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 gonna be in for a fascinating discussion this morning. If you think about our university and what makes it unique, it is that bold entrepreneurial 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, 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 STBP 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 far thinking individuals, Elon Musk and Steve Jervisin. Steve is a Stanford alum and a partner at Draper Fisher Jervisin. He was recently hailed 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 RJ 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 twenty first 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 Queen's University in Canada before moving to The US, 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 it the food, the water, the weather? No. He left to launch his first startup. Zip2, a successful internet based city guide. 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 Moda and now leads the company as its CEO and product architect. But Elon 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 gonna 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 Jermansson.
Thank you President Hennessy and this is a daunting venue. I feel like we should sing or something. Dance perhaps. Wow. Okay. So Future Fest. Today is all about the future and 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 perhaps unprecedented in history. So I'm a big fanboy. Future Fest, originally, 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 when 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 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 cockamamie. But 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 where we'll start and then move to the future. We're sitting here today, what do we think the future may bode. So turn to Elon maybe as a as a as a starting point, as you think back to your high school days, thirty years ago when we were both there and dreaming of that future, what about today is or isn't in accordance with what you thought back then? I mean, where where have your dreams of the future, the bold visions met or not met reality today?
Well, I think the 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 it's having a supercomputer in your pocket is, I think, something people wouldn't have predicted, you know, in Back to the Future. Yeah. So that that's the that's the biggest thing. And and probably the the the what they would be most surprised at is that we haven't progressed more in space. Mhmm. So the people would have expected, I think, to have a space hotel. In fact, the Otzi Clark 02/2001, I should have. Yeah. Exactly. But 2010 was really crazy, you know, as a space advancement. So we would like be going to Jupiter and that kind of thing. So, that's probably like the most surprising thing. Like, particularly if you go back even further, if you say in '69 when people first landed on the moon, if you'd ask people if you'd ask the the public what what would the situation be in 2015, I think they would imagine that we're we we would have a base on the moon, a base on Mars, and be, you know, all over the solar system by now. Mhmm. That's probably the biggest thing.
But 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 is there some reason you think? Like, as you because because we have dreams today of where the know, that we're gonna have these Mars colonies in the near future and unless something jumps to mind. Let me let me have a bunch of questions by the way from the audience as well here. Wanna I wanna move to something a little more current as we move forward in time. Twenty years ago, when we first met, you were starting your first Internet company of two, the one before PayPal, Zip two. And I know that in your youth, you envisioned a variety of industries that needed to change. When you were pursuing your first one, did you imagine you would get to the next one and the next one?
No. Mean, 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 there would be, like, the Internet and sustainable energy, making like multi planetary, then genetics and AI. And I thought the first three, if you worked on those, they were like almost certainly going to be good. And then the the the last two, a little more dodgy.
In terms of the net benefit?
Yeah. It's for the double edged sword and you're
not sure which edge is the worse. Interesting. So it would it seems like begging the question, are genetics and AI the ones that are ripe for students today to be thinking about as they look at the future?
I mean, they are.
My
cousin, my younger cousin who's just finishing up physics and computer science degree, actually, Berkeley.
We need we know.
And and he's he says everyone there is in the computer science department is working on AI. So, I mean, I think we're gonna see some crazy breakthroughs in in the next few years on that front.
Yeah. I wanna 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 and 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 gotcha. But it's just in terms of how to how to think about a life trajectory perhaps or how to pursue your passions.
I mean, I'm reasonably happy with how things turned out. So it's like
Touche.
Not terrible.
Yeah. That's a good point.
I think if there's anything
I'll let you if something jumps to mind, let me know. But let me
I mean, apart from the obvious, like, just telling telling my younger self exactly how the future will unfold, which is. Right. But but that that, you know, wouldn't be that that that's not exactly a vibe.
More has been encapsulated into non like, I'm warping wisdom. Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. Like, wisdom. I I mean, I mean, there's there's there's a lot of things. I mean, it's sort of I mean, certainly yeah. I mean, you know, listen listen more to critical feedback. 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. And
you applied that broadly?
Yeah. Applying the first principles approach to thinking is, I think, a good way to figure out the counterintuitive situations. And, you know, so I thought that was that was really a helpful thing to learn.
That's good.
Yeah. I mean Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.
No. No. Yeah. Feel free to jump in because I I don't know how I'd answer that question. I mean Yeah. What would you do? What would you tell your
younger self?
