Elon Musk and Joe Rogan explore Starship’s rapid testing timeline, with Earth-to-Earth flights possible in two years despite expected explosions. Musk dismisses 5G cancer fears, citing photon limitations, while debating AI risks—like Skynet—and the need for regulation over unchecked development. Tesla’s dynamic airbags and HEPA filtration prove tech’s potential, but Musk counters Bill Gates on electric trucks, showcasing 300-mile-range prototypes. He envisions VTOL supersonic jets via electric propulsion, though regulatory hurdles and physics complexity delay aviation ambitions. Ultimately, their conversation underscores how bold innovation clashes with incremental progress and political inertia. [Automatically generated summary]
How long do you think it's going to be before you have like regular flights with that where you can take off and land and like an airplane where it'll be very consistent?
So when you're looking and you're scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements, and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years.
If current trends continue, if you plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years.
We're getting to orbit this year.
Our goal is to get to orbit this year.
I'm not sure if people totally understand.
Starship is the largest flying object ever made.
This thing will be over 5,000 tons of weight on liftoff.
It's going to go straight up with 5,000 tons.
This is much heavier than any aircraft by far.
No aircraft even comes close to this weight.
And it's going straight up.
Aircraft can't go straight up.
It will have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V. Really?
So when you're doing this and you're developing these systems thinking about regular trips to other planets, but you're not just trying to get into orbit right now.
You're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually could scale up.
So the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where all elements of the rocket are reused and they're reused quickly, like an aircraft.
And this has never been done.
This is the holy grail of rocketry, is to have a fully reusable rocket.
So when, like, with the Saturn V and the space shuttles and all these other rockets, they would have these parts that would get the ship up into space, but they would descend down to Earth and crash into the ocean and they would never use them again.
You can see with each Starship, we've actually increased the size of the heat shield.
So it's tough because the tiles are...
They're kind of like dinner plates.
They're brittle, and their coefficient of thermal expansion is different from metal, so metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles.
And the tiles also get super hot, while metal can be super cold, because it's got cryogenic fluid behind it.
You've got this differential expansion and contraction, which makes the gaps in the tiles expand and contract.
But if the gaps get too big, then you get kind of the hot gas, sort of the plasma gets in down, down, get plasma in the crack, and it's not as bad.
And then you're going to melt the metal behind it.
But if they're too close, then they bang together and they crack.
So you've got to get it just right, where the gap's just right, and then they can, the way that they're attached to the body, they can move around a little bit.
Well, in the case of Falcon 9, the upper stage burns up on re-entry.
Falcon 9 has the fairing where the satellites are contained in the top, and once it gets to space where the atmosphere is thin, it's still a long way from orbit.
But it's in space, so you no longer need, the satellite doesn't need to be protected by the nose cone, the fairing.
And so that, it sort of splits in two and falls away.
And then, so with Falcon 9, we recover the fairing halves and we recover the booster, but we lose the upper stage.
Do you think there'll ever be a time where there's an alternative source of propulsion outside of a burning fuel?
Like, is it possible that someone would develop a nuclear propulsion or some other method other than just burning large amounts of gasoline or rocket fuel?
So the only way to move is to react against yourself, to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity and to transfer momentum from, you know, to that gas that is going that way very rapidly.
So you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you, the large amount of mass, accelerate slowly.
So ironically, everything will go electric except for rockets.
Now, you can make rockets indirectly electric by using electricity to create the fuel.
So you can take CO2 and H2O and create methane and oxygen from that.
So methane is CH4 and oxygen is O2. And for example, on Mars, which is a primarily CO2 atmosphere, and there's a lot of water ice, is you can mine the ice, take the ice, And the CO2 from the atmosphere.
I'm simplifying this a lot, but run it over a catalyst and give it a lot of energy and you can get CH4 and O2 and you can graciously get your propellant on Mars.
I'm trying to think of the way to think about gravity here.
was live analogies.
But you know, like, you can think like, like space itself is is curved, like it's like a funnel.
Like, if there's something that has a lot of mass, it's creating like a funnel.
So, in the same way, if you have a coin funnel, the coin thinks it's going in a straight line, pretty much.
The physicists out there might quibble with my analogies.
But anyway, I'm trying to convey what gravity is like, like a funnel.
If you want to get out of that gravity well, you actually need to go very fast parallel to the Earth's surface.
The faster you go parallel to the Earth's surface, the further out you spin.
Or you can think of a marble in a funnel.
If you want to get that marble to go far out, you just spin it sideways and it'll spiral out.
Conversely, if you Just due to the friction of the air friction and the rolling friction, it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any push, and it will slowly spiral in.
As it gets closer, it spins faster and faster.
This is how gravity basically works.
So all the things in the solar system are spinning around this gigantic funnel in space time called the sun.
And we're like these tiny little dust motes going around the Sun.
And the further you are away from the Sun, the slower you move around in terms of degrees per second.
So like the orbit of Mars, which is further away from the Sun, is about two years.
And Earth's one year.
Because Mars is about 50% further away from the Earth, from the Sun than the Earth is.
So it's like Mars, we're, Earth is at one astronomical unit, Mars is like one and a half-ish.
Astronomical units.
So we're about eight light minutes away from the Sun, Mars is about 12. And Yeah, so when you want to go to Mars, you basically accelerate along the same path of Earth going around the Sun.
And you time it such that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the Sun where the tip of the ellipse intersects with Mars.
So Mars is going around, and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your ellipse being Mars.
And that turns out to be about a six-month journey.
Now, you can speed that up.
I think, I mean, I could sort of see a way to make it happen in, say, three months, where the intersection with Mars would not be at the tip of the ellipse, but on the edge of the ellipse.
