Clubhouse conversation (The Good Time Show) (2021)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (20)
Transcript
0:00Elon MuskAre you celebrating anything in particular with your short shirts? No, I'm just trying to look sexy in these in these tight pants with the fabulous red and the gold.
0:14Elon MuskAre the shirts still available to be purchased?
0:24Clubhouse HostElon?
0:25Elon MuskI think you are. You might have broken. I'm not sure about the Internet, but definitely Clubhouse. This room is easily the biggest room the app has had and you're just putting all sorts of pressure on it.
0:37Elon MuskThis is amazing. This is a true historic moment. All right. Is it working? Absolutely. Absolutely. The Good Times room has almost 6,000 people in it right now. All right, let's just give it a minute because we promised we'd start at 10pm and I think few more people are going to turn trickle in and then we're going to be get.
1:00Elon MuskWe'll get going for what should be probably historic first ever time for you on some. It's going to be amazing. Just give me 30 seconds and we can go.
1:09Elon MuskOkay. By the way, can you let in Vlad from Robinhood?
1:18Elon MuskWhoa. No one else is good in that room. My phone just blew up when we started the room with people trying to get in. So we're going to try and get.
1:33Elon MuskOkay, why don't we get started? Okay. First of all, everyone, thank you for joining us for what is really a historic episode. I will come to our very, very special guest in a second, but just to quickly introduce the rest of the room, we have Jadi Tan, you know, of initialized capital.
1:56Elon MuskWe have my significantly better other half, Marty Rahul Murthy, who Elon, you have met when you took us on a tour of SpaceX. We have Stephen Sinowski of X Microsoft Team, and we have the 1N 1C mark Andre.
2:10Elon MuskBut to introduce our special guest and this person who needs your introduction, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company Neuralink, PayPal, and so much more. Elon Musk. Welcome to Clubhouse.
2:26Elon MuskThank you. Thank you. Okay. I think you're welcome.
2:32Clubhouse HostYeah, yeah. So, Elon, again, welcome. This is really fun. You know, we've been waiting all day. This is the longest way to 10pm because we just couldn't wait to get this going.
2:41Clubhouse HostI hope this is as much fun by the end of it for you as it is for us. First question from you is, when are we going to get to Mars?
2:50Elon MuskWell, I think we'll get to. When will we get to post people to Mars? I think we have a decent shot of doing that in about, I say, like, call it five years, something like that.
3:05Elon MuskSo Mars, Earth and Mars take up every 26 months. That's where we're in this kind of the. It's roughly the same quadrant of the solar system and where we do interplanetary transfer.
3:18Elon MuskAnd so we had one about six months ago. So about a year and a half there'll be another one. So I figure, you know, I don't know, five and a half years.
3:31Clubhouse HostFive and a half years. So what does it take from here to that point? Like what are the milestones you think for us to like get to you know, five years out?
3:38Clubhouse HostWe are, we are landing on Mars.
3:43Elon MuskWell, we're going to make the starship fly. It gets good over and back repeatedly. I mean the essential elements are you need a fully reused, you need a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket.
3:58Elon MuskThis is the holy grail of rocketry. So no one has ever succeeded in creating a fully reusable rocket. It can't just be fully reusable. It needs to be rapidly reusable.
4:07Elon MuskSo it doesn't take like several months of refurbishment between flights. It needs to be much like aircraft where the cost of an air flight is the police to counterfeit.
4:20Elon MuskAnd you can't just be throwing rockets away every time. And then you have orbital refilling so where you can send the ship up to orbit, then send another ship up dock with a transfer propellant so that you can load up to being almost full with propellant and then go to Mars.
4:41Elon MuskAnd if you've got a large fully, eventually reusable rocket with orbital refilling that uses high efficiency, low cost propellants, then you can go to Mars. And then one last thing is on Mars you need local propellant production.
5:04Elon MuskSo you take CH2 out of the atmosphere, combine it with the water ice, H2O to create CH4, methane and oxygen. And if you have those elements, life can become multi planetary and we can have a self sustaining city on Mars.
5:18Elon MuskWhich I think is one of the most important things we could possibly do for ensuring the long term existence of consciousness.
5:27Clubhouse HostYeah, I think that makes sense. Sorry, I'll go for that.
5:30Elon MuskYeah. You've spoken about this often which is, you know, expanding the scope of consciousness and how it is like to multi planetary life. Could you explain what that means for you and why that matters to you?
5:46Elon MuskSure. Well, so the. Originally I had an existential crisis when I was a kid trying to figure out what's the meaning of life, why are we here? What's the point of it all?
6:02Elon MuskIs it all meaningless? I got quite depressed actually and thought about it and, and then the thing that kind of Broke me out of it was reading Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where he essentially pointed out that the universe is the answer.
6:19Elon MuskAnd really the hard part is figuring out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. Yeah, exactly. He was trying to make fun of the fact that the answer is the easy part of the question, the hard part.
6:33Elon MuskSo in order for us to gain a better understanding what question to ask or to understand what it's all about, we have to increase the scope and scale of consciousness so that we're better able to figure out which questions to ask and answer them at the same time.
6:52Elon MuskThe broader scale.
7:04Clubhouse HostAnd
7:07Elon MuskI think there's arguably a great culture that we face with will we become a multi planet species or not? We're pretty surprised about there in our galaxy and others that there are a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations that prospered for a while.
7:24Elon MuskThey might have prospered for millions of years and have gradually the civilization collapse for reasons external or internal. And that was that all civilizations
7:36Clubhouse Hostgo
7:36Elon Muskthrough an arc where they grow up in technology complexity, but then they don't keep going up time, they decline their full. This has happened obviously with history with many civilizations in the past.
7:53Elon MuskYou can look at ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago. There was the great pyramid Giza, but then the people living there forgot how to build pyramids after a while and then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics.
8:05Elon MuskThere's obviously Gibbon's famous book about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and how they had advanced technology in terms of roads, aqueducts, plumbing and so forth. And then they basically forgot about it.
8:22Elon MuskThe ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, all these things that they've all gone through a similar arc, which suggests that most likely we will go through an arc ourselves and we'll be likely less resilient to recovery because of globalization.
8:40Elon MuskSo I think for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth, it's impossible to extend life beyond Earth and make life planetary. And this window of opportunity may be open for a long time.
8:54Elon MuskI hope it is, or it may be open for a short time. And I think it would be wise for us to assume that it's open for a short time.
9:02Elon MuskI'm an optimist, not a pessimist. But you have to say there's some chance it's only open for a short time. And we should take advantage of this brief window of opening where we can transport life to spinkline multi planetary and humanity is essentially the agent of life in this process.
9:20Elon MuskAnd I think we almost have an obligation to ensure that the creatures of Earth continue. Even if there is a calamity on Earth, which as I said, could be man made or it could be so natural calamity is if you look at the fossil record, there are many, many mass extinctions.
9:39Clubhouse HostYeah, I think, yeah, I think, you know, all of that makes sense. And I think we've heard you've talked about this before. I think one other question I have is, you know, when we get there, you know, we have to set up the whole society, we have to set up civilization there.
9:54Clubhouse HostHow will the whole thing work in your mind? You know, everything from what does it mean to have Internet connection in Mars all the way to like governments and rules and laws and everything?
10:07Elon MuskYeah, all those things need to happen just as they happen, you know, in the US and happen in every country. And I would not presume to prescribe what should happen there.
10:19Elon MuskI think the important part is just that we get people there and we get the equipment necessary to establish a self sustaining civilization, at least one self sustaining city.
10:29Elon MuskAnd I think the key threshold of when we would pass the great culture of this particular great culture is, is Mars sufficiently sustaining such that if the ship stopped coming from Earth for any reason, it could be something massive or something banal.
10:47Elon MuskI mean, civilization on Earth can end with a bang or a whipper. But either way, if the ships stop coming from Mars, does Mars die out or not? And Mars only has to be missing one little ingredient, like the equivalent of vitamin C.
11:02Elon MuskAnd it will spy for a while, but it will not, but it will eventually die out. So kind of getting student Mars to pass that critical threshold where it is self sustaining.
11:15Elon MuskAnd are we able to do that before some calamity or a gradual decline in civilization occurs that prevents the ships from going there? That's the key thrill, I mean, in a more pithy way is like, does the city on Mars become self sustaining?
11:31Elon MuskWhich comes first, the self sustaining city on Mars or World War Three? Yeah. If you kind of let yourself dream out over the next few decades, like, what would you consider success?
11:46Elon MuskLike, let's say they get through the first, you know, five years, maybe the first 10 years. Like what do you think is possible to build on Mars 10 years in, 20 years in, 30 years in after first arrival?