It'll be alright. You weren't as dorky as you think. You know, 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. It would probably be advice to myself. But but let's move on. I'm not used to thinking about me. 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 companies. So for example, when trying to negotiate with the Russians for launch capacity, the that we should just build a better rocket to solve this problem comes forth. Or when you deal with the commute on the 405 or whatever in LA, it's like, my god, what is wrong with mass transit and and perhaps hyperloop and then, you know, with with with a variety of ideas. There seems to be some trigger. Something that's broken in the world that and 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?
Yeah. I mean, well, if if sort of follow the what what I did initially was, you know, well, you go back to, like, college times. I was working on energy storage technologies for electric vehicles.
Mhmm.
And that's what I was gonna pursue at Stanford, actually, was work on, like, advanced capacitors and batteries to improve the energy density for electric vehicles. And then the Internet was kinda happening. It was clear like the Internet was happening, like, back in, like, '94, '95. And 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
I Why? Timing or what was your intuition?
Meaning, I think, like, could be academically useful, but not practically useful. Like, I think it could result in a PhD and adding some leaf to the tree of knowledge, but then discovering that, well, it's not really gonna matter. Like, that's you know, is is it gonna be a a good enough thing to actually be used in electric vehicle? I wasn't sure. I mean, it was like I was uncertain as to whether success was one of the possible outcomes. Like, thought maybe it was, but I wasn't sure. And and then I thought, well, if I watch the Internet get built while I'm doing this, 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 Yeah. The other stuff could wait or be on the back Yeah. Back of your mind? Was it always there as, one day I'll get back to that? Or was it
Yeah. I thought probably I'd get back to it and did did end up doing that. But yeah. I thought sort of the the Internet was was happening, like really taking off, although most people weren't aware of it in '95. And and so I I figured, like, electric vehicle technology, energy storage technology, there be some sort of natural progression in that, and I could come back to it later. But the Internet, you know, was was really that was the moment to to really do something. Although, in in '95, it wasn't obvious that you could actually make any money on the Internet. This was like, no nobody until Netscape went public, I think, the '95, nobody even thought there was like, 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. So, was really from the perspective of it wasn't like, oh, I wanna make a bunch of money. It was actually from it was like, oh, I wanna just be a part of fulfilling this thing that I thought was like a nervous system. Was like previously, people had communicated effectively by osmosis. And, you know, you'd have to, like, basically, physically connect with somebody to to really communicate. You know, like, a letter. Like, you'd send letters, like, raw 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 humanity was effectively becoming a super organism and and qualitatively different than what it had been before. And so I wanted to be part of that. And yeah. So but but initially, the goal was just to make enough money to pay the rent. It wasn't, you know, to do anything beyond that.
Interesting. And then as many know that much of that capital then got plod back into your next businesses.
Right. Right. Exactly. The exactly. So then they and 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. Just had a bunch of student debt. And so this but but software, you can just write, like, by yourself, and you don't need a lot of atoms. Like, you don't need lot of tooling and equipment and so it's like capital intensive. So the ability to start a company if it's software related and it's the first company is much, much easier. Right.
And Yeah. It seems obvious now, but of course, the easier place to start and then as you gain more of a personal reputation and have more personal capital. As as some may, mean, I know SpaceX was almost was entirely funded by Elon for its first period partially from, you know and and in an era when others probably wouldn't have funded it. Right? And those are the days.
And actually, I mean, precursor to to SpaceX was not the the idea wasn't really to create a company. It was It was to try to figure out why we hadn't gone and sent people to Mars. So we went from Subtube to PayPal then going from PayPal to sort of the next thing, was sort of thinking, is there some way to reignite the dream of Apollo? And I thought, well, it was maybe a question of, like we'd lost the will to explore it. But I actually think that my original premise was wrong. We had not lost the will to explore, but people did not think there was a way. If people don't think there's a way, then they they won't bash their head against the wall continuously. They'll, you know, sort of give up. In the beginning, I thought it was a question of will. So if we can send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars 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. People tend to respond to precedents and supporters. And this would be the first life on Mars as far as we knew, whether that life's ever traveled. You 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 catalyze action.