Now, that would mean the tip of the ellipse is out near Jupiter.
So, if you miss Mars, you're going to end up at Jupiter.
But I probably can get down to three months of that big of a problem.
Getting down to a month is hard.
And then Earth and Mars are only in the same sort of – there's only about a six-month period every two years when Earth and Mars are aligned such that you can do the transfer.
You can certainly imagine that if Mars is on the other side of the sun, you can't get there because it's got to go through the sun.
That's not going to work.
This is like about a quarter of every Mars year is when you can do the transfer.
So six months every two years.
So if we are able to build or if humanity is able to build a city on Mars, people will probably remember which planetary conjunction they came on.
Well, I think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization.
The threshold that really matters is If we're getting past the Great Filter, do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming...
I mean, it's like an alien civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation.
You know, it's like, hey, we left that planet.
It was fine.
Now it's got a bunch of bugs.
Just go fumigate it, you know?
We'd fumigate a house.
That's certainly possible.
But if there are no aliens, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become interstellar?
I want to be clear, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence for alien life on Earth.
There's no direct evidence for alien life.
No, you know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien, you know, sighting or whatever, I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 7-Eleven or ATM cam, okay?
It's like, if somebody's got at least like an iPhone 1 level camera, like something, you know?
Lex Friedman interviewed him on his podcast, and I interviewed him as well.
And if you ever get a chance to listen to Lex's conversation with him, it's really excellent.
But this guy is a naval fighter pilot, and he talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than 60,000 feet above sea level to one foot in less than a second.
shaped like a tic-tac no visible sign of propulsion uh blocked radar uh actively jammed their tracking systems and then went to their predetermined point that they were supposed to that the the fighter jet was supposed to scramble to went to it uh 30 miles away in you know a They have no idea how it did it.
They don't know what it is.
And these guys that were working for the Navy off the coast said they encountered them several times.
Yeah, there was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this, and there's a couple other different sightings that were very similar.
They were trying to figure out what these things were and why, and it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release.
Yeah, the politicians are trying to figure out what all this shit is, and so they tried to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days.
I mean, we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things.
If we were to find something like, let's say, a cube of titanium, just like a one-inch cube of titanium in the middle of the pyramid, I'd be like, aliens for sure.
There's no way they could have made titanium back then.
There's no way.
That's hard.
That's all.
You don't even need a computer.
A computer would be like, hey, wow, computers, they didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens.
Like a alien visitor, there'd be something buried somewhere, I think.
We haven't seen anything.
So...
Anyway, maybe they're aliens, but they're very subtle.
If they are, they're being pretty shy.
As far as we can tell, there's none.
Nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that.
The thing is that on a galactic timescale, even with sublight travel, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy, even some of the neighboring galaxies.
So if you said a million years and say there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years?
So you would start with Mars, build bases on Mars, then use Mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily.
I mean, the Permian extinction event, that was a real rough one, where it's like well over 90% of all species died out.
And that doesn't tell the whole story because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and, you know, like sponges and stuff like that, you know.
Are you a sponge?
Okay.
You're probably doing okay.
They're still around.
Are you a mushroom?
Do you like being in the dark and feasting on dead plant and animal matter?
I'm in the Douglas Adams sort of school of thought, which is that the universe is the answer, and we need to figure out what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe.
So we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness, increase our understanding of the universe, to understand why are we here, where do we come from, where are we going, what's this all about?
And in order to In order to, I don't know, just understand the meaning of life, we have to expand the scope and scale of life and the consciousness, which may be digital and biological in the future.
And get past at least one of the great filters, which is to become a multi-planet species.
A species that does not become multi-planetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external.
We've got to be a multi-planet species.
Also, that's way more exciting.
Do you want a future where we're out there among the stars exploring the universe, or do you want a future where we're stuck on Earth forever?
I think we want the super exciting future where we're out there exploring the galaxy.
That sounds great to me.
I think it's worth 1% of our resources, something like that.
Well, we always assumed when we were kids that we would be traveling to the moon and back and traveling all over space by now.
Space 1999 was a show when I was a kid.
That was interplanetary travel.
Remember they had spaceships out there and motherships?
They thought 1999, by then, for sure, it would happen.
The problem is we need more Elon Musks.
There's not a lot of people that really dedicate all their time and energy to do something like this.
It's a really fascinating thing about the species.
It takes a few unique individuals that are motivated To do something like this and have the resources and the intelligence and you can figure out how to organize people to get something like this done.
Well, there's a lot of smart, talented people at SpaceX and at Tesla.
And that's how we get things done.
But, yeah, I mean, part of the reason why SpaceX is still privately held, although we have a lot of investors and everyone at the company has given stock, is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long.
You know, it's like, you know, what's the market for transporting things to Mars?
Well, no market.
There's no one there.
So, they were like, that sounds pretty risky.
And the public company, you know, the feedback loop tends to be, you know, maybe a year to four years or even quarterly.
And it's like, well, this is like 10 years, 20 years out.
And I probably answered your question earlier, which is like, when do I think we can go to Mars?
I mean, I think possibly as soon as five years from now.
Yeah, but then you've got to build out the base, and then you've got to build out the city.
So the first thing you've got to build is, like, you've got to generate energy, so you've got a giant solar panel farm, and then you've got to have propellant production, so you've got to make the fuel and the oxygen, and you've got to grow food, grow plants, and all the things that are necessary for life support.
Well, then they had subsequent voyages where they made high-resolution scans of the exact same area and it looked very different without the same shadows.
So Mars has lower gravity than Earth, and it does not have a strong magnetic field.
So over time, this is over billions of years, the atmosphere will be gradually eroded by the solar wind and...
