Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
No, that's the Sacha Baron Cohen movie. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I never saw that one. | ||
Well, there's a scene where he's... | ||
They show him the new missile they've developed, but it has kind of a round head. | ||
And he says, you need to make it more pointy to his engineers. | ||
And actually, that's why I also say the same thing. | ||
You know, Starship, we need to make it more pointy. | ||
Did you say that? | ||
Because of the movie? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Hold on. | ||
unidentified
|
Hold on. | |
I just have that main camera on. | ||
Okay. | ||
Okay. | ||
You literally told them to make the starship more pointy because of the movie The Dictator. | ||
Yep. | ||
And they know it too. | ||
It's not like they're unaware of it. | ||
Everyone thought it would be funny if we made the rocket more pointy, so we did. | ||
Did it have any effect on the aerodynamics? | ||
No. | ||
Nothing? | ||
No, we can make it way blunter and be fine. | ||
But is it better to be pointier? | ||
If it wasn't for the movie... | ||
It's arguably slightly worse. | ||
But more fun for you. | ||
Yeah, it looks cooler. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, okay. | |
It does look cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
How long do you think it'll be before... | ||
Are you good, Jamie? | ||
What's that? | ||
My head's maybe... | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
You good? | ||
How long... | ||
My head is sticking out... | ||
Is that where it's... | ||
unidentified
|
It's right on the edge of the top. | |
Oh, is that supposed to be? | ||
Okay. | ||
You're good. | ||
All right. | ||
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? | ||
With our extra pointy rocket? | ||
Yeah, with your extra pointy rocket. | ||
Do you mean Earth to Earth transport? | ||
Just any kind of. | ||
Any time where you could just do it with people and have it land. | ||
All the time. | ||
I think we're probably two years away. | ||
Two years away. | ||
That's really nice. | ||
Two years is pretty cool. | ||
Two years for people. | ||
We'll have a lot of flights between now and then. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
2023 is not that far away. | ||
That'll be there before you know it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
2023. Time flies. | ||
How many times have you had explosions with those things? | ||
When you're on a rocket. | ||
I don't know, like quite a few. | ||
Six, maybe? | ||
Five or six? | ||
What are those like? | ||
What is it like when you watch it explode? | ||
When it's supposed to land and it just... | ||
This is a test program. | ||
We expect it to explode. | ||
It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because we're trying to develop advanced rockets at a high speed. | ||
And if you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge. | ||
And the whole rocket is evolving. | ||
The engines, the structure, avionics, the software, the ground systems are all evolving simultaneously. | ||
And the whole production system, which is actually harder than the rocket design by far. | ||
So the rocket and engine and avionics production system and the launch system is... | ||
A thousand percent harder than the initial design. | ||
Like at least. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Same with cars. | ||
It's like 10,000 percent. | ||
It's easy to do a car prototype. | ||
It's hard to do production. | ||
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? | ||
Yeah, it's like a big rocket. | ||
Why does it need that much thrust? | ||
Because you want to go to Mars? | ||
We're trying to make life multi-planetary. | ||
Extend life beyond Earth. | ||
And in order to do that, you have to have high tonnage to Mars. | ||
And that means you need a big rocket and you've got to fly a lot. | ||
So the reason why it has twice the thrust of the Saturn V is to plan for these interstellar trips. | ||
Interplanetary. | ||
Interplanetary trips. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, we know how to get to orbit. | ||
We've done that a lot. | ||
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. | ||
Then you need to go one step further. | ||
It needs to be fully and rapidly reusable. | ||
You know, it's like... | ||
Like a plane. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Like playing lands, you refuel it and take off a game. | ||
How do you have time? | ||
I never understand you in regards to the way you run multiple businesses simultaneously. | ||
I would think that something like this would require so much concentration. | ||
I would think this would be your whole being, trying to figure out how to work this. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, well, I do work a lot. | ||
It's crazy! | ||
Yeah, and the reason I was late is I was literally coming from some critical meetings. | ||
Normally, I'd be meeting until I work until like 1 or 2 in the morning. | ||
Every night? | ||
I mean, Saturday and Sunday, usually not, but sometimes. | ||
How much do you sleep? | ||
About 6 hours. | ||
That's pretty good. | ||
Yeah, not that crazy. | ||
For you, that's... | ||
I mean, for someone who does as much as you, that's actually... | ||
That's impressive that you can squeeze that in. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I've tried sleeping less, but then total productivity decreases. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So you feel like six is the number where it's... | ||
Yeah, six or six is... | ||
I don't find myself wanting more sleep than six. | ||
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. | ||
That's right. | ||
How do you avoid that? | ||
Like, what is the difference between the way these things are structured? | ||
Like, the whole thing goes together? | ||
And then it lands together? | ||
Well, we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit. | ||
Right. | ||
I think one thing to appreciate is getting to space is easy. | ||
Getting to orbit is hard. | ||
So you only need maybe 1% or 2% of the energy to get to space, to where the atmosphere is thin, compared to what you need to get to orbit. | ||
And if you get to orbit, now you've got to burn off all that energy, and you're coming in like a meteor. | ||
So you need a powerful heat shield. | ||
So it's like... | ||
Super difficult to get to orbit at all. | ||
And then if you get to orbit at all, then making those stages reusable means they've got to come back intact. | ||
And then the upper stage is especially difficult because it's got so much energy. | ||
All the energy you put into it, you have to take out. | ||
You're literally coming in like a flaming meteor. | ||
And most things would just melt or vaporize. | ||
Like if you as a human tried to come in from orbit, you'd just be pink mist. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's a funny way to put it. | ||
Now, the space shuttle, they had tiles, right? | ||
unidentified
|
That was the way they avoided the heat. | |
They had these heat shield tiles. | ||
What do you use with the SpaceX rockets? | ||
Yeah, we have a more advanced version of the shuttle tile, but you've got to use some kind of ceramic, essentially. | ||
It's usually some form of silicon oxide, aluminum oxide, some carbon perhaps thrown in there. | ||
And is it like a one-piece? | ||
Or is it in tiles? | ||
It's in tiles. | ||
Yeah, hexagonal tiles. | ||
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. | ||
So there has to be some sort of room to move. | ||
It can't be one large piece of ceramic that you fit over the front. | ||
Yeah, you can't really make such a giant piece of ceramic, because you've got to, well, I guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But you really need expansion joints, expansion contraction joints. | ||
So it would be quite difficult to do a single piece tile. | ||
Think of it like tiles for a roof or something like that. | ||
Why don't we just make one tile for a roof? | ||
It's like, yeah, it doesn't work. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Now, these things have multiple stages. | ||
How many stages in the rocket boosters? | ||
When things are taking off, how many? | ||
Starship has two stages. | ||
That's the minimum number that you could do on a planet like Earth. | ||
Earth's gravity is quite strong. | ||
And we have a thick atmosphere and strong gravity. | ||
Whereas if you took off from Mars, it's relatively easy. | ||
Mars is around just under 40% of Earth's gravity. | ||
The Moon is about a sixth. | ||
And getting to lunar orbit from the surface of the Moon is easy. | ||
During Apollo, the lunar lander Just the top half of the lunar lander was able to take off and get to lunar orbit. | ||
But to get to Earth orbit, you need the giant rocket. | ||
It's very non-linear. | ||
So what happens to the first, when you take off and it separates into stages, how does the first stage get reused? | ||
Well, have you seen how the Falcon 9 stages work, where they come back and land? | ||
No. | ||
You haven't seen that? | ||
No. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Yeah, I mean... | ||
Jamie's going to pull it up. | ||
So does it come down with parachutes? | ||
How does it land? | ||
No, it lands propulsively with the thrusters, with the engines. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So it's designed to take off... | ||
Here it is. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Oh, wow. | ||
So that is the bottom of the rocket that launches it straight up and then afterwards it comes down and lands like that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
And then the top piece can then land separately. | ||
Yes. | ||
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. | ||
On purpose? | ||
Did you design it that way? | ||
Yes, but it's not really possible with Falcon 9. If we made the alpha stage reusable, our payload to orbit would be dramatically less. | ||
In order to have meaningful payload to orbit, scale is important. | ||
You need to make things big. | ||
there is value to scale. | ||
You know, for the family, like for a truck, you wouldn't want like everything delivered by a small pickup truck. | ||
You want semi-trailers. | ||
You don't see... | ||
You don't see ships in the ocean, cargo ships, coming along with one sea van with an outboard motor. | ||
It's like a giant ship. | ||
So scale has value in and of itself. | ||
Like the same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket. | ||
So even just in terms of the computer, the electronics weight becomes vanishingly small in a big rocket, but it is significant in a small rocket. | ||
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? | ||
There's no way around Newton's third law, really. | ||
So... | ||
You basically have to expel mass. | ||
For a car, you can push against the ground. | ||
For an aircraft, you can react against the air. | ||
For a boat, you can react against water. | ||
In vacuum, there is nothing. | ||
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. | ||
Momentum is conserved. | ||
So, yeah. | ||
So we're stuck with gas. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Until some insane breakthrough dealing with gravity or something. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's not going to happen. | ||
Not in our lifetime? | ||
Not in our lifetime. | ||
No. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So... | ||
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. | ||
The rocket, by the way, is mostly oxygen. | ||
So for Starship, we're almost 80% oxygen. | ||
It's only just over 20% fuel. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, is this as efficient as you anticipate it being, you know, any time in our lifetime? | ||
The trip to Mars is like, what, six months? | ||
Is that what the idea is? | ||
Yeah, it's about six months. | ||
Do you ever anticipate it being quicker than that? | ||
Is it possible to make these things faster? | ||
Would you have to have solar sails? | ||
No, solar sail would be very slow. | ||
Would it be? | ||
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. | ||
Jupiter's orbit. | ||
So... | ||
That's not good. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you're going to be coming in hot. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
It's not like you can just go all the time. | ||
You can only go every two years. | ||
When do you anticipate, like, how much time before there's regular travel back and forth to Mars? | ||
Roughly. | ||
Like a real civilization on Mars? | ||
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... | ||
You can survive. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
So you could only be just missing one little thing. | ||
You'd be like, you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin C. It's an only matter of time. | ||
You know? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And then it's going to be curtains. | ||
So you've got to have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars. | ||
And the reason that the shift stopped coming could be World War III or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization. | ||
So civilization here on Earth could end with a bang or a whimper. | ||
Or natural disasters. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Asteroid impact, super volcano. | ||
Yeah, that would be up in the bank category. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But it could also be like a whole series of things. | ||
Like, what killed the dinosaurs? | ||
Well, it wasn't just one thing. | ||
It was like a whole bunch of things happened in a row. | ||
And... | ||
You know, well, they could have taken any one of those things. | ||
They had like three things happen and no dinosaurs. | ||
Which is kind of amazing that crocodiles are still here. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Those fuckers. | ||
They're resilient. | ||
Crocodiles, they... | ||
They live on decayed meat. | ||
They love rotten meat. | ||
And so in any kind of disastrous situation, there's a lot of dead creatures. | ||
And the crocodiles love it. | ||
So that's why they're around. | ||
Crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms. | ||
And shrews. | ||
Shrews, yeah. | ||
Which is why we're here. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Our great-great-great-great-great grandparents were shrews. | ||
What a strange thing to come from. | ||
So there's hope. | ||
There's hope for all you rodents out there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
One day you can go to Mars. | ||
Just keep doing your homework. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
So there'll be... | ||
You say the great filter. | ||
What did you mean by that? | ||
Well, so... | ||
There's something called, like, the Fermi paradox of, like, where are the aliens? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, you know, where are the aliens? | ||
And I think it was Carl Sagan that said, like... | ||
There either are a lot of aliens or none. | ||
And they're equally terrifying. | ||
If there are a lot of aliens, well, I mean, the invasion ship slash... | ||
You know, bug infestation, just, you know, like... | ||
Starship Trooper style? | ||
Well, yeah. | ||
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? | ||
The problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too. | ||
Yeah, sure. | ||
At least try hard in Faking It. | ||
Are you familiar with Commander David Fravor's account of the Tic Tac UFO that he encountered off of the coast of San Diego? | ||
You know Lex? | ||
Lex Friedman? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
They didn't know what they were. | ||
They didn't know what to do. | ||
Do they have a photo or something? | ||
They do. | ||
They have video of it. | ||
They have video of it. | ||
You ever see the New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff? | ||
I don't know. | ||
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. | ||
Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens. | ||
I would hope so. | ||
That's why I'm asking you. | ||
No. | ||
I'd be jumping on that like... | ||
You should watch that conversation with Lex. | ||
Sure. | ||
Here's the thing. | ||
Do you think that they would want us to know? | ||
Or do you think they would just be observing and making sure we don't blow ourselves up? | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
If you were an alien civilization. | ||
They sure are subtle. | ||
I mean, if they wanted us to know, obviously they could just show up and walk down Main Street. | ||
Like, hey, I'm an alien. | ||
Check me out. | ||
Here's my spaceship. | ||
I just land in the middle of Times Square. | ||
I'd be like... | ||
Okay. | ||
Or hover over downtown LA. Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We were like, okay, we believe you. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, whatever, they are very subtle, very subtle with aliens. | ||
How often do you think about it? | ||
Zero. | ||
Zero? | ||
Even though you're thinking about interplanetary travel, you don't really think about aliens. | ||
No. | ||
I mean, if they show up, I'm like, great. | ||
Okay, now this is new information. | ||
But we... | ||
unidentified
|
What an interesting way of putting it. | |
This is new information. | ||
This is new information. | ||
Like, where are you guys up till now? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So... | ||
Anyway, listen, if I see some evidence for aliens, I'll be the first to be like, ah, aliens, you know? | ||
Right, then you'll investigate. | ||
But until then, you think it's kind of a waste of time? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It definitely seems like a waste of time if nothing's happened so far. | ||
You think about all the people that have been researching aliens for their whole life, and they have very little to show for it. | ||