And actually, the goal was to get the public excited about that and get NASA's budget increased. So that was actually the original goal. So I went to Russia to try to buy some ICBMs in 2001. It was an interesting experience. A lot of vodka. Yeah. A lot of vodka. Yeah. It's crazy. I couldn't afford the regular rockets like the Boeing and Lockheed rockets are too expensive. And Still are. Yes. Still very expensive. That's true.
I had to. Sorry. Wait. May I 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 and whether it's popular uprising or 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 wanna 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 Powerwall and SolarCity arguably, the the description is one of assuring 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 like 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?
Sure. I should say when we started SpaceX and Tesla, I really thought the probability of success was very low. It wasn't like, I think, oh, we'll definitely be successful. I thought it would be like maybe 10% likely. Well Yeah. And we came very close to both companies not succeeding in 2008. We had three failures of the SpaceX rocket. So we were zero for three. We had the crazy financial recession, like the Great Recession. The Tesla financing round had fallen apart because it's pretty hard to raise money for a startup car company if GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt.
It's partly for the upside.
Yeah, that was a tricky one. You know, And unfortunately, at the 2008, the the fourth launch, which is that was the last launch we had money for, worked for SpaceX, and and then we we closed the Tesla financing round, as you know, Christmas Eve two thousand and eight, 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 and everything changed from, you know, divotting into the ground to success. But you were willing to go, like, net negative personally of of his entire net worth, and it's it's a remarkable story.
Thanks for supporting by the way. That was much Yeah. Much appreciated.
Yeah. We were happy to fall right behind in line but but it was all him. So I guess this idea though of the big picture, I'm curious in the way I heard you just now describe the greenhouse in the headlines is interesting. Do the marketing headlines flash through your mind as you introduce new products that are a step to a much grander vision? I'm 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.
Well well, I mean, you're trying to convince the public to do something, you have to say, okay, how's this gonna read? And what message are we gonna 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 so that's that's really, if you're trying to change people's minds or get people fired up about something, then you've got to think, okay, what's that message? What's gonna get them really excited?
And that's really good advice, by way, for all the engineering students
Yeah.
Here. I was one as well. I'm I'm curious there's a as an adjunct sometimes to these grand visions like making humanity a multiplanetary 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, there was a Tesla quarterly report, I remember famously, where the opening the literally opening line was, while profits are not a priority, comma, you know, nevertheless. So. Nevertheless. Exactly. Yeah. And and it occurred I was struck by it at first and and it did occur to me that it's not like a miss some sort of misdirected fiduciary question. To me, seems like how could you lead an industry transition if your business model was worse than what's already there? Meaning, like, 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 if you make a if if if the, if the output is more valuable than the inputs, which is really that's profit, like the output is more valuable than the input, that says you have a useful company. So in a high growth scenario, you have a lot more inputs for future outputs so that you have negative cash flow and lack of profitability, which we currently have at Tesla. But in the long term, of course, that has to be fixed. There 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 the long term. But in the short term, when there's high growth, 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 so I'm curious, what do you see from your vantage 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 the benefits for the company?
Well, I think think having a purpose certainly is going to attract the very best talent in the world because if can if there's something that's intrinsically enjoyable and the financial rewards are good, but then also it's something that's gonna genuinely change the world, then that's I think that's a pretty powerful motivator. And 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 I mean, I think really it should be like a usefulness optimization. Like, just say, is is what I'm doing as useful as it could be?
You're talking about the the goal of an organization or
A goal in general. Yeah. And, you know, just even if something isn't changing the world, if it's make making people's lives better, think that's that's great. And, you know, if even if something's like making people's lives only slightly better, but it's a large number of people, then kind of like the area under the curve is quite good.
So is that mathematical first principle's a point? Utility and number Exactly. Yeah. Okay.
Like, I mean, because so like one could say like is like some app really making people's lives better? But if it's affecting a lot of people, even in a small way, then, yeah, the the sort of area is good.
Interesting. So let's shift gears a little bit since it is Futurefest. Looking to the future. Right? We we started thirty years in the past, but the future keeps accelerating. So let's maybe look twenty years in the future for an equivalent leap. Arguably, five years in the future might be equivalent to the past thirty, but let's say twenty. So the year 2035, what does the future look like as far as you can tell? What would you '20. Twenty. Yeah. 2035. Yeah. Twenty years.
