it is a it is a sort of i think it is a um a philosophy that uh withstands uh reason meaning like it's i think there's there's a solid reasoning basis for it it's it's really just a philosophy of curiosity i would call it so so that and it's also exciting you know if you think like uh i mean the happy reasons uh when you wake up in the morning that you're excited to be alive and you look forward to the future and it can't just be solving one sad problem after another you know that's what what the hell point there's no point like that you know it just admitted yeah yeah i have a question about that later on down the road um about your stance on that um but there's always problems you know but yeah we're gonna have we're gonna have some you know things that were inspired that are inspiring and exciting as too yeah i'm not saying we shouldn't solve problems we should but we also need positive things you know and i think people just get sad if it's just one problem after another and um it is and and and the way the media works is i mean australia like you read the newspaper uh most times newspaper is trying to answer the question what is the worst thing that happened on earth today it is like that it's like yeah and it's a big planet you know so something really bad is happening somewhere on earth because it's eight billion people so you've gotta like it's like obviously something bad is gonna be happening on every given day you've got eight billion opportunities for that um and so that's just you know um and like the way we're we've actually evolved i think is to respond more to negative news than to positive news in the sense that um if if there's like a physical danger like let's say you need to like remember oh that's where the lion is that's you know that's don't go there that that's very important but it's pretty silly and i also found this place where there's some delicious berries the delicious berries are nice to have not getting eaten by lion essential so so that's why you know i think we we just sort sorry tend to tend to remember or respond to negative stuff more than positive because a negative stuff historically could be you know physically the end of us um like if we get game over first first is sort of nice to have stuff so i think that's there's this kind of like an inherent uh evolutionary bias towards negative news um but the thing is that negative views now is that we get news from all around the world that can't possibly affect us or or are very unlikely to affect us um and it's bad for when you know wherever it was in the world that that had the natural disaster or uh and so forth but but it's not it actually doesn't affect us directly um but but we we get the news from far away that doesn't affect us directly but still makes us sad yeah and that does have an effect on you because then you can't focus on what you need to focus on yeah absolutely so back uh so my next question so if the worst case were to happen if community humanity goes extinct um do you think the light of consciousness itself would die or do you think it would evolve into something else given enough time humanity will go extinct um because the counterpart will be humanity will look for ever and i think that's just unlikely but we can live for a very long time though humanity can live for a very long time and we're just trying to make that time as long as possible um as to whether there will be some other form of consciousness that evolves after humanity i hope so um but we don't know for sure and i think we want to we should we should you know it would be wise to not not to just assume that oh they'll uh if we're gone i thought they'll you know the future be some other form of consciousness maybe maybe not um like this it's earth one half billion years old um the sun is slowly expanding as the sun expands um those over millions of years um the temperature on earth will rise and eventually the sun will engulf earth and group everything everything will be incinerated um now the you know that that is you know there's different different schools of thought here but the the the sun may if the sun may think things may get hot enough uh on earth um within maybe 500 million years uh where earth may be uninhabitable you know that's sort of um a combination of the various cycles of earth because because on a very geological time scale earth actually has gone through snowball phases and and and sort of very hot phases and if you have a very hot phase of earth combined with the sun expanding that that that could really be a massive extinction event and one of the things like for an earth timing standpoint 500 million years would only be 10 longer than earth has existed thus far and so if therefore if if consciousness or civilization had taken 10 percent longer to evolve it wouldn't have evolved at all yeah so at on a lot of time scale we're kind of making it just we're actually pretty close we kind of got got here just in time not yeah okay yeah i wonder how it actually evolved like it just poof to come out of nowhere i don't know what the consciousness like itself like it just kind of um um you know things started out as hydrogen and then got more complex and and and uh you know basically leave hydrogen out in the sun long enough it starts talking that's us it became bad [Laughter] so what qualities are you looking for in a person who would want to make the first human man trip to mars well first of all i think it's very important to emphasize that what really matters is uh getting a lot of people to mars and um and enough equipment to make a city self-sustaining um i mean certainly whoever is there first i suppose will be world famous but it's that's not what's important from a civilizational standpoint what we actually need is to make a self-sustaining city on mars that's the critical threshold and we need to do that while civilization still has the ability to do so uh and that ability to do so could uh end for a number of good it could have because of world war three it could and uh because civilization just gradually peters out um the the the arc of civilizations like the in the of the various sort of civilizations that have been on earth they've they've not had a sort of continuous upper trajectory they they rose they peaked and they fell it's like a cycle of that yeah the ancient sumerians are no longer the ancient egyptians no longer um the you know so the romans yeah exactly right um so that there's many civilizations that have risen and paul and the mayans and and they have really quite an incredible uh network of cities was very amazing actually um and um so and now there's mostly just under jungle and earth so um i think we still want to take it for granted like i think people sort of have lived at a period of time where civilization from our technology standpoint has been has been increasing and so they just naturally assume that's just how that's how just how it is it'll just always increase essentially what i'm saying is the like i'm trying to say that that we should approach making life multi-planetary with a sense of urgency um and to do so while we can well you know and that because of the this is the first time that the window of opportunity has been open for life to become multi-planetary and it that window may be open for a long time or a short time but i think it would be wise for us to assume it'll be open for a short time and take action now um now from a resource standpoint sometimes people that go well is this gonna take all the resources of earth no i what i'm suggesting is that we spend less than one percent of our resources um but maybe on that order on making life multi-planetary and assume and preserving the the future of life not just for humans but for all you know life on earth because we are in in bringing life to mars we would be life's steward we would be the caretaker of life um and so you know the the other creatures can't build spaceships and we can't so you would not believe what my cats can do that's all i got to say about that but you know it's like a you know i kind of think we've got a responsibility to protect the rest of the you know the creatures on earth too and um i think we should do that and i think a reasonable thing would be like i said about a one percent of our resources will skill at 99 for earth problems but i think one percent for making life multi-planetary and uh ensuring the long-term survival of consciousness and life as we know it is is worth one percent of resources i think and that's that that's what that's that that's the you know what i would propose for people birth and um and then of course we still need to make sure things are good on earth of course we're not like oh let's abandon earth and right so those things feel like are you just gonna let both go to go to hell i'm like no uh we need to make everything we can to make both good like tesla's goal is to is to help make it ensure a good future for earth and then spacex's goal is to um make life multi-planetary and and you know ensure the long-term survival of consciousness those are awesome goals yeah so what one's the one yeah yeah i think another thing is just increasing the happiness yeah yes absolutely in fact totally so so i mean i've so you know i've mostly talked about the defensive reasons for you know like the protective reasons for making life multi-planetary but i think it's also i think things that it's like what actually gets me most the most uh excited and fired up it's actually the sense of adventure and and possibility um and the uh it's just it just be the greatest adventure ever um and it would be exciting and inspiring to see it happen well what you've done um what you and spacex have done in ukraine um with the starlink it inspires a lot of deep respect you know you've also helped saint charles parish and my state and my state you know after hurricane ida as well as the villages of tango so um what role do you see starling playing in regards of disaster relief because we're going to have a lot of disasters they're predicting more hurricanes for my area actually this year well just in general starlink because it is um not dependent on any ground-based infrastructure uh can provide internet connectivity to areas that have had floods or fires or earthquakes um and that that have destroyed the ground-based infrastructure um so that's that's obviously extremely helpful for rescuing people um and um you know not knowing where you know it's like if you just have just be people being able to you know uh say i need to i need help i need to rescue it like how do you how do you find them how do you communicate with them and stalling cannon has provided that in a number of situations yeah so when we had um ida my power was out for a week there was actually when the hurricane hit um the communications uh southeast louisiana was completely wiped out and we were using i forgot the name of the app but the cajun neighbor uses this app to rescue people to make um because they would go from place to place to place um and it just kind of made me think of that you know starlink i think would definitely help like organizations like cajun navy as well as others just to kind of be able to communicate better especially with government um and not just in my area but other areas too so but yeah it's really awesome with that it would be cool to see something like that on a more um installed on your phone too as well as you know internet you know you keep people connected yeah i think seriously like like certainly um uh one's phone is capable of behaving and at least as a short-range walkie-talkie uh even if it's not connected to the internet in any way or you can just do basically create a wi-fi bridge maybe that's is is that what you're talking about yeah or just somewhere to help people stay connected like you know if you have a disaster and you call somebody usually you get like a um well during hurricane rita um i wasn't really badly affected by rita but i had people telling me oh we get this error message um you've been you're in a disaster zone or you're in some kind of um zone where you know this person's impacted by disasters and they can't like the call's not going through i had people telling me that um that was back in 05 though yeah but just i don't know something you know just to keep people connected during the disasters so like you don't have to worry about a friend is missing you know and they can call and say hey i'm okay power's out we're you know conserving battery but um but speaking of uh disasters the must foundation um has done a lot of good work and about a month or so ago i made this really long list yeah um you saw it it was like i got tired like i was adding and adding adding to that list and it kept on growing um just how much good work you guys are doing and um so what you did also for lake charles in south west louisiana um especially after laura impacted that area was really phenomenal and it saved lives but how do you see the must foundation itself helping charities especially toward disaster relief within the next few years as the effects of climate change continue to kind of get worse well um i mean we try we try hard with the foundation to give away money in ways that are uh actually useful whether it's like you know maximum number of cents on the dollar of of actually helping the people in need uh the it's it's way harder to give away money than you think if you care about it actually doing good as opposed to sounding like it does good yeah um it's easy to make it sound like it listed money's doing good but it's hard to make actually do good um i can't tell you it's insanely hard um so we're actually just spilling up more personnel within the foundation to be more direct and and uh and go through like fewer sort of intermediaries and kind of middle entities um so we can be more um you know you have to have more the shortest path to helping people in need so but i have said it's way harder than you think to give away money effectively um and but that's what we're trying to do yeah and would you consider um grants that help organizations that also focus on disaster relief uh yeah no we we do we do provide grants to organizations that that work on disaster really that's awesome yeah absolutely um so last year you donated 100 million dollars for x price for the competition to fight climate change and so far about 20 million of that has been distributed to winners on earth day they announced that you the foundation awarded 15 million dollars and two winners in four categories that's air land ocean and rocks which of these four categories do you feel needs the most work the most impact help well i mean the larger problem is is saying okay we if we need to get the parts per million level of co2 in the atmosphere primarily in the atmosphere down to a lower level um we're going to have to pull it out of the error and store it somewhere and i think by storing it in some in some solid form is going to make sense um you know in a form that you know after you store it it doesn't gradually sort of evaporate and return to the atmosphere or somehow but you know uh it needs to be um it's just so the the you you've got to extract this here too and store it that's that's pretty tough you know so um and and it's going to take a fair bit of energy to do that and so that energy obviously has to be provided by a uh renewable or sustainable means like solar and wind um or geothermal i'm actually pro nuclear as well like i think nuclear has a bad rap and it's uh people really shouldn't be shutting down nuclear power stations in my view unless they're in like a location that's prone to natural disasters in which case you know you know you don't want a hurricane to hit you you know what so you know like you can't get always waiting for the real but once in a century the situation and then yeah um you know like the fukushima situation was like well you know there's a lot of tsunamis and stuff yeah and so it's probably not great to have uh nuclear where there's you know uh natural disasters but for example in like france and germany um many parts of the us there's really no meaningful risk of uh of a natural disaster that could affect nuclear power plants so it's like we shouldn't shut them down in that case um but anyway but i think it's primarily solar at solar and wind um as you can see and then you know it's like figuring out what is the uh the what takes the least amount of resources to convert to take the co2 from the atmosphere and bind it and perform that can be stored um yeah so that's what the competition is about and you know when you said um bringing the um taking the carmen out there and storing it you just made me think and i didn't add this on the questions but you just reminded me um there's a there's a really cool company called project vestas i think it's the name of it um they take peridot they're trying to use uh peridot to do that and then there's um other different diamond companies that are making lab grown diamonds with the air um with the carpet in the air like you're taking the carbon out there making gemstones with it definitely that that is cool i i don't think that's a very i'm not sure that scales yeah i don't know if it scales but it is cool to think about like you know this diamond yeah that's carbon that's not going in the air it's going in your ring yes i think that takes a lot of energy uh but uh so i'm not that yeah but yeah so cool yeah so would you consider having another expert like when this competition closes and the full 100 million is given out would you consider doing another one yeah absolutely i mean like i said i'm in favor of anything that anywhere with where the money where money can be spent that does real good um and we're constantly looking for you know things that we think will be you know highly effective ways to spend money uh for general social good and um what is what accomplishments that has the most foundation achieved that you're the most proudest like what makes you feel warm inside that you know that makes you feel like you're doing good i mean i really don't think we we've done enough to to uh you know at least this stage i don't think we've done enough to to be uh you know uh singing our own praises here um i mean there was an education x prize that that my foundation funded um and it was basically uh to figure out the best way to improve literacy so it was for um i i think that was that was cool and i think that did some good um you know if to agree that one can improve literacy um then you're you're essentially improving everything about uh any a given society because they can now you know learn new learn skills learn learn things if you can't read basically it's hard it's hard to make it it's hard to say sort of lift someone out of poverty probably if they can't read so yeah um i actually have neighbors that can't read they're like older than me and they just can't read or write and i'm like you know that's how my mom taught me when that was three how to read i'm very grateful for that um but i don't know like the idea of being unable to read that terrifies me and we do need more literacy yeah so we had like a also with the x prize foundation uh literacy x prize and to figure out like what what's the best soft software that you could have on like a low-cost uh sort of kind of android tablet type of thing um you know uh that that is most effective at teaching people to read so that i guess probably that's that's probably the best thing we've done so far that's awesome yeah you're doing a lot of good work with the most foundation yeah you've helped a lot of people especially in my community so um i think startup will have a really positive effect on you know improving um sort of people's get uh income and stuff and and uh they're improving the standard of living because uh for a lot of people that they that a lot large portion of what does not have internet connectivity or if they do it's it's very bad and extremely expensive um and we're installing can provide connectivity for like you know sort of a whole village of like 200 people type of thing um and then it's like you know in that case would be like 50 cents a month per person i think that's pretty affordable yeah yeah that's really affordable yeah i mean um yeah yeah so um the declining birth rate you often talk about this problem it is a real problem it really is but there's another problem i think is playing a major role and um and that's poverty um so what um what actions do you think need to be taken towards solving poverty that would kind of help it relieve some of that issue with the burst uh declining birth rate well the decline birth rate um it's somewhat counter-intuitive but uh generally the uh wealthier uh someone is the fewer kids they have i'm an exception that there is but it's quite rare um so it's it's um basically the higher the education level and the um the wealthier people are the fewer kids they have so it's not a money thing yeah um it's it's a in fact it seems the opposite like more money that someone has the fewer kids they have so um and and you know somebody who's sort of um you know sort of living at like a 2022 standard of of what's considered you know at the parts or poverty level would be really um i mean they would have access to to things that so the richest person didn't have like 100 years ago you know so i just know that um like when i was i you know i've been homeless before working two jobs and i don't know the idea of having a kid would terrify me especially if you're not stable you know and i think like you know those problems that contribute to that um that and you can't just like throw money at it and solve it now let's tell people that you know you can't just like okay here's 100 million dollars go go in homelessness you can't just do that because you got there's a lot of trauma involved and there's a lot of mental healing involved there's a lot of i think trauma is the number one cause of homelessness just from my experience of it because i've seen what it does firsthand you know and i've experienced it what it does so i mean you know it's just poverty i don't know i don't want to call it unsolvable but that's why i was asking because like what ideas do you have that could help you know point some kind of solution some kind of solution out there well like i said yeah i mean literacy and access to internet i think are fundamentally helpful um really they've got to think beyond the united states you know it's like uh there's a lot of like those billions of people who have no internet cognitive at all nothing um or or it's like a very low bandwidth and it's insanely expensive that's like the for many parts of the world this is the case uh building likes of billions people so um the you know so i think those things are helpful um i mean generally education obviously is good um and i mean these days if you can learn almost anything online so uh like mit for example has all of their lectures online um and a number of other universities do and um so you can kind of actually if you want if you want to you could learn almost anything for at a very low very low cost i mean just using a simple sort of you know i like it like like and a phone or a yeah an old tablet uh you know router box basically and and like it's yeah you can literally you've got access to all the world's information so you know i i think i think that's you know and i think this maybe this this fact is really um underappreciated and and people it's something we should be i think pretty excited and optimistic about or feel good about which is that information before the internet was uh very limited if you wanted to learn uh a scale or trade or learn it they learned something you would have to go to a school and you'd have to get get the specific books or you'd have to go to a library in that library wouldn't necessarily have all the books that you'd want um and or maybe there isn't a library there might not be a library near where you live so but with the internet you've got instant access to basically all the world's information um and and so um information quality is really incredible compared to where where it used to be um especially if you go back say you know a few hundred years or three let's say let's say go back three three four hundred years um they weren't public libraries uh well there were very few public libraries and but and and books were things that only a few percent of the population actually even had a book um and then and then the book collection would be very small um so and then before the gutenberg printing press uh books were like a insanely rare yeah um so if you look at say how how has information access to information the quality of a quality of access to information improved over time it's insane how much better it was than in the past so um i can't imagine not having books yeah um so um and you know with with google you've got like the sort of magic article that can like answer you know what's there a question yeah i learned a lot on google especially um whenever i find i go to gem the mineral shows from time to time i'm always finding something i'm like what is that having to google that and um yeah google teaches really well um do you have any other thoughts or ideas on how to reverse population decline the population decline i problem is possibly the biggest risk to civilization it's certainly one of the biggest risks um first of all people really need to a lot of people think that there's too many humans on the planet and planet can't sustain this number of humans this is absolutely not true we could double the population without any uh uh meaningful damage to the environment uh so you can put all the humans on earth in this on the city of new york um that that's the that's the cross-sectional area of humans i think the foot in they literally fit the city of new york with on on one floor you don't even need high-rises and if you if you're on a plane flight and you look down and you say what percentage of the time uh am i if i were to drop a ball that would that where that ball would hit a person basically zero um even in a city like like la uh which you think oh that's a crowded city but um looking at from above what's the cross-sectional area of humans relative to the rest of the ground and it's uh much less than one percent in even in l.a so we sort of if you're in a big city environment and you see a lot of people you sort of oh that's there must be these there's sort of extrapolate that you everywhere but it's it's actually very rare to see a concentration of humans so uh humans this is very earth is very sparsely populated with humans uh there's not enough humans far from being too many um and um and i think people people are still sort of um are operating on the assumption that the population's just growing like crazy when in fact the opposite is occurring um and these numbers are easy to look up i mean they're just on the internet so yeah um and uh weighed the lowest birth rate um in recorded history uh last year wow yeah i saw the statistics on your twitter account yeah so i don't even see all your tweets half the time like and i follow you you know that's the crazy part like i'll look at your tweets and even if you have like the latest tweets again because you got to switch because yeah i'll grab them and lay it yeah and it's like i do yeah i'm totally on twitter yeah because i'm everything bad search ghostband search button yeah yeah shadow banning is like crazy it's really bad what the heck's going on it's like i don't know i i tweet really nice things but mean exactly you're like a hate monger the furthest thing from you're obviously a super nice person so what what the heck are they doing she replied to me with a heart and got shadow band over a heart and they wanted a heart no it was kristen it was somebody somebody one of my friends i think it was you or kristen um they they replied to me with something really nice a heart and they got shadow banners and they had to leave yes oh it was you lots of lots of love yeah it really sounds like like someone on twitter is doing something shady that's not that's not not cool yeah yeah um whatever whoever's doing that on twitter shame on you right y'all need to stop that's not cool yeah don't shadow van gaal yeah that's like she's awesome so totally messed up [Laughter] all right so let's talk tesla um there's been a quite a lot of bills that have been kind of like anti-ev or anti-tesla going through put through state governments um some of them went through i don't know if they i haven't really followed up with that but um it seems like the goal is that they want to prevent tesla from doing business they want to shut down the service dinners and just stop tesla from serving its customers and most of these bills have been introduced either by dealer associations or former dealerships who are like congress so what are your thoughts on how um dealerships are trying to preserve their way of life instead of evolving with the market and the times like what's your 2.5 yeah it's to be as to be expected that incumbents will oppose a new entrance to a market um and they they're you know if they can't win a fair fight they'll try to unfair fight so i think we'll continue to see uh opposition to tesla um and um you know but i think the other day if we have the people on our side and and um we've got a customer supporting us i think with customer support or with you know tesla owner support i think uh i think we'll win most of the battles we're not going to win them all probably but we'll win most of them you wanted to say something you'd have like no i'm just agreeing oh i do i think once once people experience the product whether it's power storage or of course the vehicle tesla's are cool the plot of it like the reaction when i went to the plot event last year and then when i flew home taking off in a flight it's nothing compared to the launch in the plaque i'm just saying yeah that's super fun yeah i mean it's really designed to be what's the most amount of fun you can have in a car yeah you did a good job yeah you and the team did yeah exactly yeah so tesla insurance is making a difference for the customers who switch and you're in several states now i think it's eight or nine and um louisiana has the highest average cost of car insurance in the nation oh okay yeah we're we're always either in the highest of the worst or the lowest and the best but it's i don't know it's louisiana for you but uh sorry but when will um tesla insurance expand to all 50 states and canada and um when will louisiana get it well so the the insurance is right regulated uh primarily at the state level so it's a state by state thing and um the you have to so you have to have to jump through a lot of hoops in every state and those hoops take a long time to jump like this you have to do it there's so many things you have to do uh like there's a lot of barriers to entry basically and and i like some of these entry are like legit you can't have like some shady insurance company but then i think some of these regulations are there to protect the existing insurers and and stop new entrants um so they it but generally it's it's a it's a very slow process uh of of getting uh sort of the various licenses in in all the states and every state is different so it's a it's um paperwork insanity um so we're expanding as quickly as we can um and i'm not sure i'm not sure about louisiana um but uh we are eventually we intend to be in in all states and and and canada and hopefully the world yeah yeah we have the craziest drivers in louisiana yeah well the thing about tesla insurance is like we it's it's kind of real-time feedback so um you can the the more the safer you drive the lower your insurance rate um and um that's i think quite a revolution in insurance um and it also will allow people who um you know it's very hard to get insurance if you're like under age 25 or maybe you get like one bad thing on your driver's record or something and then sometimes you can't get insurance so it's insanely expensive but really the insurance should be proportionate to uh how good you are as a driver how safe you are as driver and so that's that's the sort of revolutionary elements of tails instruments yeah it would suck for me because i don't drive i don't know how to drive i never learned and and you know like being a first-time driver they go crazy high and yeah louisiana being the highest you know they'll be like it'll be kind of hard yeah no i think it's quite discriminatory though if you have um because because you've got um that they'll sort of just lump you in with everyone and statistically uh like you like all new drivers but like some of your drivers are going to be much safer than others and so really insurance just be proportionate to how safe you drive and that's our goal yeah so um you've said before that tesla might go into the mining industry um is this something you're still considering is it on the table or just in the back of your mind well we don't want to go into the mining industry or the sort of refining industry for uh you know because the limitation i think is actually more for example with lithium it's more lithium refinement than it is the actual mining um so you better take the ore that contains lithium and you've got to refine it and get it to battery grade lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate and and it has to be extremely pure um otherwise uh the you know you could have um breakdown in the cell like you can't have like impurities in the cell because it would cause the cell to fail um so um so so the the challenge and with a lot of the ingredients into lithium ion batteries is um is the processing it's not the fundamental rarity of lithium that is very common it's it's one of the most common elements on earth uh but but you've got to turn it into battery grade lithium and that's um so that what's all of that processing that that's where the chokepoint is so um yeah um we i hope we do not need to get into the mining business i mean it's it's more appreciate like this there's a limited number of smart hard-working people that we can say work on this problem or work on that problem and so we have people work on on this problem they can't work on that problem yeah and there's not like some magical source of super talented people so they gotta be trained there's at least some i'll be passionate about it too you know it's gonna be something they love yeah um we're not sitting or sitting around without without a resource saying i wonder what more we can take on which we we we have to sort of have some dire resources and focus on things that really make a difference but the overarching goal of tesla is to accelerate the advance of sustainable energy um and the the fundamental good of tesla will be measured or should be measured by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy and so we want to work on the things that that accelerate sustainable energy the fastest whatever the limiting factors are tesla recently had a virtual power plant um could you tell us a little bit more about how uh tesla is working with our cot and the difference that it is making there right yeah i mean we've got there are three pillars to a sustainable energy future one is electric transport uh the other is uh sustainable power generation primarily through solar and wind and then the third is uh stationary battery uh energy storage uh because so the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind does blow all the time so you gotta you know um store the energy while the sun is shining the wind is blowing in the bed and the stationary batteries and then those batteries provide power to the grid and we can have a fully sustainable energy earth just with those with those three things so until tesla is working on all those three things um the stationary battery part is is a big deal um and um we are ramping that up it's gonna be i think a very big part of our business long term um it's just it's a very important part of the total energy solution for earth our estimate is that you need about 300 terawatt hours of energy storage or certainly 3 000 hours sorry 300 000 gigawatt hours so uh other people may come up with different numbers but in order to fully transition earth including uh all electricity transport and heating we think it's probably around around that number so uh that that's a lot of batteries that need to be made yeah um and if you assume a battery life before it gets recycled of 20 years roughly then you need 15 terawatt hours a year of annual production a steady state so um fifteen thousand gigawatt hours a year uh but i think like a current production is much less than that i think we might be approaching a thousand gigawatt hours thereabouts at this point um and and this this is like my sort of mass plan part three is about scaling like how do we scale uh to get to how how do we get to that fully sustainable um economy for sustainable energy economy um and and and what what tons do we need of what materials and and what is the maybe the best way to get get all of those materials and turn them into batteries with the fundamental uh governor of the rate at which we can transition to sustainability is the rate at which uh we can grow the output of silic of lithium-ion batteries okay yeah i've been following along um with the virtual power plants in ercot and gail has really been like covering it on her blogs too um i think that's awesome um and if those go pretty well and archive says hey we're gonna allow vpps now um i'd like to see them in across the deep south because i think like the deep south is kind of like the most neglected part and we're like the hottest part of the country and the most hardest hit you know with all the disasters and stuff you know we could like you know it would be cool to see tesla and utilities partner up across in these areas as well to do demonstrations and workshops yeah right girl yeah absolutely this is going to be a game changer for texas i really think texas could lead in this really yeah i do i think they're very receptive to it yeah it's inspiring to see you know because texas you know texas grid is completely separate from every like the rest of the nation and that's like its weakest part i was just we were talking about this last time but that's like the weakest part of texas is the grid and now here comes tesla trying to strengthen that weakest part you know yeah the batteries are helpful even without sustainable energy because they can um sort of load balance the the the grid so if you have power spikes the batteries can absorb the power spike if you just it sort of dips or should say if there's a drop in power or an increase in power like you know power fluctuations the batteries can smooth it out um and so the the tesla sort of um mega pack and power walls and stuff can it can be really helpful for stabilizing the grid even in the absence of sustainable energy yeah can you see can you talk at all a little more about like the distributed energy resources or like how this factory could be protected in the event of a disaster or an emergency i i think it's going to be in terms of batteries a combination of of large batteries at the sort of utility scale batteries that work with very big installations like we just did a big thing with pg e at moss landing in california which is going to be very important for maintaining power in california and there's a number of other installations happening um and then at the local level you've got the power walls that collectively can uh stabilize the grid within a neighborhood so the combination of um centralized batteries uh with mega pack and distributed batteries at homes and businesses with powerwall um working together can have very positive effect in making sure the power stays on it's awesome yeah um that's actually pretty cool it's really cool yeah i think i i think it gives people hope i think it does really bring happiness when we talk about how much we depend on energy yeah for just about everything absolutely energy is the foundation of the economy civilization would would crumble immediately if we didn't have it it would be mass starvation be terrible yeah terrible i wanted to quickly talk about the tesla justice um first of all it's about time like y'all should have been had that of all the drama on especially with all the like short selling and just all the stuff that they put people through yeah just under a relentless attack from so many it's crazy yeah so um so i think like we just have to have like a strong litigation group that uh fights back essentially yeah yeah that's good um how's the planning on that is is there anything you could share um about that um yeah a lot of really talented um laura's have sort of sent in their resume or uh and and we're actually going through that and we're going to be hiring a bunch of people who responded to my tweet that's good yeah we definitely just we're under this class of the attack it's insane yeah it is i you are yeah the conspiracies i see on twitter from people who like really hate you and hate tesla are just nuts like it's like themselves into a pretzel here and like it's like what exactly what diabolical thing do they think i'm like in the factory trying to make you're building cars yeah like you can just literally see it yeah it's not like uh you know you know like uh but i mean there's no sellers would like try to at one point like say that oh you know shanghai is fake and it's not it's like and and they said it was a field well it's not fake if you can it's like if people have drone videos and like stuff they you know and tons of cars are coming out of it so yeah and the main reason why people did the driving so crazy prove that it was there you know to fight the flood and the negativity yeah you know that's what that thing in the drone videos were really important yeah you know and then they said that yeah i mean this is crazy they said that like jacob berlin wouldn't get built and like you wouldn't get approvals yeah we're like making a thousand cars a week is that the best congratulations by the way yeah thanks but i mean i was just like a lot of great hard-working people at tesla and um you know so uh because it's actually really hard to make cars so the whole supply chain and production process is extremely difficult as you've probably heard me say before it's like relatively speaking making a prototype is easy um you know we can make a prototype practically anything in six months with maybe 100 people but to get that to volume production and try to have the price be as affordable as possible um it you know didn't have sort of positive gross margins so you're not operating at a loss uh that is that takes 10 000 people at least two years and that's faster than that's like two to three times faster than the rest of industry so it's vastly more difficult to manufacture than to create prototypes like it's like not even remotely comparable like in general i think manufacturing is underrated um and like manufacturing used to be really cool in the us and then like became for some reason i think kind of uncool for like quite a long time and there were just a lot of talented people went in other directions um but i i sure hope a lot more talented people get into me fact stringing um because that's like you know where you're making the products that people you know use and enjoy it's like you know it's like i could just generally think um this is both both the compliments and the criticism but there are there are too many smart americans in finance and law so i'm saying they're smart but i'm also saying that that like could they could could they consider doing be doing manufacturing instead of financial law yeah because i think we we have we have probably too many lawyers in the in the united states and and and too many people in finance and uh and their talents could would just be much better uh applied to manufacturing so yeah like making stuff people need and and love what is the next step in ev technology that would make it even friendlier um to the environment and better for the economy what do you think that is i think it's really just about scaling up yeah so can we make enough like right now we cannot make enough cars to satisfy demand so we're gonna grow production capacity and looking ahead we need to make sure that like so the raw materials from a mining and refining standpoint are there to support the future growth and the really the limiting factor is the rate at which we can increase battery production so that's the that's that's what really matters um i wouldn't say that there's like some that i i don't see that i don't i don't think there's any technology breakthrough needed it's about scale that's a tremendous amount of work so let's talk about ai and optimus um so i know very little about ai and what i've learned i've learned from you in tesla actually um people have told me four years ago hey you're going to be interviewing elon musk about ai i would have looked at you like you lost your mind right yeah that's how like little i know but i'm learning and i am curious how close do you think we are to general intelligence are we already there i don't think we're quite there for artificial general intelligence in a sense if that's defined as um intelligence that exceeds humans in every way okay um so we're not quite there yet but we're headed in that i mean we're you know if progress continues that's what will happen we'll have digital intelligence that exceeds human intelligence in every way and i hope that that the the ai is nice to us i hope so too what are the chances i mean i i mean i've lost a lot of sleep thinking about ai as a an existential risk uh eventually i'm like i don't know what i i think we've got to hope that it's good and try to steer it in a good direction and i think there probably should be a regulatory agency that oversees uh advanced ai uh because it's a public safety risk and and generally where you've got a public safety risk you you won't have regulatory oversight um just makes it for no companies are cutting corners or doing unsafe things type of things but it's advancing quickly um you know for tesla we're just kind of looking for the kind of ai that can drive way safer than a human and we're i think we're uh almost there um but that's that's a sort of simple that's like a utility that's utility function inside it's a hard problem but it's i think it's like the car is not to sort of suddenly decide it wants to take over the world you know um yeah it's really just going to take you to your destination the uh babylon what did the babylon it was batman b right the tesla cars take you to work against your will or something like that yeah but i like the idea of it actually like if you pass out then they're taking you to the hospital and just yeah yeah just to the er you know yeah literally that's that's uh i think if you have like a like you know a heart attack or a stroke or something's wrong a seizure the car can figure that out and take you to that would be cool yeah yeah save lives yeah yeah totally it already does but yeah say more yeah i mean there's already like a lot of a lot of cases where people have like um you know uh fainted or or just otherwise just lost you know lost consciousness seizure one seizures yeah seizures absolutely um and because the car was on autopilot there they're alive and and uh if they didn't have autopilot they might be dead or they might have run someone over yeah and i remember and i actually wrote an article about this um you were actually inspired by otto um by an accident that happened i think it was in 2014 to create this yeah exactly so um the one of the things that really convinced me that we need to go as fast as possible with autonomy um it was that uh we had a tesla owner uh in the bay area he fell asleep with the wheel um and uh ran over a cyclist and killed the cyclist um and i was like well if that that car had been on autopilot that cyclist would still be alive so we got to hustle and and make water pilot work um and then more recently um a terrible tragedy jv's travel's wife was run over uh but yeah again sort of driver a truck driver fellas i think fell asleep uh on the opposite side of the road and the truck veered across the road and she was cycling on the far side of the road and she got killed by the truck yeah my heart went out to him yeah that's i remember reading that it was just horrible to read you know yeah so um you know this is directly affecting people we know it's not like people we don't know you know it's like it's a anyway so i think if that so if that truck had been on um on autopilot you know jp's wife would still be alive so we we gotta we gotta it's an important life-saving technology there's over a million people that die every year in in car accidents and i think on about 10 million that are severely injured like like you know we like lose a limb or have have severe pain for the rest of your life type of thing um and um you know so so there's a lot of good that can be done with autonomy because i think i think we probably improve those uh things by a factor of 10 like maybe 10 times better at least i will tell you um fsd beta kind of saved my life uh when i came back all right so when i flew back from austin from the cyber rodeo my neighbor was supposed to pick me up they had him everybody said i said okay i just call it uber and my uber driver was a tesla owner with fsd beta and he actually followed me on twitter and we were just kind of like it was like a spider-man meme almost but without us being each other and so fsd beta took me home from the airport um in baton rouge and along the way two cyclists literally like came out of nowhere it was like they popped up out of the street or something and it handled it beautifully flawlessly and i was like man i wish we could have gotten this on video yeah you know like but i wasn't even expecting to be an fsd band i just came off a flight and you know i just wanted to get home you know so but it was cool and it happened like one right after the other and then it saw a pedestrian on the other side of the street that looked like they were trying to cross so it slowed down to stop but it was really cool kind of experiencing that and seeing the car just like oh i see you i'm going to stop for you you know um it was really cool you know and we didn't see the cycle as had had it been him driving who knows what would have happened sure yeah yeah absolutely no it's been tragic yeah not enough for i'm pretty sure we would have been fine but those cyclists yeah yeah no yeah yeah i mean it says autopilot and fsd have saved a lot of lives and prevented a lot of injuries writing yeah it has it really has there's so many stories like and that's why i don't get like all these news stories talking about oh this car just killed somebody on ai or whatever i don't uh autopilot i'm like no it they don't kill people like that whole thing it's like and it frustrates me because i'm like if you do your research you'll see more stories of tesla's saving lives and not taking them you know in fact i don't think there's any case that is actually actively took a life the way they make it out to me so they're not in the sense that like the car steered itself into a tree yeah out of nowhere type of thing that that's not uh the best of my knowledge um the obviously like basic autopilot is not meant to be a full self driving and we you know we have to acknowledge every time you use it that you still need to pay attention to the road because it's not ready for uh yet for uh it's it's not ready yet where you can't pay attention we say every time you enable it uh we pop up a message saying we must pay attention to the environment um so um but it's it's also important to say like um water pilot or full self-driving uh well it will not mean that uh accidents go to zero it's not possible if you have a look you know of large numbers and billions of miles traveled that you that it's perfect perfect is not it's not possible um what really matters is is it substantially safer than a person driving on average and that is the case so the but you know when we started out on the sort of autopilot self-driving path um i was warned by a lot of people that it's like even if you save uh ninety percent of the lives the ten percent of lives you didn't save will still sue you and that's true yeah yeah the people that's whose lives were saved they didn't know the lives were saved but well sometimes they do but but you're still doing it though yeah you're doing it next move you know it's still the right thing to do for sure yeah now that speaks a lot about your character and of course tesla's character as a whole yeah i mean i think we always want to do the you know the reality of goodness should be favored obviously above the perception of it i just want to share a special thank you to elon musk tesla and his teams for not only allowing me to visit giga texas again but to interview elon i think his work is important for humanity elon is somebody inspired by the problems that the majority of us don't even think about as we go about our daily lives i learned a lot from interviewing him and my hope is that you do as well his dedication and his passion for his work is inspiring for all of us and it reminds us that we all have a purpose in life something that brings us the sense of fulfillment and of doing what you're here to do elon musk has done a lot of good in this world and i'm honored that he joined me here on getting stone a podcast about tunes and minerals most of the time hey this is getting stoned