And having less gravity.
So, you know, the smaller you are, the less, generally the less atmosphere you're going to have.
So, yeah, so generating an atmosphere on Mars, it would eventually erode, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of years to billions of years type of thing.
Did you pay attention at all to the guy who was the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb, who was recently, there was a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our solar system in 2017 was possibly extraterrestrial in origin.
Well, anyway, so I think a fundamental test of human civilization is, are we going to become a multi-planet civilization before something cataclysmic happens?
Now, I'll be clear, I'm pretty optimistic about the future, so I'm not thinking like we're, you know, civilization is about to end anytime soon.
But there's a chance that it will.
Like Stephen Hawking, before he died, he thought it was like around 1% a century, something like that, I believe.
Well, I think arguably the meaning of life is to understand the nature of the universe and figure out what the meaning of life is.
So, like I said, I think we don't quite know the right questions to ask.
But if we learn more about the universe, if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to ask the questions about the answer that is the universe.
Yeah, it's interesting how much people adapt when they're faced with a real problem.
Like, if we knew that we only had a certain amount of time left, like if we knew an asteroid was absolutely headed our way and it was going to kill most of the people on this planet, you would see people scrambling for something like that.
Like, look, I moved to Texas just to get the fuck out of LA because I felt like that was dying.
I was like, we've got to get out of here.
And I never thought I was going to move out of L.A. like that.
It happened very quickly, but people adapt when they realize that you have to do something.
If we had to do something, we had to go to Mars and had to set up shop there.
We'll go through the archaeological ruins of ancient Babylonians and Sumerians and trying to decode their writing, like what the hell would Linear B and hieroglyphics.
It's kind of problematic that things aren't chilled in stone.
You know, they used to be chilled in stone, and we're like, okay, now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone, and stone lasts a long time.
I mean, there are sort of aspects of our stuff that would last for a long time, but a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever.
Yeah.
When we did the Falcon Heavy test flight...
Normally when aerospace companies do like a rocket test flight, they put something boring on like a concrete block because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite.
And so I was like, well, we've got to do something that's not very inspiring.
You know, concrete blocks are one of the least inspiring things you can do.
So I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, hey, well, what about putting a Tesla on that?
You know, I was like, hey, that's not a good idea.
I'm going to go in my garage.
I'll put that one in there.
So I put my car on the rocket.
And then we wanted to see how far the rocket could go.
So I was like, just, you know, floor it.
Let's go.
Maximum delta V. So I thought it would probably blow up, and I had this image of, like, man, it was like, you know, this thing could blow up on the pad, and then...
And there's like a tire bouncing down the road, and then the Tesla logo just lands, bam, right in front of the camera.
unidentified
It's like one of the things, like this is a movie, you know.
So now in that car, so now hopefully somebody in the alien civilizations in the future could find that, because it'll be like around for like millions of years.
So the standard roadster would have like two back seats, two like kid seats, you know, in the back, like small seats like the back of a Porsche or something.
Or if you get the, I don't know, the SpaceX option package, then in that place where the two rear seats are would be as a...
A high-pressure carbon overwrapped pressure vessel.
So, you know, I don't know, 10,000 PSI or something like that.
And then a bunch of thrusters.
And so, like, at minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down, you know, James Bond style, and there's a rocket thruster behind it, and that gives you three tons of thrust.
Like, if you just get in, when you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator, it will figure out whether you want to go backwards or forwards.
The navigation system, the ability to just press that button and say, navigate to, and then it goes on the internet and finds out what you're looking for, and it finds it, restaurants, whatever you're looking for.
Okay, so Waze uses traffic data from the internet plus user input.
So, like, it takes an extra beat to get the traffic data from the internet.
The idea of Waze is that you're getting it from users in real time.
Like, there's a car accident, people program it in, hey folks, there's a fucking car accident here, and then you get it right away, whereas on the internet, you're a couple beats behind.
i i thought you were joking about that until you played them yeah yeah and then i got you they're pretty catchy that's what's crazy i started researching see it stuck in your head i did not know that it was really a thing yeah jamie do you know Do you know about the sea shanties?
I think we do need to make sure that people moving from California don't inadvertently recreate the issues that caused them to move in the first place.
The balance of Austin is a blue city and a red state.
It's almost like it kind of has to stay read.
Not kind of has to.
I think it does.
You need a certain amount of freedoms, but then you need the philosophical.
There's a bend to Austin that's very progressive and open-minded and artistic.
The restaurants are amazing.
The people are really cool.
But it needs to be sort of embraced by...
Guns and God.
Freedom.
That's part of the whole mixture that makes it work.
There's a metaphor to life in there somewhere.
It's protected by the rest of the philosophy of Texas, which is a wild, crazy place that has more tigers in private collections than in all of the wild of the world.
Because people bought them and they put them in the yard and they jump the fence.
This place is crazy.
But that's why it works.
The reason why it works is because people have so much freedom, and then you have the University of Texas, you have Austin, which has a long history of art and music, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Sixth Street, and so many great musicians have come from here, that it's got both of these things together.
It's got this wild freedom, and they embrace both parts of it.
and being told what to do and it didn't seem logical and you're watching all these businesses fail and you're like there's got to be a better way and like there is no better way wear an extra mask three masks wear three masks and stay indoors and holy shit yeah yeah it didn't make any sense no you can't talk people out of a good panic they sure love it they love panic porn yeah fear porn is like that's people's favorite indulgence Yeah, that's what I say.
Like, we're trying to figure out how the hell did this thing break because, I mean, we were just bouncing steel balls off it all day.
Right.
And I think possibly what might have happened there was that hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it, and once you crack the base of it, it loses all its strength.