It's always really tricky to predict the future. I mean, some of it's pretty obvious. Like, computing power is gonna be just crazy. And and the the really the big change is the cost of computing power. Mhmm. Not so much the sort of circuit density, sort of the Moore's Law thing. But if you look at, say, what is the actual dollars per instruction, and I mean, cost is dropping exponentially. I mean, if think about it like if you're making a computer, you're rearranging silicon and copper, so on a little chip. And once the capital cost of the development and the chip plant is paid for, act I mean, the the marginal cost of a chip is very, very tiny. So I think we'll massively parallel computers and and computing power and storage being, you know, as really as much as you want. Mhmm.
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 in fields like genetics and AI, which you mentioned, autonomous driving, space related topics?
I mean, just ubiquitous computing everywhere. Think AI is gonna be incredibly sophisticated in twenty years. When does it first take up? It seems to be accelerating, and the tricky thing about predicting things when there's an exponential is that an exponential looks like looks linear close-up. And and but it's actually it's not linear. So AI appears to be accelerating, from what I can see.
And do you for that, do you look at autonomous driving and point AIs, like the CRE like functionality, as your guidepost?
Well, had sort of a debate about something like, is AI accelerating or not? And he was saying, well, what's the y axis? If it's accelerating, you've t on the x axis, but what's the y axis? Well, I thought about that. I think you could have a recursive y axis so that if at any point in time your predictions for AI are coming sooner or later, that actually would help define whether it's accelerating or not.
Whatever that axis was. So you mentioned it's It's a a
reverse of axis. Like so if in any given year, if you find your predictions are going further out or coming further or coming closer in, that actually one way to think of acceleration. Because otherwise, what's the qualitative or quantitative measure of AI?
I was saying, given technology is always twenty years in the future.
Yeah, if it's always twenty years in the future, it's like more logarithmic.
So does AI seem like it's one of the most fastly accelerating things that you're aware of?
Yes. And I can certainly see that with autonomous driving where three years ago, I thought it was ten years away. And then 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, and when you say away, like released to market, available for consumer adoption as opposed to prototyping?
No. Mean, like technology works. There's a sort of second question as to when regulators would approve it. Yeah, yeah. But but like Yeah. Good luck with that. The works in in a the technology works as a general solution. So like Gotcha. Autonomous driving, like, basically So
it could be sooner for point things, highway only or
In highway only, we're already in public beta with this at Tesla. So, 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 booked in, like, roughly the last twelve months. Wow. Wow.
And so this seems like one of those things that once you've experienced it, the inevitability of it becomes more apparent. Kinda like first time I sat in an electric vehicle, it's just so clear and same with autonomous vehicles. Do you think that will help persuade public opinion and like like like the regulatory question is an interesting one because as 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?
Yeah. I mean, there's Yeah. I think there's always going to be human nature. It's difficult to predict, I think, how that will affect things. But I'm not sure if I fully answered your question, so in terms of what I think 2020 Oh,
yeah, please.
So for sure, ubiquitous computing, AI that's beyond anything like the public appreciates today. I think we'll have most of the new vehicles being produced, being electric, and we'll probably have the super majority of energy being produced, being sustainable. So I think we're headed to Solar
primarily in your
mind? Primarily solar, yeah. So I think those are sort of some good things. I think we'll be hopefully on a good path for sustainable energy. Sooner is always better, I think by 2035, I think we'll be substantially like most of transport, most of new energy being produced will be sustainable.
Broadband everywhere?
Broadband everywhere, yeah.
Mars colony?
And hopefully a small base on Mars or a small city on Mars in twenty years, yeah. City
did I hear?
Okay, fine. Town. Village. Hamlet. I
mean, that's exciting. I mean, that could get people fired up about the future.
Yeah. I I do. I I agree. Exactly. I I think that the idea of being a multi family 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 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 right. And and I think that's true of of if 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, why get 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 any other things that excites you a lot about the future beyond the multiplanetary species, perhaps AI, hopefully may scare you, as well as excite you. The autonomous vehicles, are there any other planks that you think looking forward twenty years would be like, this is what I really get excited about?
Well, I mean, for sure Mars and sustainable transport and like those items, think are really sustainable energy. Those are, I think, really cool things. And I mean, in terms of getting excited about it, I mean, it's I I think we'll probably start seeing, like, more, like, truly cyborg activity, like human brain inter like like like brain computer interfaces.
Okay. There's Alongside the AIs that are purely Yeah. Empathetic?
