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 and my pitch was very short, I said the movie's gonna be ten minutes long, because it's not happening. It was about ten 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 at a physics conference one night, and I got seated next to Elon, 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, kind of 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, think we are going to Mars, and I think a lot of it is because of you. So, one of the questions we've got here today. One of the questions that you guys have submitted that love is simple, Mars, how can we help?
Let's see. So in the short term, Mars is really about getting the spaceship built. We're we're making good progress on this on the on the ship and the booster, code named BFR.
What what does this stand for again?
Well, it's a bit of a it's like sort of a Rorschach test in acronym form. And but it is very big. Yeah. And I gave a presentation on this at the International Astronomical Congress in Australia last year and that design is evolving rapidly. We're actually building that that ship right now. I think right now the biggest thing that would be helpful is just general support and encouragement and good goodwill. I think once we build it, there will be We'll have a of a point of proof, something that other companies and countries can then go and do. But they currently don't think it's possible, so if we show them that it is, then I think they will 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 cargo and people to and from Mars as well as to and from the moon other places in the solar system, then I think that's really where there's a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial resources that are needed because you've gotta build out the entire base of industry, everything that allows 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 colonist volunteers here for Mars?
Actually, many hands raised by the way. I mean, the moon at Mars often thought of as like, is this some escape hatch for rich people? But I it won't be that at all. It's and anyone who for for the early people that go to go to Mars, it'll be far more dangerous. I mean, really, it it kinda reads like Shackleton's ad for Antarctic Explorers. You know? It's like difficult, dangerous, good chance you'll die, excitement for those who survive, that kind of thing. And I think there's not many people who actually wanna go in the beginning because all those things I said are true. But there'll be some who who will for for whom the excitement of the frontier and exploration exceeds the concern of danger. And and they will start off building the first elementary infrastructure, just a base to create propellant, a power station, glass domes in which to grow crops, all the sort of fundamentals without which you cannot survive. And then really, there's gonna be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs.
Definitely pizza joints.
I think Mars should really have great bars. The Mars bar. It's alright. Look, I would I love dad jokes. Alright?
I'm trying to say.
I'm a dad.
What what do you think the timeline for this is?
So I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the timeline. Although, I'm I can be a little Sometimes my timelines are a little, you know. People have told me that my timelines historically have been optimistic and so I'm trying to recalibrate to some degree here. But I can tell you what what what I know currently is the case is that we're are building the first ship, the first Mars or inter or interplanetary ship right now and I think we'll 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 lift off thrust of this would be about twice that of a Saturn five. So it's capable of doing 150 metric tons to orbit and be fully reusable. So the expendable payload is around double that number. So what's amazing about the ship assuming we can make full and rapid reusability work is that we can reduce the cost, module cost per flight dramatically by orders of magnitude compared to where it is today. This question of reusability is so fundamental to rocketry. It is the it is the fundamental breakthrough that's needed. If you consider aircraft for example, the you can lease a seven forty seven and do a return flight from pull a cargo from California to Australia for half $1,000,000. That's what it cost to lease a seven forty seven fully round trip to Australia which is far. To buy a single engine turboprop plane, a good one would be about 1 and a half million dollars. And that can't even reach Australia and it's tiny compared to a seven forty seven. So what that means is like a it costs less to take it to to use a giant plane with huge cargo for a long trip than it that that costs way less than buying a small plane for a short trip in the aircraft world. And the same actually is true of Rock three. The the the the a BFR flight will actually cost less than than our Falcon one flight did back in the day. So that was about a 5 or $6,000,000 marginal cost per flight. We were confident that BFR will be less than that. So that that's profound and that is what will enable the creation of a permanent base on the moon and a city on Mars. And that's the equivalent of like the Union Pacific Railroad or or having ships that cross the oceans. Until you can get there, there's no way for all of the entrepreneurial energy to You do anything. There's no way for all 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 flourish. 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 at this. Know, we talked about this yesterday. It was our grandparents who went to the moon. And we have not gone back since, 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 use that as an opportunity to inspire people, again Carl Sagan had a beautiful thought many many years ago that if you just get enough people to look at the Earth from a distance, that it would 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 for 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 Falcon Heavy launched.
Yeah. We really want we wanted to get the public, you, to we wanted you to get 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's possible. Thank you.
That that picture at the end is a picture of one of the circuit boards inside the Roadster. Right?