11:58Elon MuskWell, I think Mars would start off being very tiny, just like a tiny little outpost. And by the way, it's going to be very dangerous. Sometimes I feel like ghosts look like Some escape hatch, forest people like.
12:13Elon MuskNo, it won't be dangerous. Hard work. It's going to be. You're out there on the frontier way, far more ways to die there than there are on Earth and the trisp and hard work.
12:29Elon MuskBut it will be I think fun and event and a great adventure. But it will not be a luxurious thing that is for sure not for quite some time to go.
12:41Elon MuskWe've got to build the propellant plants, we've got to build, you know, get the solar power going, get the, you know, the food production going, creating the destinies. You know we need an iron ore refinery.
13:00Elon MuskWe need all of the sort of fundamentals of industry in order to make sure that Mars is a self sustaining planet over time like this would take a while but you could terraform the planet and make it Earth like mostly by just warming it up.
13:18Elon MuskSo yeah. So you know, as you talk about this, I mean honestly what comes to mind is sort of the idea that a Martian civilization, although obviously imported to Earth, it will quickly evolve to be quite a bit tougher by necessity.
13:33Elon MuskAnd just the mental images leap into my mind is the Spartans in ancient Greece. Do you think the sort of vector of civilization will unfold differently as a consequence of how difficult it's going to be?
13:45Elon MuskA jigoin? Yeah, probably will I think. So Maybe we don't, we don't just have a backup, right. Maybe we actually have an alternative like and the ability to actually see two different, two fundamentally different civilizations for it.
14:03Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. The fact that you can only go to Mars every two years and that is a six month journey although I think we can over time get that potentially as low as one month but still you can't go to Mars when Earth is on the, on the other side of the sun from Mars.
14:21Elon MuskLike the times where Mars looks at the other side of the sun no matter what you do. So but that time gap would mean that there would be essentially a new group of people arriving roughly every two years.
14:40Elon MuskI don't know, I think it'd be interesting Google probably trace their like yeah, I came on, you know, this, you know, this particular, you know, Earth, Mars synchronization. And like I said, the important thing is like that we established Mars as a self sustaining civilization and that we have and done whatever we can to ensure long term continuance of consciousness as we know it.
15:16Elon MuskBecause as far as we can tell we're the only the light of consciousness, which is a delicate little candle in the dark. It's only here on Earth I Mean, it might be other places.
15:30Elon MuskThere's arguments that it's likely to be other places, but honestly, we have seen no sign of it, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't know about it. And I have seen nothing to indicate that there's any alien civilization whatsoever.
15:45Elon MuskI'd be the first to jump on that in a second, but I've seen no such evidence. Eli, that's actually, you know, but that's actually something we wanted to ask you about because in the last year, there's been multiple reported UFO sightings.
15:59Elon MuskThere was the mysterious object that flew past our solar system. I think this is current. You don't see any evidence of aliens. But A, do you think we'll ever run into them?
16:08Elon MuskAnd B, if we do, have you heard of Dark Forest theory from the Deep Roddy product? How do you think we should think about aliens?
16:19Elon MuskYeah, I'm trying to be strict in the scientific sense of the word of saying I've seen not a single piece of conclusive evidence. So that doesn't mean there aren't aliens.
16:32Elon MuskI'm just literally saying I've seen nothing that could not be explained by other means and where the probable explanation by other means is much more likely than an alien technology.
16:47Elon MuskSo people are saying, like, there are sightings for aliens. I'm like, this, man. The resolution of the picture needs to be at least like 711 atm. Good. Okay.
17:04Elon MuskYou know, it's like, come on. Is that like a 500 megapixel camera? What? What are you talking about? Where do you find that thing? It's going to be at least, like, iPhone 6 level or something.
17:17Elon MuskI don't know. Can I ask one more mic session? That's okay. For real? So, Elon, you famously have a pile of really beautiful kids, and I know you care about them a great deal, as all parents do.
17:34Elon MuskWhat would your response be if they start coming to you when they turn 18 or 22 and they say, dad, now you've landed us on Mars and there's culling for me?
17:42Elon MuskLike, I really want to go. Yeah. I think if we're talking about, say, this third or fourth set of landings on Mars, I think they'll probably be. I'd be okay with that.
17:56Elon MuskAlthough I've called them so far and none of them say they want to go, so they may change their minds, but currently they're. They're not chopping it. So let's go to Mars.
18:07Elon MuskOkay. Okay. So I think for folks who may notice, I think we originally met over Twitter and you Just safe to say. And I want to move on from Mars to.
18:20Elon MuskIt is safe to say that you might be the master of the memes. And in fact, you had a quote. Who controls the means, controls the universe. Could you just explain what you meant by that and how you.
18:36Elon MuskWell, I mean. I mean, it's a play on words from. From Dune. Who controls the spice controls the universe. And this is. There's memes. I mean, there's a little bit of truth to it in that.
18:53Elon MuskHow do you. What is it that influences the Zeitgeist? How do things become interesting to people? And a memes, like, actually kind of a complex form of communication that, like, a picture says a thousand words and maybe a meme says 10,000 words.
19:12Elon MuskYou know, it's a complex picture with a bunch of meaning in it, and it's, you know, aspirationally funny. So, you know, I don't know. I love memes, but they.
19:27Elon MuskI think they can be very insightful. And, you know, throughout history, I think the symbolism in general has powerfully affected people. So. Yeah. How did you get so good at them?
19:46Elon MuskI mean, I remember following you many years ago, going from that to your sea shanties meme, or any one of the memes. And some of it might. May not be safe for work here.
20:00Elon MuskYou know, how did you get.
20:13Elon MuskYeah, yeah, I know. Yeah.
20:18Clubhouse HostI don't know.
20:18Elon MuskI guess, probably. I mean, you know, if you go back to my early, very early tweets, technically, I was on Twitter, I think, in the very early days when they were only, like, made 10,000, less than 10,000 users.
20:36Elon MuskBut then, like, people were just, like, tweeting, like, what kind of latte they had at the University Street Starbucks. And I was like, I don't need to know this.
20:43Elon MuskSo then I deleted my Twitter account. And then a fake person who got my Twitter account had tweeted for a few years, and then my friend said, hey, you really should be on Twitter so you can speak directly to people.
20:56Elon MuskAnd that. So I was like, okay, I'll make my belief. Just regain my Twitter account. And my early tweets are pretty racy, you know, like, pretty like, you know, because I was reading this biography of Cats from the Brain, you know, so.
21:20Elon MuskIt's sort of. Yeah, things went crazy from there. I like how you say that your only tweets were racy and not right now. Some people think like, oh, he's gone crazy on Twitter.
21:35Elon MuskI'm like, no, I started crazy on Twitter.
21:41Clubhouse HostWhat could you say of new memes? Elantic. What Are the new things that you're following now with respect to memes? Our two mavens? Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna ask you what are the new memes that you're like following or creating right now?
21:58Clubhouse HostWhat are the ones that are interesting
22:00Elon Muskto you right now? I don't really follow beams.
22:05Clubhouse HostDid you just make them?
22:07Elon MuskI made some of them and then some of them were sent to me. I have some pretty kick ass beam dealers.
22:13Clubhouse HostYeah.
22:28Elon MuskWait, wait, you gotta have a good beam dealer. My friend Mike is a good bean dealer. And Claire as well, and Jake now and quite a few others actually.
22:45Elon MuskI fortunately am lucky. We're slipping to a very interesting meeting.
22:52Clubhouse HostSlightly changing subjects a bit today. You posted about neuralink and why people should be working there for folks who don't know about it. I thought it was really cool.
23:02Clubhouse HostLike, you know, just the possibility of it is really fantastic. Tell us more about it. Yeah, there are a lot of engineers listening on this, this clubhouse. What is neuralink?
23:13Clubhouse HostWhy should we care what is possible with it?
23:18Elon MuskSure. So the long term. Okay, so neuralink stems from a concern I had where I was trying to figure out, even in a benign AI scenario, how do we at least go along for the ride.
23:34Elon MuskSo I mean, if a listener following AI closely, it's obviously improving dramatically. You know, looks like GPT1 versus GPT2 versus GPT GPT3 and just how radically that's improved. And just there's like, you know, deep minds and I mean, I think they've run out of games to win at basically.
23:57Elon MuskAnd there's just. And look, I say look at Tesla. An important thing I've noticed, like Tesla actually has, I think, one of the the strongest AI teams in the world, but it's AI team focused on real world usability.