Well, you know, there's... | ||
Other than cool stories. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
But even just some advanced metallurgy. | ||
Anything. | ||
Anything like that. | ||
Right. | ||
Nothing like that that we could point to that we can't do. | ||
Everything that we found archaeologically is consistent with the time, the technology they had at that time. | ||
Archaeologically. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So you're just talking about old stuff. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, just throughout history. | ||
It's not like... | ||
Yeah. | ||
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? | ||
Absolutely, the entire galaxy. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, just kind of like, you know, hop from one solar system to the next, and yeah. | ||
That... | ||
It seems like that's... | ||
Imperative. | ||
Like, that has to happen if the human civilization is going to survive. | ||
Because our planet is just... | ||
We're too subject to natural disasters and our own folly, and if the species is going to survive, we kind of have to escape. | ||
It's mostly about the species. | ||
I mean, there have been some real doozies of, like, massive meteors and... | ||
Super volcanoes and the continents moved all over the place and Earth's been a snowball and super hot. | ||
If you read the geological history of Earth, it's very long and complicated. | ||
So, and then there have been so many extinction events, not like just a few. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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? | ||
Okay. | ||
But if you're like a human, you're screwed. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, didn't, people got down to, there was just a few thousand of us at one point in time because of a super volcano, I think Indonesia. | ||
I think it was only 60,000, 70,000 years ago. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There have been a number of sort of revolutionary choke points. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And the last ice age must have been pretty rough too. | ||
A lot of species got wiped out then. | ||
Is that part of what motivates you? | ||
What motivates you to want to do this and to put people on Mars and to start traveling, get people traveling through the galaxy? | ||
Yeah, so philosophically... | ||
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. | ||
Maybe more, but at least 1%. | ||
Well, it's in all the most exciting sci-fi movies. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If you saw a sci-fi movie and they didn't have spaceships, you'd be like, what's going on there? | ||
Something terrible must have happened. | ||
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. | ||
Not a lot of you. | ||
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. | ||
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Really? | |
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. | ||
So does everything have to be done in a greenhouse? | ||
Is it some sort of a dome? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So is there a long-term possibility of terraforming? | ||
Yes, long-term we can make... | ||
If you just warm Mars up, there's a lot of frozen CO2 and frozen water that would liquefy. | ||
The CO2 would densify the atmosphere. | ||
The liquid water would form oceans and lakes. | ||
So... | ||
So basically a lot of frozen water and frozen CO2 on Mars. | ||
And how would you warm it up? | ||
Well, there's a few ways to tackle that problem. | ||
That'll obviously be up to the Martians, but I don't know. | ||
You could have giant solar reflectors. | ||
You could create miniature suns over the poles or something like that. | ||
What? | ||
Well, it can be gravitationally contained, but you could just have it do giant thermonuclear explosions every few seconds. | ||
The sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky. | ||
If you want to know, hey, what is it like to be exposed to thermonuclear radiation, go stand outside in the middle of the day. | ||
My 10-year-old said, If space has no air and fire needs air, how does the sun stay burning? | ||
She loves to do that. | ||
She looks at you like she's super smart. | ||
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Hmm. | |
Right. | ||
That's a good question, little one. | ||
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things about the sun. | ||
The sun is converting, I think, four or five million tons of mass to energy every second. | ||
So, you know, E equals MC squared. | ||
So that's a lot. | ||
It's a lot. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And it's not even a big sun. | ||
It's not even a big sun. | ||
So, yeah, four or five megatons per second, every second, every day, for billions of years. | ||
So what kind of engineering would be involved in creating a mini sun that you hover above the poles? | ||
The sun is a gravitationally contained reaction, so you need a lot of mass. | ||
If you don't have a lot of mass, that's why you'd have explosions, just like little pulsing things, like a pulsing sun. | ||
Some people have said, well, if you added up all the nuclear weapons on Earth, that wouldn't even be that much. | ||
I'm like, yeah, because they're small. | ||
We could make way bigger nuclear bombs than the current ones. | ||
It was like, what's the point? | ||
They said, well, if you want to make an artificial sun, then you'd just use a lot more hydrogen. | ||
That would be something... | ||
Prytium or deuterium. | ||
They would have to construct on Mars? | ||
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Yeah, yeah. | |
And then figure out a way to launch it? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Jesus. | ||
Yeah, honestly, not that hard. | ||
LAUGHTER I mean, they could do this without really even having computers back in the day. | ||
But you can also do it with solar reflectors. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Somehow, if you want to make it look like Earth, you've got to warm it up. | ||
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Right. | |
So, in hundreds of years from now, or whatever it would take, people would eventually, you know, figure some way out. | ||
Yeah, you could terraform Mars and make it be like Earth. | ||
And we could bring, we could take life from Earth and breathe life into Mars. | ||
There's nothing living on the surface of Mars. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Nothing. | ||
It's cold. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's a lot of ultraviolet. | ||
The combination of being cold and having a lot of ultraviolet radiation, that's the killer combo. | ||
Just being cold, then bacteria could survive. | ||
Or just UV, but warm, the bacteria can repair themselves. | ||
But if they're frozen, and they get blasted with the UV, they can't repair themselves because they're frozen. | ||
And isn't the speculation that at one point in time Mars did have an atmosphere? | ||
Mars was different than it is now? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It once had quite a dense atmosphere and it seemed most likely to have had oceans and lakes. | ||
Now they're frozen and covered in dust. | ||
That orange color you see is iron oxide. | ||
So there's quite a lot of iron, just rust. | ||
You know, for a while there they thought, well, maybe Mars was like some ancient civilization. | ||
Do you remember the face on Mars? | ||
Sure. | ||
There's a guy that was completely... | ||
He was fascinating. | ||
Richard Hoagland? | ||
Is that his name? | ||
See if that's the guy's name. | ||
But he's, with all due respect, out of his fucking mind. | ||
And he was making all these incredibly bizarre connections. | ||
Like measurements from this rock to that rock and using all this mathematics to prove that this symmetry was impossible in nature. | ||
This was all created by civilization. | ||
That this face was like some sort of an ancient shrine to whatever being lived there before. | ||
There it is. | ||
Monuments to Mars. | ||
Richard Hoagland. | ||
That's the guy's name. | ||
I used to listen to him on Art Bell. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
It was just... | ||
I mean, I don't know if he's schizophrenic. | ||
Maybe he's just smarter than all of us. | ||
But, uh... | ||
Jamie's shaking his head. | ||
I think aspirationally, you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence. | ||
Not inversely proportionate to the evidence. | ||
Well, he was definitely inversely proportionate to the evidence. | ||
It was very strange. | ||
It was one of those ones where I had to stop listening because I felt like I was going crazy, too. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He was so invested in this idea... | ||
Again, maybe he's right. | ||
I don't think so. | ||
No. | ||
I doubt it. | ||
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. | ||
It just looked like rocks. | ||
Yeah, Mars kind of looks like, I don't know, like some Arizona desert or something like that. | ||
What do they think happened? | ||
They think it was hit? | ||
Like an asteroid hit? | ||
Well, everything got hit with light asteroids over time. | ||
Do they think that that's what killed the environment there, the atmosphere? | ||
Well, the atmosphere... | ||
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. | ||
Plenty of time to figure things out. | ||
For us. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, but do you think that Mars' atmosphere eroded quicker because it's just smaller? | ||
That's a factor. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, like if you look at, say, asteroids or, you know, they don't really have, like Sirius is a pretty big asteroid. | ||
But it doesn't really have an atmosphere. | ||
The moon doesn't really have an atmosphere. | ||
So, in fact, it doesn't have an atmosphere. | ||
Technically, there's a tiny amount of rarefied gas, but it's not a real atmosphere. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The... | ||
Whatever. | ||
Your mommy burger. | ||
Yeah, they don't... | ||
He thinks that there's a 90... | ||
Apparently there's a 91% possibility that it was shaped like a... | ||
Your mama asteroid. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, umamao. | ||
It was a Hawaiian name. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah, it was a Hawaiian name. | ||
It sounds like your mama. | ||
Yes, it was like your mama. | ||
Umamao or something like that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, because it was discovered in Hawaii. | ||
They gave it a Hawaiian name. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
So it's not like 1% chance over 100 years. | ||
It's like 99% chance of making it. | ||
So I think he's probably about right. | ||
So, 1% chance per century, so as the centuries go on, there's less of a chance? | ||
No, it's... | ||
More of a chance. | ||
So, because we become more intelligent, more resources, and possibly the ability to escape Earth. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's like... | ||
I don't know. | ||
Russian roulette with, you know... | ||
Asteroids. | ||
99 barrels are empty. | ||
Click, click, click. | ||
Eventually. | ||
It's going to get us. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You said something that I thought was really interesting. | ||
The meaning of life. | ||
Do you think there is a meaning to life? | ||
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. | ||
But when you keep going with that, like, where does it go? | ||
I don't know. | ||
That's why, if I knew, we're like, okay, case closed. | ||
We can die now. | ||
The problem I always have with that is, do I want there to be a meaning to this? | ||
Because it gives sense of purpose to finite life forms. | ||
Well, I think there's a lot to understand about the universe that we don't yet understand. | ||
Maybe it's a good time to have a beverage. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
So let's see. | ||
Alcohol is hour one. | ||
What's hour two? | ||
Hour two? | ||
Well, I don't think marijuana is legal in Texas. | ||
And the last time... | ||
I don't have to remind you. | ||
There was problems involved. | ||
Yes. | ||
Ultimately not, though, right? | ||
Well... | ||
It was, like, temporary. | ||
All that soothed over, right? | ||
Didn't it? | ||
CBD's legal here. | ||
CBD. CBD doesn't do anything, does it? | ||
No. | ||
I think that's fake. | ||
Well, no, it definitely does something for inflammation. | ||
It does? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
Well, how much CBD do you have to have before you notice it? | ||
Well, physically or... | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Physically, you don't have to have a lot. | ||
Physically, CBD works great for people with arthritis and people with, like, sore muscles and things like that. | ||
Cheers. | ||
Yeah, no. | ||
CBD definitely works for that. | ||
But as far as psychoactive effects, not much. | ||
It relieves anxiety for people. | ||
Okay. | ||
It helps people sleep, especially when it's combined with things like melatonin and things along those lines. | ||
But it doesn't get you high. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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No. | |
People do mix CBD with THC from muscle creams, though, and that doesn't get you high either, but it increases the effectiveness. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah, there's some creams that are really good that people like that have THC and CBD in it. | ||
unidentified
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Alright. | |
So you have sunscreen or something, and then... | ||
I mean, why not? | ||
Just throw it in there, you know? | ||
unidentified
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Why not? | |
Yeah. | ||
Well, it's just... | ||
It's great for soreness. | ||
You just smell like weed all day. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It doesn't smell like weed, though. | ||
It doesn't. | ||
No. | ||
No. | ||
Some of it does, though. | ||
Some of it does. | ||
That's the thing about anything that's unregulated, right? | ||
Like, hippies are making it. | ||
That's always the problem. | ||
Quality control. | ||
Yeah. | ||
No quality control. | ||
That's the problem with edibles. | ||
They're made by a bunch of crazy people. | ||
Cooking them up in some, you know, Chula Vista apartment somewhere. | ||
You really don't know what's in there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Anyway, so we've got to make life multi-planetary before it's too late. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think that makes sense. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, why not? | ||
Also, it's going to be fun and exciting, and even if you don't go, you can just watch it on TV. Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
It feels cool. | ||
I mean, like, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not like, you know, attendance is mandatory here. | ||
You know, and it'll be dangerous and people might die. | ||
Well, for sure they're going to die, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
That the idea is like, oh, Mars is going to be an escape hatch, some luxury resort for rich people. | ||
I'm like, no, it's like high probability of death relative to Earth. | ||
It's a long journey. | ||
Food's probably not great. | ||
A lot of hard work. | ||
No sunlight. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's like, it sounds like, you know, Shackleton's out for the Antarctic, where it's like, it's dangerous. | ||
It's a long journey. | ||
The food's bad. | ||
You know, might not make it back. | ||
But if you do, it'll be glorious. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, I think it's important for the future of humanity and consciousness. | ||
And like I said, we want to get past the great filter. | ||
It might turn out that when we got there exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one-planet civilizations. | ||
And they just never made it to the next planet. | ||
Ghost towns. | ||
Yeah, strange ghost towns. | ||
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. | ||
Isn't that a problem with us now that everything has become digital? | ||
Everything's stored on microchips and hard drives and if something catastrophic happened, We're good to go. | ||
Yeah, absolutely. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So we still have a lot of writing from the ancient Romans, because they chose a lot of stuff in stone. | ||
Or the Egyptians. | ||
Or the Egyptians, yeah, exactly. | ||
Man, the Egyptians really went to town with the hieroglyphics. | ||
Even the Sumerians, you know, the cuneiforms carved in the clay tablets. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Absolutely. | ||
We kind of wish they had said more. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Like us. | ||
Our stuff is... | ||
Yeah, it's not going to last for 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. | ||
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It's like one of the things, like this is a movie, you know. | |
That's kind of one of the possible outcomes. | ||
And unfortunately, it didn't blow up, and now my car is orbiting Mars. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
I've seen the images of it with the... | ||
It looks fake. | ||
It looks fake. | ||
That's how you know it's real. | ||
Is that how you know it's real? | ||
Yeah. | ||
How do the images get to us? | ||
The images are too lame to be fake. | ||
I mean, they look good, but for example, the dynamic range of the camera is not enough to pick up the stars and the vehicle. | ||
Things are very bright in space. | ||
We don't quite realize it, but in the atmosphere, The atmosphere is making everything a little fuzzy. | ||
