Joe Rogan Experience #1609 - Elon Musk
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:02Elon MuskJoe rogan podcast. Check it out. The joe rogan experience.
0:06Joe RoganJoin my day joe rogan podcast by night all day.
0:16Joe RoganNo, that's the Sasha Baron Cohen movie.
0:18Elon MuskYeah.
0:19Joe RoganI never saw that one.
0:19Elon MuskWas a scene where he's. They show him the new missile they've developed and. But it has kind of a round, round head and he says you need to make it more pointy to his engineers.
0:36Elon MuskAnd actually that's why I also cited the same thing. You know Starship. We need to make it more pointy.
0:43Joe RoganDid you say that because of the movie?
0:45Elon MuskYeah. Really? Yeah.
0:47Joe RoganHold on.
0:51Elon MuskOkay.
0:54Joe RoganYou literally told them to make the starship more pointy because of the movie the Dictator.
0:59Elon MuskYep. And they know it too. It's not like they. It's not like they haven't unaware of it. Everyone thought it would be funny if we made the rocket more pointy.
1:07Elon MuskSo we did.
1:08Joe RoganDid it have any effect on the aerodynamics?
1:10Elon MuskNo.
1:11Joe RoganNothing.
1:11Elon MuskNo. We can make it way blunter and be fine.
1:14Joe RoganBut is it better to be pointier or like if it wasn't for the movie.
1:17Elon MuskIt's arguably slightly worse. But like.
1:22Joe RoganBut more fun for you.
1:23Elon MuskYeah. It looks cooler.
1:25Joe RoganOkay. It does look cool.
1:26Elon MuskYeah.
1:26Joe RoganYeah. How long do you think it'll be before. Are you good, Jamie? What's that?
1:35Elon MuskMy head's maybe. Yeah, exactly.
1:37Joe RoganGood. How long my head is sticking out?
1:40Elon MuskIs that where it's right on the edge of the top. Oh, is that supposed to be. Okay.
1:44Joe RoganYou're good.
1:45Elon MuskAll right.
1:46Joe RoganHow long do you think it's going to be before you have like regular flights with that where you can take off and land and like an airplane where it'll be very consistent with our extra pointy rocket.
1:57Joe RoganYou were your extra pointy rocket.
2:03Elon MuskDo you mean earth to earth transport or just orbit or anywhere? Yes. People. People.
2:09Joe RoganAnytime where you could just do it with people and have them have it land all the time?
2:16Elon MuskI think probably two years away.
2:18Joe RoganTwo years away?
2:18Elon MuskYeah.
2:19Joe RoganThat's. That's. That's really nice. Two years is pretty cool.
2:23Elon MuskCheers for people. We'll have a lot of flights between now and then.
2:27Joe RoganThat's crazy. That's 2023 is not that far away. That'll be there before you know it.
2:31Elon MuskYeah. Wow. 2023. Time flies.
2:34Joe RoganHow many times have you had explosions
2:36Elon Muskwith those when you're on a rocket? I don't know. Like quite a few. Six. Maybe five or six.
2:43Joe RoganWhat are those like? What is it like when you watch it explode when it's supposed to land and it just.
2:51Elon MuskNow we. This is a test program, we expect it to explode. It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly. Really? Yeah. Because we're trying to develop advanced rockets at a high speed and if you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge.
3:12Elon MuskAnd the whole rocket is evolving. The engines, the structure, avionics, the software, the ground systems are all evolving simultaneously. And the whole production system, which is actually hotter than the rocket design by far.
3:24Elon MuskSo the rocket and engine and avionics production system is. And the launch system is a thousand percent harder than the initial design, like at least. Really? Yeah. So when same with cars, it's like 10,000%.
3:41Elon MuskIt's easy to do a car prototype, it's hard to do production.
3:46Joe RoganSo when you're looking at your scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years.
4:00Elon MuskIf current trends continue, if we excite, you know, if you plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years.
4:16Elon MuskSo we're getting to orbit this year. Our goal is to get to orbit this year. So, and I'm not sure people totally understand, like starship is the largest flying object ever made.
4:28Elon MuskThis thing will be about over 5000 tons weight on liftoff. It's going to go straight up with 5,000 tons. This is much heavier than any aircraft by far. No aircraft even comes close to this weight.
4:45Elon MuskAnd it's going straight up. Aircraft can't go straight up. So it's like the, it's got more than twice, it will have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V.
4:52Elon MuskReally? Yeah, yeah. It's like a big rocket.
4:55Joe RoganWhy does it need that much thrust? Are we trying because you want to go to Mars.
5:00Elon MuskThere's this like, we're trying to make life multi planetary, you know, extend life beyond Earth. And in order to do that you have to have high tonnage to Mars and that means you need a big rocket and you got to fly a lot.
5:15Joe RoganSo the reason why it has twice the thrust of the Saturn 5 is to plan for these interstellar trips, interplanetary trips. So when you're doing this and you're developing these systems, thinking about regular trips to other planets, but you're not just trying to get into orbit right now, you're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually could scale up.
5:40Elon MuskYeah, we know how to get to orbit. We've done that A lot. So the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where the.
5:51Elon MuskWhere all elements of the rocket are reused and they're reused quickly like an aircraft. And this has never been done. This is the holy grail of rocketry is. Is to have a fully reusable rocket.
6:03Elon MuskThen you need to go one step further. Needs to be fully and rapidly reusable. You know, it's like.
6:08Joe RoganLike a plane.
6:09Elon MuskYeah, yeah. Like plane lands you, you know, refuel it and take off again.
6:14Joe RoganHow do you have time? This. I never understand you in regards to the way you run multiple businesses simultaneously. I would think that something like this would require so much concentration.
6:27Joe RoganWould require. I would think this would be your whole being trying to figure out how to work this.
6:35Elon MuskYeah, well, I do work a lot.
6:38Joe RoganIt's crazy.
6:40Elon MuskAnd I apologize for being. For the reason I was late as I was literally coming from, you know, some critical meetings, just doing. Normally I'd be meeting until. I work until like one or two
6:50Joe Roganin the morning every night.
6:53Elon MuskNot. I mean, Saturday, Sunday, usually not, but sometimes.
6:58Joe RoganHow much do you sleep?
6:59Elon MuskAbout six hours.
7:00Joe RoganOh, that's pretty good.
7:02Elon MuskYeah. Not that crazy for you.
7:03Joe RoganThat's. I mean, for someone does as much as you, that's actually. That's impressive that you can squeeze that in.
7:10Elon MuskYeah, I've tried sleeping less, but then total productivity decreases.
7:15Joe RoganYeah. So you feel like six is the number where it's.
7:18Elon MuskYeah, six. Six. Six is. I can. That I don't find myself wanting more sleep than six.
7:26Joe RoganSo when, like with the Saturn V and the space shuttles and all these other rockets, they would. They would have these parts that would. They would get the ship up into space, but they would descend down to Earth and crash into the ocean and they would never use them again.
7:45Elon MuskThat's right.
7:46Joe RoganHow do you avoid that? Like, what is the difference between the way these things are structured? Like the whole thing goes together and then it lands together?
7:56Elon MuskWell, we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit.
7:59Joe RoganRight.
8:01Elon MuskI think one thing to appreciate is, like, space. Getting to space is easy. Getting to orbit is hard. So you only need maybe 1 or 2% of the energy to get to space, where the atmosphere is thin compared to what you need to get to orbit.
8:15Elon MuskAnd if you get to orbit now, you've got to burn off all that energy and you're coming in like a meteor. So you need a powerful heat shield. So it's like super difficult to get to orbit at all.
8:26Elon MuskAnd then if you get to orbit at all. Then making those, the stages reusable means they're going to come back intact. And then the upper stage is especially difficult because it's got so much energy.
8:37Elon MuskAll the energy you put into it you have to take out. So it's. You're literally coming in like a flaming meteor. And most things would just melt and melt or vaporize.
8:51Elon MuskSo like if you as a human tried to come in from orbit, you'd just be pink mist. Yeah,
9:00Joe Roganthat's a funny way to put it.
9:01Elon MuskYeah.
9:02Joe RoganNow the space shuttle, they had tiles, right? That was the way they avoided the heat. They had these heat shield tiles. What do you use with the SpaceX rockets?
9:14Elon MuskYeah, we have a more advanced version of the shuttle table. But you've got to use some kind of ceramic essentially. It's usually some form of silicon oxide, aluminum oxide, some carbon perhaps thrown in there.
9:31Joe RoganAnd is it like a one piece or is it in tiles?
9:35Elon MuskThe way in tiles? Yeah, a hexagonal tile. So you can see with each starship, we've actually increased the size of the heat shield. So it's tough because the tiles are, they're kind of like.
9:51Elon MuskIt's not quite the right analogy. They're kind of like dinner plates. Like they're brittle and.
9:59Elon MuskThe coefficient of thermal expansion is different from metal. So metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles. And the tiles also get super hot, while metal can be super cold because it's got cryogenic fluid behind it.
10:13Elon MuskSo you have this differential expansion and contraction which makes the gaps in the tiles expand and contract. But if the gaps get too big, then you get kind of the hot gas sort of the plasma gets in, down.
10:28Elon MuskWe get plasma in the crack and it's not as bad. And then you're going to melt the metal behind it. But if they're too close, then they bang together and they crack.
10:38Elon MuskSo got to get it just right where they're. The gap's just right and then they can, the way that they're attached to the body, they can move around a little bit.
10:48Joe RoganSo there has to be some sort of room to move. It can't be one large piece of ceramic that you fit over the front.
10:56Elon MuskYeah, you can't really make such a giant piece of ceramic because you've got, you got a. Well, I guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven, but you really need, you need expansion joints.
11:11Elon MuskExpansion, contraction joints. So quite difficult to do a single piece tile. Think of it like tiles for a roof or something like that. You know, why don't we just make one tile for a roof.
11:24Elon MuskIt's not going to work.
11:25Joe RoganNow these things have multiple stages. How many stages in these rocket boosters, when things are taking off, how many
11:35Elon Muskstarship has two stages? So that's the minimum number that you could do on a planet like Earth. Earth's gravity is quite strong, and we have a thick atmosphere and strong gravity.
11:49Elon MuskWhereas if you took off from Mars, it would be. It's relatively easy. Mars is around just under 40% of Earth's gravity. The moon is about a sixth. And getting to lunar orbit from the surface of the moon is easy.
12:08Elon MuskLike during Apollo, the lunar lander, just the top half of the lunar lander, was able to take off and get to lunar orbit. But to get to Earth orbit, you need the giant rocket.