24:10Elon MuskSo just really solving vision perception and control with AI. But even in a benign scenario for AI where let's say like the AI is like just really wants to be super nice to us and make us happy, how do we stay relevant and have meaning and at least go along for the ride, that's in the good scenario.
24:34Elon MuskAnd then in terms of avoiding the bad scenario, to the degree we can couple collective human will to the outcome of artificial intelligence and what's developed in that way, I think that will probably be a better scenario than if we're unable to effectively couple collective human will to that outcome.
24:52Elon MuskSo the final. This is getting kind of esoteric, but we love when we love it. Keep going. Okay, so people are already a cyborg in that you already Have a tertiary digital layer.
25:11Elon MuskYou've got your sort of limbic system, which is your primitive drives and desires and responses. And then you've got your cortex, which is like long term planning and thinking.
25:23Elon MuskThose are two biological layers. And then there's a tertiary layer, a third layer, which is digital. And you already have that in the form of your phones and computers and all your applications.
25:35Elon MuskYou're far more powerful than a human would be without those cognitive enhancements. But the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer is very slow. And in fact, with the advent of phones, it got even slower.
25:51Elon MuskSo if you're, if you're thumbing like you just say, what's the bit rate of a thumb of a pair of thumbs on a phone? It's very low. I mean, let's be super generous and say it's 100 bits per second.
26:04Elon MuskWell, computers can communicate at trillions of bits per second. So it's, you know, at a certain point the computer gets smart enough. It's like the computer's just like trying to talk to a tree.
26:15Elon MuskYou know, trees do sort of talk, but they're torque so slow that you really notice. So we need to improve the bandwidth. And with a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude.
26:43Elon MuskProbably at least 1,000 or maybe 10,000 or more. And we could also spend a lot more time thinking about interesting things as opposed to taking complex thought structures, compressing them down into words, which is, which also gain a very low bit rate, and then having someone else receive those words, decompress them, and then, and then send words back at you.
27:10Elon MuskSo a huge amount of our brain power is spent in compression decompression, and we could be instead spending it on deeper contents. And so if you had a neural link, if Google had a neural link, you could do conceptual telepathy where you have a complex series of concepts and you just transfer them directly uncompressed to the other person.
27:34Elon MuskThis would massively improve the quality of communication and the speed of it. So, and there are other sort of pretty wild things that can be done. Like you could probably save state in the brain.
27:47Elon MuskAnd so if you were to die, your state could be returned in the form of another human body or a robot body. I mean, this is getting like really, you know, we're satisfied stuff here.
28:08Elon MuskAnd I think you could decide you want to be a robot or a person or whatever, and you wouldn't be exactly the same. So there'd be a little less than Transfer.
28:17Elon MuskBut you can also say it's also ugly too that when you wake up in the morning, you're not exactly the same as yesterday or the U of a month ago is not the same as the U of today.
28:28Elon MuskA bunch of brain cells have died and memories, some memories have faded, some have strengthened their new memories. So anyway, the point is like you wouldn't be there could be something analogous to a video game, like a saved game situation where you are able to resume upload your last state.
28:46Elon MuskYeah, Kind of like ultra carbon, maybe lose a few memories, but mostly be here. So now that's the long term stuff. In the short term, for neural link, the idea would really just be to address brain injuries or spinal injuries and you know, make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has with a chip, with an implanted chip.
29:16Elon MuskAnd so the first thing that we're going after is a wireless implanted chip that would enable someone who's a quadriplegic or cardiplogic or tetraplegic to control a computer or mouse or their phone or really any device just used just by thinking.
29:36Elon MuskAnd this obviously would be massive enabler, you know, make life way easier for them. There have been sort of primitive versions of this device, one done with like grid wires sticking out of your head, but it doesn't work all the time and you can't take it home with you.
29:50Elon MuskSo just having basically in simplistic terms, I'd say it's sort of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go to your brain. A Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.
30:00Elon MuskSo if somebody who's listening is good at designing like Fitbits, Apple watches, phones, computers of various kinds, then actually they would be a great fit for your link. So yeah, we're, I mean we'll probably be releasing some new videos showing progress maybe in a month or so.
30:27Elon MuskAnd because we've already done like a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull and the tiny wires who can play video games using his mind.
30:45Elon MuskSo it looks like an unhappy vanity and you can't even see where the neural implant was put in except he's got like a slight like dog mohawk.
30:58Elon MuskYeah, he's not uncomfortable and he doesn't look weird. So we're. Oh, and when the USDA came through and inspected our facilities, our monkey facilities, she said it was like the nicest monkey facilities she's ever seen in her entire career.
31:20Elon MuskJust FYI, we went the extra mile for the monkeys as long as you didn't make them play cyberpunk. That would be it. That would be a hard term for my view.
31:36Elon MuskYou know, one of the things we're trying to figure out is like, can we have the monkeys play mind pong with each other? Yeah, that would be super pretty cool.
31:45Clubhouse HostYeah. I have to say the pick demo was really fantastic. That was really cool.
31:51Elon MuskThanks. Yeah. Well, it's great to hear like making good progress and like I said, but I wanted to like, the early applications will really just be for people who've had a serious brain injury where it's like the value of the implant just would be enormous because obviously the early implants will come with some non collateral risk.
32:17Elon MuskAnd so it's going to be like, okay, does the good far outweigh the bad? And then that would be a candidate for some of the initial surgeries with full disclosure of like, these are risks and everything.
32:27Elon MuskAnd one of the things we're really paying close attention to is the ability to remove the implant. So it's like, it's not like if somebody doesn't want it or it's not working, we can take it out and then we can reimplant another one.
32:40Elon MuskSo we've tested implantation removal and reimplantations and it works great.
32:52Elon MuskYeah. So switching topics. So. So, Elon, I mentioned kids earlier. As it turns out, I have a very bright and inquisitive 5 year old who is crawling all over everything and trying to figure everything out and learning as much as he can as fast as he can.
33:07Elon MuskLike what? You know, with everything that we know now and kind of all the modern tools we have, like, what's the best way to think about educating a five year old in today's world?
33:17Elon MuskSorry, the best way to. Yeah. Educate a 5 year old and then think about kind of your vitrification over the course of the next, you know, five or 10 years.
33:26Elon MuskLike, what kind of program ideally should you think it should be? On.
33:38Elon MuskMy observations, my kids were mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit and then, you know, and they're, I guess, classmates and I guess there are lessons as well. But judging by the amount of time they spent online, it seems like most of their education is actually coming from online.
33:59Elon MuskI think generally with education you want to make it as interesting and exciting as possible. What are some of the. If you feel like, what are all things like say a good video game does to keep someone engaged and interested?
34:19Elon MuskIf kids can be super engaged video games like this, we're in education as well. One of the things that's I think very fundamental is to Explain the why of things.
34:30Elon MuskSo we're teaching you this, but we're going to explain why we're teaching you this and why it is relevant. I mean, we were evolved to forget things that are irrelevant or have low relevance probability.
34:44Elon MuskThat makes sense. Like otherwise we remember all sorts of nonsense things that weren't very important to our future. So unless relevance is established clearly, then people will have a hard time remember remembering it by its nature because it appears to be irrelevant.
35:02Elon MuskIt might be relevant, but if the lie explains them, they won't know. And then you want to have some sort of engaged. If you're trying to say problem solving, some sort of engaging narrative for color problem solving.
35:14Elon MuskLike, it's like, it's far better to say orientation how an engine works by taking apart an engine and then putting it back together. And then let's find out what tools are needed for in order to take this engine apart.
35:30Elon MuskPut it back together. Like, okay, we need screwdrivers, wrenches and allen keys, and we need a winch and a bunch of other things. And then you understand the relevance and it's much more interesting problem.
35:44Elon MuskThis is much better than having, say, a course on wrenches or a course on screwdrivers. You just like start with a problem and say, what tools I need to solve this problem.
35:54Elon MuskThat establishes relevance and gives a compelling arrow to spread. It seems like you could kind of, if you had sort of elaborate enough projects, you know, you could roll a huge number of topics into ultimately kind of combine into a single project with, you know, some really actually, you know, interesting formula.
36:11Elon MuskBut you know, like, you know, for example, you know, building up, you know, literally building a vehicle or something like that. Yeah, exactly. The business. You just have a narrative thread.
36:23Elon MuskWhy is law established that. And this is story to it. And, and then, and then, and you say like, well, you know, you can't, you can't turn that bolt without the wrench.
36:34Elon MuskAnd then like, let's, let's see, how can we make this engine better? What do we need to do? Okay, well, let's calculate if it's a gasoline engine, you know, what's the.