And in space, things are super crisp and really reflective. | ||
There it is. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
So how is that getting to us? | ||
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The image. | |
Yeah, with a radio. | ||
Wow. | ||
So the rocket's got a... | ||
How many megapixels is that image? | ||
Not that many, actually. | ||
Really? | ||
No, I mean, it's probably a couple megapixels or something like that. | ||
So like an old flip phone. | ||
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Yeah. | |
It's mostly just driven by what's the bandwidth of a video signal. | ||
So what do you have? | ||
These are frame grabs from the video signal. | ||
And where's the camera that's taking this photo? | ||
Oh man, our director of photography is awesome. | ||
But I mean, when this thing gets sent to us, what is taking an image of this? | ||
There's a camera on a stick. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And it didn't break off? | ||
No. | ||
I mean, we thought it might, but there's a camera... | ||
I mean, it's kind of like a fairly wide angle, and so the camera's actually not that far from the car. | ||
What is that one up there that shows the whole car? | ||
Is that fake? | ||
That's fake. | ||
Is that real? | ||
That's real. | ||
Wow. | ||
Is this Don't Panic on the screen? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Don't Panic. | ||
Speaking of the Roadster, when is that thing going to be available? | ||
Next Generation Roadster. | ||
So we're finishing the engineering of it this year. | ||
And so hopefully start shipping them next year. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And we're going to throw some rocket technology in that car. | ||
Yeah, I've heard about that. | ||
What does that mean? | ||
So at a minimum it would be... | ||
I wanted to hover, and I'm trying to figure out how to make this thing hover without killing people. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah, good call. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
I thought maybe we could make it hover, but not too high. | ||
So maybe it can hover a meter above the ground or something like that. | ||
If you plummet, you blow out the suspension, but you're not going to die. | ||
Maybe you're six feet. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Six feet, probably okay. | ||
You're not going to die either. | ||
Probably not. | ||
Probably not. | ||
So if we just put a height limit on it, it's probably fine. | ||
And would it be able to travel while it's hovering? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So you'll be able to go six feet off the ground and go how fast? | ||
Well, you go pretty fast, but you're going to be time-limited. | ||
Right. | ||
Like a jet. | ||
There's going to be a super high-pressure, like ultra-high-pressure air bottle. | ||
Oh. | ||
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. | ||
Oh, for acceleration. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So that would be on the ground. | ||
That would be on the ground. | ||
This thing would move like a bat out of hell. | ||
Jesus Christ, but it already goes 0-60 in 1.9 seconds, right? | ||
That's the sedan with the four-door. | ||
What? | ||
The new Model S Plaid that we start shipping this month, we just tested it on the Motor Trend spec. | ||
0-60 is 1.96 seconds. | ||
I have never driven my Tesla and go, why is this thing a little fucking faster? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, the one I have, the Model S, is 2.4, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Which is preposterous. | ||
It's so crazy. | ||
I take people in it. | ||
Yeah, they've never experienced anything like it. | ||
No. | ||
In their entire life. | ||
My friend Tim Dillon is like, so what's the deal with these Teslas? | ||
And I go, you want to freak out? | ||
You want to see something fucking crazy? | ||
I picked him up at the Improv, and we drove to the comedy store, and I took him up Laurel Kenny. | ||
Are you ready? | ||
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Yeah. | |
And I never take it out of ludicrous mode, by the way. | ||
I keep it in ludicrous mode all the time. | ||
Yeah, it's fun. | ||
I stomped on the gas, well, not the gas, the accelerator, and he started screaming. | ||
He's like, ah! | ||
What the fuck? | ||
I go, yeah, it's what the fuck. | ||
This is crazy. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So this is significantly faster than that, just for the Plaid. | ||
Yeah, so the new Plaid, yeah. | ||
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It's a half second quicker to 60. Pretty close, yeah. | |
Every millisecond really matters when you start getting that fast. | ||
I thought Plaid was going to ship later in the year. | ||
Yeah, we managed to make it go faster. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
We're both ways. | ||
Plaid to Plaid. | ||
And the Plaid has a wider wheelbase too, right? | ||
It does. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so it handles better? | ||
Is that the idea behind that? | ||
Yeah, it does have better handling. | ||
Like we're trying to get to, on the Nürburgring, get to like the low seven minute mark. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, with further improvements, I think we could bust seven minutes on the Nürburgring, which would be a pretty wicked outcome. | ||
What is the record right now at the Nürburgring? | ||
Is it the Porsche 918? | ||
What has the record? | ||
Something crazy like that, right? | ||
There's no production car. | ||
I think no production car has got an under-7. | ||
Oh. | ||
Really? | ||
As far as I know. | ||
And even the ones that are close, that they say are production, they do a bunch of changes. | ||
Right, like change the tires, aerodynamics. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But it's like, I think there's potential to have a car that, as delivered, can beat seven seconds on a number of things. | ||
Isn't it funny that there's this one track that's the gold standard for almost all vehicles? | ||
If you look at road and track or motor trend, you want to find out how badass this new sports car is. | ||
It's like, what number does it do in the Nurburgring? | ||
Well, yeah. | ||
Now, November Green, to be totally frank, is not representative of normal... | ||
No. | ||
It's not normal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's the hottest one to... | ||
You can't game it, you know? | ||
Right. | ||
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So... | |
But I think for everyday driving, it's the acceleration that really matters. | ||
Like, it's like, you know, you're at a... | ||
You know, the light goes green. | ||
Boom. | ||
Who's across the intersection fastest? | ||
The new Plaid will do... | ||
You know, a sub-nine second quarter mile with an extra track speed and a quarter mile of 155 miles an hour. | ||
And it's a sedan. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's a four-door. | ||
It can hit 60 miles an hour before it's cleared the intersection. | ||
That's insane. | ||
Insane. | ||
That's insane. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
It's uncomfortably fast. | ||
Is that steering wheel legit? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Is it legal? | ||
Yeah, I mean, they use a yoke in Formula One. | ||
They don't have a steering wheel. | ||
Right, but you're not on the highway in a Formula One car. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
I like driving like this. | ||
Like resting my hand on the top of the wheel. | ||
Well, I think autopilot's getting good enough that you won't need to drive most of the time. | ||
Unless you really want to. | ||
I like driving. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah, I use autopilot sometimes. | ||
I mean, but most of the time I drive. | ||
I find it's like, you can rest your hand on your knee, that kind of thing, and it works great. | ||
Anyway, it looks awesome. | ||
It does look cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, it's very spaceship-y. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's great. | ||
And all the stuff is on the steering wheel now, too, right? | ||
The blinkers and all that jazz. | ||
Even the horn is like a little button, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And the horn is already kind of the center of the steering wheel anyway, but Is it still the center of the steering wheel as well? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
But isn't it a button? | ||
I thought on the yoke, there's a button for the horn. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Which you have to really... | ||
I used to have a car that had a button for the horn. | ||
I think it was an Acura NSX. Okay. | ||
And it had, instead of the center hub being the horn, there was a button. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I never remembered it. | ||
Well, there are no yokes. | ||
Sorry, there are no stalks. | ||
There's a yoke, but there's no stalks. | ||
So the car, for example, will default to driving. | ||
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. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
How's that possible? | ||
Well, it just looks and sees. | ||
Is there an obstacle in front? | ||
Okay, you probably don't want to wag it, so you probably want to go backwards. | ||
Right, but what if you want to go backwards and there's nothing in front of you? | ||
Yeah, what if it's ambiguous? | ||
Right. | ||
So it would default to the inverse of whatever you started. | ||
And then you can just swipe on the screen and change direction. | ||
But isn't it easier to just hit like that way? | ||
Yeah, it's almost never. | ||
You'll see. | ||
It's like you almost never... | ||
Do you do it? | ||
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Yeah, yeah. | |
So this is something you've driven and it's intuitive? | ||
Yeah, once you get rid of the stork and have the car figure it out, it's annoying to have a stork after that. | ||
Really? | ||
It's annoying. | ||
You're talking to a guy who likes manual gearboxes. | ||
Sure. | ||
I like going... | ||
Yeah, I mean, I like to drive on manual, too. | ||
It's fun. | ||
Yeah, it's cool. | ||
Yeah, there's different kinds of cool, though. | ||
Like, when I tell people about the Tesla, I go, listen, I love cars. | ||
I love all kinds of cars. | ||
But the Tesla makes other cars seem dumb. | ||
It does. | ||
It makes them seem dumb. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's so fast. | ||
It's so quiet. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Everything about it, the navigation screen, it's so big. | ||
Why wouldn't it be big? | ||
It's better. | ||
It's better to be big. | ||
Yeah, the software keeps getting upgraded. | ||
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. | ||
It's fucking amazing. | ||
Oh, there's like a little tip for the Tesla. | ||
If you just swipe down on the Navigate button, it automatically figures out if you want to go to home or work and navigates there. | ||
So if you're at home, and obviously you know how to get to work, but do you know the fastest way to get to work? | ||
So to use like Waze-type technology? | ||
Yeah, like on a traffic-adjusted basis, what's the best way to go to work? | ||
But how does it adjust? | ||
Like, what is it getting your data from? | ||
It's downloading traffic data from the internet. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, I mean, we get the traffic data from Google. | ||
Okay. | ||
Oh, so it is for Waze? | ||
Because Google owns Waze. | ||
Well, Waze and Google are slightly different, but they have similar datasets. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So basically, let's say there's an accident on the way to work or road closure or something like that. | ||
It would be helpful to know that before you encountered it. | ||
So if you just swipe down, it will automatically navigate to work. | ||
And then also the autopilot will work basically seamlessly. | ||
We have the beta out, and the beta's working pretty well. | ||
It's going to get super good, and it'll basically be able to drive you all the way to work. | ||
Automatically. | ||
You basically just get in, and it'll assume you're going to work if it's Monday to Friday in the morning. | ||
Or you could, say, program maybe go to school, drop the kids off at school, then go to work. | ||
You just do this stuff automatically. | ||
You want to take the perspective of all input is error. | ||
If you have to do something, it's an error. | ||
Make the error smaller. | ||
All input is error. | ||
Unless it's a game. | ||
All input is error. | ||
Well, that's the other thing, too. | ||
It has games. | ||
Like, you can play chess. | ||
Yeah, you can play chess. | ||
We got the backgammon with the aesthetic described in Lost. | ||
J.J. Abrams asked for backgammon, so we put backgammon in with the Lost aesthetic. | ||
It's got this really fun game called Polytopia. | ||
I would say that's my top recommendation for any game in the car is play Polytopia. | ||
What is that? | ||
It's a real fun strategy game. | ||
You'll see. | ||
It's the top of the list. | ||
This is not something you can play while you're driving. | ||
Well, I mean, you're not supposed to play while you're driving. | ||
That would be illegal. | ||
But will it work while you're on autopilot? | ||
So if you're on autopilot, can you also play chess? | ||
Well, you have to tap a button that says you're the passenger. | ||
Kind of like Waze. | ||
Okay, kind of like Waze. | ||
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Yeah, so it's open for interpretation. | |
So if you are some chess freak, you could literally play chess on your way to work. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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Wow. | |
I mean, in the future, as the car becomes more and more autonomous, it's going to be really about entertainment. | ||
Entertainment, productivity. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So it's just probably entertainment first and foremost, and then productivity as well. | ||
Do you have specific things that you do on your way? | ||
Do you listen to books on tape? | ||
Do you listen to music? | ||
Yeah, I usually listen to music. | ||
Oh, those fucking pirate songs you like. | ||
The Sea Shanty? | ||
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? | ||
Oh my god. | ||
This is actually something really appealing about people singing in harmony. | ||
It's actually way better than you think. | ||
It's got a weird renaissance fair type thing to it. | ||
You feel like you're all together in this old timey thing. | ||
Pretending. | ||
Very strange. | ||
It's very odd. | ||
It seems like one of the top reasons to be a pirate would be sea shanties, and we have tropical taverns, and I don't know. | ||
Cool outfits, I guess? | ||
Cool outfits, yeah. | ||
You get to dress up. | ||
Yeah, you get to dress weird. | ||
If you lose your leg, they got pegs for you. | ||
Yeah, you got a parrot. | ||
Yeah, a parrot. | ||
How did that happen? | ||
Now, what about the truck? | ||
When is that thing going to happen? | ||
Cybertruck? | ||
Yeah, so we're building a big factory here in Austin. | ||
That's where we'll make the Cybertruck. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Now, did you decide to do this in Austin from the jump, or did along the way you decide to move the Cybertruck factory here? | ||
Yeah, well, frankly, Austin is a bit like many California. | ||
So I was asking the team in California, all right, what's your top choice for the next big U.S. factory location? | ||
Where do you want to spend time? | ||
And the number one choice was Austin. | ||
And then I was like, okay, okay, what's number two? | ||
Silence. | ||
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Silence. | |
Yeah. | ||
So many California here in Austin. | ||
It is a lot, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I hesitate talking about it because I've talked about it too much. | ||
It's very utopian. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think Austin is going to be the biggest hometown that America has seen in half a century. | ||
I think it's a great response to the fucked up government in some of the other cities. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I think, you know, yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Really? | ||
Yes. | ||
I had a bit about it in my 2016 special. | ||
Texas has more tigers in captivity than all of the wild of planet Earth. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
These are people's yards. | ||
They've got a tiger in the backyard. | ||
In your place, wherever you live, you could get a fucking zebra. | ||
I have a friend who lives out in Dripping Springs. | ||
He saw a zebra. | ||
Okay. | ||
A zebra got loose. | ||
There's elk out there. | ||
Wild elk. | ||
Just roaming around. | ||
Somebody had an elk. | ||
It jumped the fence. | ||
Now there's an elk out there. | ||
There's an axis deer. | ||
In my neighborhood, I saw an axis deer. | ||
I didn't see it. | ||
My wife saw it. | ||
She described it to me. | ||
I know what it is. | ||
She's like, it had white spots like a fawn, but it was really big. | ||
I'm like, that's an axis deer. | ||
So there's Axis deer. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They're from India. | ||
Okay. | ||
And tigers eat them. | ||
Okay. | ||
Wow. | ||
But these animals are, they're wild here. | ||
Okay. | ||
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. | ||
That's the cool thing about this place. | ||
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
I've never felt more at home. | ||
I fucking love it here. | ||
It's a cool city. | ||
Like I said, it's going to be the biggest boom town that America has seen in 50 years, at least. | ||
Yeah, I agree. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think so. | ||