12:22Elon MuskIt's very, very nonlinear.
12:24Joe RoganSo what happens to the first when you take off and it separates into stages? How does the first stage get reused?
12:33Elon MuskWell, have you seen how the Falcon 9 stages work where they come back and land?
12:38Joe RoganNo.
12:38Elon MuskYou haven't seen them?
12:39Joe RoganNo.
12:39Elon MuskWow. Yeah. I mean, Jamie's gonna pull it up.
12:46Joe RoganSo does it come down with parachutes? Does it. Like, how does it land?
12:52Elon MuskNo, it lands propulsively with the thrusters, with the engines.
12:57Joe RoganReally?
12:57Elon MuskYeah.
12:59Joe RoganSo it's designed to take off. Here it is.
13:03Elon MuskYeah.
13:06Joe RoganOh, wow.
13:12Joe RoganSo that is the bottom of the rocket that launches it straight up, and then afterwards it comes down and lands like that.
13:18Elon MuskYeah.
13:19Joe RoganThat's amazing. And then the top piece can then land separately?
13:28Elon MuskYes. Well, in the case of Falcon 9, the upper stage burns up on reentry. Falcon 9 has. There's the fairing, the top, where the satellites are contained in the top, and that, the fairing halves.
13:43Elon MuskOnce it gets to space, where the atmosphere is thin, it's still a long way from orbit. But it's in space. So you no longer need. The satellite, doesn't need to be protected by the nose cone, the fairing, and so that it sort of splits in two and falls away.
14:00Elon MuskAnd then. So with Falcon 9, we recover the fairing halves and recover the booster, but we lose the upper stage on purpose. Did you design that way? Yes, but it's not really possible.
14:15Elon MuskWith Falcon 9, we. The. The Arcitecture does like, if we made the alpha stage reusable, our payload to orbit would be dramatically less. So in order to have meaningful payload to orbit, scale is important.
14:35Elon MuskLike, you need to make things big. There are some. There is value to scale, you know, for the famous, you know, like for a truck, you wouldn't want, like everything Delivered by a small pickup truck.
14:49Elon MuskYou want semi trailers. You know, you don't see. You don't see ships in the ocean, cargo ships, you know, coming along with one sea van with an outboard motor.
15:03Elon MuskIt's like a giant ship. So scale has value in and of itself. Like the same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket. So even just in terms of the computer, the computer and the electronics, weight becomes vanishingly small in a big rocket.
15:22Elon MuskBut it is significant in a small rocket.
15:25Joe RoganDo you think there will ever be a time where there's an alternative source of propulsion outside of just of a burning fuel? Like, is it possible that someone would develop a nuclear propulsion or some other method other than just burning large amounts of gasoline or rocket fuel?
15:45Elon MuskThere's no way around Newton's third law, really. So you basically have to expel mass. Like when you get. There's a, you know, for a car that you could push against the ground, for an app, for an aircraft, you can react against the air.
16:06Elon MuskFor both, you can react against water. In vacuum, there is nothing. So the only way to move is to react against yourself, to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity and to transfer momentum, momentum from, you know, to that gas that is going that way very rapidly.
16:32Elon MuskSo you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you, the large amount of mass accelerate slowly because momentum is conserved. So. Yeah, so we're stuck with gas.
16:49Elon MuskYeah.
16:50Joe RoganUntil some insane breakthrough dealing with gravity or.
16:54Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's not going to happen.
16:55Joe RoganNot. Not in our lifetime.
16:56Elon MuskNot in our lifetime, no. Yeah, so.
17:04Joe RoganSo.
17:04Elon MuskSo, ironically, everything will go electric except for rockets. It's just now you can make rockets indirectly electric by using electricity to create the fuel. So you can take CO2 and H2O and create methane and oxygen from that.
17:29Elon MuskSo methane is CH4 and oxygen is O2. And for example, on Mars, which is a primarily CO2 atmosphere and there's a lot of water, ice is. You can mine the ice, take the ice and the CO2 from the atmosphere, Simplifying this a lot.
17:50Elon MuskBut run it over a catalyst and give it a lot of energy, and you can get CH4, O2, and you can gracefully get your propellant on Mars. The rocket, by the way, is mostly oxygen.
18:03Elon MuskSo for starship, we're almost 80% oxygen. It's only just over 20% fuel. Really. Yeah.
18:15Joe RoganSo is this as efficient as you anticipate it being anytime in our lifetime? The trip to Mars is like what, six months? Is that what the idea is?
18:26Elon MuskYeah, it's about six months.
18:28Joe RoganDo you ever anticipate it being quicker than that? Is it possible to make these things faster? Would you have to have solar sales?
18:37Elon MuskNo. Solar sale would be very slow. Would it be? I mean, I'm trying to think of a way to think about gravity here. There's a lot of analogies, but, you know, like, you can think like space itself is curved, like it's like a funnel.
18:57Elon MuskLike if there's something that has a lot of mass, it's creating like a funnel. And so in the same way, like, if you have a coin funnel and the coin thinks it's going in a straight line, pretty much.
19:14Elon MuskYou know, the physicists out there might quibble with my analogies. But anyway, I'm trying to convey what gravity is like, like a funnel. And so if you, if you want to get out of that gravity well, you actually need to go very fast, parallel to the Earth's surface.
19:32Elon MuskAnd the faster you go parallel to the Earth's surface, the further out you spin. So. Or you can think of like a marble in a funnel. Like, if you want get that marble to go far out, you just spin it sideways and it'll spiral out.
19:43Elon MuskAnd conversely, if you just due to the friction of the air friction and the rolling friction, it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any, any push and will slowly spiral in.
19:56Elon MuskAnd then as it gets closer, it spins faster and faster. And this is how gravity basically works. So.
20:08Elon MuskAll the things in the solar system are spinning around this gigantic funnel in space time called the sun, and where there's like these tiny little dust motes going around the sun, and the further you are away from the sun, the slower you move around in terms of degrees per second.
20:28Elon MuskSo like, the orbit of Mars, which is further away from the sun, is about two years and Earth's one year, because Mars is about 50% further away from the Earth than the, from the sun than the Earth is.
20:43Elon MuskSo it's like Mars, we're. Earth is at one astronomical unit. Mars is like one and a half ish astronomical unit. So we're about eight light minutes away from the Sun.
20:53Elon MuskMars is about 12. And yeah, so when you want to go to Mars, you basically accelerate along the same path of Earth going around the sun, and you time it such that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the sun where the tip of the ellipse intersects with Mars.
21:17Elon MuskSo Mars is going around and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your ellipse being Mars. And that turns out to be about a six month journey.
21:29Elon MuskNow you can speed that up, I think. I mean I could sort of see a way to get, make it happen in say three months where the intersection with Mars would not be at the tip of the ellipse, but on the edge of the ellipse.
21:41Elon MuskNow that would mean the tip of the ellipse is out near Jupiter. So if you miss Mars, you're going to end up at Jupiter, Jupiter's orbit.
21:49Joe RoganSo that's not good.
21:52Elon MuskYeah. And you're going to be coming in hot.
21:55Joe RoganYeah.
21:56Elon MuskSo but it probably can get down to three months of that big of a problem. Getting out to a month hard.
22:08Elon MuskAnd then Earth and Mars are only in the same sort of. There's only about a six month period every two years when Earth and Mars are aligned such that you can do the transfer.
22:22Elon MuskYou can certainly imagine that if Mars is on the other side of the sun, you can't get there because it's got to go through the sun and that's not going to work.
22:29Elon MuskSo you got to time it. This is like about a quarter of every Mars year is when you can do the transfer. So six months every two years. So if we are able to build, or if humanity is able to build a city on Mars, people will probably remember which planetary conjunction they came on because it's not like you just go all the time.
22:57Elon MuskYou can only go every two years.
22:59Joe RoganWhen do you anticipate, like how much time before there's regular travel back and forth to Mars? Roughly. Like a real civilization on Mars.
23:18Elon MuskWell, I think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization.
23:25Elon MuskThe threshold that really matters is for getting past the Great Filter is do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming, you can survive?
23:42Elon MuskYeah. So you can only be just missing one little thing. It'd be like you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin C. It's only a matter of time, you know.
23:56Joe RoganYeah.
23:56Elon MuskAnd there's gonna be curtains. So you gotta have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars. And the reason that those ships from Earth stopped coming could be World War 3 or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization.
24:13Elon MuskSo civilization here on Earth could end with a bang or a whimper or natural disasters. Asteroid impacts in the bang category.
24:23Joe RoganYeah.
24:24Elon MuskBut it also could be like a whole series of things like, like what killed the dinosaurs. Well, it wasn't just one thing, you know, it was like a Whole bunch of things happened in a row and.
24:33Elon MuskAnd, you know, while they could have taken any one of those things, they had like three things happen and no
24:42Joe Rogandinosaurs, which is kind of amazing that crocodiles are still here.
24:46Elon MuskYeah.
24:47Joe RoganThose fuckers.
24:48Elon MuskWell, they're resilient crocodiles. They live on decayed meat. They love rotten meat. And so in any kind of disastrous situation, there's a lot of dead creatures and the crocodiles love it.
25:05Elon MuskSo that's why they're around crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms and.
25:11Joe RoganShrews.
25:13Elon MuskShrews, yeah.
25:13Joe RoganWhich is why we're here.
25:15Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Our great, great, great, great, great grandparents were shrews.
25:19Joe RoganWhat a strange thing to come from.
25:22Elon MuskSo there's hope.
25:23Joe RoganThere's hope for all you rodents out there.
25:25Elon MuskYeah.
25:26Joe RoganOne day you can go to Mars. Just keep doing your homework.
25:29Elon MuskAbsolutely.
25:30Joe RoganSo. So there'll be, you say, the Great Filter. What did you mean by that?
25:38Elon MuskWell, so there's something called like the Fermi Paradox of like, where are the aliens? Yeah, so where are the aliens? And I think it was Carl Sagan that said, like, there either are a lot of aliens or none.
26:00Elon MuskAnd they're equally terrifying if there are a lot of aliens. Well, I mean, the invasion ship slash, you know, bug infestation, just, you know, like
26:19Joe Roganstarship trooper style.
26:21Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean, it's like an alien civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation, you know, it's like, hey, well, if that planet was fine, now it's got a bunch of bugs, just go fumigate it.
26:29Elon MuskYou know, like, we'd fumigate a house. That's certainly possible. And then. But if there are no aliens. Well, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become inter.