But we try to confuse the aliens as much as possible. There's 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. That was just by friend of us called Nora. Nora's just that, so if you guys have any suggestions, let us know.
I think for me watching those two boosters come down side by side 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 a singular vision, and hundreds or thousands of very talented people working together. 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 in that, how do you manage, you're very hands on with the details, but you're also looking at the bigger picture, how do you manage your time, how do you how do you zoom in and zoom out, and make sure that all these things are coming together?
Well, at SpaceX, almost all my time is spent on engineering and design, it's probably 80 or 90%, and then Gwynne Shotwell, who's President and Chief Operating Officer, takes care of the business operations of the company, which is what allows me to do that. I think in order to make the right decisions, you have to understand something. If you don't understand something at a detailed level, you cannot make a decision. So But I'd like to just point out what you saw there is a result of an incredible team at SpaceX, super talented people who really work like crazy to make that happen. You know, I think my role is to make sure that they have an environment where they can really where the talents can really come to the fore, and you know, and and but I 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?
Well Kanye West, obviously. Me too. Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire. You You should see my dance moves.
We may we may see some dance moves unless
I do love Fred Astaire. He's amazing. If you haven't watched his movies, they're amazing. Yeah.
I 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, Silver City, now with The Boring Company, it feels like you're seeing a firmly established and mature industry, that is ripe for sort of a quantum shift. There's an opportunity there for, you know, in the case of cars, it's electrification, which drastically changes the complexity of an automobile, and potentially down the line, the expense of it. With rockets, it's the usability of it. With solar, it's about a firmly established energy system that's about be massively disrupted, this is happening, and with The Boring Company, it's about looking at infrastructure projects, which typically take decades and billions of dollars, and looking to reduce the complexity of that. 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. I I don't sort of like look at things and say, what's the rank ordered business opportunity from a financial standpoint, or anything like that. It's really just like, there's some things that don't seem to be working, that are important for our life and for the future to be good. And I'd say that if if one were to say like, where is the if one were to do a risk adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put errors, like basically building rockets and cars, pretty close to the bottom of the list. That they would have to be the dumbest things to do. Just just because, you know, you look at the 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 haven't gone bankrupt, and there's a big graveyard of companies that did. So and then you're going up against the trench competitors. There's no I I 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. You know, where where are the sort of space hotels that were promised in 2001, the movie? It's like, you know, it's a This just wasn't happening year after year. It was getting me down. And I look at the NASA website, I was like, where does it say when you're going to Mars? It doesn't. Initially for SpaceX for example, I thought well, the genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company but really how do we get NASA's budget to be bigger? That was initially the goal. 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 there were upon landing, the seeds would be a dehydrated nutrient gel, hydrated upon landing, and and and you have this little greenhouse. And then the money shot would be, you know, green plants against a red background. Recently learned that money shot has a meaning that that I didn't wasn't aware of. But the the you know, I think that that would get people excited about rekindles the the spirit of Apollo, essentially. And as I got more and 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 cost per pound a kilogram to orbit had actually gone up over the years, not down. And, it's like, okay, well, it won't matter if if we are able to do this philanthropic mission and it generates a lot of will to go to Mars, that's not gonna matter if there's no way. So after my second or third trip back from Russia, I was like, woah. There's gotta be a way to build rockets. There's gotta be a way to solve this rocket problem. I started reading a lot of books on rockets and did a sort of a first principles analysis of a rocket. Just broke down the materials that are in a rocket, what would it cost to buy those materials versus the price of the rocket, and there's a gigantic difference between the raw material cost of the rocket and the finished cost of the rocket. So there must be something wrong happening in going from the constituent atoms to the final shape, found that certainly to be true. Then why weren't people trying to make reusability work? It was very difficult to make rock reusability work. Then unfortunately, the space shuttle ended up being a counter example of don't try to make reusability work because space shuttle ended up costing more per flight than an expendable vehicle of equivalent capability. So for a long time, people were using 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 reuse the rocket's it has to be it has to be true reuse, which means rapid and complete reuse. The problem with the space shuttle is 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 reused were incredibly difficult to refurbish. So the kind of re the only kind of re reuse that matters is if it's rapid and complete. It's that the only thing you're changing between flights apart from scheduled maintenance is the propellant. So we we embarked upon that journey to create SpaceX in 2002. And in the beginning, I wouldn't actually, wouldn't even let my friends invest because I don't wanna lose their money. I thought it was like, you know, I'd rather lose my own money. So and then we we almost did die at SpaceX, actually. So we I budgeted for for three flights. I mean, technically, I did have a plan where I I had a had this had the money from PayPal. I had, about a 180,000,000 from PayPal. I thought, you know, I'll I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and Solar City, and that should be fine. I'll have 90,000,000, like, just lots, you know? But but then what happened is things cost more and took longer than than I thought, so I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are gonna die. So I ended up putting all the money in and and borrowing money for rent from France. 2008 was brutal. Yeah. 2008, we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon Rocket for SpaceX. Tesla almost went bankrupt. We we closed our financing round 6PM Christmas Eve two thousand eight. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would've gone bankrupt two days after Christmas otherwise. And I got divorced. That was like rough. Man, permanent scar tissue there.