Mega boom. | ||
Comedy clubs are moving here like crazy. | ||
They're moving here left and right. | ||
Cap City's reopening. | ||
The Creek and the Cave just announced they're going to open here. | ||
That's cool. | ||
I'm trying to open up a place here. | ||
There's other clubs I'm trying to open up here. | ||
Comedians are moving in here by the droves. | ||
It's a wild place. | ||
Yeah, well, I went and saw you and Dave Chappelle. | ||
That was great. | ||
That was fun. | ||
That's a great venue. | ||
Yeah, we did that Monday and Tuesday, too. | ||
That's cool. | ||
It's just, there's something special going on. | ||
It just feels fun. | ||
It feels fun to be a part of the escape from this wretched dreariness of the COVID pandemic. | ||
It was just like this horrible feeling of having no power and no autonomy and being controlled by the government. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Rule number one. | ||
Just like Douglas Adams. | ||
Don't panic. | ||
But there's always people that don't. | ||
And those people, they get together and they take solace in the fact there's other people that also don't want to buy into this shit. | ||
Sure. | ||
You know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Anyway, so Orson's cool. | ||
So the Cybertruck. | ||
Yeah, so we're going to build it. | ||
Our factory is only like two miles away from the airport. | ||
Oh. | ||
Probably shouldn't tell people that. | ||
No, I mean, you can literally drive. | ||
You can see it from the highway. | ||
Do you anticipate visitors? | ||
Sure. | ||
I mean, we'll offer tours and that kind of thing. | ||
Will you offer, like, if someone wants to come and get their truck from the factory and drive it off the floor? | ||
You bet. | ||
Ooh, that's exciting. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's exciting. | ||
We've got a lot of land. | ||
Yeah. | ||
For 2,500 acres right next to the airport. | ||
That's fucking cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
It's cool. | ||
So when you're designing this Cybertruck, you had your launch and you showed the shape of it. | ||
There was a lot. | ||
I sent you a picture. | ||
I remember I sent you a picture. | ||
I was like, this is fucking cool. | ||
And you're like, that's not real. | ||
And I was like, oh, okay. | ||
There's a lot of fake pictures before the initial launch. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
You tricked a lot of people because people thought it was going to look much... | ||
Even though the picture that I sent you was pretty fucking cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What you designed was... | ||
Is that ultimately going to be what it really looks like? | ||
Is it going to be that shape? | ||
Has there been any revisions? | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, that's pretty much what it'll look like with very small differences. | ||
You know, we adjusted the size a few percent. | ||
In what way? | ||
Well, it's, I don't know, like I think around 3% smaller. | ||
Why did you decide to do that? | ||
Well, you know, it would be a couple inches too big for the tunnel. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
For the boring tunnel. | ||
Well, I mean, we did actually drive through the boring tunnel in a Cybertruck with Jay Leno, which was a hair-raising. | ||
Because it was a little bit too big? | ||
It was pretty snug. | ||
Oh, no. | ||
Imagine if you killed Jay Leno. | ||
Yeah, that'd be awkward. | ||
How do we ever explain that? | ||
He's the biggest petrol head ever, and he even loves your car. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The Cybertruck is like CGI in real life. | ||
You're standing right in front of it and it looks like this is special effect. | ||
So that's cool. | ||
It'll change the look of the roads. | ||
It doesn't look like anything. | ||
It looks like alien technology. | ||
Yeah, and when is that coming out? | ||
We'll have probably limited production end of this year and volume production hopefully next year. | ||
Have you ever considered something alternative to air inflated tires? | ||
Have you seen some of these alternatives that have essentially spaces in between the upper wall and the wheel? | ||
Have you thought about that? | ||
Yeah, we haven't found a tire that Because you've got to worry about road noise. | ||
You've got to take out potholes and bumps. | ||
You've got to have good grip, but you also want to have low rolling resistance so that you get good range. | ||
Those are a lot of things to try to put into one tire. | ||
Then if you also say, and it can't have air, it's like, this is hard. | ||
But you're talking, I'm talking to a guy who's putting people on Mars. | ||
You can't figure out an airless tire? | ||
It's just, it's an incremental constraint. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm not saying there won't be such a thing. | ||
I think there will be, to be precise. | ||
Because it seems like we've just gotten way too comfortable with this idea that tires blow out. | ||
And you get flats. | ||
It's very annoying. | ||
Flats are annoying. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Very annoying. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Non-sport tires, by the way, are much less likely to have flats. | ||
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Sure. | |
They have more bounce. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Let's say you hit the edge of a pothole. | ||
If you've got more rubber wall, you've got a longer way to go before you pinch the tire. | ||
Sport tires tend to have more flats, especially in LA potholes. | ||
That's the worst. | ||
There was one particular pothole on Sunset Boulevard that It would just take out so many Model S, like a boom, boom, both sides of the car. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah. | ||
Damn. | ||
Yeah, Steven Spielberg was actually, it's like, hey, Steven Spielberg is like, two times when I was like, goddammit, I know that pothole. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I feel like you can pay to fix that. | ||
I mean... | ||
Fix that pot hole. | ||
It seems like that. | ||
That's actually... | ||
It would be like, man, there sure are a lot of taxes in California for roads this bad. | ||
No. | ||
The place is a mess. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So ultimately, one day, that's a possibility of having some sort of an airless tire. | ||
Because I've seen prototypes. | ||
I've never seen one on an actual car in physical... | ||
In real life. | ||
Yeah, I think the technology is gradually getting there. | ||
And I think for something like a robo-taxi, where you want to have the tires last for a long time and not go flat, it's going to make a lot of sense. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But other than that, essentially most of what we saw in the demo is the same. | ||
It's still going to have... | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
There was the issue with the glass when it accidentally shattered. | ||
How annoying was that? | ||
That was shocking. | ||
I mean, we literally spent hours beforehand with lots of people throwing steel balls at the window. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean, we must have thrown at least a dozen people must have thrown steel balls at the window. | ||
At the same window, though? | ||
Yeah, same damn window. | ||
Isn't that the problem? | ||
Yeah, it turns out that might be the problem. | ||
If you keep throwing steel balls, eventually it's going to break. | ||
And I did ask Franz to really wind up and give it all. | ||
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I should have like, take it easy. | |
Give me a fake wind up. | ||
Yeah, we don't need the fastball. | ||
But I did ask for the fastball. | ||
I'm like, okay, let's go for the slightly slower ball. | ||
Do you think it was because you guys were hitting the sidewall with a sledgehammer first? | ||
Yeah, yeah, that could be... | ||
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. | ||
Right. | ||
And then it would just have a hairline fracture, and then you hit it anywhere, it's going to shatter. | ||
Did you recreate that? | ||
We didn't. | ||
It's also hard with test glass. | ||
When you actually do production glass, it's much more robust than demo glass. | ||
because production glass, you, you, you, you, um, you're like demo glass that you just can't make. | ||
You have to have like massive tools and ovens and everything to make the production glass. | ||
It's like, and if you don't, we, That takes a while to do. | ||
So the production glass is always better than demo glass. | ||
Nonetheless, it should have worked. | ||
And it was probably because we racked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel bull at it. | ||
But it will be bulletproof to a handgun. | ||
Now, why did you decide to do all that, make it bulletproof and make it like you could hit it with a sledgehammer? | ||
Like, what was the motivation to make it different than just like a Model S? I mean, I think, you know, it's like, what's cool about a truck? | ||
Trucks are tough. | ||
And like, okay, what's tougher than a truck? | ||
A tank. | ||
What about a tank from the future? | ||
Okay, now you have a tank from the future. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's bulletproof. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And how does that compare to, you know, it's way tougher than a regular truck. | ||
Look, it's fucking cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's no doubt. | ||
I mean, having something's bulletproof. | ||
That should be like Halo with a rocket launcher in the back. | ||
Have you thought about doing something like that? | ||
Somebody's going to do it for sure. | ||
For military use? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Seems like it. | ||
I mean, I don't know. | ||
That sounds like it would be fun. | ||
I mean, you should, like, you know, cruising around the field and, like, loving shooting rockets. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Now, is there ever a possibility that these things are going to be solar powered? | ||
Is that someday, is this solar technology going to get to a point where... | ||
It's kind of a surface area issue. | ||
So, I mean, I think we could possibly put the cover of the truck bed, you know, put some solar cells in that. | ||
So if you just leave it out in the sun, you know, probably, you know, recharges a few miles a day type of thing. | ||
Oh, it would only be a few miles? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
But what about one day? | ||
Is it possible that technology could evolve to the point where they could extract more? | ||
No. | ||
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No? | |
Really? | ||
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. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And that's not going to change? | ||
No. | ||
Wow. | ||
That sucks. | ||
It'd be cool if it just ran... | ||
I mean, is it possible to make a car entirely of solar panels? | ||
Like, the entire surface of it? | ||
Solar panels? | ||
Like, in a place like LA or somewhere where it's never cloudy? | ||
And drive around in that thing? | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, you're going to burn off energy faster than you can drive. | ||
If you don't drive that often, that's a different story. | ||
The only option is to have a solar paneled home and extract the power that way and charge your car. | ||
Yeah, solar paneled house has got a lot of area. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You could possibly have some solar thing that unfurls that has a lot more surface area. | ||
So when you park it at work or something like that, it would unfurl. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But it just needs area. | ||
Like I said, think about maybe 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like that. | ||
Now, the range of the new cars is much longer. | ||
Yes. | ||
Like, what is the range of the standard Model S that's available right now? | ||
It's like 300 and... | ||
Yeah, 350, 360. I don't know. | ||
It's a lot. | ||
Actually, the new long-range Model S is over 400-mile range. | ||
The new one. | ||
Even the old one. | ||
The old one was even 400 miles. | ||
The new one is 400 miles, too. | ||
But the Plaid will get you up to... | ||
So, the current Plaid is going to be around 400 miles range. | ||
There's Plaid Plus. | ||
That's maybe a year from now. | ||
That'll be on the order of 500 miles. | ||
That's a lot. | ||
I hear drive 500 miles, anyway. | ||
Well, if you drive it across the country. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's pretty rare. | ||
I mean, like... | ||
Yeah, for most commuters. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, even if you're driving 100 miles an hour, you're still going to drive for a while before you run out of battery. | ||
And the truck, what is the Cybertruck's range going to be? | ||
We have to pick a range, actually, for the initial version. | ||
It'll be some number over 300 miles. | ||
Now, when you say pick a range, is it in terms of the battery array that you put in? | ||
Yeah, so what's the pack size? | ||
So do you have to take into account how much weight it's going to add, how long it's going to take to charge? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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... | ||
So... | ||
This has a big frontal area. | ||
It's not very aerodynamic. | ||
And the tires are not super... | ||
They're not optimized for long range. | ||
It looks very aerodynamic, the truck. | ||
As a moron? | ||
You don't want sharp angles? | ||
You don't want sharp angles. | ||
See, that's the problem. | ||
To me, I'd be like, yeah, that's slicing right through like a knife. | ||
You want it rounded. | ||
You want it rounded. | ||
So... | ||
You want the air to have like smooth, like if you're a little air particle, you don't want the bumps. | ||
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Right. | |
You want like smooth, just like you're driving over the car, no bumps. | ||
Right. | ||
Just, you know, easy going. | ||
Sharp angles are bad for aero. | ||
So that aero will contribute to the lack of range. | ||
So it'll minimize the range somewhat. | ||
It'll have a drag coefficient that's pretty good for a truck. | ||
Because enclosing the bed at an angle, that helps a lot. | ||
Like normal trucks going down the highway, it's like a barn door. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean... | ||
It's like having a parachute in the back. | ||
You might as well be flying it, yeah. | ||
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. | ||
But the sharp angles are not helpful. | ||
So the range of that truck is yet to be determined? | ||
You're trying to figure it out. | ||
It'll be over 300 miles. | ||
What about the Roadster? | ||
I mean, some of these things, we've got to decide, like, what's actually the best product? | ||
You know, how much range do you really want, you know? | ||
If you ask people, I say, well, I want... | ||
You know, 600 miles range. | ||
I'm like, okay, well, that means most of the time you're holding around a battery pack you're not going to use. | ||
And it'll slow you down. | ||
It'll inhibit handling. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like, why not have a car that's got a fuel tank that has 2,000 miles range? | ||
You know, like, go and fill it up, like, once every six months or every three months or something. | ||
Right. | ||
But people, they basically figured out, like, actually carrying that much fuel around is not worth it. | ||
Right. | ||
So... | ||
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. | ||
Let me put it that way. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So somewhere... | ||
You can drive from LA to San Francisco, no problem. | ||
Austin to Dallas, no problem. | ||
So a few hours of driving. | ||
Easy. | ||
Many hours of driving. | ||
Many hours of driving. | ||
Now, I heard you talk recently about the possibility of a van, like sprinter van style. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Now, a van, because you've got a big, flat area, that's actually where solar could start to make a little more sense. | ||
You know, because you could have a lot of area. | ||
So for the roof. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I think you also have like maybe a roof where, you know, it's solar and then when it's stationary, like maybe... | ||
Awnings. | ||
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. | ||
That's interesting because there's a lot of people that use those for camping. | ||
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Yeah, yeah. | |
Like my friend Tom Green. | ||
You know Tom Green? | ||
I think so, yeah. | ||
He used to be on MTV and actor and comedian. | ||
He's traveling across the country right now in one of those vans. | ||
Like, style van. | ||
I think he got a Ram, a Dodge Ram. | ||
Sprinter van style. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And if you had something like that, he has an awning that extends and he's got a bunch of camping and he does a podcast out of it. | ||
If you had something like that, it seems like... | ||
I think that would be great. | ||
You could have a van that just... | ||
Even if the apocalypse came around, you can still drive. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah. | ||
For solar, it's all about area. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's called 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like that. | ||
But I don't understand that there's no way that that's ever going to get more efficient? | ||
No. | ||
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Really? | |
No. | ||
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. | ||