Yeah. I think so.
It's the only way we can relate, I think, you know, and have a conversation. Yeah.
And 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 rats and monkeys. And now they're looking at doing that to solve severe epilepsy. About half of severe epilepsy cases originate in the hippocampus. And and by having sort of an artificially augmented hiccup hippocampus, they can actually solve the severe epilepsy cases. Wow. That's amazing. So it's it's like I'm like, wow. And you can you can write 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 fascinated me personally as a as a computer science oriented person. Before I go to the student questions, 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 mean, I brought I brought the SpaceX board out to take a look at one of the vertical takeoff and landing tests and, of course, that's the one that blows up.
And we're all in a tent, you know, like the glass of Wow. I mean, you feel the repercussions and walking through
the like a steam ride. It's a rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's right.
A ride. Yes. Rapid unscheduled disassembly. Anyone in a rocketry, like a hobbyist or or professionally knows what that one is. Every component part is just strewn strewn across. And we as we walked, one of the other board members asked and maybe they 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. It's a paraphrase of the quote. And I remember your reply, and I have it written as a quote because I wanna 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 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.
I mean, are there are many that sort of I mean, I think there's sort of there's like some entropic basis for this. Like, there are many more more ways to fail than to succeed. So you I mean, you have to explore mean, particularly, like, for a rocket, there's like a thousand ways to think and fail and, one way it can work. So you could you could have a lot of rocket failures to explore all the ways in which you could fail. So but 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, that's okay. Like, you can learn from that and 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 if either on the well, seems to me that on the system design side, can accommodate a likely failure of subcomponents and so much of the elegance of, let's say, a Falcon Nine or a Falcon Nine 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 inter like in managerially, is there ways that you motivate the team either in advance of failure to to coach them on, hey, this is gonna happen, or in the aftermath of failure to get them fired up to solve it and and move forward when it might be dark times. Like, for example, when you the notion like failure to launch, 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. I'm curious how you manage a round failure.
I I mean, it I think it's it's, like, quite quite painful and difficult, honestly, and it's it feels terrible. But, yeah, I mean, the the the company is sort of looking to, you know, me to, you know, rally them and so I do. But I honestly feel super bad.
Like a punch in the gut. Yeah. Yeah. I remember it's almost like a time like the stages of grief. I remember in Texas is kinda like sort of denial and then sort of hits us at dinner. It's like, oh my god. What just happened?
Yeah. I mean, it's just I mean, it it's particularly with rockets, it's it's just a really, like a rockets, space is hard, and rockets tend to fail, unfortunately. And even when you've got a lot of really smart people working super hard to minimize the probability of failure, it's it's still there and it's and it's, you know, it's it's quite significant. And, you know, people have asked me, like, well, why why are rockets, you know, especially hard? And and the the you know, part of it is like everything has to work the first time. You can't do a recall, you can't patch it, it's like nine minutes to orbit or it's over. You can never test the rocket completely in the environment that it's actually going to experience. You can't fully recreate something that's moving super fast in a vacuum on the surface of Earth. You can only really recreate that in space.
Is that a limit of the simulation tools?
Sorry?
Is that a limit of the simulation tools today or is that a full Absolutely.
If there's any error between the simulation and reality, and there's always some amount of error, then that that can result in a failure.
Yep.
So it's a really really tricky one. It's like, in a 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 gonna run on.
Gotcha.
Then you put them put all the modules together, run it for the first time in a 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. Modular reuse, I mean, there's many of these. For those who aren't familiar, it's not like this is an aerospace engineer by traditional training coming, 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, a computer scientist or a physicist approach the problem, which oftentimes is a solution very unlike the industry incumbents. There's a certain elegance to it, at least from the outside, an outside observer like myself. Let me switch, if I may, to some student questions, which will be completely in a different direction. First one comes from Nick Zhu in an architectural design co term. So this will 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.