36:42Elon MuskHow do you get to a higher RPM or a, you know, better compression ratio? You know, I'm using like outdated analogy engines, but you said for an electric motor, what steps would you take to get higher torque and pull higher power out of this electric motor?
37:06Elon MuskAnd then you can explain, it's obvious why things like Maxwell's equations become necessary in that situation. Yeah, yeah. You not believe the number of parents and people of Kids who have asked us about tonight.
37:27Elon MuskAnd I think that two questions are connected. One is, you know, how do kids. If you're having children, you want teacher to become a polymath like you have become.
37:35Elon MuskWhat advice do you have for parents? And the next one is, here you are with, you know, so many companies in your field, I can't even list them off the top of my head.
37:43Elon MuskWhy doesn't the world have. And this. It doesn't mean to sound, you know, psychopathic, but why does the world have more Elon Musk? Well, I don't know. I might be getting too much better here.
37:57Elon MuskSo I mean, for me, these things, things that don't have been because I felt a struggle. So it's not like nobody's pushing me to do it, but they're just like a felt stroke toss through them.
38:15Elon MuskI mean, I wouldn't say you. There are pretty long sections in my life that have been very painful and difficult. And I'm not sure I would. I'm not sure people would want to do that.
38:26Elon MuskYou know, there's a. Yeah. If somebody wants to be me or do things I've done, they should. I. I would say most probably you're mistaken. You do not want to do that.
38:46Elon MuskYou'd have to have some kind of like rape demon in your skull that you just got to get it done. There's no. It's like when people ask me, like, what encouraging words do you have for entrepreneurs who want to do a startup?
39:01Elon MuskIn My response is, if you need encouraging words, don't do a startup.
39:11Elon MuskDoing a startup is like eating glasses, staring into campus for a long time. Yep. Okay, we're going to switch. I think for everyone in the audience who just caught up and you managed to start just a quick reset recap.
39:30Elon MuskThis is the one only Elon Musk for his first time on Clubhouse. And there's a field that we do every single day. I know a lot of you are trying to get in the room.
39:38Elon MuskThere are a bunch of overflow rooms. See if we can get in there. But we just having an amazing conversation. Elon, Elon, again, this is something you joked about, but I'm kind of curious to get your maybe serious answer to this, which is all things cryptocurrency and bitcoin.
39:53Elon MuskYou famously just changed your Twitter bio to just the bitcoin logo and the word bitcoin this week. What do you think of cryptocurrency? What do you think of bitcoin?
40:01Elon MuskWhat do you think of other to get your take on The Atlantic. Well, yeah, I gotta watch what I say here because some of these things can really move the market.
40:17Elon MuskSo first of all, I should say, like many friends of mine have get involved in bitcoin for a long time. Like when it first just popped, you know, popped out there, you know, I fear my bully.
40:36Elon MuskHe actually had bitcoin cake, a cake that was like, had a bitcoin symbol on it. And he fed me a slice of bitcoin cake in 2013. So, I mean, clearly I should have at least buying boards of bitcoins eight years ago.
40:52Elon MuskLike, what, what more do people need to do? You know? Like, Jesus, who am I being late to the party? So I was a little slow on the uptake there.
41:01Elon MuskMy apologies. But I, I, and I think about it for a bit, but I, I do at this point think bitcoin is a good thing.
41:10Clubhouse HostAnd
41:13Elon Muskso I am a supporter of bitcoin. Like I said, I'm late to the party, but I'm a supporter of bitcoin and I think bitcoin is really on the verge of getting broad acceptance by sort of conventional finance people.
41:37Elon MuskI don't have a strong fear on cryptocurrencies. I mean, I think jokes about dogecoin, but they are really just meant to be jokes. Dogecoin was made as a, as a, made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, obviously.
41:56Elon MuskBut fate loves irony and often that's where my stuff, the most ironic outcome is most likely. Or I like to say the most entertaining outcome is often most likely.
42:12Elon MuskAnd arguably the most entertaining outcome, the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.
42:25Elon MuskOh my God, Elon, when you tweeted me this afternoon, I would say my tweet replies have been overwhelmed by probably a billion different cryptocurrency coins. And by the way, you might remember the infamous time when your replies were filled with cryptocurrency bots on Twitter.
42:41Elon MuskOh my God. It was insane.
42:48Elon MuskHow Elon and I actually wanted meeting because that was a very painful, painful time. Okay. Yeah. In fact. And then I made a joke about bitcoin and my account got locked.
43:04Elon MuskI had to actually try and send in some folks that block. Okay, so I want to bring us back to one of your companies. We actually have a Tesla Model S sitting outside our house right now.
43:24Elon MuskIt carries us and our two year old baby around and we love it. Would you just get your take on, you know, where you see, you know, you just have a reference of the model s coming out and saw the review for it where you just see, you know, the future for Tesla and especially when it comes to all things battery technology and self driving, those two types of a lot of people are very interested in.
43:47Elon MuskOkay, so we're asking about the future of batteries and self driving. Where do you see Tesla over the next few years?
44:00Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean I think that, I mean the goal with Tesla is to and has been from the beginning is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. So in order to do that we've got to make a lot of cars, we've got to make them increasingly affordable.
44:18Elon MuskAnd our rough target is we want to be able to potentially make 20 billion cars a year. The reason for that is there's 2 billion active cost trucks on the road and figure you're not really moving the needle unless you're changing 1% of the existing fleet.
44:36Elon MuskAnd so that's roughly how we came up with 20 million cars and trucks per year. That's very important to accelerate the evidence of sustainable energy. And then of course stage burning battery packs and solar which makes a lot of progress in that front.
44:57Elon MuskSo yeah, we're going to try to grow car production as fast as possible and the primary limiting factor there is battery cell production. So we're getting as much as possible from suppliers and then but even that is not enough.
45:15Elon MuskSo we are actually going to be building battery cells ourselves. But important to emphasize that to our suppliers. We are great, we've got great suppliers that we're not trying to put them out of business.
45:30Elon MuskWe want them to increase their rate as well. So Panasonic algae and Catl and then to increase the accelerate stable energy push further, we're making our own cells and pretty excited about that.
45:50Elon MuskAnd then anyway, so I think you expect possibly acceleration of compounding annual growth. Well, at least aspirationally that's our goal. And then combine that with autonomy and it's very powerful story because once you have autonomy of self driving cars, you massively increase the utility of any given car.
46:18Elon MuskA typical car has driven about 12 miles, sorry, 12 hours a week. You think like maybe depending on the situation you're where you look maybe an hour and a half a day or something like that or in LA it might be two hours a day.
46:33Elon MuskSo roughly 12 hours a week and there's 168 hours in a week. And so most likely cars that are autonomous could make you a third of the hours in the week or something like that.
46:49Elon MuskSo maybe they do. I don't understand 60 hours a week of usage instead of 12. So you've got basically a 5x increase in asset utilization there and far less need for parking lots, parking garages and that kind of thing.
47:05Elon MuskSo and this in itself is good for the environment because you need fewer cars to get the same thing done. And we would need fewer parking garages and places just to keep cars when they're not in use because they're being used a lot more so but the net of like having a lot of cars, times automation or time self driving I think is at the heart of why a lot of investors think Tesla is worth what it is.
47:37Elon MuskThey're giving us a lot of credit for future execution. But I think the trend is there, it's quite positive. And I'd like to once again say if anyone is interested in practical AI, that where the robbery hits the road, please.
47:51Elon MuskTesla's Autopilot AI team. I think who might appreciate that that Tesla has some of the most advanced AI in the world, both on the software side and on the hardware side.
48:02Elon MuskAnd on the hardware side we've obviously got our inference computer which I think is still the best inference computer out there, even though it's been going for a couple years.
48:15Elon MuskAnd then we're building Dojo, which is will be the most powerful training computer because it's going to process vast amounts of video training data and bringing the day of self driving sooner is translates directly to life saved and injuries avoided.
48:37Elon MuskAbout a million people die every year in car accidents and about 10 million per year have serious injuries. So that's the sooner the better. And a lot of lives will be saved in lives.
48:49Elon MuskIt feels lives made better. On self driving you made headlines I think a while back when you basically, to put it mildly, criticized LIDAR as a key technology for self driving.
49:03Elon MuskCould you talk more about that and why you're not such a huge fan of LiDAR? Yeah, I mean sometimes I'm just talking smack, you know,
49:19Elon MuskIt's tiny new.
49:26Elon MuskSo yeah, so first of all I'm not like farming like a flat or on all things because you know for SpaceX Dragon and DarkSmith space station we actually developed and built our own lidar for docking with space station.
49:49Elon MuskSo obviously if I hated lidar we would not have done that. And this is well before this is like 10 years ago we started doing that. So I look like I don't have some sort of weird like you know.