26:42Elon MuskInter. Stellar? You know, so. And I want to be clear, like, to the best of my knowledge, I. There is no evidence for alien life on Earth. That alien.
26:54Elon MuskThere's no. There's no evidence for alien life. There's no direct evidence for alien life. No. You know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien for, you know, sighting or whatever, I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 711 or ATM cam.
27:12Elon MuskOkay. It's like if somebody's got at least like an iPhone, one level camera, like something.
27:19Joe RoganYou know, the problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too.
27:23Elon MuskYeah, sure. At least try hard and faking.
27:27Joe RoganAre you familiar with Commander David Fravor's account of the Tic Tac UFO that he encountered off of the coast of San Diego. You know Lex. Lex Friedman.
27:40Elon MuskYeah.
27:40Joe RoganLex Friedman interviewed him on his podcast, and I interviewed him as well. And if you ever get a chance to listen to Lex's conversation with him, it's really excellent.
27:49Joe RoganBut this guy is a naval fighter pilot, and he talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than 60,000ft above sea level to one foot in less than a second.
27:59Joe RoganShaped like a Tic Tac. No visible sign of propulsion. Blocked. Radar actively jammed their tracking systems and then went to their predetermined point that they were supposed to. That the.
28:14Joe RoganThe fighter jet was supposed to scramble to. Went to it 30 miles away in, you know, a couple seconds. Like, they have no idea how it did it. They don't know what it is.
28:23Joe RoganAnd these guys that were working for the Navy off the coast said they encountered them several times. They didn't know what they were.
28:31Elon MuskThey didn't know what to do or something.
28:34Joe RoganThey do. They have video of it. Okay, they have video of it. They have. There's. You ever see the New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff?
28:45Elon MuskNo.
28:45Joe RoganYeah, there was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this. And there's a couple of. There's a couple. Couple other different sightings that were very similar.
28:54Joe RoganThey were trying to figure out what these things were and why. And it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release. Yeah. Politicians are trying to figure out what all this shit is, so they try to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days.
29:11Elon MuskHonestly, I think I would know if there were aliens. I would hope so.
29:15Joe RoganThat's what I'm asking you.
29:16Elon MuskNo, I'd be jumping on that.
29:18Joe RoganLike, be like, you should watch that conversation with Lex. It's like, here's the thing. Do you think that they would want us to know, or do you think they would just be observing and making sure we don't blow ourselves up?
29:32Elon MuskWould I know?
29:34Joe RoganCivilization.
29:34Elon MuskThey sure are subtle. I mean, if they wanted us to know, obviously, they could just for sure show up and walk down Main street, you know?
29:43Joe RoganRight.
29:44Elon MuskHey, I'm an alien. Check me out. You know, he has my spaceship. I just land in the middle of Times Square. I'll be like, right, okay.
29:50Joe RoganOr hover over downtown la.
29:51Elon MuskYeah.
29:52Joe RoganYeah.
29:52Elon MuskWe were like, okay, we believe you. So whatever. They're. They are very subtle. Very subtle, these aliens.
30:01Joe RoganHow often do you think about it?
30:03Elon MuskZero.
30:03Joe RoganZero. Even though you're thinking about interplanetary travel, you don't really think about aliens.
30:09Elon MuskNo, I mean, if they show up, I'm like, great, okay. Now this is new information. But we.
30:18Joe RoganWhat an interesting way of putting it. This is new information.
30:21Elon MuskThis is new information. Like, where were you guys up till now?
30:23Joe RoganYeah.
30:25Elon MuskSo anyway, listen, if I see some evidence for aliens, I'll be like, I'll be the first to be like, ah, aliens, you know?
30:35Joe RoganRight. Then you'll investigate. But until then, you think it's kind of a waste of time. Yeah, yeah, it definitely seems like a waste of time. If nothing's happened so far.
30:43Joe RoganYou think about all the people that have been researching aliens for their whole life and they have very little to show for it.
30:50Elon MuskWell, you know, there's.
30:52Joe RoganOther than cool stories.
30:54Elon MuskYeah. I mean we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things. You know, there's this people, like if we were to find something like let's say like a cube of titanium, just like a 1 inch cube of titanium, see, in the middle of the pyramid.
31:10Elon MuskI feel like aliens for sure. There's no way they could have made titanium back then. There's no way. That's hard. That's all one little. Didn't even need a computer.
31:20Elon MuskLike a computer would be like, hey, wow, computers. They didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens. But, but even just like some advanced metallurgy, anything like.
31:30Elon MuskWe didn't say anything like that, right?
31:33Joe RoganNothing like that that we could point to that we can't do.
31:38Elon MuskEverything that we found archaeologically is consistent with the time, the technology they had at that time.
31:45Joe RoganArchaeologically, yes. Yeah. So you just talk about old stuff. Yeah, yeah.
31:49Elon MuskJust throughout history. It's not like if aliens visit, there'd be something buried somewhere. You'd think, we haven't seen anything. So anyway, maybe there are aliens, but they're very subtle.
32:02Elon MuskIf they are, they're just very. They're being pretty shy. So as far as we can tell, there's none. So nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that.
32:17Elon MuskSo now, and the thing is that on a galactic time scale, even with sub light travel, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy, even some of the neighboring galaxies.
32:31Elon MuskSo if you gave, if you said a million years and say there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years? Absolutely. The entire galaxy.
32:42Joe RoganSo you would start with Mars, build bases on Mars, then use Mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands
32:50Elon Muskof years, each kind of like, you know, from one solar system to the
32:55Joe Rogannext and yeah, that it seems like that's imperative, like that has to happen if the human civilization is going to survive. Because our planet is just. We're too subject to natural disasters and our own folly.
33:09Joe RoganAnd if the species is going to survive, we kind of have to escape.
33:12Elon MuskIt's mostly about the species. I mean there have been some real doozies of like, you know, massive meteors and super volcanoes and the continents moved all over the place and Earth's been a snowball and super hot.
33:28Elon MuskIf you read like the geological history of Earth, it's like very long and complicated, so. And there have been so many extinction events. Not like just a few. Yeah, I mean the Permian extinction event, that was a real rough one where it's like well over 90% of all species died out.
33:51Elon MuskAnd that doesn't tell the whole story because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and sponges and stuff like that. Are you a sponge? You're probably doing okay.
34:06Elon MuskThey're still around. Are you a mushroom? Do you like being in the dark and feasting on dead, dead, dead plant and animal matter? Okay, but if you're like a human, you're screwed.
34:18Joe RoganYeah, so. Well, didn't people got down to there was just a few thousand of us at one point in time because of a super volcano. I think Indonesia, I think it was only 60, 70,000 years ago.
34:31Elon MuskYeah, there have been a number of sort of revolutionary choke points. And the last ice age must have been pretty rough too. A lot of species got wiped out then.
34:43Joe RoganIs that part of what motivates you, what motivates you to want to do this and to put people on Mars and to start traveling, get people traveling through the galaxy?
34:57Elon MuskYeah. So philosophically I'm in the Douglas Adams sort of school of thought which is that the universe is the answer and we need to figure out like what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe.
35:14Elon MuskSo we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness, increase our understanding of the universe, like to understand why are we here, where do we come from, where are we going, what's this all about?
35:27Elon MuskAnd in order to, in order to, I don't know, just understand the meaning of life, we have to expand the scope and scale of life and the consciousness, which may be digital and biological in the future and get past at least one of the great filters which is to, to become a multi planet species.
35:57Elon MuskA species that does not become multi planetary is simply waiting around until there is Some extinction event, either self inflicted or external. So we gotta be a multi planet species also.
36:13Elon MuskThat's like way more exciting. That's like, do you want a future where we're out there among the stars exploring the universe or do you want a future where we're stuck on Earth forever?
36:22Elon MuskI think we want the super exciting future where we're out there exploring the galaxy. That sounds great to me. And you know, I think it's worth 1% of our resources, something like that, you know, maybe more, but at least 1%.
36:39Joe RoganWell, so it's in all the most exciting sci fi movies.
36:42Elon MuskYeah. If you saw a sci fi movie and they didn't have spaceships, you're like, what got on there? Yeah, something terrible must have happened.
36:51Joe RoganWell, we always assumed when we were kids that we would be traveling to the moon and back and traveling all over space by now. You know Space 1999 was a show when I was a kid.
37:02Joe RoganThat was interplanetary travel. Remember they had spaceships out there and motherships and they thought 1999 by then for sure, for sure it would happen. The problem is we need more, more Elon Musks.
37:14Joe RoganThere's not a lot of people that really dedicate all their time and energy to do something like this. It really does. It's a really fascinating thing about the species.
37:22Joe RoganIt takes a few unique individuals that are motivated to do something like this and have the resources, the intelligence and the, you can figure out how to organize people to get something like this done.
37:37Joe RoganNot a lot of you.
37:40Elon MuskWell, it takes, there's a lot of smart, talented people at SpaceX and at Tesla and that's how we get things done. But yeah, I mean part of the reason why SpaceX is still privately, privately held, although we have a lot of investors and everyone at the company is given stock, is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long.
38:05Elon MuskYou know, it's, you said like, you know, what's the market for transporting things to Mars? Well, no market, there's no one there.
38:16Joe RoganRight.
38:17Elon MuskSo they're like, that sounds pretty risky. And a public company, you know, the feedback loop tends to be, you know, maybe a year to four years or even quarterly.
38:28Elon MuskAnd it's like, well this is like 10 years, 20 years out. And I don't probably answer your question earlier, which is like, when are we, when do I think we can go to Mars?
38:37Elon MuskI mean, I think possibly as soon as five years from now. Really? Yeah, but, but then to have a, then you got to build out the base and then you got to Build out the city.
38:51Elon MuskSo the first thing you got to build is like, okay, you got to generate energy, so you got like giant solar panel farm and then you've got to have propellant production, so you got to make fuel and oxygen and you got to grow food, grow plants, and like all the things necessary for life support.
39:11Joe RoganSo does everything have to be done in the greenhouse? Is it some sort of a dome?
39:15Elon MuskYeah.
39:16Joe RoganSo there's. Is there a long term possibility of terraforming?
39:20Elon MuskYes, long term we can make. If you just warm Mars up, there's a lot of frozen CO2 and frozen water that would liquefy the CO2, would densify the atmosphere.
39:35Elon MuskThe liquid water would form oceans and lakes. So basically a lot of frozen water and frozen CO2 on Mars.
39:45Joe RoganHow would you warm it up?
