Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #252
Transcript
0:00Lex FridmanThe following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his third time on this the Lex Friedman Podcast. Yeah. Make yourself comfortable. Wow. Okay.
0:11Elon MuskYou don't do the headphones thing?
0:12Lex FridmanNo.
0:13Elon MuskOkay. I mean, how close do I get me to get this thing?
0:15Lex FridmanThe closer you are, the sexier you sound.
0:17Elon MuskHey, babe. Can't get enough of the oil, baby.
0:23Lex FridmanI'm going to clip that out. Anytime somebody messages me about it, you
0:27Elon Muskwant to respond and you think I'm sexy, come right out and tell me. So.
0:37Lex FridmanGood. So good.
0:39Elon MuskOkay.
0:40Lex FridmanSerious mode, activate.
0:41Elon MuskAll right, Serious mode. Come on, you're Russian. You can be serious. Everyone's serious all the time in Russia.
0:47Lex FridmanYeah, yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there.
0:52Elon MuskYeah.
0:52Lex FridmanIt's gotten soft. Allow me to say that the SpaceX launch of human beings to orbit on May 30, 2020, was seen by many as the first step in a new era of human space exploration.
1:07Lex FridmanThese human space flight missions were a beacon of hope to me and to millions. Over the past two years, as our world has been going through one of the most difficult periods in recent human history, we saw, we see the rise of division, fear, cynicism, and the loss of common humanity right when it is needed most.
1:26Lex FridmanSo, first, Elon, let me say thank you for giving the world hope and reason to be excited about the future.
1:32Elon MuskOh, it's kind of you to say. I do want you to do that. Humanity has obviously a lot of issues and people at times do bad things. But despite all that, I love humanity and I think we should make sure we do everything we can to have a good future and an exciting future and one where that maximizes the happiness of the people.
1:58Lex FridmanLet me ask about Crew Dragon Demo 2. So that. That first flight with humans on board, how did you feel leading up to that launch? Were you scared? Were you excited?
2:08Lex FridmanWhat was going through your mind? So much was at stake.
2:13Elon MuskYeah, no, that was extremely stressful, no question. We obviously could not let them down in any way. So extremely stressful, I'd say, to say the least. But I was confident that at the time that we launched that no one could think of anything at all to do that would improve the probability of success.
2:40Elon MuskAnd we racked our brains to think of any possible way to improve the probability of success. We could not think of anything more, nor could NASA. And so then that's just the best that we could do.
2:51Elon MuskSo then we had. We went ahead and launched. Now, I'm not a religious person, but I nonetheless got on my knees and prayed for that Mission.
3:03Lex FridmanWere you able to sleep?
3:05Elon MuskNo.
3:07Lex FridmanHow did it feel when it was a success first, when the launch was a success, and when they returned back home or back to Earth?
3:16Elon MuskThat's a great relief. Yeah. For high stress situations, I find it's not so much elation as relief. And I think once as we got more comfortable and proved out the systems, because we really, you got to make sure everything works, it was definitely a lot more enjoyable with the subsequent astronaut missions.
3:46Elon MuskAnd I thought the Inspiration mission was actually very inspiring. Inspiration4 mission. I'd encourage people to watch the Inspiration documentary on Netflix. It's actually really good and it really is.
4:01Elon MuskI was actually inspired by that. So that one, I felt I was kind of able to enjoy the actual mission and not just be super stressed all the time.
4:10Lex FridmanSo for people that somehow all don't know, it's the all civilian, first time, all civilian out to space, out to orbit.
4:19Elon MuskYeah. And it was, I think, the highest orbit that in like, I don't know, 30 or 40 years or something. The only one that was higher was the one shuttle, sorry, Hubble servicing mission.
4:32Elon MuskAnd then before that it would have been Apollo in 72. It's pretty wild, so it's cool. I think as, you know, as a species, like, we want to be continuing to do better and reach higher ground and like, I think it would be tragic, extremely tragic, if Apollo was the high watermark for humanity, you know, and that's as far as we ever got.
5:00Elon MuskAnd it's concerning that. Here we are, 49 years after the last mission, the moon. So almost half a century and we've not been back. And that's worrying. It's like, does that mean we've peaked as a civilization or what?
5:21Elon MuskSo I think we got to get back to the moon and build a base there, a science base. I think we could learn a lot about the nature of the universe if we have a proper science base on the moon.
5:33Elon MuskWe have a science base in Antarctica and many other parts of the world. And so that's, I think, the next big thing. We've got to have a serious moon base and then get people to Mars and get out there and be a spacefaring civilization.
5:52Lex FridmanI'll ask you about some of those details. But since you're so busy with the hard engineering challenges of everything that's involved, are you still able to marvel at the magic of it all of space travel, of every time the rocket goes up, especially when it's a crewed mission?
6:08Lex FridmanOr are you just so overwhelmed with all the challenges that you have to solve. And actually sort of to add to that, the reason I wanted to ask this question of May 30, it's been some time, so you can look back and think about the impact already.
6:23Lex FridmanIt's already. At the time it was an engineering problem. Maybe now it's becoming a historic moment. Like it's a moment that. How many moments would be remembered about the 21st century?
6:33Lex FridmanTo me, that or something like that, maybe inspiration for one of those would be remembered as the early steps of a new age of space exploration.
6:44Elon MuskYeah, I mean, during the launches itself, I think maybe some people know, but a lot of people don't know is like, I'm actually the chief engineer of SpaceX, so I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions.
6:59Elon MuskAnd you know, so if there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle, it's fundamentally my fault, you know. So I'm really just thinking about all the things that like, so, so when I see the rocket, I see all the things that could go wrong and the things that could be better.
7:18Elon MuskAnd the same with the Dragon spacecraft. It's like other people will say, oh, this is a spacecraft or a rocket. And that looks really cool. I'm like, I've like a readout of like, these are the risks, these are the problems.
7:32Elon MuskThat's what I see. Like, so it's not what other people see when they see the product, you know.
7:40Lex FridmanSo let me ask you then to analyze Starship in that same way. I know you'll talk about, in more detail about Starship in the near future, perhaps.
7:49Elon MuskYeah, talk about it now if you want.
7:51Lex FridmanBut just in that same way, like you said, you see, when you see a rocket, you see a sort of a list of risks. In that same way you said that Starship is a really hard problem.
8:03Lex FridmanSo there's many ways I can ask this. But if you magically could solve one problem perfectly, one engineering problem perfectly, which one would it be?
8:12Elon MuskOn Starship.
8:14Lex FridmanSorry, On Starship. So is it maybe related to the efficiency the, the engine, the weight of the different components, the complexity of various things, maybe the controls of the crazy thing has to do to land?
8:26Elon MuskNo, actually by far the biggest thing absorbing my time is engine production, not the design of the engine. I've often said prototypes are easy, production is hard. So we have the most advanced rocket engine that's ever been designed.
8:52Elon MuskBecause I say currently the, the best rocket engine ever is probably the RD180 or RD170. That, that's the Russian engine, basically. And, and still I think an engine generally can't if it's gotten something to orbit.
9:09Elon MuskSo our engine has not gotten anything to orbit yet. But it is, it's the first engine that's actually better than the Russian RD engines, which were amazing design.
9:22Lex FridmanSo you're talking about Raptor engine. What makes it amazing? What are the different aspects of it that make it like, what are you the most excited about if the whole thing works in terms of efficiency, all those kinds of things?
9:37Elon MuskWell, the Raptor is a full flow staged combustion engine and it's operating at a very high chamber pressure. So one of the key figures of merit, or perhaps the key figure of merit, is what is the chamber pressure at which the rocket engine can operate?
10:00Elon MuskThat's the combustion chamber pressure. So Raptor is designed to operate at 300 bar, possibly maybe higher. That's 300 atmospheres. So the record right now for operational engine is the RD engine that I mentioned, the Russian RD, which is I believe around 267 bar.
10:22Elon MuskAnd the difficulty of the chamber pressure increases on a nonlinear basis. So 10% more chamber pressure is more like 50% more difficult. But that chamber pressure, that is what allows you to get a very high power density for the engine, so enabling a very high thrust to weight ratio and a very high specific impulse.
10:57Elon MuskSo specific impulse is like a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine. It's really the effective exhaust velocity of the gas coming out of the engine. So with a very high chamber pressure, you can have a compact engine that nonetheless has a high expansion ratio, which is the ratio between the exit nozzle and the throat.
11:31Elon MuskSo you know, engines got like, you see a rocket engine, it's got like, sort of like a, like a hourglass shape. It's like a chamber and then it necks down and there's a nozzle.
11:39Elon MuskAnd the ratio of the, the exit diameter to the throat is expansion ratio.
11:46Lex FridmanSo why is it such a hard engine to manufacture at scale?
11:51Elon MuskIt's very complex.
11:53Lex FridmanWhat does complexity mean? Here's a lot of components involved.
11:56Elon MuskThere's a lot of components and a lot of unique materials that. So we had to invent several alloys that don't exist in order to make this engine work.
12:11Lex FridmanIt's a materials problem too.
12:14Elon MuskA materials problem. And in a staged combustion, a full flow staged combustion, there are many feedback loops in the system. So basically you've got propellants and hot gas flowing simultaneously to so many different places on the engine.
12:39Elon MuskAnd they all have a recursive effect on each other. So you change one Thing here, it has a recursive effect here, it changes something over there and it's quite hard to control.
12:52Elon MuskThere's a reason no one's made this before.
12:58Elon MuskAnd the reason we're doing a stage combustion, full flow, because it has the highest, the highest theoretical possible efficiency. So in order to make a fully reusable rocket, which that's the really the holy grail of orbital rocketry, you have to have.
13:26Elon MuskEverything's got to be the best. It's got to be the best engine, the best airframe, the best heat shield, extremely light avionics, you know, very clever control mechanisms. You've got to shed mass in any possible way that you can.
13:45Elon MuskFor example, we are, instead of putting landing legs on the booster and ship, we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing legs.
13:53Elon MuskSo that's like, I mean, we're talking about catching the largest flying object ever made with, on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It's like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger.
14:11Lex FridmanI mean, pulling stuff like that, this
14:13Elon Muskprobably won't work the first time anyway. So this is bananas. This is banana stuff.
14:19Lex FridmanSo you mentioned that you doubt. Well, Matt, you doubt. But there, there's days or moments when you doubt that this is even possible. It's so difficult.
14:29Elon MuskThe possible part is, well, at this point we'll, I think we will get starship to work. There's a question of timing. How long will it take us to do this?
14:45Elon MuskHow long will it take us to actually achieve full and rapid reusability? Because it will take probably many launches before we are able to have full and rapid reusability.
14:57Elon MuskBut I can say that the physics pencils out like we're not at this point, I'd say we're confident that. Let's say I'm very confident. Success is in the set of all possible outcomes.
15:16Elon MuskFor a while there, I was not convinced that success was in the set of possible outcomes, which is very important actually. But so we were
15:28Lex Fridmansaying there's a chance.
15:29Elon MuskI'm saying there's a chance. Exactly. Just not sure how, how, how long it will take. We have a very, very talented team. They're working night and day to make it happen.
15:43Elon MuskAnd like I said, the critical thing to achieve for the revolution in spaceflight and for humanity to be a spacefaring civilization is to have a fully unravely reusable rocket, orbital rocket.
15:56Elon MuskThere's not even been any orbital rocket that's been fully reusable ever. And this has always been the Holy grail of rocketry. And many smart people, very smart people, have tried to do this before and they've not succeeded because it's such a hard problem.
16:16Lex FridmanWhat's your source of belief in situations like this when the engineering problem is so difficult? There's a lot of experts, many of whom you admire, who have failed in the past.
16:29Elon MuskYes.
16:30Lex FridmanAnd a lot of people, a lot of experts, maybe journalists, all the kind of, the public in general, have a lot of doubt about whether it's possible. And you yourself know that even if it's a non null set, non empty set of success, it's still unlikely or very difficult.
16:51Lex FridmanLike, where do you go to both personally, intellectually, as an engineer, as a team, like for source of strength needed to sort of persevere through this and to keep going with the project, take it to completion.
17:18Elon MuskA source of strength. That's really not how I think about things. I mean, for me it's simply this, this is something that is important to get done and we should just keep doing it or die trying to.
17:32Elon MuskAnd I, I don't need a source of strength.
17:35Lex FridmanSo quitting is not even like, that's
17:39Elon Musknot, it's not in my nature.
17:40Lex FridmanOkay?
17:41Elon MuskAnd I don't care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that. We're going to get it done.
17:47Lex FridmanGoing to get it done. Can you then zoom back in to specific problems with starship or any engineering problems you work on? Can you try to introspect your particular biological neural network, your thinking process, and describe how you think through problems, through different engineering and design problems?
18:08Lex FridmanIs there like a systematic process? You've spoken about first principles thinking, but is there kind of process to it?
18:14Elon MuskWell, I like saying physics is law and everything else is a recommendation. I've met a lot of people that can break the law, but I've been having that, met anyone who could break physics.
18:28Elon MuskSo first, for any kind of technology problem, you have to sort of just make sure you're not violating physics and first principles analysis, I think is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really.
18:50Elon MuskIt's really just saying, you know, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles. The things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level and that sets your axiomatic base.
19:05Elon MuskAnd then you reason up from there and then you cross check your conclusion against the axiomatic truths. So some basics in physics would be like, are you violating conservation of energy or momentum or something like that?
19:21Elon MuskThen you know it's not going to work.
19:29Elon MuskSo that's just to establish is it possible. And then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit. If you take a particular thing and you scale it to a very large number or to a very small number, how do things change, both in number
19:47Lex Fridmanof things you manufacture or something like that, and then in time.
19:51Elon MuskYeah, let's say take an example of manufacturing, which I think is just a very underrated problem. Like I said, it's much harder to take an advanced technology product and bring it into volume manufacturing than it is to design it in the first place.