It poses a question, or maybe you just answered the question of why is no one else doing these things?
What's your pain threshold? Hope it's real high. Yeah, I mean, SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth, so is Tesla. If if things had just gone a little bit the other way, both companies would be dead. And I and I like one of the most difficult choices I ever faced in life was was in 2008. I think I had like maybe $30,000,000 left 30 or $40,000,000 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 the two companies, then both might die. And when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something, building something, it's like a child. And so it's like which one am I gonna let one starve to death? I can ring myself to do it. So I put I I split the money between the 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 that change you? What was your biggest failure and how did that change you?
I have to really think hard about that. Failure. Never heard of it.
There's there's your answer.
There's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure. As I said, for for SpaceX, the first three launches failed, and we're we're just barely able to scrape together enough parts and and money to do the the fourth launch. If that fourth launch had failed, we would have been dead. So multiple failures along the way. I I tried very hard to to get the right expertise in for for SpaceX. I tried hard to to find a great chief engineer for the rocket, but it the good chief engineers wouldn't join, and the bad ones, well, there's no no point in hiring them. 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.
Do you 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 did how does the business plan work?
I don't really have a business plan. Yeah. I haven't had a I had a business plan way back in the zip two days, but but these things are just always wrong. So I just just didn't bother with business plans after that. Yeah. Mean, I think, you know, wishful thinking for sure is a source of many problems in in in many walks life. Business or personal, wishful thinking causes a lot of a lot of trouble. You really have to ask, you know, whether something is true or not that doesn't make sense. Ever If feels like too easy, it probably is. You know, Before the drama of SpaceX, think Tesla's actually probably two thirds of my total drama dose over time. Fred Tessa's a drama magnet. It's crazy.
How do you I mean, a lot of people wanna know. You know, you're managing three or four companies now, each of them trying to do something revolutionary, each of them challenging a business that has historically been regarded as impossible to challenge or disrupt. How do you prioritize? How do you prioritize between different companies? How do you How do you spend your time?
Yeah. Absolutely. Actually, I drop you for a water? I've got a bit of a cold, my voice is a bit hoarse. Okay. In terms of time 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 time allocation. So it's and and then, more non business stuff, it's almost entirely kid stuff. My kids are here here today. Actually brought them along to South by Southwest. Hope they're having a good time. Went and saw the Westworld exhibit. It's just really amazing. If you haven't seen the Westworld, what do you call it, exhibit or a
I don't know what you call I think
you just call it Theme Westworld at this park. It's really incredibly well done. Took a guest there yesterday that they had a great time. But yeah, I think probably one of the biggest of a sort of standard is that I'm actually not an investor. Some of these people think I'm an investor or invest in things. I don't actually don't invest in anything. In fact, the only public security that I own of any kind is Tesla. And then the next biggest is is SpaceX, and and then the Boeing company kinda started it more as a joke, because that would be a funny name for a company. You know, we put we put the zero in bring. I mean, it's sort of like that doesn't sense. Make
But when we when we we talk I remember when you first told me that you were thinking about tunnels.
And when when did I first tell you about that?
Years ago.
Okay. It's like a long time ago.
Yeah. Like, I thought you were joking.