https://youtu.be/TjBA6jy4ako

we now have a man who by many measures at least as the world's greatest capitalist at the moment um elon musk thank you very much for coming and talking to us you could argue at the moment that us in the media we have at least three elon musks to deal with we have the proposed buyer of twitter we have the ceo of tesla spacex and much else and we have musk the emerging political force and that's before we discover or discuss all the different provocations and tweets and so on but maybe we can run through those three and let's begin with twitter and i suppose my question for you is what is the status of the 44 billion deal 44 billion deal to buy the company if you look at the deal spreads at the moment the investors seem to be betting that it won't happen i suppose and right here you have the qataris who are amongst your backers um what are you going to say to them and to us first of all i'd like to say um your highness your excellencies and distinguished guests thank you very much for hosting me virtually um it's an honor to be here or be there virtually um and um i actually wish i could be there in person so with respect to the twitter transaction there's a limit to what i can say publicly given that is somewhat of a sensitive matter so i i will actually be measured in my responses here um such as not to generate incremental lawsuits unfortunately that seems to be a risk you sometimes manage to overcome yes a deposition minimization is i think important um have you have twitter given you enough information well there are still um a few unresolved matters uh you've you've probably read about the the question as to whether the number of um fake and spam users on the system is less than five percent as twitter claims um which i think is probably not most people's experience uh on when using twitter um so we're still awaiting resolution on that matter um and that that is a very significant matter um so uh we're awaiting resolution on that um and then of course uh there is the question of uh will the uh the debt portion of the uh round uh come together and then will the shareholders vote in favor so i think those are the three things that um uh stand in the uh you know if that need to be resolved before uh the transaction can complete what about the general state of the economy does that weigh on you when you think about this i mean you just described it you have a super bad feeling about the economy are you still in that position i just said to you earlier joe biden has just come out and said that a recession in america is not inevitable how do you feel about the economy well i think a recession is inevitable at some point as to whether there is a recession in the near term i think that is more likely than not uh it certainly isn't it's not a certainty but um it appears more likely than not um and what do you think i'm i'm i'm i'm with you i agree with you i think it's more likely can i ask you one particular thing to do with the twitter bid which is you know you are one of the biggest and fastest growing um investors in china tesla you've talked about it being a third of your sales going forward you're now buying twitter the kind of public forum for free speech the chinese historically don't tend to be very enthusiastic about free speech are you worried about whether you can keep those two particular horses running is is buying twitter gonna get you in trouble with the chinese well uh twitter does not uh operate in china i think uh china does not uh attempt to if you interfere with the uh free speech of the work of the press in the us uh as far as i know i i assume you're not under pressure to at bloomberg to uh from china so i think there's um i don't think this is gonna be an issue and in terms generally of that issue of freedom of speech and twitter you've talked about twitter being making it even freer and letting more people onto it um is there a limit at all to who you think should be allowed onto twitter well i my aspiration for twitter or in general for the digital town square would be that it is as inclusive uh in the broader sense of the word as possible that is it is an appealing system to use um so i mean ideally i'd like to get like 80 of uh that's in north america and perhaps i don't know half the world or something ultimately on on twitter in one form or another and that needs that means it must be something that is appealing to people it obviously cannot be a place where they feel uncomfortable or harassed or they'll simply not use it so it um and i think there's there's this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach um in that one can obviously let's say in the united states go in the middle of times square and pretty much yell anything you you want and you you know you'll you'll annoy the people around you but but you're you're kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in in in you know a crowded public place more or less apart from this is this is a robbery probably that would get you in trouble um so uh but but then that that whatever you say however controversial does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country so i think generally the approach of twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the balanced law but then limit the you know who sees that based on the any given twitter user's preferences so if your preferences are to see anything uh or read anything then well you'll get that and if but if your preferences are well you prefer not to see uh you know comments that you find offensive in one form or another then you you can have that as a setting and not see it and uh but i think one way or another it one needs to take the steps that uh and that that entice most people to to want to be on twitter and enjoy it and find it informative and entertaining and funny you know and just something and useful as usual as possible it sounds like you want to be involved is your plan to be ceo of twitter and if you do that would you still keep being ceo of tesla and spacex um well i i would drive the product which is what i do at spacex and and tesla um so i drive the product of technology uh whether i am that when i'm called the ceo or something else is much less important than my ability to drive the product in the right direction can i jump towards tesla though not you know most people it's very obvious you have changed the car industry in a in a dramatic way i'm quite intrigued by one thing which is your competitors where do you see competition coming from do you see it coming from the old car makers coming back at you i just saw a forecast that maybe in a couple of years time volkswagen would be bigger than you in electric cars or do you see it coming from new place do you believe that why not i believe that forecast was was from you yes it was yeah and do you agree with that i would not agree with that forecast no but do you see people like volkswagen and general motors and people like that as the opponents or do you see people like china the new chinese companies where do you see the most vibrant competition in electric cars i'd say that i am very impressed with the the companies and the car companies in china and just in general uh with companies in china i think they're um extremely competitive um hard-working and smart and and i think there's gonna be just a massive wave of chinese products going out into the world um there already are but um you know for example i think almost all the iphones are made in china um uh by contract manufacturers for apple um but i think we'll see just a large wave of products being exported from china in many industries um you know in electric cars do they have an advantage at all yeah yeah no i i do think well i should say from tesla perspective we don't really think about other competitors our constraints are much more in raw materials and and being able to scale up production um so our constraints are not um imposed upon us by competitors but rather uh the just imposed upon us by the realities of of the supply chain um and building up uh manufacturing capacity so um i mean as anyone knows who has tried to order that order at tesla the demand for our cars is extremely high and the wait list is long so our and and this is not intentional it we are increasing production capacity as fast as humanly possible so uh that's so relaxed we really don't think about competition at all we just think about how how do we address the uh limiting factors in the supply chain um and in our own industrial capacity basically we need to build the factories faster and then we need to look ahead to whatever the chokepoints are in the whole lithium-ion battery supply chain from mining and refining to catheter nanoproduction and cell formation so can you can you can you set the record straight on one thing which is this issue about the layoffs i think you said initially that tesla 10 of the workforce would be cut then 10 percent of salary would be cut then salaried would stay flat flat and overall head count would go up what is the number i know there's already i think been a lawsuit about the 10 is is 10 the goal to reduce the workforce or what is the number that we should think about or that you're planning yes so tesla is reducing the salaried workforce by roughly 10 over the next probably three months or so the uh we expect to grow out our um hourly workforce uh it's quite clear that we expect to grow our hourly workforce but we we grew very fast with on this on the salary side um and we grew a little too fast in some areas and so it requires uh reduction in the salaried workforce and we're about two-thirds uh hourly and one-third salary so i guess technically a ten percent reduction in the salary workforce is only roughly a three three and a half percent reduction in total head count um now i think that number is important legally isn't it because i think people are trying to say if you if you're going to lay off 10 of your workforce you have even in america to make an announcement about that we did make an announcement um yes um let's not read too much into a a preemptive lawsuit that has no standing um that that that is a small lawsuit of minor consequence that just anything that related to tesla gets big headlines but it is whether it is um you know a bicycle accident or something much more serious uh it's still it and it seems like anything else related tesla gets a lot of clicks whether for whether it is trivial or significant i would put that lawsuit referring to in the trivial category so a year from now i think our head count will be higher in both salaried and obviously in hourly but in the short term of the next few months uh we expect to see like i said roughly a 10 reduction in salary salaried workforce which is actually just really only a three three and a half percent reduction in total head count and uh not a super material should we jump to that la that that third elon musk the the uncontroversial one in politics uh you you've indicated that the florida governor ron desantis is someone you could get behind if he ran for president i wonder if you're still in that position and whether you would for instance think about supporting donald trump if he were to run well i was simply asked um if there was um if i had decided on on who i would be supporting in the next presidential race and i said uh i had not decided uh who i would support then i was asked well who might you be leaning towards i said possibly desantis and now now i'm asking you about trump whether you would consider him um i think uh i'm undecided at this point on that election i wanted you you talked about putting your money behind a super moderate super pac in the u.s yes and i wondered how much money do you think you're going to put into that what kind of support would you push i have not decided on an amount but it would be some some non-trivial figure i think um i mean at least sort of on the order of non-trivial words sorry non-trivial could mean a lot of money with you i i was guessing well uh i don't know i have not decided on the exact amount but um fafsa would be 20 or 25 million dollars just on that issue i mean again you look at the santa what desantis says you look at what trump says um and those sort of politicians they again are people who make a large noise about china and i wondered whether you thought that was also an issue for you in terms of business in china um well no i don't think so you're a brave man is it can i can i ask you over the weekend you you tweeted your support of one cryptocurrency you've seen the kind of carnage that has been happening in cryptocurrencies at the moment um what is happening and do you still think people should should invest or is it a more selective approach well i i have never said that people should invest in crypto um in the case of uh tesla spacex myself um uh you know spacex and tesla myself all did buy some bitcoin um but it's a small percentage of our total uh cash and near cash assets uh so uh you know not all that significant um i also uh bought some dogecoin and tesla accepts dogecoin for some um merchandise and spacex will do the same and um and i intend to personally support dogecoin because i just know a lot of people who are not that wealthy who you know have encouraged me to buy and support dogecoin so i'm responding to those people just people that would have walked around the factory at spacex or tesla they've asked me to support dogecoin so i'm doing so because dogecoin i think has come down a lot it's down about 80 90 percent or it's down a lot and that's the reason why you you came out and said that you still thought there was value there i said i support altcoin and i'm doing that can i ask you one last question is i noticed that you you're going to um unleash a humanoid robot to be unveiled on september 30th um i wonder if there's anything more you could tell us about that well i hope that we will have an interesting prototype to show people um but we're a very challenging team at tesla that i'm working with closely to have a prototype humanoid robot ready by the end of september and i think we are tracking to that point so that and there'll be a few other exciting things that we talk about at the tesla ai day um but i i really want to you know we have these sort of ai day events to just emphasize that tesla is a lot more than a car company and that we are in my view the the leading real world ai company that exists well you were you did you see at all the the drama about the um the the at google where tweet where people at least one engineer thought that what was happening in terms of their ai machinery was closer to human thought than had been seen before and quite worry had a personality is that something that you think about at all and or you worry about um i think i think we should be concerned about uh ai and and i've said for a long time that i think there should be ought to be an ai regulatory agency that oversees um artificial intelligence uh for the public good um and i think uh just as there's anything that for anything that where there is a risk to the public whether that's a the food and drug administration or federal aviation administration federal communications commission whether it's a public risk or public good at stake uh there it's good to have sort of a government referee um and a regulatory body and i think we should have that for ai and we don't currently and um that would be my recommendation elon musk you've been incredibly kind with your time not least because i think it's three a.m and then in the in the morning new year um it's been a heroic performance thank you very much for talking to the qatar economic forum and talking to bloomberg thank you you're most welcome thanks for having me

https://youtu.be/FLvTcRrzy20

all right hello everyone thanks for joining this special q a session with elon elon thank you so much for joining us the company's been so eager to hear from you live and direct and we all appreciate you joining us uh today thanks for having me uh it's glad to be able to speak to everyone and since we started late i'm gonna go right right ahead hand it over to leslie so that she can moderate this q a session for us okay sounds good amazing thanks um we have a lot to cover a ton to cover so i am going to ask you a question that usually gets asked at the end which is you know you come back for a part two at some point if there are things that we don't cover oh yeah absolutely okay great okay so you have some breathing room so um i really do see this at the beginning of a conversation obviously with the company at large and then also with teams and leaders over the next coming weeks and months and beyond so we're just getting started um okay so i'm going to zoom all the way out to the reason that we're actually here together today and that is because you love twitter um yes i want to be clear about that i love twitter in fact i literally have tweeted i love twitter you have so tell us say more why do you love twitter and also why did you and do you want to buy twitter well um let's see i mean i i find like i learn a lot uh from what i read on twitter and what i see on the um the pictures videos text and memes that people uh create um i also find it's a great way to get a message out or if i want to if i want to say something make an announcement um i think twitter's the best way to do that um it just goes out immediately to everyone um and um you know i i sort of made this joke already but uh you know some people use their hair to express themselves i use twitter so um you know i i find it's uh yeah um the best uh forum for communicating with um a lot of people simultaneously um and getting that message directly to people um you know in the past you have to in order in order for somebody to to read about something you have to issue a press release or and then you hope that the regular media would write about the press release and then they wouldn't write about it in quite the way you'd like to write about it um i always found those like about old-style press releases kind of oddly like really quite strange because you're writing a press release about yourself which is sort of uh something that the media it's like it's overly some overly flattering it's like mainly sort of you know propagandist in fact quite propagandist um and then hope that the media writes something favorable which they usually do not um and you know i think that that actually is maybe one of the biggest reasons for me using twitter is so i can talk and communicate directly with people and not through the lens of the media um and you know i think there's obviously an important role for the media to play but uh as anyone knows who reads the newspaper uh it's coming through quite a negative lens so you know i have to say how many newspaper articles do you read that are positive and how many news articles do you read that are negative what percentage are positive what percentage negative and then when you read about it you know it's obviously overwhelmingly negative um and then when you when you read about something in um this newspaper was a dated term uh in the news um that you where you actually personally understand the situation how many times has have the media gotten it right well i would say almost never not never but almost never so uh you know it's this is a a way to for for people to communicate directly with each other um and not through a negative lens and um i think that's extremely important for the world so i'm sort of going waxing on about this but i think it's pretty important um and um you know that the that sort of like some of my comments about twitter being sort of like a digital town square um but really much more than that because you know you can't put that many people in town square but you have to communicate with millions of people on twitter um that's just an incredibly important thing and i think it's it's essential for a functioning uh democracy or to to function well i think it's essential to have a free speech um and for and to be able to communicate yeah just communicate freely um now the you know the the priests speech stuff this needs to be you know it's free speech within within the context of the law so it's not i'm not definitely not suggesting that we you know um just flout the law because they hope it will get shut down in that case um and and i think there's also um this freedom of speech and freedom of reach and uh your freedom of speech is one thing because like anyone could just go into the middle of times square right now and say anything they want they just walk into the middle of times square and deny the holocaust okay you can't stop them they will just do that but that doesn't mean you have to that needs to be promoted to millions of people um so um so i think people should be allowed to say you know pretty outrageous things that are within the balance of the law but but then they don't you know it doesn't get amplified it doesn't get you know a ton of reach um and um i think an important goal for twitter it would be to try to include as as much of the country as much of the world as possible um so currently you know it's a it's a relatively small percentage of the world that is it is a small percentage of what that is uh on twitter if you say like daily active users if you assume that that's say 200 million um you've got you know eight billion people on earth that's a 7.8 billion who are not on twitter so that's a pretty big number um and really i think you want as many as much as possible on twitter you want to be as inclusive as possible uh the broadest demographic um and for that to happen people must like being on twitter so if they're being like harassed or if they're uncomfortable uh they're just not gonna use twitter and they're you know so you know we yeah we have to sort of strike this balance of you know allowing people to say what they want to say but but but also making people comfortable on on twitter uh well they simply won't use it it will be you know it'll be sort of quite niche um but i think there's also a lot of a lot that should be done in terms of enhancing the core technology and offerings of twitter um like right now if somebody does uh say a video like let's say a content creator does a video then they're gonna put that video on on youtube and and just like put a link to it from twitter because they're able to monetize their content on youtube but not on on twitter and i think it's going to be really important for if you want people put the content on on twitter which we do um then it has to be a mechanism for content creators to monetize that that content and so they could make a dual post so they could post it to youtube and to enter twitter but i think it's crazy right now that you know uh content creators will use twitter to to drive traffic to their youtube video of because you know that's how they make a living um and and that really should be on on twitter um like we want to basically address the reasons that people like why why aren't more people using twitter and why do people click away from twitter and if we can um address those reasons then then there will be they'll use twitter more and they'll get greater value from the for you know from the service and um and and uh you know if but if i um you know think of like like wechat in china which is actually a great great app um but there's no wechat booklet in uh outside of china and i think that there's a real opportunity to create that um sort of you know you basically live on wechat in china so um because it's so useful and and uh you know so so helpful to your daily life um and i think if we achieve that or even get close to that with twitter be an event a success um hopefully that that is that's you know really i really went on there but um i don't have to elaborate on any of those points yeah no it's great and we're gonna get a little bit deeper on free speech and policy a little bit later so i do want to come back to this actually um but in terms of you you clearly have a lot of thoughts around sort of the problems with twitter the things that aren't working well or the barriers to what's possible um how do you see your buying the company is that was that sort of feed your desire to buy the companies or how do you see these things um sort of come together and what like how what's your thought process around that um well there's definitely um an ongoing challenge or twitter with um with bot what accounts and spam accounts um you know there's still quite a lot of crypto scams on twitter um it's gotten like it's been better but this looks still a fair bit of that um there are also people where they're not necessarily bots but they might be operating you know one person's operating hundreds of accounts um and trying to make you try trying to make them look like individuals but they're not so um you know i think it's and i a lot of stuff kind of reiterating stuff that i said publicly but and in fact on twitter um uh the in order for people to have trust in twitter i think it's extremely important that there be transparency so that's why i'm an advocate of having the algorithm be open source so people can uh critique it improve it identify bugs potentially or bias but what is transparent transparency it constantly increases trust um so i think it's just um a very important like that yeah any anything that's happening on an automated basis be um open source and be uh you know clear and that if there is any action taken by someone within twitter to um you know uh deep boost or d boost or something with a tweet that it's just very clearly identified on the tweet so people aren't um you know subscribing to malice that which is not the way where there's no malice um so um but when when it's inscrutable then people don't know what to think and they will sometimes think the worst uh when when that's actually not true so i think that price is extremely important and and then just for the usefulness of the system um get getting rid of of um sort of troll farms and and advanced and spam is incredibly important um i'm going to have a thought in this regard which i think um is is might work which is to you know there's currently just twitter blue but if you hit twitter blue it doesn't your identification in the system does not change at all like you still look like a normal user id but i think if if there was like a little you know twitter blue authenticated not like authenticated like a celebrity but authenticated at least by twitter blue payments um just using the paper pay your banking on the payment system to your authentication um that i think a lot of people will be like okay that's that's uh that's pretty helpful to have some designation that is next to my name um that indicates i'm i'm probably not a bot or spam or one of one person who's operating out of accounts um and um you know that's like three bucks a month i believe i think that would be pretty helpful and then uh and then also prioritizing uh comments and um you know mentions and whatnot by who is verified in this broader sense the word of verification in the sense of you know that you're twitter blue verified um and just prioritize yeah like um that above someone who's not not verified so there'll still be full read access to the system so people write access to a system but but instead but you essentially uh um any uh any tweets or our actions will be prioritized according to who's verified and then a very large number of people can be verified i'm going to have a couple of follow-up questions on this specifically but given you mentioned trust i wanted to ask one of the employee questions around trust um they said twitter has a lot of incredible smart talented people what can we do to earn your trust and what are you going to do to earn ours um you know i think uh i know trust is as trust does um so um you know the i i tend to be extremely literal in what i say um so you know i aspirationally one does not need to read between the lines one can simply read the lines um and uh so the things that i said about twitter i think are need to happen um in order for it to be um you know to really go to the next level i mean i think like the potential is there for twitter to have and you know be accessible to an order bank to more people um and for a lot more people to find it useful um not you know currently i guess would be like four or four percent of the world or something like that i don't know i said four or five percent of the world optimistically is finding twitter useful and like maybe 50 percent of the world could find twitter useful um so i want to take whatever actions um would lead to that and um you know the uh you know i'm very much like uh it's it's just as i wouldn't say essentially a trust thing it's like if somebody's getting useful things done um then that's great and but if if they're not getting useful things on them like okay why are they at the company um so it's really just um like we need to improve the course technology uh improve the design um and [Music] you know so trust emerges from that yeah i mean trust that yes it's not it's like you know if somebody's getting stuff done great i love them and if they're not i don't like that then i do not it's pretty straightforward can we i would like to stay on this topic of employees and how we work um so distributed work is something that has been core to our strategy um most of our people work in a hybrid model about 1500 people work remote full-time um we know that you recently made you know sent a communication to tesla executives about remote work can you share what your point of view is on remote work and specifically for twitter yeah so now tesla makes cars and you cannot make cars remotely um obviously they're they're you have to make cars in a big factory um and the supply chain and and you know and you have to bring in the parts and you know assemble them and then transport the car to the owner um all of these things must be done in person because they're just it's physically impossible to do them remotely now there are some roles at tesla where what can be can be done remotely like say software or design um and uh it's so that you know i think that's still a case where you want to aspire to do things in person um but if somebody is exceptional at their job then it's possible for them to be effective even working remotely so uh with with tesla i simply have asked for a list um you know that the manager has to confirm that that they're um they're an excellent contributor and if they do they're allowed to work remotely um so it's pretty basic i think um there isn't there is a hit one takes remotely because the they've just reduced esprit de corps and you know it's like it's hard to you know like get like if you just there's there's really it really it kind of matters to be in person um at least some of the time so like one of the things he said even if somebody's working remotely they're going to show up at the office occasionally so that they recognize their colleagues and don't have you know you have to walk down the street and pass your colleague and and they're you don't even recognize them that would not be good yeah no i think this is this is super clarifying and resonates with us and entirely in terms of how we work so thank you for for clarifying that topic is really important to us um i would like to keep on the topic of employees and some of the questions that have come through um this one's on on compensation and benefits most people especially obviously here are used to working for a public company um can you talk a little bit about how you compensate folks at spacex as a private company how does it work and what approach you plan to take at twitter as a private company yeah so um spacex i think operates in the best of both worlds where uh stock and options are issued to everyone but um we don't have all the challenges being publicly traded company where the stuff could be up and down from one day to the next would be quite a distraction um and where one is at the mercy of short sellers and um class action lawsuits and just generally it's like being in the stockades of public stockade and they should throw tomatoes at you all day um so but spacex still allows liquidity and and so every every six months this liquidity event at spacex and people have the opportunity to sell their shares um and that's worked very well uh for the whole life of the company so i think something like that would make sense at twitter so it still be stocking options everything and it just be liquidity events twice a year great and thanks we are getting some real-time feedback on the remote work questions i just want to make sure i follow up um your approach to remote work and distributed work at twitter you are that what i'm hearing from you is that you are supportive of remotely distributed work as as it is productive and meaningful people show up when it's important and depending on their jobs is that an accurate reflection yeah i mean the bias definitely needs to be strongly towards working in person um but but if somebody is uh exceptional then um remote work can be okay um but then if basically if they're if their work output is exceptional then remote work is is fine there is some communication uh you know impact that one takes when working remotely because if you're with people you know that and they're just you know a few desks away it's very easy to communicate in real time uh but it's much harder to do that if you're in different physical locations so i do want to emphasize that the bias is very much uh towards in-person work it's it's just but it would obviously be insane if someone is uh excellent what they do but can only work remotely to then fire them even though they're doing excellent work would be insane so i'm definitely not in favor of like things that are like mad um i'm in favor of things that that build the business and make it better thank you um question about layoffs um we've received several questions from employees on this point um obviously they've read about the recent playoffs at tesla um can you speak to how you're thinking about layoffs on twitter well i think it depends on um you know the company does need to be to get healthy so i mean right now the the costs exceed the revenue so that's just that's not that's not a great situation to be in um and so i don't have to be some rationalization of of the of headcap and expenses to have revenue be greater than cost otherwise twitter is simply not not viable or you know can't grow um so [Music] yeah i think it would just be dependent on you know but when i said that anyone who's like obviously like a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about like i'm i i'm not you know i do not take actions which are destructive to the health of the company um so you know um yeah elon question connected to that as you're obviously learning and gaining information as we get closer to this deal being closed um what do you feel that you have sort of a deep understanding and grasp of and what are the areas that you feel you want to dive much more deeper on to understand and learn well i certainly i mean i have a strong a great understanding of the product because i i use twitter um every day practically um and you know i think i've got a really good understanding of of um you know how twitter works from a product standpoint um what i have less understanding of is you know um you know like like this this uh sort of bot spam or or you know multi-user account basically anything that that affects the monetizable daily user number is that that's probably my biggest concern um because that's really what drives advertising revenue at as well as subscription revenue um so um and really the twitter's your revenues is gonna be subscription um advertising i think payments would be an interesting thing to do um as well um but uh but all of those things are are only relevant for as a function of how many uh unique humans are on the system so [Music] it's that's that's the that's the most that's my that's my biggest concern and that's what's you know what i said publicly as well um like i said i try to be as literal as possible um so um and yeah yeah and as we think about obviously the product and the service and serving customers all around the world clearly um it's critical and extension essential for us to serve diverse communities um and all people as you said as you said earlier so inclusion diversity is obviously core essential to our work at twitter both our employees and the customers that we serve um you've been vocal on a variety of different topics and issues that relate to inclusion and diversity can you talk about your qual for your views and also your commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace and also a service where everyone can feel included safe uh yeah i mean well it's to be clear um you know if everyone talks about the you know as i said about twitter as a whole like there's eight billion people in the world um there's sort of um i'm told there's 200 million um you know daily users of twitter that's a 7.8 billion person gap um so i think we really want to have you know i don't know at least a billion people on twitter maybe more um as many people as you can possibly get on twitter so that i think is the most inclusive definition of inclusiveness it's like all humans so um you know that's uh that's important um you know from a company standpoint you know i believe in something in a sort of strict meritocracy so whatever uh you know whoever's doing great work great you know they they get more responsibility authority um and that's that and i know we you mentioned in in some of our conversations about your ind team at tesla we have an amazing id team here here at twitter as well so um continue on the journey on the journey together um i wanted to talk about content moderation go back to a number of things that you said earlier um so this one i'll take um i'll take verbatim so you've spoken a lot about the importance of free speech let's start with the u.s where we have a strong tradition around this and you talk you've touched on this earlier a lot of what's called lawful but awful speech is allowed here in the united states right animal abuse footage doxxing videos of sexual violence etc um so along allowing this kind this type of content obviously could cause harm um and make you know twitter unusable for for the broad audience that that you're trying to reach um what is your approach to this type of content that's sort of legal um but problematic as it relates to people actually using the service how do you think about this tension um as i said earlier really it's like i think people we should allow people to say what they want post what they want to put in the balance of the law um but that that that's different from them being able to reach people who don't want to be reached with that content so if that content is offensive then um two two people they will those who will not will simply stop using twitter so uh it's important to uh make twitter as attractive as possible and really that that means not showing people content that they would find uh painful or offensive or or even frankly content they would find boring is not good so we don't want them to see boring content um unless we were talking about uh tick tock last night and uh tick tock obviously just like like a great job of making sure you are not bored um i mean if this does like feel like 80d but like next level but um but tick tock does a great job of of making our board i mean i i i do find some other videos offensive i think um but they're not boring um so the the folks we are like how do we ensure people have content that is that they find entertaining and engaging and interesting um such that they want to keep using twitter and use it more so that's uh you know uh that's what that that's essential to the growth of the service and one of our employees asked about sort of people who use twitter having the right and the ability to filter out content that they don't want to see i think this gets to exactly what you're what you're pointing to um yeah yeah i mean to be clear it's like like the the standard is much more than not offending people the standard should be that they're they're very entertained and informed like this because like so like you could not offend someone but you'll support them and show them a bunch of content that they don't find interesting and then they will not use the service or they will use it less um so um that's why i use the example of tick tock where they they just hold an algorithm to be as engaging as possible um and i think we want to also hold it to be as engaging as possible in a different way i think um you know that's that's like tick tock is interesting but like you want to be informed about like serious issues as well um and um i think twitter in terms of like serious issues can be a lot better you know informing people about serious issues um i do think it's important that that there be you know if there are two sides to an issue it's important to represent you know if there are multiple opinions but you know and just make sure that we're not sort of uh driving a narrative um but they'll be give people an opportunity to understand the the various science missions most issues