50:06Elon MuskHowever, for the, for driving on real world roads you have to solve vision. You have to solve vision of basically understanding objects with passive optical photons and then making sense of those objects.
50:30Elon MuskSo like vision perception, what are those objects mean, what are they going to do to do what is the likely path of travel and then control. And so and all of that really is AI.
50:45Elon MuskThe way we're doing it is by running a bunch of neural nets in our head. So we got to run a bunch of neural nets to do the same thing in the car.
50:52Elon MuskAnd the point in which you solve passive optical. And this is better passive optical than human has because you've got eight cameras through which point directly forward, two that are diagonally forward and two that are diagonally rear and one rear.
51:03Elon MuskSo the way we do it right now is we have all eight cameras, cameras synchronized. So you've got eight frames collected simultaneously and we're moving towards and have in fact mostly moved towards video training.
51:20Elon MuskSo you've got eight surround cameras. It's like kind of a surreal thing to see because people look, you know, really people have two eyes, but kind of like really more like one eye because the two eyes kind of combine.
51:38Elon MuskBut anyway, the neural net is basically it needs to move to full video training, video inference, surround video trains around video inference and then avoid superhuman. No question about it, because people don't have eyes at the back of their head.
51:55Elon MuskLike they can't. You basically have effectively human all intensive purposes has. It's like having one camera on a slow gimbal and that is often distracted and maybe sort of drunk or change the radio or they fall asleep or you know, there's all sorts of things that go wrong.
52:17Elon MuskThere's no question that you can be superhuman with just cameras. And I think if one is going to go with sort of active photon generation, I would raise something in the occlusion penetrating wavelengths, you know, something like radar, you know, sort of roughly 4 millimeter radar or something like that.
52:37Elon MuskWould be better if you could really delve into the arena of active photon generation. Wow. Okay, that's amazing again. Also, I love DP Garden. That was super, super fun.
52:51Elon MuskAll right, I'm going to switch topic just a bit. I would say it seems to say a lot of people are very interested in how you work and you all, for example, discover yourself as an engineer.
53:02Elon MuskSo walk us through. It's Monday morning, you wake up. What is the day a typical work day in the life of Elon look like? I guess I'll wake up and see if there are any emergencies on text or email.
53:20Elon MuskAnd often there are.
53:27Elon MuskI mean a ton of what I deal with is not actually fun or interesting. It's like chores. So I've tried really hard not to do my chores, but then if I don't do my chores, things go to hell.
53:39Elon MuskSo. Oh man, you have to do your chores.
53:44Clubhouse HostSo, you know, I believe that Elon Musk basically has the same schedule as the rest of us. You know, we all. And you do too. And it's kind of.
53:56Clubhouse HostThere's something just really relieving just hearing you say that.
54:02Elon MuskYeah, I mean that's pretty much how it goes these days. I do enjoy the in person meetings more than email. In fact, I haven't. I think I'm getting like a slight like negative like Olympic reaction to email.
54:20Elon MuskTexts are way better to deal with. And then in person meetings are much better. Even zoom meetings or whatever, they're still better than email. Anything better than email. So anyway, I'll have a bunch of meetings.
54:38Elon MuskI'll write email or write texts. Especially if it's like an email to a group, like saying, hey, we need to, I think we need to change direction, do the polling things and let me know if you think otherwise.
54:51Elon MuskOtherwise we've got to do these things and get our act together in this area or that area. And then, yeah, a bunch of meetings. Most of my meetings are engineering and design, but of course you have to deal with finance and, you know, sales and other things and different things that are necessary for a company to function.
55:14Elon MuskAnd then there's quite a lot of context switching. And so he sent me the meme of like bear is not the mind killer. Context switching is the mind killer, which I totally agree with.
55:29Elon MuskContext switching is a real bear. So just basically try to do less context switching. So base focus on one thing four and then another thing for another hour. It's really hard to context switch between SpaceX and Tesla and all the things that are going on in SpaceX and Tesla and then Neuralink, boring company, which was fortunately pretty low bandwidth load.
55:56Elon MuskThey don't take a high level CPU load because they're smaller and there's personal stuff and of course memes, you know,
56:10Elon MuskWhere's my meme by now you're calling up your meme dealer for your hit of memes. I love it. Exactly. Earlier last year I talked to Mark about how he spent his time and Mark talked about, you know, you know, when he was younger, used to have large blocks of open time on his calendar.
56:30Elon MuskAnd I think a lot of, you know, well known founders have large blocks of open time of integral time. So you are engaged because you have multiple companies you're running, you're also much more engineer than traditional CEOs.
56:41Elon MuskWhat does your calendar look like? Are you allocated 30 minutes back to back? You have open space. How do you handle it? I do not have a lot of open space.
56:51Elon MuskIt's generally back to back meetings and it's insane. I mean my days were like insane. Torrance torrents, information. I mean sometimes people, if you want to like audience what I do for a day, it's insane.
57:11Elon MuskI don't recommend it.
57:17Elon MuskI was thinking like, man, how long can I keep this up? I don't know what my brain takes. Word. It's like the meetings that are scheduled are not like nice to have meetings.
57:27Elon MuskThey're like, this meeting is essential. Like, okay, it's. It's pretty intense. I was thinking like, maybe I should like at some point, like take a week off or something, you know, clear my mind.
57:44Elon MuskLike, I know like a bunch of people like writing books on Tesla and SpaceX for example. Like it's pretty, pretty hard for them to get it right because the.
57:54Elon MuskYeah, they just weren't there. And maybe I should like write some like book of my experiences that has like, you know, all the foolish things I've done and like, you know, some advice for others that might be helpful.
58:11Elon MuskI think so. A book, a documentary, I think. You know, I mean, I remember once hearing about how you still sleep on the floor of your factory. I really used to, at one point in time I did.
58:25Elon MuskI only if there's like a crisis situation. And you know, I actually, it's like basically when the team is being asked to do. To really work super hard, I gotta be right there with them and they gotta see it.
58:42Elon MuskYou know, seeing is believing. And so a bunch of sleeping in the middle of the factory floor and you know, sort of going to sleep at 4 in the morning, like, you know, waking up like four hours later, like they literally see me, they walk past me.
58:58Elon MuskIt's not like hidden or anything. And it's like, okay, see, I was willing to take that level of pain. Then they'll do it too. I was going to say when you first said you slept in the factory, I figured, you know, there must be like an executive floor or something.
59:13Elon MuskYou must have like the couch. It must be like a nice setup. And then, you know, when I came over to see you that one time, you know, it's like you have.
59:21Elon MuskYour conference room is literally, literally in the middle of the factory and like the giant.
59:27Clubhouse HostSure.
59:28Elon MuskPardon my swearing, but I have to. The giant fucking robots are 15ft away and they're pounding metal and it's like you're splitting and your factory is like, littered or your room is like, literally right in the middle of them.
59:40Elon MuskAnd then at least I saw your sleeping bank in the conference room, so I assume that's where you're sleeping. I didn't see any of the rooms.
59:51Elon MuskMost of the time I did not sleep in the conference room because people could not see me in the conference room. So I slept on the floor outside the conference room.
1:00:02Elon MuskHow do people know? You know, I don't know things believing. So mostly they just sleep on the floor outside the country room so they can see that I was there.
1:00:14Elon MuskEven more advanced level. Yeah, that's wild at heart. And I always wake up and smell like oil and iron filings.
1:00:26Elon MuskIt was rough, but I was asking people to really go all out, you know, And I can't expect them to go all out if I'm not doing the same thing.
1:00:38Elon MuskThat's super interesting, because when people think, you know, again, I'm not saying this about the. When people think, how does it richest person in the world live? They don't think uncomfortably sleeping outside a conference room with, like, a lot of loud banging going on right next door.
1:00:53Elon MuskThey probably don't. But people. The people at the back, we do. They saw it themselves. I love it. And that's what's important. Yeah, okay. I love it. Okay, switching topic just a little bit.
1:01:07Elon MuskI think a lot of people, you know, okay, you have your hands full. It's basically Tesla, you know, and the boring company. And neuralink. If you had to start, if you somehow magically found an extra five hours in a day and you had to start another company or another network, what would you start?
1:01:25Elon MuskWell, I'm definitely. I'm too planning to start yet another thing. You got the same time. Yeah, Brian will definitely do it.
1:01:36Clubhouse HostIt's like the gladiator meme. Are you not entertained enough? Have you not created enough company? Indeed.
1:01:46Elon MuskI think there are still tremendous opportunities in tunneling. For five years, people ask me, what do I see opportunities? And I would say tunneling. And then nobody did anything.