Yeah. Yeah. It was. I was joking. But but it's it's not because of some epiphany that I had one day driving on the four zero five. That's how it gets translated somehow. I was talking about 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 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. Like, maybe maybe I'm missing something here. So, yeah, so I was, like, basically talking people's ears off of tunnels for for several years and then said, well, let's find out what it takes to build a tunnel. And, yeah, so so I started digging a tunnel. I wanted to start the tunnel from where I could see it from my office at SpaceX. So I start I said, well, let's just carve off a 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. He's like, I'm waiting for it. It never came. Finally, it did, and and we got it going. And now we're making good progress. And we're we're funding the company for merchandise sales. So thank you for anyone who's bought our Flamethrower. You will not be sorry, or maybe you will. It won't be boring.
We we have a video, I think, here of the latest vision for The Boring Company in terms of how it planned, you know, the
the I
didn't I didn't even know this. Great. We've added seats.
I think, you know, when we were first talking about the concept, you know, tunnels feel like a resolutely old school solution
to a problem. I invented tunnels.
And I was still holding out hope for the flying car, and then 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 a flying 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 there's not a lot of market competition there. Something that's ripe for change. So how do you I remember you talked about the philosophy with Godot was to just keep running it basically until you figured out Mhmm. Why it can't run any faster.
Yeah. So
I mean, the bony company, to be
clear, it's it's it's like literally 2% of my time. It's it's probably 20% of my tweets. But 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 is about it's literally 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. It's something that you and I have as a shared interest, 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 dangers of Booze.
What's Famous last words.
What what specifically do you believe that they don't? Well,
the the biggest issue I see with called AI experts is that 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. Much less smart, dumber than we think we are by a lot. So tends to plague plague smart people. They just can't They define themselves by their intelligence and they don't like the idea that a machine could 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. And 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 to then beating the European world champion who was ranked 600, then beating Lisa Dole four five, who had been world champion for many years, then beating the current world champion, then beating everyone while playing simultaneously. Then then there was AlphaZero, which crushed AlphaGo a 100 to zero. And AlphaZero just learned by playing itself, and it it can play basically any game that you put the rules in for. Whatever rules you give it, it literally read the rules, play the game, and be superhuman for any game. Nobody expected that rate of improvement. If you ask those same experts who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying, I think you'll find that their predictions for things like Go and other AI advancements have, their batting average is quite weak. It's not good. We'll see this also with self driving. I think probably by end of next year, self driving encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100 to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking maybe eighteen months from now. NHTSA did a study on Tesla's autopilot version one which is relatively primitive and found that it was a 45% reduction in highway accidents. And that's despite autopilot one being just version one. Version two I think will be at least two or three 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 superintelligence 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 if we take it that it's inevitable at this point, that some version of AI is coming down the line, how do we how do we steer through that? Well,
I'm not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight. I mean I think once you generally are on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public. Hence therefore there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. I think the danger of AI is much greater than the the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. And nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want. That that would be insane. And mark 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 come to the forefront over the last year where you begin to realize that it doesn't necessarily, I think we've all been focused in on the idea of artificial super intelligence, right, which is clearly a danger, but maybe a little further out. What's happened over the last year is you've seen what I've been calling artificial stupidity. Talk algorithmic manipulation of social media, we're in it now, it's starting to happen. What's the intervention at this point?
I'm not really all that worried about the short term stuff, things that are narrow AI is not a species level risk. It it will it will result in dislocation in lost jobs, and of better weaponry and that kind of thing, but it is not a fundamental species level risk, whereas digital superintelligence is. So it's really all about laying the groundwork to make sure that if humanity collectively decides that creating digital superintelligence 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 than AI and the other issues that 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, mean, there there are other things that are on a longer time scale. The and obviously, the things that I believe in, like extending life beyond earth, making life multiplanetary. I'm a big believer in sort of Asimov's foundation series or the principle that you really want to recommend reading the foundation series, but it's like if you know that there's likely to be, well you don't know but there's likely to be another dark ages which it seems, my guess is there probably will be at some point. I'm not predicting that we're about to enter dark ages but that there's some probability that we will particularly if there's a third world war, then we wanna make sure that there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of the dock ages. I think that's why it's important to get a self sustaining base ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive. It's more likely to survive than a moon base. But I think a moon base and a Mars base that could perhaps help regenerate life back here on earth would be really important and to get that done before a possible World War three. You know, last last century, had two massive World Wars, three if you count the Cold War. I think it's unlikely that we will never have another World War again. It probably will be at some point.
Or if we have another one, it'll be the last.