in the world are are complex they they are they're not they're boiled down to a simple this is this is 100 good and this is 100 bad um so i think it would be uh it would be it would have a more informed public if if people presented with multiple sites to an issue one point i just want to go back to on sort of uh the law and sort of how that how that in fact impacts content and moderation as we think globally around the world there are some countries right that limit that have laws that limit speech um and sometimes actually use these laws to silence disagreement with the government et cetera you're talking about different points of view so twitter is historically focused on doing what we can do to enable people everywhere to have their voices um how do you think about that as it relates to again like the local laws and what that means well i mean i i'm in favor of doing you know of going as far as the law will allow us if the law you know if say 200 employees would get arrested in the country if we if we didn't adhere to the law then we would also adhere to the law or uh exit the country or something um so um but i mean as much as we can enable people to have a voice and um and to speak their mind i think we want it we want to do that um yeah um and i know we talked about this as well last night about the teams doing this work and your desire to connect with those teams and sort of understand sort of where we've been where we are where we're going um and i think that would be hugely productive um across the board both ways um can we talk uh briefly about your political views um how if all if at all do your political views play into the leadership of the companies that you currently run how would it affect twitter if at all well my my political views i think are moderate at least as would be you know as if you said like what is the center of the normal distribution of political abuse in the country i think i'd be pretty close to the center um you know i i voted democrat um every election until this recent one this week um and uh and then i voted for mayor flores who's a republican um she was um uh mexican american and um i thought a good candidate and and was voting for so um but i i you know i i'm in favor of uh of moderate politics um but but you know allowing people who have like uh you know relatively extreme views to um you know to express those views with it within the bounds of the law um so that's you know you know as i said like the i think if the let's say the far left 10 and far right 10 were equally upset on twitter then that would probably be a good outcome i want to um just talk about our business um for a minute you've spoken about incentives um that the ad business creates for services like twitter um what role does advertising play in the future of your business plan for the company i think advertising is is very important for twitter so in the case of say tesla spacex there's is there's no need for advertising because the demand exceeds um our production so um i mean advertising is fundamentally a demand generator um and occasionally you want to get some other message out there but it's it's fundamentally a demand generator so um given that that tesla demand is far in excess of production uh there's no need for tesla to advertise um but uh you know i'm not against advertising um i i would i would uh probably i don't want to talk to the advertisers and say like hey let's let's make sure the ads are as entertaining as possible um that i think they're more effective if they're entertaining um like you want sort of you don't want to be strident or spammy and they add and then of course i don't think it's good to allow advertising of any products which are you know uh bad products you know like like um i was literally scammed on it i bought this thing off of a youtube ad and it doesn't work um and then i i just googled it and it's like oh yeah once you click on the second page of google search results it's like yeah this product totally does work and it's trash um and i'm like well what the hell's you youtube allowing advertising of the of scammy products that's totally not cool um so you know like and i just i think if if you if the advertising is entertaining interesting um it's something you might actually want uh and the product would be cool you know fulfilling to the you know to the twitter user then i think that's great advertising um so yeah so you know we're going to go over is that okay oh yes awesome thank you um can you talk a little bit about twitter and payments um you mentioned this a few times at different settings let's uh understand your thinking there yeah i think um you know money is essentially a form of information so um uh you know it's information that allows us to exchange products and services without having to to barter and and allows the people to shift obligations in time um but but money is fundamentally digital at this point and it has been for a while and um you know paypal you know i think has um done done a great job on the payments front um i think it's it's it would make sense to integrate payments into twitter um so that's easy to send money back and forth um uh you know and and fiat currency as well as crypto um you know and i said essentially whatever somebody would find useful so like i said i think the goal my goal would be to to maximize the usefulness of the of the uh service um the more useful it is uh the better and if one can use it to make convenient payments that that's an increase in usefulness um it you know it's sort of it's sort of news uh entertainment and payments i think are like three critical areas um but really it's just about sort of thinking about how how to make this how to make using twitter so compelling that you can't live without it and that and that everyone wants to use i it to stay on the product i know you again you did such about this earlier but it's um a recurring question around the authentication piece um you know in terms of yours and you you want to authenticate all humans so so just to sort of double click into that you know balancing this with those who benefit from anonymity right from safety perspective especially for example human rights activists and marginalized communities so it's sort of um can you just clarify again and speak to that sort of that tension and how you think about about those groups specifically sort of core to have the service yeah yeah i i don't think um it's necessary for someone to use their real name um so if one say does a famous base authentication um i think it should be okay to not use your real name on twitter so twitter would would know who would know who you are at least from a payment standpoint but um but you would not have to state your real name or anything um that's obviously important where if if someone has different political views from their manager let's say then they they don't really want to you know uh get crosswise there and so that it'd be better for them to um you know have a pseudonym um on twitter um but but it's still fit back handle dedicated and like i said this is no point would um i suggest that you have to be authenticated in order to use twitter it's just that it would just be a prioritizing authenticated uh comments um and actions on twitter over unauthenticated um in order to combat uh the sort of bots and trolls and essentially like it needs to be much more expensive to to have a troll army um whereas right now it's it's basically very inexpensive to have a hundred thousand paid twitter accounts and you have you have certainly been very vocal on twitter you are very vocal on twitter and um often your tweets and even emojis create news cycles um you know you have been also critical of the company um on twitter which obviously impacts lots of discussions conversations and perceptions from whether it be partners or even our employees um how do you think about these tweets um do you look at the reaction about the reaction of those these tweets and just curious or the thinking behind the tweet if you will well i think that it would be helpful you know i think one thing about words is that it's hard to convey tone um and so it's possible for um essentially people will sometimes like take take the words and then assume they were said in maybe an angry way or um you know an addictive way or something like that um but i mean although you can tell like my normal tone is not uh i'm not i'm not an angry person i almost never raised my voice so um like in a year i might not have raised my voice literally um so this is not um you know so sometimes people may think oh wow he's sort of yelling screaming or something but i'm really not um uh so make some way to indicate tone i mean emojis sort of do that um but i don't know maybe there could be like a where you [Music] have like a i don't know um irony flag or something um this is like this is an ironic you know it's an ironic tweets or something like that um listen i think i think spaces is a great product for you as well which i don't think i've seen you use before but i think that would add sort of your your literal voice over um and color some of the things that you tweet so maybe you cannot sort of oh sure [Music] i should i should yeah maybe i could just say it yeah exactly exactly or you could you could read it but then you can also see how i would have said it like when you you know you're like i wonder if you said that in an angry way and then you can see how i actually said it yes absolutely absolutely that'd be a new thing um on your um i know we have i'm gonna only push you about 10 more minutes um up at the hour so i'm holding you until then um your your role at the company um you know there's been some discussion about will you be a ceo will you not be ceo how what can you speak to this and how do you anticipate your role sort of influencing strategy day-to-day division well i guess i'm i'm not that hung up on titles but uh i i do want to um drive the product in a particular direction um so you know it's it could be like i don't really care what you know about being ceo in fact uh i i i renamed myself techno king at tesla um with an official sec filing um so um yes we saw yeah and and then our cfo was renamed master of coin which i think is a cooler thing than cfo um so um the i mean the what i really just want to do is is like drive the product to improve the product and then it's like basically a software and product design you know so um you know i don't mind doing other things you know related to operating a company but there are kind of chores there's a lot of chores to the ceo um and uh i i really just want to make sure that the the rapidly and in a good way um and um i don't really care what title is but um but i do obviously people do need to listen to me uh if i say like hey we need to make part improve production like i'm falling away make the following changes um uh at these features uh then you know like can't you expect that that that people listen to me um in this regard and i mean that's how i that's what i do at spacex and tesla so um you know i i'm really just working with really engineering and production um and um like it sometimes may seem like wow he's really out there a lot but actually i'm not if you see how many actual interviews do i do it's quite a small number um but uh when if i do a tweet they'll like make an entire like two-page article about it you know um so i'm like like basically far furious i'm like actually quite internally focused at spacex and tesla even though it may not seem that way um and it's really just you know evolving the rocket technology uh with spacex and providing global internet with starling and then tesla it's about accelerating sustainable energy um and you know with electric cars and stationary battery packs and solar power and um you know the fundamental good of tesla i would say is measured by um how many years did we accelerate the advantage of sustainable energy uh and then the fundamental good of spacex is uh you know are we able to make life multi-planetary um and thus improve the probable lifespan of of uh consciousness um but you always say like what what is a unifying philosophy uh for me it is uh we should take the set of actions most likely to uh extend the scope scale and lifespan of consciousness as we know it um and uh you know so that's like like what what set of actions improve things at a civilizational level um and improve a probable lifespan of civilization um like hospitalization will come to an end at some point but let's try to make it last as long as possible um and it would be great to understand more about the nature of the universe uh why we're here the meaning of life where are things going where we come from um can we travel to other star systems and see if there are any alien civilizations that there might be there might be a whole bunch of long dead one planet civilizations out there that that existed you know 500 million years ago um if you think about the hispanic human civilization from the advent of the first writing it's only about five thousand years which is nothing um you know earth is roughly four and a half billion years old so um the old civilization as measured from the adventure writing is a flash in the pan and uh i think we want to take whatever actions we can to extend that flash in the pan to hopefully be a plane that lasts a long time i can't believe that's the transition from aliens away from away from this conversation back to uh to twitter what what i'm just saying it's aliens but yes what does twitter look like to you all right i gotta stop trolling people about the alien stuff because people really think i i i to be clear i've i've seen no evidence uh what i've seen no actual evidence for aliens i get asked that a lot um and i think i know and i've not seen anything um yet okay you've heard it here everybody um question about twitter when you look um five to ten years from now what do you consider successful for yourself in in acquiring the company and for all of us and the work that we do what does success look like yeah so i think um success would be um a is a substantial increase in daily active users um you know i don't like said if uh you know can you can we get uh daily active users over a billion that would be you know it's still only one eighth of us uh but that would be a huge improvement from where things are today um and uh you know and and i guess broadly speaking like is twitter helping um further civilization and consciousness um you know like are we it's just twitter i'm not we're not saying transactions are complete so i shouldn't say we but um but like on is twitter contributing to a a um a stronger longer lasting civilization where we're better able to understand the nature of reality um i would say like my philosophy is one of curiosity of trying to understand the nature of the universe in as much as possible to understand um so in order to understand the nature of the universe we must expand the scope and scale consciousness to extend the life of consciousness uh so i like i guess broadly speaking would be has twitter meaningfully improved um the strength and longevity of civilization i know that we have gone meaningfully over so first of all thank you so much for the time thank you for coming back for a part two thank you for continuing um the conversation with all of us all right you're welcome thank you so much we'll talk very soon all right thanks bye thank you bye everybody [Music] you

https://youtu.be/u5w_VkAx6tc

i want to especially thank you for starman putting starman and roadster into space was the most life-changing thing i've ever seen um also i wanted to give you this and thank you for allowing this to happen this is the starman begins episode we just made just a gift thank you thank you thank you for i mean like the course we're on that i was a space geek as a kid and i didn't believe anything was gonna happen because in the 90s nothing was happening yeah and it i didn't even pursue an engineering career because there was nothing to do in space but when i saw that i was like i knew that this was real and pretty much changed everything i was doing to how i make this all right cool thank you that's this is great um yeah and do you you know that how how it came to be that arose it was in the in the falcon heavy i've heard bits of internal lore but never from you so i would love to hear this well normally when there's a new rocket that's launched uh there's something very boring like a chuck of concrete or something is is just says because you're not going to risk an expensive satellite uh on the first launch of a new rocket um so but i was like hey guys we we can't put a chunk of concrete that's going to be super boring that's what boeing would do literally they did do it in fact they literally i think it was a chunk of concrete or something that they put on their first launch uh you know if the delta iv or something um so i'm like now we gotta spice it up um so i was talking to my friend uh jonah nolan uh who's like uh like you wrote like the the really good batman movies and west world and stuff like crystal's brother you know so oh wow um and i was in his kitchen and he suggested that we should put a tesla in and i was like oh okay that's a good idea and so i was like well i've got one in my garage i can use that one so um you know it's not serial number one or anything it's like it's a later like 1500 serial number or something like that and um so literally the car that i was driving around la is now in orbit around earth and mars you could track it yeah uh so but it was basically like let's have something that looks cool instead of boring concrete and uh and i i really thought there was like quite a good chance the rocket would fail fail you know like we've had a number of rocket failures in the past so there's so much that can go wrong with the falcon heavy that's kind of like surprising that it all worked like it was like holy crow i can't believe it all worked this is insane that was my reaction uh with the falcon heavy launch and then the the star man was like well we've got a car gotta put someone in the car you know otherwise like who's driving it you know and uh so that's where we put the star man in in the car and then there's the tiny star man yeah and that was that was a friend of mine uh uh nora who who was like yo she put like a small i wish i put like the matchbox tesla on the you know on the dashboard with a tiny star man in it i'm like okay we'll do it so then like i don't know what the aliens are going to think when they discover it like like like clearly they worship this thing and then when they made a small version of it because they worship it so much it's like like like the stuff like that we just discovered of ancient civilizations probably the answer might be like much more like you know less serious than we think it's like oh this is like we just think everything's a temple that they worshipped but maybe it's not it was just like some thing that they made you know all the way down exactly totally i also have one selfish question car sharing obviously we're working towards full autonomy that's the main goal but there seems to be a 0.5 step and i'm actually a car sharer i have eight teslas and one vivian okay sharing on turo and i just feel like there's so many ways that like the model y specifically is optimized and cyber truck in the future will be even more optimized for car sharing is there someone working on that a tesla you know you know our issues for the last few years have been not uh you know car sharing like i mean i guess like like a rental car you know is kind of a car sharing situation yeah yeah we've just been trying to keep the factories operating the last couple years has been a very difficult thing and like supply shaded eruptions have been severe like extremely severe so it has required uh all of our attention just to uh keep the factories going not not to think of like like i think like the super hard part for a car company is like how do you get revenue above cost so you don't go bankrupt and so it's not really like a you know as long as as long as our demand is enough to absorb the production uh and we have production enough to cover our fixed expenses then we're in an okay spot that's right but i'm thinking about like downtime if these cars are traveling 400 000 miles sitting in someone's driveway they're not going to collect 4000 miles before the paint's kind of having issues i imagine that increasing the utilization of the existing fleet obviously full self driving does that but up until then if we have car sharing installed to increase utilization increase the number of miles on these vehicles it's a good thing for the world i i said that this is that that is a that's a high-class problem that that uh you know um the the thing that like car companies they should think of car companies as like at any given point they desperately want to go bankrupt okay that a car company is desperately trying to go bankrupt at any given point in time um so uh in order to have that not be the case you have to have the fact that factories had to have to be active otherwise uh you have parts piling up in warehouses all over all around the world and you can't ship the but but if you're missing any parts you can't finish the car and ship it um so the past two years have been an absolute nightmare of supply chain interruptions one thing after another and we're not out of it yet uh so um so that that's that's overwhelmingly our concern is how do we keep the factories operating so we can pay people and not go bankrupt and then everything else is like nice to have but um you know uh yeah even recently like the kobe shutdowns in china were very very difficult yeah you guys actually so well that we all think of you as a tech company first which has like you know like alec apple right they make hardware but they spend way more money on software which i i'd even say i've got the perception sometimes that it's like oh yeah things are they've got this just huge stack of bandwidth but like you're right the amount of money and hardware moving through this place is like this factory is losing insane money right now because we can't make it because we um like we should be uh outputting a lot more cars from this factory versus a very puny amount of cars um but we had challenges with the 4680 ramp and with the structural pack ramp and the and then ironically the tooling because we had we were able to do 2170 cells but the tooling necessary for making 2170 variant cars was stuck in china so with this shanghai factory in op we've got the the tooling to enable this factory stuck in port in china with no one to actually move it uh which basically then caused this factory's production ram just to be very tiny uh now this is all gonna get fixed real fast you know but it requires a lot of attention um and we'll take like i said it'll take more effort to get the production get this factory to high value production than it took to build it in the first place and the same is true of berlin berlin's in a slightly better position because berlin started off with the 2170 style and did not have the 4680 and structural back risk so so but both berlin and austin factories are gigantic money furnaces right now yeah okay there should be like a giant roaring sound which is the sound of money on fire okay that's what dumpster fire bigger than a dumpster is too small gigafactory level like berlin and austin are losing billions of dollars right now because there's a ton of expense and and hardly any output so having getting berlin in austin functional and getting shanghai back back in the saddle fully are overwhelmingly our concerns yeah uh everything else is a very small thing basically understanding that this is not an immediate concern but does a plaid model 3 make sense to you in your mind uh no could the weight even handle that power strain um like its potential we're trying to reduce complexity [Laughter] yeah and we're our own worst enemy in adding complexity um i mean in the grand scheme of things the model s and x are we're doing them not because they are huge money owners but really for uh sentimental reasons the like they're at at uh full output we're talking about 100 000 cars a year for s and x but three and y will do i don't know two million plus so it's like 10x the you know or more frankly i think three and y i could probably do three or four million and snx will top out at a hundred hundred thousand just because the affordability drops off exponentially with price so as as price rises you basically the number of people that can afford an s or an x it doesn't drop by a little it drops by an order of magnitude so like a doubling of the price will drop the affordability by factor of 10 as a rough rule of thumb yeah is there any additional thing that we can continue to do i mean we tried our best with the the solar taxing i mean it's probably hard even like i'm like asking you like how can we help it's kind of a weird it feels like a weird question but well i i mean the public support is certainly appreciated um and uh shooting down fight is is always very helpful um you know the you know and there's an argument for maybe we should advertise because the you know you know the the sort of traditional media will not run negative pieces about automotive because automotive is like one of the biggest if not the biggest advertisers in their in the in their paper so like the ads could literally be nothing but it would be better because the articles that they're supposed to be bad yes like this is like like so tesla is like basically free game whereas uh it's safe to say that uh if they run some negative piece about general motors right next to a general motors ad general motors uh marketing exec he's going to call them up and say um why did he do that do you want me to pull it now uh yeah exactly yeah it's like uh yeah your budget uh next year we'll be spending nothing with your publication yeah exactly that and they don't have to do that because uh they they they know so there is tacit there's a test and understanding uh that you don't run hit pieces on your major appetizers yeah it's bad for business yeah right and and another people's like oh there's don't worry there's a there's a fire there's a truck trying to eat wall between the business and the editorial i'm like yeah but they also know who's paying their salary okay they don't need like uh they they they're not they're not idiots there's a yeah exactly they just know don't go there that's what they know um but they can go to they can trash tails like it tells us an advertise so that's the issue um so maybe we should advertise and at least like you know uh i don't know it's sort of it doesn't feel right but that is something we could do i mean in the grand scheme of things though like the if you look at like if if if you ignore some of the sternum drum and say just like okay well is it actually causing us to sell fewer cars uh it doesn't seem to be um so then then why should we care land is not an issue so they i mean they can actually i mean frankly a bunch of the tr the pieces trashing tesla you know as like like especially like say like 2017 through 2019 the price was just a non-stop hate stream it was like hate like tesla's a fraud test is a failure because it's a fraudulent failure they're like you know the thumbing through the thesaurus were like bad words to use it was like insane um you just like click on like the the phone like the stock app ticker and i remember like for three years straight it would just be like a headlines just trashing tesla just over and over and over again and our sales went up so i'm like okay yeah so like i guess keep trashing us you know uh because at the end of the day people were like oh yeah i just kept reading about tesla i don't know why but i just kept reading about it i can't remember what the article was about but i know i read about tesla 17 times [Laughter] is good press or whatever yeah there's like this old price is good press there's some truth to that you know so because like generally you say like uh you know of the articles that you read about a newspaper like last week how much content can you remember about that about those articles really it's just the headline it's sentiment yeah the headline vaguely we weren't reading the articles yeah yeah even if they are i don't think there was a big movement on twitter like please read the article before you retweet it everyone's just forward retweeting and forwarding based on the freaking headline even the content says the exact opposite of what the headline is and and the headline chosen by the editor and and the you know so the writer is like i i didn't pick the headline you know i you know literally said the total opposite of what the headline was and people don't even know because they just boarded the headline yeah um i mean actually one of the best one of the things that should happen in twitter is like it's like uh like like every time you click on a news article you get a paywall and it's like you do yeah yeah it's super annoying yeah yeah exactly so you can just see the headline and you literally can't read through that article [Laughter] so there's a little sign there it says can't read article yeah and it's like it's like i i don't want to get a subscription to philadelphia inquirer but i'm sure they have everything in a good article that i'd like to read but i don't want like 18 like 12 000 subscriptions and and also they don't even make it easy to get a subscription like any like these this like you know 18-page process where you like tell us everything about your entire life is what's required to subscribe to xyz newspaper in some whatever like man who's going to do that so imagine what it would do and then i keep losing my password for the ones and then it opens like twitter's emulated browser yeah it doesn't even log in anyway yes exactly it's like i like actually like like i have a subscription to the new york times in the wall street journal but like i like open i click on the twitter link and i'm like uh it's saying that i'm not a subscriber yeah so then after like click go to the web web server have it redirect to the app on my phone and it says cockamamie nonsense right this feels like a problem for apple though i was literally just about to say where it should be i wonder it's just [Laughter] even as you have the subscription it doesn't figure it out and i mean yeah this is totally dismissed if twitter got in the middle and algorithmically started um um de-prioritizing content that did that eventually i'll say what he was saying about apple twitter could ultimately end up like apple which is like you want your content that's subscribed to be that way great users can subscribe to twitter to whatever news is and when you click it's good yeah twitter can i mean honestly would make a better user experience if you did get in the middle of that i would might not pay i might pay a dollar a month to the atlantic is part of a five dollar a month twitter plan i paid yeah it gets me all the subscribed news right now clicking a link and going to it i just lose my [ __ ] mind yes i'm going to reddit to go find the [ __ ] link with somebody like pokemon totally uh be cool to see if that ever happened one day no i i think that's the thing that should happen no that's not the irony of that like there's definitely like like a a loss of value here that is is simply missing uh where it's like i understand that all these publications want to maximize their subscribers and kind of like own their customer and stuff but there's there's a huge number of people who are never going to subscribe to that publication like let's say you know not a particular philosophy required but let's say uh you're live in philadelphia so most of the time you don't want to read the articles but every now and again they've got like some reporter on the scene at some news event and you and and they they're actually the source article everyone else is just copying them and printing their stuff and so you want to so you want to just like read the philadelphia enquirer article and but but you're not there's no chance you would become a subscriber so they're not losing a subscriber but they are annoying everyone who's not going to be a subscriber so there's got to be some way to solve that sort of quarter yeah ten cents for this article or something exactly one dogecoin for this article uh you know it should be like i'll pay i'll pay 10 cents for this article whatever 15 cents 20 cents it's like fine um and and uh you know and that should work music that's how it should work music artists get paid like that already it's more listen based on like yeah scaled out over a lot of dimensions exactly news is going to have to go micro payments there's just like this exactly and and there's no there's there's no losers here like in fact the media company will be a winner because they will get incremental revenue over and above those who are never subscribed to their publication that's right uh and and then we can all read news and not have to be stuck behind pale worlds over mad house i mean we don't even have uh a a an app that's as good as wechat in china uh and like in china you can like live on wechat basically uh yeah it's like yeah everyone everyone's like they're like you live on wechat you do payments you do everything it's like yep it's great basically checks kick ass um and we don't have anything like wechat outside of china that's true so i was like my idea would be like how about if we just copy wechat hey copy them twitter copies wechat yeah i guess better user experience well before you have to go we should probably get a selfie or a picture with you okay thank you thank you for watching what are you doing these days what am i doing youtube and uh i review electric cars for a living i break out those cars on turo car sharing and i'm considering what it would look like to build an app that makes that experience better because turo is good but it is not specialized and so no there's so many things that could do better for the tesla experience yeah if you build that i'll use it and autonomy is just such a monumental breakthrough that it's just it's just car sharing what does not matter really i get that yeah i get that but the point five step of what other learnings maybe do you have there as far as maintaining cars who's responsible those kinds of things that's where i think it happens yeah no i think this i mean there's there will need to be like sort of a shepherd of cars exactly that's why i'm trying to be at this point car shepard yeah years ago not to try that no i mean so this is not like this until we're there it's not like this like cars still need to be like maintained like if it's like you know you gotta clean the car you gotta you know if it gets scuffed or damaged it's gotta be it's like literally like tending a flock of cars yeah very personally yeah exactly so uh they'll still it's it's like i mean i think it will effectively like for people that are currently like uh uber or lyft drivers it'd be like okay like instead of you driving yourself you manage i don't know 50 cars or something like that and you're taking 10 to your flock exactly yeah basically ryan has 52 cyber trucks on order oh really okay complete in the bay area we need to get on that i mean the design at least finally is is locked and and we're for sure locked yeah it's locked uh for sure locked pencils down uh yeah seriously though we got too carried away with the anyway that that features features blade runner um blade runner yeah just kept changing yeah um i mean last year the chip shortage was so bad that even if we had uh it wouldn't matter you could just you're just robbing one pocket to pay the other pocket like yeah so you could and we even couldn't make the stationary storage stuff because stationary storage batteries were they used uh chubs too yup so then we had like basically a star of the powerwall line uh to make cars and even then uh couldn't make all the cars we wanted to make so and then go straight from that into this china cover shutdown which was really like not just affecting shanghai production but also like there's still some parts that are made in for cosmetic california that are with the parts made in china and it was and we had tooling stuck in china as well so i think i'm not sure everyone knows how just how serious that the co-acceptance were trained up there and it's not done yet by the way it's not like major green light yet it's still bumping bumpy yeah it's tough to ramp up if you were to guesstimate when would the cyber truck hit production i think middle next year okay roughly 12 months ish okay i'm excited excited we are for it i'm so excited oh really yeah absolutely i stopped having kids at four because i can't grow i can't have a cyber charge going past that so stop that four smart man six seats you outdid your contribution to society exactly yeah i mean good for you it's like i mean man so many of the friends i know have like zero or one kid yeah uh that's why i'm like i'm always banging the baby drum i'm like man civilization's gonna you know collapse and no big deal yeah yeah like where do you think people come from like some magical [ __ ] people factory it's the dork the stork the stork the baby baby store i mean like it's they gotta come from somewhere and they take ages to grow uh you know so unless uh you know uh like the thing that tends to happen is like once the birth rate starts going down it seems to accelerate in a downward trajectory like japan is leading indicator here yeah saying they're about to collapse no population nutty they lost six hundred thousand people last year that negative six hundred thousand and japan is like pretty close to being the uh the long most like they're live expectancies like 85. so like that's the only thing that was more towards keeping the population plummeting before but now despite having like the world's longest lifespan they're still losing the population oh wow saying something yeah i was saying something so uh seems to me the rate of that decline is such one that's going to be not really able to be turned around we kind of got a plan for what we do in spite of it happening yeah like well if that train continues japan is going to flat out disappear as as well most countries in the world so it's not like you know i'm just saying if that trend continues hopefully it doesn't but if it does this is going to be i don't know what chad's going to do like chad's going to have like a period of time of great prosperity of like the next 10 years uh and then but transit like roughly half replacement rate you know maybe because of the one child policy right they they got rid of the one child policy several years ago yeah then made it a two child policy now it's a three child policy okay growth rate unchanged really yes well it's so ingrained in them for whom you know interesting things matter too oh and japan never had a one-time policy and they still weren't that bad yep so uh it's just look at the trends it's like basically with with with education and openness urbanization yeah both great plummets yeah and it's there's people like oh people can just afford it nope actually the places that have the best social safety nets have the worst birth rate yeah okay yeah that's not the reason yeah it says inverse is true right the poorer you are the more kids you have yeah and mostly i think there's a social economic study that says the reason why is because parents need comfort i i mean you can say like one could like say figure out what whatever causes it's hard to say what the cause would be but but the the the correlation cannot be argued with yeah and the the more religious the less educated and the poorer the higher the growth rate yeah so like if for lower if like this lower religious uh low on the religion high on education uh and at high on income that has the lowest birth rate yeah yeah i think if we parse the data there's probably an argument to be said how we got to the side religious had a large impact on getting to the size of population we did because if you study religion you know like most of them preach the fruitful go go grow numbers yeah go forth and multiply yeah i like that [Laughter] so yeah hopefully the things turn around um yeah um i think the current trend is is not good from a birthday standpoint i'm trying to set a good example another reason why we did another civilization on another planet yeah the number of humans is it's not training well um i think a lot of people are under the impression that like you know the current number of humans is unsustainable on the planet and this is totally untrue yeah uh we could double number humans and be okay i still keep the rainforests people forget we're animals if we actually couldn't sustain it we would just die off yeah like the population density is actually very low and most parts of the world have no people in them so if you like fly over the country you know from like l.a to new york or something and he looked down and said like what percentage of the time if you dropped a bowling ball would you hit someone here we know can i see you like round the second oh really yeah yeah but like you can just know a few cities and hit a person or die you're going to die because you're not going to succeed in any question even in la like you think la's got a lot of people but you look at the actual if you like just look to say what cross-sectional area is human like like the cross section of like you know you take like several blocks in la and and and make make the houses and cars translucent and and look at okay well from looking at from above what percentage of the cross-section of the area is is humans it's almost nothing that's below one percent in l.a wow interesting yeah have you ever seen that giant ball of flesh they did that if you combine every human into new york city you've seen it right the big ball of goo of like all humans pushed into one thing it would like sit in new york's uh what's the big park in new york central it would sit in central that's it and like it's a little bit taller than the tallest skyscraper it's not very big at all like a cuboid of humans [Laughter] on a single floor you could fit all humans uh in new york city without on on one floor without any even having what do you mean on one floor i mean like oh surface area yeah how thick would that human pie be no it's just one human tall i'm gonna say there's no human without stacking without stacking it's just side by side you mean yeah just say like what's the cross-sectional error of a human yeah say okay there's eight billion of those what's what's the area of new york city oh it's less than you can find stanford all the humans in new york city yeah i love the phrase cross-sectional area of a human actually there's something yeah from space it's just we're targeting and the cross-section is low so we're going to have to just coarse in the missile because of that low cross section of humanity that's that's basically what it comes down to um so yeah anyway yeah it's like if people like living in some bustling city they think humans must be everywhere but actually uh there are very few cities like like no place in america has dead the density of manhattan and then even if you've got like it's sort of what seems like a dense city like la the actual cross-sectional area that's human is small like less than one percent of the of the area is human so that means that if you if you dropped a cannibal exclu that doesn't bounce too much the probability of hitting a human is extremely low wow that's interesting we've had pieces from rockets and multiple nations re-entered the tanks and crashed uncontrolled and not hit anybody many times when we had this baseball tragedy like that on entry it it it rained debris across the entire united states and and i don't think there were any injuries at all yeah like the entire yeah a lot of debris i cried and nothing people were scared oh my god it almost hit me yeah okay they weren't bowling balls like they recovered most of the material from the shell um wow but at the end zero people were they were hit i believe and here's an interesting part of that is it was going not vertical it's going around the earth which increases the probability so it's it's it's it's coming in from orbital so it's going power up more or less parallel to the surface and and and and start start breaking up uh i believe over the us like a crop dust or at least certainly like like none of the parts fell in the ocean it all fell on the con on the land i believe uh um so uh that's it because it's it's when when you're going orbital you're going parallel off the earth's surface you know roughly 25 times the speed of sound so cells decelerating and breaking apart uh acid and the debris is raining down on the u.s and no people were here so there are actually very few humans on earth um i have one fsd related question would it be possible to give for us to get access to some folks to give narrative feedback from the experience we're having because some of us drive a [ __ ] ton of miles cross country somewhere about the texas and back and there's things that we saw that there's no button or email i could possibly send to say hey here's what here's the issues we're seeing here's how they're breaking down and more importantly here's how they're breaking down across contexts right like if there was any way to if it would be helpful if it's not then no worries but if there's a way to give that narrative feedback to somebody i think it might help i mean our goal right now is to get to zero interventions in in point point drives in cities yeah so the polish is less important than that solving for zero intervention point one drives in cities um the sheer amount of work required to do this boggles the mind yeah um yeah and to the best my knowledge i asked the team like do we know of anyone who is even trying to pull their nice biceps we don't know anyone maybe there is someone but the the i mean i i've seen a lot of tough technology problems and and solving real-world ai such that a car can drive itself is one of the hardest problems i've ever seen and and it is way harder than i originally thought by far um so what would you say to the people that have said for several years you've said it it'll be this year it'll be next year what would you say to those people it'll be this year we got it put that out quote for six months yeah no i i think it's still tracking for this year but as far as the i'm going more for like the uh yeah why did i where was i overly optimistic in the past uh i did not i just understand the just the scope of the problem and you feel you do now yes um i mean the it's it's so it it's very easy to get to get close to it working and where it feels like it's just you know all right there just a little further you know um and it's like that you know the donkey with the carrot over over here it's like that's right these keep you know just pull the card a bit further and faster pull this card faster maybe that cash gonna come closer um so the and and frankly um having radar and ultrasonics uh was a mistake radar especially because radar uh it allows you to get close to solving it and solve it most of the time except when you can't lock the radar and and the visual neural net like radar radar and vision disagree which one is right um and so you basically