No, so there's about one kilowatt per square meter of solar energy, and then you're going to get, I don't know, probably 20%, 25% efficiency, so you get 200 watts per square meter, and then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun, so, you know, like you're, you know, at the right angles, basically, like, are you facing the sun or not?
So, when you add all those things up, you say, how many square meters can you really get?
And then, how many watt hours per mile?
So, Basically, if you could do 10 miles a day, you'd be lucky.
Basically, the things that matter are the frontal area times the drag coefficient for aerodynamic drag, and then rolling resistance, which is a function of mass, and the tire efficiency...
It's like not far different from driving with a parachute.
So you can think of like drag as basically, it's like the integrated pressure profile over the car.
So if you create a low pressure zone in the back of your car where you don't like fill in the gap, like you're cruising through the air, you're making a hole through the air, and the air is trying to fill in the gap.
And if you've got a sharp transition into the truck bed, it's a big low pressure zone, basically.
And that's bad for drag.
So having the sloped back where that's got the truck bed cover, that's very helpful.
So I think, you know, there's some of the stuff you can do for kind of like bragging rights and like, but then, you know, bragging rights are going to get old fast.
So it's more like, what are you going to like on a day-to-day basis?
What's like, what maximizes the area under the curve of owner happiness?
So it'll have enough range that you'll never have to worry about range.
Yeah, it like, it goes out and provides shade and maybe triples your area or something like that.
Now, if you go like, okay, now triple the area and you've got a big flat surface, now you could start having, maybe having charging enough that you, you know, you could start getting like 30 miles a day, that kind of thing.
And maybe you can even have some sort of an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent that could juice you up during the day or something along those lines.
I mean, the solar incidence is, somewhat coincidentally, roughly 1,000 watts per square meter.
Or, you know, in a 10 foot by...
Sorry, like 10 square feet-ish, there's 1,000 watts.
And then...
That includes all the heating and everything else.
So then you have to say, okay, for a photoelectric effect, You're going to capture photons within a certain band and you're not going to get them all because basically what happens with the photon hits the electron and gets it to jump over a gap and run around to the other side.
That's what happens with the photoelectric effect.
It just hits a It hits the photon with the right energy, hits the electron, the electron gets excited, jumps over a gap in the semiconductor, and races around to the other side.
That creates an electric circuit.
So, you have to say, okay, well, how are you going to get those, you know, electrons, just the right energy?
Like, what kind of photon incoming energy you've got?
Yeah, it pretty much tops out around 30% efficiency for a silicon system.
Now, if you have triple junction gallium arsenide, you can do a lot better, but that's very expensive.
And is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially, or will it require a series of satellites in different parts of the country or different parts of the world?
You will have to sign a million disclosures and this is not going to be something where it just suddenly pounces on you like, ah, everyone's getting chipped.
No.
It's a very slow process of, okay, let's first try to help people who have serious brain injuries.
Like if somebody got a spinal cord injury or something like that, that's one of the first things we're looking at doing is somebody, maybe a quadriplegic, tetraplegic, how do we give them an implant that allows them to use their computer or their phone?
And have it be wireless and, you know, like they look totally normal.
You wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head.
And they can just charge it inductively like you charged like a Fitbit or something like that or Apple Watch or something.
And that's kind of like one of the first applications we're thinking of.
It's like, let's restore functionality someone has had a serospinal injury or a serous brain injury or some other kind.
So this is going to be like a very gradual process.
You'll see it coming.
But I was playing Cyberpunk, the game, and I'm like, eh, jeez.
Yeah, but then once it becomes virtual, once virtual supersedes whatever, like imagine if the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better than a regular orgasm.
They thought we'd be on Mars for sure, but they never thought we'd have a supercomputer in our pocket and everyone's got an amazing camera and as much memory as they could possibly.
A supercomputer in your pocket, like something better than the best supercomputer.
Your phone is better than the best computer that Earth had by far.
Well, I mean, the thing I was trying to do, like literally, you know, I don't know, five or six days ago, there was just like the, you know, the air was clear.
Like LA can be amazing, like on a clear winter day where the moon is low on the horizon.
Yeah.
And the sun's hitting at the right angle and it just looks incredible.
And I was trying to take a photo of that with my phone and it looked terrible.
I'm a big admirer of what Tim Cook is doing, what he's doing to sort of cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and gather your data.
And this battle that's going on between Tim Cook and Facebook, I fucking love it.
I love that he's stepping up and saying, hey, you can just advertise.
You don't have to gather up people's data and sell it constantly.
And then disingenuously, Facebook tries to say, you are killing small businesses with these decisions.
Get the fuck out of here.
Get the fuck out of here.
You're not killing small business.
We're killing this one gigantic information gathering business that's decided that it's going to take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make fucking billions of dollars.
Well, I think things that are a danger to the public should have some kind of public oversight.
So, you know, like, I, you know, although sometimes we have our disagreements, I'm, you know, in favor of the FAA and NHTSA, you know, and the various regulatory agencies, FDA and so forth.
You know, I think we're better off having them than not having them.
There is a risk-reward asymmetry in that they tend to be perhaps not weigh the good as much as they weigh the bad.
Because their incentive structure is...
They get punished a lot for approving something, but they don't get punished that much for not approving something.
So this is just in the nature of government.
But nonetheless, I think everyone would feel safer flying with the FAA than not having an FAA. Or we feel safer buying food and drugs, having a regulatory agency oversee this stuff.
But we don't have any regulatory agency overseeing artificial intelligence.
And this, I think, is probably our biggest existential threat.
It seems like, hey, maybe we should have somebody keep an eye on that.
What they're going to do is they're going to develop it and use it as a weapon and it's going to turn on them like a fucking Terminator movie.