1:01:56Elon MuskSo then actually, initially, as a joke, created the boring company and we did like a test tunnel in la. And then still people don't believe us. And then so we just did our first operational tunnel in Vegas.
1:02:11Elon MuskBut the world really needs tunnels because all major cities have traffic. And tunnels can massively improve people's quality of life by making it easier to travel from one place to another in a city.
1:02:23Elon MuskAnd then that can be further expanded to long distance travel where if you just draw a vacuum on the tunnel then you can go extremely fast. Faster than a plane and faster than a plane or a high speed rail.
1:02:35Elon MuskSo I'd really still recommend. Can someone else say please start a tunneling company? That would be great. Then there's RNA or mRNA basically synthetic viruses which is. We're seeing pretty good effect with Biontech and Moderna but I think people don't quite appreciate that what's actually going on is the digitization of medicine.
1:03:00Elon MuskSo it's where you can just literally create an art DNA sequence like a computer program and then encapsulate that in a multiplied many many billions of times billions of times and encapsulate that in a lipid shell so it looks like a tasty treat for your cells and you can literally do anything.
1:03:26Elon MuskThis is absolutely the future of medicine. I mean you could. You probably figured out how to turn someone into a literal butterfly. Okay, that's, it's, it's. Your cells are biological computers.
1:03:41Elon MuskThey execute just like like sort of a old school computer where you feed it like a. You know, you feed a tape, you know or a punch card. That's, that's usually the cells which are tiny, tiny biological computers punch card and they will do whatever they that much consistent.
1:04:01Elon MuskSo that was probably a big eye opener last for 2020 of like just the understanding the potential of RNA and just super randomly Tesla actually is making affiliate best RNA sort of microfab or something where currently for CureBac to grow to make it for other companies as well.
1:04:28Elon MuskI'm not sure I understand this. Why is Tesla making R and a fab? It's super random. So a little over four years ago we were hired a company in Germany primarily for they're very good at automation.
1:04:45Elon MuskThey were called Groman and they're in southern Germany near basically study and at the time the acquisition they said like look, we're willing to be acquired but there's like just a couple of projects that we think even though they're not related to automotive we really like to continue if you don't mind.
1:05:06Elon MuskAnd the two projects were. One is this like tiny chip analyzer I think with tiny wires for analyzing chips that intel needs from hcpus. And then another one was this Biontech thing for.
1:05:26Elon MuskIt's basically a. There's three parts to it. There's a DNA multiplier, an RNA multiplier and something which puts them the clipping shell on the RNA sequence. We're on like version three of it.
1:05:42Elon MuskAnd this makes sense. Keep going. So if you keep it under 10% of resources, no problem, we can keep going and then I don't know if it turns out may actually be useful.
1:05:53Elon MuskI just love that you accidentally found yourself with an RNA Fab. You've been talking a lot about how MRNA obviously has been key to the Moderna vaccines and all the COVID 19 vaccines.
1:06:03Elon MuskWhich brings me to Covid. Let it take somehow magically tomorrow you've been running the vaccine effort, the distribution effort right now. What would you do to get the vaccines out?
1:06:15Clubhouse HostSpecifically around the development of the logistics side which we just don't seem to be doing a really good job across the world. So what would you do differently there?
1:06:27Elon MuskWell, I don't have good insight into the situation as Dan's but I think relaxing the requirements on there's some sweet. There are too many requirements of who can get the vaccine.
1:06:40Elon MuskThe vaccine really is important for anyone with that is elderly or has a compromised immune system or is otherwise risk for the virus. And I think really just saying like you know, first come first, don't show up, show up here like use CVS and Walgreens which give out the flu vaccine every year.
1:07:05Elon MuskOkay, Just show up here. And especially for the Moderna and Biontech vaccines which are quite temperature sensitive, they can only be sort of defrosted from the deep, deep freeze briefly and then they must be used or they lose their effectiveness.
1:07:24Elon MuskThis is because the my understanding is the rna because the, the RNA sequences they use are not stable, those sequences want to revert to something else because they're not stable.
1:07:39Elon MuskIt must be frozen at a very low temperature or they will simply want you to remote to a lower energy state RNA sequence. That's my understanding. So just like instead of worrying about like is the exact right person going to get the vaccine, like just accept that maybe some people shouldn't get the vaccine.
1:08:00Elon MuskWe'll get it, but we'll still get a hell of a lot more vaccines out there. And let's not worry about the details here. Let's just get into as many people as possible as quickly as possible and for sure we should not worry about the second dose quite yet.
1:08:13Elon MuskJust give everyone the first dose. I suspect that the immunity granted by the first dose is very significant and that third dose is coming three or four weeks later.
1:08:24Elon MuskSo we've got plenty of time to think about the second dose. Just worry about the first dose and first come first serve and don't worry about like accidentally give them doing the damn thing to Someone who maybe didn't serve it.
1:08:36Elon MuskThat will happen a little bit. So that's my recommendation on that front. We are going to be, there is going to be an avalanche of vaccine coming. I think the US may have ordered, on the order of Lipton, they may have ordered something like that.
1:08:52Elon Musk900 million doses. It's been blinding. And the combination of this can be we're going to have so many, so much COVID vaccine. I guarantee you it will be thrown away later this year more than we could possibly ever need or want.
1:09:12Elon MuskAnd the vaccine just got approved, which is, that's good. It's more conventional vaccine but it's single shot room temperature. And then there are more and more vaccines that are going to get approved.
1:09:25Elon MuskHopefully the CureVac won't be approved soon. And I know because I know the Tesla machine, it can make a bazillion doses super fast. So you know, I think there's definitely, for those who are concerned about vaccine, you should expect an exponential increase in vaccine availability.
1:09:47Elon MuskAnd then combined with that we are I think starting to approach some degree of herd immunity with people who contract the virus and recover, which is actually better than getting vaccine.
1:10:01Elon MuskThe antibody reaction is better than if you got the vaccine. So yeah, could go on and on about it. But I think, you know, optimistic message that there will be less vaccines and I really encourage people to take the vaccine.
1:10:19Elon MuskI am not an anti vaxxer to be clear. I'm a pro vaxer. So you know, speaking of vaccine, you know, California has, you know, it's been sort of bouncing between kind of 40th, 45th and 50th country, you know, by states in terms of the speed of the rollout.
1:10:36Elon MuskAnd for me it can sort of, you know, be re racing those questions by coming up more and more, which is you and I and a lot of people here listening have like Bill's companies primarily in California up until now.
1:10:49Elon MuskWhat's your view on the future of California from here? Well, first of all, I should say I love California and I've been, I've lived half my life, more than half my life in California.
1:11:00Elon MuskJust like I am Californian, you know, like so much of my, I mean I built my companies here, you know, came here as a, as a summer, came to Silicon Valley as a summer intern to work on energy storage technology for electric vehicles.
1:11:21Elon MuskWay back in like 92, I think it was 92 or 93, this little company called Pinnacle Research and I got slipped out as soon as I could and then Sam, for us we're Working on sort of advanced capacitors like vehicles, address studies, and end up putting that on a hold for the Internet.
1:11:44Elon MuskAnd, yeah,
1:11:51Elon MuskTrying to get a job at Netscape. By the way, I have heard that story indirectly. I would actually like for you to tell us so that I can learn what was pickup.
1:12:03Elon MuskOkay, well, first of all, I wouldn't say I did a very good job of trying to get job misky, but I was like, I was convinced that the Internet would be the future.
1:12:10Elon MuskEssentially the humanity communicated by osmosis until then. But with the Internet, it would be like humanity acquiring a nervous system had become much more of a superorganism. And so I was like, okay, what do PhDs effort on sort of advanced capacitors for use in electric vehicles, which may or may not be successful.
1:12:31Elon MuskLike, I could get the PhD, but would it be useful or not? Uncertain. Or I could be part of building the Internet, which is, I suppose, like, do PhD and watch the Internet get bulls right in front of me or study grant studies on hold and try to help pull the Internet in some way.
1:12:49Elon MuskAnd, like, you know, I mean, you're basically the only Internet company. I sent my resume and I was like, thinking back and then. And then I tried hanging out in the lobby, but I was too shy to speak to anyone.
1:13:08Elon MuskAnd I was like, what if Charles? And I am sitting in this lobby?
1:13:15Elon MuskAnd then I just started writing stuff for myself because I was like, okay, well, I'll just write stuff for myself. And I actually wrote the first maps and directions on the Internet.
1:13:23Elon MuskI'm not sure how many people are aware of that, but first, maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages. I wrote it personally. It was just me and my computer.