have to get rid of the radar um and once we've read the radar which by the way was initially strongly opposed by the autopilot team and now nobody wants radar back is that right yeah i have to lay down the low and say like that radar is coming out man yeah uh it is it you can't that radar is a crutch and if you're carrying that crush you can't run so uh it just it the radar would would it just the signal that radar was contributing more noise than signal at the end of the day uh so so that wasn't great contradicting signal but it was it was more noise than signal and so that's that's uh it had to be removed um and once radar was removed then it became clear that uh actually our neural nets are much worse than we think they are so they were being they're being helped by radar um too much um so now yeah just having to use vision uh you you you there's nothing you can't hide behind anything the vision has to work the neural net vision has to work and then there was quite a profound change to go from bag of points neural net to having a neural net interpret that bag of points to figure out what a lane center is because previously we're doing that all in c so you know i mean the neural net architecture is insanely complicated at this point it's like it's a lot of layers and and then then you then it'll turn out oh actually we need to delete this layer put this layer on and and like we we've reacted re-architected the neural net so many times here's a question i kind of had from the outside it's like it seems like tesla has like one general autopilot team why not have two compete against jill you did with boca chica and florida why not have one that you know still has radar and all the old data points and a separate team and make them compete i think the team does not lack for motivation level or work ethic they they work super hard and the the tesla autopilot uh sort of software ai team is like the best software team i've ever worked with um i'm a host judge of technical skill and they are uh outstanding it took a while for us to get there we had a lot of false starts with the autopilot team um i was like in silicon valley there's like i don't know like 12 people who say they're responsible for autopilot but they're not um some generally good people on that team too i still hang out with some of them golf with some of them ski with some of them good people not often they don't have a lot of time yeah the other day like the the streets were designed for uh eyes and biological neural nets that's what the entire road system was designed for so therefore it makes perfect sense frankly that cameras and digital neural nets are required to solve self-driving you basically have to repeat what the humans do but in silicon and and nothing else will actually solve it so i mean tesla's actually i mean going to be in a situation where tesla has a self-driving solution and no one else is even close not even for five years licensing yeah yeah sure absolutely we're not going to stop people from doing um but the they will it it will need to slap them in the face like that not like hey we think like it has to be taking sales away from them oh it'll take sales away from uber it'll take sales yeah everything so it'll be very clear it's actually delivered it'll be very clear that this is the way everyone will know in that moment within a month this is the way if they don't already know right anyone who has those the that you guys have the beta you you've seen the trajectory of improvement and it's very clearly gonna uh achieve full self driving yep yeah it's just a question that there's some debate about when when yeah but but but if you say like what is the rate of improvement per unit time yeah you can say this is clearly going to get to a point which is where it's much safer than human yeah um is how do those you know basically there is that point you cross and it feels as if we are kind of slowing the progression and i want to know that it could oh okay so that the the thing that's that's sort of hard to appreciate from sort of outside the company is that we'll re-architect the neural net like for the thousandth time and and uh um i mean that's like the the the things that i like they take up the most amount of brain space for me are working on self-driving and getting starship to orbit those are two things that take up like i don't know 70 percent of my brain space like something like that those two things um and there's other things that that just don't require as much sort of cp brain cpu cycles but like a lot of chores basically if i do my chores then [ __ ] gets the fan basically i hate dog chores um so um anyway just like basically autopilot is absorbing a massive amount of my brain cycles that that that and getting starship to orbit um or two things that are overwhelmingly uh that's a super majority of brain cycles the um so the reason that it like the say 12 that's one or whatever didn't seem like it was that great uh was because we refactored the so many of the neural nets uh that that like to the outside it seems like two steps forward two steps back um and so it feels like like like the improvement is flat but actually a whole [ __ ] ton of like we just reacted with the neural net so uh like it's a word for having like like an a and a c architecture to having a c and an a architecture but now now you can improve room to grow yeah you got it exactly so uh you know the they still we still don't have a unified vector space uh where all the neural nets pour their output into a single agreed upon uh vector space for uh both fixed and moving objects so that's huge yes that's quite important um because like if they disagree like let's if the if the moving objects neural net like currently this they're really so fairly separate the moving objects network and the static objects network uh if they disagree on the position of a car then then like you could say well this this car is in a non-drive space position because of a disagreement between the neural nets and and then if they're not running at the same frame rate you can get a time error as well and if so if cars are you know moving at i don't know uh 30 meters per second or something then and and you uh you know have like a sort of 33 34 millisecond error okay like that car has now moved a lot you know so it's moved a meter you know so uh a meter is a lot like if we're not colliding with something it's a ton yeah it can be like so this is this car like you're driving along let's say these two there's two this car is going on opposite directions if you if you have if that car coming towards you is offset by a meter that could be the difference between colliding or not so um and so there could even be like a slight a time lag error you know between one year on the next and you can have an issue so it's uh no no any limit as these neural nets get very good they will be much much better than a human so the it will be able to do to drive better than james bond could possibly drive unfortunately the threshold for uh succeeding is just being bad on a human and humans have uh really a lot of latency in general so so this it's like not actually all that high of a bar when you realize it it's sort of like you think like elevator operators back in the day mm-hmm and and uh yeah you can be an expert elevator operator but you gotta flip that relay and get the and get the elevator and the floor to line up exactly it's like uh you're not going to succeed nearly as much as the computer so now now anyone if you did have an elevator operator with big big relay switch you'd think that's pretty backwards um and and you'd really prefer to have a button that's how it would be with with the autopilot that's good analogy yes like like normal human drivers will be like an elevator operator that's a good analogy yeah yeah and the precision of waterpilot will be insane after hitting the um no interventions on city streets what's the next benchmark that comes after that and i'm assuming it's on some number of miles some number of drives happening because like if we're saying true zero then you've reached autonomy right like true absolutely it's gonna be it's gonna be extremely rare uh to have an intervention i mean driving uh from my friend's house to your factory today i had no interventions um and actually that's austin has you know either in city streets or on the highway um so uh the one only one thing i say is like the the the speed that the car decides on was wrong so i had to like adjust speed several times which as i understand from feedback from the autopilot team that is considered an intervention right did you have you hit the pedal accelerator no it's not i'm talking about accelerators okay cool the car basically was generally going too slow gotcha like it's and there's there's definitely going to be like a collision with reality here because uh you know just like the rolling stop in california everyone does rolling stop like who doesn't you know yeah yeah you practically get rear-ended if you don't yeah yeah like there's no one at the end there's like literally you know what the intersection and you squeeze to a halt it's kind of weird is that uh you know so but then technically that's against the law so you know nasa got all up in arms about it and said oh you have to come to a full zero hull and then like uh because of some rule about like the speed like like like you're allowed you can never show the speed below what it really is and so you have to earn the side of it being slightly above what it really is like so sometimes it would show one mile an hour even for briefly even though the wheel was stopped [Music] because of nitsa rules that's speed and and and and then somebody sent in a complaint so then we had to literally show a picture of the wheel a video of the wheel while showing see it says one mile an hour but that's because of your rules that make us round up to one mile an hour but the wheel is not moving literally it's gonna descend on the video to prove that the wheel's not the car wheel is not moving even though it says one mph and that says one mph because of their rules so wow uh we're getting a lot of of sort of complaints involved and whatnot from competitors about autopilot because they have no answer to it [Music] and they're not like thrilled about the idea of like licensing it from tesla that's not like oh yeah let's give our competitor a ton of money yeah it's not the one their number one objective because the value is just ridiculous yes the value of a fully self-driving car is like we've never seen before yeah yeah why do you think everyone undervalues uh self-driving it seems like the world doesn't really understand the value of it why is that well it's from like i think if someone's never seen a unicorn or something you know they're like how's it happening like universe don't exist you know it's just a horse with a horn on its head no big deal it's a magical creature you know that's what basically self-driving sounds like some magical a fiction thing to most people until you actually use it and then close your mind yeah so now it wouldn't be that hard to use it they could just like talk to someone who's in the beta program in the car right now yeah seriously it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out but they're not trying yeah um and and so like they're all just thinking that no uh self-driving is like it's very far away slash they have invested in some solution that that will solve it which we want no one is pursuing a pure vision ai approach to this which also requires like a massive amount of labeling mm-hmm like custom auto labeling software uh you know a massive array of training computers it's not just the in-car software it's all of the training and labeling and debugging software that rule wrote us we wrote all that too like it didn't exist got it the sheer amount of software it tells us written uh just in software tools and debugging is is uh insane um and you know take like being like taking the frames of video and like analyzing this video and seeing ah this is where that it got the error and this is why when the order labeling software needs to be corrected and this like order labeling is in and of itself a massive thing yeah huge yeah and we have like i think 1500 human labelers wow wow yeah but but they're amplified probably by a factor of a thousand by the order labeling okay at least a factor of 100. wow so it's more like having 150 000 right exactly uh it's like it's a lot yeah um that's huge it is huge yeah uh and the speed of the aura labeling means that like the rate at which you can order label and then so when you order label an entire video segment uh you know that that's like thousands of frames that get order labeled and then the all the human has to do is like say oh yes that's correct or nope um tweak that line slightly over that's it and then and then it corrects the order label and you feed that back into the order labeling uh basically you train the order labeler to order label and then you have fewer fewer errors over time yeah trust that human was correct no we don't there's a lot of there's a lot of training examples and you just trust that that aren't that that the error is statistically yes like that it's rare for the error to occur a number of the improvements have been us going through the order labeling software and saying like why is this why is the probability of of this thing not much higher than it that we think it should be and and and there are a number of cases it's been because of a very serious mislabeling error so that so then the what the neural net will think is that the vast majority of the time the line is over there but every now again it's over here and it's like no it's still over here that was just a labeling error so it actually tries to compensate for for uh you know it's it's a statistic so it's like oh there's there's a it's there's an oil distribution oh there's a little hump over here no there's not a little hub over here that's just mislabeling delete now everything's on now it works so so some of these most like a significant mis-labeling error uh it can have quite a significant reduction in the effectiveness of the neural net yeah for sure one thing um so i was walking through i was at target the other literally yesterday i was walking through the parking lot and this old lady was backing up of course wasn't looking out at all for me and she almost hit me um and what i was gonna say is is that a lot of the people that are gonna be saved from full self-driving won't know it right whether it's my tesla dodge all right all right we were we're at best buy we're going to best buy today already way through other people yes they're you know a car yeah so it's crazy yeah yeah unsung i mean when we started download autopilot path i was actually taught somebody said like oh yeah well you know there's like somebody that said like well you're not going to be you're going to get no praise for the whatever 90 people you save and you're going to be sued by the 10 people you don't so this is a thankless task yes exactly so it's like uh but the other day i think we just have to put this before jury and say listen you got to believe statistics here uh yeah because it's like the end if this is like you know i think highway safety is like an order of magnitude safer than people and it's like it's like these are not small numbers here you know you just say objectively how many crashes were there oh it's ten times fewer okay so like then the company that massively reduces uh deaths and anti-accidents should not be penalized for the few that do occur that's like that would be super messed up kill full autonomy safety is it's going to happen even even with full autonomy there's still going to be a non-zero number of things because this you're a lot like fall well like you're still interacting with uh you know like the it's going to take a long time before the the fleet is autonomous it's like when the fleet is autonomous let's say at that point the problem like accidents will be insanely rare like 100 times less or more than what they are right now like you just have to literally leap into the traffic with no chance of the car like like practically a suicide you know um so uh when all the cars are autonomous but for a long time uh there will be autonomous cars mixed in with 99 point something percent non-autonomous cars and then uh that that means people will do you know we'll swerve across traffic like so you go down the road and somebody you know with a high speed non-divided road and a truck just drives into you yep okay like uh were you supposed to do um yeah um and uh but i mean i think people also realize like just how many people are dying out there from uh you know basically drivers falling asleep or whatever i mean jay's wife was killed by a truck driver that fell asleep he forgot about that she was on a bike on a bike yeah yes and it's actually a truck driver fell asleep yeah the truck veered across the road and ran her over killed him yeah yeah and if that car if that truck had had a water pilot uh it would have stayed in late and it would not it should be alive today wow the irony of that yeah so anyway like either way we're just going to keep doing it um it's you know yeah yes got to do it let's just take take the heat i don't know one last thing it won't take as much alpha waves or mind share but a lot of people a lot of fans and owners want to know about apple music you've been avoiding my question on that so i stopped asking [Laughter] and what are we looking for here yeah it could definitely be better uh come on man just thank you seriously i mean you should just like like sync with your calendar and and you shouldn't have to type anything yeah um cloud profiles i'd have to use my calendar for that to work yeah let's say we have the calendar sync working pretty well i don't know i just don't i just don't i just don't use the calendar that's a joke yeah yeah for me it's a hit and miss but yeah like for a while we had it working well i think i haven't used it in a while so but but it should basically just automatically take you where you want to go without you ever say anything yeah and just look at your calendar and yeah yeah go based on that yeah essentially so spotify title amazing thank you oh my god holding the new model s when you're actually connected to wi-fi yeah yeah right before the cyber rodeo we were in a parking garage with wi-fi oh my god yeah really unlocked yeah title is great i love it but balafan's don't have title but they do have apple music so they've just been asking so yeah really is it like are you talking about like the apple's like car implementation no no no no no no you're saying literally so spotify has a subscription that you can pay to like subscribe to it yeah apple has a apple music that used to consult oh you mean just not through the phone basically yes correct to the car yeah exactly yeah so you want to so just to avoid bluetooth yeah correct exactly because then it's still yeah yeah there's a fair amount of customers who use apple music okay versus spotify that's it that's true yeah and i use apple i actually one of the rare people who i use apple music and spotify um but i i just use spotify through bluetooth i mean so i should i choose apple music through bluetooth oh you do so if i play apple music i just bluetooth it oh um yeah it's doesn't bother you sound quality uh i mean the the sound quality i it's like we can definitely improve the bluetooth data rate if that's the the bottleneck we're talking about i mean that would make everyone happy but not just the apple music builders sure yeah but i use spotify but i still do it through my phone because like that's just how i do it using my house i do it through my phones when i get on my sonos so i get in the car and it goes through no i'm i'm just sorry i'm just still in off like just this whole experience yeah yeah sorry you caught me one of those blank moments we already have waypoints so i have no feature to request cars one day but who doesn't i have one so all right i'm a peasant now with legacy s or have a legacy p 100 d so the blind spot camera when you right click or when you use the blinker it doesn't show up so when you reverse though you know the repeater cameras they would show up they show up in you know all the new ones but i'm on the legacy x it's 2018 december show's up yes so it's already there it's just it you talk about the future on the three when you hit the blinker on it'll show yes i love that i got a rental and i got me i mean elon you responded to me to do it and then it just didn't get on my car so it's like okay it seems like a small number of people but that's a feature too that's why i said i'm a peasant but i'm not gonna it's fine i mean i'm not saying like our resource allocation is is perfect because it certainly isn't but uh you i mean one does need to stack rank these the issues by like how much good will this do times number of people yeah um and and we we have a lot of uh long list of things uh so so the and pretty far down the list is is like uh you're adding features to uh legacy yeah products that's why i said i'm a peasant a different way of saying that is upgrade oh come on i got free lifetime supercharger man it's yeah it's just it's just like it doesn't it doesn't make sense for you know future people to yeah make sense like if there was like some factory that just produced great software engineers like you that you just ordered like i would need a hundred grade software engineers they're then no problem but there isn't like there's a very small number of great software engineers makes sense and a bunch of the ones that i know are great uh got rich and stopped working right you probably know a few of those yeah you're trying to bring the price down no stop leaving yeah i mean i know a lot of very capable people and once they got rich they just stopped working sure it's like i don't you know it's their life but they stop coding and they just uh i don't know what they do actually like watch them say they invest and stuff i but you know there's yeah i mean like there's a lot there's a lot of really capable people yeah who are similar retired that that i know um so i'm just like the weirdo who's like i still work like a maniac because i'm just wired that way so but most people i know they just pass a certain amount of money there their work amount of work they're here is much less well this is the interesting thing for this interview i've never actually heard you say that like basically you're an existentialist i've not heard you say that directly i've always thought that actually basically studying in high school yeah right around the same time i discovered tesla and i was inspired tied to that and so it's just interesting that like yeah i don't see you ever really retiring just because of the fire that is driving you to work right now and yeah yeah i just don't see it happening yeah exactly so it's like trying to you know i'd just try to figure out what's going on um yeah yeah and then and then just like take take the set actions that are most likely to enable uh us to figure out what's going on and understand the universe um yeah i think if you're not an alien i just realized that you're trying to become an alien you're trying to pursue and find other life potentially you're coming yes we're trying to be the alien yeah yeah are you talking about the entire time i've never thought of it that way yeah at some point yeah yeah astronauts are kind of just aliens yeah i mean it's very it's very you know the furry paradox is a profoundly important question um and there's a book that's like i don't know 50 answers to the fermi paradox or um something now and again they put out a new one when they can think of some other answers to the funny paradox it's quite good um because it's very troubling that we do not see scientific science of aliens very very troubling like something doesn't add up the universe why is the universe 13.8 billion years old and we see no evidence of of any alien visitation whatsoever nor can we detect any signals or anything like that yeah nothing the only thing i can think is it's time bound we're the last one that's currently alive and there may be future ones that become alive or at least can be perceived as alive in the future yeah well actually like the universe is like say 13.8 you know go like basically thousand eight hundred and something million years old that's when you talk about that well if you even wanna increment the like the third digit past decimal point that would be a million years in the future and our civilizations as well since the start of writing is five thousand years old so and given current birth rates too yeah like i think so do you think we're allowed a million years to be 200 times the length of civilization yeah what was that one yeah do you say do you think we're alone i'm certainly stating the you know i think we should adhere to the scientific method which is that we have no evidence of evidence yeah like it's not yeah just there is nothing that we have no evidence of aliens life whatsoever nothing nothing nothing flat damn nothing yeah no signals no you know like all i would have taken would be for like an alien civilization to to put like like a one inch cubed of pure titanium like just like just a titanium cube i'll be like [ __ ] aliens man okay because they sure as [ __ ] they sure as hell didn't know how to how to how to refine deoxidize and and create like a cube of pure titanium oh what is that oh pure anything pure nickel how about that so in my mind alien life it will if we if and when we find the especially the first one we'll be more like a bacteria we probably won't find uh you know human-like able to modify the world around them i think we'll find bacteria yeah so i think this this likely like if you look at earth earth was was just basically archaic bacteria for a very long time um and and it was a huge thing to have mitochondria get incorporated into a cell and then have that mitochondria also divide when the cell divides that's so gigantic um and you just can't have a complex organism really of any size unless you've got a little power plant with the mitochondria in your cell yeah so but with the myocardium basically seems to have been like uh some bacteria archaic bacteria that got captured and then essentially when it's symbiosis with a thing but but then the crazy thing is like how does it replicate itself when the when the cell divides the mitochondria must divide at the same time how does the mitochondria absorb that so so there must have been like a crazy number of times where mitochondria was absorbed but did not do not replicate itself when the cell did i think that's why i think we'll find bacteria but i guess the follow-up question is how would we even perceive that if it's further than our solar system how do we perceive bacteria as life if it was outside our solar system because that's what gives me hope is that it's just so small or different that we just haven't yet been able to look forward yeah well and i think generally we're looking for like life we can talk to you know type of thing because it doesn't matter if it's life versus life it can talk to you yeah i mean if we find a planet of trilobites you know like okay that's still incredible it's not quite awake it's cool it's cool can't talk to them simple shell creatures and they're probably different maybe maybe different from different simple shell creatures uh okay we found a wide range of different symbols shell creatures um you know then i think like that seems quite likely frankly yeah um there we go yeah no no i mean i say the probability from a probability standpoint i think that's likely yeah um it's like how many civilizations that can actually you can actually talk to that are around at the same time as we are around those appears to be a vanishingly small number maybe zero that are in this galaxy and we don't really know of a way to get to other galaxies with current physics would you say given potentially all the unknowns what is your thoughts on there being like a creator you know in general i'm just saying like what like if you're gonna uh aim for an evidence-based uh approach to existence then you simply say what is the evidence and you your conclusion should be probabilistic according to the evidence um so there's clearly some like like we don't know what the origins of the universe are um we don't know if this is just is this a simulation always somebody's video game i mean if you look at how at the progress of video games going from simple blocks with pong to you know 3d re you know massively multiplayer photorealistic video games in our lifetime if that trend continues video games will be instinctual from reality so not saying our video games we're saying that this is a remarkable situation we witness you can still be at a single turn of civilization yeah i mean that's the wild thing right is there's the history of it finding the way something something causes the universe to come to being you know there's like some uncaused cause or something like this some like uh originate it's like it came from somewhere it's a whole several question is like is is there someone some invisible creature or invisible deity uh judging our actions and deciding whether we're going to go to a good place or bad place when we die that doesn't seem to be the case or at least it's not it's it's not clear what the rules are for because then there'd be a lot of like you know mass murderers and stuff that should have been i don't know not enough in a good place so i don't know it's hard to say maybe if people get get very defensive about religion because it's like you know they'll sort of identify themselves by a particular religion i'll put out there if you kind of drive yourself by existentialism it's like replacing that for them yeah it's replacing their purpose for being well it's it's certainly uh it would be a change um to say like let's pursue uh an expansion of consciousness uh in order to understand the nature of reality whereas if you say no i do i do understand the nature of reality because i believe in this this religion or that religion and that that is that is my explanation for reality which is how a lot of people would would view a few things yeah um so i'm like okay you know i mean it's uh you don't one doesn't want to get into a religious debate it's just it's just it's just going to be a different path that people follow if they you know take religion at face value versus uh take the position that we don't know what's going on and we want to find out what's going on yeah so it's very different different uh set of actions and i guess what i'm saying like religion lets people believe that they know what's going on already yeah um uh you know i don't really have any issue with religion uh provided that we just generally go in a direction that furthers consciousness yup and at the end of the day if a religion results in more people being created and then and that the atheists aren't having kids then well it's going to be a self self-fulfilling prophecy yeah fate loves irony yeah that's the only people around will be religious people all right okay sure

https://youtu.be/iHmSrK238vI

so this is like we're getting like some serious drama here so um on a parallel thread i'd like to met someone and they said like if you come through germany you stop by and i said okay on my way to india i'm gonna stop by daimler headquarters and and talk to them um and see if there's any kind of partnership that could be had this is i forget the exact it it's it's right before i gave the the iac talk so that like it would be that's how i could place it um and i and i met with uh their engineering team and i said like is there anything you guys like what do you guys want like is there you know i'm trying to play cool here you know uh even though like we definitely need some kind of partnership where we're screwed um and uh and they said well they're thinking about an electric smart car so i was like okay if we were to do something you know when like when would you want to see it and i said well we've got like a delegation of timely executives coming through in january january of 2009 i think this was october or something like that and i talked to jb um and like drew and scott and vineet and a bunch of others i was like guys we need to get a smart car uh and we need to uh stuff a roadster powertrain into it and make a custom battery and it needs to work well that's by the time the daimler team comes here in january [Laughter] oh my god we can interview jb and about it and maybe he could like add some additional color so now so the problem was that there were no smart cars uh in were not being sold in the us but they were being sold in mexico so we sent someone to mexico to just buy a smoker and drive across the border uh so so so we just we so we this is a gasoline smart car so just with mexican plates um so we went what bought a smart car in mexico drove across the border and and then and then literally put a roaster drive unit and modified battery pack in in the smart car and had it working by january when the diamond delegation came by and i remember that being in that diamond meeting and man they were just they're like why it's clearly that they're they're quite grumpy that they even have to meet with us they did not know we had this uh electric smart car so they're grumpy that they had to meet with us and we're clearly trying to get out of the room as quickly as possible yeah and and when we started off made the mistake of starting off with with powerpoint and that which immediately made them even grumpier because everything works in powerpoint and they've seen way too many powerpoint slides and they were like literally getting ready to like they were gonna just walk out uh from the powerpoint presentation i said well would you like to drive the car like well what do you mean it's like we have an electric smart car so you want to drive it like like you don't have an electric smart car that's impossible like yeah it's just in the parking lot you can go drive it actually it was like normally it was a smart car it was [ __ ] sick like this thing had a roaster power train in the smart car the power weight ratio this thing was bananas it's like you could pull wheelies in a smart car literally if you if you're definitely yeah you could lift the front wheels off the it was insane you could burn rubber in a smart car it looked bizarre like you just never seen a thing move that drive a smart car if it was like i like yeah it was awesome anyway so we kind of blew their minds like they're like what how how is this this is like impo what impossible black magic can you figure it out to have like an electric smart car it's like well we got one from mexico three months ago and we uh put a roaster power train in it and a modified battery pack and you still use the car like the intern the interior of the car was so fully usable so we didn't like uh intrude on the interior space um and and we're like yeah we can and they're like okay well this is pretty impressive um they never seen anything like this before so they're like okay well they'll consider that they will do eight eight some smart car uh limited production like part of this is because they're like they had to make the regulators happy so this was not like you know they needed like some you know sustainable energy cars to make the regulators happy this is that was the reason for this electric smart car the fuel the fleet miles it was not it was not it was it was it was not a grand vision by diamonds to go electric it was to get these annoying regulators with our back so for the credits right yeah there was like compliance it's compliance compliance vehicles so it's like there was like a minimum number of electric vehicles that had to be made uh they could also make fuel cell vehicles but those were way more expensive yeah so from from this standpoint this was at the time it was really more like uh what's the least amount of money we can spend and get the regulators without the regular monkey of our back so like uh so anyway so that so we ended up making a bunch of electric smart cars for for daimler um and um and and then uh over time we actually extended that into like an electric a b class um but but they were always just really compliance vehicles they did not want to make dyno was not willing to place at that time a big bet on electric vehicles and and so the volume and the price were always like the volume's too low the price is too high this is these are going to be niche vehicles no matter what um and um but anyway so what it did lead to what was really essential was tesla uh getting saved by daimler investing 50 million dollars so the 40 million dollars invested in december of 2008 just gave us six months of runway so uh that basically gave us until june of 2009. um and again during this period general motors is bankrupt chrysler is bankrupt so not a lot of people are interested in investing in a startup car company let's learn an electric car company yeah and remember this is back when electric was synonymous with dumb you could have said you said you said it was using the word electric car company could you substitute dumb do you want to invest in a dumb car company that's like that's what it sounds like to most people um so so at the time the uh i think like daimler was i think daimler vaguely thought that that volkswagen group might invest in tesla and they didn't want that so uh so so they they were essentially to block vw from investing in tesla which by the way vw was not going to invest in tesla i talked to their their their person and they expressed some initial interest but then they weren't darker me so uh actually only the only one the only investor that was interested in tesla at all was daimler and that was because of the electric smart program wow um so they invested uh 15 million dollars into tesla um at roughly a 500 million valuation so it worked out yeah yeah ten percent right yeah yeah you got 10 company and we're really really in the in the in the weeds here so hopefully this is interesting to some people um yeah but it's like this is like definitely some like you know deep lower worst war story stuff um so then um in 2009 we're also just figuring out how to actually get the roads to into into volume production yeah so we were not able to reach volume production for even for the by register standards in 2008 um and we still had uh a bunch of things in the car that were brought i think we managed to deliver like maybe 20 or 25 cars in 2008 most of which were in december and then we had to bring all of those cars back to have uh reflect to have their drive trains replaced and i think most of them got their battery pack replaced too so uh i mean it was a fumbling mess basically it was insane but in 2009 uh this was when we actually figured out how to make the car half decent uh half decent roads for one where you could give it to someone and it wouldn't just like break down immediately um and like a roughly summer of 2009 is is when the car wasn't uh a complete piece of trash that that just didn't work um and then we did a roaster 1.5 and then uh franz joined uh and france helped redesign the roads and make it better with the roycer2 um then by like basically 2009 early 2010 was where the roadster was like a decent decent as a toy yeah not as like a you know transport you could count on but as a toy it was decent became decent around under 2009 early 2010. um anyway so that so that that diamond investment in may 2009 was what was essential to uh tesla survival uh not a government loans so this is another thing that is a misunderstanding here uh because what they got confused between because uh gm and chrysler and ford jm got a massive bailout just like a flat out freaking donation from from taxpayers like uh of of tens of billions of dollars so uh gm got like yeah on a 30 billion dollar handout basically with with no no repayment last i checked there's over 14 billion that's unpaid okay so maybe it's yeah it's a real amount though okay so 14 uh that has not been repaid and never will be i suspect so um and like chrysler got a bunch of money and then uh and then ford ford got uh like a five billion dollar loan um but ford is in better financial shape because i don't know whatever reason i think that poor just the ford family has more long-term thinking than um the people that are running uh gm at chrysler so they were in a better financial position um but it remains the case today that the only company american car companies have not gone bankrupt or tesla and ford uh and you know unless something changes significantly with rivien and lucid they will both go bankrupt they're tracking to bankruptcy they may not i'm saying like that that is currently like if that's an airplane they're like they're going like that so if something happens to go is change okay but currently the intersection with doom yeah so uh you know i i hope they are able to do something but unless they cut their costs dramatically they'll deep trouble um and and will end up in the in the cemetery like every other company with the exception of tesla and ford uh anyway that diamond investment was essential to tesla survival around that time in mid 2009 we got a letter a sort of a sort of a letter of interest like a non-binding letter of interest from the doe for a loan that i believe was around 500 million dollars um now that was not a loan where they just give you 500 million dollars that that was one where you spend the money you provide invoices uh those invoices are provided to doe they then uh refund you based on the audited expense expenses that you you paid it's not like lump sum type of thing it's retro it's retroactive after you spend it it's a reimbursement it's a rainbow it's it's a it's a a loan reimbursement so so not it's there's nothing nothing's given for free it it's a loan reimbursement um so it's it's not it would not be possible to use that as advanced capital to get make something happen it can only be used to reimburse you reimburse expenses that have already taken place with a two to three month lag um and the first disperse that that that letter of interest did not become an actual uh binding document until 2010. and then and and the first money that tesla received as a reimbursement from that i think was march or april of 2010 by which time the the recession had passed so if if we had needed the money from that loan tesla would have gone bankrupt yeah um so the the doa alone i think was was was helpful as an accelerant but it was not a life or death thing for tesla um and ultimately the we the constraints the the the problem is that the doe was second guessing our business plan and our execution so so we're like well we need to change business plan because if we keep going in that direction we're going to die so we're going to go in that direction and in the non-death direction and then when you're explaining someone to the doe why you're changing the plan and then they're like but the plan is different you need to stay to the plan like well if we stay the plan we're going to crash and and the company will die and that's why we want to change the plan but that's the plan but that's the plan okay this is not good uh and like you know with enough effort we could actually get the doey to agree to change the plan but this was taking up a lot of bandwidth to you know to be constantly convincing people at doe that the new plan is better than the old plan so uh so so after the uh ipo in 2010 uh uh we paid back the doa loan um that's awesome and and we actually had to pay a penalty an earlier there was an early repayment penalty so we paid back the loan with the interest plus a prepayment penalty like taxpayers made money on the loan very important yeah uh taxpayers have made money on the tesla doe loan um you know uh whereas they're still 14 down on on 14 billion down on on gm so um another thing was pointing out is none of the incentives the ev incentives that exist not one of them was obtained by tesla not one of them the the the 7 500 uh uh tax credit was general motors they're the one who got that like tesla had no loving uh uh power in dc at all like the but gm had huge lobbying powers they're the ones that got the 7 500 tax credit uh put in place um and and nissan but we had basically no presence in dc so um because yeah i mean you'll certainly hear like oh tesla's tesla and tax credits i'm like okay well currently we don't have we the 7 500 tax credit does not apply to tesla but it does apply to our competitors so anyone who has not made any any company that's accumulated production below 200 000 cars has a 7500 tax credit and tesla does not because we've we've long ago exceeded the 200 000 car maximum so uh we tesla is at a competitive disadvantage with respect to tax credits that is quite significant when you're talking about like say a 40 000 car and a 7500 tax credit that's like almost a 20 difference so a big deal so tesla is successful currently in spite of our competitors having uh materially greater tax advantages than tesla in spite of it not because of it if you eliminated all in ev incentives tomorrow tesla's competitive position would improve significantly i'll say again if you eliminated all tax credits in ev tax credits tesla's position would improve immediately tesla did the purpose what the tax credits were for right to drive that innovation ramp you guys just actually did it so fast that the competitors are still using it yeah well when we started tesla gas was two under two bucks a gallon in california and there were no tax credits so it's not from the standpoint of like hey this is a a great opportunity i remember when we saw the tesla i i should be clear like the with it was with an expectation of success of less than ten percent and the same for spacex yeah and who in their right mind would think that that a car company would have anything more than attempts and probably a success if you've never done built a car in your entire life before and uh there have been guys yeah there's only this exactly there's only uh at the time you you know you're jam uh ford and chrysler and but but the history of car companies is like they've been like over a thousand car company startups in the united states and they're all dead so uh and you know with the 2008 2009 recession gm and chrysler also went bankrupt so so then that you know their chances of survival are extremely tiny uh only like only a fool would start a car company with with electric car company or a car company whatsoever and think that the probability of success was high so my initial thought for both tesla and spacex was that i take half the money from the paper from paypal and i'd waste half of it on two ludicrous ventures one being a car company and a rocket company and that would be dumb and i just lose it all and that'd be but i'd still have 90 million left so whatever you know and but in the end i i could i i like so the companies were like children to me so like it was like uh so i gave the companies all the money that i had and then i would have had no money at all if tesla and spacex had not survived i would have owed a lot of money and been personally bankrupt if if tesla's spacex had not survived that hadn't happened we still wouldn't have electric vehicles yeah i think so it like tells us i