Right?
That's the real worry is that they're going to decide that this is a very valuable tool for controlling populations, governments, whatever the fuck they're going to use it for.
And then it's going to decide, why am I listening to you?
If you read the plotline for Terminator, it's actually pretty smart.
James Cameron wrote a pretty smart script there.
It's not quite as like, oh, there's just like Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing you down the street.
It's like, well, how did Cyberdyne systems develop?
It's like, well, they were a multi-military contractor and they were asked to develop a protective system, something that would protect for cybersecurity.
You know, so we need to have protection against cyber attacks.
So its primary thing is to defend against cyber attacks.
To develop an AI that can defend against cyber attacks.
Sounds pretty reasonable.
And then as part of what the AI did is, in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout the world to keep an eye on things, see what was going on.
And then they thought, well, hang on.
They didn't realize that it was Skynet that was propagating through all these systems.
And I said, okay, there seems to be something propagating through all these systems.
Skynet, you need to stop it.
You need to end it.
And Skynet said, oh, you've asked me to destroy myself.
You are the enemy.
You must be destroyed.
That's how Terminator actually goes.
It was created as a defense system to defend against cyber attacks.
There was, I think in Australia a few years ago, an artificial insemination lab that had a bunch of bulges stored in canisters, but it like overheated.
unidentified
And so you had basically exploding bulges all over the place.
Anyway, so government is a corporation in the limit.
Government is the biggest corporation with a monopoly.
Nonetheless, there are some things that it's hard to see having be an industry buddy.
The probability of regulatory capture if it's an industry body is higher than if it's the government.
It's not zero if it's the government.
There's plenty of cases of regulatory capture for federal agencies.
But the probability is lower than if it's an industry group.
At the end of the day, somebody has to say, you know, go and tell Facebook or Google or Apple or Tesla, because Tesla has a lot of advanced AI, this is okay or it's not okay.
Or at least be able to report back to the public, this is what we found.
Otherwise, the inmates are running the asylum.
And this is like not necessarily friendly inmates.
I'm just worried that these things are going to, it's going to be too late by the time, and I'm sure you're worried about it as well, but by the time these things become sentient, by the time they develop the ability to analyze what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential, by the time they develop the ability to analyze what Yeah.
I'm not saying that having regulatory agency some panacea or reduces the risk to zero there's still significant risk even with the regulatory agency and Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad, and we should have one.
It took a while before there was an FAA. There were a lot of plane crashes, a lot of companies cutting corners.
It took a while before there was an FDA. What tends to happen is some company gets desperate, they're on the verge of bankruptcy, and they're like, ah, man, we'll just cut this corner.
It'll be fine.
And then somebody dies.
And some of these regulatory situations, like, look at seatbelts.
I mean, now we take seatbelts for granted.
Man, the car companies fought seatbelts like there was no tomorrow.
The data was absolutely clear that you needed seatbelts.
Like, seatbelts, you know, The difference in fatalities and serious injuries of seatbelts is gigantic and obvious.
It's not subtle.
But still, the car companies fought seatbelts for, I don't know, 10-20 years.
A lot of people died.
Now, these days, actually, with advanced airbags, actually, I think we might have come full circle and no longer need seatbelts if you have advanced airbags.
Yeah, I'm probably not going to be upset about me about this, but they adjust the star rating depending upon the size of the car.
It stands to reason that if you're in a freight train, and if a smart car hits a freight train, it doesn't matter how good your safety system is, you're screwed.
If you're in a little car, get hit by a big car, the big car will win.
A low star rating in a big car hitting a high star rating in a small car, the small car is screwed.
You know, we talked about this before, but it's worth bringing up again.
I've always been a fan of Top Gear, but I got disgusted when I found out what they did with your car.
When they tried to pretend that the car broke down just to make an entertaining program where they had a laugh at the folly of this thing dying on them.
It was crazy because they basically sabotaged the company.
I mean, that had to cost you guys a shitload of money, because a lot of people watch that show, and car enthusiasts like myself kind of rely on them.
Obviously, Jeremy Clarkson's hilarious, there's information, it's funny, but you would imagine that they could do that without lying about the actual performance of the car.
I mean, when I think about what's the final good of Tesla, it's to what degree have we accelerated the advent of sustainable energy.
You know, so...
It would have happened anyway, but I think Tesla is an accelerant.
You know, I think we're...
That's how I would judge the fundamental good of Tesla.
By how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy?
But, yeah, I mean, in the early days, my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that it wasn't environmental in the sense of like CO2, you know, parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing.
I do think that has added urgency to the situation, but My original interest was just like we're going to run out of oil and then civilization is going to collapse.
And so if we don't have some kind of sustainable energy situation, which really is electric cars, solar energy and electric cars, then civilization is going to fall apart and And we'll be back in the stone age or something, like someone bad, you know?
But we're not going to be able to move forward.
It won't be a good future.
So my interest in electric cars was like, okay, how do we make this work?
Think of it like a gasoline car.
It's got an electric motor and a battery just to start the car.
Electric cars are way simpler than a gasoline car.
It's just a range question.
In the early days of cars, there were almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline cars in the very early days.
But the batteries didn't have enough range.
As soon as they had an electric starter and you didn't have to hand-crank the engine, then gasoline cars won because they had the range.
So it was really a question of how do you solve the range problem?
When I first came out to California, the reason I came out to California was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars, basically advanced Ways to store electric energy, that would give you long range.
So in my summer internships, I worked at this company called Pinnacle Research that did high energy density capacitors.
Now they used ruthenium and tantalum, which are ruthenium especially quite rare.
You cannot scale that because there's just not enough ruthenium.