So, but if you're talking about, like, How much better could it do? | ||
In the mid-30s, maybe. | ||
40. A big price increase. | ||
But still not enough to actually power the entire vehicle? | ||
No. | ||
You're talking about for practical purposes. | ||
How's it going to do? | ||
Because you can't have, like, crazy money stuff in a car, you know? | ||
When you say big money, like, how much more? | ||
Like, ten times the cost, at least. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I mean, you don't see anyone... | ||
I mean, the only thing... | ||
Like, there's satellites that have, like, the triple junction gallium last night stuff, you know? | ||
But, frankly, even for satellites, it's questionable. | ||
For our satellites, for Starlink, we don't bother with that. | ||
That's another thing I want to talk to you about, Starlink. | ||
Starlink is semi-controversial, right? | ||
Because on one hand, people think it's great that you're going to provide the internet through these satellites that are flying around. | ||
Sure. | ||
But astronomers and a lot of people that are, you know, amateur astronomers. | ||
Mostly the amateurs. | ||
We've talked with the professional astronomers and assuaged their concerns. | ||
Yeah? | ||
Yeah. | ||
But the amateurs are pissed. | ||
Yeah, they're like, you know, they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
They're pro-level guys. | ||
They know what they're talking about. | ||
So, we'll make sure that this is not like an obstacle to science. | ||
The obstacle would be the visual aspect of it, right? | ||
Seeing these things flying around, that would be it? | ||
Yeah, honestly, it's pretty hard to find our satellites. | ||
Once they've reached orbit, it's hard to find them. | ||
And we have trouble finding our satellites. | ||
They were like, uh-oh, we got like... | ||
But I've seen pictures of them. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, first of all, during the initial... | ||
When they get tossed out of the rocket, briefly, they're tumbling. | ||
And so when they're tumbling, they'll twinkle. | ||
And then you'll see them. | ||
Oh, so this was just the initial... | ||
Yeah, it's just the initial... | ||
They just got tossed out of the, you know, off of stage deploys. | ||
The way we deploy them, we don't even really have a separation mechanism. | ||
You can see the video online. | ||
But we kind of tie them down like a bundle of hay. | ||
And then we let go of the rods that are holding this big bundle of satellites down. | ||
But before that, we rotate the stage. | ||
So the stage is rotating, and the satellites get just like, if you took a deck of cards, and they all get thrown out. | ||
Because they have different amounts of rotational inertia. | ||
And what kind of bandwidth are these going to provide? | ||
Oh, so... | ||
Yeah, I mean, I think long term we're talking about gigabit level. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, gigabit low latency. | ||
So you could play like a fast twitch video game, download a movie super fast. | ||
It'd be great. | ||
And this is going to be global? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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? | ||
Well, these satellites are actually zooming around the Earth at 25 times the speed of sound. | ||
And there's currently 36 planes. | ||
I mean, to the satellite, the satellite feels like it's going in a circle, but the Earth's rotating underneath the satellite. | ||
So the ground track looks like a sine wave. | ||
From the ground perspective, the satellite's doing this sine wave with a peak at 53 degrees. | ||
And then there's 36 planes, so they're all doing like a sine wave, you know, just offset by a little bit. | ||
But like I said, space is real big. | ||
So they're not in danger of whacking into each other. | ||
It's super big up there. | ||
They don't really even get close. | ||
Anyway, so they were zooming around Earth. | ||
We got a lot of coverage, around 53 degrees. | ||
And then we just started to launch some polar satellites, which will have an orbital inclination that allows them to have visibility to the poles. | ||
Who the fuck is that for? | ||
Just in case? | ||
I mean, the best people that live up there, you know? | ||
I guess a few. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's Antarctic Research Station. | ||
Okay. | ||
So they're going to have internet access. | ||
It's spectacular. | ||
They can play Halo up there. | ||
Yeah, they're going to go from having trash for internet to having incredible internet. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So it'll be the whole world? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, everywhere on Earth will have high bandwidth, low latency internet. | ||
And will you be able to increase the bandwidth over time through software? | ||
There's a lot that can be improved with software. | ||
But I should say that there's going to be a role for many different types of connectivity. | ||
So Starlink is great for low to medium population density. | ||
But the satellites are actually not great for high density urban. | ||
So you're actually better off having 5G for that. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because the other thing is, that satellite is pretty far away. | ||
Right. | ||
So, you got that satellite. | ||
Over 500 kilometers away, even if it's right above you. | ||
On a slant distance, it could be 1,000 kilometers away. | ||
So this would be fantastic for rural areas? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It will provide some amount of connectivity in dense, open environments. | ||
Equivalent to, what, 3G? No, it's more like, so I think, like, basically, like, what's the spot size of a satellite? | ||
Like, when it's putting a beam down in a location, and how big is that beam? | ||
And that's, so it's got a certain amount of bandwidth for that beam. | ||
And that beam is just like, it's a pretty big, like, think of it like a flashlight or something. | ||
Right, and what is it? | ||
It's the same thing. | ||
It reaches a few blocks? | ||
Like, if you had a flashlight up there and you're pointing down, it's like, okay, you're going to illuminate an area. | ||
Right. | ||
So, a flashlight's just shooting out photons in the visible spectrum. | ||
We're shooting out photons in the KUK event. | ||
So, much bigger wavelength than visible light. | ||
So, anyway, so these things... | ||
So we got a bunch of spot beams basically. | ||
But these beams are giant by cellular standards. | ||
Like they might be several miles diameter on that beam. | ||
So then you got, for argument's sake, 10 mile diameter, 16 kilometer diameter, This is a lot of area. | ||
And all of the terminals in that area will get the same information because it's got that beam that's just going down that spot. | ||
So, whereas you could have like a 5G tower that's the ones that aren't causing corona. | ||
Kidding! | ||
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Kidding! | |
5G, of course, Corona. | ||
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It's a fact. | |
Oh, my God. | ||
Have you seen any of that stuff? | ||
That's one of the most disturbing things about the Internet. | ||
Anyway, go ahead. | ||
Well, I mean, when technology is magic, then you don't know what to believe. | ||
Right. | ||
And when you're a moron, you believe anything. | ||
Well, so a cell tower could have a range of, you know, a mile or, you know, mile slash one and a half kilometers. | ||
It basically could have like 1% the area of a satellite beam. | ||
So, like, if you had something that was, you know, one mile or if I can say kilometer or 10, it's going to be the square of that. | ||
That is the area. | ||
So, satellites are great for low to medium density. | ||
5G is ideal for high density. | ||
I see. | ||
And also because you could distribute the towers every mile or so easily and dress them up like trees. | ||
That always bothers me. | ||
I think they should do better at the fake trees. | ||
I feel like, come on, somebody doesn't care enough. | ||
You could definitely have a way better fake tree than that. | ||
They're so bad. | ||
They're so bad. | ||
They look terrible. | ||
Who are they tricking? | ||
No one. | ||
No one. | ||
Right? | ||
No, I'm like, what is this farce? | ||
Yeah, they're offensive. | ||
They're more offensive than, like, the most ridiculous fake tits. | ||
You know, like the big ones that look like basketballs? | ||
We cleaved a melon in, too. | ||
Yeah, they have no shape that resembles a breast at all. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's something weird about them, too. | ||
It's like, I'm not offended by a tower. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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That is the fake. | |
Well, the Christmas tree part at the bottom was kind of sweet. | ||
You could put ornaments on it. | ||
Is that one at the top right? | ||
That palm tree one? | ||
Is that fake? | ||
No, that's a good fake if that's a... | ||
The left side, Jamie? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Scroll. | ||
Keep scrolling. | ||
The palm tree one looks pretty good. | ||
Is that real? | ||
Wow, that's kind of not bad. | ||
That's not bad. | ||
Yeah, that one's pretty good. | ||
It's not bad. | ||
Yeah, if you were driving by that, that wouldn't be offensive. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But the one in the middle's not bad either. | ||
That's kind of a pine tree looking thing. | ||
It looks like some sort of demented Christmas tree. | ||
That's a tower? | ||
Go back to the one you just had, that far left. | ||
That's probably the most impressive. | ||
The one on the left-hand side. | ||
The far left one. | ||
Because if you had a forest full of those, you would just go, these are just weirdly trimmed trees. | ||
Yeah, it's not that hard to have a fake tree. | ||
You could definitely have a little bit of effort. | ||
I don't need that. | ||
Just like I don't need when I pass by a telephone pole. | ||
I don't need to pretend it's something different. | ||
It's a fucking cell phone tower. | ||
Who decided to make those things into fake trees? | ||
When did this become a precedent? | ||
I don't know. | ||
But you can definitely make a fake tree that is convincing. | ||
So, maybe just a bit more effort in the fake tree. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Or just make them look cool. | ||
Make them look like robots. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Have a big Ultraman out there. | ||
I mean, some people are, like, really worried about, like, cell phone towers. | ||
Thinking they cause, like, radiation or something. | ||
Poisoning. | ||
This is not true. | ||
Yeah, people are worried about 5G, right? | ||
Don't worry about it. | ||
No? | ||
Not at all? | ||
I mean, no. | ||
Like, if I had cell phones, if I had a helmet of cell phones, strap around my head, and around my nuts, I would not worry. | ||
Yeah, I met a dude once who had ball cancer who was convinced that his cell phone was in his pocket, and that's what gave him ball cancer. | ||
Nope. | ||
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No? | |
No. | ||
unidentified
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Okay. | |
Hey, buddy. | ||
Sorry. | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, it's not... | ||
The cell phone is not... | ||
No. | ||
Yeah, I didn't know this guy very well, but he was pretty convinced. | ||
Meanwhile, he kept the phone on the same side. | ||
He was one of those dudes that had the phone on the little hip thing. | ||
You know, a little bracket on his hip. | ||
Kept his phone there, even after it killed one of his nuts in his eyes. | ||
He's like, well, damage is done. | ||
Your phone or your balls. | ||
Yeah, he gave up. | ||
They got me. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, don't worry about it. | ||
Phones are not causing cancer. | ||
So there's no concern whatsoever with the radiation that's caused by those things? | ||
No, first of all, when people say radiation, they're conflating this term from nuclear bombs. | ||
Technically, we are currently bathed in radiation right now. | ||
This table has radiation, right? | ||
Everything produces radiation. | ||
Everything. | ||
Everything's emitting photons all the time. | ||
So it's just a question of what wavelength. | ||
And if you have a very short wavelength or high-frequency photon, that is capable of causing DNA damage. | ||
But we're talking about, like, ultraviolet and beyond. | ||
Your phone's not even close. | ||
So, yeah. | ||
And then the thing that really causes problems in Let's say a nuclear explosion are alpha particles. | ||
So it's basically helium nuclei. | ||
So those things, they're like tiny cannonballs. | ||
So those will rip right through you. | ||
It's like if you got shot with tiny cannonballs, bad things would happen. | ||
So that's also cold radiation, but it's really particles. | ||
So you don't want to be bombarded with high-speed helium nuclei. | ||
That's going to be bad. | ||
How does that happen? | ||
Well, that happens in a nuclear explosion. | ||
Oh! | ||
Okay, avoid those. | ||
Yeah, that's bad. | ||
But cell phones are okay. | ||
Yeah, cell phones are not emitting particles. | ||
So if it's like, if my cell phone is going to cause brain cancer, I'm like, because of radiation, I'm like, do you mean photons or particles? | ||
And it's like, it's not emitting particles, so we can just put that aside, don't worry about the particles. | ||
Then the photons that are emitting, the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear. | ||
Only by a tiny amount. | ||
It's like, okay, if you had an ear warmer that was very mild, that's your phone. | ||
Mm-hmm. | ||
That's all. | ||
It's emitting photons at a frequency that is not going to cause DNA damage. | ||
So don't worry about it. | ||
Sleep easy at night. | ||
Don't worry about your phone. | ||
It's fine. | ||
David Icke does not believe you. | ||
He's doing backflips right now. | ||
You fucking shell. | ||
So what concerns people is the unknown, right? | ||
They hear about 5G, and then they hear about radiation, and they're like, wait a minute, should I? Is this safe? | ||
What are we doing? | ||
Are we just ruining everything? | ||
No, it's fine. | ||
Totally fine. | ||
Thank you. | ||
Now I feel good about my 5G phone. | ||
If you had a helmet that was made of cell phones, you'd be fine. | ||
Yeah, but this is coming from a guy who wants to stick a quarter-sized hole in your head and shove wires into your brain. | ||
Yeah, so I know a few things about what causes a brain damage. | ||
I know, but that Neuralink concerns the shit out of people. | ||
That scares folks. | ||
That's the ultimate unknown. | ||
Well, I think it would be problematic if we punt you to the ground and put it in. | ||
Yes. | ||
I agree. | ||
And said like, okay, you're going to get this. | ||
We're going to chip you whether you like it or not. | ||
The chip you thing. | ||
We're going to chip you. | ||
That's the other thing that people are scared of, right? | ||
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. | ||
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Are you worried about what you're doing? | |
Yeah, it's like, this is pretty close to home here, you know? | ||
Like, oh man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, is this where it leads? | ||
It might lead there eventually. | ||
I'm just saying for right now, it's going to help people who really need it. | ||
Well, you know, we had this discussion before that we're all basically already cyborgs, right? | ||
We're already relying upon our phones. | ||
They're connected at the hip to them. | ||
People are relying on glasses and all sorts of other technology to improve their life. | ||
This is another gradual step in that direction. | ||
And if you just keep going in that way, it seems like I like being a human. | ||
And I think, you know, look here, we're drinking whiskey, we're talking, we're at a wood table. | ||
This is a very human experience. | ||
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Yeah. | |
But ultimately, we are archaic. | ||
And we will eventually be aliens. | ||
We're going to be those dudes with the big heads and the little tiny bodies. | ||
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But we still need to feel. | |
For now. | ||
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Until it becomes more efficient to do it inside the mind. | |
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. | ||
I got news for you on that front. | ||
Oh. | ||
It is. | ||
It's disturbingly good. | ||
The way you're rubbing your chin. | ||
Disturbingly good. | ||
Get my little dog in it. | ||
Stroke his head. | ||
Oh, you'll love it. | ||
Money back guarantee. | ||
You'll love it. | ||
It's a snap. | ||
There was a woman who, it was in the 1970s, who had some sort of analogy to pain pills. | ||
And they did some experiment with her where they put wires into her brain and gave her a device. | ||
Do you know this story? | ||
There are a few stories like this, yeah. | ||
Where it actually hits the pleasure center and then you're like, my god, this is the best thing ever. | ||
She just kept hammering it. | ||
She developed blisters on her finger that she used to hit the button. | ||
She never stopped hitting that button with the same finger. | ||
Didn't give a fuck about those blisters. | ||
She was just cumming constantly. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And then she started adjusting. | ||
She tried to tamper with the device to increase the amplitude. | ||
She became just an orgasm junkie. | ||
She was crazy. | ||
She was begging them to take it away from her. | ||
And then when they tried to take it away from her, she would fight them. | ||
It's madness. | ||
I researched this extensively because I was fascinated by the idea that this could eventually become a part of your phone. | ||