20:13Elon MuskOrders of magnitude. So. So let's say you're trying to figure out why is this part or product expensive? Is it because of something fundamentally foolish that we're doing, or is it because our volume is too low?
20:31Elon MuskAnd so then you say, okay, well what if our volume was a million units a year? Is it still expensive? That's what I mean by thinking about things in the limit.
20:37Elon MuskIf it's still expensive at a million units a year, then volume is not the reason why your thing is expensive. There's something fundamental about design.
20:44Lex FridmanAnd then you then can focus on the reducing complexity or something like that
20:48Elon Muskin the design change design to change the change apart to be something that is not fundamentally expensive. But that's a common thing in rocketry because the unit volume is relatively low.
21:01Elon MuskAnd so a common excuse would be, well, it's expensive because our unit volume is low. And if we were in automotive or something like that, or consumer electronics, then our costs would be lower.
21:11Elon MuskI'm like, okay, so let's say we now you're making a million units a year, is it still expensive? If the answer is yes, then economies of scale are not the issue.
21:22Lex FridmanDo you throw into manufacturing, do you throw like supply chain? You talked about resources and materials and stuff like that. Do you throw that into the calculation of. Trying to reason from first principles like how we're going to make the supply chain work here?
21:34Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
21:35Lex FridmanAnd then the cost of materials, things like that, or is that too much?
21:38Elon MuskExactly. So like another, like a good example I think of thinking about things in the limit is if you take any.
21:50Elon MuskProduct, any machine or whatever, like take a rocket or whatever, and say if you look at the raw materials in the rocket, so you're going to have like an aluminum, steel, titanium, inconel, specialty alloys, copper, and you say, what's the weight of the constituent elements of each of these elements and what is their raw material value?
22:22Elon MuskAnd that sets the asymptotic limit for how low the cost of the vehicle can be, unless you change the materials. And then when you do that, call it like maybe the magic wand number or something like that.
22:36Elon MuskSo that would be like, if you had the, you know, like just a pile of these raw materials here and you could wave the magic wand and rearrange the atoms into the final shape.
22:47Elon MuskThat would be the lowest possible cost that you could make this thing for, unless you change the materials. So then, and that is always, almost always a very low number.
22:57Elon MuskSo then what's actually causing things to be expensive is how you put the atoms into the desired shape.
23:06Lex FridmanYeah. Actually, if you don't mind me taking a tiny tangent, I often talk to Jim Keller, who's somebody that worked with
23:13Elon Muskyou as a fan. Jim was, yeah. Did great work at Tesla.
23:17Lex FridmanSo I suppose he carries the flame of the same kind of thinking that you're talking about now. And I guess I see that same thing at Tesla and SpaceX.
23:30Lex FridmanFolks who work there, they kind of learn this way of thinking and it kind of becomes obvious almost. But anyway, I had argument, not argument. He educated me about how cheap it might be to manufacture a Tesla bot.
23:46Lex FridmanWe just, we had an argument, what is, how can you reduce the cost of scale of producing a robot? Because I gotten a chance to interact quite a bit, obviously, in the academic circles with humanoid robots and then Boston Dynamics and stuff like that, and they're very expensive to build.
24:04Lex FridmanAnd. And then Jim kind of schooled me on saying, like, okay, like this kind of first principles, thinking of how can we get the cost of manufacturing down. I suppose you do that.
24:14Lex FridmanYou have done that kind of thinking for Tesla bot and for all kinds of complex systems that are traditionally seen as complex. And you say, okay, how can we simplify everything down?
24:27Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think if you are really good at manufacturing, you can basically make. At high volume. You can basically make anything for a cost that asymptotically approaches the raw material value of the constituents, plus any intellectual property that you need to license, anything.
24:49Elon MuskBut it's hard. It's not like that's a very hard thing to do, but it is possible for anything. Anything in volume can be made, like I said, for a cost that asymptotically approaches its raw material constituents, plus intellectual property license rights.
25:05Elon MuskSo what will often happen in trying to design a product is people will start with the tools and parts and methods that they are familiar with and try to create a product using their existing tools and methods.
25:21Elon MuskThe other way to think about it is actually try to imagine the Platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology, whatever it might be, and say, what is this?
25:33Elon MuskWhat is the perfect arrangement of atoms? That would be the best possible product. And now let us try to figure out how to get the atoms in that shape.
25:43Lex FridmanI mean, it sounds, it's almost like Rick and Morty absurd until you start to really think about it. And you really should think about it in this way because everything else is kind of, if you think you might fall victim to the momentum of the way things were done in the past, unless you think in this way.
26:05Elon MuskWell, just as a function of inertia, people will want to use the same tools and methods that they are familiar with. That's what they'll do by default. And then that will lead to an outcome of things that can be made with those tools and methods, but is unlikely to be the Platonic ideal of the perfect product.
26:27Elon MuskSo that's why it's good to think of things in both directions. Say, like, what can we build with the tools that we have? But also what does the theoretical perfect product look like?
26:37Elon MuskAnd that theoretical perfect product is going to be a moving target because as you learn more, the definition for that perfect product will change because you don't actually know what the perfect product is, but you can successfully approximate a more perfect product.
26:54Elon MuskSo thinking about it like that and then saying, okay, now what tools, methods, materials, whatever do we need to create in order to get the atoms in that shape?
27:05Elon MuskBut people rarely think about it that way. But it's a powerful tool.
27:12Lex FridmanI should mention that the brilliant Siobhan Zillis is hanging, hanging out with us in case you hear a voice of wisdom from outside, from up above. Okay, so let me ask you about Mars.
27:28Lex FridmanYou mentioned it would be great for science to put a base on the moon to do some research. But the truly big leap, again in this category of seemingly impossible is to put a human being on Mars.
27:43Lex FridmanWhen do you think SpaceX will land a human being on Mars?
28:09Elon MuskBest case is about five years, worst case, ten years.
28:16Lex FridmanWhat are the determining factors, would you say, from an engineering perspective? Or is that not the bottlenecks?
28:24Elon MuskYou know, it's fundamentally engineering the vehicle. I mean, Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, order of magnitude or something like that.
28:40Elon MuskIt's a lot. It's really next level. So. And the fundamental optimization of starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars.
28:54Elon MuskThis may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is Actually the thing that needs to be optimized, like there is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self sustaining city.
29:08Elon MuskAnd then above that we cannot afford to do it. So right now you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get your ticket to Mars.
29:19Elon MuskSo we need to get that above, you know, to get that like something that is actually possible at all. But that's, we don't just want to have, you know, with Mars flags and footprints and then not come back for a half century like we did with the moon.
29:38Elon MuskIn order to pass a very important great filter, I think we need to be a multi planet species. This may sound somewhat esoteric to a lot of people, but eventually, given enough time, the Earth is likely to experience some calamity.
30:02Elon MuskThat could be something that humans do to themselves or an external event like happen to the dinosaurs. But eventually, if none of that happens and somehow magically we keep going, then the sun is gradually expanding and will engulf the Earth.
30:26Elon MuskAnd probably Earth gets too hot for life in about 500 million years. It's a long time, but that's only 10% longer than Earth has been around. And so if you think about like the, the current situation is really remarkable and kind of hard to believe, but Earth's been around four and a half billion years.
30:49Elon MuskAnd this is the first time in four and a half billion years that it's been possible to extend life beyond Earth. And that window of opportunity may be open for a long time, and I hope it is, but it also may be open for a short time.
31:01Elon MuskAnd we should, I think it was wise for us to act quickly while the window is open, just in case it closes.
31:13Lex FridmanYeah. The existence of nuclear weapons, pandemics, all kinds of threats should kind of give us some motivation.
31:24Elon MuskI mean, civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. You know, if it's, if it dies, a demographic collapse, then it's more of a whimper, obviously. But if it's World War 3, it's more of a bang.
31:40Elon MuskBut these are all risks. I mean, it's important to think of these things and just, you know, think of things as like probabilities, not certainties. There's a certain probability that something bad will happen on Earth.
31:53Elon MuskI think most likely the future will be good. But there's like, let's say for argument's sake, a 1% chance per century of a civilization ending event. That was Stephen Hawking's estimate.
32:07Elon MuskI think he might be right about that. So then we should basically think of this like being a multi plant species is like taking out insurance for life itself.
32:21Elon MuskLike life insurance for life.
32:27Lex FridmanIt's turned into an infomercial real quick.
32:29Elon MuskLife insurance for life. Yes. And you know, we can bring the creatures from, you know, plants and animals from Earth to Mars and breathe life into the planet and have a second planet with life.
32:44Elon MuskThat would be great. They can't bring themselves there. So if we don't bring them to Mars then they will just for sure all die when the sun expands anyway and then that'll be it.
32:56Lex FridmanWhat do you think is the most difficult aspect of building a civilization on Mars? Terraforming Mars from engineering perspective, from a financial perspective, human perspective, to get a large number of folks there who will never return back to Earth.
33:15Elon MuskNo, they could certainly return. Some will return back to Earth.
33:18Lex FridmanThey will choose to stay there for the rest of their lives.
33:21Elon MuskMany will. But we need the spaceships back like the ones that go to Mars. We need them back. So you can hop on if you want, but we can't just not have the spaceships come back.
33:34Elon MuskThose things are expensive. We need them. I'd like to come back and do another trip.
33:38Lex FridmanI mean do you think about the terraforming aspect like actually building. Are you so focused right now on the spaceships part that's so critical to get to Mars?
33:46Elon MuskWe absolutely. If you can't get there, nothing else matters. So and like I said, we can't get there with at some extraordinarily high cost. I mean the current cost of let's say one ton to the surface of Mars is on the order of a billion dollars.
34:02Elon MuskSo because you don't just need the rocket and the launch and everything, you need like heat shield, you need guidance system, you need deep space communications, you need some kind of landing system.
34:15Elon MuskSo like rough approximation would be a billion dollars per ton to the surface of Mars right now. This is obviously way too expensive to create a self sustaining civilization.
34:30Elon MuskSo we need to improve that by at least a factor of 1000.
34:36Lex FridmanA million per ton?
34:38Elon MuskYes, ideally much less than a million per ton. But if it's not like it's got to be, you have to say, well, how much can society afford to spend or just want to spend on a self sustaining city on Mars?
34:52Elon MuskThe self sustaining part is important. It's just the key threshold. The great filter will have been passed when the city on Mars can survive. Even if the spaceships from Earth stop coming for any reason.
35:08Elon MuskIt doesn't matter what the reason is. But if they stop coming for any reason, will it die out or will it not? And if there's even one critical ingredient missing, then it still doesn't count.
35:18Elon MuskIt's like if you're on a long sea voyage and you've got everything except vitamin C and it's only a matter of time, you're going to die. So we're going to get Mars city to the point where it's self sustaining.
35:32Elon MuskI'm not sure this will really happen in my lifetime, but I hope to see it at least have a lot of momentum. And then you could say, okay, what is the minimum tonnage necessary to have a self sustaining city?
35:44Elon MuskAnd there's a lot of uncertainty about this. You could say like, I don't know, it's probably at least a million tons. Because you have to set up a lot of infrastructure on Mars.
35:55Elon MuskLike I said, you can't be missing anything that in order to be self sustaining you can't be missing. Like you need semiconductor fabs, you need iron ore refineries, you need lots of things.
36:11Elon MuskAnd Mars is not super hospitable. It's the least inhospitable planet. But it's definitely a fixer offer of a planet outside of Earth. Yes, Earth is pretty, Earth is like easy.
36:22Lex FridmanAnd also, we should clarify in the solar system.
36:25Elon MuskYes, in the solar system there might
36:27Lex Fridmanbe nice vacation spots, there might be
36:30Elon Musksome great planets out there, but it's
36:32Lex Fridmanhopeless to get there.
36:33Elon MuskYeah, way, way, way, way, way too hard to say the least.
36:37Lex FridmanLet me push back on that. Not really a pushback, but a quick curveball of a question. So you did mention physics as the first starting point. So general relativity allows for wormholes.
36:51Lex FridmanThey technically can exist. Do you think those can ever be leveraged by humans to travel faster than the speed of light?
36:59Elon MuskWell, are you saying the one whole thing is debatable. We currently do not know of any means of going faster than the speed of light. There is like,
37:17Elon MuskThere are some ideas about having space. So you're going to move at the speed of light through space. But if you can make space itself move, that's warping space.
37:36Elon MuskSpace is capable of moving faster than the speed of light, right? Like the universe in the Big Bang, the univers expanded it much, much more than the speed of light by a lot.
37:46Lex FridmanYeah.
37:49Elon MuskSo, but the, if this is possible, the amount of energy required to warp space is so gigantic it boggles the mind.
38:03Lex FridmanSo all the work you've done with propulsion, how much innovation is possible with rocket propulsion is this, I mean, you've seen it all and you're constantly innovating in every aspect.
38:14Lex FridmanHow much is possible? Like how much can you get? 10x somehow. Is there something in there in physics that you can get significant improvement in terms of efficiency of engines and all those kinds of things?
38:24Elon MuskWell, as I was saying, really the holy grail is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital system. So right now the Falcon 9 is the only reusable rocket out there.
38:41Elon MuskBut the booster comes back and lands. I'm sure you've seen the videos. And we get the nose conal fairing back, but we do not get the upper stage back.
38:49Elon MuskSo that means that we have a minimum cost of building an upper stage. You can think of like a two stage rocket of sort of like two airplanes, like a big airplane and a smaller airplane.
39:03Elon MuskAnd we get the big airplane back but not the small airplane. And so it still costs a lot. So that upper stage is at least $10 million. And then the degree of the booster is not as, not as rapidly and completely reusable as we'd like in order the fairings.
39:21Elon MuskSo our kind of minimum marginal cost, not counting overhead for per flight is on the order of 15 to 20 million dollars maybe. So that's extremely good for it's by far better than any rocket ever in history.
39:41Elon MuskBut with full and rapid reusability, we can reduce the cost per ton to orbit by a factor of 100. Just think of it like, like imagine if you had an aircraft or something or a car.