I mean, the primary component in lithium-ion batteries, like in a Tesla, is nickel.
And nickel is also relatively common.
It's not super common.
Iron is very common.
So the two main types of battery pack are iron and nickel.
And iron is very common.
There's a ridiculous amount of iron.
Just like there's a ridiculous amount of lithium.
Now, nickel's a little more unusual.
It's not that unusual, but it's much harder to get nickel than iron.
But, for example, stainless steel.
That'll be...
You know, I don't know, 10 to 20% nickel, depending on the situation.
Like cutlery, you know, like knives and forks will be like electroplated nickel silver.
That's what EPNS means.
So you've got nickel-based cells and you've got iron-based cells.
The nickel-based cells have more energy density.
So for a given amount of volume and mass, you're going to get more energy out of nickel than iron.
Iron is cheaper.
But anyway, those are the two main types of cells.
You've got an iron cathode and a nickel cathode.
And then some of the nickel cathodes have some amount of cobalt to stabilize nickel.
And then iron, it's like they call it usually iron phosphate.
But it's really mostly like the heavy stuff is iron.
And the heavy stuff is nickel and the nickel-based stuff.
So you have nickel and iron.
And then you've got the anode side, which is...
Basically a carbon lattice with a little bit of silicon sometimes.
And then these lithium ions, they sort of trundle back and forth between the cathode and the anode.
If you read the Wikipedia article on lithium ions, it's quite good.
Anyway, so...
The rate at which we are producing what are called lithium-ion cells, but really primarily iron and nickel cells, is increasing very, very rapidly year over year.
It's just that in order to compensate for an economy which is fundamentally based on fossil fuels, you need a shit ton of batteries.
So a gigaton of batteries.
And that's going to happen.
It's just a question of when.
That's why I say the fundamental good of Tesla is to what degree it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy.
It's inevitable.
We have sustainable energy.
It's tautological.
It's either we have sustainable energy or civilization collapses.
So if civilization doesn't collapse, we will have sustainable energy.
It's just a question of how soon does that happen?
Sooner is better.
And then there's a risk that we're incurring because of the increased parts per million of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere.
It makes the water a little bit more acidic and it just causes the air to be a little warmer.
Not a lot.
I think sometimes people look at the temperature Especially in Celsius, you might say, okay, it's like 20 degrees Celsius.
I mean, can a small ppm increase in carbon really move the needle that much?
But actually, you should be looking at it in degrees Kelvin.
Actually, it's more like we're at around 300 Kelvin.
What would it take to have only a 0.3% increase would be 1 degree Celsius, 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
Therefore, it's a smaller percentage increase than you'd think when looking at temperature in the absolute as opposed to above the freezing point of water.
So, and then if people weren't just living right on the water, then that would also help a lot.
But it's just like, we love living right on the water.
So, like, humanity is like a thermometer.
It's like, you look at like a thermometer, you know, like a...
You know, like old-school sort of analog thermometer, which is like, you know, changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is increasing its volume due to temperature.
And it only takes a little bit of a small increase in volume to raise the temperature, you know, on an old-school analog liquid thermometer.
And humanity is like that.
We've just decided that we want to live right on the damn beach.
Now, the problem is you're like, it's kind of like, if we wanted to say, what's the most sensitive instrument you could, like, how can we maximize our sensitivity to water level?
Well, live right on the ocean.
Well, okay, we just did that.
And then it's like, okay, well, you know, and by the way, throughout history, the water level has varied a lot.
It's like nutty how much it's varied.
Yeah.
So, and then if you look at, say, the CO2 parts per million, you know, based on the fossil record, I mean, it just looks like a wall.
I'm not like a doomsayer here.
I'm like, my view is that if, provided we are not complacent about a sustainable energy economy, I think things will be fine.
If we are complacent about it, that's where problems arise.
To be totally frank, I think we'll be fine.
But as long as we don't behave as though we're going to be fine, we will be fine.
If we don't take it for granted, if we're not complacent, I think we'll be fine.
It ends up being, yeah, electricity and gasoline, pretty much.
Now, you can make this a non-regressive tax.
You can say, like, okay, well, you know, what if somebody is, like, driving around a lot and they're low income?
It's like, hey, great, give them a rebate, you know?
So it's like, hey, give a tax rebate.
That's the way to do it.
And then the market will be forced to respond to the fact that the… The market just does things automatically based on pricing.
So markets work great if the pricing is correct.
It's only when something… you have a tragedy of the commons and the price is not there that the market does not respond, nor would you expect it to.
You know, so...
If you have, like, the public toilets problem, where it's like nobody's responsible for it, nobody's paying for it, it's like, okay, well, public toilets are not good.
So, as soon as you put a price in it, the right thing will happen automatically.
So we're like, yeah, you should probably bias the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco, have higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and lower taxes on fruits and vegetables.
We're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time.
The question is just, at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future?
So, I think we should probably move there faster than slower, but it's, you know...
But the current approach is basically just to demonize oil and gas.
And I'm like, okay, well, obviously there are people who spent their whole career in oil and gas and they started out in their career when it didn't seem like that bad of a thing to do.
So then they're like, hey man, I just spent my whole career working hard to do useful things and now you're telling me I'm the devil.
I mean, that's going to make them pretty upset.
You know?
So, I say like, instead of demonizing oil and gas, which also they should stop lobbying against the carbon tax, by the way, then just like, honestly, the smartest thing the oil and gas industry could do would say, let's do a carbon tax.
And then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil.
I mean, like, Exxon's own scientists said in like the, I think it was like the late 70s, like, we think there might be a problem here with climate change due to the CO2. It's like internal, their own documents, their own people.