39:48Elon MuskWell, there's a few ways to tackle that problem. That'll obviously be up to the Martians, but I don't know, you could have giant solar reflectors. You could create like miniature suns over the poles or something like that.
40:03Joe RoganWhat?
40:04Elon MuskWell, it can be gravitationally contained, but you could just have a, just have, you know, have it just do giant thermonuclear explosions every few seconds. The sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky.
40:19Elon MuskIf you want to know what like, hey, what is it like to be exposed to thermonuclear radiation? Go stand outside in the middle of the day.
40:25Joe RoganMy 10 year old said, if space has no air and fire needs air, how does the sun stay burning? Yeah, she loves to do that. She looks at you like she's super smart.
40:38Elon MuskHmm, right?
40:40Joe RoganThat's a good question, little one.
40:42Elon MuskYeah, there's a lot of interesting things about the sun. The sun is converting, I think 405 million tons of mass to energy every second. So, you know, E equals MC squared.
40:57Elon MuskSo that's.
40:58Joe RoganIt's a lot.
40:58Elon MuskIt's a lot.
40:59Joe RoganYeah. It's not even a big sun.
41:01Elon MuskIt's not even a big sun. So yeah, 4 or 5 megatons per second every second, every day for billions of years.
41:10Joe RoganSo what kind of engineering would be involved in creating a mini sun that you hover above the poles?
41:16Elon MuskSo I mean, the sun is a gravitationally contained reaction, so you need a lot of mass. So if you don't have a lot of mass, you can just. That's why you'd have like explosions.
41:28Elon MuskJust like little, little pulsing things, like a pulsing sun. And. Yeah, so some people have like said, well, if you added up all the nuclear weapons on Earth, That's.
41:38Elon MuskThat's. That wouldn't even be that. That much. I'm like, yeah, because they're small. We can make way bigger nuclear weapon, nuclear bombs than the current ones. It's like, what's the point?
41:46Elon MuskThey said, well, if you want to make an artificial sun, you then you just use a lot more hydrogen.
41:50Joe RoganThat would be something. Or deuterium they would have to construct on Mars.
41:54Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
41:55Joe RoganAnd then figure out a way to launch it.
41:57Elon MuskYeah. Jesus. Yeah. Honestly, not that hard.
42:06Elon MuskI mean, they could do this without. Rarely had even having computers, so Back in the day. So. But you can also do with, like, solar reflectors. I don't know.
42:17Elon MuskSomehow, if you want to make it look like Earth, you got to warm it up.
42:20Joe RoganRight.
42:21Elon MuskYou know, so.
42:24Joe RoganSo in hundreds of years from now or whatever it would take, people would eventually, you know, figure some way out.
42:31Elon MuskYeah. You could terraform Mars and make it be like Earth, and we could bring. We could take the life from Earth and breathe life into Mars. There's nothing living on the surface of Mars.
42:43Elon MuskYeah, nothing. It's cold. Yes. There's a lot of ultraviolet. The combination of being cold and having a lot of ultraviolet radiation. That's the killer combo. Just being cold, then bacteria could survive.
43:06Elon MuskOr just uv, but warm. The bacteria can repair themselves. But if they're frozen and they get blasted with the uv, they can't repair themselves. They're frozen.
43:15Joe RoganAnd isn't the speculation that at one point in time, Mars did have an atmosphere? Mars was different than it is now?
43:22Elon MuskYeah. It once had quite a dense atmosphere, and it seems most likely to have had oceans and lakes. Now they're frozen and covered in dust. And that orange color you see is iron oxide.
43:41Elon MuskSo there's quite a lot of iron. Just rust, you know. For a while there, they thought, well, maybe Mars was like some ancient civilization, you know?
43:49Joe RoganDo you remember the face on Mars that they.
43:52Elon MuskSure.
43:54Joe RoganThere's a guy that was completely. He was fascinating. Richard Hoagland. Is that his name? See, if that's the guy's name, but he's, with all due respect, out of his fucking mind.
44:07Joe RoganAnd he was making all these incredible, incredibly bizarre connections, like measurements from this rock to that rock and using all this mathematics to prove that this is. That this symmetry was impossible in nature.
44:20Joe RoganThis is all created by civilization. That this face was like some sort of a, you know, ancient shrine to whatever being lived there before. There it is. Monuments. Tomorrow is Richard Hoagland.
44:34Joe RoganThat's the guy's name. I used to listen to him On Art Bell. That's crazy. It was just. I mean, I don't know if he's schizophrenic, maybe. Maybe he's just smarter than all of us, but.
44:46Joe RoganWell, Jamie shaking his head.
44:47Elon MuskI think aspirationally you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence, not inversely proportionate to the evidence.
44:53Joe RoganWell, he was definitely inversely proportionate to the evidence. It was very strange. It was one of those ones where I had to stop listening because I felt like I was going crazy, too.
45:02Elon MuskYeah.
45:03Joe RoganHe was so invested in this idea. Again, maybe he's right. I don't think so.
45:11Elon MuskNo, I doubt it.
45:12Joe RoganWell, then they had subsequent voyages where they made high resolution scans of the exact same area, and it looked very different without the same shadows. It just looked like rocks.
45:25Elon MuskYeah, Mars kind of looks like, I don't know, like some Arizona desert or something like that.
45:30Joe RoganWhat do they think happened? They think it was hit. Like an asteroid hit.
45:33Elon MuskWell, everything got hit with light asteroids over time.
45:35Joe RoganThey think that that's what killed the environment there. The atmosphere.
45:39Elon MuskWell, the atmosphere. So Mars has lower gravity than Earth and it does not have a strong magnetic field. So over time, this is over billions of years. The atmosphere will be gradually eroded by the, by the, you know, by the, by the solar wind and, and, and having less gravity.
46:06Elon MuskSo, you know, the smaller you are, the, the less, generally the less atmosphere you're going to have. So. Yeah, so generating an atmosphere on Mars, it would eventually erode, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of years to billions of years type of thing.
46:24Elon MuskPlenty of time to figure things out for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:28Joe RoganSo, but do you think that Mars is. Their atmosphere eroded quicker because it's just smaller?
46:34Elon MuskThat's a factor. Yeah. I mean, like, if you look at, say, asteroids or, you know, they don't really have, like, Sirius is a pretty big asteroid that doesn't really have an atmosphere.
46:46Elon MuskThe moon doesn't really have an atmosphere. So it doesn't have an atmosphere. Technically, there's a tiny amount of rarefied gas, but it's not a real atmosphere.
46:57Joe RoganDid you pay attention at all to the guy who was the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb, who was recently. There was a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our solar system in 2017 was possibly extraterrestrial in origin?
47:15Elon MuskYeah, the. Whatever. Umami burger.
47:19Joe RoganYeah, they don't. He thinks that there's a 90. Apparently he's a 91% possibility.
47:25Elon MuskShaped like a yo mama asteroid.
47:28Joe RoganYeah, it was a Hawaiian name.
47:32Elon MuskOkay.
47:32Joe RoganYeah, it was a Hawaiian name.
47:34Elon MuskIt sounds like your mama.
47:35Joe RoganYes, it was like your mama. Yeah. Umau MAU or something like that. Yeah, yeah, because it was discovered in Hawaii. So you're a Hawaiian name.
47:45Elon MuskYeah.
47:50Elon MuskWell, anyway, so I think a fundamental test of human civilization is are we going to become a multi planet civilization before something cataclysmic happens. Now, to be clear, I'm pretty optimistic about the future.
48:03Elon MuskSo I'm not thinking like we're, you know, civilization is about to end anytime soon, but there's a chance that it will. Like Stephen Hawking before he died was like, he's like, he thought it was like around 1% a century, something like that.
48:17Elon MuskI believe so. You know, it's not, it's not like, you know, 1% chance over 100 years, it's like 99% chance of making it. So I think he's probably about right.
48:32Joe RoganSo 1% chance per century. So as the centuries go on, there's less of a chance. No, it's more of a chance. So because we come more intelligent, more resources, and possibly the ability to escape Earth.
48:45Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's like Russian roulette with, you know, asteroids. 99 barrels are empty. Click, click, click.
48:54Joe RoganEventually it's gonna get us.
48:56Elon MuskYeah.
48:57Joe RoganYou said something that I thought was really interesting. The meaning of life. Do you think there is a meaning to life?
49:09Elon MuskWell, I think arguably the meaning of life is to understand the nature of the universe and figure out what the meaning of life is. So like I said, I think we don't quite know the right questions to ask.
49:25Elon MuskBut if we learn more about the universe, if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to ask the questions about the answer that is the universe.
49:36Joe RoganBut when you keep going with that, like, where does it go?
49:38Elon MuskI don't know. That's why if I knew, we're like, okay, case closed, we can die.
49:44Joe RoganNow the problem I always have with that is that do I want there to be a meaning to this because it gives sense of purpose to finite life forms.
49:54Elon MuskWell, I think with, there's a lot to understand about the universe that we don't understand.
50:00Joe RoganHave a beverage.
50:01Elon MuskAbsolutely. So let's see, alcohol is hour one. What's our two?
50:05Joe RoganHour two. Well, I don't think marijuana is legal in Texas. And the last time, I don't have to remind you, it was. There's problems involved.
50:14Elon MuskYes.
50:17Joe RoganUltimately not though. Right. Well, temporary. Oh, that's soothed over. Right. Didn't it. CBD's legal here.
50:26Elon MuskCBD? CBD doesn't do anything, does it? No, I think that's fair.
50:31Joe RoganNo, no, it definitely does something for inflammation.
50:34Elon MuskIt does, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, how much CBD do you have to have before you notice it?
50:39Joe RoganWell, physically or. Yeah, yeah, physically. You don't have to have a lot physically. CBD works great for people with arthritis and people with like, sore muscles and things like that.
50:51Joe RoganCheers. Yeah, no, CBD definitely works for that. But as far as, like psychoactive effects, not much. It relieves anxiety for people.
51:00Elon MuskOkay.
51:02Joe RoganIt helps people sleep, especially when it's combined with things like melatonin, things along those lines. But it doesn't get you high.
51:12Elon MuskYeah,
51:17Joe RoganPeople that do mix CBD with THC from muscle creams, though, and that doesn't get you high either. But it increases the effect of the.
51:24Elon MuskOkay.
51:24Joe RoganYeah, there's some. Some creams that are really good that people like that have THC and CBD in it.
51:31Elon MuskAll right, so you, like, have like sunscreen or something and then, I mean, why not just throw it in there, you know, why not?
51:38Joe RoganYeah, well, it's just. It's great for soreness.
51:42Elon MuskSmell like weed all day.