40:00Elon MuskAnd if you had to buy a new car every time you went for a drive, it would be very expensive, it'd be silly, frankly. But in fact you just refuel the car or recharge the car and that makes your truck like, I don't know, a thousand times cheaper.
40:20Elon MuskSo it's the same for rockets. It's very difficult to make this complex machine that can go to orbit. And so if you cannot reuse it and have to throw even any significant part of it away, that massively increases the cost.
40:36Elon MuskSo starship in theory could do a cost per launch of like a million, maybe $2 million or something like that and put over 100 tons in orbit. Which is crazy.
40:53Lex FridmanYeah, that's incredible. So you're saying it's by far the biggest bang for the buck is to make it fully reusable versus some kind of brilliant breakthrough in theoretical physics?
41:05Elon MuskNo, there's no brilliant breakthrough. You're going to make the rocket reusable. This is an extremely difficult interning problem. Got it. But no new Physics is required.
41:17Lex FridmanJust brilliant engineering. Let me ask a slightly philosophical fun question. Gotta ask. I know you're focused on getting to Mars, but once we're there on Mars, what form of government, economic system, political system, do you think would work best for an early civilization of humans?
41:38Lex FridmanI mean, the interesting reason to talk about this stuff, it also helps people dream about the future. I know you're really focused about the short term engineering dream, but it's like, I don't know, there's something about imagining an actual civilization on Mars that gives people, really gives people hope.
41:55Elon MuskWell, it would be a new frontier and an opportunity to rethink the whole nature of government, just as was done in the creation of the United States. So.
42:07Elon MuskI mean, I would suggest having direct democracy, like people vote directly on things as opposed to representative democracy. So representative democracy I think is too subject to special interest and a coercion of the politicians and that kind of thing.
42:31Elon MuskSo I'd recommend that there's just direct democracy. People vote on laws, the population votes on laws themselves. And then the laws must be short enough that people can understand them.
42:46Lex FridmanYeah. And then like keeping a well informed populace, like really being transparent about all the information about what they're voting for.
42:53Elon MuskAbsolute transparency.
42:54Lex FridmanYeah. And not make it as annoying as those cookies where you have to accept the.
42:58Elon MuskAccept cookies. I always like, there's always a slight amount of trepidation when you click accept cookies. I feel as though there's perhaps a very tiny chance that it'll open a portal to hell or something like that.
43:12Elon MuskThat's exactly how I feel. Why do they keep, why don't you accept it? What do they want with this cookie? Somebody got upset with accepting cookies or something somewhere.
43:22Elon MuskWho cares? It's so annoying to keep accepting all these cookies.
43:26Lex FridmanTo me this is just a great
43:29Elon Muskyes, you can have my damn cookie. I don't care.
43:31Lex FridmanWhatever. You heard it from Elon first. He accepts all your damn cookies.
43:35Elon MuskYeah. And start asking me. Annoying.
43:41Lex FridmanYeah. It's one example of implementation of a good idea done really horribly.
43:50Elon MuskYeah, Somebody was like, there's some good intentions of like privacy or whatever, but now everyone just has to click accept cookies. And it's not, you know, you have billions of people who have to keep clicking except cookie and super annoying.
44:02Elon MuskAnd we just accept the damn cookie. It's fine. There is like, I think a fundamental problem that we're. Because we've not really had a major like a world war or something like that in a while and obviously we would like to not have cold wars there's not been a cleansing function for rules and regulations.
44:22Elon MuskSo wars did have some sort of lining in that there would be a reset on rules and regulations after a war. So World Wars I and 2, there were huge resets on rules and regulations.
44:35Elon MuskNow if society does not have a war and there's no cleansing function or garbage collection for rules and regulations, then rules and regulations will accumulate every year because they're immortal.
44:46Elon MuskThere's no actual humans die, but the laws don't. So we need a garbage collection function for rules and regulations. They should not just be immortal because some of the rules and regulations that are put in place will be counterproductive, done with good intentions, but counterproductive, sometimes not done with good intentions.
45:05Elon MuskSo if rules and regulations just accumulate every year and you get more and more of them, then eventually you won't be able to do anything. You're just like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of little strings.
45:19Elon MuskAnd we see that in us and basically all economies that have been around for a while and regulators and legislators create new rules and regulations every year, but they don't put effort into removing them.
45:38Elon MuskAnd I think that's very important that we put effort into removing rules and regulations. But it gets tough because you get special interests that then are dependent on like they have a vested interest in that whatever rule and regulation, and then they fight to not get it removed.
45:57Lex FridmanYeah. So I guess the problem with the Constitution is it's kind of like C versus Java because it doesn't have any garbage collection built in. I think there should be.
46:07Lex FridmanWhen you first said the, the, the metaphor of garbage collection from coding standpoint. From a coding standpoint. Yeah. Yeah. I, it would be interesting. Interesting if the laws themselves kind of had a built in thing where they kind of die after a while unless somebody explicitly publicly defends them.
46:23Lex FridmanSo that, that's sort of, it's not like somebody has to kill them, they kind of die themselves. They disappear.
46:29Elon MuskYeah.
46:32Lex FridmanNot to defend Java or anything, but you know, with C, you know, you could also have great garbage collection in Python and so on.
46:39Elon MuskYeah. So yeah, something needs to happen. Or just the civilization's arteries, arteries just harden over time and you can just get less and less done because there's just a rule against everything.
46:56Elon MuskI think, I don't know, for Mars or whatever. I'd say obviously for Earth as well. I think there should be an active process for removing rules and regulations and questioning their existence.
47:07Elon MuskJust like if we've got a function for creating rules and regulations, because rules and regulations, you can also think of like, they're like software or lines of code for operating civilization.
47:18Elon MuskThat's the rules and regulations. So it's not like we shouldn't have rules and regulations, but you have code accumulation but no code removal. And so it just gets to become basically archaic bloatware after a while and it makes it hard for things to progress.
47:38Elon MuskSo I don't know, maybe Mars, you'd have like any given law must have a sunset and require active voting to restore to keep it up there. And I actually also say these are just, I don't know, recommendations or thoughts and ultimately will be up to the people on Mars to decide.
48:00Elon MuskBut I think it should be easier to remove a law than to add one because of the. Just to overcome the inertia of laws. So maybe it's like for argument's sake, you need like say 60% vote to have a law take effect, but only a 40% vote to remove it.
48:23Lex FridmanSo let me be the guy. You posted a meme on Twitter recently where there's like a row of urinals, a guy just walks all the way across and he tells you about crypto.
48:36Elon MuskI mean, that's happened to me so many times. I think, maybe even literally.
48:41Lex FridmanDo you think technologically speaking there's any room for ideas of smart contracts or so on? Because you mentioned laws. That's an interesting implement. Use of things like smart contracts to implement the laws by which governments function.
48:57Lex FridmanLike something built on Ethereum or maybe a dog coin that enables smart contracts.
49:03Elon MuskSomehow I don't quite understand this whole smart contract thing, you know, I mean, I'm too dumb to understand smart contracts.
49:14Lex FridmanThat's a good line.
49:18Elon MuskI mean, my general approach to any kind of deal or whatever is just make sure there's clarity of understanding. That's the most important thing. And just keep any kind of deal very short and simple plain language.
49:31Elon MuskAnd just make sure everyone understands this is the deal. Is it clear? And what are the consequences if various things don't happen? But usually deals are business deals or whatever are way too long and complex and overly lawyered and pointlessly.
49:52Lex FridmanYou mentioned that doge is the People's Coin and you said that you were literally going SpaceX may consider literally putting a dogecoin on the moon. Is this something you're still considering Mars, perhaps?
50:12Lex FridmanDo you think there's some chance, we've talked about political systems on Mars, that dogecoin is the official currency of Mars at some point in the future?
50:22Elon MuskWell, I think Mars itself will need to have a different Currency because you can't synchronize due to speed of light or not easily.
50:32Lex FridmanSo it must be completely standalone from Earth.
50:36Elon MuskWell, yeah, because the Mars is at closest approach, it's four light minutes away roughly. And then at furthest approach it's roughly 20 light minutes away, maybe a little more.
50:50Elon MuskSo you can't really have something synchronizing if you've got a 20 minute speed of light issue. If it's got a one minute blockchain, it's not going to synchronize properly.
51:01Elon MuskSo Mars, I don't know if Mars would have a cryptocurrency as a thing, but probably seems likely. But it would be some kind of localized thing on Mars.
51:12Lex FridmanAnd you let the people decide.
51:14Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. The future of Mars should be up to the Martians. Yeah, I think the cryptocurrency thing is an interesting approach to reducing the
51:33Lex Fridmanerror
51:34Elon Muskin the the database that is called Money. You know, I think I have a pretty deep understanding of the, of what money actually is on a practical day to day basis because of PayPal.
51:49Elon MuskYou know, we really got in deep there. And right now the money system actually for practical purposes is, is really a bunch of heterogeneous mainframes running old cobol.
52:07Lex FridmanOkay, you mean literally?
52:08Elon MuskLiterally.
52:09Lex FridmanThat is literally what's happening in batch mode.
52:12Elon MuskOkay, in batch mode, yeah. Pity the poor fast as you have to maintain that code. Okay, that's pain.
52:22Lex FridmanNot even Fortrans Cobalt.
52:23Elon MuskYep, it's cobalt. And banks are still buying mainframes in 2021 and running ancient COBOL code. And the Federal Reserve is probably even older than what the banks have and they have an old COBOL mainframe.
52:44Elon MuskThe government effectively has editing privileges on the money database and they use those editing privileges to make more money whenever they want. And this increases the error in the database that is money.
53:00Elon MuskSo I think money should really be viewed through the lens of information theory. And so it's kind of like an Internet connection, like what's the bandwidth,
53:12Lex Fridmantotal
53:12Elon Muskbit rate, what is the latency, jitter packet drop, errors in network communication? So think of money like that, basically. I think that's probably the right way to think of it.
53:27Elon MuskAnd then say what system, from an information theory standpoint allows an economy to function the best? And crypto is an attempt to reduce the error in money that is contributed by governments diluting the money supply as basically a pernicious form of taxation.
53:58Lex FridmanSo both policy in terms of with inflation and actual technological cobalt cryptocurrency takes us into the 21st century in terms of the actual systems that allow you to do the transaction, to store wealth, all those kinds of things.
54:16Elon MuskThanks. Just think of money as information. People often will think of money as having power in and of itself. It does not. Money is information and it does not have power in and of itself.
54:32Elon MuskAgain, applying the physics tools of thinking about things in the limit is helpful. If you are stranded on a tropical island and you have a trillion dollars, it's useless because there's no resource allocation.
54:50Elon MuskMoney is a database for resource allocation, but there's no resource to allocate except yourself. So money is useless.
55:00Elon MuskIf you're trying to run desert island with no food. All the bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving.
55:15Elon MuskSo like just think of money as a database for resource allocation across time and space. And then what system, in what form should that database or data system, what would be most effective?
55:39Elon MuskNow there is a fundamental issue with say Bitcoin in its current form in that the transaction volume is very limited and the latency, the latency for a properly confirmed transaction is too long, much longer than you'd like.
56:00Elon MuskSo it's actually not great from transaction volume standpoint or latency standpoint. So it is perhaps useful to solve an aspect of the money database problem, which is the sort of store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations, I suppose.
56:25Elon MuskBut it is not useful as a currency, as a day to day currency.
56:30Lex FridmanBut people have proposed different technological solutions. Yeah, Lightning network and layer two technologies on top of that. It seems to be all kind of a trade off. But the point is it's kind of brilliant to say that just think about information, think about what kind of database, what kind of infrastructure enables.
56:48Lex FridmanYeah.
56:48Elon MuskLike you're operating an economy and you need to have some thing that allows for the efficient to have efficient value ratios between products and services. So you've got this massive number of products and services and you need to, you can't just barter.
57:07Elon MuskIt's like that would be extremely unwieldy. So you need something that gives you the. A ratio of exchange between goods and services and then something that allows you to shift obligations across time, like debt, debt and equity.
57:27Elon MuskShift obligations across time. Then what does the best job of that? Part of the reason why I think there's some merit to dogecoin, even though it was obviously created as a joke, is that it actually does have a much higher transaction volume capability than Bitcoin.
57:49Elon MuskAnd the cost of doing a transaction, the dogecoin fee, is very low. Like right now, if you want to do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high.
58:00Elon MuskSo you could not use it effectively for most things, nor could it even scale to a higher volume.
58:12Elon MuskAnd when Bitcoin was started, I guess around 2008 or something like that, the Internet connections were much worse than they are today, like, order of magnitude. I mean, they're way, way worse in 2008.
58:27Elon MuskSo, like, having a small block size or whatever is and a long synchronization time made sense in 2008, but 20, 21 or fast forward 10 years, it's like economically low.
58:50Elon MuskAnd I think there's some value to having a linear increase in the amount of currency that is generated. So because some amount of the currency, if a currency is too deflationary or like, or should say, if a currency is expected to increase in value over time, there's reluctance to spend it because you're like, oh, I'll just hold it and not spend it, because scarcity is increasing with time.
59:20Elon MuskSo if I spend it now, then I will regret spending it. So I will just, you know, total it. But if there's some dilution of the currency occurring over time, that's.
59:31Elon MuskThat's more of an incentive to use it as a currency. So Dogecoin, somewhat randomly, has a. Just a fixed number of sort of coins or hash strings that are generated every year.
59:49Elon MuskSo there's. There's some inflation, but it's not a percentage base. It's a fixed number. So the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time. So I'm not saying that it's the ideal system for a currency, but I think it actually is just fundamentally better than anything else I've seen.
1:00:13Elon MuskJust by accident.
1:00:16Lex FridmanI like how you said around 2008, so you're not, you know, some people suggested you might be. Satoshi Nakamoto. You previously said you're not. You're not for sure. Would you tell us if you were?
1:00:30Elon MuskYes.