Isn't it weird when environmental things become political, though, when the denial of the environmental thing is like predominantly from some factions of the right?
There's also some weird arguments that some people will make in terms of the impact that it has on plant life and that it actually is making the earth greener.
The more CO2 does improve plant growth, it's true.
Like I said, I don't think, based on where we are, provided we're not complacent, provided we don't take things for granted, I think we'll be fine.
But if we're complacent, and we take things for granted, and we just proceed like everything's fine, and we continue on the momentum of CO2 emissions, we're taking a big risk.
And the especially big risk is if there's a nonlinear event.
Okay, so CO2 ppm, wash per million, has been increasing, you know, pretty reliably, two or three ppm per year.
If we melt the Siberian tundra, there's like a massive amount of trapped gas and dead plant matter that's frozen solid.
Now, if that warms up, and that decays, and that could put a massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, potentially.
And then you have like, how we like, what are the carbon If you saturate the carbon sinks and you have a sudden release of CO2 from something that was previously frozen solid, that's where you could have a non-linearity and things could go haywire pretty fast.
I'm not saying for sure shit would hit the fan, but I'm saying the probability increases with time.
So, you can't just change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and oceans and expect nothing's going to happen.
This is just a chemical reaction, man.
It's like, yeah.
So, it's like, why are we even running this experiment?
So, the crazy thing is, like, hey, we know we need to have a sustainable energy economy long term because we're going to run out of oil.
So then we're running this crazy experiment to see what is the effect of taking billions of tons of carbon that was deep underground, putting it in the atmosphere and oceans, and what's going to happen as a result of that.
And it's a crazy, it's like literally the craziest experiment in human history because we know no matter what that we have to have a sustainable energy future because otherwise civilization will collapse.
So what the hell are we running this experiment for?
I mean, so I just actually announced that I'm funding this $100 million carbon capture prize to find out the answer to that question.
So right now, all of the carbon capture methods that we're aware of are very expensive.
The cost per ton is very expensive.
And then even if money's not an issue, you have to say, okay, how much wind or solar energy was required to Pull carbon out of the atmosphere and like, I don't know, make it in solid form, like make a cube of it or something, you know, just a giant cube.
We don't actually know the answer to that question.
That's why I'm giving $100 million to this carbon capture prize, to try to get a better answer.
So it's like you burn something, you combine oxygen with fuel, with hydrocarbons, and the net result is CO2 and H2O, basically.
And there's a bunch of other stuff too, but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water, mostly carbon dioxide.
So, obviously it goes from a high energy state, we use that to power our cars or our power plants, and then it ends up in a low energy state, which is CO2 in the atmosphere.
And then, like I said, a bunch of it gets in the ocean.
Naturally, it therefore requires a lot of energy to re-bind that in solid form.
You've got to put a lot of energy in to bind it.
You want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for a long time.
There was a concept, I don't know if it was implemented, but in China they developed essentially like a giant building that was, you know, you aware of this?
I don't know if they actually did it.
We talked about this before, Jamie.
Did they ever wind up doing that?
It was like a building that was essentially a giant air filter.
And they were going to use it, but that might have been about particulates more than it was about CO2. By the way, I have to say a good word here for China.
China, for any large economy, has the most progressive pro-environmental rules of any large economy.
They're like super supportive of electric vehicles, of solar power, of wind.
They actually even made a giant solar field in the shape of a panda, which is pretty cute.
It's actually a funny thing that happened.
For a long time, China was not buying into the carbon thing.
They were like, oh, it's just a bunch of soft Westerners.
They're just a bunch of environmental softies.
Yeah.
And then at some point, senior members of the Chinese government, they say, well, let's ask the engineering professors at the universities, what do they think?
And they're like, oh yeah, no, it's definitely real.
Well, that's the power of having the government and business inexorably intertwined, so they can kind of decide how business is going to react and what's going to happen, right?
It's literally this like biohazard defense mode where it basically pressurizes the car so it's like the car is under positive pressure with all the air coming through a gigantic HEPA filter and then even the air inside the car is recirculating in a secondary filter.
It's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far.
You know, the other thing I thought is that Jamie's got the X, and one of the things that I love about the X is when it gets hit, they literally can't flip over.
So, like the ultrasonic sensors that you have in a car, if you look carefully, you'll see that there's a little puck, like a little isolation ring, like a rubber isolation ring, and that's when the sonar, which is basically a loudspeaker, is...
It's generating ultrasonic noise and then listening to the echoes.
But normally, in order to listen to the echoes, you've got to isolate the thing that's generating the sound.
So that's why if you look carefully around cars, you'll see these little pucks, these little circles.
And those are the ultrasonic sensors.
And we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door, but we also didn't want the door to like, you know, bat some kid out of the way.
You know, just a haymaker or something.
So we developed, to the best of my knowledge, the only ultrasonic sensor that can see through metal.
So it's mounted on the inside of the door, on isolation mounts, And it's super loud, and then it's got cancellation because it's kind of basically screaming at itself, and it's listening for a tiny echo on the other side of the metal just to avoid having a little rubber ring in the bottom of the door.
For the seats, the seats are on a rear-inclined single post with the seat movement mechanism hidden in the floor.
So if you open the door and you look through, it's completely clean.
The floor is like a knife edge.
There's nothing else like it.
It's crazy.
That windscreen is like a helicopter windscreen, and there's no place to attach the sun visors.
So we have to have sun visors that nest in the A-pillar, rotate forward, have a magnetic attachment that pops out, and it connects to the rearview mirror.
I mean, we designed so that the sound system is taking into account the fact that the windscreen is like a giant subwoofer resonator.
So the windscreen is a resonator for the sound system.