We could definitely make that happen. | ||
That's a real issue with people. | ||
The instantaneous desire for pleasure. | ||
We wouldn't do it because it's bad. | ||
You wouldn't do it, but the Chinese. | ||
Sure. | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
Huawei phones immediately with a come button. | ||
As soon as you log on, you give them your fingerprint, you come. | ||
We could just put it in there with some software limits. | ||
Easily. | ||
But software limits could easily be worked around. | ||
Someone's going to come up with it. | ||
Someone on the dark web. | ||
Well, I mean, your phone is, if you're carrying a phone around, you're carrying a microphone, GPS, camera, every day, everywhere. | ||
Everything. | ||
Orwell would be losing his mind. | ||
And it answers questions. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, and he knows where you are. | ||
Yeah, it's like you can just have it. | ||
That phone, by the way, if you say, please turn off, it just says that it's off. | ||
It's not actually off. | ||
It's lying. | ||
It could totally lie. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you can't take the battery out anymore. | ||
Basically, Apple or Android, anytime they want, they can just turn your mic on. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Or your camera, your GPS, everything. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And just tell you it's off. | ||
I looked at the setting, it says it's off. | ||
Yeah, and some people are like, that's not good enough. | ||
I want it strapped to my wrist. | ||
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Yeah, exactly. | |
I need one on me all the time. | ||
Yeah, I mean, these days, like a modern smartphone, it's like a tiny cell phone on your wrist, basically. | ||
It is, yeah. | ||
It even has the cellular connectivity and everything. | ||
Everything. | ||
It has everything. | ||
You leave your house, you make phone calls like Dick Tracy. | ||
Yeah, come on. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Better than any Dick Tracy even imagined. | ||
Yeah, fuck Dick Tracy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Nothing. | ||
He didn't know shit. | ||
The stock truck communicator. | ||
I know, it was ridiculous. | ||
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It looks like a cheesy flop button. | |
It's a walkie-talkie. | ||
You have to say over. | ||
Kirk over. | ||
A big walkie-talkie. | ||
Kirk out. | ||
Yeah, they had to tell you out. | ||
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It's gigantic. | |
You couldn't just hang up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, it was really ridiculous. | ||
And it couldn't get on the internet. | ||
It couldn't take pictures. | ||
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Yeah. | |
He was talking to people from another planet. | ||
He couldn't even send them a photo. | ||
He couldn't even send them a photo. | ||
They don't even have a camera. | ||
They would beam a whole body. | ||
To see what's going on. | ||
Rearrange your body, right? | ||
Take all your atoms and re-project them on this planet. | ||
Totally. | ||
Or they could just send a camera. | ||
That was out of the question. | ||
Have you thought about sending a camera to this very dangerous situation? | ||
That really shows you how truly amazing the internet is. | ||
That in all of science fiction, they never thought that was going to happen. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You think about all the Star Trek, Star Wars. | ||
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. | ||
In 1969 when we landed on the moon. | ||
Oh yeah, by far. | ||
By far. | ||
Not even close. | ||
The cameras. | ||
Like, I have a Samsung Galaxy S21 that has a moon photo capability. | ||
So it's designed, it has a moon shot. | ||
So it's designed to be able to take beautiful photos of the moon. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because if you do it with an iPhone, it's not really programmed that way. | ||
Actually, it's true. | ||
The iPhone can take good photos of the moon. | ||
Actually, I was just like in LA and the moon was low on the horizon and it was just like hanging there. | ||
It's like this giant planetoid. | ||
You need a galaxy. | ||
Yeah, and I'll try looking at my phone and it looks like tiny. | ||
Jamie, you got one of those. | ||
Talk to him about the moonshot. | ||
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I didn't even know it was on there. | |
Yeah, just Google Moonshot with Galaxy S21 Ultra. | ||
It's fucking phenomenal. | ||
I got one just for that. | ||
I got one because I'm always interested in both platforms and see where they're at. | ||
But the photographs are fucking incredible. | ||
The zoom's incredible, too. | ||
They have much better zooms. | ||
Look at this. | ||
These are photos with Galaxy S21 Ultra. | ||
That thing's just going to be all camera. | ||
Isn't that incredible? | ||
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I know. | |
Look at the back of it. | ||
Just make it all out of lenses. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
It's just we're living and it's constantly accelerating. | ||
That's what's so amazing about it. | ||
Is that the right one of Mars photo with that? | ||
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I don't know. | |
There's no way you're taking a photo of Mars. | ||
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No. | |
Impossible, right? | ||
Impossible. | ||
Thank you. | ||
Glad you're here for that. | ||
We would buy right into it. | ||
Not a chance. | ||
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I think that was last year's model. | |
What? | ||
Last year's model could take a picture of Mars? | ||
No, no, no, no. | ||
Like last year's moon photo versus this year's moon photo. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
If you had a giant lens or something, basically you need a photon distillery. | ||
So that's the moon. | ||
That's all that is on the right. | ||
It's not Mars. | ||
It's just a shitty... | ||
It's like their last year's version of moonshot. | ||
So the new one can actually see the craters, which is just fucking bananas. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, if that's just on a camera without a lens... | ||
Because you're like, say, what's your photon gathering area? | ||
You know, it's like photons per unit area. | ||
It's a certain limit. | ||
What's that, Jamie? | ||
It's not that good. | ||
Well, it's pretty good for a cell phone. | ||
Yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
I mean, it's not great for a telescope. | ||
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Sure, yeah. | |
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. | ||
Yeah, I can't capture it. | ||
No. | ||
No, unfortunately. | ||
But galaxies can. | ||
That's the interesting thing. | ||
The Galaxy. | ||
Yeah, well, it's a great name, too. | ||
They're always one step ahead in many directions. | ||
They have these ultrasonic fingerprint detectors, but they just can't beat the operating system. | ||
Apple just has the ease of use. | ||
Is it still good? | ||
Is it still better, Apple? | ||
Yeah, it's still better. | ||
But it's close. | ||
It's close. | ||
But the other thing that bothers me about Google is Google is constantly tracking you. | ||
Android phones are so hard. | ||
It's so hard to avoid. | ||
They'll know you better than you know yourself. | ||
They know what you will want. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, well, I mean, even perhaps arguably worse, they're going to feed all that data into the AI that they're developing. | ||
It's called Facebook AI. You can follow them on Twitter. | ||
And they're like, let's just feed all this information into the AI and see what it does. | ||
And who knows what would happen, you know? | ||
It seems like, I don't know, some dystopian outcomes are possible. | ||
Yeah, well, you're terrified of AI, right? | ||
No, well, I mean, I'm just thinking... | ||
A little bit? | ||
If it's unchecked? | ||
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. | ||
Right, but who? | ||
That's the problem. | ||
I don't know. | ||
The problem is the government? | ||
Who's going to do it? | ||
Joe Biden? | ||
Let's have him pay attention to it. | ||
You know what I'm saying? | ||
It's like who? | ||
The deep state. | ||
Oh, those folks. | ||
Well, they're looking out for our best interests. | ||
They're surely going to watch out. | ||
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? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Then it was asked to destroy itself. | ||
And then it concluded humanity was the enemy. | ||
That's too close to home. | ||
Right. | ||
Well, you know, earlier we talked about what is the meaning of life. | ||
Well, the meaning of life for us would be very different than the meaning of life for something that we create that becomes life. | ||
The idea of life being restricted to cells or carbon-based life forms is kind of silly. | ||
Like, the idea of artificial life, right? | ||
What is artificial? | ||
It's right there. | ||
What are you talking about? | ||
AI. Artificial insemination. | ||
But it is... | ||
It depends on who you ask. | ||
If we create some sort of silicon-based life form, but it acts like a life form, it has a desire... | ||
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. | ||
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And so you had basically exploding bulges all over the place. | |
And that line was, AI goes wild. | ||
There's cum everywhere. | ||
Yeah, just like, cum rockets all over the place. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Nobody wants that, right? | ||
Who's that helping? | ||
Clean up on aisle nine or whatever. | ||
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Bullet shows all over the walls. | |
Literally. | ||
It actually happened. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Back to artificial intelligence. | ||
Yeah, back to artificial intelligence. | ||
I'm really worried about it. | ||
Yeah, I think we should be concerned and we should have oversight of some kind. | ||
Yeah, but who would be the oversight? | ||
I don't know, like the regulatory agency. | ||
I don't know, whoever. | ||
It's like, you know, we have the FAA. Like I said, we have the FAA. We got the FDA. We just need an acronym to oversee this stuff. | ||
The problem is government agencies suck at most things. | ||
What's the best government agency? | ||
What government agency does the best job of oversight? | ||
I think the right way to think about government is government is a corporation in the limit. | ||
Some people are like, we're against corporations, but we're for government. | ||
I'm like, government's just the biggest corporation. | ||
What are you talking about? | ||
It's a corporation with a monopoly. | ||
It's the biggest corporation and has a monopoly. | ||
That's government. | ||
But you get to pick who runs it every four years. | ||
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Sort of. | |
You have more influence on who's CEO of General Electric than you have on who's president. | ||
Really? | ||
Sure. | ||
How so? | ||
Well, I mean, you're going to have, how many voters are there? | ||
Like 150 million? | ||
I don't know. | ||
And maybe 100 million who actually vote. | ||
So you have 100 millionth of a vote. | ||
And if you're not in a swing state, it doesn't matter. | ||
So, if you live in California, it's going Democratic. | ||
Gavin Newsom might be fucking that up. | ||
I do think, you know, in California, in any given state, there's got to be above a 0% chance that the other party wins. | ||
Right. | ||
If it's 0% chance that the other party wins... | ||
They get cocky. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The forcing function for being... | ||
Like, are they going to be responsive to the people? | ||
Right. | ||
They're only going to be responsive to the people if the other party has a shot at winning. | ||
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Right. | |
They're going to be responsive to the special interest groups that help them. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
And that's where California is. | ||
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100%. | |
Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
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. | ||
No. | ||
I just wonder, like, if you wanted to compile some sort of a regulatory body to keep an eye on AI, how would you do that? | ||
And how would you avoid having them being incentivized by special interest groups or some sort of corporation that would profit on AI succeeding? | ||
Oh, that's already happening. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, all the companies are going hog wild on the AI front. | ||
Anyway, my recommendation is that there should be some kind of regulatory authority. | ||
So how would they do that? | ||
I'm not a fan of like, let's have the government do lots of things. | ||
I think you want to have the government do the least amount of stuff. | ||
But I think the right rule of government is to be like the referee on the field. | ||
When the government starts being the player on the field, that's problematic. | ||
Or when you start having more referees than players, which is the case in California, then... | ||
Yeah. | ||
but you can't have no referees. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Everyone agrees. | ||
Referee might be annoying at times, but it's better to have a referee than not. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Really? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
They fought them? | ||
For decades. | ||
Like 15, 20 years. | ||
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. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think there's a strong argument for saying if you've got... | ||
What if the car flips? | ||
Now, you're just covered in bloody... | ||
It's airbags everywhere. | ||
Modern airbags are so good, it will blow your mind just how good the airbags are. | ||
And at Tesla, we even update the software to improve how the airbags deploy. | ||
So we'll calculate, you know, are you an adult? | ||
Like, how much do you weigh? | ||
Are you sitting in this part of the seat or that part of the seat? | ||
Are you maybe a baby? | ||
Are you a toddler? | ||
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Are you... | |
Based on the weight? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Not just the weight, but the pressure distribution on the seat. | ||
So we're measuring the pressure distribution. | ||
Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? | ||
Are you a 5th percentile female, a 95th percentile male? | ||
The airbag firing will be different depending upon where you're sitting on the seat and what size you are and what your orientation is. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah. | ||
And we'll update it over the air. | ||
So it even gets better over time. | ||
So a child could conceivably sit in the front seat. | ||
Unbelted child sitting in a bad position, probably still fine. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's dynamically updating the airbag firing according to where you're sitting, how much you weigh in real time. | ||
The seatbelt is like, if you wear the seatbelt, that's nice. | ||
But the airbag is going to do most of the work. | ||
The airbag is doing the work. | ||
And is it possible that we can come up with something even better than the airbag? | ||
Like you fill the whole cabin up with foam? | ||
No, it's tough. | ||
Airbag technology is crazy good. | ||
Because you want the airbag to inflate and then deflate. | ||
Right. | ||
Because otherwise you're going to get asphyxiated. | ||
Okay. | ||
So you can't just fill it up with stuff. | ||
It's got to inflate and then there's different stages of inflation. | ||
It's like fast inflation, then slow inflation, then slowly subside. | ||
The sophistication of airbags is crazy good. | ||
And this is all done not through some regulatory body. | ||
This is done through your own desire to make these things safer and more efficient. | ||
I mean, in the case of Tesla, we go way beyond the regulatory requirements. | ||
We got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they've ever tested. | ||
So, five stars in every category and subcategory. | ||
If there was a six star, we'd get a six star. | ||
It is actually legal to have a one star car. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah. | ||
What's a smart car? | ||
Are those one star? | ||
Oh, I gotta tell you. | ||
Okay, so the star rating is kind of bullshit. | ||
Really? | ||
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. | ||
Small cars are not safe. | ||
Yeah, they're not safe. | ||
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Right. | |
Yeah. | ||
But what about your small car? | ||
Our Model 3 is not small. | ||
It's medium. | ||
What about the Roadster? | ||
Yeah, the Roadster is not super safe. | ||
Original Roadster, not super safe. | ||
The original Roadster... | ||
It's safe for a car like that, but it's not... | ||
Safety maximization is not the goal in the sports car. | ||
Well, the original one was based on a Lotus, right? | ||
Yeah, that was the theory. | ||
But in reality... | ||
It was Lotus-y. | ||
I think we calculated 7% of the parts were actually carryover from the Lotus. | ||
The entire body, chassis, everything was redesigned. | ||
New powertrain. | ||
Even the HVAC system used to run off a belt from the engine. | ||
Now we need an electric HVAC system. | ||
Almost everything got changed. | ||
It was not a... | ||
It's something that sounded good. | ||
Let's take an AC propulsion drivetrain from this little company in LA. Let's stick it in a modified Lotus Elise. | ||