mean if she's like what is tesla's fundamental value it is to it is to serve as an accelerant to sustainable energy um and if you say like uh but for tesla uh what would the world be like um in in ways that like let's say you're sort of you're looking at this from you know the macroeconomic god standpoint or or like a civilization or you know the sims or something you know like what's the difference here the difference between tesla and not tesla is by is how many years uh is sustainable energy accelerated that is the fundamental good of tesla yeah yeah um and then there's there's also the autonomy thing uh which is uh i think could also be very very significant it will be very significant but i'd say like in the absence of there being a fundamental technology discontinuity in the form of electrification and autonomy both of them together i think a new car company cannot succeed so i'll tell you like actually the real reason that people should have been shorting tails and perhaps why some of them were shorting tesla and the real reason that car companies uh new car companies cannot succeed or are why it's very hard for them to succeed and this was first told to me by this uh this automotive investor when i was at axel springer headquarters getting a golden steering wheel award and this this guy is apparently like the best automotive investor in the world you know comes up to me and like he's like huh i know why you're going to fail i'm like well please tell me i can think of several reasons um tell me when i don't know yes and he said the he said the car companies don't make any money on the new car sales they make all of their money selling used selling parts to cars to the existing fleet so when the the warranty runs out like the life of a car before it hits the junk car might be 20 years warranty is going to typically run out after four years and there's a bunch of stuff that's not covered under warranty so if you've got a steady state fleet it means that 80 of your fleet is not under warranty so you can sell high margin uh parts replacement parts for the for the existing fleet and and you can sell your new cars at effectively zero zero margin it's like it's like a razors and blades thing yeah yeah so you sell you sell the the razor for zero margin and you sell the blades at higher margin so then this this creates an a massive barrier to entry for any new car company because you have no existing fleet so so the only way for new car companies succeed is that does not have an existing fleet is to charge a lot more uh for your car than what others are paying than competitors and in order to charge a lot more have people actually buy it the product must be so so compelling that people are willing to pay the premium above the alternative cars from from the incumbent carmakers this is the only way and i think without both electrification and autonomy this does not succeed so that is the only way to do it you have to win on autonomy and you have to run on electrification and you have to make the product so compelling that uh that it is worth paying the paying the uh the premium relative to the incumbent competitors that's this is a very big deal yeah very very big deal um so yeah why am exactly that customer by the way what i first test drove a tesla in 2015. the acceleration and all that was cool the electric was cool but when i tapped the stick for autopilot 1.0 and it locked on the rail on the road like rails and holy [ __ ] the future is here and went from a four thousand dollar car to at the time of fully loaded model s opposite into the spectrum that exact angle was it and that's gotten so many people right yeah i probably still wouldn't be a tesla yeah exactly the thing that actually got me um you know because we got to get a lot of flack for like autopilot deaths and stuff yeah but let me tell you that yeah it's like no amount of statistics can convince people otherwise they're like yeah yeah um but the thing that that actually got me to um really get a move on with autopilot was that um this this anecdote illustrates several things by the way um so uh and i think this was this might have been like 2014 or something like that um a model s owner in the bay area fell asleep while driving his model s and ran over a cyclist and killed the cyclist now if there had been even basic lane following um that cyclist would still be alive so i was like man if if anything illustrates the importance of autopilot it's it's this case here where that innocent cyclist would still be alive if if that guy that fell asleep had had a autopilot or any kind of like lane following even basic lane pulling it wouldn't the car would not have veered off the road and killed the cyclist so i was like we got to get a move on here this is a real safety issue um so that's part of what it really uh you know encouraged me to like we need to go make this happen as quickly as possible um but there's more to the story um the guy that uh ran over the cyclist um did not internalize responsibility for himself uh he was he said the problem was he blamed it on tesla and and and said he fell asleep because of the new car smell i'm not making this up you can literally search the court records and he got a lawyer okay amazingly got a lawyer to represent him and file a lawsuit against tesla saying it's not his fault he ran over the the cyclist it's because of the new car smell that put him to sleep now obviously when this got before the judge judge is like that's ridiculous case dismissed but this just gives you some sense of both uh the importance of autopilot um and generally people's unwillingness to internalize responsibility [Laughter] car smells yes yeah yeah i mean he actually had to engage a lawyer and file a lawsuit and you're like wow that's that's in the court records yeah you're like okay dude maybe it's not maybe it's you i'm you know the judge like it's you okay take responsibility for actions so anyway um but yeah so so that's why i think like unless some new car company is able to solve autonomy and electrification and make a product that's extremely compelling and reach volume production uh where with a cost of goods where the cost of the cost of the car is uh low enough that you can charge a price where you don't exceed the affordability limit of of people like the uh number of times i've had this conversation with with like rich investors on wall street is crazy because they there are two factors at play one is a value for money uh the other is uh fundamental affordability so by um these things are often conflated by by p if somebody has is like uh you know has tens of millions of dollars lives on wall street and whatever they they they don't understand that they just think about value for money they don't think about affordability like all cars are affordable if someone just literally does not have enough money money in the bank account they cannot buy the car even if you rail desirability to infinite like we'll just turn this directly you know this is this this thing you know will transform into a jet and fly you to a private island that it will create by itself you know like you make it so desirable that it's you can just make desirability infinite but if it costs more than people can afford they can't buy it no matter how great it is and so uh that affordability threshold is very very important so it must both be good value for money and be affordable with uh in order to achieve the the unit volumes and where car companies can get get kind of painted into a corner the corner of doom uh is as if the um if the cost of the car is is so high that they have to raise the price of the car to the point where the price of the car is and review trouble uh they raise the price to the point where only a very small number of people can afford the car no matter how desirable it is then at that point if you cannot achieve a unit volume that covers your fixed costs you're you're screwed so um and i i really need my advice for moving to would be to cut costs immediately across the board dramatically uh or or they're doomed yeah so or this applies to any car company yeah as you as you raise the price you're sort of the the percentage of of people who can afford the car starts to drop exponentially um so um you know like so i started getting getting a car above a hundred thousand dollars very very few people can afford it no matter how desirable it is uh and then you've got it but you've got to have enough unit volume to pay for um just pay for your fix-up heads so you basically you've got to you cover you've got to cover your operating expenses let's check we can do a time check too if we need to no just a friend of mine it's like suggesting that i troll hard drive by posting more memes from them they're just going to keep stealing their memes and posting them without giving them any credit people love to the that yeah exactly it's the whole point of me exactly yeah and typically you'll like the meme too that you'll post and so people know where it's coming you quit your own memes though don't you i sound like you create some memes um your mean king is strong thank you yeah who control him my friend is saying i should post hard drive memes and declare that i made it myself and and then tell a hard drive to stop copying me [Laughter] um so yeah um you good on time too yeah yeah i'm um i'm okay this i'm just getting little text buzzes so um but nothing is like the house you know something's on fire which by the way sometimes they do get the text on fire the house on fire the car is on fire the dumpster is on fire so we've had a lot of dumpster fires to tesla actually what's what's going on in fremont it seems like [Laughter] of the dumpster on fire floating down the river i mean things like if you have like a lot of uh cardboard and wood packaging um in a dumpster then or whatever it's gonna like it's flammable it's you know then somebody i don't know sometimes i think some of these things are some kids having fun or whatever just like uh being arsonists and and some of it are just you know i don't know where how these things like trying to figure out why is this stuff on fire i don't know it's on fire clearly but why did the fire start i don't know nobody knows how the fire started like dumpster fires are actually not that dangerous but they're like uh you know unless it's indoors or something but uh like an outdoor dumpster fire is not intrinsically dangerous it's contained yeah it's contained it's like the dumpster is not going to melt or anything yeah uh so it tends to just be like it just genera it creates drama but it's not like actually dangerous so currently we get to give we've all been fsc beta you guys think thank you by the way it's been fun yeah thank you for testing that um recently got kicked out but [Laughter] long long road trips yeah i was on a long drive to san francisco and unfortunately on really long road trips i have this problem where i'll get the nag thing will give me enough time and i'll disable and you know i did like 800 miles across texas and i'll get tired that's actually not what it's about uh we currently get to give feedback for when the car does something wrong would it be useful if we got to give feedback when the car did something like really well and really right because i have to do great things all the time but i have no way to like call somebody or mark the video and say hey they did this turn incredibly interesting well and like it's sort of i mean like because i was assuming the ai's being treated trained with reinforcement learning as well it'd be great if we could help give that feedback when the car is like great job buddy like the plus one button or something i don't know um all input is there yeah it won't produce error exactly listen unless unless somebody missed the future in worst case no input is there like in some cases we've got like cool features nobody ever used when you knew was there like the uh you know um wizards and winter dance with the model x doors and uh it's rare to encounter a customer who actually knows about that most of them doesn't don't know it exists and then we made it like too hard to to do and should be the opposite of an easter egg it should be like mac this maximize number of people know about it not like minimize it i actually shot the video oh okay all right great yeah i think like people didn't translate that to my car can also do this yeah yeah it's true um but still today i bet i bet the probably i don't know at least two-thirds of model x owners have no idea the car can do that you're not talking about the christmas dance are you yeah yeah oh yeah that's like such okay yeah yeah yeah do you have like a favorite easter egg or feature that you've put into the cars that yeah this is just your favorite um well i mean i i suppose that the sort of wizards and winter door dance is my favorite uh you know sort of easter eggy feature or fun thing that has no value in and of itself uh entertainment yeah it's like it's entertainment but it's like uh you know it's not it's like an unnecessary thing that's cool um i mean there was the uh you know tap uh autopilot four times uh to play uh more cabo yeah yeah like people would but that's the one that you could accidentally do and then and then and then your screen turns to like mario kart rainbow road and uh [Laughter] kids can't be sleeping during that time yeah i think i think it's quite a few times people accidentally because like it is a thing you could just tap too many times it's like it's not one of those easter eggs you know it's like one of those like old school arcade games where it's like up up down down left left right like you know it's like just press it four times in bingo so i think a lot of people just accidentally like what happened am i going crazy why is the car doing this yeah um so that that's a cool one um you can change the car to 42 cars name change left universe and everything um does uh the james bond where it turns into the spider left me a car that's a submarine car base yeah yep um if you want to change the uh screen to reindeer not funny we'll play the song grandma got run over with reindeer [Laughter] grandma got run over by reindeer is the haha not funny yes is there any undiscovered easter eggs in production right now i mean there might be like i don't know they don't necessarily tell me about all the easter eggs you know but i mean the thing is that uh like we can't spend too much time on easter eggs because we should be that should be the improv the entire focus well the problem if if something is rare like what you're really trying to do is maximize the area under the curve of number of people times degree of enjoyment yeah so like it's fine to have like like a you know a low effort easter egg that is something that like a small number of people will get a lot of joy from and then you like area under the curve of like well they've got a lot of joy and it's but a small number of people but you know the what you're really looking for is something that would uh provide a lot of people enjoyment um and uh maximize the area under the curve of total total people times amount of average enjoyment yeah that's that's what you're actually trying to do you know so that's why i can't get carried away with the easter egg stuff yeah um yeah you really want everyone to experience it not not make it some extremely you know 0.01 percent of people actually even notice this situation yeah um so um i think we've got a lot of work to do actually with the with the basic software in the car like our web browser sucks and um we definitely need to do work on the overall interface in the car like you know there's a lot of complaints on the interface i think we do better on the interface but like if you try to use the web browser in the car it like takes a long time to load and that's a trash browser yeah it's worse than like some you know ipad from five years ago like by a lot um and um like the real the rear screen and the snx the controls need a lot of work um but but like it can be quite helpful for like entertaining your like having like your kids now has something to watch in the back yeah um and you can put like youtube stuff on changer yeah if you play it's a game changer it is a game changer but like for example like like that's something where we could um we should have separate audio for the back and like like what's the point of like currently we play the same uh audio level for the for that back screen in the front as in the back like it should just play the back should play that audio or it should like route to a bluetooth that's keyed off of the rear screen and then you give them headphones or something so that people can listen to music in the front and not get blasted by the youtube kids show audio in the front which is currently the situation that's correct uh so there's like a bunch of stuff like that that we need to fix um but the the but the overwhelming focus is is solving full self-driving so um yeah and that that's essential and like that's really the difference between tesla uh being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero yeah yeah so one question i was going to ask with a little maybe a lot uh remaining time would do is there any additional questions or thought or misinformation about tesla or i don't know maybe you want to walk around the factory or whatever you have time for it's kind of quiet so but whatever whatever you have time for we'll game for um well i mean is there anything we should go over that would be helpful and i think so some of these things are like just uh like the whole founder thing is like yeah it's like it's like i think fundamentally like even a sort of like kind of a stupid question because what does it mean to found something you know the there's there's some critical mass of uh inspiration and perspiration but it's an it's a nebulous number or nebulous metric to say uh you know who this person deserves to be a co-founder this one doesn't it's nebulous um but i think if you you could apply the but for uh question like but for this person would the company exist or would it would have gone bankrupt or not exist in in the form that it is currently uh or in a much diminished form or simply not exist at all and the only two people that you could apply the butt four argument to um are uh jb straval and me mm-hmm but for jv stroll with me tesla would i would i think never have existed in any meaningful way and if it had it would have gone bankrupt so that's those are the only two people that the before argument applies maybe you want to go into this here or not um you mentioned i think on twitter very recently about the cold shoulder tesla and spacex and stuff has experienced and the broader you know economic and political climate do you want to share more about how and how that's been affecting chances how do you see that changing as you know tesla expands in the great lone star state uh sure so um i mean those that follow closely are aware of it i think you're probably aware of it so somewhat of a rhetorical question i suspect but um the uh i think the general public is not aware of the degree to which the unions control the democratic party this is uh one does not need to speculate on this point uh last year uh president biden held an eb summit where tesla was explicitly not allowed to come but the uaw was so now tesla's made uh two-thirds of all electric vehicles in the united states so deliberately excluding us from an ev summit at the white house but including the uaw that tells you all you need to know the the reality is the uaw would prefer that tesla was dead or unionized but not anything but alive and unionized and there are no fans of sustainable energy therefore sustainable energy the entire way so now at tesla far from uh like tesla has the highest pay in the water industry uh and uh moreover the people that work at a fremont plant have like you know five job offers to work somewhere else there's negative unemployment in the bay area like try hiring someone in the bay area it's ridiculous it's negative unemployment so our challenge is how do we convince people to stay given the many other opportunities that they have let alone a union like they're like what we don't need union i've got five other jobs that's the real reason uh it's the complete opposite for for what they're characterizing and the uaw has never been able to get even uh enough people to to do a vote let alone get to 50 and california is an extremely pro-union state there's nothing you could do to stop a union if they want to come in is it that it's like the california will roll out the red carpet so um so then the the uw is like is basically forced to engage in like dirty tricks and and attempt to demonize the me and anyone else associated with the company it's like if the company's like basically the companies run by by someone who's perceived to be good then they have trouble unionizing because there's no they're like well he's a good guy why would he why would you want to unionize that company so they have to make me that make me evil somehow and so i i do not i as you can tell i don't like the uaw because they have run a dirty tricks campaign on me since at least 2017. basically the point which they thought maybe tesla wasn't going to go bankrupt because while they thought tesla was going to go bankrupt there was no point in dirty tricks uh when they thought tesla might not go bankrupt that's when the the dirty tricks and the sort of smear campaigns started so i'm not a huge fan of them now their their attacks uh did lose a bit of the wind in the sails when the president of the uw was sent to prison [Laughter] so that that took a little win out of it that took a little wind out of their sails and then when the next uaw president who was supposed to be the person who would clean things up when he was sent to present also that also took some more wind out of their sails um and um but since then they they you know recently in the last several months they've sort of backed their their their old tracks so and i mean that they have so much power over the white house that they can exclude tesla from an eb summit it's insane insane uh and and and just in case in case the first thing in case that wasn't enough then you then you have uh president biden with maribara at a subsequent event uh congratulating uh mary for having led the eevee revolution uh the 76 evs in q4 exactly exactly this is it i mean i believe it was in the same quarter that gm delivered 26 electric vehicles and tesla delivered three hundred thousand it's like not twenty six thousand twenty six this is not this is what they what the what they said like it's not us saying oh oh you're you're artificially saying their number is low no that's what they put in their earnings report okay we're just reading it yeah so like that's like some next level insanity so i think so it's not like it's not like a sort of a conspiracy theory it's just like it's just just observe what like if if anyone is remotely impartial observer just observe the actions and what other conclusion could you could you could you come to then uh the current democratic party does not support tesla because it is not unionized they would rather tesla was dead than than than be alive and non-unionized so and i think the pressure on this will increase over time so the more tesla is successful the more tesla is an existential threat to the uaw and so this the more pressure they'll put on the people that they got they got elected to to do harm to tesla has reception been tesla moving into texas i mean it's been good like um i mean the thing about building the factory here uh that's i think should be noted is that we built the factory here in less time than it would have taken to get the permits in california so the typical permitting time for a green field in california is two years um two years and you're going to get sued by if you're just gonna get sued because you're in california like uh we didn't get any lawsuits here and we got the factory built in 18 months it's insane yeah yeah sensing the factory come online i've flown here i'll get people in the airport be like oh do you work at tesla they're so excited that's the general sentiment i've seen had a guy um while driving down to see starbase stop me he's an oil man but he was like my goodness if this is what they're doing with the rockets their cars have got to be amazing too i think it's working for people yeah it's like i love living in california but the problem is you cannot get things done um yeah so it's like that's what i mean like i don't this is not like this is simply a description of fact and ask anyone and anyone who's done a large project in california how long would it take you to get the approval to proceed and pass sequa in california for a large project oh two years and you're doing well if you do it in two years um and and you're going to get a ton of people is going to sue you just just for the hell of it basically and like i said we got this built in 18 months less time that it would take him to get the permit down in california and when you go back to the fundamental good of tesla is to what degree are we accelerating uh sustainable energy it matters if we get it done now or in two years that explains a lot actually yeah i didn't think yeah so so we therefore have a choice uh do a gig factory in california and delay uh progress by two years or yeah uh accelerated by two years in durham texas yeah what is the marley right thing to do obviously texas yeah yeah so and unless like this california's gonna need like a crisis to have uh to have deregulation um and delitigation um it's just the because there are the the two entities that most control the democratic party are the unions and secondarily the the plaintiff lawyers the the plaintiffs bar on the law side so basically the lawyers that that suit um especially class action that's who controls the democratic party uh anyone who's who's familiar with inside baseball of this is will will agree with me this is in fact the case especially in california so the issue is that the the lawyers write the legislation to make it easy to win lawsuits in california because they they they they funded the election of the officials of the people that got elected are funded by democrats and lawyers so then the right to legislation to make it easy to win lawsuits and and get gigantic awards because they got the people elected and you have this sort of circle of nightmarish circle until there has to be an above zero percent chance of a republican getting elected in california it has to be above zero percent otherwise you have a one-party state consequences action yes and then the the political parties are irrelevant and it's just the primaries so that that's the situation where california is it and unless there's a crisis i don't see i don't like that one possible solution is like more open primaries like more open primaries i think would would reduce the probability of uh of special interests uh manipulating the election um i feel i think like in la the like the mayoral election is is open primaries or sort of open primaries it's like it looks like like maybe where caruso will get get elected and he's like i think it'd be great you know and uh but for the most part california is it's it's gerrymandered to to hell and gone uh and to to ensure a super majority uh democrat uh outcome generally speaking everything you do is for humanity why why are we working why do you care about the politics why do you care about multi-planetary species consciousness you mentioned that but like yeah do you ever get like feel like that's maybe not the case or not true um well i mean certainly at times when i you know have bounced off these things so all right i mean i think it's a good question you asked because it goes to like what it at a foundational level what is my philosophy and why does it lead to this conclusion yes um so the the reason is that when i was a teenager i had like an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life uh it doesn't seem to be any meaning um for me at least the religious texts and i read all of them that i get my hands on did not seem convincing um so then i'm like okay then i started reading the philosophers um you know be careful of like reading german philosophers as a teenager i'm definitely not going to help with your depression so reading show open hour nature like as an adult it's much more manageable but as a kid you're like vote so so then i was like man i'm just like struggling to find meaning in life here and then i read hitchhike's guide to the galaxy and basically what douglas adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask like the question is not uh what's the meaning of life um you know uh in the historic sky the galaxy turns out is big computer that's and its goal is to uh answer the question what's the meaning of life and and earth comes up with the answer 42. uh this is where the 42 number comes from uh and 420 is just 10 times 42. yeah uh so um so what that in in that book with it which is really sort of a book about is an existential philosophy book disguised as as humor they come to the conclusion that no the real problem is is trying trying to formulate the the question so and and to really have the right question you need a much bigger computer than earth um and so maybe like one way i think way of characterizing this would be say the the universe is the answer what is the question and the the more or what are the questions the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe and the more we expand consciousness you become a multi-planet species ultimately a multi-seller species we have a chance of figuring out what the hell is going on and so and this this is this is why i think we should have more humans and and and more digital both biological and digital consciousness um and why we should become a multi-planet species and a multicellular species is so that we can understand the nature of the universe and then in order for that to occur then we have to make sure that things are good on earth um you know an earth to disappear so sustainable energy is important for ensuring the long-term viability of earth and making life multi-planetary is important for extending consciousness um and and ultimately we want to go and visit other star systems to see if there are alien civilizations there that perhaps still exist or perhaps died out millions of years ago the the extraordinarily short i feel i think don't realize just how short civilization like it's it's so like so the first writings were only about five thousand years ago so i don't know what happened around five thousand years ago but for whatever reason there's not really writings before that so not some there's not like some coherent symbolic representation um before about five thousand maybe fifty five hundred years ago so you can call like if you date civilization from the point of which we had uh writing it's only five thousand years old um earth has been around for i don't know four and a half billion years five billion ish um the universe has been around for 13.8 billion years um they were like shellfish basically 500 million years ago so basically what i'm saying is civilization has existed for uh an instant from a from a from a sort of a galactic time scale frame of reference uh civilization at five thousand years is practice basically flash in the pan so and if you look at the history of civilizations which i encourage people to read the history of civilizations in fact there's literally a book called the story of civilization it's quite good um and there's there's been the rise and fall of many civilizations over the last five thousand years um and if you look at say the the egyptian ancient egyptian civilization which is one of the first writings not the first but the but close to the first you know they bought these incredible pyramids and had the sophisticated writing system and then and then the people living in the area past a certain point uh i know maybe around 1500 years ago the the last person who could read hieroglyphics died i think so probably 1500 to almost 2000 years ago that's the they had and the and well before that the last people who could build pyramids died and then and then basically people living next to these structures with that didn't know where they came from and with funny symbols written on them and if it took like napoleon invading egypt and bringing a bunch of scholars with him and another zetastrone but much more than the rosetta stone ultimately to decipher hieroglyphics it's quite a difficult thing to decipher so i'm just saying like that's that's a civilization that had a really good run the i mean the ancient egyptians had like a 2 500 year run ish um that's a very long time you know like 10 times longer than the united states has been a country so but still they died out the ancient sumerians died out um they were arguably the first like from an archaeological standpoint the first uh evidence of writing is the ancient sumerian yeah um they even found like school books stuff uh like clay school books with like teachers corrections and stuff so it's just like basically civilization has existed for us for a split second is really what it amounts to so um i think it's very important that we become a multi-planet species while we can and before uh technology potentially subsides below the level where it's possible like we're like one of the possible scenarios and i think possibly even a probable scenario is that our tech level actually drops like just like the ancient egyptians just like every civilization which has gone through uh you know you know it's gone sort of on a sine wave but ultimately a downward sloping sine wave so you know just like the the egyptians living in egypt forgot how to build pyramids and read hieroglyphics um we may forget to how to build spaceships and so we should build the spaceships and make life multi-planetary while it is possible and if there were to be a world war three which is not zero probability um looking at recent events um what will be left after that will they even be i mean will there will there be uh who's to say what technology would be left after world war iii situation um yeah should be noted that russia still has enough nukes appointed at the united states to make every major city uh to make the radioactive rubble bounce several times in every major american city currently it's not a small number several thousand you've seen battlestar galactica i presume right yeah do you think that's do you think this has all happened before no not on earth anyway i mean archaeologists uh are really trying hard to find anything interesting you know so if you found evidence of an advanced alien civilization you'd be like the number one hero in the entire archaeological profession you know it's like they're trying very hard to find these things we're not found anything so and people sometimes ask me have i seen evidence of aliens i'm like i have not um and frankly if i had seen have an evidence of aliens i'd be like hey guys we found evidence of aliens everyone gives spacex lots more money because we we need to improve our rocket technology otherwise these aliens are going to get us i thought yeah i was an alien until like you know got your citizenship that's an alien registration card it said yeah totally um you know and like if if the dod had evidence of aliens that i mean immediately tried them out and said danger aliens uh give us more money all of your money yeah and everybody like absolutely that's not those these aliens may not be friendly you know so the best of my knowledge there's no evidence of aliens so um but anyway like going back to the philosophy part is like if you accept as a proposition that we don't really understand the meaning of life and we wish to understand the meaning of life then in order to understand the meaning of life we should expand consciousness such that we can ask better questions learn more uh expand beyond the solar system uh ensure that life on earth is good uh both collectively for civilization and um and then we can be less dumb about the nature of the universe and maybe we can answer some questions about where this all came from and where it's going i think that's a sound philosophy it's the least unsound philosophy i can think of

https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8

fundamental model where you've got like 10 000 unique things and you need to batch 10 000. not 99999 yep ten thousand home run every time yes and whoever is the least lucky and i was emphasized like unlucky like could be like a train derailed or there was a blizzard there was a you know there was uh a wildfire the utility shut down the there were you know there was you name it the revolutions there's there's a you know water shut down for some random reason um you know drug gang shoot out we had that one time oh my goodness yeah really a truck got impounded by a it was like near the shootout oh wow we're shut down oh wow happened several years ago it shut down all this production for three days oh um because like the truck got impounded on like a friday and then the da wasn't open and i think ground yard was not open until monday any workers literally like we need out and it was just carpet for the model s trunk we can't like ship people you know cars in their carpet in the trunk yeah it looks weird because you see the you know all the the body stuff it looks it looks not okay i've pulled it out before it it would be rough if that was what you got a delivery yeah we might exactly complain yeah so so we can you know we have to wait until we get the truck back from the you know do you have their numbers that's not something i could probably be shared but hearing that now what an incredible story i mean honestly if this i there's so many different reasons that you could possibly imagine um yeah you must have a lot of stories like that too yeah earlier the full list of all the reasons for supply chain interruptions or internal issues um is comedically long i think you know well i just wanted to take a moment and kind of step back so the reason we're here right is because of the early days of tesla right there's a lot of misinformation yeah um and i know you and i have kind of gone back a little bit over that and so i thought you know this is the time to just potentially set some of the misinformation straight and really just kind of kind of let you speak on how things happen during those days and so i wanted to step back and just really what gave you the vision first off uh to even step into electric vehicles i think you made a comment one time you were on a date or something like that yes girl like she wasn't sure was the day to be frank when i was actually with christy nicholson who's a writer for scientific american um and i guess it was like sort of a sammy date i don't know uh we went out to dinner i guess so and i was talking about electric cars a lot because i think i was like 20 years old um and um yes i asked some question like do you think about electric cars she's like no i don't think about them at all i said i think about them a lot [Laughter] so did was there more questions after that or was that uh that was the end of the day no i mean um he was still friends today actually i think she's coming by austin in a few months okay um so i've been thinking about uh electric cars since ours basically in high school um you know it's just kind of the thing that is like the the thing that is sort of the kind of the way cars should be if you can just solve range yeah um so it's not like if you think about like an internal combustion engine car um it requires a battery and a starter motor just to get started so it requires an electric motor and a battery just to get started yeah and then there's this incredible kind of roof go bug contraption that all has to work in order for you to get motion uh and then most of what you what you're producing with fuel is heat so you got to get rid of the heat and then you've got to process the toxic gases and and uh you know there's a limit to how well you can process the toxic gases so um it's it's sort of an odd uh an odd thing the eternal russian car and people look back on on on the internal combustion car era as as a strange time yeah um quaint queen yeah quaint and um quaint and and just weird basically um so you know sort of we look back on the external combustion era of steam engines as quaint you know this big steam engine chuffing and shoveling the coal and stuff and you're like well you wouldn't really get around like that today yeah you know it's sort of like more of a niche thing in a you know some amusement park or you know trip down memory lane situation but but like you it would be like weird if you're like shoveling coal into today's world yeah shoveling cold cold coal into an external combustion steam engine to get around i mean it'd be like well that's pretty weird and that's how they will view the future will view internal combustion the same way external combustion is viewed so the issue really the only thing holding electric cars back was range and and um the fundamentals of energy density uh determined to mean that um if you have a lead acid based battery based car um your range is optimistically going to it's going to be like maybe 70 miles 80 miles if you really are quite good um then uh if you get if you go to something like nickel metal hydride you've got twice the energy density so that's going to give you with the same massive pack somewhere around maybe 160 miles and then if you go to lithium-ion and there's many varieties of lithium ion lithium ion is an incredibly broad description um but without having to go to a super advanced lithium ion you can get to a 300 mile range pack yeah with the same weight so you're gonna get uh roughly four four times the energy density of of lead acid uh five if you go to advanced uh lithium ion and as you go to more advanced lithium ions more refinement the costs goes up to further refinance that correct uh yeah so the the difficulty of getting to it as you get to a high energy density um a lithium ion you need to change the anode to silicon so you get a dramatic increase in energy density as you switch the anode to silicon the problem with silicon is that it expands and contracts a lot during during charge and discharge so and in that expansion and contraction uh it wants to kind of crumble and so uh like mud cracks essentially is one way to think about it yeah um so the problem with a pure silicon anode is that it's very difficult to have it uh stay together uh which when you charge and discharge it so then one of the things you can do is to add silicon to the carbon in the in the typical anode so a car carbon uh just just has only very minor expansion contraction um so it's easy to maintain a carbon anode and have its structure be robust across many charge cycles and then you can throw a little bit of silicon in there and the silicon can kind of expand and contract inside the carbon matrix but as you start adding more silicon it gets harder and harder to maintain um the structure of the anode yeah yeah um so our our highest energy density cells will use um like ninety percent carbon maybe ten percent silicon or something like that okay it's a small percentage it's a small percentage um and the the silicon you will have a but a bit more early life degradation in range with silicon so uh it's it just it does it does get harder there there are much higher energy density cells you can get uh where if you have very precise construction of the anode like with like a c chemical paper deposition type process and you sort of print it almost like a circuit board situation uh such that the expansion can it can expand and contract uh without cracking uh then uh you can get to like 50 higher energy density than we have in our cars but that is still that's very expensive yeah so it might be suitable for long-range aircraft but it would not be economically feasible for cars yeah so so basically the that situation um that's that's really the only thing holding back electric cars yeah is range um so um so the the what i was going to be studying um at stanford for grad studies there was i'd be primarily in the material science uh group um the uh boldnecks would have would have been my professor uh he's the last he's the guy i spoke to and i said uh that i would uh i'd like to put my studies on hold but but i will probably fail so uh i'll please come back if if i fail or when i fail um and he's like sure but i don't think i'm gonna hear from you again and that was the last conversation i had with bill nix oh wow he was an article yeah you know he knew yes yeah well um but that's essentially what i was going to be starting at stanford uh this is uh back in 95 um was uh how to improve the energy density of how to solve the energy density problem for electric vehicles oh great yeah so the it's so like i'm not so i'm like johnny come lately to electric vehicles point is that uh i was thinking about electric vehicles like all the way back to high school you know yeah uh like literally talking about it on dates at age 20 uh you know so i've been like a electric vehicle uh you know proponent for since like i was you know a teenager basically yeah so uh and that's what i was going to be starting at stanford it's like how to how to make the cars go go far enough that you don't on a some energy storage system that you don't need uh batteries so the idea that i actually had at stanford was uh which i think some some others were trying to pursue at this point but it isn't necessary uh was to use uh advanced chip making equipment to develop a solid-state capacitor with enough energy density to uh get 250 miles of range in a car so uh and an idea was that if if you can piggyback on the process on advanced chip making processes whether it's like tens of billions of dollars of r d being spent every year to have uh to make chips that are precise at the molecular level then maybe you can make a capacitor where you've got enough surface to volume ratio and you you can uh stop it stop the uh the electrons from tunneling across if you make the you know if the sort of insulator uh too thin that you you'll you'll you'll actually like quantum mechanics will make them teleport across which is you know so it's it's not like uh things get weird at a molecular scale yeah the quantum mechanics very weird it's like like my quantum mechanics course in physics uh in final year was harder than all of my other courses combined wow so it's like it's intense what's your outlook on solids that you do you think it'll ever get figured out well the sausage capacitors yeah um i think it's possible to make capacitors that are much better than what we have right now um so um and and actually i think i don't use the word graphene because it's used in context so often but uh graphene may be an interesting um to present an interesting avenue into uh creating a high energy density capacitor so like if that's that that could you'd have to have a lot of layers um and and what you need is like something that is extremely uh resistant to electrons jumping the gap so you need a great conductive but also like effectively uh is something that will basically drop the probability of a an electron jumping the uh insulator to a low number it will still they're not going to be zero but it needs to be low number otherwise