I mean, I I think there's, I mean, you you you wanna make something beautiful. I mean, you want to to trigger whatever fundamental aesthetic algorithms are like, in in your brain, there's You have, I think, some intrinsic elements that represent beauty and that trigger the emotion of appreciation of beauty in your mind. And I think that these are these are actually relatively consistent among people. I mean, not not completely. Some people like not everyone likes the same thing, but there are there's a lot of commonality. Yeah. But I think it is important to combine aesthetic design with functionality. Like, the thing that's like, you say, like, what was really hard about, say, the Model S or the Model X was to combine aesthetics and utility, so to balance the two. You can make a car look very good by giving it of certain proportions, like making it sort of low and slim. But 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 wanna have sort of 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 think we should take the whole family on the spacecraft. But but but that like, the big challenge with the like, with with the s was having a car that had a high utility and looked good, and the same with the x. 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. I think another principle is you want to have it feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. And that's also a really hard thing to do. And then, really pay attention to the little details. The nuances of design and shape and form and function and the way it looks in different lights.
When something's off, the little thing, how do you experience that?
It drives me bananas. Yeah. 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. Although this is a very much double edged sword because then you see all the little details and then little things drive you crazy. Like most people don't, they consciously see the small details but they do subconsciously see them. Your mind takes in a gestalt of an overall impression and you know if something is appealing or not, even though you may not be able to point out exactly why. And it's it's a summation of of these many small details.
So most of us experience it as a, oh, think that's ugly or I think that's beautiful or like, wow, that's elegant, but
Yeah.
Can't break it down. You mentioned something in passing, like, can train yourself in this though?
Yeah. You can train yourself, I think. You can make yourself pay attention to to why, you're essentially bringing the subconscious awareness into conscious awareness.
God, wish I could do that. How do you do that?
Just just pay really close attention.
Almost like a meditation on the object, and trying to find the details. Like, why do I not like this? Is that what
Yeah. Just look look closely and carefully. Mhmm. And, you know, for any given object, it's that it's it's geometry. It's
I heard someone whisper Steve Jobs, and that thought occurred to me as well. I worked briefly with him, and I I could only experience as a visceral agitation with imperfection. And and like, that's just wrong. Like, that has to be fixed.
I I I have to turn it off. Otherwise, it can go through life. It just yeah. It's It's
The the world around you or even in
Yeah. Yeah. If you because there's there's always something wrong somewhere all the time. And so it you 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 this running tally. Right? Oh my god. So let me go to one other question. I I found that one interesting. I I had no idea where that was gonna go, so I really appreciate that question, Nick. Thank you. Let's see. Which one of these do I there's some combination of questions. Let me mention both, you can pick which one you like more because they both relate to colonizing Mars. One comes from Henning Rodell, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering, which just asks, Elon, given your plan to bring bring a million colonists to Mars, what are the pressing future technologies that need to develop in order to support a robust and thriving surface colonies? 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 if
you Sure.
Had to think about that yet.
I thought a little bit about those things. I mean, the obviously, the first challenge is just getting there at all. SpaceX is working super hard on figuring out just how to get large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. Think we've got something that I think works at a fundamental physics and economics level, so it's a question of figuring out the detailed design, which we're working on. We're only spending like half an hour a week on it because we're pressing near term priorities, but I'm kind of excited about how it's coming together. So just getting that transport thing solved, I think, will then open up a tremendous number of opportunities for people on Mars. Just like having the Union Pacific Railroad to California you know, and and and look at what what, you know, resulted
System of other companies figuring out what are
you gonna do there, then you get the the opportunities for entrepreneurs are are tremendous. 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 gotta do it, and it'll be kinda cool. You know, like an iron refinery, you know, like a resource foundry, know, like the entire base of industry. And then there'll probably be things that are just unique to Mars.
But
we've got to get that, effectively, Union Pacific Railroad there in order to get the entrepreneurs there and then create a fertile environment for them to create companies. So once you're there, it's going to be, I think, a lot of exciting things that can be done. And in the beginning, people would live in kind of glass domes, but over time, it would terraform Mars and make it like Earth. And I think there'd just be a lot of super exciting things that are hard to predict, just like when they're building Union Pacific, they it would hard nobody would have predicted Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
Right.
You know, that that's would have been
like And urbanization in general.
Yeah. And, you know. Well, that California would be like the the most populous state in the country. They'd be like, that sounds crazy.
For them gold is discovered, right?
Yeah. So, think it's really incumbent on SpaceX or maybe other organizations to figure out how to get there. Otherwise, nothing else matters. Then once you get there, there's a lot that can be done. From a governance standpoint, obviously, ultimately, the governance of Mars will be up to the Martians. The
We have a name for them. We become a Martian when you go there.