Yeah. It just could be radioactive rubble. Again, I'm not predicting. This seems like, well if you say given enough time, will it be? Most likely, given enough time. This has been our pattern in the past. I So really believe in the zeroth law, as of the zeroth law. Take the set of actions most likely to support humanity in the future. But I think sustainable energy is also obviously really important. That's tautological. If it's not sustainable, it's unsustainable.
And how close are we to solving that problem?
Well, I think that the core technologies there with the wind, solar, with batteries. The fundamental problem is that there's an unpriced externality in the cost of CO2. The market economics works very well if things are priced correctly. But when things are not priced correctly and something that has a real cost has zero cost, then that's where you get distortions in the market that inhibit the progress of other technologies. So essentially anything that produces carbon, it puts carbon into the atmosphere, which includes rockets by the way, so I'm not excluding rockets from this. It has to be a price. And you can start off with a low price, but then price and then depending upon whether that price has any effect on the possible million possible million of c o two in the atmosphere, you can adjust that price up or down. But in the absence of a price, we sort of pretend that digging trillions of tons of fossil fuels from deep under the earth and putting it into the atmosphere, we're pretending that that that that has no probability of a bad outcome. And the entire scientific community is saying, obviously, it's gonna have a bad outcome. Obviously, you're changing the chemical constituents of the atmosphere. So it's really up to people and governments to put a price on carbon then automatically the right thing happens. It's really straightforward.
What do we do with the carbon that's already up there?
I actually think we can manage with the current carbon level or even a little bit higher. It's and this is gonna sound 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 two hundred years ago and say okay, well a few hundred years ago we had like two eighty, two ninety parts per million of carbon, We're probably a little carbon starved. Now we're about 400, just past 400 mark. I think somewhere in the four hundreds, probably okay. We don't have to worry about sequestering carbon or anything like that. But now if this momentum keeps going and we start going up to 600, 800, a 1,500, that's where things get really squirrely. And the sheer momentum of the world's energy infrastructure is leading us in that direction. So it's just very important that the public and the government's push to ensure that the correct price of carbon is paid. So that will be the thing that matters.
Audience is very interested in knowing how many hours of sleep you got last night.
I don't know, about six. Five or six, I think. Five? I know.
I feel like we know part of the answer to this because you were trapped in Westworld for a while. But but how I mean, on a a regular day for you,
are you are you are you sleeping?
You're not sleeping a lot. Right?
Oh, jeez. Do I look that bad? No. You look great.
But we just imagine with the amount of responsibilities, with the amount of you know, with with what you've got going on, do these problems still keep you up at night, or do you think we're on our way to solving?
Well, right now, the only things that are really stressing me out in a big way are AI, obviously. That's like always there, and working really hard on Tesla Model three production, and we're making good progress, but it's hugely hard work. But those are the two most stressful things in 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? 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 a good picture would look like we're really substantially transferred to sustainable generation and consumption of electricity so that the CO2 risk and the ocean rising risk is mitigated. And we're not looking at like having Florida and sort of large portions of world underwater. That'd be great. But not to have addressed that risk, that'd be enormous. For us to have a base on the moon, base on Mars, out there exploring the solar system, start building industry on essentially having human civilization go out there have it such that anyone can go to the moon or Mars or out to the solar system if they want to make it really affordable. I do think it's important that there's competition, that there are multiple companies doing this, just SpaceX. That AI risk is, I guess it's sort of a benign AI and that we're able to achieve a symbiosis with that AI. Ideally the AI, there's somebody who, I can't remember his name, but had a good 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 a function of dopamine and serotonin. So it captures all humans and injects your brain with large amounts of dopamine and serotonin. Like, okay, it's not what we meant.
It sounds pretty good though.
Oh, you will love it. But I like the definition of like, the AI 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 a close coupling between collective human intelligence and digital intelligence. Neuralink is trying to help in that regard by creating an interface between a high bandwidth interface between AI and and human brain. Yeah. We're already we're already a sidewalk in the sense that that your phone and your computer are kind of an 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?
The the band bandwidth thing?
The bandwidth issue. I mean, we've all we've all succumbed to it now. We're all we're all cyborgs. We're just low efficiency cyborgs. So how do we how do we make it better?
I think we've gotta build a we've gotta build an interface. Like, we didn't evolve to have a communications jack. Know, or So there's gotta be essentially vast numbers of tiny electrodes that are able to read right from your brain. Of course, security is pretty important in this situation, to say the least.