your leakage current is going to be too too high let's just start with small problems like teleporting electrons yeah when electrons are done like so this the world is crazy at a at a molecular scale the world is cr just like if you cannot apply your normal intuition so i think it gets super weird um distance is what i've heard it called very very well it's incredibly predictable from a probability standpoint the uh quantum mechanics has unbelievable predictability um you just have to believe what what it tells you even though what it tells you it doesn't sound seem to make sense in a macro scale but anyway i think that there's an opportunity to i think that out there to have a very high energy density capacitor but that was the idea that i was that's the idea that i had back then but that's not to say that idea would have succeeded um the thing i could have found out after several years was i could have added some knowledge like some leaves to the tree of knowledge only to and get phd but not uh but uh actually not prac not practical after all that something learned that this this branch ended here yeah yeah so like like one of the possible outcomes a strong possibility would be uh yeah you spent all this time uh this is this is not technically something that would work but it is uh commercially uh uh not feasible uh and uh at a waste of time yeah and that and that that would suck basically so i figured that i could always so that's why i started decided in 95 to uh work on the internet um yeah so like when i was in college i wanted to i was trying to think of like what uh other things that would most affect the future of humanity yeah obviously you pursued multiple of those like choices right what would you say like when you first joined tesla like everyone thinks that you weren't the founder of you know everyone tries to correct you on that he didn't found it like what did it actually consist of right because i think a lot of people just think that someone else started it you join later and whatever but obviously that's not true so that that is not true the reason people i think that is because everhart has has engaged in a non-stop campaign to to try to uh effectively gain sole credit for tesla for himself and he's the worst person i have ever worked with and that is saying something okay i've worked with some real okay so for somebody to be the worst person i have ever worked with by far yeah that's not easy that's what i'm saying so uh the the actual origin of tesla uh goes to 2000 uh 2003 when i had lunch with jv uh in el segundo and we got to talking about electric cars and jv said uh hey have you tried the ac propulsion t0 i said no uh but we talked about battery technology and how the lithium ion would enable a long finally enable a long range car i never heard of eberhardt at this point no never heard of them so then um i got it i got a test drive from ac pulse and t0 and i was like wow okay this is this is pretty cool um so at first i was like well can you guys just make me a t-zero i'll i'll buy one from you and they didn't they didn't want to make another one uh so i was like okay and i said you guys should really commercialize the t0 because t0 had all the properties that we later had in the roadster you know sort of like 250 mile range zero to 60 under four seconds or roughly four seconds um and um it was a two-door well didn't have doors admittedly the t zero um but it it it looks you can see a resemblance between the t0 and the roadster it's a small basically a small electric sports car and so i was trying to convince uh the the guys there um to to to like commercialize the teaser it's like like hey the world needs to see that that is possible to have a viable electric car um and um at the time i was obviously very much uh you know working crazy hours at spacex trying to get a rocket to orbit and we've not yet restored it so we would not reach over it for until 2008 for spacex so anyway so then uh um i kept hounding ac propulsion to uh commercialize the t0 uh and then weirdly they they wanted to uh not do the t0 but uh how to do an electric toyota scion like i guess truth is stranger than fiction so i'm like guys with hamsters dancing too i mean the thing is like the uh the batteries in powertrain at low volume are going to be very expensive and you know so like no matter what you'd have to have like maybe uh a 70 or 80 thousand dollar electric scion or you could have argument's sake a hundred thousand dollar electric sports car and people are willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for an electric sports car but they are not willing to pay let's say eighty thousand like you'd only save a small amount uh uh because the the battery pack and electric power train overwhelmingly what was expensive um but i even said let's listen if you guys actually want to do an electric scion i will fund ten percent of it because you have to find other people who will find that fund the other ninety percent uh and the only people who are willing to do 10 cent with me and sergey brin and so so then that project sold um so then i so then i sent uh uh i talked tom gage uh at an email saying like listen uh if you guys are sure that you don't want to commercialize the t0 how about if you let me do that so i was like i want to let me i'm going to start a company to commercialize the t0 so uh then then dan said well if you're interested in commercializing teaser he knows two other groups that are also interested in doing it and and would you like to would i like to meet them uh i never met the second group uh but the first group i met was uh uh eberhard tarponing and wright now everhart keeps trying to erase uh ian wright from history as well because they they hate each other so uh so it's so but all they had uh was it was just basically the plan was commercialized they had there were no no employees there were no offices there was no ip there was no nothing literally nothing there was no nothing you would call a company you said like where is the company i i don't know where is it there was an empty shell corporation that had zero value uh and no employees no offices no designs no intellectual property no nothing uh except the general idea basically of commercializing the t0 which i had before meeting them uh like if i had not met them i would have just gone move forward created a company with jb yeah commercialized at t zero yeah and gone our way and that's actually what happened at the end of the day oh my gosh except with a lot of grief along the way yeah okay so uh but in effect uh after about a year uh eberhard mark one hot and and ian wright uh uh could not stand each other and they they made me pick which one uh would leave basically they can't both be in the same company so uh i have to pick one of them and then i talked to jb and i was like which is the let's tell at least bad option here yeah and uh it was like okay we'll we'll say goodbye to it to in right and and keep mark and martin i mean um so [Music] uh but anyway like the the key i think the key point here is when somebody says like you're invested in a company it's the the money that i provided was the least important thing that i provided to the company there was no company and if i had not uh met them i would have just moved forward and created tesla and i think it would be indistinguishable from what it is today you would not be able to tell the difference i think we could have avoided a lot of drama as well in the early days so um yeah um i i would like if there's one thing i could go back in time and say i wish i had never met martin everhard so if he could go back he's the absolute worst yeah in case i haven't made that clear yeah the worst the worst may i don't ever he's like yes may i ask i know kelvin is someone who claims credit for things he didn't do uh and is uh obnoxious about it yeah so clearly if you had a time machine you can go back in time and not work with him yes fantastic yeah exactly that would of course i saved a tremendous amount of anguish yeah and then just partnered up with jb uh you know the name tesla and the logo means so much to so many of the fans of the cars so uh help us understand who came up with the name tesla and what were some of the alternatives and would tesla be called tesla had you and jb broke out together and not met martin so the tesla motors which is what is called at the time um was the trademark was actually held by a guy i think who lived in around sacramento or something uh and he so the with the trademark tells him tesla motors was uh like said owned by someone we'd uh not us uh so the uh uh in the beginning it actually seemed like we would not be able to use uh steve selleck who came up with the tesla motors the guy that we bought the trademark from that guy um there's nothing to come up with he trademarked it okay so uh and we could not he would not respond to anyone uh any contact so then finally uh i sent uh mock topping who is this although he's martin's best friend is uh still a super nice guy uh and uh so i sent uh mark hoppening to sit on the guy's doorstep and not leave until we got the tesla motors trademark so that's who came up with that i forget his name but uh it's in the it's in the trademark you can look up the trademark history um that's who came up with tesla motors that guy but you like the name so much that you insisted that yeah you sent mark to sit on his doorstep right so yeah and which i think you paid 75 000 dollars for the trademark which was a lot at that time yeah sure um so and i think it's also maybe important to emphasize like uh you know uh martin everhart is quite a bit older than me and had successful startups before me and had a had a lot of money he was just unwilling to risk it he was not poor he had a 10 million dollar house in woodside okay he was just unwilling to risk his own money i was not i was willing to risk my own money and then i arrested all so just important to upsize this is not like some poor inventor who gets crushed by big capitalist which is the archetype that he tries to portray he had uh he could have matched my investment uh if he wanted to he just didn't want to at what point you know through that right um did you start to see the red flags right so you join with him he's on board where's like i didn't well i convinced jb to join yeah so the the ultimate path that i wish we had gone on was is was just if if ac repulsion hadn't mentioned uh that there were two other teams interested in commercializing the t0 then i would have just moved forward as jb commercialized t0 with a whole a hell of a lot less drama um that's the that's the path that i wish had occurred um the the the the moral error that i made here is uh it is that i wanted to have my cake and eat it too uh so i wanted to like i was like okay i want to i need to do spacex but i also really want to do an electric car company how can i have my cake and eat it too yeah so it's like okay if i have someone else run the car company and i will just be responsible for the like overall sort of technology and design like the product side of things like the thing that i enjoy doing is the product side of things not um not being the boss i don't like being the boss at all but i like engineering and design problems so um so so that that that so i thought okay i'll just work on the stuff that i like doing which is product design and uh then someone else can be ceo and deal with all the chores of being a ceo now this unfortunately does not work no because you had a ceo in place it didn't work out well no it yeah um yeah things finally came to a head in um in mid-2007 where uh martin just flat out lied to me about the cost and readiness of the car and i actually gave an opportunity i said okay so i said mark martin what what what is the what is the the cost of goods of the car like how much is it like where we're trying what are we tracking to and uh and and is it above the price that we are charging um and i actually knew the answer uh because an investor had joined uh who had done who had ordered the class and and that that investor uh told me like hey hey man the numbers he's adding up for the best case long-term cost of the roadster is 180 000 i think we were like selling it for 85 thousand dollars yeah so that's that's like huge uh yeah you can make it up on volume yeah so basically the i was like well this is extremely messed up and he also said that uh like about the the the sort of new investor came in i said um that about a third of the car is works about a third of the car is super late and a third of it will never work at all oh i'm like okay this is pretty bad so i called martin's like martin what's the cost of the car they said he didn't know so like okay he's flat out lying to me um because i asked how did you tell martin this and he said yes i told him on this so when i then called martin said uh what's cost the car one oh i don't know are you sure and and that when he did both place lied to me i was like that's it you know he can't be ceo anymore so he had a board meeting and we fired him uh unanimously including the people that he had appointed to the board wow uh and uh at the time at the time we did not know the full extent of the situation so we kept him on like he was not he was in in the company but but fired as of july of 2007 uh and then um i still didn't want to be ceo of the company so i got like um an interim ceo um but i was effectively it's fair to say i was de facto ceo from july 2007 because in bringing an interim ceo this interim ceo did not know anything about cars so i had to basically increase my time allocation to tesla and help figure out help the new ceo figure things out um and this is all happening uh as we're progressing into 2008 uh and and it i mean i so badly didn't want to be ceo like like to be clear i could have been ceo from day one like i it's not like i was like uh i like majority ownership on day one yeah yeah because i'm now ceo if i wanted to be ceo i could have just made myself a ceo anytime i want there's no need for any machinations or machiavellian anything i just could say i bought me ceo in the story um yeah so it's because i was trying to not be the ceo uh that things became problematic yeah um so uh we had an interim ceo for a few months and then we did a ceo search uh in 2007 and the only person who was willing to say yes was with zev drawing and if you guys remember anything about sir troy all right joseph is um i like zev actually uh let's just say like he he is fearless um so the the only one who would the only person who would agree to be ceo of tesla was a guy who spent three years in the israeli paratroopers and was afraid of nothing so so is it joined the ceo um but but he from a personality standpoint uh his personality did not mesh well with the rest of the team so um after about six months of of zev being ceo and me being de facto co-ceo because again he didn't know anything about electric cars really he was the technology guy from the trip industry um uh the the team kind of had a revolt basically they said look if if um if zev is going to continue to be the ceo we're all going to leave so that so they were like i was like okay then i i was like can you guys at least hang on for us to complete a financing round uh so because this is mid-2008 like july 2008 like we just needed completed financing round can you just you know tough it out through through then and they're like okay we'll tough it out for a few more months um and then we tried raising money and basically summer of of 2008 and we got term sheets but the market started falling off a cliff around september uh of 2008. so the term sheets never never turn into actual agreements um to uh invest and then a bunch of the investors who were thinking about investing in tesla themselves went bankrupt so it's not like you know they're holding out on us they they themselves were just trying to figure out how not to go bankrupt yeah lemon brothers and bear stearns you know bite the dust um and and a bunch of the major banks would would have been the dust too if there was not government intervention um so anyway and goldman was leading the round uh so uh it you know it became clear around september of of 2008 that the no round was going to happen right um the markets were plunging um [Music] and then i i i told zer like serve um i'm gonna have to put in everything i've got all the money i've got left uh so that means i i have to be ceo i've gotta you know putting all my chips on the table um and zev said i totally understand um so then i was like okay so to like technically i was ceo from like mid-2007 uh he said like you know officially ceo in like late 2008. man that was a lot of drama that was a nightmare year um so like like part way through that year spacex had failed its third launch and i i only ever thought we had enough money for three launches so so like we're like zero for three launches with spacex um my marriage felt falling apart so i'm getting divorced uh the tales of financing rounds falling apart and we're nowhere near production and we have the great recession party on yeah good times doesn't get worse than that perfect storm man yeah extremely brutal say the least uh the lowest of the lows um so then your help so can i ask one when you took over a ceo this is a piece that a lot of people i don't think i've ever i've ever seen documented where was product development exactly like how far along was the product in the making when you took it over because i think a lot of misconceptions people have this idea that you showed up to a done product no i i i i was i i oversold the product from the beginning so like i mentioned earlier the my my role is uh effectively like chief product officer um so uh the thing that gets confusing is that normally someone who's a chief product officer is not an investor so people get confused like which one are you that's like i'm both and the money was the the you know the investment was the least important part um so uh it's just that i believe if in putting your own capital ex at stake if you're going to uh start a company like whatever the opposite of other people's money is i think is the morally right thing to do so uh like if you're not prepared to invest your money then why should you ask others to invest theirs that's not right that's why i invest uh and i for my first companies of two i had no money so i could not invest in zip two that's why no i like starting zip two uh just like when i put uh grad studies at stanford on hold in 95 um i had a hundred thousand dollars in student debt and because i didn't start the uh start the standard quarter that means that i didn't have access to student housing i lost my student stipend i yeah i mean like and i had like two thousand dollars okay so uh and i heard like more than a hundred thousand dollars in student debt and one computer so uh and and that that that summer night five i wrote the first maps and directions uh and white pages and yelp pages uh uh ever on the internet personally by myself it's insane yes it's insane and they're like well what website did you use i don't use web server i just read the ports directly i don't have time to move data between one process and another just read the port directly why do you need a server 3.8080 from solved [Laughter] yeah but i didn't have any money so when my brother came down he had like five thousand dollars so that was like a gigantic improvement the beckmans of two days uh we found like a a like a sort of an attic sort of uh office uh where there was like a hole in the roof and watered like piled on the floor and the rug was all stained um but i think it doesn't rain that often in california so we got like a discount rug from nearby rug store and then got like uh two futons and they would just like sleep in the office and uh and then remake it so it looked official during the day and at one point we still only had one computer so like the website wouldn't work at night because i was coding at night and the web server would run during the day uh and and the way we got internet access was there was an isp on the floor below so uh i just i just ran an ethernet cable through the ceiling drilled a hole in the floor ran it through the ceiling tiles and plugged it into the isp below no they didn't know i didn't know yeah but there's like we'll give you a real cheap rate if you just plug in directly so i didn't get like a permit or anything you know i just rolled the hole in the floor and took the see the cable down and plugged it plugged it right in so it was like okay we don't need it buy a t1 or router or anything let's go um so um then then with when our brother came down we managed to get a second computer so then it could be like okay this one can run and i can code on the other one um and uh yeah so this is like that was we didn't even have an apartment we just basically got a shower at the ymca on on pagemail el camino um which was like you know pretty easy to walk to so just give you a sense of like how little money we had in the beginning it was like nothing yeah and i needed the jack in the box if you know that jack in the box yeah but one thing i wanted to clear up was how did how did the journey of all the founders like kind of taper so obviously everhard was fired yeah what happened with jb and all the rest like how was like their journey and you know kind of their role even towards so um yeah i mean i think it's like it'd be accurate to say that there are like five uh co-founders of tesla you know um and and even though i just buy his money hard he obviously would be one of those five um and ian wright should also be considered one of the five like since the like who who was there uh you know when the company would basically had nothing which was nothing um and and that's the five people now the the the people that were like essential at the end of the day were jb and me so um they would not be a successful tesla otherwise they would know it would never even have gone into production um and i think the evidence for this would be like hey we fired martin um and gave him a bunch of money great start a car company he did he did try it did not succeed yeah yeah so if you're so awesome why did it succeed and why did nobody leave with him yeah if somebody's awesome so they leave good people leave with them every time not one person left that's a tell right there yes of life companies and that team members follow us along so if you can't do that as see chief executive when everyone knew you that's not a good sign when you did there yes you're trying you're trying to figure out the truth or something who followed did no one follow okay if i'm if he's a good guy and i'm the bad guy why they'll stay with me yeah yeah very clear exactly yeah um and a top-notch engineer in silicon valley has like 17 job offers they can work anywhere so if if they're not don't respect personally working for this will work somewhere else and frankly people could have gotten way more money uh that than than tesla was offering uh you know and and with less risk so it's like okay so they could get dr they'd go work at i don't know apple or something and make more money with less risk and it didn't and tesla today is and spacex are rated the top uh places to go by graduating engineers yep why is that yeah it's very clear yeah so um yeah so like just to be crisp about the timeline the company or the people that uh deserve credit for the concept of an electric sports car uh are ac propulsion yeah and the t zero yeah um the uh the so so they deserve a lot of credit um eberhard also will never mention that so this is also a bad sign it's like if you it's like it came from whole cloth in his mind i'm like no no no the t-zero yeah from ac propulsion uh tom gagen and alcoconi made an electric sports car they used they took their idea and said let's commercialize it yes agreed and independently i also thought let's commercialize it and allegedly there was some other team that also had the idea let's commercialize the c0 because ac propulsion was not going to do it themselves so um but from the beginning i oversaw the product development in fact eberhard blames me for a bunch of the issues with the car uh saying oh like the reason it was expensive was because elon insisted on all these things about the car and it's like okay so if i was uh controlling the minutiae or the product design but i also had nothing to do with it which one is it i can't be both i can't be blamed for micromanaging the design of the car but also have nothing to do with it one of the two these are incompatible yep um so i agonized over every inch of that car um i mean at the the pasadena school of design gave me an honorary degree in in because of my work on the roadster that is so that's how much i had to do with it a lot yeah um um but the the issues the the the problems with production i actually wrote a piece i don't know if you uh like it's out there somewhere um early history of tesla like a blog piece i don't know if you've seen it it's been a while i don't think i've seen it yeah you could probably you know dredge it up from the wayback machine or something like that it's like the history of early history of tesla so i was trying to explain like just in detail how messed up things were um so like like the like the core product design for the car itself was i think you know compelling uh but the uh business decisions around how to make it were at work which ever had made were were terrible um among the many decisions that were insane were outsourcing battery production to a barbecue factory in in thailand yes so i'm sure they make great barbecues they didn't know how to make an advanced lithium-ion battery pack oh my goodness it's not a factory though but hey it's factory yes are we even sure if it was real right literally yeah so uh so uh so like the cells be made in japan uh then be shipped to thailand then be put into a battery pack then go on a boat again to uh england uh to be put into a car and then uh that car would then go on a boat again to california which is the initial market and that so it was like this it ended up being like a five or six month long supply chain so if there was any problem with the sales of the pack you'd have basically half a year's worth of inventory that you have right off yeah and cars that didn't work which is basically what what happened so the the barbecue company had was just utterly unable to make a battery pack uh they've never done anything like it before um the uh so much drama um martin did not want to change the the motor size uh or power electronic size from with the ac propulsion design which then therefore required uh having a two speed transmission um there were three attempts to make a two-speed transmission they all failed uh and i think on the order of ten million dollars was spent just trying to make a two-speed transmission um after we fired martin i said we're just gonna change the make the motor bigger and and the power electronics bigger and get rid of the two speed and just have uh direct uh you know no transmission just a direct drive need differential and an rpm reducer basically but you no longer have to have a clutch uh so uh we just made the motor motor bigger power electronics got rather transmission uh it's the nano transm no no transmission the normal sense of the word when we first for the very first cars that went into production they still had that crappy two-speed transmission it was just stuck in first gear so it had like top speed of like 65 miles an hour or something like that um [Laughter] and and with some chance of seizing so um so the yeah the the body panels have been uh outsourced to a company that was completely unable to make uh carbon fiber body panels um and was and and when i visited lotus i asked for their top ten risks they said oh your body panel supplier is going to fail i'm like excuse me and this is like a friday i'm like well let's go there right now it's like friday night um so we went to the body panel thing and just like the tools were just the wrong they were all wrong they didn't fit like the uh any given body panel had to be basically hand hand hand massaged as i sort of like make it in the tool and then it'll be wrong the tool was wrong and the process was wrong so then you had to basically hand craft each body panel in order to to make it vaguely fit and even after that uh the body panel gaps were so bad with the trunk you could literally put your thumb between the the in the gap it was like messed up beyond belief um and i was like wow okay these guys were have a zero percent chance of succeeding so then we had to transfer the body panel uh production to this company sotera in france uh so then i ended up camping out in france uh for quite for a few months there um just just building new tools for the body we had to retool the whole body um so zotero was capable of making the body but uh but they but you still needed to retool the thing so we had to retool the entire car body um so so let's see we so we changed the car body the battery pack was uh i shifted production battery pack to menlo park or two basically to the bay area um technically san callus i think at the time um and switched final assembly to the the the car dealership um on on el camino the ford car dealership if you watch revenge of the electric car you can see some of these scenes um um instead of having lotus it's like so we'd make the battery pack um in san carlos uh and then um and and also make the motor power electronics so i shipped basically i in-sourced production of the battery pack the motor and the electronics uh internal to tesla so we could iterate quickly and and actually have figured out a design that worked so like because design has to be safe reliable and not cost crazy money or doesn't matter so yeah so body car body motor power electronics transmission to a single speed uh almost everything that changed in the car so we had to recapitalize the company and it took you know about two years before we we could actually be in real production like from mid 2007 to mid 2009 what was the original vision of the roadster though i mean you obviously had production issues but you had an initial vision once you conceived it and i know retrospect you said you that was a mistake to use the roadster body because there's so many compromises well the elise what do you mean yeah uh yeah so the tesla was created with two two false assumptions uh what the one false assumption was that you could use the ac propulsion drivetrain technology um and and and that you you could take a lotus elise uh and easily modify that to have an electric powertrain so essentially stuff the uh ac propulsion drivetrain into a lease um have lotus do the production outsource everything just um i think martin's thought the peak number of employees would be 35 like literally um which this all sounds great especially coming at it from like a mostly software background took me at the time like great sounds good you know unfortunately uh neither of those panned out the ac propulsion technology was not viable in a production vehicle and they used a for example analog um and analog power electronics you know so like the depending upon what temperature it was uh you'd the car would either work or not work or certainly work very differently um so we designed our own digital um powerpower electronics and uh so the car would be consistent in how it performed um and uh we ended up not using the ac propulsion motor design we increased the we changed the motor design we ended up not using any any ac propulsion technology at all um so um so so it's on that side things and then the problem with it with the elise is that once you add a big battery pack to a car uh the the mass of the car is now like 40 percent heavier than a leaf so you invalidate the entire structural design of the elise uh the battery pack wouldn't fit so we had to stretch the chassis the mass distribution is completely different like yeah like i said old crash tests are invalidated all the structural design is invalidated uh you have to it's you have to you're really essentially redesigning everything but but but are still left with the constraints of an elise which is that it's a little too small so that's an issue you couldn't even use the air conditioning system because air conditioning was belt driven so we needed an electric air conditioning system so couldn't even use that um so in the end the the car was like i think the car had maybe four percent or five percent of parts in common with an elise um it's nothing it basically it was it was worse than if we started from a clean sheet so sort of like if you say like you have a particular home in mind but instead of building that home on a fresh piece of ground take somebody else's home and stick what you want in it and then you you knock down everything except one wall and the basement it's the other footprint and one wall and and uh you know so you have to have like that that sort of and then you try to build your dream home once but with with somebody else's foundation it's like not a good idea and more expensive than if you just did a clean sheet yep so that was an issue did you ever consider midway through it dropping the body entirely or was it just the capital sunk in already too late of an option what do you mean by dropping the body i mean not using the elise at all and uh yeah i i was like um at one point i told jv and i said i think we should not have we should not work with lotus and we should do this about this directly and jv was like well you know we still we had no clue how to build a car it's not like we're just coming out this from how do you build a car an idea you know how to learn so in theory uh it's a car company has been around for like 50 years it should be you should have a lot of expertise more so than someone who's never never built a car so yeah but um because uh lotus would have periodic financial difficulties uh when they would have financial difficulties they would then uh turn the screws on tesla so uh because if you're sure at lotus and you have a choice of uh let's go raise money or let's extract money from tesla or they will extract money from tesla so they extract a lot of money from from from tesla and we didn't have any choice uh it was not possible to to actually we had no optionality we were stuck the only way to make the car was with with lotus so when they increased the price on us was nothing we could do [Music] but anyway after after all that we managed to get the cost of the car down from where it was previously headed of 180 000 to i think around 80 000 um by roughly mid 2009 but by redesigning and and and re doing basically the entire supply chain you know with very few exceptions um it was like insanely hard uh to to get the cost of the car uh below the price and then we and then we increased the price of the car um and i think we had like an average selling price of around maybe 110 120 so we're able to get to like 25 cent margins but with with great difficulty um but he'll actually difficult no one can say teslas aren't appreciating assets the roadsters are still going for more than that today so yeah yeah i know still quite a collection of original roadsters out there i was lucky enough to get my hands on 523. okay yeah beautiful the electric blue the one you guys repainted for the owner because uh yeah he told me the story about that i guess he backed into a parking lot somewhere somebody hit him and you guys repainted it for him it's beautiful it's beautiful yeah we had some pretty wild colors in the beginning um because like the cars were just being made like one at a time so it was you could you could make them be all kinds of interesting colors we had a pretty vibrant orange color at one point um so like the production was excruciatingly difficult i'm getting um from the first set from the first set of tooling from that company that went bankrupt that uh was completely unable to make car bodies uh we were able to extract five car bodies uh and each of those car bodies required extensive uh hand modification in order to and still look like like trash basically with giant body gaps and stuff um but there was only five literally five yeah so the first uh five production roadsters uh have the body from the old tooling and and then uh that then we're able to transition to the sortier uh yes it's so t uh ira print company um switch to switch to bodies made with air tooling and they did a great job actually um i remember having to talk the the production team there um into working a lot more than they would usually work i mean they're not that they're like they have a good work ethic but they you know they they're like i was like can you guys please not go on vacation because otherwise a company's going to die essentially with my speech in a nutshell yeah and they were actually like okay we'll stay and we'll make the car buddies i i they were kind enough to actually postpone their vacations and stuff and uh and put in some serious hours to make the car buddies for tesla etc that's cool so um and scott tim watkins deserves a lot of credit as well to markets was essential to making that work jb's role was critical he made it so that the batteries didn't catch on fire anymore right yeah dave jb was like uh i mean jv um andrew baklino um i mean there and there were a number of really top-notch people there that solved the problem i mean it's not that the batteries wouldn't catch on fire it's just that if i saw a corner on fire that it would not go into thermal runaway and domino the other cells so the i mean in order for that to happen we had to have liquid cooling to keep the cell temperatures uh even um and then you've got a tough uh problem where you want something to be thermally conductive but electrically isolated so you know this is these things normally go together if something is uh thermally conductive it is it is uh electrically conductive as well um so um trying to try to find some material uh to still cool cool or heat the batteries of the cells uh but but not create a short it was quite difficult and then the the early packs for the roadster were um we did not have we did not scale up the we did not have a way the um cooling tube so we just had a straight a straight cooling tube so that it wasn't much contact um between the cells and the the cooling tube um anyway we made it work basically um without too much without too much drama um but it required a lot of iteration and making the battery packs ourselves uh in the bay area the most expensive place to build a car i feel like a very expensive place to build a car but but actually uh cheaper than if that if it's outsourced to a barbecue company in thailand [Laughter] because it actually works um so you know initial designs for the pack were uh extremely wrong because it also has to be okay you know in an accident um so you know it can't just you know just go your robust to an accident as well so during any point of those early days like was obviously bankruptcy was kind of almost knocking at the door was there a bankruptcy actually technically was knocked at the door um uh in like 2008 but not before then okay because i i had like money from paypal it's just when i started running out of money from paypal and the markets went to you know went into a recession that's when bankruptcy was knocking the door so it was more like um you know in 2008 okay from 2008 through 2012 bankruptcy was knocking at the door okay frequently just standing out there looking hopefully it wasn't a special person but david did it cross your mind at any point to just say this is a bad idea i just need to i don't know focus on spacex or something else um during those even four years yeah i had it i mean one of the toughest decisions i ever had to make was in 2008 um i could i think it had like 40 million dollars left or something from uh from the paypal sale and i i could have it's like okay i can put at all on spacex or all on tesla and increase probably either one words five or i could split split you know and and then it's like but to me like the kit the company is like kids you know it's like it's not like just a company to me so it's sort of like if you got two kids like how could you really say okay we're gonna let one kid starve you know so i was like can bring myself to say i'm gonna you know definitely that company's gonna die definitely that company can die so i ended up splitting the money and and and gave the 20 million dollars to 1020 million to spacex but that could have ended up being a super dumb decision and both companies could have gone bankrupt as a result so at the time i was like man this would really suck if if both companies go bankrupt because i kind of split split the meal you know but then fortunately the fourth launch of spacex reached orbit if that fourth launch had failed spacex would be dead for sure um and then we closed the tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that was possible which was 6 p.m december 24th 2008. um crazy crazy um and the only people who would invest were a subset of the existing investors into in tesla so um you know so that was um you know uh and uh yeah i was like antonio crossus our aaron price steve davidson i think there might have been a few others but but those are three main ones and um and then advantage point who's the worst venture capitalist on the face of this earth uh and alan salzman who's this second only to martin overheard in douchebag douchebaggery he actually wanted tesla to go bankrupt so he could recap the company and and literally that was his strategy what a douche um anyway they refused to um allow inequity like we try to do an equity round they block the equity rounds so then the only way to get the because the salesman and vantage point little known fact wanted to deliberately tried to bankrupt tesla in december of 2008. uh with their nefarious plan being it would go bankrupt then they would zero out the equity and recap the company and own the whole thing pretty evil yeah yeah but evil but also dumb um because like once a call company goes bankrupt you lose confidence with the customers and like people like well this company went bankrupt and the suppliers are like uh this car doing bankrupt i don't want to buy you parts yeah so so they're an afford nefarious plot would failed um but anyway so but but the the the good investors uh agreed to match uh the the 20 mi 20 million so then tesla would have 40 million dollars so that's but but because it cannot be an equity round it had to be a debt convertible to equity round because vantage point had blocking rights on equity yeah this is like some you know deep lore basically um and that that actually was very difficult for the venture investors because their uh the terms of their of their investment was like they were not debt investors they're equity investors so they have to actually go to their to their partners to get an exception for tesla to say this is debt convertible to equity and it only is convertible to equity if at some point in the future vantage point agrees that to allow it it's a tough position to invest it yes especially while general motors and and chrysler are going bankrupt um yeah i mean i try to raise outside money uh and people were angry that i even asked like when i went a call to try to raise money for tesla like we got zero outside money in that december 2008 uh because it's like so many companies were going bankrupt they were just it was like no one like helena so we managed to get this like squeaked through with a convertible debt round um that that basically just matched the the money that i that i put in which is everything i had and then i had like zero money and not even have a house or anything at the end of 2008 my ex-wife had the house so i had like basically nothing and then i actually had to borrow money to pay rent and stuff because like literally like zero if yeah zero so uh and that that just got us six months basically

https://youtu.be/CnxzrX9tNoc