1:13:33Elon MuskAnd when we started our first company, we only had one computer. The website only worked during the day because I was coding Ike, and the server ran during the day.
1:13:44Elon MuskThat's quite adventure, that's for sure. Yeah. So I. I just want to let you know that the next time you show up at one of my companies and hang out in the lobby for an internship, you're going to get an internship.
1:13:56Elon MuskWow. Thanks, man. Only if you get the stuff running 24 7. Like, you can't slack off at night.
1:14:07Clubhouse HostThink I'll take a control. That's not okay.
1:14:09Elon MuskYeah. We will provide you with not just one, but two computers. Okay. I want to, you know, wrap up with some light questions for you, which I think a lot of people curious in.
1:14:21Elon MuskWhat are you. What are you watching on tv? What are you reading right now? Well, I just finished watching The Last Kingdom, which I think is a great piece of mostly accurate historical drama.
1:14:38Elon MuskThere's Cobra Kai, which is if you grew up in. It's so good. It's such a sick burn, that show. My goodness. You may just like turn the knife constantly and.
1:14:55Elon MuskYeah, let's see what else Moon wants you to think. What do you think of the Expanse? Maybe I should start watching that. I think there are like some sort of like things about like having a shortage order or something.
1:15:14Elon MuskThere's something like. It didn't make any scientific sense at first. So I was like, come on, this is dumb. So then I stopped watching it. But it sounds like keep watching it.
1:15:23Elon MuskI need to keep my on the treadmill, otherwise I won't calculate with you. Yeah, I think you'll find, I mean, I think season four now. I think you'll find it's apparently, I think you'll know more than I will.
1:15:34Elon MuskBut the sort of most accurate representation of what, you know, actual space, actual like interplanetary travel would be like, you know, what's this sort of thing's routine? The way the politics would flow.
1:15:44Clubhouse HostRight.
1:15:44Elon MuskIt sort of sets up a three way battle between, you know, basically Earth and Mars and then the asteroid belt and kind of gets involved.
1:15:54Elon MuskThat would be a good outcome because it means that humanity's actually made it out there as long as they don't mally each other. Besides the experience, I mean, we recommend.
1:16:08Elon MuskOh, I just gotta bring one up. Devs spelled V E B S. If you have not seen Devs, Dev is definitely the show for you. And I will not say anymore, but you will enjoy it.
1:16:18Elon MuskAll right. Devs. Oh, yeah, and that's pretty good. Is Mythic Quest. Yes. After TV show. Yeah, it's a good one.
1:16:28Clubhouse HostDid you see the Ravens Banquet? The most recent one?
1:16:31Elon MuskYeah, it's great. Have you seen Tenet yet, the new Christopher Nolan movie? Yes, it's pretty good. Wow, okay. And did you understand Tenet? Well, I think you. I think if you think too hard about Tenet, it's not going to make maybe complete sense.
1:16:50Elon MuskBut I enjoy.
1:16:54Clubhouse HostThat's kind of what Nolan said too in one of the interviews. He said just don't like go deep into it, just enjoy it for the movie. And four hours like later I emerged from it and think I still don't like entirely get it.
1:17:05Clubhouse HostSo I should, you know, just skim through it and just watched it for the fun of it.
1:17:11Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. Elon, you know, I think you don't want to take up too much of Your time. This has been amazing. You've pretty much broken clubhouse. There are probably about like over a dozen, maybe more old plural rooms.
1:17:24Elon MuskAnd I see so many Twitter threads right now. You've been so generous for all your listeners here and on Twitter. You've been asking for people to join Neuralink. You've been asking for people to join Tesla.
1:17:34Elon MuskDo you have any final thoughts for everybody who's listening to you right now? Well, do you want to hear the real story from Vlad from Robin Hood about what happened this week with GameStop?
1:17:49Elon MuskYou go for it. Okay. You need to like, let him somehow click on a button so he can talk. All right, let me figure this out.
1:18:04Clubhouse HostWhile we figuring it out, why don't you talk to us about hit Guide to the Gamut. Since you mentioned it right at the beginning.
1:18:12Elon MuskYeah. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is in fact a book of philosophy disguised as a silly humor book. And if you read it from the standpoint of, wow, this is an interesting book of philosophy, it's quite insightful.
1:18:34Elon MuskAs much as he really goes, here's the point of the answer is easy once you probably can probably formulate the question. And yeah, I mean, I like the fact that the ship is powered by infinite improbability.
1:18:53Elon MuskIt's called the Heart of Gold. Yeah, yeah.
1:19:03Elon MuskHe makes fun of bureaucracy. In fact, Earth essentially gets destroyed by a sort of clerical error. Or.
1:19:15Elon MuskThey basically decide that they need to have an interstellar highway and the Earth's in the way. And so they pose the fact that the Earth needs to get the storage for this interstellar highway.
1:19:25Elon MuskBut of course, there's posts that are unalienable, of course, that no one Earth can access. And so then they're surprised when people on Earth were unhappy about this. Slick was posted on the board.
1:19:37Elon MuskWhat do you mean? Like what board? Some things in dive style book. Like the Babel Fish, where you put the fish in your ear, then try and put it back into translates.
1:19:47Elon MuskWe kind of have that already, so. Yeah, I mean a deeper stomach fats. Elon. Okay. Vlad, can you hear us? Vlad, the stock. And failure. Hey guys, thanks for.
1:20:03Elon MuskThanks for inviting me up. It's good to hang with all of you. All right, Vlad, what really happened? Give us the inside scoot. All right, well, I was actually hoping that you would invite me up for the Fermi paradox part because this has been a very surreal weekend and week for me.
1:20:23Elon MuskOne of the really great things is all the people coming to coming out of the woodwork to offer support for the company offer, you know, advice. So I got introduced today and actually I should say I just randomly downloaded Clubhouse a couple days ago just to see what it was all about.
1:20:42Elon MuskSo this is my first time literally using the app. But yeah, I got introduced to your friend Antonio Elan, who had some good advice for me and then introduced me to you.
1:20:56Elon MuskYou had some great advice and then I figured, you know, I heard about this Clubhouse and this has got to be part of the simulation. So I just thought, why not?
1:21:06Elon MuskSo here I am. So I'm actually an adherent to the simulation hypothesis. All right, well, spill of beans, man. What happened last week? Why do you still. Why can people buy the GameStop shares?
1:21:22Elon MuskThe people demand an answer and they want to know the details of the truth. Yep, yep. Okay, so let me, let me start by giving a little bit of background.
1:21:32Elon MuskSo I'm the chief executive of Robinhood.
1:21:39Elon MuskDon't worry, this is important. It's actually a couple of companies. So there's an introducing broker dealer called Robinhood Financial and that basically is the app that you know and love.
1:21:55Elon MuskIt processes trades. You're a customer of Robinhood Financial. Then there's a clearing broker dealer, Robinhood securities, that clears and settles the trades. And then we have Robinhood Crypto, which is our crypto business.
1:22:11Elon MuskAll of which, all of these are different entities that are differently operated. So basically Wednesday of last week we just had, you know, unprecedented volume, unprecedented load on the system.
1:22:27Elon MuskA lot of these, you know, so called meme stocks were, you know, going viral on social media and people were, people were joining Robinhood and there was a lot of net buy activity on them, as you guys all know.
1:22:44Elon MuskAnd Robinhood at this time I think was number one on the iOS app store and pretty close, if not number one on Google Play as well. So just unprecedented activity.
1:22:58Elon MuskAnd so Thursday morning, right, so I'm sweet. But at 3:30am Pacific, our operations team receives a file from the NSCC, which is the National Securities Clearing Corporation. So basically as a broker, as a clearing broker, and this is where Robinhood securities comes in.
1:23:24Elon MuskWe have to put up money to the NSCC based on some factors including things like the volatility of the, of the trading activity, concentration into certain securities. And this is, this is the equities business.
1:23:44Elon MuskSo it's based on stock trading and not options trading or anything else. So they gave us a vial with a deposit and the request was around $3 billion, which is, you know, about an order of magnitude more than what it typically is.
1:24:06Clubhouse HostRight.
1:24:08Elon MuskSo why is that so high? Like this seems like it sounds like this is an unprecedented increase in demand for capital. What formula did they use to calculate that?
1:24:21Elon MuskWell, yeah, and just to give context, you know, Robin Hood up until that point has raised, you know, a little bit around $2 billion in total venture capital up until now.
1:24:33Elon MuskSo it's a big number. Like $3 billion is, is a large number. Right. So basically the, you know, the details are. We don't have the full details. It's a little bit of an opaque form formula, but there's a component called the VAR of it which is value at risk.