1:00:30Lex FridmanOkay. Do you think it's a feature, a bug, that he's anonymous or she. Or they. It's an interesting kind of quirk of human history that there is a particular technology that is a completely anonymous inventor or creator.
1:01:03Elon MuskWell, I mean, you can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of Bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas. And then I don't know exactly. Obviously, I don't know who created Bitcoin for practical purposes, but the evolution of ideas is pretty clear before that.
1:01:29Elon MuskAnd it seems as though Nick Szabo is probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas. So he claims not to be Nakamoto, but I'm not sure.
1:01:43Elon MuskThat's neither here nor there. But he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else.
1:01:50Lex FridmanSo it's not perhaps like singular figures aren't even as important as the figures involved in the evolution of ideas that led to a thing. Perhaps. It's sad to think about history, but maybe most names would be forgotten anyway.
1:02:06Elon MuskWhat is the name anyway? It's a name. A name attached to an idea. What does it even mean, really?
1:02:13Lex FridmanI think Shakespeare had a thing about roses and stuff. Whatever he said.
1:02:17Elon MuskRose by any other name. It smells sweet.
1:02:22Lex FridmanI got Elon to quote Shakespeare. I feel like I accomplished something today.
1:02:26Elon MuskShall I compare thee to a summer's day? I'm going to clip that out. More temperate Animal Fair.
1:02:39Lex FridmanAutopilot. Tesla Autopilot.
1:02:46Lex FridmanTesla Autopilot has been through an incredible journey over the past six years or perhaps even longer in the minds of. In your mind. In the minds of many involved.
1:02:56Elon MuskYeah. I think that's where we're first, like, connected really, with the Autopilot stuff. Autonomy.
1:03:01Lex FridmanAnd the whole journey was incredible to me to watch. I was. Because I knew. Well, part of is I was at mit and I. I knew the difficulty of computer vision.
1:03:12Elon MuskYeah.
1:03:13Lex FridmanAnd I knew the whole. I had a lot of colleagues and friends about the Darber challenge. I knew how difficult it is. And so there was a natural skepticism when I first drove a Tesla with the initial system based on mobileye.
1:03:24Elon MuskYeah.
1:03:25Lex FridmanI thought there's no way. So first when I got in, I thought, there's no way this car could maintain, like, stay in the lane and create a comfortable experience.
1:03:35Lex FridmanSo my intuition initially was that the lane keeping problem is way too difficult to solve.
1:03:41Elon MuskOh, lane keeping. Yeah. That's relatively easy.
1:03:43Lex FridmanWell, like. But not this. But solve in the way that we just. We talked about previous is prototype versus a thing that actually creates a pleasant experience over hundreds of thousands of miles or millions.
1:03:57Lex FridmanYeah.
1:03:57Elon MuskSo we had to wrap a lot of code around the mobileye thing. It didn't just work by itself.
1:04:03Lex FridmanYes. I mean, that's part of the story of how you approach things sometimes. Sometimes you do things from scratch. Sometimes at first you kind of see what's out there and then you decide to do from scratch.
1:04:14Lex FridmanThat was one of the boldest decisions I've seen, is both on the hardware and the software to decide to eventually go from scratch. I thought, again, I was skeptical whether that's going to be able to work out because it's such a, such a difficult problem.
1:04:26Lex FridmanAnd so it was an incredible journey. What I see now with everything, the hardware, the compute, the sensors, the things I maybe care and love about most is the stuff that Andrej Karpathy is leading with the data set selection, the whole data engine process, the neural network architectures, the way that's in the real world, that network is tested, validated, all the different test sets, versus the ImageNet model of computer vision.
1:04:54Lex FridmanLike what's in academia is like real world artificial intelligence.
1:05:01Elon MuskAndre is awesome and obviously plays an important role, but we have a lot of really talented people driving things. And Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering, Andre's director of AI.
1:05:16Lex FridmanAI stuff. Yeah, yeah. So yeah there's, I'm aware that there's an incredible team of just a lot going on. Yeah.
1:05:22Elon MuskJust, you know, people will give, will give me too much credit and they'll give Andre too much credit, so.
1:05:28Lex FridmanAnd people should realize how much is going on under the hood.
1:05:33Elon MuskA lot of really talented people. The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. It's like some of the smartest people in the world. So yeah, we're getting it done.
1:05:45Lex FridmanWhat are some insights you've gained over those five, six years of autopilot about the problem of autonomous driving? So you leaped in having some sort of first principles, kinds of intuitions, but nobody knows how difficult.
1:06:05Elon MuskI thought the self driving problem would be hard, but it was harder than I thought. It's not like I thought it would be easy. I thought it would be very hard, but it was actually way harder than even that.
1:06:14Elon MuskSo what it comes down to at the end of the day is to solve self driving, you have to solve. You basically need to recreate what humans do to drive, which is humans drive with optical sensors, eyes and biological neural nets.
1:06:34Elon MuskAnd so in order to that that's how the entire road system is designed to work with, with basically passive optical and neural nets biologically. And now that we need to.
1:06:47Elon MuskSo for actually for full self driving to work, we have to recreate that in digital form. So we have to. That that means cameras with advanced camera neural nets in silicon form.
1:07:04Elon MuskAnd then it will obviously solve for full self driving. That's the only way. I don't think there's any other way.
1:07:10Lex FridmanBut the question is what aspects of human nature do you have to encode into the machine? So you have to solve the perception problem and then you first realize what is the perception problem for driving.
1:07:23Lex FridmanAll the kinds of Things you have to be able to see. What do we even look at when we drive? I just recently heard Andre talked about at MIT about car doors.
1:07:33Lex FridmanI think it was the world's greatest talk of all time about car doors. The fine details of car doors. What is even an open car door, man. So the ontology of that, that's a perception problem.
1:07:47Lex FridmanWe humans solve that perception problem and Tesla has to solve that problem. And then there's the control and the planning coupled with the perception. You have to figure out what's involved in driving, especially in all the different edge cases.
1:08:04Lex FridmanMaybe you can comment on this. How much game theoretic kind of stuff needs to be involved at a four way stop sign. As humans when we drive, our actions affect the world.
1:08:18Lex FridmanIt changes how others behave. Most of the time was driving if you, you're usually just responding to the scene as opposed to like really asserting yourself in the scene.
1:08:31Lex FridmanDo you think?
1:08:32Elon MuskI think these, I think, I think these, these sort of control logic conundrums are not, are not the hard part. The, you know, let's see,
1:08:45Lex Fridmanwhat do you think is the hard part in this whole beautiful complex problem?
1:08:50Elon MuskSo it's a lot of freaking software man. A lot of smart lines of code for sure in order to have create an accurate vector space. So like if you're, you're coming from image space which is like this, this flow of photons, you're going to the camera cameras and then you have this massive bit stream in image space and then you have to effectively compress a massive bitstream corresponding to photons that knocked off an electron in a camera sensor and turn that bitstream into vector space.
1:09:47Elon MuskBy vector space I mean like you've got cars and humans and lane lines and curves and traffic lights and that kind of thing. Once you have an accurate vector space, the control problem is similar to that of a video game like a Grand Theft Auto of Cyberpunk.
1:10:13Elon MuskIf you have accurate, accurate vector space, it's the control problem is. I wouldn't say it's trivial, it's not trivial, but it's not like some insurmountable thing. But having an accurate vector space is very difficult.
1:10:31Lex FridmanYeah, I think we're. Humans don't give enough respect to how incredible the human perception system is mapping the raw photons to the vector space representation in our heads.
1:10:44Elon MuskYour brain is doing an incredible amount of processing and giving you an image that is a very cleaned up image. Like when we look around here we see like you see color in the corners of your eyes, but actually Your eyes have very few cones like cone receptors in the peripheral vision.
1:11:02Elon MuskYour eyes are painting color in the peripheral vision. You don't realize it, but their eyes are actually painting color. And your eyes also have this blood vessels and all sorts of gnarly things.
1:11:13Elon MuskAnd there's a blind spot. But do you see your blind spot? No. Your brain is painting in the missing. The blind spot. You're going to do these things online where you look here and look at this point and then look at this point and it's.
1:11:28Elon MuskIf it's in your blind spot, your brain will just fill in the missing bits.
1:11:33Lex FridmanThe peripheral vision is so cool, makes you realize all the illusions for vision science. It makes you realize just how incredible the brain is.
1:11:40Elon MuskThe brain is doing crazy amount of post processing on the vision signals for your eyes. It's insane. And then even once you get all those vision signals, your brain is constantly trying to forget as much as possible.
1:11:57Elon MuskSo human memory is perhaps the weakest thing about the brain is memory. So because memory is so expensive to our brain and so limited, your brain is trying to forget as much as possible and distill the things that you see into the smallest amounts of information possible.
1:12:16Elon MuskSo your brain is trying to not just get to a vector space, but get to a vector space that is the smallest possible vector space of only relevant objects.
1:12:26Elon MuskAnd I think you can sort of look inside your brain, or at least I can. Like when you drive down the road and try to think about what your brain is actually doing consciously.
1:12:38Elon MuskAnd it's like you'll see a car because you don't have cameras. You don't have eyes in the back of your head or the side. So you say like, you're basically.
1:12:51Elon MuskYour head is like a. You basically have like two cameras on a slow gimbal. And what's your. And eyesight's not that great. Okay. Human eyes are. People are constantly distracted and thinking about things and texting and doing all sorts of things they shouldn't do in a car.
1:13:09Elon MuskChanging the radio station. So having arguments is like, so. So then like say like, when's the last time you looked right and left and rearward or even diagonally forward to actually refresh your vector space.
1:13:31Elon MuskSo you're glancing around and what your mind is doing is trying to distill the relevant vectors, basically objects with a position and motion, and then editing that down to the least amount that's necessary for you to drive.
1:13:49Lex FridmanIt does seem to be able to edit it down or compress it even further into things like concepts it's like it goes beyond the human mind, seems to go sometimes beyond vector space to sort of space of concepts to where you'll see a thing.
1:14:04Lex FridmanIt's no longer represented spatially somehow. It's almost like a concept you should be aware of. Like, if this is a school zone, you'll remember that as a concept, which is a weird thing to represent, but perhaps for driving, you don't need to fully represent those things.
1:14:20Lex FridmanOr maybe you get those kind of. Well, indirectly.
1:14:26Elon MuskYou need to establish vector space and then actually have predictions for those vector spaces. So, like, you know, like, if, you know, like you drive past, say, say, a bus and you see that there's.
1:14:45Elon MuskThere's people. Before you drove past the bus, you saw people crossing, like, or some. Just imagine there's like a large truck or something blocking site. But you. Before you came up to the truck, you saw that there were some kids about to cross the road in front of the truck.
1:15:01Elon MuskNow you can no longer see the kids, but you need to be able. But you would now know, okay, those kids are probably going to pass by the truck and cross the road, even though you cannot see them.
1:15:12Elon MuskSo you have to have memory. You need to remember that there were kids there, and you need to have some forward prediction of what their position will be.
1:15:23Lex FridmanIt's a really hard problem. So with occlusions and computer vision, when you can't see an object anymore, even when it just walks behind a tree and reappears, that's a really, really.
1:15:34Lex FridmanI mean, at least in academic literature, it's tracking through occlusions. It's very difficult.
1:15:40Elon MuskYeah, we're doing it.
1:15:41Lex FridmanI understand this.
1:15:42Elon MuskYeah. So some of it, it's like object permanence. Like, same thing happens with the humans with neural nets. Like, when, like, a toddler grows up, like, there's a. There's a point in time where they develop.
1:15:54Elon MuskThey have a sense of object permanence. So. So before a certain age, if you have a ball or a toy or whatever, and you put it behind your back and you pop it out.
1:16:02Elon MuskIf they don't, before they have object permanence, it's like a new thing every time. It's like, whoa, this toy went poof. Disappeared, and now it's back again, and they can't believe it, and that they can play peekaboo all day long because the peekaboo is fresh every time.
1:16:16Elon MuskBut then we figure out object permanence. Then they realize, oh, no, the object is not gone. It's just behind your back.
1:16:22Lex FridmanSometimes I Wish we never did figure out determinants.
1:16:26Elon MuskYeah, so
1:16:29Lex Fridmanthat's an important problem to solve.
1:16:31Elon MuskYes. So like an important evolution of the neural nets in the car is.
1:16:41Elon MuskMemory across both time and space. So now you can't remember like you have to say, like how long do you want to remember things for? And there's a cost to remembering things for a long time.
1:16:53Elon MuskSo you out of memory, if you try to remember too much for too long, and then you also have things that are stale, if they're remembering for too long, then you also need things that are remembered over time.
1:17:06Elon MuskSo even if you say have, for argument's sake, five seconds of memory on a time basis, but let's say you're proced at light and you saw, use a pedestrian example.
1:17:20Elon MuskIf people were waiting to cross the across the road and you can't quite see them because of an occlusion, but they might wait for a minute before the light changes for them to cross the road, you still need to remember that that's where they were and that they're probably going to cross the road type of thing.
1:17:40Elon MuskSo even if that exceeds your time based memory, it should not exceed your space memory.
1:17:48Lex FridmanAnd I just think the data engine side of that. So getting the data to learn all of the concepts that you're saying now is an incredible process. It's this iterative process of just this Hydronet of many.
1:18:00Elon MuskHydronet. We're changing the name to something else.
1:18:05Lex FridmanOkay. I'm sure it'll be equally as Rick and Morty, like
1:18:11Elon Muskwe've rearchitected the neural nets in the cars so many times, it's crazy.
1:18:17Lex FridmanAlso, every time there's a new major version, you'll rename it to something more ridiculous or, or memorable and beautiful. Sorry, not ridiculous.
1:18:25Elon MuskOf course, if you see the full array of neural nets that are operating in the car, it kind of boggles the mind. There's so many layers, it's crazy.