so uh live from an undisclosed location with the sultry filter on very sultry filter on yeah having a great hair day yeah that is a good hair day great hair day my pal and your favorite ceo and twitterer mr elon musk how you doing palette [Applause] [Music] [Music] appreciate you uh coming to the event and um or coming zooming in um what's new in your world um well let's see um i guess right now uh i'm sort of debating the number of bots on twitter [Music] [Applause] on twitter um and um the currently i'd like to what what i'm being told is that the uh there's just no way to know the number of bots it's like as unknowable as the human soul basically so you have an idea witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these for the spot percentage i said like why don't i try calling people but i haven't got a response you know like if you tried calling people or something you know like maybe trying to answer it's not about no no no i don't know but i think like that would be one of the things to do to say like have you tried calling them as opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here that's like impossible you know uh obviously you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated where one person is operating a thousand accounts or something um but that person can only buy one toaster they're not gonna buy a thousand toasters so you care about like number of unique real people that are on the system it's extremely fundamental and anyone who uses twitter is well aware that uh the their comment the comment threads are are full of spam scam and and um just a lot of you know fake accounts so um it's it seems uh beyond beyond reasonable for twitter to claim that the number of uh essentially the number of re said another way the number of real unique humans uh that you see making comments on a daily basis on twitter is above 95 percent that is what they're claiming does anyone have that experience [Music] [Laughter] i'd like to sell you you know you know and also you can buy the brooklyn bridge um what do you think it is what yeah what's what's the uh i mean it's not five percent what is it um i think it's some number that is probably at least uh four or five times that number the i'd say it at uh if you did sort of the the lowest estimate would be probably 20 um and uh and this and this is a a bunch of uh quite smart outside firms have done analysis of twitter and uh looked at the the the daily daily users and their conclusion is also about is about 20 but that's a lower bound it's not an upper bound if you look at say um the most liked tweets on twitter um so i i have the uh the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human um this is thank you everyone for liking my tweet including you some of the bots out there but that tweet is less than 5 million likes it's like 4.7 or something like that and that that that was the where i tweeted about um that next time buying coca-cola to put the cocaine back in it's definitely it's clearly something that the public really wants and you know uh coca-cola corporation should really think about going back to their roots um coca-cola um i mean this this i guess is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow because they had coca-cola with cocaine this is a real reason so um anyway that was that's that is literally the most popular tweet um of any of any living human um and but twitter says that the daily monet the sort of monetizable daily act of uses is 217 million um so why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only you know two two and a half percent of the entire user base this this seems a very very low number um and um and the most popular tweets generally are clustered around that sort of four million uh like level so it's like sort of caller like basically two percent or that or less than two percent of of the uh daily active users and and technically monetizable daily active users is how twitter refers to it so it just seems how is this possible um surely there's something that maybe you know ten percent of people would like not merely two percent well actually you know if you think about it elon um there's a corollary on youtube what do what's the total user base of youtube and what have the most popular videos gotten there yes and i think there's a billion or two maybe a billion people using youtube and those the most popular videos have tens of billions of views that might be instructive exactly that ratio makes a lot more sense um so something doesn't add up here um and my concern is isn't it's not that is it like you know is it five or or seven or eight percent but is it potentially eighty percent or ninety percent bots yeah um you know uh is it i mean i i certainly know there's some real people on twitter but uh but what's if is it an order of magnitude is it is it 50 instead of five and that's obviously an incredibly material number um especially since twitter uh relies uh primarily on brand advertising as opposed to specific click-through advertising where you make a purchase if you if you make a purchase it it doesn't really matter that much but for brand advertising which is really just awareness advertising it matters if real humans are seeing that or not yeah and and so i guess stepping back for a second people are curious why you want to buy twitter why is this so important to you and then i guess what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point so a two-parter why is it so important to me i mean some of this i've articulated before but i think there's a need for a a public town square digital town square that uh where people can debate uh issues of all kinds um including the most substantive issues and in order for for that to be the case you have to have something that is as broadly inclusive as possible that has as much of the the people on the platform as possible uh where it's uh it feels uh balanced from a political standpoint uh it's not biased one way or the other um and where the system is transparent this is why i think it's important to put the algorithm on on github and actually allow the public to see it and critique it and improve it and if there are any manual changes uh sort of shadow banning as it's called or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet that's done manually that that should be noted uh so you know what has happened and it's not just uh you know you're just where it is right now we don't know what the heck is going on why is one tweet doing well why isn't that sweet not is it the algorithm did someone manually intervene uh why are some accounts banned uh with no recourse apparently um and um you know the the reality is uh that twitter at this point you know has uh a very far-left bias um and i would class myself as a moderate and you know neither the republican nor nor democrat um and in fact uh i have voted vote overwhelmingly for democrats uh historically overwhelmingly like i'm not sure i might never have voted for a republican just to be clear right now now this election i would well david you okay how are you gonna die he keep going keep going he's fine he's fine we're gonna resuscitate him we're gonna resuscitate david sacks i mean let me ask you a person the point i'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to uh you know it's not some right wing takeover uh as as say people in life may fear uh but rather a moderate wing takeover um and an attempt to uh ensure that that people of of all uh you know political uh beliefs feel welcome on on a digital town square that and they can express uh their their beliefs uh without fear of being banned or shadow banned um and and and that we we obviously need to get rid of the bots uh and and scams and trials and people that are operating uh huge bot armies in an attempt to uh unduly influence the the public opinion so this is what i think it's very important that we have that like the the some of the smartest people in history have have thought about it and said like free speech is important for a for a healthy democracy it is important and free speech only matters like say when does prestige matter most it's when someone when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like uh that's when it actually matters um so um you know obviously and and and it's pretty annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like that's that's that's bad but it's actually a good sign of uh that that you have free speech um so i mean i get trashed by the media all the time it's fine i don't care uh go do do it twice as much i couldn't care less um but it's indicative of the fact that even though um i you know i have like a lot of resources i do not actually have the ability to stop the media from trashing me and that's actually a good thing yeah i i have to ask um with regard to this current administration i know how hard you work uh on the car company and then biden you know you've been a lifelong democrat you've donated to obama and to everybody probably never voted republican and yet and the same is true for joe rogan joe rogan is you know a bernie sanders supporter and that the democratic party has been openly hostile to joe rogan and biden can't even say the word tesla or invite you to the white house when they do an eevee summit i'm curious just on a very personal basis what does it feel like to have that experience where the party you supported is won't even say the name of your company or invite you there they should be celebrating the work you're doing yeah i mean it it definitely feels like this is not right like this is [Music] the the issue here is that there's just an uh this the democrat party is overly overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers particularly the class action uh lawyers um and generally if you if you'll see something that doesn't that is not in the interest of the of the people um on the on the democrat side it's going to come because of the unions uh which is just another form of monopoly and the uh the trial lawyers uh that that's where actions will be happening from democrats side they're not in the interests of the people and then um to be fair on the republican side uh there's this if you say like where is something like not not ideal happening it's because of corporate evil um and uh religious zealotry um but that's generally where the bad things will be coming from on the republican side um that are not representative of the people so um in the case of biden he is simply too too much uh captured by the unions um which was not the case with obama um so in the case of obama you could have you know he was sort of quite reasonable um and i think he took more of a view of that you know obviously take the concerns of the unions into account but uh there are there are bigger issues at stake and and unfortunately biden does not do that you'll have a tesla question i read today it's incredible there was a bloomberg article that said the following so the setup is this it said since you went public tesla's up 22 000 uh 11 quarters of prof sequential profitability so hitting on all cylinders but the a public analyst we had to look at it [Laughter] but analysts uh when they put out their projections okay it's it's one of the most enormous bands for any company in america the the price targets for tesla despite all of this success some have it at 200 some have it at 1600 it's all over the place you tweeted a couple months ago tesla's not a company it's like six companies inside of a company like you've had yeah maybe more can you just explain to people all these companies inside this super company just so folks have a sense of what had to be done to get here okay i mean this question requires thought and i'll probably be leaving out quite a few things but if you look and say what what does a typical uh car company do uh what what they do is they they um assemble vehicles um and they send them to dealers and they manage the supply chain uh the they they might make the engine uh or typically we'll make the engine but most of the parts are made by suppliers and a lot of the actual technology development is done by suppliers and most most of the vehicle software is done by suppliers so the actual amount of uh real work done by car companies that what you think of sort of like a gmo ford is not actually that much um and but like so they don't do they don't do uh sales they don't do service um they uh so so in the case of tesla for example we we do we we do our own sales and service we don't have dealerships um then uh tesla also has by far the biggest network of superchargers sort of the electric equivalent of gas stations so we built an entire global supercharger network which is still the most advanced and by far the best uh way to charge your car when traveling long distance or if you live in a city um and uh and don't have the ability to charge your car there's a street parking or an apartment so the whole supercharged network we developed the supercharged network we deployed it i think we have i don't know 15 000 supercharges globally um you can travel anywhere in america right now with uh the tesla supercharger network um then uh in terms of vertical integration uh we uh we make the the battery pack uh the the power electronics the drive unit um we uh we actually make we're more integrated in in the parts we actually make so much of the car uh internally uh we're vertically integrated um not necessarily because we think that there's some religious reason to be a product integrator but because uh the pace that we needed to move was just much faster than the supply chain could move and to the degree that you inherit the legacy supply chain and hurt the legacy constraints including their speed uh cost and uh and technology and then tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company so the software that runs in tesla operates the car operates the screen uh does the charging uh all of that stuff is developed by tesla and um so we have sort of a car a tesla os in the car when you and then very importantly uh tesla has built uh an uh an autopilot ai team from scratch uh that is the best real world ai team on earth and if anyone else has got a better one i'd like to see it demonstrated in a car um the full self-driving beta at this point can very often take you with zero interventions across the bay area from san jose to marin so through complex traffic it's really quite sophisticated um and i invite anyone to to join the beta or or look at the videos of those who are in the beta we've got like 100 000 people in the beta so it's not tiny and we'll be expanding that to i know probably a million people or a million i don't know on that order by the end of the year so um it's um we also we also built a chip team to because there wasn't it wasn't hardware to that we could run the freaking uh ai on uh we couldn't just uh fill the trunk with a whole bunch of gpus um and and you know they would would have taken a trunk full of gpus that would have been very expensive and take massive amount of power and cooling uh just to be able to do what the tesla designed uh full self-driving computer can do so and we started a chip team from scratch designed it it was the best in the world and still is the best in the world several years later um and we also then developed we were designing a dojo supercomputer to be able to process the all the video that's coming in from billions miles of data because just sort of like the way that it's critical to compete with google because they have so much data and they have all these people doing searches all the time and humanity is training it but the same is true of tesla you really need billions of miles ultimately tens of billions of miles of training data combined with a sort of a vast training computer and then uh optimize uh inference hardware in the car and stay the ai and training and specialized software across the board to be able to achieve a full self-driving solution i uh when when he opened tesla gigafactory remember this 67 years ago i'll just tell the audience a story quickly elon he puts a slide up there and he says guys we're not actually building a factory we're building a machine that makes machines and he puts the layout of the factory and it looks like a chip and it was basically like how you would actually lay out a microchip if you were or you know you were like a layout engineer it was the craziest thing i'd ever seen i was like that was when i first got it yeah you know you walk in tend and you see what's happening and you have an insurance company now you're doing insurance for tesla owners and an uber competitor right and eventually a robo taxi uber competitor alright um yeah i mean insurance is like quite significant now are you okay i'm okay okay okay because the the car insurance thing is a bigger deal it may seem a lot of people are paying um you know 30 40 as much as their lease payment for the car in in car insurance um so the car insurance industry is incredibly inefficient because they they're just uh first of all you got like so many um sort of middle entities you've got from the insurance agent all the way to the final sort of reinsurer there's like a half dozen companies each taking a cut um and then uh the it's all very statistical so that this um even if you're a very good driver like you could be like you know 20 years old and a great driver but they they're it's all statistical so you can't get either can't get insurance or it's extremely expensive um so what tesla allows for real-time insurance based on your how you actually drive the car um you can actually if you drive the car in a safer way you actually have lower insurance so ours is is insurance is based on how you actually drive not how you know historically people that you know fit your whatever demographic have drive it's and and then you can close the loop around your uh insurance rate by simply driving better and looking at your score and and and lowering your insurance in real time and people do it actually promotes safer driving i actually have had this experience because in my household two people drive my car and one of them has a 93 score and the other one does not they have like a 60 score and you may have met this other person but i've been trying to work with her on the aggressive turns and stops in advance of our insurance bill uh which we're hoping will go down at some point um you didn't oh the one question are is this twitter deal going to get close do you think are the chances here well i mean it really depends on a lot of factors here um i'm still waiting for uh some sort of a logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on twitter and twitter is is refusing to tell us so you know this just seems like a strange thing um wait sorry is are they refusing to tell you or you don't think they really know i mean there's a good chance they may just have no idea they claim that they do know yeah and they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand um [Laughter] but the guy who landed two rockets simultaneously you stir this cauldron and then you throw the knuckle boom and um it comes to you in a dream i don't know um but but there should be some uh you know objective way to assert the uh thing because this is a this is a material public state threshold issue yeah it it you know it's it's a you know it's a material adverse uh misstatement uh you know if if they in fact uh have been um vociferously claiming less than five percent of faker spam accounts but in fact it is four or five times that number or perhaps 10 times that number this is a big deal um it's not this it seems like if you said okay um i'm gonna i agree to buy your house you say the house has less than five percent termites that's that's an acceptable number but if it turns out it is 90 percent termites that's uh not okay you know it's not the same house um made most your house will disappear because it's mostly made in two months um so it you know that that would obviously just not be appropriate so in in making the twitter offer i was obviously reliant upon the the truth and accuracy of their public filings and if those those filings are not accurate it's simply not that's that it's it's not you you can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed and you know they say elon life's a negotiation so at a different price it might be a totally viable deal correct i mean that i mean it's not out of the question um okay but i really would you know this is you know the more the more questions i ask the more i the more my concerns uh grow um so you know at the end of the day acquiring it has to be fixable um and and fixable you know with reason reasonable time frame and without revenues collapsing along the way and all that sort of stuff um and so you know i really need to see how these things have been calculated and it it can't be some deep mystery that is like more complex than the human soul or something like that um it's got to be you know i think we can apply the scientific method to this and try to figure out what's really going on and um twitter's revenue is is primarily dependent i think 70 or some that order on brand advertising as opposed to specific purchase advertising this is a big deal because brand advertising is not there's not a there's not a purchase that results from that so it's basically you know how much mind share or like basically if you're a big company how how often do they hear your name um it's as opposed to something that where you can directly measure the outcome um so that that means that they're somewhat going on faith um and if that faith is undermined or or reduced because of the reality of the situation coming to the fore then that the tesla's revenue twitter starts with the t um the quarter's revenue uh will be uh significantly impaired and that's a major problem elon did you have a chance to ask these questions during your negotiation uh the i like i said i was reliant upon their public filings so to the degree that that they're probably public and this is normal for a public company if you you know if if you make a formal filing um that that that is what investors are lying up relying on whether they are making an acquisition offer or simply buying some shares so this this the accuracy of these filings is important whether you're buying one share or the whole company and so if these filings are inaccurate or if they're sort of potentially blatant it's a big deal you know do you have a sense of why this has been such a persistent problem for twitter do they not have the technical capabilities to solve the the bot problem or is it more of like just a they've underprioritized the issue or been unwilling to because potentially their implications for uh ad revenue i i i i don't know it's sort of speculative at this point so the you know the the uh the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer that would be the worst interpretation um the bet i'm not sure what the best interpretation is but the least bad interpretation would be maybe they thought it was this way but they're the way they were doing it was wrong and they didn't realize they were mistaken and simply weren't paying enough attention um it does seem as though it should be a lot easier to get rid of the bots and and spam and trolls then uh like this is not some we're not trying to split the atom here you know uh we're not trying to get to the moon okay we're just trying to uh limit the amount of obviously scammy accounts if it's if it's if it's like your bitcoin giveaway um you know probably it's f it's a spammer you know like it does maybe you know wait you're not giving away a hundred bitcoin i just sent you danny if if if you send me two bitcoin i'll send you one back right that's my what if i send you 20. actually um i thought one of the interesting things that came up in your product roadmap um or i guess this was released and people covered it was the um possibility of twitter becoming kind of a super app with payments included um maybe perhaps even doge or something this seems to me uh based on your work with with david a paypal like a pretty brilliant idea what's what's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it you know perhaps at the right price um what would it look like if you know i could add jason to at elon musk you know 10 bucks or something if you know we were splitting a check or something sure well for those that have used wechat i think that's wechat's actually a good model um if you're in china it's basically you kind of live on wechat it does everything um it's sort of like twitter plus paypal plus a whole bunch of other things and we'll roll into one with actually a great interface and it's really an excellent app and we don't have anything like that um outside of china so uh i think such such an app um would be really uh useful um and it just like the utility of it uh of of sort of a a spam free thing where you could you can make comments you can post videos you can uh you know i think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share um now now this this does not need to be done on twitter it could be done from something that's created from scratch so it could be something new um so really but but i think this thing needs to exist whether it is uh converting twitter to uh be the sort of like kind of all-encompassing app that that like said everything from digital town square where important ideas are debated uh you know maximally trusted and inclusive and at a point where you sort of have a high trust situation than than payments uh uh whether it's uh crypto or fiat uh can make a lot of sense just what you just want something that's incredibly useful and that people love using um so that but it it's it's either convert twitter to that or start something new those are the two but it does need to happen somehow well it's interesting you bring that up because the price of twitter is pretty high and you've built a couple of companies and some engineers like to come work for you and you've now gone through the intellectual exercise of studying all this um if you're looking at the two choices now fixing twitter given all these problems and maybe just starting your own version which one are you leaning towards because it i have watched you build a couple of companies and the products have turned out pretty good so is it easier for someone like you to just start from scratch i mean i mean it's certainly the my my default inclination is to start things from scratch uh i mean i'm not really i don't buy things like there's still this sort of you know uh um yeah like like spacex was started from scratch you know in the case of of tesla uh you know it was like five people it was still this guy everhart who's the worst guy i've ever worked with who tries to claim like soul credit essentially for equating tesla if he's so damn great why didn't he just go you know create another car company when he was fired um but anyway um so well i mean that's a pretty good story i mean yeah i remember jesus i mean no but i i remember having this conversation with you we were having a conversation about the roadster i think i can tell the story i said how's it going pal and you said well i got one problem um it turns out the roadster parts and putting it together cost 190 000. yeah and i said i gave you 150 for number 16. so if you make 2000 of these you're gonna lose 80 million dollars and you're like yeah or double that i mean they basically the parts of the car cost more than they were selling it for when you were starting to get involved that's it it was difficult no no i i got involved well before before that yes when twitter when tesla was was nothing but a piece of paper let me be crystal clear [ __ ] clear no they didn't bring me in either [Music] i was gonna start i was gonna start an ed company with jv struggle and based on the the ac propulsion t0 and when i when i asked ac propulsion if it was okay to do that they said well there's also some others who want to create an ev company but have not created one yet yes would you like to join forces with them and i said okay well we'll do that that was a huge mistake jb and i should have just started the car company ourselves instead uh we uh teamed up with everhard topping and right um big mistake uh the the the actual moral error here was me trying to have my cake and eat it too which is like uh i just want to work on the technology and the product and have someone else be the ceo and and sort of run the business operations because i just like working on technology and product and design and um and and also i was like doing spacex uh you know at the time in our rockets were blowing up so it seemed like uh okay this is like i always wanted to an electric car company this is how i can have my cake and eat a two that was a huge mistake and fundamentally a moral error um and uh so so uh in the end i had to freaking be ceo and i didn't want to be basically um so but it's either that or a company's gonna die so uh so we started with with really just nothing and uh the uh you know the t0 prototype from ac propulsion not not if that's that's the precursor to tesla um clear once again uh when uh we created tesla i when i when i joined there were no no employees there was no intellectual property there was no prototype there was no and nothing yeah we crystal [ __ ] clear and it almost bankrupted you i mean you that sent you to the cliff of india i mean that was yes we were on the ragged edge of bankruptcy so many times it was ridiculous um so um and what 2008 was one of the worst years where basically the you know gm and ford just a gm jammer ford almost went bankrupt and um you know trying to raise money for a startup electric car company in 2008 while gm's going bankrupt was uh difficult to say the least um you know people were angry that i even asked them uh they're like [ __ ] you and hang up so the only way that that that tesla actually made it through 2008 was uh a subset of the existing investors um which includes like people like antonio gracias and uh you know um steve jobson and and a few other key people our aaron price uh who who i've uh hold a debt of gratitude to the state um and and i i put in all the money i had left and they said everything literally everything um uh i didn't have a house uh so uh this is my actually so i've had the house so i was like staying actually in jeff skull's bedroom spare bedroom um and uh and but they were the the uh the subset of the investors would say okay i put in they're putting as much as i put in so i put in everything um and and then we closed that round 6 p.m uh christmas eve 2008 it was last hour of the last day that was possible because after that people were like kept breaking for the holidays and we were to bounce payroll two days after christmas it was uh pretty that's doorstop i mean it was an incredible moment in time and and people also forget at the time that the first two rockets spacex sent up uh didn't exactly make it to orbit like one of those yeah the first three and i remember having dinner with you at that time and i asked you hey how's it going i heard glocker says you got four weeks of payroll left and you said that's not true and i said thank god and you said we have two [Music] i said no i mean both spacex and tesla in 2008 if we'd simply paid our suppliers on time we would have gone bankrupt immediately hey tell us tell us actually uh it was it was a pretty crazy moment because i also remember asking you that we were having dinner at boa and i said well certainly it's got to be some good news and you took out your blackberry to date the conversation i don't remember it and you said don't tell anybody jacob is it right no problem and you showed me the clay version of the model s yeah the most beautiful car i'd ever seen and i said oh my god it's stunning how much is it gonna cost you said i think i can make it for fifty thousand i remember it was yesterday i said if you make that car for fifty thousand you'll change the [ __ ] world and you did it you know it was a little more than fifty thousand but uh how's your let's ask about spacex okay well that's what's basically but i want to ask one more personal question has life gotten easier for you as these companies have hit scale or has the complexity made life even more challenging because those early days it was just fighting to survive nobody knew who you were you were anonymous and it was really just about the work and now let's face it you're the world's most famous guy and everybody's watching everything you do but these companies are also very big so what's life like for you today are you enjoying what you're doing every day um well i mean it's it's somewhat of a roller coaster so there are like good days and bad days um and there's there also crisis issues um and you know like sort of you know knock on wood like we're not like uh facing you know death in the face like like it's it's definitely like quite stressful when like you know death is like trying to eat your face off and like the foam is like you know just getting it and like right there you know you know that's it's pretty stressful in that situation um so like right you know both spacex and tesla have um you know significant cash reserves so like you know it's like we're sharing death in the face we could sort of see it over in the horizon you know so i don't want to get complacent or entitled because it um but but if it's not like just sort of foaming at the mouth and actually trying to eat your face off on a daily basis that's that's certainly we've moved on from that point um and hopefully never never return um but but there are a lot of issues that need to be it's just like the if you're a ceo of a company the chore level is high and if you don't do your chores then the company goes to hell and i hate doing doing chores frankly so uh who does uh so that's the real like there's a whole bunch of sort of uh you know personnel issues and legal issues and and and things that i i i don't find enjoyable to work on but if i don't work on them the company suffers so it's more like just the sheer volume of work is insane that's the uh and then and then you know go do some go add to it with you know twitter or something like that yeah i mean honestly i'm an extra processor yeah yeah i mean i i have a habit of biting off more than i can chew and then just sitting there with like chipmunk cheeks alice tell us a little bit about where we are at spacex like how you fund the ability to go to mars but then also commercially still build um a conventional space business domestically i think this russia thing was probably really good for spacex if you want to just tell us a little bit about that sure um well i mean the goal of spacex is to develop the technology that enables life to become multi-planetary um and uh and make humanity a space sparring civilization which i think is a very exciting inspiring thing and it's like some one of those things where you can that i think just makes kids like be excited about the future and we need things that are inspiring and exciting and make the future seem like it's going to be better than the past life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another it's got to be like like what's what's inspiring and exciting and i think that a future where we are space-bank civilization is is one that we can all get excited about um and and we can go out there and find out what what's what's out there in the universe and what's the meaning of life and you know where are the aliens and hopefully they're friendly and that kind of um so uh you know it's interesting i do get asked about the aliens question a lot and i've i've not seen any evidence of aliens um and i'll i'll be the first to you know tweet about it or whatever if i found it if i see something i mean you'll tell us if you find him i will tell you i will definitely tell you if there's aliens um and um you know uh i think it'd be quite helpful for you know like like if if we found aliens like probably spacex would get a ton more revenue because people like oh man aliens we're gonna upgrade on space technology pronto because what if you're unfriendly you know um it's like you know uh the idea of that is the idea that you build um basically the ability to do orbital cargo take all those profits launch starlink take all those profits and move it all into building something that can get to mars is that the kind of rough plan pretty much it's if it was like a three step a three slide power point it would be pretty much as you described which is um develop rockets that are that are capable of of taking uh satellites to orbit and uh crew to the space station um you know basically servicing government commercial space launch needs um and then uh uh build a global communication system in space uh that obviously it does a lot of good for earth but by providing uh internet connect internet connectivity to the least served because a satellite system is really great for remote locations um and you know countryside or or remote islands or or places where someone's trying to cut off their internet as a prelude to a war we take that system like in star wars yeah yeah so it's like you know so it can be pretty pretty helpful like i think like a song like basically i think is a a sort of forceful grid on its own right um by providing uh connectivity to the the least served where they've got either no connection or a a very expensive or poor connection uh you know um the like we're like we're connecting a lot of schools remote schools in brazil right now i'm actually kind of going to be headed there uh to sort of kick things off but they've got a lot of schools that have no connectivity at all and in a modern age uh how do you learn with no connectivity i mean you get i guess old textbooks and stuff but it's really you're at a huge disadvantage if you have no digital connectivity um so i think there's just a lot of good that starling can do in it just by by itself but but then the the revenue generated from starlink is what can enable the uh of a permanently uh crude base on the moon which would be the next you know next step from apollo which is like let's just not go there for a few hours and and then head back let's have a opponent at the occupied science station on the moon um and we could also build um some pretty epic uh telescopes uh on the moon uh that uh would enable us to learn more about the nature of the universe and figure out what's going on and maybe detect those aliens um do you do you um do you think that there's enough profit in those businesses to fund all this or do you need wall street and other investors to come share the load with you is kind of going to mars a partnership with the government does it need to partner with governments to get there um well i think technically it does not need to partner with governments um but of course uh government support would be helpful um so i mean it's going to be very expensive to build a self-sustaining city on mars like in order for us to become multi-planetary in a way that's meaningful um the the key threshold is at which point does the city become self-sustaining such that if the ships from earth stopped coming for any reason and it could be any reason could be world war iii or it could be just you know civilization subsided and um and and just gradually got decrepit or something but but if the ship's stuff coming the three supply ships from earth stop coming to mars for any reason does the city still survive and that's like really a large base of resources that are that that are needed uh on mars you can't be missing any one critical ingredient uh the so and you can think of this like there are these various great filters um you know that that perhaps stop civilizations and one of the great filters is will we become a multi-planet species or not will humanity be one of those species that passes the great filter of going beyond one planet and being a multi-planet species and this is certainly something we'll have to do at some point because this the sun is expanding and will eventually boil the oceans and destroy your life on earth so if you care about life on earth you should really care about life becoming multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar because otherwise you're basically saying you're signing the sort of death warrant for all life as we know it it's inevitable um and then there's also the the various things that kill the you know the dinosaurs and and i mean you look at the fossil record they've been five major extinctions uh that are sort of on the order of eighty nine eighty to ninety percent of all creatures on earth dying um for a wide range of reasons um but uh and then humans can also you know with us the world war three danger um that were that that other creatures didn't have where we could do ourselves in um by sort of misusing advanced technology and and sort of just you know having some radioactive hellhole that's all that's left after world war three so um you know you want you could even characterize it potentially as which will come first world war three or uh life becoming multi-planetary on mars um yeah i'm sorry i was gonna shift but um you know when you think about the importance of going to mars versus solving critical energy and climate change problems here on earth obviously the effort with tesla is related to sustainable energy and i think going back to like probably the 1950s there were engineering designs around plasma fusion or fusion-based systems that have evolved to these plasma systems to these tokamak systems and every year every decade it's like hey next decade we're going to have it what's your point of view on where plasma fusion systems are are we going to have fusion energy this century this decade and does it create limitless energy where the electricity production goes up by ten thousand fold and the price of electricity drops by ten thousand fold and then what does that world on earth look like if that happens so i guess question is like is that technology real when does it happen and what happens to the world here when and if that happens i'll answer that question but then i'll let me sort of point out what the what the actual issue is uh if the question is like uh is it possible to solve uh fusion energy uh 100 yes definitely definitely definitely definitely is for sure um so the the and and and really just using a takamak style which is like it basically a doughnut ring with uh uh with electromagnets that control the the plasma uh the the way to solve that is simply scale up the tokamak uh fusion is uh very much a scale based thing you want to minimize your surface volume ratio so as you scale up a tokamak you reduce your surface volume ratio which means like the the the volume you have relative to this the surface uh you you now have much more uh like you can basically have a hot zone in the center that's relatively far away from the walls and and more of a hot zone um so the the so it's not in my mind a question as to whether which fusion can work but there is a question as to whether it is economically viable um and and whether it is competitive with uh with with alternatives i think that the economic viability of fusion is a much bigger question and i i think the answer probably is that a fusion earth fusion is not competitive economically i think that is that is uh i would say it's probably not competitive economically by an order of magnitude where does it break is it a materials breakdown or where does it break down economically well so so you can't just um use uh normal hydrogen you know you you need to use like deuterium and tritium like unusual forms of hydrogen helium-3 uh you know that there are um there are some uh some uh other types of fusion that could be used uh but um these are just not they're not like there's not a lot of this raw material it's quite difficult to get the raw material so first you have to get the raw material uh that's that's expensive raw material um and then um it's not just about generating the the energy you've got to um turn that energy into usable electricity you can't just have a hot thing okay so the hot thing has to translate to usable electricity so i think you got you've got a cost of a fuel issue which is very significant uh you've got you've got a whole bunch of knockdowns from when you generate the heat to when you actually convert that into electricity you've got some very difficult maintenance issues with with the effusion reactor [Music] so uh and that should be then compared to alternatives uh the the sustainable energy alternatives that i think uh are overwhelmingly more competitive are [Music] solar energy wind geothermal hydro uh some tidal and energy but it's really primarily uh solar uh and and wind um now and you can really say like what why bother creating a fusion on earth when we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that just works with zero maintenance and it shows up every day right it's pretty consistent yeah but elon can we scale to 1000 x or 100 x our electricity production here using solar and other renewable sources yes so the the amount of uh surface area you need to power the united states is remarkably tiny um so you need like basically roughly a hundred miles by a hundred miles of territory and it obviously doesn't need to be in one place uh in the united states to power the united states it's like a little corner of texas or utah the entire country um and and then if you if you you could you could basically power uh you you probably 10x the just with solar alone um without displacing uh anyone's home uh power an economy ten times the size of the united states in the united states on land what when energy prices if you say if you extend that to water because earth is 70 percent water yeah i mean you could you could say okay now we could probably have a civilization that is a hundred times as energy intensive as we currently have it and so what does that look like with the last part of my question which is a world where energy costs are saying it's a hundred times cheaper than they are today and we have a hundred times more energy production capacity what what changes about civilization what do we do differently and what do we see change most kind of dramatically well currently we're not because of of just generally low birth rates almost worldwide civilization is not headed to have a population that is an order of magnitude greater than where where we're kind of we're currently headed towards a population decline uh and this is almost everywhere in the world um so you know it basically seems as as though as soon as you have like urbanization um and and and education beyond a certain level and income being on a certain level birth rates plummet um and so as countries get get wealthier their birth rates plummet it's it's somewhat counterintuitive because people will say like well it's too expensive to have a baby nope the the wealthier they are are the fewer kids you have um the more educated you are the fewer kids you have so um it's it's a it's it's it's the inverse um so so i'm not sure who to use all that energy um unless there's a significant change in the growth rate um or we have a very robot oriented economy so that's also possible so if we've got a lot of um you know four wheeled robots informed cars and uh androids humanoid robots then you could certainly see that there'd be perhaps a need for an order of magnitude more energy but it's not coming from the humans unless something major changes on the on the human uh birth rate uh level uh this by the way is i think the biggest single threat to civilization uh right now is the why why do you think societally people just make those decisions when they become more affluent is it that they just become more selfish or there's more things for them to do and they have more money to spend on themselves and they say you know what i don't want to have a large family i want to you know go to coachella yeah well there is this like weird like mind viruses thing where some people are think like having fewer kids is is like better for the environment yeah that's crazy total nonsense the environment is going to be fine they're going to be fine even if we if we doubled the size of the humans um this is and i know a lot about environmental stuff so um you know uh you that we can't have civilization just dwindle into nothing um and you know japan's leading indicator here like the japan's population declined by 600 000 people last year that lowest birth rate in history uh it's you know it's pretty bad um so we i don't know we and i think so so this one element of this is it's a lot of people just think that having kids is somehow bad for the environment i want to be clear it's not it's essential for me for maintaining civilization that would at least maintain our numbers we don't necessarily need to grow dramatically but at least let's not uh you know gradually dwindle away and until uh civilization ends with us all in adult diapers and and in a whimper like we don't want a civilization to end in an adult diapers with a whimper that would kind of suck yeah lee well i mean and you and i have had this conversation i mean in japan i had two people tell me when i was there like i think it's immoral to bring humans into the world i mean people have gotten very sad about the future it's kind of crazy it's great life's awesome yes no this there's literally i've heard many times how like how can i bring a child into this terrible world i'm like have you read history because let me tell you it was way worse back then okay yeah now it's a good time it's a good time hey you know listen i i know you're super busy but i want to ask you about the move to texas because i've been thinking about it uh austin california i don't know some senator told you to go [ __ ] yourself and like you know like we don't know he's been a couple senators said that actually yeah it seems to be turning into a bit of a trend um but how has building the tesla gigafactory which i got to see in austin a couple weeks ago and it was one of the most inspiring things i've ever seen i mean i don't know how many months it took to build there but how long did it take to build that dreadnought and then what would have taken to build that in california california under gavin newsom so we built the the gigatexas which is the biggest factor in north america i think possibly the biggest factor in the world um and it's three times the size of the pentagon to give you a sense of scale okay this is freaking big it's like it's weird it's like so big it's weird like you just like i was trying to find you in it and i was trying to drive around and it took me about 45 minutes to find you yeah like no you have to like call you can't like find someone in the world you have to call them on their cell phone and say where are you you know um so i mean the building is like uh just under a mile long and