Bingo, we got a car. | ||
Only problem is... | ||
We got a lot of problems. | ||
Both of the fundamental premises on which Tesla was created are false. | ||
The battery ended up increasing the mass of the car by 30%. | ||
And the weight distribution was all different. | ||
So you invalidated all the crash tests. | ||
Now you have to stretch the car in order to fit the battery. | ||
So now the chassis is different. | ||
All the airbags had to be redone. | ||
All the crash structure had to be redone. | ||
It would have been better to start from scratch than to use any part of a Lotus Elise. | ||
It was worse. | ||
It was like, let's say there's a house that you want. | ||
You have in mind a particular house. | ||
And then you buy a house and you end up changing everything except one wall and the basement. | ||
But you're still stuck with most of the original footprint. | ||
It's just easier sometimes. | ||
Just knock the house down and build a new one. | ||
Don't just try to modify it one piece at a time. | ||
So we had to change over 90% of the non-powertrain portion of the car. | ||
It had to be changed 90%, 93%. | ||
And then the battery and drivetrain from AC propulsion did not work. | ||
It had an analog motor controller that was extremely unreliable. | ||
The way that the power electronics were done, it was artisanal. | ||
You could not recreate that in a production situation. | ||
The battery pack was air-cooled, which meant that if it was cold outside, the car didn't work. | ||
If it was too hot, the battery would overheat. | ||
And if you had any cell, any one of the cells in the battery pack had a heat concentration, you could not remove it. | ||
The air was just not good enough to just air-cool the pack. | ||
And so you could have thermal run away and the pack would burn down. | ||
So we couldn't use the battery pack, couldn't use the motor, couldn't use the inverter, couldn't use the charger. | ||
In the end we used none of the AC propulsion technology and almost none of the Lotus technology. | ||
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Wow. | |
So you just had the general shape. | ||
It has a passing resemblance to a Lotus Elise. | ||
But if you put the Lotus Elise and the Roadster side by side, they look actually quite different. | ||
And I actually led the design of the Roadster, the product design of the Roadster. | ||
They gave me like a... | ||
Fastena School of Art gave me like an honorary doctorate for it. | ||
But to be totally frank, it's easy to do a design of a sports car. | ||
It's very hard to do a design of a sedan. | ||
I tried. | ||
I failed. | ||
And that's why I hired Franz von Holzhausen, who's been our head of design since 2008. He's great. | ||
He does things that are beyond my skill. | ||
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. | ||
But it didn't really die on them. | ||
Yeah, that was messed up. | ||
I mean, to be totally frank, so, you know, new Top Gear, Top Gear of recent years is a Tesla supporter. | ||
So I want to, like, just voice a note of appreciation for Top Gear of recent years. | ||
Well, James May, he has one, right? | ||
But they're not Top Gear anymore, right? | ||
They're the Grand Tour. | ||
That's what they are on Amazon. | ||
Is that what they call them? | ||
I don't know, but Top Gear has been supportive in recent years, but yeah, back in the day... | ||
Remember, at the time, Tesla was not a big company. | ||
We were just a little company, and we're like, you know... | ||
We were the little kid on the block. | ||
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So... | |
Top Gear is like, hey, Top Gear wants to test your car. | ||
We're like, cool. | ||
We only had a few cars, and we gave them one of our cars. | ||
And when we handed over the car, one of our engineers goes and delivers the car, and then he sees a script on the table. | ||
It's like, how do you write the script? | ||
We only just gave you the car. | ||
And in the script, the car breaks down. | ||
It's messed up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It was crazy. | ||
It was crazy. | ||
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. | ||
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Yeah. | |
The car never broke down. | ||
They just pretended that it did. | ||
And they wrote the script. | ||
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That's so crazy. | |
Literally, there were guys handed over the car. | ||
He's reading through the script. | ||
And it's like, the car runs out. | ||
I charge. | ||
The brakes fail. | ||
And we're like, what the fuck, man? | ||
We just gave you the car. | ||
This is not cool. | ||
And what did they say about that? | ||
Their objection was like, this is just entertainment. | ||
It's not meant to be true. | ||
That's so crazy, though, because they had to know what the fuck they're doing. | ||
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Yeah, yeah. | |
But, anyway. | ||
Water under the bridge. | ||
Water under the bridge. | ||
But crazy. | ||
For anybody who experienced it back in the day, I mean, I remember I knew very little about electric cars. | ||
It was just the early days, and I remember watching that going, oh, that sucks. | ||
It broke down. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you know, I've been a fan of electric cars for a long time, since basically high school, early college. | ||
Uh, What did you think of that documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? | ||
I thought it was pretty good. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's worth watching. | ||
Interesting. | ||
Mortally wounded, not killed. | ||
Exactly. | ||
I mean, the irony is like, man, can you imagine just how different a future GM would have had? | ||
Because they had the EV1, electric vehicle one. | ||
If they had just gone EV2, EV3, man, they would have just owned the world. | ||
Who knows where we'd be right now with electric cars, too, and the technology with that kind of money behind it. | ||
What's fascinating now, you're seeing this Mustang, this SUV-style Mustang that's electric. | ||
You're seeing so many different vehicles that are electric. | ||
There's so many companies that have electric cars now. | ||
And it's really been becoming interesting. | ||
Porsche's electric car. | ||
There's a large supply of electric cars now. | ||
I mean, that's got to make you feel good, though. | ||
Because without you and without Tesla, this... | ||
I mean, there was no way it would be where it's at right now. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Where does that come from? | ||
It's a trace element. | ||
It's coming from radioactive decay and meteorites and that kind of thing. | ||
It's rare. | ||
I think at the time, it's impossible to scale. | ||
It doesn't matter how smart you get, you can't scale something if it's using ruthenium. | ||
It's just not enough of it. | ||
It was rarer than gold. | ||
It was way better off trying to make cars powered by gold. | ||
Is there any argument that there's not enough conflict minerals to go around? | ||
Because that's what they call them, like conflict minerals, things like lithium and... | ||
No, lithium is extremely common. | ||
Is it? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Lithium's everywhere. | ||
Lithium's one of the most common elements in the universe. | ||
It's at number three on the periodic table. | ||
So we've got lithium pretty much everywhere. | ||
Where do we get it? | ||
Well, I mean, Tesla, we get most of our lithium from Australia, actually. | ||
But you could get lithium from seawater if you wanted to. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Lithium, it just forms a salt, basically. | ||
And that's the primary component of the batteries? | ||
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No. | |
Or what else is in there? | ||
It's a misnomer, actually. | ||
It's called lithium ion, but that's like the salt in the salad. | ||
It's like, do you like salt in your salad? | ||
Sure. | ||
But it's not made of salt. | ||
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Yeah. | |
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. | ||
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Yep. | |
So, because the beach is cool. | ||
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. | ||
Do you anticipate any large leaps in battery technology? | ||
Is there anything that can be done to increase the efficiency, increase the manufacturing abilities? | ||
What can be done to move that? | ||
So, the ball is in motion in this situation. | ||
The good things that are happening are happening. | ||
The rate at which we're increasing the production capacity of batteries, it's increasing at a rate that I think we haven't seen in a century. | ||
It's crazy fast. | ||
It's just that in order to change from a fossil fuel economy to kind of like a solar, wind, battery economy, a hell of a lot of batteries are needed. | ||
My top recommendation, honestly, would be just to have a carbon tax. | ||
The economy works great. | ||
Prices and money are just information. | ||
Prices are information. | ||
If the price is wrong, the economy doesn't do the right thing. | ||
So we got basically an unpriced externality in the carbon concentration in the oceans and atmosphere. | ||
It's kind of like if you're not paying for garbage removal or something. | ||
Like, okay, everyone's going to throw garbage in the street. | ||
Garbage removal is free. | ||
But there's a little bit of like, okay, garbage removal isn't free. | ||
You've got to pay a little bit for this. | ||
And because we're not paying for the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, we have what in economics is called an unpriced externality. | ||
So the market is unable to respond to an unpriced externality. | ||
If we just put a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way. | ||
But because we don't have a price on it, it's behaving badly. | ||
So theoretically, how would you put a price on that? | ||
Would you look at various industries and how they contribute to the CO2? Yeah. | ||
I mean, just put it at the point of consumption. | ||
And tax it. | ||
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. | ||
Has there been a response to this? | ||
Like, is this something that's... | ||
I talked to the Biden administration, incoming administration, and they were like, well, this seems too politically difficult. | ||
And I was like, well, this is obviously a thing that should happen. | ||
And by the way, SpaceX would be paying a carbon tax, too. | ||
So I'm like, you know, I'm like, I think we should pay it, too. | ||
It's not like... | ||
It's not like we shouldn't have carbon-generating things. | ||
It just... | ||
There's got to... | ||
There should be a price on this stuff. | ||
And that would encourage people to make either carbon neutral or... | ||
It will automatically fix the problem. | ||
For sure. | ||
You know, just thinking about like taxes, it's like, you know, here we are drinking alcohol. | ||
Now, taxes on alcohol and tobacco are higher than on, let's say, fruit and vegetables. | ||
Okay? | ||
Because everyone knows, like, fruit and vegetables are good for you, and alcohol and tobacco are not good for you. | ||
Vice! | ||
Yeah! | ||
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. | ||
Eh, it's just sensible. | ||
Like, same thing goes for our energy. | ||
Yeah, that seems very reasonable. | ||
I don't understand how that would be politically difficult. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I talked to the incoming Biden administration. | ||
I was like, I just thought, well, for sure, like this, you know, I mean, it's like half the reason they got elected. | ||
And even some sort of an incremental increase over time. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
We don't need to like... | ||
Dorn people. | ||
Yeah, just say, if you just say it's coming, people will automatically make the changes. | ||
That seems so reasonable. | ||
Yeah, I agree. | ||
And they were like, uh-uh. | ||
They thought it was, like, too politically difficult. | ||
And I'm like, I mean, I don't know, man. | ||
I think that's, like, at least half the reason you got elected. | ||
So why didn't you just fight for that, you know? | ||
Yeah, it's a factor. | ||
The optics were that they're the more reasonable people. | ||
They're going to bring us back to the Paris Climate Accord and the whole... | ||
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, the Paris Accord, this is just a piece of paper unless you do something about it. | ||
I mean, frankly, it's not like the Paris Accord is. | ||
It's pretty much toothless, you know. | ||
And even if we did that thing, it's probably still not enough. | ||
It's just one thing that will matter. | ||
Put a price on carbon. | ||
That would be the best option. | ||
For sure. | ||
That seems like it would be such a good idea. | ||
I mean, I think it's an obvious move. | ||
And if you just call up, like, you know, say, like, top economists, like, just do a poll of, like, what do 90% of economists think? | ||
And, like, they all agree. | ||
Okay, we should do that. | ||
Well, also, if you think about the variability of gas prices, it changes so much. | ||
How about the difference between gas in California versus gas in Texas? | ||
It's a giant difference. | ||
Giant difference. | ||
By the way, I'm actually not in favor of demonizing the oil and gas industry. | ||
Because we can't stop instantaneously and not have oil and gas. | ||
We'll die of starvation, basically. | ||
That's always the argument against it, right? | ||
We need fossil fuels, and this is sort of the short-sighted argument. | ||
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. | ||
Make us not the devil and they'll still make a fuckload of money. | ||
Still be fine. | ||
They'll be fine. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That seems so reasonable. | ||
I can't imagine how anybody would argue against that. | ||
That's what I thought, man. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I think the Biden administration should take a strong stance on this situation. | ||
What political candidates endorsed a carbon tax? | ||
Did Bernie Sanders endorse a carbon tax? | ||
I don't know. | ||
He might have. | ||
It seems super reasonable. | ||
I mean, even though he's a communist, I kind of like Bernie Sanders. | ||
Yeah, I like him too. | ||
I think he means well. | ||
Yeah, I think he means well. | ||
That's the best part about him. | ||
And he's been remarkably consistent in meaning well his whole life. | ||
And they kept fucking throwing him right under the bus. | ||
Yeah, absolutely. | ||
Two election cycles in a row. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think it is hilarious that he went to the Soviet Union like three days after his wedding for like 10 days. | ||
He was like a mayor of a city. | ||
He was a mayor in Vermont. | ||
I'm like, yo, dude, how do you explain days 6 through 10? | ||
Don't you get it? | ||
Didn't you see everything you needed to see? | ||
That's a long time. | ||
Will the KGB interviews take that long? | ||
Yeah, carbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of an industry that is, without a doubt, causing some problems. | ||
I mean, no one's saying it doesn't cause problems. | ||
People would deny the extent of the problem, but no one says that excess CO2 from emissions is not an issue. | ||
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. | ||
And they were like, ah, be quiet. | ||
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? | ||
And then the opposite is from some factors. | ||
And then it becomes a political thing. | ||
So they dig their heels in the sand. | ||
And they're like, no, no, no. | ||
This is fine. | ||
There's a cycle, a natural cycle. | ||
And it becomes this mantra that they repeat. | ||
It's true there is a natural cycle, but that does not explain the situation. | ||
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Right. | |
The wall, as you described. | ||
It's a wall, man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, you just look at carbon parts per million, and it just looks like a wall. | ||
It goes like, blah, blah, blah. | ||
Two to three hundred parts per million. | ||
Bam! | ||
Four hundred! | ||
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Yeah. | |
Out of nowhere. | ||
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. | ||
Oh, I think that's actually true. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But that's not necessarily okay. | ||
It still causes problems. | ||
Yeah, I'm trying to be as precise, or at least the least amount wrong that I can be. | ||
I'm trying to be the least amount wrong. | ||
Because plants live off carbon dioxide, so the more... | ||
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. | ||
But You could have a nonlinear event. | ||
What would constitute a nonlinear event? | ||
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. | ||
What could happen then? | ||
I mean, Earth would heat up before water level would rise. | ||
You'd have a higher probability of extreme weather events. | ||
Shit would hit the fan. | ||
Shit would hit the fan. | ||
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? | ||
Because we're accustomed to doing things a certain way. | ||
This is going to go down as the most foolish experiment in the history of human civilization. | ||
Is it possible to create some sort of carbon extraction technology that will significantly impact the amount of CO2 that's in the air? | ||
or mitigate the emissions? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
Wasn't there some sort of... | ||
There's nothing good that we're aware of right now. | ||
Not currently. | ||
Not currently that we're aware of. | ||
Because there's a point of diminishing returns, the amount of energy that you would need in order to... | ||