1:18:43Elon MuskAnd we started off with simple neural nets that were basically image recognition on a single frame from a single camera and then trying to knit those together
1:19:00Lex Fridmanwith
1:19:03Elon MuskC. I should say we're really primarily running C here because C is too much overhead and we have our own C compiler. So to get maximum performance, we actually wrote our own C compiler and are continuing to optimize our C compiler for maximum efficiency.
1:19:20Elon MuskIn fact, we've just recently done a new rev on a C compiler that will compile directly to our Autopilot hardware.
1:19:26Lex FridmanSo you want to compile the whole thing down with your own compiler?
1:19:30Elon MuskYeah.
1:19:30Lex FridmanLike so efficiency here because there's all kinds of compute, there's cpu, gpu, there's like the ASIC types of things. And you have to somehow figure out the scheduling across all of those things.
1:19:40Lex FridmanAnd so you're compiling the code down. That does all. Okay, so that's why there's a lot of people involved.
1:19:47Elon MuskThere's a lot of hardcore software engineering at a very sort of bare metal level because we're trying to do a lot of compute that's constrained to our full self driving computer.
1:20:03Elon MuskAnd we want to try to have the highest frames per second possible in a very finite amount of compute and power. So we really put a lot of effort into the efficiency of our compute.
1:20:23Elon MuskAnd so there's actually a lot of work done by some very talented software engineers at Tesla that at a very foundational level to improve the efficiency of compute and how we use the, the trip accelerators which are basically doing matrix math dot products like a bazillion dot products.
1:20:47Elon MuskIt's like what are neural nets? It's like compute wise like 99%.products.
1:20:56Lex FridmanAnd you want to achieve as many high frame rates like a video game. You want full resolution, high frame rate,
1:21:04Elon Muskhigh frame rate, low latency, low jitter. So. One of the things we're moving towards now is no post processing of the image through the image signal processor. So like what happens for cameras is that almost all cameras is they there's a lot of post processing done in order to make pictures look pretty.
1:21:40Elon MuskAnd so we don't care about pictures looking pretty, we just want the data. So we're moving to just raw photon counts so the system will like. The image that the computer sees is actually much more than what you'd see if you represented it on a camera.
1:21:59Elon MuskIt's got much more data and even in very low light conditions you can see that there's a small photon count difference between this spot here and that spot there.
1:22:08Elon MuskWhich means that so it can see in the dark incredibly well because it can detect these tiny differences in photon counts much better than you could possibly imagine. And then we also save 13 milliseconds on a latency
1:22:29Lex Fridmanfrom removing the post processing in the image.
1:22:31Elon MuskYes, it's like because we've got eight cameras and then there's roughly, I don't know, one and a half milliseconds or so maybe 1.6 milliseconds of latency for each camera.
1:22:46Elon MuskAnd so going to just basically bypassing the image processor gets us back 13 milliseconds of latency which is important. And we track latency all the way from photon hits the camera to all the steps that it's got to go through to go through the various neural nets and the C code.
1:23:14Elon MuskAnd there's a little bit of C there as well. Well, I can maybe a lot, but the core stuff is the heavy duty computers all in C. And so we track that latency all the way to an output command to the drive unit to accelerate the brakes, just to slow down the steering turn left or right because you got to output a command that's going to go to a controller.
1:23:41Elon MuskAnd some of these controllers have an update frequency that's maybe 10 hertz or something, something like that, which is slow. That's like now you lose 100 milliseconds potentially. So then we want to update the drivers on the like, say steering and braking control to have more like 100 hertz instead of 10 hertz and you get a 10 millisecond latency instead of 100 milliseconds, worst case latency.
1:24:06Elon MuskAnd actually jitter is more of a challenge than latency because latency is like you can anticipate and predict. But if you're. But if you've got a stack up of things going from the camera to the computer, through then a series of other computers and finally to an actuator on the car, if you have a stack up of tolerances, of timing tolerances, then you can have quite a variable latency which is called jitter.
1:24:30Elon MuskAnd that makes it hard to anticipate exactly how you should turn the car or accelerate. Because if you've got maybe 150, 200 milliseconds of jitter, then you could be off by up to 0.2 seconds.
1:24:45Elon MuskAnd this could make a big difference.
1:24:47Lex FridmanSo you have to interpolate somehow to deal with the effects of jitter so you can make robust control decisions. So the jitter is in the sensor information or the jitter can occur at any stage in the pipeline.
1:25:06Elon MuskIf you have fixed latency, you can anticipate and like say, okay, we know that our information is for argument's sake, 150 millisecond stale, like so 150 milliseconds from photon second camera to where you can measure a change in the acceleration of the vehicle.
1:25:33Elon MuskSo then you can say, okay, well we're going to, we know it's 150 milliseconds, so we're going to take that into account and compensate for that latency. However, if you've got then 150 milliseconds of latency plus 100 milliseconds of jitter, which could be anywhere from 0 to 100 milliseconds on top.
1:25:52Elon MuskSo then your latency could be from 150, 250 milliseconds. Now you've got 100 milliseconds that you don't know what to do with. And that's basically random. So getting rid of jitter is extremely
1:26:03Lex Fridmanimportant and that affects your control decisions and all those kinds of things.
1:26:07Elon MuskOkay, yeah. The car is just going to fundamentally maneuver better with lower jitter. Got it. The cars will maneuver with superhuman ability and reaction time much faster than the human.
1:26:20Elon MuskI mean, I think over time autopilot, full self driving will be capable of maneuvers that you know, you know are far more than what like James Bond could do in like the best movie type of thing.
1:26:36Lex FridmanThat's exactly what I was imagining in my mind as you said it.
1:26:40Elon MuskIt's like impossible maneuvers that a human couldn't do. You know so well.
1:26:45Lex FridmanLet me ask, sort of looking back the six years, looking out into the future, based on your current understanding, how hard do you think this, this full self driving problem, when do you think Tesla will solve level 4Fs?
1:27:00Elon MuskI mean it's looking quite likely that it will be next year.
1:27:05Lex FridmanAnd what does the solution look like? Is it the current pool of FSD beta candidates, they start getting greater and greater as they have been degrees of autonomy and then there's a certain level beyond which they can do their own, they can read a book.
1:27:22Elon MuskYeah. So I mean you can see that anybody who's been following the full self driving beta closely will see that the rate of disengagements has been dropping rapidly. So like a disengagement be where the driver intervenes to prevent the car from doing something dangerous potentially.
1:27:44Elon MuskSo.
1:27:49Elon MuskThe interventions per million miles has been dropping dramatically at some point and that trend looks like it happens next year is that the probability of an accident on FSD is less than that of the average human and then significantly less than that of the average human.
1:28:14Elon MuskSo appears like we will get there next year. Then of course then there's going to be a case of okay, we now have to prove this to regulators and prove it to.
1:28:27Elon MuskAnd we want a standard that is not just equivalent to a human, but much better than the average human. I think it's got to be at least two or three times higher safety than a human.
1:28:39Elon MuskSo two or three times lower probability of injury than a human. Before we would actually say like, okay, it's okay to go. It's not going to be equivalent, it's going to be much better.
1:28:48Lex FridmanSo if you look 10, FSD 10.6 just came out recently. 10.7 is on the way. Maybe 11 is on the way somewhere in the future.
1:28:58Elon MuskYeah, we were hoping to get 11 out this year, but it's 11 actually has a whole bunch of fundamental rewrites on the neural net architecture and some fundamental improvements in creating vector space.
1:29:17Elon MuskSo
1:29:19Lex Fridmanthere is some fundamental leap that really deserves the 11. I mean that's a pretty cool number.
1:29:25Elon MuskYeah, 11 would be a single stack for all one stack to rule them all and. But there are just some really fundamental neural net architecture changes that will allow
1:29:44Lex Fridmanfor
1:29:46Elon Muskmuch more capability. But at first they're going to have issues. We have this working on alpha software and it's good, but it's basically taking a whole bunch of C C code and deleting a massive amount of C code and replacing it with a neural net and, and makes this point a lot, which is like neural nets are kind of eating software.
1:30:12Elon MuskOver time there's less and less conventional software, more and more neural net, which is still software but it still comes out the lines of software. But more neural net stuff and less heuristics.
1:30:29Elon MuskBasically if you're more matrix based stuff and less heuristics based stuff and you know, like, like one of the big changes will be like right now the neural nets will deliver a giant bag of points to the C or C and C code.
1:31:05Elon MuskWe call it the giant bag of points. And it's like, so you got a pixel and something associated with that pixel. Like this pixel is probably car. This pixel is probably lane line.
1:31:17Elon MuskThen you've got to assemble this giant bag of points in the C code and turn it into vectors. And it does a pretty good job of it. But.
1:31:33Elon MuskWe need another layer of neural nets on top of that to take the giant bag of points and distill that down to vector space in the neural net part of the software as opposed to the heuristics part of the software.
1:31:48Elon MuskThis is a big improvement.
1:31:51Lex FridmanNeural nets all the way down is what you want.
1:31:53Elon MuskIt's not going to be all neural nets, but it's. This will be just a, this is a game changer to not have the bag of points, the giant bag of points that has to be assembled with many lines of CPC and have a neural net just assemble those into a vector.
1:32:12Elon MuskSo the neural net is outputting much, much less data it's outputting. This is a lane line. This is a curb. This is drivable space. This is a car. This is pedestrian or cyclist or something like that.
1:32:32Elon MuskIt's really outputting proper vectors to the C C control code, as opposed to sort of constructing the vectors in C, which we've done, I think, quite a good job of.
1:32:52Elon MuskBut we're kind of hitting a local maximum on how well the seat can do this. So this is really a big deal. And just all of the networks in the car needs move to surround video.
1:33:06Elon MuskThere's still some legacy networks that are not surround video. And all of the training needs to move to surround video. And the efficiency of the training needs to get better.
1:33:17Elon MuskAnd it is. And then we need to move everything to raw photon counts as opposed to processed images, which is quite a big reset on the training because the system's trained on post processed images.
1:33:35Elon MuskSo we need to redo all the training to train against the raw photon counts instead of the post processed image.
1:33:44Lex FridmanSo ultimately, it's kind of reducing the complexity of the whole thing.
1:33:47Elon MuskSo reducing the lines of code will actually go lower.
1:33:51Lex FridmanYeah. That's fascinating. So you're doing fusion of all the sensors, so reducing the complexity of having
1:33:57Elon Muskto deal with these fusion cameras. There's other cameras, really, right? Yes.
1:34:04Lex FridmanSame with humans. I guess. We got ears too. Okay.
1:34:07Elon MuskYeah. We'll actually need to incorporate sound as well because you need to listen for ambulance sirens or fire trucks or somebody yelling at you or something. I don't know.
1:34:21Elon MuskThere's a little bit of audio that needs to be incorporated as well.
1:34:24Lex FridmanDo you need a quick bath break?
1:34:26Elon MuskYeah, sure. Let's take a break.
1:34:27Lex FridmanOkay.
1:34:28Elon MuskHonestly, frankly, the ideas are the easy thing and the implementation is the hard thing. Like, the idea of going to the moon is the easy part, but going to the moon is the hard part.
1:34:39Lex FridmanIt's the hard part.
1:34:40Elon MuskAnd there's a lot of hardcore engineering that's got to get done at the hardware and software level. Like I said, optimizing the C compiler and just cutting out latency everywhere.
1:34:57Elon MuskIf we don't do this, the system will not work properly. So the work of the engineers doing this, they are like the unsung heroes, but they are critical to the success of the situation.
1:35:09Lex FridmanI think he made it clear. I mean, at least to me, it's super exciting. Everything that's going on outside of what Andre is doing, just the whole infrastructure of the software, I mean, everything that's going on with Data Engine, whatever it's called, the whole process is just work of art.
1:35:24Elon MuskThe sheer scale of it is boggles mind like the training, the amount of work done with like we've written all this custom software for training and labeling and to do auto labeling.
1:35:34Elon MuskAuto labeling is essential because especially when you've got like surround video, it's very difficult to like label surround video from scratch is extremely difficult. Like take a human such a long time to even label one video clip, like several hours or the auto label, it basically just apply like heavy duty, like a lot of compute to the video clips to pre assign and guess what all the things are that are going on in the surround video and
1:36:09Lex Fridmanthen they're like correcting it. Yeah.
1:36:11Elon MuskAll the human has to do is tweet like say adjust what is incorrect. This is like increases productivity by effect 100 or more.
1:36:21Lex FridmanYeah. So you've presented Tesla Bot as primarily useful in the factory. First of all, I think humanoid robots are incredible from a fan of robotics. I think the elegance of movement that human, the humanoid robots, the bipedal robots show are just so cool.
1:36:38Lex FridmanSo it's really interesting that you're working on this and also talking about applying the same kind of all the ideas of some of which we've talked about with Data Engine, all the things that we're talking about with Tesla Autopilot, just transferring that over to the, just yet another robotics problem.
1:36:54Lex FridmanI have to ask, since I care about human robot interaction. So the human side of that, so you've talked about mostly in the factory, do you see it also, do you see as part of this problem that Tesla Bot has to solve, is interacting with humans and potentially having a place like in the home.
1:37:10Lex FridmanSo interacting not just, sure, not replacing labor, but also like, I don't know, being a friend or an assistant.
1:37:18Elon MuskI think the, the possibilities are endless.
1:37:27Elon MuskYeah, it's obviously like a, it's not quite in Tesla's primary mission direction of accelerating sustainable energy, but it is an extremely useful thing that we can do for the world, which is to make a useful humanoid robot that is capable of interacting with the world and helping in many different ways.
1:37:49Elon MuskSo certainly in fact reason and really just, I mean I think if you say like extrapolate to, you know, many years in the future, it's like I think work will become optional.
1:38:05Elon MuskSo like there's a lot of jobs that if people weren't paid to do it, they, they wouldn't do it. It's not fun necessarily if you're washing dishes all day.
1:38:16Elon MuskIt's like even if you really like washing dishes, you really want to do it for eight hours a day every day. Probably Not. And then there's dangerous work. And basically if it's dangerous, boring, has potential for repetitive stress injury, that kind of thing, then that's really where humanoid robots would add the most value initially.