I was gonna say, 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' neural lace.
Mhmm.
But not
but in in the case of neural lace, it's sort of that that's there from when you're born or
it's it's sort of it's not a
it's more of a backup. Sorry?
It's a backup.
Yeah. Kind of a backup. This would be there's 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 the tertiary layer which is the digital AI extension of you, and the high bandwidth connection is what achieves a tight symbiosis. I think that's the best outcome. I hope so. If anybody's got better ideas, I'd love to hear it.
Talk about another project that you're working on that our audience wants to know a little bit more about, Starlink.
Oh. Can you tell us anything? Do mean Skynet?
Hopefully not Skynet.
It's internet in the sky. We don't talk that much about Starlink, but essentially it's intended to provide low latency, high bandwidth internet connectivity throughout the world. There actually will not be enough cognitive processing power onboard the satellite system to in any way be a Skynet thing. Digital AI requires a lot of super intelligence requires a lot of big servers on the ground. It's too power intensive. But this is intended to be to provide people with who don't have any Internet connectivity with Internet connectivity. And it's very good for sparsely populated and moderately sparsely populated areas, and for giving people in cities a choice of, low cost choice of internet access. But I do think it's gonna be important, the Starlink 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 either no or super extensive 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?
Because we're happy
to And what's your and what's your title?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Emperor or god emperor? I don't know. It might be too much. I don't know. You watch my jokes here, not everyone gets irony. Know? Must remember. I I think the I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where you vote on issues where where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government. In in you know, when The United States was formed, representative government was the only thing that was logistically feasible because there's no way there was no way for people to communicate instantly. A lot of people didn't even have really access to mailboxes or there wasn't even really the post office was 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. But I think the most most likely it's gonna be people Everyone votes on every issue and that's how it goes. There are a few things I'd recommend which is keep law short. Long laws, it's like that's something suspicious is going on if there's long law. 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 you should be able to digest it. Like, how come you can read the constitution and all of the amendments? Like, you can read those in maybe an hour. And and we we govern so much of our civilization by that, and yet modern law is this obtuse, super boring term that's indecipherable to almost anyone. So I think direct democracy, laws 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 inertia. You have to have something that's gonna overcome inertia. So probably, I don't know what the right number would be, maybe it's like sixtyforty. Maybe it requires 60% to get a law in place but any number above 40% can remove a law. Otherwise you just get laws just accumulate over time and accumulate over 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 rules and rules and rules and rules. So it should be just easier to get rid of a rule than to put one in. Maybe it should even have some kind of sunset clause so that they just automatically expire unless there's enough of an impetus to keep them around.
I know there's a fair amount of interest. I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about the very early days with Tesla and how it came together. Brother Kimball 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.
We got hats, got a guitar.
Would guess there are fair number of entrepreneurs here today and a fair number of people interested looking at Tesla, which now, extraordinary success of it. How did this come together? You guys were looking at, I know famously you were looking at problems you could solve. What do those conversations look like? So
let's see, I mean, Tony, Kimmel, thanks for coming on, about the things that I thought would be most important to work on for a long time, all the way back to college days. Electric cars are something I've been interested in since I was 18, 19. When do you first recall hearing me talk about electric cars? I was curious.
First time was, well you talked about it in the 90s a lot. We used to brainstorm a lot randomly even in, I think we were 20 years old, and the first thing I remember I was brainstorming was solving connectivity amongst doctors. We were on a road trip from
That was hopeless.
Long time ago. We had a lot of doctors in the family so we had the information. But the idea was really to solve that problem where are from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia brainstorming how you do it. This is before the internet so we, in our minds, designing network computers, doctors talking. This has all happened of course over twenty five years but that's 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, this is probably 2002 or 2003, and you had these plans laid out that the team at Tesla had, or the earlier guys had basically said, we're going to take this Lotus lease, we're going to convert it into an electric car. We sat down and talked about it for a bit 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. Then it went from there.
First internships that I had that were interesting were on ultracapacitors for use in electric cars. So that's what why I first came out to Silicon Valley in, like, '93 or '92 or something like that. We're working a company called Pinnacle Research on advanced ultracapacitors with the idea that this could be a solution to the energy storage problem in electric vehicles. And then when I graduated from Penn, I was gonna be doing a PhD at Stanford in material science and physics. Trying 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. That's a 95. And then I wasn't sure, was 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 could publish a paper and you get a PhD in all that 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 vehicle technology was gonna progress slowly on its own whether I was there or not. So I thought, well, I'll put press studies on hold and do something to help build the internet or do something useful on the internet. And that's when I talked to Kimball and you were working in Canada at the time.