51:43Joe RoganYeah, it doesn't smell like weed.
51:45Elon MuskIt doesn't?
51:45Joe RoganNo, no, some of it does, though.
51:47Elon MuskSome of it.
51:48Joe RoganThat's the thing about anything that's unregulated.
51:50Elon MuskRight.
51:50Joe RoganLike hippies are man making it. That's always the problem.
51:53Elon MuskQuality control.
51:54Joe RoganYeah, no quality control. That's the problem with edibles. They're made by a bunch of crazy people cooking them up in some, you know, Chula Vista apartment somewhere. You really don't know what's in there.
52:07Elon MuskSo anyway, so we gotta make life multi planetary before it's too late.
52:11Joe RoganYeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah.
52:13Elon MuskI mean, why not? It also be fun and exciting and even if you don't go, you can just watch it on tv.
52:17Joe RoganYeah, yeah.
52:20Elon MuskIt's still cool. I mean, like. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not like, you know, attendance is mandatory here, you know, and it'll be dangerous and people might die.
52:30Joe RoganWell, for sure they're gonna die.
52:31Elon MuskYeah, like sometimes, maybe. Surprised? Some people think that the idea is like, oh, Mars is going to be an escape hatch, some luxury resort for rich people. I'm like, no, it's like high probability of death relative to Earth.
52:45Elon MuskLong journey. Food's probably not great, A lot of
52:49Joe Roganhard work, no sunlight.
52:51Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's like, it sounds like, you know, Shackleton's out for The Antarctic, where it's like, it's dangerous, it's a long journey, the food's bad, you know, might not make it back, but if you do, it'll be glorious.
53:06Joe RoganYeah. It's interesting how much people adapt when they're faced with a real problem. Like, if we knew that we only had a certain amount of time left, like we knew an asteroid was absolutely headed our way and it was gonna kill most of the people on this planet.
53:21Joe RoganYou would see people scrambling for something like that.
53:23Elon MuskYeah.
53:24Joe RoganLike, look, I moved to Texas just to get the fuck out of la because I felt like that was dying. I was like, we gotta get out of here.
53:31Joe RoganAnd I never thought I was gonna move out of LA like that. Yeah, it happened very quickly. But people adapt when they realize that this is. You have to do something.
53:41Elon MuskYeah.
53:42Joe RoganIf we had to do something, we had to go to Mars and had to set up shop there.
53:47Elon MuskYeah. I think it's important for the future of humanity and consciousness. And like I said, we want to get past the great vulture. You know, it might turn out that when we're.
53:56Elon MuskWe got there, exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations, you know, and they're just, they just never made it to the next planet.
54:05Joe RoganGhost towns.
54:06Elon MuskYeah, strange ghost towns of like, you know, it's like if you, you know, we're like, we'll go through the archaeological ruins of like ancient Babylonians and Sumerians and like, you know, and like trying to decode their writing.
54:20Elon MuskLike, what the hell, Linear B and hieroglyphics and isn't that a problem with
54:25Joe Roganus now that everything has become digital? Everything's stored on microchips and hard drives. And if something came, catastrophic happened.
54:33Elon MuskYeah.
54:34Joe RoganAnd you don't have the ability to access all that stuff. We're kind of starting from scratch.
54:39Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. It's kind of problematic that things aren't chiseled in stone. You know, they used to be chosen in stone. We're like, okay, now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone.
54:48Elon MuskAnd stone lasts a long time.
54:50Joe RoganYeah.
54:50Elon MuskSo we still have a lot of writing from ancient Romans because they chose a lot of stuff in stone.
54:55Joe RoganOr the Egyptians.
54:56Elon MuskOr the Egyptians. Yeah, exactly. Man, The Egyptians really went to town.
54:59Joe RoganWe with the hieroglyphics, Even the Sumerians, you know, the cuneiforms carved into clay tablets. Absolutely. Yeah.
55:08Elon MuskI kind of wish they'd said more. Yeah, exactly like us. Our stuff is. Yeah, it's not going to last for a long time. I mean, there's sort of aspects of us, of our stuff that would last for a long time, but a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever.
55:24Joe RoganYeah.
55:25Elon MuskYou know, for when we did the Falcon Heavy test flight, that normally when, you know, aerospace companies do, like, a rocket test flight, they put something boring on, like, a concrete block because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite.
55:42Elon MuskAnd so I was like, well, we got to do something that's not very inspiring. You know, concrete block is one of the least inspiring things you can do. So I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, hey, well, what about putting a Tesla on that?
55:54Elon MuskI was like, hey, that's not, like, a good idea. I'm going to go into my garage. I'll put that one in there. So I put my car on the rocket, and then we wanted to see how far the rocket could go, so I was like, just floor it.
56:06Elon MuskLet's go. Maximum Delta V. So I thought it would probably blow up. And I had this image of, like, man, this thing could blow up on the pad. And then.
56:17Elon MuskAnd there's like, a tire bouncing down the road, and then the Tesla logo just lands. Bam. Right in front of the camera. It's like one of the things that, like, this is a movie, you know, that's kind of one of the possible outcomes.
56:30Elon MuskAnd unfortunately, it didn't blow up. And now my car is orbiting Mars.
56:34Joe RoganWow.
56:35Elon MuskYeah. So now in that car. So now hopefully somebody in the alien civilizations in the future could find that, because it'll be, like, around for, like, millions of years.
56:43Joe RoganI've seen the images of it with the.
56:46Elon MuskThat looks fake.
56:47Joe RoganIt looks.
56:47Elon MuskThat's how you know it's real.
56:48Joe RoganIs that how you know it's real?
56:50Elon MuskYeah.
56:50Joe RoganHow do the images get to us?
56:53Elon MuskThe images are too lame to be. To be. To be fake or. I mean, they look good, but you. For example, the dynamic range of the camera is not enough to pick up the stars and the vehicle, you know, because, like, things are very bright in space.
57:10Elon MuskThere's no. Like, we don't quite realize it, but in the app, like, the. The atmosphere is making everything a little fuzzy, and its base things are super crisp and super, like, really reflective.
57:22Elon MuskYeah. Yeah, exactly. So.
57:24Joe RoganSo how is that getting to us?
57:26Elon MuskWith an image? Yeah, with a radio. Wow. So the rocket's got a.
57:34Joe RoganHow many megapixels is that image?
57:35Elon MuskNot that many, actually.
57:37Joe RoganReally?
57:37Elon MuskNo, I mean, it's probably a couple megapixels, something like that.
57:40Joe RoganSo, like, an old flip phone.
57:42Elon MuskYeah. It's mostly just driven by the. What's the bandwidth of a video signal?
57:49Joe RoganSo what do you have?
57:50Elon MuskThese are frame grabs from the video signal.
57:53Joe RoganAnd where's the camera that's taking this photo?
57:57Elon MuskOh man. Our director of photography is awesome.
58:00Joe RoganBut I mean when this thing gets sent to us, what is taking an image of this?
58:05Elon MuskThere's a camera on a stick.
58:07Joe RoganReally?
58:07Elon MuskYeah.
58:08Joe RoganAnd it didn't break off?
58:09Elon MuskNo. I mean, thought it might, but there's a camera. I mean it's, it's kind of a, like a fairly wide angle and like sort of the camera is actually not that far from the car.
58:23Joe RoganWell, what is that one up there? That shows the whole car. Is that fake?
58:26Elon MuskThat's fake.
58:28Joe RoganThat real?
58:28Elon MuskThat's real.
58:29Joe RoganWow. This is. Don't panic on the screen.
58:31Elon MuskYeah, don't panic.
58:35Joe RoganSpeaking of the roadster, when is that thing going to be available?
58:40Elon MuskNext generation roadster. So we're, we're finishing the engineering of it this year and so hopefully start shipping them next year. Really? Yeah. And that we're going to throw some rocket technology in that car.
58:50Elon MuskSo.
58:50Joe RoganYeah, I've heard about that. What does that mean?
58:53Elon MuskSo at a minimum it would be. I want it to hover and I'm trying to figure out how to make this thing hover without, you know, killing people.
59:04Joe RoganRight, yeah, good call.
59:06Elon MuskYeah, exactly. I thought like maybe we could make it hover but like not too high, you know, so like maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground or something like that, you know, like if you plummet, blow out the suspension.
59:19Elon MuskBut you're not going to die. So maybe you're six feet out of six feet probably. Okay, you're not going to die either.
59:26Joe RoganProbably not.
59:26Elon MuskProbably not. So if we just put a height limit on it, probably, probably fine.
59:31Joe RoganAnd would it be able to travel while it's hovering?
59:34Elon MuskYeah.
59:35Joe RoganSo you'll be able to go six feet off the ground and go how fast?
59:39Elon MuskWell, you go pretty fast but you're going to be time limited.
59:44Joe RoganRight. Like a jet, like there's going to
59:48Elon Muskbe a super high pressure, like ultra high pressure air bottle in the. Oh, so, so the, the standard roadster would have like two, two back seats, two like kid seats, you know, in the back, like small seats, like a back of a Porsche or something.
1:00:00Elon MuskOr if you get the, I don't know, the SpaceX option package then in that place where the two rear seats are would be, is a high pressure carbon over wrap pressure vessel.
1:00:13Elon MuskSo, so I don't know, 10,000 psi or something like that and a bunch of thrusters and so at minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down James Bond style and there's a rocket thruster behind it, and that gives you three tons of thrust.
1:00:33Joe RoganOh, for acceleration.
1:00:34Elon MuskYeah.
1:00:35Joe RoganSo that would be on the ground.
1:00:36Elon MuskThat would be on the ground. This thing would move like a bat out of hell.
1:00:39Joe RoganJesus Christ. But it already goes 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds.
1:00:42Elon MuskRight. That's the sedan with the four door.
1:00:44Joe RoganWhat?
1:00:45Elon MuskYeah, the new Model S. Model S plaid that we start shipping next month, or this month is. We just tested it on the motor trend spec. 0 to 60 is 1.96 seconds.
1:01:00Joe RoganI have never driven my Tesla and go, why is this thing a little fucking faster? Yeah, I mean, the one I have, the model S is 2.4, right?
1:01:08Elon MuskYeah.
1:01:08Joe RoganWhich is preposterous. It's so crazy. I take people in it, like.
1:01:11Elon MuskYeah. They've never experienced anything like it.
1:01:13Joe RoganNo.
1:01:14Elon MuskIn their entire life.
1:01:15Joe RoganMy friend is like, so what's the deal with these Teslas? I go, you want. You want to freak out? You want to see something crazy? I picked him up at the Improv.