1:24:56Elon MuskAnd that's based on kind of some fairly quantitative things, although it's not fully transparent. So there are ways to reverse engineer it, but it's not kind of publicly shared.
1:25:11Elon MuskAnd then there's a special component which is discretionary. So that's, that kind of acts as a multiplier and basically Discretionary meaning like it's just their opinion? Yeah, it's a little bit, I mean I'm sure there's, there's definitely more, more than just their opinion, but basically, I mean, I guess everyone wants to know, everyone wants to know is like did something maybe shady go down here?
1:25:39Elon MuskLike, like seems weird that you'd get a sudden ten billion dollar demand, you know. Sorry, how much? Yeah, it was three billion US dollars. Okay. It was three billion around, you know, just suddenly out of nowhere and what does it.
1:25:59Elon MuskI wouldn't impute, I wouldn't impute chaining as to it or anything like that. And actually you know, the NSCC was reasonable subsequent to this and you know, they've been, they've been, they worked with us to, so it was unprecedented activity.
1:26:17Elon MuskYou know, we don't, I don't have the full context about you know, what was, what was going on in, what's going on in the, in the NSCC to make these calculations.
1:26:29Elon MuskBut yeah, essentially holding you hostage right now. No, no, I'm okay. Yeah, thanks for asking. But anyway, so this was, this was obviously nerve wracking and I actually was asleep at this point.
1:26:49Elon MuskYou know, the operations team was, was fielding this at 3:00. And then you know, we got back, we put our heads together, you know, our chief operating officer basically said look, let's call up the higher ups at the NSCC and kind of figure out what's going on.
1:27:09Elon MuskMaybe there's some way we can work with them. And basically there was another call and they lowered it to something like $1.4 billion from 3. So we're making Some progress, right, and then, but still a high number.
1:27:28Elon MuskAnd then we basically proposed. Well, let's, let's explain how we plan to. Let's explain how, you know, we'll manage risk in these symbols throughout the day. We propose marking these volatile stocks that were kind of driving, driving the activity.
1:27:49Elon MuskPosition closing only. And then at about an hour before market close, market open. So 5:30 or 5 in the morning, they came back and they said, okay, the charges or the deposit, 700 million, which we then deposited and paid promptly and then everything was fine.
1:28:12Elon MuskSo that, that essentially explains why we had to, we had to mark these symbols, position closing only. And also why, you know, we didn't want to. We knew this was a bad outcome for customers.
1:28:26Elon MuskYou know, part of what's been really difficult is Rodimus stands for, you know, democratizing access to stocks. And we want, we want to give people the access. So that's been very, very challenging.
1:28:40Elon MuskBut we had no choice in this case. We had to conform to our regulatory capital requirements. And so the team did what they could to make sure we were available for customers.
1:28:54Elon MuskWho controls this organization? This fairy has, you know, it's a, it's a consortium. It's not, it's not quite a government agency. You know, I, I don't really know the details of all that.
1:29:13Elon MuskOkay. You know, and to be fair, like, we were, we were, I think there was legitimate sort of turmoil in the markets. Like these are unprecedented events with these meme stocks.
1:29:28Elon MuskAnd, you know, there was a lot of activity. So there probably is some amount of extra risk in the system that warrants higher, higher requirements. So it's not entirely unreasonable.
1:29:42Elon MuskBut we did operational processes to make sure that customers that had positions could sell their open positions. Because obviously restricting someone. We got a lot of questions about, okay, you had to restrict buying.
1:29:56Elon MuskWhy didn't you also restrict selling? And the fact of the matter is people get really pissed off if they're holding stock and they want to sell it and they can't.
1:30:04Elon MuskRight. So I think that's categorically worse. So. And lots of other brokers, I think were in the same situation. Robinhood was in the news, but you sort of heard this industry wide.
1:30:18Elon MuskRight. Other brokers basically restricted the same exact activity. All right, so it sounds like this organization calls you up and they basically have a gun to your head, either handed over this money or else.
1:30:35Elon MuskAnd so, because, I mean, basically what people are wondering is like, did you sell your plans down the river or do you have no choice? If you have no choice, that's understandable.
1:30:44Elon MuskBut then, you know, we gotta find out why you have no choice. And who are these people that are saying you have no choice? Yeah, I think that's fair.
1:30:54Elon MuskYou know, we have to comply with these requirements. Financial institutions have requirements. You know, the, the formula behind these requirements. I think it would obviously be ideal if there was a little bit more transparency so we could plan better around that, you know, but to be fair, we were able to open and serve our customers and you know, 24, 24 hours later, our team raised over a billion dollars in capital.
1:31:27Elon MuskSo that when we, when we did open. Well, when we do open tomorrow morning, we'll be able to kind of relax the stringent position limits that we put on these securities on Friday.
1:31:42Elon MuskWill there be any limits? Well, I think there's always going to be some theoretical limit, like we don't have infinite capital. Right. And on Friday there were limits. So there's always, there's always going to have to be some limit.
1:31:57Elon MuskI think the question is, you know, will the limits be high enough to the point where, you know, some, it won't impact, you know, 99.9 plus percent of customers.
1:32:10Elon MuskSo, you know, someone were to deposit $100 billion and decide to trade in one stock like that, that wouldn't be possible, you know. All right,
1:32:27Elon MuskAll right. Well, I guess people really just want to know, you know, if you had no choice, then you had no choice. It's gun to head situation. And you know, then that's understandable.
1:32:40Elon MuskBut then put that gun to your head should, you know, be willing to answer the public. Yeah, listen, and you know, I know there's, there's processes. This is unprecedented times and to be fair to those guys, they've been reasonable.
1:32:56Elon MuskSo we are, I think the one thing that is maybe not clear to people is Robin is a participant in the financial system. So we have to work with all of these counterparties.
1:33:08Elon MuskSo we do get a lot of questions about, you know, why do you work with market makers when you work with clearing houses vertically integrating and getting, I mean, it's hard enough to build a.
1:33:20Elon MuskIntroducing a clearing broker dealer. Not too many people have done that. But the financial system that allows customers to trade shares is sort of a complex web of multiple parties.
1:33:35Elon MuskAnd you know, it's hard to. Everyone says it could be better, it could be improved. It's, it's just the necessity of trading equities in the US that you have to do all these things.
1:33:52Elon MuskTo what degree are you beholden to Citadel? I mean, like, basically, if Citadels are happy, then I. Well, then what happens? Yeah, so that. Yeah. So, you know, there was a rumor that Citadel or other market makers kind of pressured us into doing this, and now that's just false.
1:34:09Elon MuskRight? Market makers execute our trades. They execute trades of every broker, dealer. This was a clearinghouse. This was a clearinghouse decision, and it was just based on the capital requirements.
1:34:25Elon MuskSo from our perspective, Citadel and other market makers weren't involved in that. But wouldn't they have a strong say in who got put in charge of that organization? Since it's an industry consortium, not a government consortium or not a government agency?
1:34:47Elon MuskI don't have any reason to believe that. I think that's just like, you know, then you're getting into kind of the conspiracy theories a little bit. So I just have no.
1:34:56Elon MuskNo reason to believe that that's the case, you know? Okay.
1:35:04Elon MuskAll right. Well, I guess we'll see what happens with future actions. Hopefully that insight at least a little bit entertaining. Are you not entertaining? Yeah. Okay, well, I don't know what to say.
1:35:24Elon MuskFirst of all, Vlad, thank you so much for jumping on. I know it's pretty late, and thank you so much. You know, I deeply appreciate it, and I'm sure everyone in the audience here and watching elsewhere, so thank you so much.
1:35:39Elon MuskWe appreciate this. I'm going to wrap this up. Elon, what can I say? Thank you so much. I hope you had a fun time for your first time on Clubhouse.
1:35:51Elon MuskYes. Great. This is awesome. I didn't even access the week, so it seems cool. Awesome. So would you come back? Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, thank you so much, and also thank you, everyone, for listening.
1:36:05Elon MuskAnd I know we went way over. Elon. Elon. Every time we do this show, we try and pick a song that fits the first way. Interviewing so I'm going to play us out of the show with a song that I think you might like.
1:36:16Elon MuskGary, hit it.
1:36:24Elon MuskThere we go.
1:36:29Elon MuskThank you so much. This was a true breaking moment. Thank you, everyone.
1:36:48Elon MuskAll right, I think. I think you're done. Wow. Wow. That was insane, guys.
1:36:56Clubhouse HostWhoa.
1:36:57Elon MuskThank you.
1:36:58Clubhouse HostWe just witnessed history, guys.