1:38:41Elon MuskSo that's what we're aiming for, is for the humanoid robots to do jobs that people don't voluntarily want to do and then we'll have to pair that obviously with some kind of universal basic income in the future.
1:38:57Elon MuskSo I think.
1:39:01Lex FridmanDo you see a world when there's like hundreds of millions of Tesla bots doing different, performing different tasks throughout the world?
1:39:12Elon MuskYeah, I haven't really thought about it that far into the future, but I guess there may be something like that. So
1:39:20Lex Fridmanask a wild question. So the number of Tesla cars has been accelerating. There's been close to 2 million produced. Many of them have autopilot.
1:39:30Elon MuskI think we're over 2 million now. Yeah.
1:39:32Lex FridmanDo you think there will ever be a time when there'll be more Tesla bots than Tesla cars?
1:39:40Elon MuskYeah, actually it's funny you asked this question because normally I do try to think pretty far into the future, but I haven't really thought that far into the future with the Tesla bot, or it's codenamed Optimus, I call it Optimus Subprime because it's not like a giant, you know, Transformer robot.
1:40:04Elon MuskSo but it's meant to be a general purpose help robot.
1:40:14Elon MuskAnd basically like the things that we're basically like. Tesla I think has the most advanced real world AI for interacting with the real world, which we've developed as a function of to make self driving work.
1:40:30Elon MuskAnd so along with custom hardware and like a lot of hardcore low level software to have it run efficiently and be power efficient. Because it's one thing to do neural nets if you've got a gigantic server room with 10,000 computers.
1:40:45Elon MuskBut now let's say you have to now distill that down into one computer that's running at low power. In a humanoid robot or a car that's actually very difficult and a lot of hardcore software work is required for that.
1:40:59Elon MuskSo since we're kind of like solving the navigate the real world with neural nets problem for cars which are kind of like robots with four wheels, then it's like kind of a natural extension of that is to put it in a robot with arms and legs and actuators.
1:41:20Elon MuskSo.
1:41:25Elon MuskLike, like the, the two like hard things are like you basically need to make the have the row of be intelligent enough to interact in a sensible way with the environment.
1:41:36Elon MuskSo you need real Real world AI. And you need to be very good at manufacturing, which is a very hard problem. Tesla is very good at manufacturing and also has the real world AI.
1:41:49Elon MuskSo making the humanoid robot work is basically means developing custom motors and sensors that are different from what a car would use. But I think we have the best expertise in developing advanced electric motors and power electronics.
1:42:15Elon MuskSo it just has to be for humanoid robot application, not a car.
1:42:22Lex FridmanStill, you do talk about love sometimes. So let me ask, this isn't like for like sex robots or something I
1:42:29Elon Musklove, is the answer.
1:42:30Lex FridmanYes, there is something compelling to us. Not compelling, but we connect with humanoid robots or even legged robots, like with a dog in shapes of dogs. It just, it seems like, you know, there's a huge amount of loneliness in this world.
1:42:48Lex FridmanAll of us seek companionship with other humans, friendship and all those kinds of things. We have a lot here in Austin. A lot of people have dogs.
1:42:55Elon MuskSure.
1:42:56Lex FridmanThere seems to be a huge opportunity to also have robots that decrease the amount of loneliness in the world or help us humans connect with each, with each other.
1:43:10Lex FridmanSo in the way that dogs can. Do you think about that with Tessabot at all or is it really focused on the problem of performing specific tasks, not connecting with humans?
1:43:23Elon MuskI mean, to be honest, I have not actually thought about it from the companionship standpoint, but I think it actually would end up being. It could be actually a very good companion and it could.
1:43:36Elon MuskYou develop like a personality over time that is, that is like unique. Like, you know, it's not like they're just all the robots are the same and that personality could evolve to be, you know, match, match the owner or the, you know, I guess the owner.
1:43:59Elon MuskWell, whatever you want to call it, the other, the companion half.
1:44:03Lex FridmanRight. In the same way that friends do. See, I think that's a huge opportunity. I think.
1:44:09Elon MuskYeah. No, that's interesting because there's a Japanese phrase like wabi sabi. The subtle imperfections are what makes something special. And the subtle imperfections of the personality of the robot mapped to the subtle imperfections of the robot's human friend.
1:44:34Elon MuskI don't know, owner sounds like maybe the wrong word, but could actually make an incredible buddy, basically.
1:44:42Lex FridmanAnd in that way, the imperfection R2D2
1:44:44Elon Muskor like a C3PO sort of thing, you know.
1:44:46Lex FridmanSo from a machine learning perspective, I think the flaws being a feature is really nice. You could be quite terrible at being a robot for quite a while in the general home environment or all the.
1:44:59Lex FridmanIn the general world. And that's kind of adorable. And that's like, those are your flaws and you fall in love with those flaws. So it's very different than autonomous driving where it's a very high stakes environment you cannot mess up.
1:45:13Lex FridmanAnd so, yes. Yeah, it's more fun to be a robot in the home.
1:45:17Elon MuskYeah. In fact, if you think of like C3PO and R2D2.
1:45:21Lex FridmanYeah.
1:45:21Elon MuskLike, they actually had a lot of like flaws and imperfections and silly things and they would argue with each other.
1:45:29Lex FridmanWere they actually good at doing anything? I'm not exactly sure.
1:45:33Elon MuskThey definitely added a lot to the story, but there's sort of quirky elements and you know that they would like, make mistakes and do things. It was like it made them relatable, I don't know, enduring.
1:45:52Elon MuskSo, yeah, I think that could be something that probably would happen. But our initial focus is just to make it useful. I'm confident we'll get it done. I'm not sure what the exact time frame is, but we'll probably have, I don't know, a decent prototype towards the end of next year or something like that.
1:46:15Lex FridmanAnd it's cool that it's connected to Tesla, the car.
1:46:20Elon MuskYeah, it's using a lot of. It would use the autopilot inference computer and a lot of the training that we've done for cars in terms of recognizing real world things could be applied directly to the robot.
1:46:38Elon MuskBut there's a lot of custom actuators and sensors that need to be developed
1:46:42Lex Fridmanand an extra module on top of the vector space for love. Yeah, that's me saying, okay, we can
1:46:51Elon Muskadd that to the car too. That's true.
1:46:55Lex FridmanThat could be useful in all environments. Like you said, a lot of people argue in the car, so maybe we can help them out. You're a student of history, fan of Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast?
1:47:06Elon MuskYeah, it's great.
1:47:06Lex FridmanGreatest podcast ever.
1:47:08Elon MuskYeah, I think it is, actually.
1:47:11Lex FridmanIt almost doesn't really count as a podcast.
1:47:13Elon MuskYeah, it's more like a audiobook. Yeah.
1:47:16Lex FridmanSo you were on the podcast with Dan. I just had a chat with him about it. He said you guys went military and all that kind of stuff.
1:47:23Elon MuskYeah, it's literally. It was basically. It should be titled Engineer wars. Essentially. Like when there's a rabid change in the rate of technology, then engineering plays a pivotal role in victory and battle.
1:47:43Lex FridmanHow far back in history did you go? Did you go World War II?
1:47:48Elon MuskWell, it was supposed to be a deep dive on fighters and bomber technology in World War II, but that ended up being more wide ranging than that because I just went down a total rat hole of studying all of the fighters and bombers, World War II and like the constant rock paper, scissors game that like, you know, one country make this plane, then it makes a plane to beat that and that plane to beat that.
1:48:13Elon MuskAnd then, and really what matters like the pace of innovation and also access to high quality fuel and raw materials. So like Germany had like some amazing designs, but they couldn't make them because they couldn't get the raw materials.
1:48:31Elon MuskAnd they had a real problem with the oil and fuel. Basically the fuel quality was extremely variable.
1:48:39Lex FridmanSo the design wasn't the Botnek. It was.
1:48:42Elon MuskYeah, like the US had kick ass fuel that was very consistent. The problem is if you make a very high performance aircraft engine, in order to make high performance you have to.
1:48:53Elon MuskThe fuel, the aviation gas has to be a consistent mixture and it has to have a high octane. Like high octane is the most important thing, but also can't have impurities and stuff because you'll foul up the engine.
1:49:14Elon MuskAnd Germany just never had good access to oil. They try to get it by invading the Caucasus, but that didn't work too well. That never works well, didn't work out for them.
1:49:26Elon MuskNice to meet you. So Germany was always struggling with basically shitty oil and then they couldn't count on high quality fuel for their aircraft. So then they had to have all these additives and stuff.
1:49:43Elon MuskWhereas the US had awesome fuel and that provided that to Britain as well. So that allowed the British and the Americans to design aircraft engines that were super high performance, better than anything else in the world.
1:49:58Elon MuskGermany could design the engines, they just didn't have the fuel. And then also the quality of the aluminum alloys that they were getting was also not that great. And so, you know, is this like
1:50:10Lex Fridmanyou talked about all this with Dan?
1:50:11Elon MuskYep.
1:50:11Lex FridmanAwesome. Broadly looking at history, when you look at Genghis Khan, when you look at Stalin, Hitler, the darkest moments of human history, what do you take away from those moments?
1:50:23Lex FridmanDoes it help you gain insight about human nature, about human behavior today, whether it's the wars or the individuals or just the behavior of people. Any aspects of history?
1:50:41Elon MuskYeah, I find history fascinating.
1:50:49Elon MuskThere's a lot of incredible things that have been done, good and bad, that they help you understand the nature of civilization and individuals.
1:51:04Lex FridmanAnd does it make you sad that humans do these kinds of things to each other? You look at the 20th century, World War II, the cruelty, the abuse of power.
1:51:15Lex FridmanTalk about Communism, Marxism and Stalin.
1:51:20Elon MuskI mean, some of these things do. I mean, if you like, there's a lot of human history. Most of it is actually people just getting on with their lives, you know, and it's not like human history is just non stop war and disaster.
1:51:36Elon MuskThose are actually just. Those are intermittent and rare. If they weren't, then humans would soon cease to exist. But it's just that wars tend to be written about a lot, whereas something being like, well, a normal year where nothing major happened was.
1:51:57Elon MuskDoesn't get written about much. But that's, you know, most people just like farming and kind of like living their life, you know, being a villager somewhere. And every now and again there's a war and I think so.
1:52:16Elon MuskAnd you know, I would have to say, like, there aren't very many books that I. Where I just have to stop reading because it was just too, too dark.
1:52:25Elon MuskBut the book about Stalin, the Court of the Red Czar, I had to stop reading. It was just too dark. Rough.
1:52:37Lex FridmanYeah, the 30s. There's a lot of lessons there. To me in particular, that it feels like humans, like all of us have that it's the old Solzhenitsyn line, that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, that all of us are capable of evil, all of us are capable of good.
1:52:59Lex FridmanIt's almost like this kind of responsibility that all of us have to tend towards the good. And so to me, looking at history is almost like an example of, look, you have some charismatic leader that convinces you of things.
1:53:16Lex FridmanIt's too easy based on that story, to do evil onto each other, onto your family and to others. And so it's like our responsibility to do good. It's not like now is somehow different from history.
1:53:29Lex FridmanThat can happen again. All of it can happen again. And yes, most of the time you're right. I mean, the optimistic view here is mostly people are just living life.
1:53:38Lex FridmanAnd as you've often memed about, the quality of life was way worse back in the day and keeps improving over time through innovation, through technology. But still, it's somehow notable that these blimps of atrocities happen.
1:53:54Elon MuskSure,
1:53:56Lex Fridmanyeah.
1:53:56Elon MuskI mean, life was really tough for most of history. I mean, for most of human history, a good year would be one where not that many people in your village died of the plague, starvation, freezing to death, or being killed by a neighboring village.
1:54:16Elon MuskIt's like, well, it wasn't that bad. It was only like we lost 5% this year. That was a good year. That would be par for the course. Just not starving to death would have been the primary goal of Most people throughout history just making sure we'll have enough food to last through the winter and not get enough freeze or whatever.
1:54:36Lex FridmanSo
1:54:39Elon Musknow food is plentiful. I have an obesity problem.
1:54:46Lex FridmanWell, yeah, the lesson there is to be grateful for the way things are now for some of us. We've spoken about this offline. I'd love to get your thought about it here.
1:54:59Lex FridmanIf I sat down for a long form in person conversation with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, would you potentially want to call in for a few minutes to join in on a conversation with him, moderated, translated by me?
1:55:15Lex FridmanSure.
1:55:15Elon MuskYeah, sure. I'd be happy to do that.
1:55:19Lex FridmanYou've shown interest in the Russian language. Is this grounded in your interest in history of linguistics, culture, general curiosity?
1:55:27Elon MuskI think it sounds cool.
1:55:29Lex FridmanSounds cool. Now it looks cool.
1:55:32Elon MuskWell, it takes a moment to read Cyrillic. Once you know what the Cyrillic characters stand for, actually, then reading Russian becomes a lot easier because there are a lot of words that are actually the same, like bank is bankrupt and so
1:55:55Lex Fridmanfind the words that are exactly the same. And now you start to understand Cyrillic.
1:55:59Elon MuskYeah. If you can sound it out, then it's much. There's at least some commonality of words.
1:56:06Lex FridmanWhat about the culture you love? Great engineering, physics, There's a tradition of the sciences there. You look at the 20th century from rocketry, so some of the greatest rockets of the space exploration has been done in the Soviet and the former Soviet Union.
1:56:23Elon MuskYeah.
1:56:24Lex FridmanSo do you draw inspiration from that history, just how this culture that. In many ways, one of the sad things is because of the language, a lot of it is lost to history because it's not translated all those kinds of.
1:56:37Lex FridmanBecause it, it is in some ways an isolated culture. It flourishes within its. Within its borders.
1:56:44Elon MuskYeah.
1:56:44Lex FridmanSo do you draw inspiration from those folks from. From the history of. Of science, engineering there?