1:01:22Joe RoganWe drove to the Comedy Store.
1:01:23Elon MuskYeah.
1:01:23Joe RoganAnd I. I took him up Laurel Canyon. Are you ready? I never take it out of ludicrous mode, by the way. I keep it in ludicrous mode all the time.
1:01:31Joe RoganI stomped on the gas. Well, not the gas, the accelerator. And he started screaming. He's like, ah, what the fuck? I go, yeah, it's. What the fuck? This is crazy.
1:01:41Elon MuskIt's crazy.
1:01:42Joe RoganIt's crazy.
1:01:42Elon MuskYes.
1:01:43Joe RoganSo this is significantly faster than that just for the plaid.
1:01:46Elon MuskYeah. So the new. The new plaid. Yeah.
1:01:48Joe RoganIt's a half second quicker to 60.
1:01:51Elon MuskPretty close. Yeah. Yeah. Like every millisecond really matters when you start getting that that fast.
1:01:57Joe RoganI thought plaid was going to ship later in the year.
1:02:00Elon MuskYeah, we juiced it up. We managed to make it go faster.
1:02:04Joe RoganOh,
1:02:07Elon Muskwe've applied plaid to plaid.
1:02:08Joe RoganAnd the plaid has a wider wheelbase too, right? It does, yeah. And so it handles better. Is that the idea behind that?
1:02:13Elon MuskYeah, it does have better handling. Like, we're trying to get to. On the Nurburgring, get to, like, the low seven minute mark. Really? Yeah. And then, you know, with further improvements, I think we could.
1:02:26Elon MuskWe could bust seven minutes on the Nurburgring, which would be a pretty wicked outcome.
1:02:29Joe RoganWhat is the record right now at the Nurburgring? Is it the Porsche 918? Like what has the record? Something crazy like that, right? Some.
1:02:37Elon MuskThere's no, no production car. I think no production car has gotten under 7 really. As far as I know. And even the ones that are close that they say are production there, they do a bunch of changes, right?
1:02:49Joe RoganLike change the tires, aerodynamics.
1:02:52Elon MuskYeah, yeah. But it's like I think there's potential to have a car that as delivered can beat seven seconds on Nurburgring.
1:03:02Joe RoganIsn't it funny that there's this one track that's the gold standard for almost all vehicles. Like if you look at like road and track or motor trend. Do you want to find out how badass this new sports car is?
1:03:13Joe RoganIt's like what number does it do in the Nurburgring?
1:03:16Elon MuskWell, yeah. Now Nurburgring, to be totally frank, is not representative of normal. It's not normal. Yeah, it's the hottest one to. You can't game it, you know, so. But I think for everyday driving, it's the acceleration that really matters.
1:03:33Elon MuskLike it's like, you know, you're at a, you know, the light goes green, boom. Who's across the intersection fastest? The new plaid will do, you know, a sub 9 second quarter mile and with a, with an extra track speed and a quarter mile of 155 miles an hour.
1:03:51Joe RoganAnd it's a sedan.
1:03:52Elon MuskYeah.
1:03:52Joe RoganIt's a four door.
1:03:54Elon MuskIt can hit 60 miles an hour before it's cleared the intersection. That's insane. Insane.
1:03:59Joe RoganThat's insane.
1:04:00Elon MuskYeah.
1:04:00Joe RoganWow.
1:04:02Elon MuskIt's uncomfortably fast.
1:04:03Joe RoganIs that steering wheel legit?
1:04:05Elon MuskYeah.
1:04:05Joe RoganIs it legal?
1:04:06Elon MuskYeah, I mean formally, they, they use a, a yoke in Formula one. They don't have a stadium. Right.
1:04:11Joe RoganBut you're not on the highway Formula one car.
1:04:15Elon MuskYeah, Yeah.
1:04:16Joe RoganI like driving like this, like resting my hand on the top of the wheel.
1:04:20Elon MuskWell, you. I think autopilot's getting good enough that you won't need to drive most of the time. Unless you really want to.
1:04:26Joe RoganI like driving.
1:04:27Elon MuskOkay.
1:04:28Joe RoganYeah. I use autopilot sometimes. I mean, but most of the time I drive.
1:04:34Elon MuskI find it's like you can rest your hand on your knee, that kind of thing and it works great anyway. It looks awesome.
1:04:41Joe RoganIt does look cool.
1:04:42Elon MuskYeah.
1:04:43Joe RoganYeah. It's very spaceshipy.
1:04:45Elon MuskYeah.
1:04:45Joe RoganYeah.
1:04:46Elon MuskThat's great.
1:04:46Joe RoganAnd all the stuff is on the steering wheel now too, right? The blinkers and all that jazz. Even the horn is like a little button, right?
1:04:55Elon MuskYeah, the horn is already kind of the center of the steering wheel anyway.
1:05:01Joe RoganIs it still the center of the steering wheel as well?
1:05:03Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
1:05:03Joe RoganBut isn't it a button? I thought on the yoke there's a button for the horn. Yeah, but you have to really. I used to have a car that had a button for the horn.
1:05:13Joe RoganI think it was an Acura nsx.
1:05:15Elon MuskOkay.
1:05:16Joe RoganAnd it had. Instead of the center hub being the horn, there was a button.
1:05:20Elon MuskYeah.
1:05:21Joe RoganI never remembered it.
1:05:24Elon MuskWell, with the. There. There are no yolks. Sorry. There are no stalks there. So with this, there's a yo. There's a yoke, but there's no stalks. So the car, for example, will default to driving in the.
1:05:36Elon MuskLike, if you just get in, when you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator, it will figure out whether you want to go backwards or forwards. That's crazy.
1:05:45Joe RoganHow's that possible?
1:05:46Elon MuskWell, it just, you know, looks and sees. Is there an obstacle in front? Okay. You probably don't want to wag it, so you probably want to go backwards.
1:05:53Joe RoganRight. But what if you want to go backwards and there's nothing in front of you?
1:05:58Elon MuskYeah. What if it's ambiguous?
1:05:59Joe RoganRight.
1:06:01Elon MuskSo it would default to the invoice of whatever you started and then you can just swipe on the screen and change direction.
1:06:11Joe RoganBut isn't it easier to just hit like that way to get.
1:06:14Elon MuskAlmost never. You'll see. It's like you almost never.
1:06:16Joe RoganDo you do it?
1:06:17Elon MuskYeah.
1:06:18Joe RoganSo this is something you've driven and it's intuitive.
1:06:21Elon MuskYeah. Once you get rid of the stalk and have the car figure it out, it's annoying to have a stalk after that.
1:06:27Joe RoganReally?
1:06:28Elon MuskIt's annoying.
1:06:28Joe RoganYou're talking to a guy likes manual gearboxes. Sure. I like going.
1:06:35Elon MuskYeah. I mean, I learned to drive on manual too.
1:06:37Joe RoganIt's fun.
1:06:38Elon MuskYeah, it's cool.
1:06:39Joe RoganYeah. There's different kinds of cool, though. Like, I. The one wouldn't. What I tell people about the Tesla, I go, listen, I love cars, I love all kinds of cars, but the Tesla makes other cars seem dumb.
1:06:51Joe RoganIt does. It makes them seem dumb.
1:06:53Elon MuskYeah, it just.
1:06:54Joe RoganIt's so fast, it's so quiet. Everything about it, the navigation screen, it's so big. Like, why wouldn't it be big?
1:07:00Elon MuskYeah, it's better.
1:07:01Joe RoganIt's better to be big.
1:07:02Elon MuskYeah. Keeps get. The software keeps getting upgraded.
1:07:04Joe RoganThe navigation system, the ability to just press that button and say navigate to, and then it goes on the Internet and finds out what you're looking for and finds it.
1:07:11Joe RoganRestaurants.
1:07:12Elon MuskYeah.
1:07:12Joe RoganWhatever you're looking for, it's fucking amazing.
1:07:14Elon MuskOh, there's like a little tip for the Tesla. If you just Swipe down on the navigate button. It automatically figures out if you want to go to home or work and navigates there.
1:07:25Elon MuskSo if you're at home and obviously you know how to get to work, but do you know the fastest way to get to work?
1:07:32Joe RoganTaking Waze type technology.
1:07:34Elon MuskYeah. Like what's the. On a traffic adjusted basis, what's the best way to go. To go to work.
1:07:38Joe RoganBut how does it adjust? Like, what is it getting your data from?
1:07:41Elon MuskIt's downloading traffic data from the Internet.
1:07:43Joe RoganOkay. So Waze uses traffic data from the Internet plus user input. So, like it takes an extra beat to get the traffic data from the Internet. The idea of Waze is that you're getting it from users in real time.
1:07:56Joe RoganLike there's a car accident, people program it in, hey, folks, there's a fucking car accident here. And then you get it right away. Whereas on the Internet you're a couple beats behind.
1:08:05Elon MuskYeah, I mean, we get the traffic data from Google.
1:08:07Joe RoganOkay. Oh, so it is for Waze, because Google, well, waiting.
1:08:10Elon MuskGoogle is slightly different, but they have similar data sets.
1:08:13Joe RoganYeah.
1:08:14Elon MuskSo basically, let's say there's an accident on the way to work or road closure or something like that. It was helpful to know that before you encountered it. So if you just swipe down, it'll automatically navigate to work and then also the autopilot will work basically seamlessly on the way to work.
1:08:32Elon MuskWe have the beta out and beta is working pretty well. It's going to get super good and it'll basically be able to drive you all the way to work automatically.
1:08:42Elon MuskYou don't like, you basically just get in and it'll assume you're going to work. If it's Monday to Friday in the morning, or you could say program, maybe go to school, drop the kids over to school, then go to work.
1:08:54Elon MuskIt should just do this stuff automatically. You want to take the perspective of all input is error. If you have to do something, it's an error, make the error smaller.
1:09:07Elon MuskAll input is error. Unless it's a game. All input is error.
1:09:11Joe RoganWell, that's the other thing too. It has games like you can play chess.
1:09:16Elon MuskYeah, you can play chess. We've got the backgammon with the aesthetic described in Lost. J.J. abrams asked for backgammon. So we put backgammon in with the Lost aesthetic. It's got this really fun game called Polytopia.
1:09:34Elon MuskI would say that's my top recommendation for any game in the cars. Play Polytopia.
1:09:37Joe RoganWhat is that?
1:09:40Elon MuskIt's a real fun strategy game. That's. You'll see, like it's the top of the list.
1:09:46Joe RoganThis is not something you can play while you're driving.