But I think if you said, like, how would you do Democracy two point zero, you know, or like some of the new version, I think we'd probably have more of a direct democracy than a representative democracy. And, you know, when The United States was formed, really impossible to have a direct democracy. Like, sending a letter took weeks. So there was no way that people could vote directly on issues. You had to have representatives.
Interesting.
So I think probably there would be more direct democracy.
And is this thing about the latency of communication
from Yeah, there's communication latency, same. Communication errors and communication latency, when you have letters that take weeks to get anywhere, have made governance almost impossible, I think, if it hadn't been a representative democracy. You had a lot of people who couldn't even read or write, 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 on one side? Right?
Yes. It's difficult to predict, but I can say, like, I think probably we would aim for a more direct democracy. And then I and and I was talking to Larry Page about this and he had a like a good suggestion, like, should limit the number of words in the law. Because like we have these like thousand page laws that get passed 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't if you can't write the law in a thousand words, then probably it shouldn't be there. And, you know, just we we shouldn't have, you know, a a single law passed that's like the size of Lord of the Rings. That's right. And and like literally not a single person in congress has read the whole thing.
Like the tax code, it's unscrewable.
Yes, exactly. So does that and I think laws also have an infinite lifespan unless they're given some sort of sunset period. So probably it would be good to default laws to have a sunset period. If it's not good enough to be renewed, then it goes away. And maybe some hysteresis in making it easier to remove a law than to put one in place. You can just imagine, because over time, the body of law just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's like how do you avoid that? And you have inertia associated with laws, and so maybe it would take 60% to create a law, but only 40% to remove a law.
How interesting. How fascinating. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.
Those are like the the the rules of a constitutional democracy have such a profound impact, and to have a a new playground would be fantastic. There's something embedded in what you said a moment ago that I wanna highlight on a transition to perhaps a closing question. I heard in passing, I think about some of these things about a half hour a week, if I heard you right. And this is, I think, a profound thing to to 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 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 doing a sample return from Mars and sending a genetic sequencer there to help understand life there that might exist, etcetera. And I remember profoundly that the response was that is a really interesting topic, but I gotta get these rockets to work first before that's gonna be relevant to me and let me hunker down on what's important here. That ability to prioritize it, 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 clear sense of where we're heading, chaining back to the present, and making sure we're taking the right steps to not fumble the future, if you will. I think I wish we could all do that in the way we try to implement change. So let me move, if I may, to 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, I think everyone who hears your story, you know, an immigrant from South Africa to Canada to The US taking on four or five different industries with great aplomb 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. And so I guess, maybe Fred, 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 pull that filter off for a moment on the things of the world that are broken. And if everyone here in the audience could be a change agent themselves in their area of passion, 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, honestly, I don't think everyone needs to go, you know, try to solve, some big big world changing problem. I I mean, I think that, like, if I I really think, like, we should just think, like, are we doing something that's useful Mhmm. To the world? Like, if if you're doing something useful, that's great.
Imagine it's like animal fault. Some things are more useful.
Sure. Sure. But but
Like, maybe one of your personal things.
Just think that that, like, your sort of usefulness optimization
Mhmm.
Is is like that's like a really good thing. You know, if you've if you've done something that's useful to your fellow human beings, that's you've done a really good thing. And they all should feel pretty proud of doing that. You know, it doesn't doesn't always have to be something that's gonna change the world. I mean, sometimes the world should just keep going in a particular direction. Like, I Up the world. Yeah. It might be the it might be going in right direction. And and and, I mean, in a lot of ways, the the world is and we're we're in we are in great shape in that if you look at, say, violent crimes, you know, per capita in the world, it's at an, like, all time low. We're actually quite prosperous. You know, compared to history. And, you know, I think there's a lot of things to feel good about in terms of how the world is today. Access to information is incredible. I mean, anyone with like a $100 device could have has access to basically all the world's information, which is an incredible thing. And, yeah. So I I honestly, I just think, like, the best thing for people to try to do is say, like, hey. What is something that 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 and FutureFest and A Fudge in the Future.
So just very quickly, on behalf of all the faculty and staff affiliated with STVP, we'd like to thank president Hennessy, the school of engineering in our home department of management science and engineering. Matthew Tues, Stanford Arts, and and the amazing staff here at Bing that was so helpful to us this morning. DFJ, obviously, for your incredible sponsorship of FutureFest 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 Jervison.
No messages found