1:56:51Elon MuskI mean, the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine as well, have a really strong history in spaceflight. Like some of the most advanced and impressive things in history were done by the Soviet Union.
1:57:11Elon MuskSo one cannot help but admire the impressive rocket technology that was developed after the fall of the Soviet Union. There's much less that happened, but still things are happening, but it's not quite at the frenetic pace that was happening before the Soviet Union kind of dissolved into separate republics.
1:57:46Lex FridmanYeah, I mean, there's Roscosmos, the Russian agency. I look forward to a time when those countries with China are working together, the United States are all working together. Maybe a little bit of friendly competition,
1:58:01Elon Muskbut I think friendly competition is good. Governments are slow and the only thing slower than one government is a collection of governments. So yeah, the Olympics would be boring if everyone just crossed the finishing line at the same time.
1:58:16Elon MuskYeah, nobody would watch and people wouldn't try hard to run fast and stuff. So I think friendly competition is a good thing.
1:58:26Lex FridmanThis is also a good place to give a shout out to a video titled the Entire Soviet Rocket Engine Family Tree by Tim Dodd, AKA Everyday Astronaut. It's like an hour and a half.
1:58:35Lex FridmanIt gives the full history of Soviet rockets and people should definitely go check out and support him in general. That guy is super excited about the future. Super excited about spaceflight.
1:58:45Lex FridmanEvery time I see anything by him, I just have a stupid smile on my face because he's so excited about stuff.
1:58:51Elon MuskI love people like that. It's really great. If you're interested in anything to do with space in terms of explaining rocket technology to your average person. He's awesome. The best, I'd say, and I should say, like the part of the reason like I switched us from like Raptor at one point was going to be a hydrogen engine.
1:59:15Elon MuskBut hydrogen has a lot of challenges. It's very low density. It's a, it's a deep cryogen, so it's only liquid at a very, you know, very close to absolute zero.
1:59:23Elon MuskRequires a lot of insulation. It's. So there's a lot, a lot of challenges there. And I was actually reading a bit about Russian rocket engine development and at least the impression I had was that Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine primarily were actually in the process of switching to methalox.
1:59:50Elon MuskAnd there were some interesting test stand data for isp. Like they were able to get like up to like a 382nd ISP with the metal ox engine. And I was like, whoa, okay, that's, that's actually really impressive.
2:00:05Elon MuskSo, so I think we could, you could actually get a much lower cost like in optimizing cost per ton to over cost per ton to Mars. It's, I think methane oxygen is the way to go.
2:00:25Elon MuskAnd I was partly inspired by the Russian work on the test stands with method ox engines.
2:00:32Lex FridmanAnd now for something completely different. Do you mind doing a bit of a meme review in the spirit of the great, the powerful PewDiePie? Let's say 1 to 11.
2:00:42Lex FridmanJust go over a few documents, print it out.
2:00:45Elon MuskWe can try.
2:00:46Lex FridmanLet's try this. I present to you document numero uno.
2:00:57Elon MuskOkay.
2:00:58Lex FridmanVladimir discovers marshmallows.
2:01:03Elon MuskThat's not bad.
2:01:07Lex FridmanSo you get it. Because failing things. Yes.
2:01:12Elon MuskI don't Know, three, whatever.
2:01:14Lex FridmanThat's not very good. This is ground in some engineering, some history.
2:01:28Elon MuskYeah. I Give this an 8 out of 10.
2:01:31Lex FridmanWhat do you think about nuclear power?
2:01:33Elon MuskI'm in favor of nuclear power. I think it's in a place that is not subject to extreme natural disasters. I think it's. Nuclear power is a great way to generate electricity.
2:01:48Elon MuskI don't think we should be shutting down nuclear power stations.
2:01:51Lex FridmanYeah, but what about Chernobyl?
2:01:54Elon MuskExactly. So I think people. There's like a lot of fear of radiation and stuff. And it's. I guess the problem is, like, a lot of people just don't. They didn't study engineering or physics.
2:02:13Elon MuskJust the word radiation just sounds scary. So they can't calibrate what radiation means. But radiation is much less dangerous than you think. So, like, for example, Fukushima, when the Fukushima problem happened to the tsunami, I got people in California asking me if they should worry about radiation from Fukushima.
2:02:46Elon MuskI'm like, definitely not. Not even slightly. Not at all. That is crazy. And just to show, like, look, this is how, like, the danger is so much overplayed compared to what it really is that I actually flew to Fukushima and actually I donated a solar power system for water treatment plant and I made a point of eating locally grown vegetables on TV in Fukushima.
2:03:28Elon MuskLike, I'm still alive. Okay.
2:03:31Lex FridmanSo it's not even that the risk of these events is low, but the impact of them is.
2:03:35Elon MuskThe impact is greatly exaggerated.
2:03:38Lex FridmanIt's just human nature.
2:03:40Elon MuskPeople don't know what radiation is. Like, I've had people ask me, like, what about radiation from cell phones causing brain cancer? I'm like, when you say radiation, do you mean photons or particles?
2:03:49Elon MuskThat I don't know, what do you mean, photons, Particles? Do you mean. Let's say photons. What frequency or wavelength? And they're like, no, I have no idea. Do you know that everything's radiating all the time?
2:04:05Elon MuskWhat do you mean? Yeah, everything's radiating all the time. Photons are being emitted by all objects all the time, basically. And if you want to know what it means to stand in front of nuclear fire, go outside.
2:04:21Elon MuskThe sun is a gigantic, you know, thermonuclear reactor that you're staring right at it. Are you still alive? Yes. Okay. Amazing.
2:04:32Lex FridmanYeah. I guess radiation is one of the words that could be used as a tool to fear monger by certain people. That's it.
2:04:40Elon MuskI think people just don't understand.
2:04:41Lex FridmanSo, I mean, that's the way to fight that, that fear I suppose is to understand is to learn.
2:04:46Elon MuskYeah. Just say like, okay, how many people have actually died from nuclear accidents? It's like practically nothing. And say how many people have died from coal plants? And it's a very big number.
2:04:59Elon MuskSo obviously we should not be starting up coal plants and shutting down nuclear plants. Just doesn't make any sense at all. Coal plants, like, I don't know, 100 to 1000 times worse for health than nuclear power plants.
2:05:15Lex FridmanYou want to go to the next one? It's really bad. So that 90, 180 and 360 degrees. Everybody loves the math. Nobody gives a shit about 270.
2:05:27Elon MuskIt's not super funny. I don't know, like two or three. Yeah, this is not, you know, LOL situation.
2:05:37Lex FridmanYeah,
2:05:43Elon MuskThat's pretty good.
2:05:44Lex FridmanThe United States oscillating between establishing and destroying dictatorships. It's like a metro. Is that a metronome?
2:05:50Elon MuskYeah, yeah. It's on a 7 out of 10. It's kind of true.
2:05:54Lex FridmanOh, yeah. This is kind of personal for me. Next one.
2:05:59Elon MuskOh, man. This is Leica.
2:06:00Lex FridmanYeah. Well, no, this is.
2:06:02Elon MuskOr it's like referring to Leica or
2:06:03Lex Fridmansomething as Leica's like husband.
2:06:06Elon MuskHusband. Yeah. Yeah.
2:06:08Lex FridmanHello? Yes, this is Dog. Your wife was launched into space. And then the last one is him with his eyes closed and a bottle of vodka.
2:06:16Elon MuskYeah. Like, it didn't come back.
2:06:17Lex FridmanNo. They don't tell you the full story of, you know what, What? The love. The impact they had on the loved ones.
2:06:24Elon MuskTrue.
2:06:25Lex FridmanThat one gets an 11 for me.
2:06:26Elon MuskSure.
2:06:27Lex FridmanSoviet. Yeah. This keeps going on the Russian theme. First man in space. Nobody cares. First man in the moon.
2:06:36Elon MuskWell, I think people do care.
2:06:37Lex FridmanNo, I know, but
2:06:41Elon MuskYuri Gargari's names will be forever in history. I think there is something special about
2:06:47Lex Fridmanplacing, like stepping foot onto another totally foreign land. It's not the journey like people that explore the oceans. It's not as important to explore the oceans as to land in a whole new continent.
2:07:02Lex FridmanYeah, this is about you. Yeah, I'd love to get your comment on this. Elon Musk, after sending $6.6 billion to the UN to end world hunger, you have three hours.
2:07:17Elon MuskYeah, I mean, obviously $6 billion is not going to end world hunger. So,
2:07:25Elon MuskI mean, the reality is at this point, the world is producing far more food than it can really consume. Like, we don't have a caloric constraint to this point.
2:07:35Elon MuskSo where there is hunger, it is almost always due to like civil war or strife or some like. It's not A thing that is extremely rare for it to be just a matter of like, lack of money.
2:07:53Elon MuskIt's like, you know, it's like there's a civil war in some country and like one part of the country's literally trying to starve the other part of the country.
2:08:02Lex FridmanSo it's much more complex than something that money could solve. It's geopolitics, it's a lot of things. It's human nature, it's governments, it's money, monetary systems, all that kind of stuff.
2:08:14Elon MuskYeah, food is extremely cheap these days. It's like, it's. I mean, the US at this point, among low income families, obesity is actually another problem. Obviously it's not hunger, it's like too many calories.
2:08:34Elon MuskSo it's not that nobody's hungry anywhere, it's just this is not a simple matter of adding money and solving it.
2:08:46Lex FridmanWhat do you think that one gets?
2:08:50Elon Musk2.
2:08:53Lex FridmanHe's going after Empire's world. Where did you get those artifacts? The British Museum. Shout out to Monty Python, we found them.
2:09:02Elon MuskYeah, the British Museum is pretty great. I mean, admittedly Britain did take these historical artifacts from all around the world and put them in London, but it's not like people can't go see them.
2:09:16Elon MuskSo it is a convenient place to see these ancient artifacts is London for a large segment of the world. So I think on balance, the British Museum is a net good.
2:09:28Elon MuskAlthough I'm sure a lot of countries are arguing about that. Yeah, it's like you want to make these historical artifacts accessible to as many people as possible. And the British Museum, I think, does a good job of that.
2:09:41Lex FridmanEven if there's a darker aspect to like the history of empire in general, whatever the empire is, however things were done, it is the history that happened. You can't sort of erase that history, unfortunately.
2:09:54Lex FridmanYou could just become better in the future. It's the point.
2:09:58Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's like, well, how are we going to pass moral judgment on these things? Like, it's like, you know, if one is going to judge, say the British Empire, you've got to judge, you know, what everyone was doing at the time and how were the British relative to everyone?
2:10:17Elon MuskAnd I think they would. British would actually get like a relatively good grade. Relatively good grade. Not in absolute terms, but compared to what everyone else was doing, they were not the worst.
2:10:31Elon MuskLike I said, you got to look at these things in the context of the history at the time and say, what were the alternatives and what are you comparing it against?
2:10:39Elon MuskAnd I do not think it will Be the case that Britain would get a bad grade when looking at history at the time. If you judge history from what is morally acceptable today, you basically are going to give everyone a failing grade.
2:10:58Elon MuskYeah. I'm not clear. I don't think anyone would get a passing grade in their morality of, like, you go back 300 years ago. Like, who's getting a passing grade?
2:11:08Elon MuskBasically no one.
2:11:10Lex FridmanAnd we might not get a passing grade from generations that come after us. What does that one get?
2:11:20Elon MuskSure.
2:11:20Lex FridmanSix, seven for the Monty Python, maybe.
2:11:24Elon MuskI always love Monty Python. They're great. The Life of Brian and the Quest of the Holy Grail are incredible.
2:11:29Lex FridmanYeah.
2:11:29Elon MuskYeah. Damn those serious eyebrows.
2:11:34Lex FridmanHow important do you think is facial hair to great leadership? Well, you got a new haircut. How does that affect your leadership?
2:11:43Elon MuskI don't know. Hopefully not. It doesn't.
2:11:48Lex FridmanYeah. The second is no. 1.
2:11:51Elon MuskThere is no one competing with President no.
2:11:53Lex Fridman1.
2:11:53Elon Musk2. Those are like epic eyebrows. Sure.
2:11:59Lex FridmanThat's ridiculous.
2:12:00Elon MuskGive it a six or seven. I don't know.
2:12:02Lex FridmanI like this, like, Shakespearean analysis of memes.
2:12:06Elon MuskHe had a flair for drama as well. Like, you know, showmanship.
2:12:11Lex FridmanYeah, yeah. It must come from the eyebrows.
2:12:14Elon MuskAll right.
2:12:15Lex FridmanInvention. Great engineering. Look what I invented.
2:12:19Elon MuskYeah.
2:12:19Lex FridmanThat's the best thing since ripped up bread.
2:12:21Elon MuskYeah. They're just sliced bread.
2:12:25Lex FridmanAm I just explaining memes at this point? This is what my life has become,
2:12:36Lex FridmanA meme. What it like a, you know, like a scribe that, like, runs around with the kings and just like, writes down memes.
2:12:44Elon MuskI mean, when was the cheeseburger inventor? That's like an epic invention. Yeah, Like. Like, wow. You know, that was versus just like a burger or burger. I guess a burger in general is like, you know, Then there's like, what is a burger?
2:12:58Lex FridmanWhat's. What's a sandwich? And then you start getting the pizza sandwich. And what is the original? It's. It's. It gets into an ontology argument.
2:13:05Elon MuskYeah. But everybody knows, like, if you order like a burger or cheeseburger or whatever and you, like, you get like, you know, tomato and some lettuce and onions and whatever, and, you know, Marin, ketchup and mustard.
2:13:15Elon MuskIt's like epic.
2:13:16Lex FridmanYeah, but I'm sure they've had bread and meat separately for a long time. And it was kind of a burger on the same plate, but somebody who actually combined them into the same thing and bite it and hold it.
2:13:27Lex FridmanMakes it convenient. It's a materials problem. Like, your hands don't get dirty and whatever.
2:13:33Elon MuskYeah.