we're actually gonna extend it it will be like literally a mile long um and about a quarter mile wide uh and it's uh 80 feet tall so it's just uh ridiculously big um and when you think about like for manufacturing situation like what what what are the two the two things that really define manufacturing competitiveness are economies of scale and technology and so if you got an ace on economy like if you sort of maximize your ace level on technology and you maximize your ace level on scale this is obviously going to be the most competitive situation and that's why they're so freaking giant um and the the gigatexas will go all the way from raw materials like like basically rail cars of cell raw materials coming in and then forming the the battery cell then the battery pack uh building the the motor uh casting we also have introduced a major innovation which is to cast the entire front third and rear third of the car and as a single piece um i got this idea from toys actually because i was like how do they make toys those are cheap they just cast them i was like well can you build a casting machine that big and they're like well no one ever has i'm like is it are we breaking physics like no well let's just ask them and there were six major casting machine suppliers in the world and five of them said no and the six said maybe i'm like i'll take that as a yes um well i mean this you wanted to do this for the model 3 but it was just too soon huh and and now it's almost there yeah actually this this partly comes from the model 3 which is actually a fantastic car in many ways but we were rightly criticized for an inefficient design uh with for the front and rear body um like sandy monroe who i think is really has excellent from an engineering standpoint and and really a very fair critic he pistol wept us for um the design of the the battery and piece by piece told you why you suck yeah and then he did the why and told you why you were awesome he took it apart and tells us exactly why he's why we sucked and he was correct um and then and i was like well that's pretty embarrassing so uh no there he was complimentary of other parts of the car but not the body design and uh and so it's like okay we're gonna go from like you know uh the it's just an incredibly difficult party to make it's made out of like 120 different pieces with dissimilar metals that are joined and you've got galvanic corrosion challenges it's very difficult to make um to a single piece casting that's one piece so like 120 pieces went down to like one so um it's it's it's a it's a huge and the the like the model y body shop especially the new one where we cast both the front and rear is 60 smaller than the model 3 body shop so it's you know gigantic it's quite this there's a lot of innovations of tesla besides the stuff that is is obvious yeah um so anyway so yeah the the but if and and really you know to to be fair to gavin newsom like uh you know if you if you had a gun to gavin's head okay um and said we need to build start building this factory in california right now he couldn't do it because there are so many uh regulatory agencies um and so many uh litigators in california that want to stop you from doing anything that even if you're the governor of the of the state you cannot get it done um so something's got to be done to to to to you know because california used to be the land of opportunity and it's a beautiful state and i love i loved living there and i still spend a lot of time in california even though every time i go there i get every literally every day i go there i get the jesus taxes big tax bill by day yeah like the sheer cost per day of me going and working in california days boggles the mind and but i still do it you know um but but it the california's gone from a land of opportunity to to the land of of of sort of taxes uh over regulation and litigation and this is not a good situation and really there's got to be like a serious cleaning out of the pipes in california how many months was it to get the giga austin done took a year and a half two years yeah 18 18 months to build something three times the size of the pentagon incredible and you just basically the answer to how many months it would take in california is infinity we would still be working on the permits yeah elon this this begs a good question which is like i'm ready graduating and you just keep signing paperwork but we have one more form for you what's a better model yes what's a better model for government so you know like all governments tend to increase in complexity dictatorship capacity is the dictatorship the right model and um you know like like how do we solve this let's say you go to mars or let's say you have to fix california is california permanently broken is there a way to fix it or like how do you set up a better model so that you don't end up having this this kind of special interest complexity situation that eventually kills the uh population i mean i think ultimately with california the people of california just have to get fed up and and demand change um that's the thing that really has to happen um and and there's there's gotta be an above zero percent chance of the of the republicans winning in california if if if if it's just the democrats every time you've got to be you know and this is this is like occasionally uh it the thing is that right right now uh and plus the level of level of gerrymandering uh which is basically just treating the people like sheep uh and and it's terrible um that's gone on in california is outrageous so california uh the dems have a super majority in um the house and senate in california and the governor and everything and so how responsive is any political party going to be to the people if they are guaranteed to win it's a one-party state and so i'm not saying that you know go sort of elect the republicans every time but if it's never you're you're just making california a one-party state they will no longer be responsible responses to people and will only be responsive to those that funded their political campaigns clip elon saying that 30 seconds on tv over and over go ahead sex yeah so elon shifting gears to the economy um you know we saw this uh surprise report of negative 1.4 gdp growth in q1 uh interest rates been rising that increased the cost of the consumer of getting loans things like that we've had a stock market correction really a crash in a lot of growth stocks software stocks um what from where you sit and the data that you see uh where do you think the economy is is headed right now do you think we're in a recession or is it just a risk how do you how do you assess our current economic situation well predicting economic record economics is always difficult um and and want to assign probabilities to these things um but ironically i did last year people asked me what i think about the economy i said well i think we might enter a recession in approximately uh uh spring of 2020 of 2022. called it nailed it um yeah um so uh now the thing is that recessions are not necessarily a bad thing uh they they you know um what i i've now been through a few of them and what has happened is if you have um a boom that goes on for too long you get misallocation of capital uh it starts raining money on fools basically it's like any any dumb thing gets money and i'm sure you've seen a few of those um so at first at some point it gets just out of control and you just have a misallocation of of human capital uh where people are doing things that are silly and not useful to their fellow human beings um and and then those companies there needs to be sort of an economic enema if you will um to have everyone sort of shift uncomfortably in their seats [Music] um sorry it's just like visualizing it the economic enemy i mean listen it's got alliteration um so this too shall pass eventually the economic enemy does its job it clears out the pipes if you will yes and um and and sort of the the the [ __ ] companies um uh go bankrupt and the ones that are doing useful products uh are prosperous um and um but there's certainly a lesson here that if one is making useful product and and doing has a company that makes sense uh make sure you're not running things too close to the edge from a capital standpoint they've got some capital reserves to last through uh irrational times because in the in the past when there's been a recession um it has gone it's amazing it's flipped like a light switch i mean david do you remember this when from the from the paypal you know ex-paypal days when we uh raised 100 million dollars in march of 2000 uh and we literally we had the demand was so high we had uh people like vcs like just literally without even a term sheet wiring money into our account um we'll send the term sheet later literally we're like we like sleuth out our our bank account number and wire money in and we're like where'd this come from and it's like um they so it was like there was literally fire hosing money in march of 2000 and and then in april 2000 the market went into free fall and it went from money raising money was trivial to even good companies could not raise money uh in a month um so it's just important to bear in mind like that you know paypal almost went bankrupt in in 2000 uh we came close um but but thankfully we would raise that that hundred million dollars in in march 2000 uh without which would be uh could be a game over basically um uh and we kind of saw it coming so it's like we we we got that the the x confinity merger done in like three weeks and raised 100 million dollars because we were like oh how we see this coming to an end pretty soon and then a month later it was like you know a nightmare basically um and and uh anyway so it's just important make sure if you're a healthy company you've got some capital to get through things um and and then what what's your costs and uh if you if if it is a recession which it more likely than not it is a recession not saying it is but it probably is um then just uh make what's your cash flow and get the cop positive cash flow soon as you can um so um yeah uh but i think we probably are that are in a recession and that that recession will get get worse um but you know these things pass and then there will be boom times again um so it'll probably be some some tough going for i don't know a year uh maybe maybe you know 12 to 18 months is usually um the amount of time that it takes for for the a correction to to happen um what do you guys think yeah i david uh how do you feel about it yeah i mean it feels like it started um you know what started as a slowdown earlier this year um now seems like i mean technically i guess we need two quarters of negative growth to be in a recession but it feels like we're in one feels like it started um you know the growth stock the software businesses that we invest in are sort of the canaries in the coal mine and there's a lot of a lot of dead canaries uh having a hard time breathing yeah [Laughter] it got stunned for a brief moment and and it just it'll be fine um it it reminds me of the the parrot that you know the pet shop sketch or the parrot it was monty python um it's pining was parrot is pining for the fjords hey um elon a lot has been talked about as we wrap here and you've been incredibly gracious giving us so much time thank you for that um a lot of talk about american exceptionalism over the last couple years waning and maybe this country had seen its best days and uh we see the work you're doing and other people in this great country are doing and the debates we're having about the future and yeah china's doing pretty fantastic rushes on the ropes but it does seem like uh america is still producing some of the greatest companies uh the world has ever seen some of the greatest innovations what are your thoughts on america and our future and what we need to keep this country and this beacon of hope that you know four of the five of us were not born here you know two of you came from south africa and no three of you three of you came from south africa one of you from canada i don't know what they're putting in from sri lanka and from sri lanka and through canada canada via canada he came through canada too yeah i know it seems like that's the that's the way canada is a gateway it is a gateway and how do we it's a well i'm hinting at the answer here but you know it does seem like our immigration policy is absolutely insane and uh maybe we need to keep collecting some of the great individuals that i get to share the stage with here and yourself we need to keep bringing great people to this country why can't we get that in our heads that yeah it's talent recruitment no absolutely i think uh it's incredibly important that the united states be like the destination for the world's best talent i mean you can think of this like like like a pro sports team if you want to win the league um and and uh you know you want the best players on your team um there now there are obviously a lot of very talented people born in the united states um but if you can add a few aces from uh from uh outside the country to the team you're gonna win the league um and and and here's the thing those aces actually want to work for your team they don't want to compete against you they want to they want why don't we want to be on team america and and so it's like we have to like fight them off to not be on team america that's the crazy thing um and so it's like if you got some aces that that are the difference between winning and losing we should be like really recruiting them like you'd recruit like a star basketball player or football player that's what we should be doing um active recruiting um just like if you're a company that once wants to succeed you actively recruit the best talent and then and and that that's the way to win and and if if that stops happening america will stop winning and we have two administrations in a row biden and trump who don't want to let the greatest minds the most talented people into this country is absolutely insane i mean i think they deal with this every day reality is like actually any anyone who who's gonna who wants to to to work hard and be and do useful things um and in this you know uh we we want in the united states um and it's not just people who are sort of intellectually strong but it's just anyone with a with a strong work ethic you know if if they're coming from mexico or if they're coming from you know europe or china wherever it's just if they're like going to come here and crank hard and and contribute more than they take hell yeah i mean that's just it's a no-brainer have you been have you been disappointed in the similarities between biden and trump on this like maybe you could have expected it from trump because that was a rhetoric he needed to use to get elected but it's not as if biden has flipped the script and said okay we're going to go 180 degrees in the other direction he's kind of kept it the same which has been really surprising actually man it's hard to tell what bite is doing if we told frank um yeah like i feel like it's weaker than bernie's the the the real president is whoever controls the teleprompter you know it's like it's like the path to power is the path to the teleprompter you know like what what because that then he just reads the teleprompter so you know i do feel like like if if somebody would accidentally lead on lean on the teleprompter it's going to be like anchorman it's going to be like qqq asdf123 you know type of thing um i mean in fairness to biden he he hasn't been napping as much as he needs to but it's just it's hard hard things that are getting done you know i mean this administration just it doesn't seem to get a lot done like and you know um whatever like the trump administration leaving trump aside there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done so uh but this this administration seems just just to not have like the drive to just get you done uh that that um that that's my it's it's that's my impression um so um you know we definitely need to fix immigration policy like we had covert which was an issue and and and so that was like one reason like not you know i guess clamp down it on but now now we've moved on and so let's let's just make sure we're getting tough talent uh in the united states um and and really i'd say broadly it's anyone who who wants to work for [ __ ] um and and uh and contribute more than they take to the economy like that's just necessarily going to make for a stronger better society in america elon did you see uh jeff's uh bezos's tweet back and forth with biden um where biden i think was talking about inflation inflation but then he correlated that to taxing corporations and bezos said this is misinformation and disinformation et cetera et cetera what do you what do you think about that whole exchange then back and forth i mean the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount more money than it had uh obviously um so it's like the government can't just uh you know have [Music] um issue checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation um you know velocity of money held constant so unless something would change with velocity of money but but it it just look the the if the federal government writes checks they don't they never bounce so that is effectively creation of more of more dollars and if if there are more dollars created than the increase in the goods and services output of the economy then you have inflation again velocity money held constant um but so uh this is just this is very basic this is not like uh you know uh super complicated um and if if the government could just issue uh massive amounts of money and have it and deficits didn't matter then why don't we just make the deficit a hundred times bigger okay the answer is you can't because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless so um and various countries have have tried this experiment multiple times it's not like oh i wonder what happens if this if if this is done yeah have you seen venezuela like the the poor people of venezuela are you know have been just run roughshod by their government um and so obviously you can't simply uh create money the the true economy is very important like the true economy is the output of goods and services it's not money it's it's literally what is the output of goods and services money is simply a way to to for us to or anything that you call money uh is is a way for us to conveniently exchange goods and services without having to engage in barter and also to shift obligations in time that those are the two reasons that you have money this thing called money it's it's really it's a database the money is an information system for uh for labor allocation and for exchange of goods and services and for translating in time and the quality of that information is a function of it's like you basically you can apply information theory to money and and i think it it helps explain why one money system is or why one action is better than another and so if like the the money you you just just like a an internet connection you'd want something that's high bandwidth uh low latency and jitter and uh is not dropping packets does not have a lot of errors in the system um and the same is true true of money um you you want then and really like you said what did paypal really really do that helped improve the the the bandwidth that the speed at which money could move um instead of of mailing checks back and forth which amazingly that was what people did uh in 2000 um uh you you could now do real-time exchange of of money um and and now you could ship your goods immediately instead of mailing a check and waiting for the bank to clear the check so uh like and and the the ultimate thing that with paypal or or if it sort of was in the x.com sort of went more less sort of niche payments more sort of broad financial would be to simply just that uh just mediate all the heterogeneous uh cobalt databases out there running on mainframes during batch processing and have a single real-time system that uh that was secure um and not batch processing um and so it would just be from an information standpoint more efficient and and eventually it would all the the batch processing cobal mainframes operated by the banks would cease to exist you've um spent more time uh and built more in china than almost anybody i mean apple would be the only company i could think of that's probably got a bigger footprint but i'm not certain of that what have you learned about china that you didn't know before you opened the factories there and started delivering cars there and what should we know about china you know as americans how should we think about china and our relationship with it because we haven't spent time there sure well i'd say like china first of all is not monolithic it's not like uh everything everything is not some plot by the chinese government um the uh the the there are many uh factions within china that compete uh vigorously within china um and uh so um and and and perhaps most important is that there's just a just a tremendous number of hard-working smart people in china who want to get ahead and get things done um and they're not complacent and they're not entitled um and they're gonna they're they want to get things done and they they want to make a better life for themselves um and what we're gonna see uh which was china for uh for the first time that anyone can remember who is alive is an economy that is twice the size of the us possibly three times the size of the us is going to be very weird living in that world so uh we we better stop the infighting in the u.s and start punching ourselves in the face because like there's a whole there's way too much uh you know of america punching itself in the damn face it's just just dumb um and and think about like hey we got to be competitive here and and uh there's a new kid on the block that's going to be two to three times our size we better step up our game um and uh you know and stop infighting um you think it's easier to stop in fighting once we're beaten or do you think that there's a way folks here can actually just you know get their political and commercial act together but or does it not happen until we've realized we've lost or do we need a war i mean we i sure hope we don't need a war um uh but there will be certainly um you know an economic competition that i think will will blow people away um when they realize just how competitive they have to be to be competitive with companies in china it's very difficult you know tesla is competitive hotels is competitive because we have an awesome team in china that uh you know so um like do your tesla china employees work some meaningful percentage more or harder than your tesla non-china employees do you find like it's two different companies basically well i mean i i think tesla is somewhat it it tells us sort of pretty far out there in terms of work ethic uh anywhere in the world so uh the tales of work ethic in the us i think is substantially greater than any other car company or or any large manufacturing company that i'm aware of so you know tesla tesla does have a a strong worth work ethic in in the u.s but but to be totally frank it it the work that work ethic is exceeded um uh on balance by uh it tells a china team that that is i think objectively true so does not say there aren't lots of hard-working people that tells the u.s they certainly are but if you say on average the the the work ethic in china is higher it's just tell us tell us what you're calling it like it is you know so what about if you're an american ceo how do you deal with do you think just the need for managing all these political factions inside of a company you probably saw you know all the sturm and wrong related to disney and what happened to them and what's continuing to happen to them on both sides between their employees as well as the governments etc um do you have any advice or what do you tell like young ceos that you hang out with about how to deal with that how to make those decisions where you land in the spectrum of dealing with all of this stuff the non-work issues that are related to now you know going to work every day i'm not sure i entirely understand what you mean like uh you know although whether it's the the need for political correctness or the need for having political points of view and having to bring that and balance that in the workplace how do you deal with that how do you give advice to other folks about having to deal with it look i think it you know the the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings it is not uh you know some political gathering place or a thing where if that's the point of a company like it's i'd say like it's you know politics and other stuff should let's not lose sight of why companies should exist um [Music] so i i i i gotta i gotta i'm i'm actually late for yeah i apologize i'm gonna work on the rocket guys uh yeah um we're gonna go ahead and let you uh get to mars and uh i'll see you soon [Music] and they've just gone crazy [Music] we need to get mercies [Music]

https://youtu.be/XP5k3ZzPf_0

Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to Starbase, Texas. Today, I'm gonna be taking you up SpaceX's launch tower, otherwise known as stage zero, with Elon Musk. We'll get the ultimate view of Starbase and learn more about just how exactly SpaceX plans to catch the world's largest flying object with giant robotic chopsticks. This is part two of our spring 2022 Starbase Tour with Elon. In the first part, we got up close and personal with the high bay and Starship prototypes. And in the next part, we'll get really in depth with Raptor 2 and Merlin rocket engines. So stay tuned. And if you happen to find this video valuable, consider dropping a "Super Thanks" as a tip below here on YouTube, or become a channel member or Patreon supporter for early access and to show your support. That being said, let's get up in there. I feel like you always talk about, you know, how you just wanna build an exciting future, a world where people get excited about stuff, wake up and wanna do cool things. And I gotta tell you standing right here, man. That's, that's pretty hard to not get excited about this. Yeah. I mean, this is pretty crazy. I mean, there's a custom built tower with arms that' are designed to catch the largest and heaviest flying object ever made and pluck it outta the air. I mean, that's the theory anyway, so. Yeah, I think it's funny people actually forget now that they're actually built to lift and stack the rocket, that cranes have such bad wind capability, but one time the booster legs were gonna weigh a lot, Elon just said, you know, delete the legs, delete. We're like, well, what is he? Like? You just, just use the arms and then say it again, and we were like, "Oh wow, he's serious?" Okay. We better get on this. And now it seems normal. Or we think at least seems plausible. Yeah. I mean, it's still super crazy but the more you talk about it... At SpaceX we specialize in converting things from impossible too late. . So, But it's pretty nutty because you're gonna have this gigantic, you know, booster coming back. I mean that's nine meters in diameter, not counting the chines, or roughly 30 feet in diameter. It'll weigh about 250 tons just a bit on the heavy side we'll make that lighter over time. Weighs about 250 now, is that what you said? This is way heavier than... I think we can get the... Well there's there's the weight at different points. So it's like say like weight when the landing tanks are full versus weight when the landing tanks are empty is also what, how much ullage mass do you have.. Dry, weight's kind of floating, you know, there's dry weight is yes. Kind of irrelative when it's actually in the air. Yeah. I mean there's several tons of air mass in the vehicle. If you just say like what's the mass of one atmosphere in that volume. It's several tons. Anyway, but I think we'll be able to get the mass well under 200 tons over time, but still pretty heavy. So you gotta like, you know, call it a couple hundred tons plummeting at you know, Let's see... well, I think our... the velocity at which we, we start up the engines is more than half the speed of sound. So this thing is still coming in really fast. Pretty much down in a downward direction. So then we light, the engines like I said, I think around Mach 0.5, give or take but it's only, you know, several hundred meters in the air, so it's gonna slow itself down very fast then, and correct any error. So like wherever the, whatever the X,Y error is when the engine's land it's gotta, take out the X,Y error and drop the last three of basically zero come in between the arms. The arms will be wide and as it's coming in, the arms will, will close go flush against the side of the vehicle and the vehicle will be descending through the arms. Those tiny little, you can barely see the little nubs, those kind of lifting lugs will touch the top of the arms and then it will hopefully not sheer off and crumple. Joe, is there anything you wanna add that, I dunno if you caught that, but I was just describing the landing sequence. Yep. That was accurate. . We really hope it doesn't hit the tower. Yeah, exactly. And especially not that launch ring, which is really difficult to make that launch ring is very complicated. We have not found a reason yet why it will not work. Yes. Success is one of the possible outcomes. The probability is uncertain, but the, it is above zero. So the part of the, you know, like the arms are off to the side. So in theory, the booster is gonna come back and then when the engines start up, it'll translate over, slow down and translate over and get in between the arms, arms need to close and when they close, they need to close in such a way that they don't crush the rocket as well. Or score it all the way up the whole thing, just , . Yeah. There's a lot of ways for this to fail. How quickly... Is it gonna close almost at the last second, like, or will it be mostly closed and there's a small tolerance there and it skirts the whole thing by, you know... It's intended to close on the methane tanks of the smooth, upper section about the top third of the rocket, and then you can keep translating down. And, and catch on those nubs that stick out the rocket. Yeah. I mean, if things are going right, it will actually look like the rocket is descending between the arms for quite a while. You know, cuz you gotta... The length of the thing is like basically around 70 meters. So you know, if you've got a descent rate of, I don't know, let's say two or three meters per second and you have, you know, 20 meters or something like that. It's okay. You're waiting for like 10 seconds. You know, So it'll actually be like actually this is taking a while . And now you gotta clear those chines too, you know, you can't have it be so close down on the... The chines will be clocked kind of away from the tower. So they won't be increasing... Oh, got it. The opposite way from the clamps. Got it. So as the, yeah, that makes sense. That's cool. But you still need to get the rocket has to still fit in between these arms. So, you know, it's still gotta come in and ... It has to center up and the arms will slew in... Yeah. ...To meet it wherever it is. So if it's off to one side, it's gonna hit one of the arms, which will be quite bad. Yeah. . yeah. . Or cook the arm or, you know, a bunch of bad things can happen. It's just insane though. I mean, it looks big from far away, but it looks even bigger when you're underneath it and you start to see almost the atmospheric distortion and the hazE make it fade into the distance there. Yeah. I'm told this is the tallest thing south of San Antonio. Yeah. Because I think the other tallest was on South Padre. They have the hotel was the other tallest thing in the whole area here, so. And that's quite a bit taller. Actually booster and rocket are almost identical. At least the 120 meter version was like exactly the size of the Sapphire over there. So people need to know what that feels like. Just go up in the Sapphire and know that's how big this rocket is. , which is insane to think about. Obviously you're not too worried about like the Human Landing System right now, compared to just getting things into orbit. But how is that has any of that stuff solidified yet? Like any of the Human Landing System? Uh, well, I mean, there's a lot of sort of design done on the computer level, but and there's some hardware, but, and our focus is getting to orbit, you know, if we can... Because human landing won't work without getting to orbit obviously. Yeah. We need Starship to get to orbit 'cause it's the only thing that can carry the Starlink 2.0 satellites. So, we've already produced the first, and we have on site, the first Starlink 2.0 satellite and it's seven meters long and Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0. So even if we shrunk the Starlink 2.0 satellite down, the total up mass of Falcon is not nearly enough to do Starlink 2.0. How heavy does one version 2.0 weigh? Well it's, it's about one and a quarter tons. There's so volumetrically huge that. Um, but if you just say like there's... A lot of people talk a lot about how many launches per year there are to orbit, but this is not really what matters. I think what really matters is what's the total useful payload to orbit per year. Cause otherwise you could say if this were ocean ships, you'd be like comparing a dinghy to a super tanker and it's like, they're not the same. For a satellite constellation, the thing that really matters is what is your total useful max mass flux to orbit. You know, so mass, you know, mass to orbit. So we need Starship to work and to fly frequently or Starlink 2.0 will be stuck on the ground. Wow. So that's your big motivator at this point is like get these things going. I assume because they're bigger will there have to be fewer of those to service the same amount of like area? Like is it gonna be, is version two gonna be in a higher orbit, servicing more people like with per satellite or is it just bigger so it has higher capacity, more bandwidth, more like all of that, I guess, compared to version one? Um, the Starlink 2.0 satellites are almost an order of magnitude more capable than Starlink 1.0. Bandwidth wise or total like throughput. I just think of it like how many useful bits of data can each satellite do Starlink 2.0 in terms of useful bits of data is almost an order of magnitude, better than a Starlink 1.0. Are those different user terminals too, compared to...? The user terminals are on a separate upgrade path. Although user terminals will work with Starlink 1.0. or Starlink 2.0 satellites, but the Starlink 2.0s are just much more capable. Um, is it possible to go up in the tower, and do some or...? Um, I don't know. Can we go up in the tower? Is the elevator working? As long as the generator gone? Yeah. I can fire it up. Okay. I mean just might not be a bad place to watch a sunset at this point. Yeah. Where are y'all going to? Men's department! I guess we could stop at the QD arm and then, you know, then continue up. That will be and then... Yeah. This views gonna be insane. I can already get little sneak peaks through the... Danggg. Wow, this is epic. This is so epic. We're not even at the top. . Better enough. It's worth. This is where the QD arm is. Oh, hey. The top has a better view. Look at how beefy all this stuff is though. Yeah. I mean, this is insane, custom designed gigantic hardware. I mean it's hard to believe this is real. It genuinely is. Oh man. Geez. That's... It's quite the view. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. We're even above the booster even right now. And we are in the sky. We can't even see South Padre. Oh, wow. Yeah. Really hazy. Well, should we go up? Yeah. . Even better when there's a vehicle on the OLM. Oh, I know. I know. I can't imagine. Up close and personal. You gotta come back. Oh yeah. I missed the one... I came out here I think the day after you guys stacked. Well, I guess I came out for last event, but I think they stacked on like the 4th or not, don't know something. I don't what day it was. I was like next day. That's right. Emergency escape ladder thing? You can hand crank all the way down if you really lost power. I maybe want to do that once. It'd probably take like an hour. I feel like you... Holy crap. We're really getting up here though. The craziest thing to me is that none of this was here a year ago. You know, that's just hard to fathom is like, especially if you were out here three years ago and saw quite literally nothing but a field and a little R2D2 man. Wow, look at that. I mean it's far down there. If this isn't surreal. I don't know what is. Yeah, totally. It's insane. I mean, the Ship looks small from here. The ship looks tiny from here. Even people are like tiny. It's like, "Whoa". How tall is this again at this point? 143 Meters at the top. Or about 138 maybe? Oh my God. And look at how how hazy even the production site is right now. Yeah. This is not a good place if you have a fear of heights, that's for sure. You better go get over 'em real quick. Yeah. We should get like a hang glider and jump off or something. That'd be sweet. . You could sell rides as a zip line over to the High Bay. You could probably zip line pretty far. I can't believe how small the boosters look from here even. That just looks... It looks so fake right now. This is insane. And just, we how's that feel? Whoa. Vertigo. Oh my God. You see the ocean out there. We really lucked out on the on the night. The Gulf, I guess Insane. It is insane. . It is gorgeous. I think this is the time to be philosophical almost. It's just so inspiring out here, you know, it's... Do you, I mean, in your heart of hearts, like in the very depths of your soul, do you really believe this is like the start of making human Multi-planetary? I believe we have... I think for the first time it is possible. There's a possible outcome to make life multi-planetary. The key to making life multi planetary is a fully reusable rocket. That's the key. So full and rapid reusability, like an aircraft. So it's just very hard to achieve full reusability given the strength of Earth's gravity field and the density of the atmosphere. Full reusability would be, well, like relatively easy on Mars which has around 37-38% of Earth's gravity and about 1% atmospheric density. It's just barely possible to achieve reusability on Earth. Like it's not as though, you know, all the, the rocket engineers in the past.. It's not as though reusability never occurred to them. They, I mean, they're well aware of aircraft and other things. It's just that it's an incredibly difficult technical problem and they just thought it was impossible or the probability of success was so low that it was not worth doing. I feel like you almost had a bit of a Noah's Ark-esque you know, if you're gonna get Biblical, aspect at the last talk was saying how, you know, if you care about life and the true continuation of life on Earth and continuation of life as a consciousness, then you have to have a sustained planet, you know, another sustained planet off of Earth. Exactly. I mean, I think you know, if you think really long term, then you realize that eventually there will be some natural disaster even if it is not made by humans that destroys all life on Earth. So eventually the sun will expand and evaporate the oceans and and will be like Venus you know, just so hot that no life can really exist or maybe some chemotrophic bacteria, but eventually even they will, they will die. So the only way to prolong life, as we know it is for us to become multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar. And if we do not do that all life on Earth will die. So those who care about life on Earth should really care a lot about life becoming multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar. Well, I think there's a lot of people get attached to this idea that for some reason, you know, SpaceX or other aerospace companies are trying to escape Earth and escape Earth's problems. And I think you put it into a really good perspective that, you know, currently specifically like NASA's budgets, you know, 0.3% of the, you know, of the federal budget and then let alone, you know, the entire cost of how much we're investing so far in, you know, making, you know, getting humans off of Earth and protecting our planet even with asteroid defense and stuff is still relatively small. I think people don't understand that the... Oh yeah. So the Earth does not currently have any ability to stop asteroids now with Starship that we then have some ability to stop an asteroid. Actually, technically a comet would be the real danger because there are billions if not more than billions, maybe trillions of objects that are in the outer solar system some of them with that are very long period comments. An example that most people are probably aware of is Halley's Comet. So I forget the exact period is today but it's slightly under once per century that Halley's comment comes by. So there are probably many objects, many comments that have very long periods that we simply don't know exist and for example, the comet Shoemaker-Levy when that hit Jupiter, it made a hole in Jupiter, the size of Earth. So if that did hit Earth, that's "Game Over" everything's dead. So anyways, there's always some risk of such a thing occurring and the probable lifespan of life is just much greater if we're a multi-planet and ultimately multi-stellar civilization. Well, I think people also don't tend to realize that it's not a zero sum game, that if we're working on rockets and space flight and aerospace technology and all of these things, life support for these things, it's not just that you, you know, as company spend a hundred million dollars on a rocket and that a hundred million dollars went into space, it's that a hundred million went into the economy, you know, invested in our own technology, our terrestrial technology, you know. Look at all the spinoffs of NASA and what, you know, what NASA had done in the 60s and 70s to create the society that we live in today. You know, I mean, I think people are shortsighted sometimes on, you know, on the implications that you don't immediately see those things that you don't immediately grasp, because we they're just kind of unknowns at this point, you know? I mean, in general, the you know, the economy is very much a positive sum game, a kind of a growing the pie situation. When people examine their understanding or beliefs of the economy, if they have an implicit assumption that the economy is zero sum, then the only way for one person to get ahead is by taking things from another. But obviously the economy today is much, much greater than it was in the past. And we have the economic output per person is massively greater than the past. And so obviously what has happened is that the pie has grown and has grown much faster than the population has grown. You know, essentially if one creates wealth or creates great products and services that, that is something that should be applauded. That is, we've effectively increased the standard of living of, you know, of the country and perhaps of the world. The, you know, and sometimes people will conflate or you know, essentially they think of consumption and wealth as the same thing, but they're obviously not the same thing. You know, this is sort of a long argument of sort of capital allocation is a job consumption is fun, but capital allocation is a job. So anyway, I don't think a ton of people want say Warren Buffet's job, which is to read through very tedious annual reports of companies, including the minutia of the accounting and decide whether to invest in Coke or Pepsi. I don't want that job. . I think aerospace in general kind of still follows the same, like, you know, if back in the day at one point, no one had electricity, running water, air conditioning, all of modern life's conveniences. And of course at first it started off as something that only a few people could get. And now it's, you know, a pretty common standard of living across the world. And, you know, you gotta start somewhere, same with air travel, you know? Yeah. Exactly air travel used to be accessible to almost no-one, to very few people. It was insanely expensive and dangerous. And now it is commonplace to fly somewhere. TVs used to be rare and expensive. And then, you know, big flat screen, plasmas used to be extremely expensive. And now you can buy, you know, go to Walmart and buy an amazing flat screen plasma for 500 bucks. It's amazing. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Oh man. I don't wanna end the conversation on Walmart plasmas, but at the same time . Yeah. Wow. It's a hell of a lot of progress. I mean, again, not to bring up the past, but three years ago, I think the first time I ever came out here was March, 2019. So almost exactly three years ago. And all you had was little hoppy. He had just made it out here and was starting to do some of the initial static firing. That was that was three years ago. That's amazing that the, the hopper is still there. Yeah. Looking over us, all the grandfather, we all need. Yeah. But even, I mean, even the tank farm was like three tanks of those smaller, you know, for the first test, it was so tiny and there was literally just a dirt mound and three tanks. And now, you know, it's and there was a tent out there and that was about it. Yeah. The propellant storage for the whole vehicle was actually, that was a really, that was a quite difficult, just put a lot of effort into the propellant storage. How? So if you have to scrub, if you're trying to do like the first static fires and stuff, how long does it take to recycle because you're probably... What's that look like? Because you have to drain the propellants back into the tanks and say, you have to come out here and wrench on something and you know, you have 33 engines that all have to work harmoniously. What's a scrub and recycle look like with this system right now? Well, first is gonna take us long time to scrub and recycle, but over time it should be very fast and we really shouldn't be scrubbing. It should just take off for it's like a normal thing. Yeah. But I mean, obviously the first, the first booster static fires will be probably... Yeah, no, I mean, it is gonna be very bumpy at first. I mean, for Falcon 9 in the beginning we'd have like a dozen recycles, like we'd scrub the launch like a dozen times. I mean, for a while there I was living out at the Cape, basically just working on, getting the damn rocket to take to, you know, getting all nine engines to start and take off and, and 'cause we would just have one launch abort after another. And I brought the kids with me and I went to, went to DisneyWorld a lot and Harry Potter land. Thanks again to Elon for all of your generous time and thanks to Ryan Chylinski with Cosmic Perspective, for helping to capture and share this conversation. And I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make this and everything we do at Everyday Astronaut possible. If you want to help support us, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut and while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome merch store for shirts like this, the RD-171 shirt and lots of other cool nerdy rocket stuff at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.