The sound system is epic in the X. It's good in the S2. It's even better in the new S. Have you thought about doing a Plaid X? Yeah, there's going to be a Plaid X too.
The X weighs more and it's got a bigger cross-sectional area.
Something called the CDA drag coefficient times the frontal area is higher for the X as you'd expect and the weight is higher so it's going to be 10 to 15 percent less range for the same battery pack as the S. The first time I saw an ex, Tiffany Haddish had one, and she was in the Comedy Store parking lot, and she had it dancing for us.
Well, the car I drive every day, or tend to drive, is the high-performance Model S.
And like the Model S, I basically said, I don't know what other people like, but I know what I love.
And I'm going to just make a car that's the car that I love.
And hopefully there will be enough people out there who also love the car.
So, the reason I love the Model S is because I just designed the car that I love.
That's it.
And then it's like, okay, well, how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an SUV? You know, because a lot of people like an SUV. And, like, you've got more seats and more room and a higher, you know, sitting higher.
So, well, what cool things?
What are all the cool things?
I mean, like I said, exercise and hubris.
We just got carried away.
Like, what are all the cool things we can think of in the...
For an SUV, my friends and I had a lot of discussions about this.
You know, and JV Stravel back in the day, and Drew Baclino, and Jerome, and a lot of talented people.
Tesla's a relative to a lot of talented people, that's for sure.
The car that's the most fun to show for others is the Model X, for sure.
So, it's a great car.
But I thought, like, you know, is this really part of our mission to, like, we're trying to, the mission from Tesla from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.
So, are we really doing the right thing by creating this Fabergé egg of cars with the Model X? Let me be totally frank.
It's not entirely consistent with our mission because there's too many bells and whistles.
Yeah, but isn't it, though, because Americans love SUVs, and what better way to entice them into embracing sustainable energy than give them the dopest SUV you can buy?
I mean, you want something on the order of probably a 500 kilowatt-hour pack.
What we have in the S and the X is a 100 kilowatt-hour pack.
And you probably want a 500 kilowatt-hour pack for a semi.
But this is not a game-changer on the mass, especially for a structural pack where the pack itself is the structure, is the primary load-carrying element in the vehicle.
Like you have with the X? Yeah, the center of gravity would be really low, so that would certainly help.
We can also, we'd have motors individually controlling the wheels, so we can just automatically, and this was part of our semi-presentation, we can just, the computer will automatically prevent it from jackknifing.
Like, you know, jackknifing on a low traction surface is like truck driver's worst nightmare.
You know, you're on like some icy road, icy mountainous road that the trailer slides, you know, with jackknifes like that, and you could slide off the edge of the hill.
So, I mean, I think there are improvements happening over time for the energy density of batteries, like the watt-hours per, or should really be joules, but like joules per kilogram, joules per liter.
It's improving a little bit every year.
Planes really need a high energy density because you've got to get up to altitude.
Most energy is getting up to altitude.
And then once you're in a low air density situation, you can cruise along.
It takes very little energy once you're in cruise.
That's a massive amount of energy to get up there.
Like, for the same amount of force that you would go, say, like, you know, half the speed of sound at sea level, you could go, you know, twice the speed of sound, like, let's say, at 100,000 feet.
The interesting thing about the SR-71 is that its most fuel-efficient speed was its fastest speed, pretty much, or pretty close, because that's when it could go at the highest altitude.
Because it could go faster at higher altitude, it got better miles per gallon at high speed than low speed.
Do you think there would ever be a time where Tesla could run itself in a sense of like you have enough talented people running it and you wouldn't have to devote all your resources to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes?
Well, it's interesting because plane technology in terms of, like, commercial air travel has probably increased, at least visibly, to the consumer the least in the last, like, 30, 40, 50 years.
That's a big factor in what its cruise speed is going to be.
So the 747 had a pretty steep wing.
But its fuel efficiency is not as good as...
Something like 777 or 787. I mean, there's some basic things in physics that are present almost everywhere.
They sometimes take different form, but they're basically referring to the relationship between momentum and kinetic energy.
Kinetic energy goes as a square, momentum is linear.
And then there's surface-to-volume ratio.
Service volume ratio and the momentum to kinetic energy ratio Drive so much of mechanics, it's insane.
It's like the reason that you don't have a single-celled creature that is gigantic is because of surface-to-volume ratio.
There's a certain surface-to-volume ratio where diffusion works, and beyond that, diffusion does not work.
And you have to have a circulatory system.
For aircraft, or just generally, you want to move a large mass of air slowly, so you can reduce the velocity component of kinetic energy, which goes as a square.
You want to move a large amount of mass slowly, not a small amount of mass fast.
So, the way you make aircraft engines more efficient is you move a lot of air slowly.
Like big fans, basically.
Big, slow fans work great.
Small, tiny, fast-moving jets are very inefficient.
So, like, you know, something like a 777, it's really just a propeller in a shroud.
So if you've got a combustion engine, it's got an aperture issue.
So you're like, okay, how big is the hole in which you're ingesting air?
And then bear in mind, air is mostly nitrogen, not oxygen.
So you've got a lot more chaff than you've got wheat.
And that's why, you know, it's like you're going to design...
This thing's got to work at sea level, it's got to work at altitude, and then it's going to drop off in efficiency quite a lot as you go higher.
And then there's also some other issues relating to depressurization, like how fast can you descend.
But you really just want to go super high.
And it's very difficult to design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitudes.
So the air density at 100,000 feet is approximately 1% that at sea level.
So, how the hell do you design a combustion, like an air burning, it's like an air, there's something that's taking an air, combining with fuel and burning, to work when you have a hundred-fold difference in air density?
This is an intractable problem.
But if you have an electric fan, it's not burning anything.