Yes, right.
I said, hey, why don't we try to do this company in Silicon Valley?
It was pretty cool. We were the first to see maps in door to door directions. Was built by a company, Navtech, but never been on the Internet. And it 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 did about 50 times today each. We were the first to see that and put it on the internet, it was really cool.
It was the first maps and directions, yellow pages and white pages on the internet. And then we ended up helping bring a lot of publications online so as investors and customers, the New York Times company, Knight Ritter, Hearst and a number of others. And yeah, but I always wanted to get back to electric vehicles because that was a primary interest of mine from undergrad and grad days. So after Zip2, I still did one more Internet company because I thought Zip2 had not achieved its full potential. We built this incredible technology, but it wasn't being used by the customers in the right way. It was a bit like building, you know, f 22 fighter jets, and then and then you sell them to people and they roll them down the hill at each other. You're like, it's really not the way to use it. Okay. That's where I decided you really wanna go to the end consumer. If you've got great technology, you wanna go all the way to the end consumer. Don't tell it to to some bonehead legacy company that doesn't understand how to use it. So yeah. So with with x.com, which became PayPal, that's where we tried to do something significant with the Internet. It got sort of part of the way towards its objective. After PayPal went public and they got bought by eBay in 2002, that actually freed up me and a bunch of other people to go and create companies and I started debating between either solar, electric car, or space. I thought space was like the least likely to have somebody least likely to attract entrepreneurial talent. I thought 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 J. B. Straubel and Hal Rosen. Was at, it was like a fish restaurant in El Segundo. Hal Rosen had been involved in space and electric vehicles and JB had just graduated from college and was working with him and the conversation turned to electric vehicles because Harold had done something called Rosen Motors which was like an attempted EV startup. And I said, well I've always been super interested in electric vehicles. I was gonna do my PhD on advanced energy storage. I was gonna do grad studies on advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles so JB said, well, have you heard of this company called AC Propulsion? Because they had created the t zero electric sports car as a prototype. I was like, wow, that's great. Lithium ion batteries had really achieved a level of energy density that for the first time could allow you to have significant range electric in car. And they had a sports car that had zero to 60 in under four seconds, a 250 mile range, and it was pretty cool. Now it was just made of a it was 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 Propulsion 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 Zero and 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 Scion would cost $70,000 or you could build a sports car for $100,000 Okay. But like nobody's gonna buy the electric Scion. But people might buy the electric sports car. So after hounding them for for 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 prob no problem. Go ahead. I was like, great. So I'm gonna do that with JV. And they said, but if you're they said, you're gonna if you're go and try to prioritize t zero, there's some other teams you should talk to that are also interested in doing that. So that's where Martin Eberhard, Mark Topping and Ian Wright came in. I think that was probably the biggest mistake of my career, quite frankly. I think whenever you think you can have your cake and eat it too, that's something you're 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 it didn't. Things really melted down, Went through hell. We had to recapitalize the company. Kim was there singing in real time.
So Silicon Valley accurate or not accurate?
The the show? Yeah. The it starts to get very accurate around around episode four. So it took a few episodes to kinda 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 about the fourth or fifth episode, season one, it really starts to get good and then by season two, it's amazing. In fact, reality the 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 it too. Right? Yeah. It's like, wow. What
will have to be a story for another time, unfortunately, as we've we've been asked to wrap it up, got one last question from the audience. It is, what is your favorite song from the movie Three Amigos?
We'd only do it if you guys are willing to sing along. So Jonah actually is the dancer of the three.
He's a big behind the
The three of us have been playing and singing and dancing the song since we were kids. And so we're gonna do that on stage, and if you guys can sing along. We'll we'll do the first verse, and then you guys can sing along on the second verse.
Okay. This is gonna be real bad.
That it would be terrible.
Yeah. Exactly. I said terrible. It's gonna be terrible.
I I'm nixing the dancing thing.
Oh, come on.
Come with me when moonbirds hits the sky. Okay. All together now.
Well, this is really winning.
Thank you.
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