1:09:50Elon MuskWell, I mean, you're not supposed to play it while you're driving. That would be illegal.
1:09:54Joe RoganBut will it work while you're on autopilot? So if you're on autopilot, can you also play chess?
1:09:59Elon MuskWell, you have to tap a button that says you're the passenger. Kind of like Waze.
1:10:06Joe RoganOkay, Kind of like Waze.
1:10:08Elon MuskYeah.
1:10:08Joe RoganSo it's open for interpretation. So if you are some chess freak, you could literally play chess on your way to work.
1:10:18Elon MuskYeah.
1:10:19Joe RoganWow.
1:10:21Elon MuskI mean, in the future, as the car becomes more and more autonomous, it's going to be really about entertainment. Entertainment productivity. So it's just entertainment first and foremost, and then productivity as well.
1:10:37Joe RoganDo you have specific things that you do on your way. Do you listen to books on tape? Do you listen to music?
1:10:44Elon MuskYeah, I usually listen to music.
1:10:46Joe RoganOh, those fucking pirate songs you like.
1:10:49Elon MuskThe sea shanties?
1:10:53Joe RoganI thought you were joking about that until you played them.
1:10:55Elon MuskYeah. Pretty catchy.
1:10:57Joe RoganThey're pretty catchy. That's what's crazy. I started researching things.
1:11:01Elon MuskStuck in your head.
1:11:02Joe RoganI did not know that it was really a thing.
1:11:03Elon MuskYeah, yeah, yeah.
1:11:08Joe RoganJamie, do you know. Do you know about the sea shanties? Oh, my God. Yeah.
1:11:14Elon MuskThere's actually something really appealing about people singing in harmony.
1:11:18Joe RoganYeah.
1:11:19Elon MuskIt's actually way better than you think.
1:11:20Joe RoganIt's also like. It's got like a weird renaissance fair type thing to it. You feel like you're all together in this old timey thing, you know, pretending.
1:11:29Elon MuskYeah.
1:11:30Joe RoganVery strange.
1:11:32Elon MuskYeah.
1:11:33Joe RoganIt's very odd.
1:11:35Elon MuskSo it seems like one of the top reasons to be a pirate would be we have sea shanties and we have tropical taverns and, I don't know, cool outfits.
1:11:46Elon MuskCool outfits. Yeah. You get the scarves. Dress up. Yeah.
1:11:50Joe RoganYou get to dress weird. Yeah. If you lose your leg, they got pegs for you.
1:11:53Elon MuskYeah. You got a parrot.
1:11:54Joe RoganYeah. Parrot. How'd that happen? Now, what about the truck? When is that thing gonna happen?
1:12:02Elon MuskCybertruck. Yeah. So we're building a big factory here in Austin. That's where we'll make the cybertruck. Yeah.
1:12:08Joe RoganNow, did you decide to do this in Austin from the jump, or did along the way you decide to move the cyber factory. The cybertruck factory here?
1:12:17Elon MuskYeah. Well, frankly, I was just. Austin is a bit like many California. So I was like asking the team in California. All right, where. Where do you want to.
1:12:28Elon MuskWhat's your top choice for, you know, next big US Factory location. Like, well, where do you want to spend time? And the number one choice was Austin. And then I was like, okay, okay, what's number two?
1:12:42Elon MuskSilence.
1:12:48Elon MuskYeah. So many California here in Austin.
1:12:50Joe RoganIt is a lot, right?
1:12:51Elon MuskYeah, yeah, it's.
1:12:53Joe RoganI mean, I hesitate talking about it because I've talked about it too much, but it's very utopian.
1:13:00Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. I think Austin is going to be the biggest boomtown that America has seen in half century.
1:13:08Joe RoganI think it's a great response to the fucked up government in some of the other cities.
1:13:13Elon MuskYeah. I mean, I think, you know. Yeah. I think we do need to make sure that Austin does not, you know, people moving from California don't inadvertently recreate the issues that they moved.
1:13:28Elon MuskCaused them to move in the first place.
1:13:29Joe RoganYes. The balance of Austin is a blue city and a red state. And it's almost like it kind of has to stay red. Not kind of has to. I think it does.
1:13:39Joe RoganYou need the certain amount of freedoms, but then you need the philosophical. Like there's a bend to Austin that's very progressive and open minded and artistic and the restaurants are amazing, the people are really cool.
1:13:52Joe RoganBut it needs to be sort of embraced by guns and God. Freedom. That's part of the whole mixture that makes it work. And that's, you know, it's, it's kind of.
1:14:06Joe RoganThere's a, there's a metaphor to life in there somewhere, you know?
1:14:10Elon MuskYeah.
1:14:10Joe RoganThat it's protected by the rest of the philosophy of Texas, which is a wild, crazy place that has more tigers, private collections than in all of the wild of the world.
1:14:23Elon MuskReally?
1:14:23Joe RoganYes. I had a bit about it in my 2016 special. Texas.
1:14:29Elon MuskA lot of tigers.
1:14:29Joe RoganMan has more tigers in captivity than all of the wild of planet Earth.
1:14:37Elon MuskOkay.
1:14:37Joe RoganYeah. Well, these are people's yards. No bullshit. You can, you can. In your place, wherever you live, you could get a fucking zebra, no problem. Like, I have a friend who lives out in Dripping Springs.
1:14:50Joe RoganHe saw a zebra, okay? A zebra got loose. There's elk out there, all right? Wild elk just roaming around. Somebody had an elk jump the fence. Now there's an elk out there.
1:15:01Joe RoganAxis deer in my neighborhood. I saw an axis. I didn't see it. My wife saw it. She described to me, I know what it is. I said, that's an act.
1:15:07Joe RoganShe's like, it was like, it had white spots like a fawn, but it was really big. I'm like, that's an axis deer. So there's axis Deer? Yeah, they're from India.
1:15:15Joe RoganAnd tigers eat them.
1:15:17Elon MuskWow.
1:15:18Joe RoganBut these animals are. They're wild here because people bought them and they. They put them in the yard and they jumped the fence. This place is crazy. But that's why it works.
1:15:29Joe RoganThe reason why it works is because people have so much freedom.
1:15:32Elon MuskYeah.
1:15:32Joe RoganAnd then you have the University of Texas, you have Austin, which has a long history of art and music, Stevie ray Vaughan and 6th Street. And so many great musicians have come from here that it's got both of these things together.
1:15:45Joe RoganIt's got this wild freedom, and they embrace both parts of it. You know, this is. That's the cool thing about this place.
1:15:52Elon MuskYeah. Yeah, absolutely.
1:15:53Joe RoganI've never felt more at home. I fucking love it here.
1:15:56Elon MuskIt's a cool city. Like I said, it's going to be the biggest boom town in the America scene in 50 years.
1:16:03Joe RoganYes, I agree. Yeah, I think so. Megaboom comedy clubs are moving here like crazy. They're moving here left and right. Cap City's reopening. The Creek in the Cave just announced they're going to open here.
1:16:13Joe RoganThat's cool. I'm trying to open up a place here. There's other. Other clubs are trying to open up here. Comedians are moving in here by the droves. It's a wild place.
1:16:22Elon MuskYeah. Well, yeah, when saw you and Dave Chappelle. That was great.
1:16:28Joe RoganIt was fun.
1:16:28Elon MuskThat's a great venue.
1:16:29Joe RoganYeah, we did that Monday and Tuesday, too.
1:16:31Elon MuskThat's cool.
1:16:31Joe RoganIt's. It's just. There's something special going on. It just feels fun. It feels fun to be a part of the escape from this wretched dreariness of. Of, you know, the COVID pandemic.
1:16:44Joe RoganIt was just like this horrible feeling of having no power and no autonomy and being controlled by the government and being told what to do, and it didn't seem logical.
1:16:53Joe RoganAnd you're watching all these businesses fail and you're like, there's got to be a better way. And like, there is no better way. Wear an extra mask. Three masks.
1:17:00Joe RoganWear three masks and stay indoors and. Holy shit.
1:17:04Elon MuskYeah.
1:17:05Joe RoganYeah. It didn't make any sense.
1:17:06Elon MuskNo. You can't talk people out of a good panic. They sure love it.
1:17:12Joe RoganThey love panic porn. Yeah. Fear porn is like. That's people's favorite indulgence.
1:17:18Elon MuskYeah. That's why I say rule number one. Just like Douglas Adams, don't panic.
1:17:22Joe RoganBut there's always people that. That don't. And those people, they get together and they. They take solace in the fact there's other people that also don't want to buy into this shit.
1:17:35Elon MuskYeah. Anyway, so Orson's cool.
1:17:38Joe RoganSo the cybertruck.
1:17:39Elon MuskYeah. So we're gonna build it. Our factory is only like, two miles away from the airport. Oh.
1:17:46Joe RoganProbably shouldn't tell people that.
1:17:48Elon MuskYou can literally drive. You can see it from the highway.
1:17:51Joe RoganDo you. Do you anticipate visitors?
1:17:53Elon MuskSure. I mean, we'll. We'll offer tours and that kind of thing.
1:17:56Joe RoganWill you offer, like, if someone wants to come and get their truck from the factory? Drive it off the floor?
1:18:01Elon MuskYou bet.
1:18:02Joe RoganThat's exciting. Yeah, that's exciting.
1:18:04Elon MuskWe got a lot of land.
1:18:06Joe RoganYeah, no, I know.
1:18:07Elon Musk2500 acres right next to the airport.
1:18:09Joe RoganThat's fucking cool. Yeah, that's amazing.
1:18:12Elon MuskIt's cool.
1:18:13Joe RoganSo when you are designing this cybertruck, you know, you had your. Your launch, you showed the shape of it.
1:18:20Elon MuskThere was a lot.
1:18:21Joe RoganLike, I sent you a picture. I remember I sent you a picture. I was like, this is fucking cool. And you're like, that's not real. And I was like, oh, okay.
1:18:27Joe RoganLike, there's a lot of fake pictures before the initial launch.
1:18:31Elon MuskOh, yeah.
1:18:31Joe RoganYou tricked a lot of people because people thought it was going to look much, even though the. The picture that I sent you was pretty fucking cool.
1:18:40Elon MuskYeah.
1:18:40Joe RoganWhat you designed was. Is that ultimately going to be what it really looks like? It's going to be that shape, or has there been any revisions?
1:18:50Elon MuskNo, that's pretty much what it'll look like with very small differences. You know, we adjusted the size a few percent, but in what way? Well, it's. I don't know, like, I think around 3% smaller.