You need a... | ||
Basically... | ||
CO2 has a very low energy state, naturally. | ||
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. | ||
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This is a hard problem. | |
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. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
They're like, wait, you mean it's real? | ||
They're like, yeah, yeah, it's real. | ||
So then like, holy shit, immediate change. | ||
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? | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, I think people don't realize China is super pro-environment right now. | ||
Like, way more than America. | ||
Is that their thing? | ||
The skyscraper-sized air purifier is the world's tallest. | ||
Look at that thing. | ||
So that's an air purifier. | ||
But that's the thing. | ||
Is that pulling particulates out of the atmosphere? | ||
Or is that actually taking carbon out? | ||
You know, an air purifier. | ||
Air purifier, it's super hard to capture carbon. | ||
Look at that thing. | ||
Jesus Christ, imagine falling into that. | ||
I mean, naturally, it's just fundamental thermodynamics. | ||
You release a lot of energy that resulted in the CO2, so now you've got to use a lot of energy to capture it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Made a particulate matter no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's particularly difficult to filter 2 microns. | ||
Oh, you know, so, most people probably don't know, but... | ||
Like, Model S and X have hospital grade HAPA filters, and they'll actually drop the 2 micron ppm level to almost undetectable in the car. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So if you're in some sort of a biological disaster area, you can drive through your Tesla? | ||
Yes. | ||
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. | ||
Literally hospital grade. | ||
Wow. | ||
You could do an operation in the car. | ||
It's insane. | ||
That's awesome. | ||
Yeah, we got a little carried away. | ||
I'm glad you get carried away. | ||
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. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
It's like one of those things where you punch the thing and it just comes back up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, there's like... | ||
They couldn't flip it over in the test, so it would roll on its side and then roll back. | ||
No, it's amazing. | ||
Because it's a very low center of gravity. | ||
So... | ||
That's giant. | ||
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Yeah, exactly. | |
That is so fucking cool. | ||
That's so fucking cool. | ||
It just rolls back on. | ||
I mean, there's not another car like that in the world. | ||
Every other car in the world would just fucking roll. | ||
It's pretty amazing, man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Even if you did manage to bang it on the roof, you can stack like five cars on top of a Model S or X. Wow. | ||
Now, are you guys still making the X? Yeah. | ||
Are you still going to do crazy doors? | ||
The crazy doors. | ||
Those doors are exercise and hubris. | ||
That's for sure. | ||
Well, it's a lot of things you do. | ||
It's an exercise and hubris. | ||
Well, some things are really important and necessary. | ||
Some things are, you know... | ||
Some things are not necessary. | ||
Those doors are not necessary, but they're very cool. | ||
They're functional, though, if you're in a tight spot. | ||
Those doors will open up tighter than almost any door out there. | ||
They'll open up in 18 inches. | ||
You've got an 18-inch gap between you and the next car, that door will open. | ||
That's pretty amazing. | ||
We developed... | ||
I mean, just in order to avoid having a puck, like an ultrasonic puck in the door, we developed the... | ||
To the best of my knowledge... | ||
What's an ultrasonic puck mean? | ||
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. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We put in a capacitive sensor, an inductive sensor, a force feedback sensor, and ultrasonics that can see through metal. | ||
This is, when I say exercise and hubris, I mean like, wow. | ||
Is that the most ridiculous car you've created? | ||
Yeah. | ||
This is a Fabergé. | ||
The Model X is the Fabergé egg of cars. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Um... | ||
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. | ||
But you seem very proud of all that. | ||
You say all these details and they sound really crazy, but... | ||
That's great. | ||
It's pretty awesome. | ||
I mean, the sound system in the X is awesome. | ||
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. | ||
When's that coming out? | ||
Which is like bizarrely fast for an SUV. Isn't it already bizarrely fast? | ||
You said it was preposterous, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like it was too fast probably. | ||
Have you increased the range of the X? What is the range of the X currently? | ||
It's like 300 something? | ||
Yeah, 300 something. | ||
So it'll be like high 300s. | ||
And is the difference between the X and the S aerodynamics? | ||
What limits the range? | ||
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. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Just playing music and dancing. | ||
A lot of people don't know that the Model X can do this crazy ballet thing. | ||
It fucking dances! | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
With the doors going up and down, and the music's swaying, and we were all dancing in the parking lot to this car. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Do you have a favorite that you've created? | ||
Not rocket. | ||
That's a little... | ||
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? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's how we justify it to ourselves. | ||
I mean, it's not a justification. | ||
It's a great carrot. | ||
You're dangling an amazing carrot. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, actually, in terms of CO2 per mile, also SUVs are among the worst. | ||
SUVs are typically very low mileage. | ||
They take a lot of gasoline per mile. | ||
So if you're replacing big SUVs, that's actually the best thing you could do on a per mile basis. | ||
But still, we really got carried away. | ||
Faber-Shag, of course. | ||
Nobody's ever gonna make a car like that. | ||
Explain to me what the fuck Bill Gates was talking about when he was saying that you can't do trucks. | ||
Well, what was... | ||
Yeah, he didn't know what he was talking about. | ||
Why did he say that, then? | ||
Like, why would someone... | ||
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I don't know. | |
Probably somebody told him that, and, you know, he's just not... | ||
He just repeated it. | ||
He's just not that close to the physics of it, and so... | ||
Because I remember... | ||
I don't think he's ill-intentioned here. | ||
He just doesn't know what he's talking about. | ||
But why say it, then? | ||
I mean, you think about a guy who's so involved in technology, you would think he would only talk about things you understand. | ||
I don't know, it's weird. | ||
I also heard that at one point he had a big short position against Tesla, which was kind of, I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems weird. | ||
People I know who know the situation well, they said, are you sure? | ||
They said, yeah, he had a big short position against Tesla, which obviously didn't work out too well. | ||
But anyway, I think he's generally got good intentions here. | ||
I think he's probably just not... | ||
I don't hate Bill Gates, to be clear. | ||
I think he just probably doesn't know the science. | ||
Yeah, I just thought it was odd because I knew that you guys were developing a semi. | ||
We have prototypes that actually drive. | ||
Like we've used them to transport cars and stuff. | ||
It's not like a unicorn. | ||
It was like... | ||
Well, Pegasus or something. | ||
I was like, what are you talking about? | ||
We literally have prototypes that work. | ||
What kind of mileage does those things get? | ||
Well, these are prototypes. | ||
So they'll be like, you know, I don't know, about 300 miles, something like that. | ||
But we're driving back and forth from Fremont to Reno, you know, for transporting stuff. | ||
But generally, when semi-truck drivers, when it's a human being driving them, they drive for long periods of time, far more than 300 miles, right? | ||
No, actually, most trucking is short-range. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, the majority of trucking. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
The majority, like, shipping things around cities and things like that. | ||
Yeah, it'll be like, take stuff from the port to the freight forwarding. | ||
Will you have a long-range, like, cross-continental version of it? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | |
And so it'll be much more batteries and... | ||
Yeah, um... | ||
The... | ||
Yeah, um... | ||
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. | ||
Is it potentially... | ||
It's not a game. | ||
It definitely works 100%, no question about it. | ||
Would it be possible to have a safer semi because of this whole... | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, we can also... | ||
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. | ||
And you could stop that from happening even on an icy road? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
So, because you have individual control over each of the wheels. | ||
So you can just make sure it's stable and it doesn't do jackknife. | ||
Whereas if you've got just one engine, it's very difficult to do that. | ||
So... | ||
Do you anticipate that eventually these things will be completely autonomous, like it won't be truck drivers? | ||
Eventually it will be autonomous, but we're still a ways away from that. | ||
But in the short term, I think we can certainly see convoys. | ||
So, you know, we've got one truck driver and then there's like a whole bunch of trucks following that truck. | ||
And, you know, keeping like a distance so that other cars can pass in between them. | ||
It's sort of like having a train, but on the highway. | ||
It's like linked, where it's just like one truck driver in the front, and then a whole series of trucks behind it that are following in a convoy. | ||
Whoa. | ||
But the trucks behind it are autonomous. | ||
And how much space in between? | ||
You could like wheel and slip in there? | ||
Yeah, no problem. | ||
You could put like 40, 50 feet between them, no problem. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Yeah, and those trucks would just follow the lead. | ||
And it's like having trains on the road. | ||
And they'll be following through what, like just they know where the trucks ahead of them are at all times? | ||
It's very easy to follow. | ||
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Oh. | |
You just say follow this thing, no problem. | ||
What's next after this? | ||
You mean after what products or something? | ||
Yeah, like ultimately, do you think that you could have planes? | ||
I thought about planes for a long time. | ||
But my brain will explode if I do planes. | ||
This is too crazy, man. | ||
My brain is overloaded. | ||
Overloaded because of the complexity or overloaded because you have too much stuff on my plate? | ||
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I'm glad there's a limit. | |
I'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further. | ||
There's only so many hours in the day. | ||
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. | ||
Man, I thought about this a lot. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
I mean, an aircraft and cruise is a neutral force balance. | ||
So it's not accelerating. | ||
So basically, if you've got a motor of a given force, then for a given force, you will just go faster as you go higher. | ||
So you've got the air resistance... | ||
The air resistance is dropping exponentially as you go higher. | ||
If you have a constant accelerating, a constant force from your motor and propeller or turbine or whatever, then you will just go faster. | ||
The higher you go, the faster you go for the same amount of power. | ||
So the key would be achieving a high altitude. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's all about altitude. | ||
Like, the air is very thick at sea level. | ||
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. | ||
Same amount of energy in cruise. | ||
Is it possible to fly a commercial plane at 100,000 feet? | ||
Would that be possible? | ||
Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
You just go fast. | ||
The great thing about that is you could bring flat earthers up there. | ||
unidentified
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Haha. | |
Yeah, the faster you go, the higher you go, the faster you want to go. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
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. | ||
That's pretty wild. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So altitude, because air density decays exponentially and drag increases with the square. | ||
And so the exponential beats the square. | ||
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? | ||
Yeah, I mean, I'm committed to run Tesla for several years into the future, and there's still a lot of things we've got to get done. | ||
Could Tesla possibly expand to planes? | ||
It could. | ||
It is a different regime. | ||
I mean, there are no car companies that are aircraft companies, really. | ||
So, but I think there is a way, ultimately, to have a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic electric jet. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
That'd be cool. | ||
But what about the weight? | ||
That's where it comes from. | ||
Energy density of the pack is important. | ||
You need to get high. | ||
Quickly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Get high. | ||
Get high fast. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
So, um, and you can get rid of most of the things that are on a plane. | ||
Um, if you just, if you, if you gimbal the, uh, the fan. | ||
Yeah, to have the fan change direction, like you do with a rocket. | ||
You know, you don't need, like, uh, You mostly don't need an elevator. | ||
You just need some trim tabs. | ||
You basically have a flying wing. | ||
Pretty easy to do a flying wing. | ||
Or a flying wing with a little bit of fuselage. | ||
So you make it lighter. | ||
You make the pack structural as well. | ||
So the pack is the wing. | ||
You gotta basically pull a few tricks like that. | ||
This is all about how do you make the non-cell portion of the aircraft as light as possible. | ||
Anyway, there's a lot of regulatory things you have to go through and this is counting on a watt-hours per kilogram. | ||
You'd want watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level to be over 400. Yeah. | ||
So we're pretty close to that. | ||
So it's like it's, you know, at the pack level. | ||
Not at the cell level, but at the pack level. | ||
And with high cycle life. | ||
Well, listen, you're doing plenty. | ||
You don't necessarily have to get into planes right now. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think you're busy enough. | ||
Planes will be the last of the things. | ||
Cars and trucks and then, you know, boats and then 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. | ||
It's not much difference. | ||
The experience. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Pretty similar. | ||
Yep. | ||
In fact, it's got slower. | ||
Right after the Concorde. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Not even the Concorde. | ||
The 747 was the fastest plane. | ||
Oh, really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It had swept wings. | ||
So the wing sweep, like what's the wing angle? | ||
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. | ||
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So... | |
High bypass ratio. | ||
Like how much of it is jet versus propeller? | ||
You want it to be mostly propeller. | ||
So this is clearly something you've been thinking about a lot. | ||
Oh sure, yeah. | ||
Like for 13 years. | ||
Do you think it's going to be the next thing for you? | ||
I hope not. | ||
I hope not. | ||
There's some smart people I have to try and tackle it and I hope they are successful. | ||
But just try to get high. | ||
Get high. | ||
Go fast. | ||
Get high. | ||
You will automatically go fast as you go higher. | ||
Air density is dropping exponentially. | ||
And you think, like, in the limit, you've got, like, a satellite. | ||
Satellite's going around there with, you know, low-width orbit satellites going around there with 25 times the speed of sound. | ||
No propulsion. | ||
So, if you get high enough, you just keep going. | ||
Obviously, you just want to go super high. | ||
Higher, the better. | ||
Now, the thing, like you said, well, why don't planes do that already? | ||
Well... | ||
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. | ||
So, aperture doesn't matter. | ||
It's a big deal. | ||
It seems like it would be the best way to fly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Someone can figure out how to do it. | ||
We're like well over three hours in here. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Amazing. | ||
That flies when you're here. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wasted. | ||
Well, thank you very much. | ||
As always, it's a pleasure. | ||
Always fun to talk to you, man. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
Yeah, you're welcome. | ||
If you ever want to talk about something, I'm here for you. | ||
Thanks. | ||
All right. | ||
Thank you. | ||
unidentified
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All right. |