2:13:33Lex FridmanIt's brilliant.
2:13:38Lex FridmanWell, that is not what I would
2:13:40Elon Muskhave guessed, but everyone knows, like, if you order a cheeseburger, you know what you're getting. You know, it's not like some obtuse, like, I wonder what I'll get. You know?
2:13:49Elon MuskYou know, fries are, I mean, great. I mean, they were the devil, but fries are awesome. And yeah, pizza is incredible.
2:14:01Lex FridmanFood innovation doesn't get enough love. Yeah, I guess, is what we're getting at.
2:14:05Elon MuskGreat.
2:14:08Lex FridmanWhat about the Matthew McConaughey Austinite here? President Kennedy, do you know how to put men on the moon yet? NASA. No, President Kennedy. Be a lot cooler if he did.
2:14:20Elon MuskPretty much.
2:14:21Lex FridmanSure.
2:14:21Elon MuskSix. Six or seven, I suppose. All right,
2:14:26Lex Fridmanthis is the last one.
2:14:28Elon MuskThat's funny.
2:14:30Lex FridmanSomeone drew a bunch of dicks all over the walls. Sistine Chapel Boys bathroom.
2:14:35Elon MuskSure. I'll give it nine. It's really true.
2:14:39Lex FridmanThis is our highest ranking meme for today.
2:14:42Elon MuskI mean, it's true. Like, how do they get away with that?
2:14:44Lex FridmanLots of nakedness.
2:14:46Elon MuskDick pics are, I mean, just something throughout history, as long as people can draw things, there's been a dick pic.
2:14:53Lex FridmanIt's a staple of human history.
2:14:54Elon MuskIt's a staple consistent throughout human history.
2:14:58Lex FridmanYou tweeted that you aspire to comedy. You're friends with Joe Rogan. Might you do a short stand up comedy set at some point in the future? Maybe open for Joe, something like that?
2:15:09Lex FridmanIs that.
2:15:10Elon MuskIs that stand up actual? Just full on stand up, full on stand up?
2:15:13Lex FridmanIs that in there or is that.
2:15:14Elon MuskI've never thought about that.
2:15:17Lex FridmanIt's extremely difficult, if at least that's what like, Joe says. And the comedians say, huh, I wonder if I could. There's only one way to find out.
2:15:29Elon MuskYou know, I have done stand up for friends, just impromptu, you know, I'll get on like a roof. And they do laugh, but they are friends too. So I don't know if you got to call, like a room of strangers, are they going to actually also find it funny?
2:15:47Elon MuskBut I could try, See what happens.
2:15:51Lex FridmanI think you've learned something either way. Yeah, I kind of love both when you bomb and when you do great. Just watching people, how they deal with it, it's so difficult.
2:16:04Lex FridmanYou're so fragile up there. It's just you and you think you're gonna be funny, and when it completely falls flat, it's just. It's beautiful to see people deal with like that.
2:16:15Elon MuskYeah, I might have enough material to do standards. I've never thought about it, but I might have enough material. I don't know, like 15 minutes or something?
2:16:25Lex FridmanOh, yeah, yeah. Do a Netflix special.
2:16:28Elon MuskNetflix special, sure.
2:16:31Lex FridmanWhat's your favorite Rick and Morty concept? Just to spring that on you, there's a lot of sort of scientific engineering ideas explored there. There's the favorite Morty. There's the butter robots.
2:16:43Elon MuskIt's a great show.
2:16:44Lex FridmanYou like it? Yeah.
2:16:45Elon MuskRick and Morty's awesome.
2:16:47Lex FridmanSomebody that's exactly like you from an alternate dimension showed up there. Elon Tusk.
2:16:51Elon MuskYeah, that's right.
2:16:52Lex FridmanThat you voiced.
2:16:53Elon MuskYeah. Rick and Morty certainly explores a lot of interesting concepts. So, like, what's the favorite one? I don't know. The butter of it certainly is. You know, it's like, it's certainly possible to have too much sentience in a device.
2:17:07Elon MuskLike, you don't want to have your toaster be like a super genius toaster. It's going to hate life because. Or it could just make his toast. But if it's like, you don't want to have like super intelligence stuck in a.
2:17:19Elon MuskA very limited device, do you think
2:17:21Lex Fridmanit's too easy from. If we're talking about from the engineering perspective of super intelligence, like with Marvin the Robot, like, is it. It seems like it might be very easy to engineer just a depressed robot.
2:17:33Lex FridmanLike it.
2:17:34Elon MuskSure.
2:17:35Lex FridmanIt's not obvious to engineer a robot that's going to find a fulfilling existence, same as humans, I suppose. But I wonder if that's like the default. If you don't do a good job on building a robot, it's going to be sad a lot.
2:17:52Elon MuskWell, we can reprogram robots easier than we can reprogram humans. So I guess if you let it evolve without tinkering, then it might get sad. But you can change the optimization function and have it be a cheery robot.
2:18:12Lex FridmanYou. Like I mentioned with SpaceX, you give a lot of people hope. And a lot of people look up to you. Millions of people look up to you. If we think about young people in high school, maybe in college, what advice would you give to them about if they want to try to do something big in this world, they want to really have a big positive impact.
2:18:33Lex FridmanWhat advice would you give them about their career, maybe about life and general.
2:18:39Elon MuskTry to be useful. Do things that are useful to your fellow human beings, to the world? It's very hard to be useful. Very hard. Are you contributing more than you consume?
2:19:00Elon MuskCan you try to have a positive net contribution to society? I think that's the thing to aim for, you know, not. Not try to be sort of a leader for.
2:19:12Elon MuskJust for the sake of being a leader or whatever,
2:19:16Lex Fridmana lot of time.
2:19:17Elon MuskPeople who, a lot of times the people you want as leaders are the people who don't want to be leaders. So.
2:19:29Elon MuskIf you live a useful life, that is a good life, a life worth having lived, you know, and like I said, I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life.
2:19:48Elon MuskThey are the best tools.
2:19:49Lex FridmanWhen you think about education and self education, what do you recommend? So there's the university, there's self study, there is a hands on sort of finding a company or a place or set of people that do the thing you're passionate about and joining them as early as possible.
2:20:08Lex FridmanThere's taking a road trip across Europe for a few years and writing some poetry. Which, which, which trajectory do you suggest in terms of learning about how you can become useful, as you mentioned, how you can have the most positive impact?
2:20:32Elon MuskI encourage people to read a lot of books, just read like basically try to ingest as much information as you can and try to also just develop a good general knowledge.
2:20:47Elon MuskSo, so you at least have like a rough lay of the land, of the knowledge landscape. Like try to learn a little bit about a lot of things because you might not know what you're really interested.
2:20:59Elon MuskHow would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't like doing it? Peripheral exploration broadly of the knowledge landscape and you talk to people from different walks of life and different industries and professions and skills and occupations.
2:21:20Elon MuskLike just try learn as much as possible, man. Search for meaning.
2:21:30Lex FridmanIsn't the whole thing a search for meaning?
2:21:34Elon MuskYeah. What's the meaning of life and all? Yeah, but just generally, like I said, I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas and then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and what you're interested in.
2:21:51Elon MuskSo people may be good at something or they may have skill at a particular thing, but they don't like doing it. So you want to try to find a thing where that's a good combination of the things that you're inherently good at, but you also like doing.
2:22:13Lex FridmanAnd reading is a super fast shortcut to figure out which where are you, you both good at it, you like doing it and it will actually have positive impact.
2:22:23Elon MuskWell, you got to learn about things somehow. So reading a broad range, just really read it. More important one, as a kid I read through the encyclopedia, so that's pretty helpful.
2:22:39Elon MuskAnd all sorts of things I didn't even know existed or lights, obviously it's
2:22:44Lex Fridmanlike as broad as it gets.
2:22:45Elon MuskEncyclopedias were digestible, I think, whatever, 40 years ago. So maybe read through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I'd recommend that you can always skip subjects. You read a few paragraphs and know you're not interested, just jump to the next one.
2:23:07Elon MuskSo read the encyclopedia or skim through it.
2:23:17Elon MuskBut I put a lot of stock and certainly have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day's work to do useful things and just generally to have not a zero sum mindset or have more of a grow the pie mindset.
2:23:38Elon MuskIf you sort of say, like when we see people, like perhaps including some very smart people kind of taking an attitude of doing things that seem like morally questionable, it's often because they have at a base sort of axiomatic level a zero sum mindset.
2:23:58Elon MuskAnd without realizing it, they don't realize they have a zero sum mindset, or at least they don't realize it consciously. And so if you have a zero sum mindset, then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others.
2:24:13Elon MuskIf the pie is fixed, then the only way to have more PI is to take someone else's PI. But this is false. Obviously the PI has grown dramatically over time, the economic PI.
2:24:24Elon MuskSo in reality you can have overuse this analogy. We have. There's a lot of PI. PI is not fixed. So you really want to make sure you're not operating without realizing it.
2:24:43Elon MuskFrom a zero sum mindset where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others, then that's going to result in you trying to take things from others, which is not, not good.
2:24:51Elon MuskIt's much better to work on adding to the economic pie, creating, like I said, creating more than you consume, doing more than you. So that's a big deal. I think there's a fair number of people in finance that do have a bit of a zero sum mindset.
2:25:17Lex FridmanI mean, it's all walks of life. I've seen that. One of the reasons Rogan inspires me is he celebrates others a lot. There's not creating a constant competition. Like there's a scarcity of resources.
2:25:31Lex FridmanWhat happens when you celebrate others and you promote others, the ideas of others, it actually grows that pie. I mean, the resources become less scarce. And that, that applies in a lot of kinds of domains.
2:25:46Lex FridmanIt applies in academia where a lot of people are very. See some funding for academic research is zero sum. It is not if you celebrate each other, if you make, if you get everybody to be excited about AI above physics, above mathematics.
2:26:00Lex FridmanI think there'll be more and more funding and I think everybody wins. Yeah, that applies, I think broadly.
2:26:06Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly.
2:26:08Lex FridmanSo last question about love and meaning. What is the role of love in the human condition? Broadly and more specific to you. How has love, romantic love or otherwise, made you a better person, a better human being, better engineer?
2:26:29Elon MuskNow you're asking really perplexing questions. It's hard to give up. I mean there are many books, poems and songs written about what is love and what exactly what is love?
2:26:48Elon MuskBig you don't hurt me.
2:26:52Lex FridmanThat's one of the great ones. Yes. You've earlier quoted Shakespeare, but that's really up there.
2:26:57Elon MuskYeah. Love is a many splendid thing.
2:27:03Lex FridmanI mean there's. Because we've talked about so many inspiring things like be useful in the world, sort of like solve problems, alleviate suffering. But it seems like connection between humans is a source, you know, it's a source of joy, it's a source of meaning and that, that's what love is, friendship, love.
2:27:24Lex FridmanI, I just wonder if you think about that kind of thing when you talk about preserving the light of human consciousness.
2:27:30Elon MuskRight.
2:27:30Lex FridmanAnd us becoming a multiplay, multi planetary species. I mean to me at least that means like if we're just alone and conscious and intelligent, it doesn't mean nearly as much as if we're with others.
2:27:48Elon MuskRight.
2:27:48Lex FridmanAnd there's some magic created when we're together, the friendship of it. And I think the highest form of it is love, which I think broadly is much bigger than just sort of romantic, but also.
2:28:01Lex FridmanYes, romantic love and family and those kinds of things.
2:28:06Elon MuskWell, I mean the reason I guess I care about us becoming a multi planet species in a space frank civilization is foundationally. I love humanity and so I wish to see it prosper and do great things and be happy and if I did not love humanity, I would not care about these things.
2:28:31Lex FridmanSo when you look at the whole of it, the human history, all the people who's ever lived, all the people alive now, it's pretty, we're okay
2:28:41Elon Muskon
2:28:41Lex Fridmanthe whole, we're pretty interesting bunch.
2:28:45Elon MuskYeah. All things considered. And I've read a lot of history, including the darkest, worst parts of it. And despite all that, I think on balance I still love humanity.
2:28:59Lex FridmanYou joked about it with a 42. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Is there a non numerical?
2:29:08Elon MuskYeah. Really? I think what Doug Satoms was saying in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is
2:29:13Lex Fridmanthat
2:29:15Elon Muskthe universe is the answer and what we really need to figure out are what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe, and that the question is really the hard part.
2:29:28Elon MuskAnd if you can properly frame the question, then the answer, relatively speaking, is easy. So, therefore, if you want to understand what questions to ask about the universe, you want to understand the meaning of life, we need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we're better able to understand the nature of the universe and understand the meaning of life.
2:29:52Lex FridmanAnd ultimately, the most important part would be to ask the right question.
2:29:57Elon MuskYes.
2:29:59Lex FridmanThereby elevating the role of the interviewer.
2:30:02Elon MuskYes, exactly.
2:30:03Lex FridmanAs the most important human in the room.
2:30:07Elon MuskGood questions are, you know, it's hard to come up with good questions. Absolutely. But, yeah, like, it's like that. That is the foundation of my philosophy, is that I am curious about the nature of the universe.
2:30:22Elon MuskAnd obviously, I will die. I don't know when I'll die, but I won't live forever. But I would like to know that we are on a path to understanding the nature of the universe and the meaning of life and what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
2:30:42Elon MuskAnd so if we expand the scope and scale of humanity and consciousness in general, which includes silicon consciousness, then
2:30:51Lex Fridmanthat
2:30:51Elon Muskseems like a fundamentally good thing.
2:30:55Lex FridmanElon, like I said, I'm deeply grateful that you spend your extremely valuable time with me today, and also that you have given millions of people hope in this difficult time, this divisive time, in this cynical time.
2:31:11Lex FridmanSo I hope you do continue doing what you're doing. Thank you so much for talking today.
2:31:15Elon MuskAll right, you're welcome. Thanks for excellent questions.
2:31:18Lex FridmanThanks for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Elon Musk himself.
2:31:29Lex FridmanWhen something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.