1:19:06Joe RoganWhy did you decide to do that?
1:19:09Elon MuskWell, you know, it would be a couple inches too big for the tunnel.
1:19:12Joe RoganOh, okay. So for the boring tunnel.
1:19:15Elon MuskWell, I mean, we did actually drive through the boring tunnel in a cybertruck with Jay Leno, which was a hair raising because it was a little bit too big.
1:19:25Elon MuskIt was pretty snug.
1:19:27Joe RoganOh, no. Imagine if you killed Jay Leno.
1:19:30Elon MuskYeah, that'd be awkward. How do we ever explain that?
1:19:35Joe RoganHe's the biggest petrol head ever and he even loves your car.
1:19:38Elon MuskYeah. The cybertruck is like CGI in real life. You're standing right in front of it and it looks like this is special effect, so that's cool. It'll change the look of the roads.
1:19:52Elon MuskIt doesn't look like anything. It looks like alien technology.
1:19:54Joe RoganYeah. And when is that coming out?
1:19:57Elon MuskWe'll have probably limited production end of this year. And Volume production, hopefully next year.
1:20:02Joe RoganHave you ever considered something alternative to air inflated tires? Have you seen some of these. These alternatives that have essentially spaces in between the upper wall and the wheel?
1:20:15Joe RoganHave you thought about that?
1:20:16Elon MuskYeah, we haven't found a, you know, a tire that. Because you got to worry about road noise, you got to take out potholes and bumps. You got to have, like, good grip, but you also want to have low rolling resistance so that, you know, get good range.
1:20:39Elon MuskThose are a lot of things to try to put into one tire. Then if you also say, and it can't have air, it's like, this is hard.
1:20:49Joe RoganBut you're talking. I'm talking to a guy who's putting people on Mars. You can't figure out an airless tire.
1:20:56Elon MuskIt's just. It's an incremental constraint. I'm not saying there won't be such a thing. I think there will be, to be
1:21:04Joe Roganprecise, because it seems like we've just gotten way too comfortable with this idea that tires blow out and you get flats. It's very annoying.
1:21:11Elon MuskFlats are annoying.
1:21:12Joe RoganYeah. Very annoying.
1:21:13Elon MuskYeah. Non sport tires, by the way, are much less likely to go to have
1:21:20Joe Roganflats because they have more bounce.
1:21:22Elon MuskYeah. Like, let's say you hit the edge of a pothole, if you got more rubber wall, you know, you got a longer way to go before you pinch the tire.
1:21:30Elon MuskSo sport tires tend to have more flats, especially in LA Potholes. That's worse. There was one particular pothole on Sunset Boulevard. It would just take out so many model S, like a boom, boom, both sides of the car.
1:21:48Elon MuskReally? Yeah.
1:21:49Joe RoganDamn.
1:21:53Elon MuskYeah. Steven Spielberg was actually once. It's like, hey, Steven Spielberg is like two tires. When I was like, God damn it, I know that pothole.
1:22:06Joe RoganFeel like you pay to fix that.
1:22:07Elon MuskI mean, fix that pothole. It seems like that's actually. It'll be like, man, there sure are a lot of taxes in California for roads this bad.
1:22:14Joe RoganYeah, the place is a mess.
1:22:17Elon MuskYeah.
1:22:18Joe RoganSo. So ultimately, one day that's a possibility of having some sort of an airless tire. Because I've seen prototypes. I've never seen one on an actual car. On physical.
1:22:27Joe RoganIn real life. Yeah.
1:22:28Elon MuskI think the technology is gradually getting there. And I think for something like a robo taxi, where you want to have the tires last for a long time and not go flat, it's going to make a lot of sense.
1:22:40Joe RoganYeah. But other than that, essentially most of what we saw in the demo is the same. It's still going to have. Now there was the Issue with the glass when accidentally shattered.
1:22:54Joe RoganHow annoying was that?
1:22:56Elon MuskThat was shocking. I mean, we literally spent hours beforehand with like, lots of people throwing steel balls at the window.
1:23:07Joe RoganRight.
1:23:09Elon MuskI mean, we must have thrown at least a dozen people must have thrown
1:23:13Joe Rogansteel balls at the same window, though.
1:23:15Elon MuskYeah, same damn window.
1:23:15Joe RoganIsn't that the problem?
1:23:17Elon MuskYeah, that might. It turns out that might be the problem. If you keep throwing steel balls, eventually it's going to break. And. And I did, I did ask Franz to really wind up and give it all, you know, I should have, like,
1:23:31Joe Rogantake it easy, you know, give me a. You don't need to wind up.
1:23:33Elon MuskYeah, we don't need the fastball. But I asked, I did ask for the fastball and like, okay, let's go for the slightly, not slightly slower ball.
1:23:41Joe RoganDo you think it was because you guys were hitting the sidewall with a sledgehammer?
1:23:44Elon MuskYeah, that could be. Like, we're trying to figure out how the hell this thing break because, I mean, we were just bouncing steel balls on foot all day and we think possibly what.
1:23:55Elon MuskWhat might have happened there was that hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it. And once you crack the base of it, it loses all its strength.
1:24:03Joe RoganRight.
1:24:03Elon MuskAnd then. And then it was just have a hairline fracture and then, then you hit it anywhere, it's going to shatter.
1:24:09Joe RoganDid you recreate that?
1:24:12Elon MuskWe didn't. It's also hard with test glass. Like with, you know, like, when you actually do production glass, it's much more robust than demo glass. Because production glass, you like demo glass that you just can't.
1:24:32Elon MuskYou have to have like massive tools and ovens and everything to make the production glass. It's like. And if you don't, you know, that takes a while to do so.
1:24:41Elon MuskThe production class is always better than demo class. Nonetheless, it should have worked. And it was probably because we whacked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel bulleted.
1:24:57Elon MuskBut it will be bulletproof to a handgun.
1:24:59Joe RoganNow, why did you decide to do all that? Make it bulletproof and make it like you could hit it with a sledgehammer. Like, what. What was the motivation to make it different than just like a Model S?
1:25:09Elon MuskI mean, I think, you know, it's like, what's cool about a truck? Trucks are tough. And like, okay, what's tougher than a truck? A tank. What about a tank from the future?
1:25:17Elon MuskOkay, now you have a tank from the future.
1:25:20Joe RoganOkay.
1:25:21Elon MuskYeah, that's bulletproof.
1:25:23Joe RoganYeah.
1:25:24Elon MuskAnd how's that compared to you know, it's way tougher than a regular truck look.
1:25:31Joe RoganIt's fucking cool. There's no doubt from the future that
1:25:34Elon Muskshit's like Halo with a rocket launcher in the back.
1:25:37Joe RoganHave you thought about doing something like that?
1:25:39Elon MuskSomebody's gonna do it for sure.
1:25:40Joe RoganFor military use? Yeah, seems like it.
1:25:42Elon MuskI mean, I don't know. That sounds like it'd be fun. I mean, like, you know, cruising around the field and like loving shooting rockets.
1:25:50Joe RoganNow, is there ever a possibility that these things gonna be solar powered? Is that, is that someday is the solar technology gonna get to a point
1:25:57Elon Muskwhere it's kind of a surface area issue? So I mean, I think we could possibly put the, the COVID of the truck bed, you know, put some solar cells in that.
1:26:06Elon MuskSo if you just leave it out in the sun, you know, probably bring, you know, recharges a few miles a day type of thing.
1:26:13Joe RoganOh, it was only, it would only
1:26:14Elon Muskbe a few months.
1:26:15Joe RoganBut what about one day? Is it possible that technology could evolve to the point where they could extract more? No.
1:26:20Elon MuskReally? No, it's. So there's about 1 kilowatt per square meter of solar energy and then you're going to get probably 20, 25% efficiency. So you got 200 watts per square meter.
1:26:33Elon MuskAnd then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun. So you know, like you're, you know, at right angles, basically. Like are you facing the sun or not? So, you know, we add all those things up.
1:26:45Elon MuskYou say how many square meters can you really get? And then how many watt hours per mile? So it's basically if you could do 10 miles a day, you'd be lucky.
1:26:56Joe RoganReally?
1:26:56Elon MuskYeah.
1:26:57Joe RoganAnd that's not going to change?
1:26:59Elon MuskNo.
1:27:00Joe RoganWow, that sucks. It'd be cool if it just ran. I mean, is it possible to make a car entirely of solar panels? Like the entire surface of it, solar panels, like in a place like LA or somewhere where it's never cloudy and drive around in that thing?
1:27:18Elon MuskNo, you can, you're going to burn off energy faster than you can drive. Like if you don't drive that often, that's a different story.
1:27:24Joe RoganThe only option is to have a solar paneled home and extract the power
1:27:27Elon Muskthat way and charge a lot of, lot of area.
1:27:31Joe RoganYeah.
1:27:32Elon MuskSo now you could possibly have like some, you know, solar thing that unfurls, that has a lot more surface area.
1:27:42Joe RoganSo when you park it at work or something like that.
1:27:45Elon MuskYeah, but it's just, it just needs area.
1:27:47Joe RoganRight.
1:27:48Elon MuskYou know, so like I said, think about like maybe 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like that.
1:27:58Joe RoganNow the range of the new cars is much longer. Like what is the range of the standard model S that's available right now? It's like 300.
1:28:10Elon MuskYeah, 350, 360. I don't know. It's a lot actually. The new long range model s is over 400 mile range. The new one, but even the old one. The old one was even 400 miles.
1:28:22Elon MuskThe new one's 400 miles too.
1:28:23Joe RoganBut the plaid will get you up to.
1:28:26Elon MuskSo the current plaid is going to be around 400 miles range. There's plaid. Plus if you. That's maybe a year from now, that'll be on the order of 500 miles.
1:28:38Elon MuskThat's a lot. Who drive 500 miles anyway?
1:28:41Joe RoganWell, if you're driving across the country. Yeah, yeah.
1:28:44Elon MuskPretty rare. I mean like.
1:28:46Joe RoganYeah, for most commuters.
1:28:49Elon MuskYeah. I mean even if you're driving 100 miles an hour, you know, it's still, you know, you still gotta be drive, drive for a while before you run out of battery.
1:28:59Joe RoganAnd the truck, what is the, the cybertruck's range going to be?
1:29:05Elon MuskWe have to pick a range actually for the initial version it'll be some number over 300 miles.
1:29:13Joe RoganNow when you say pick a range in terms of like what the battery
1:29:17Elon Muskarray that you put in, what's the pack size?
1:29:19Joe RoganSo do you have to take into account like how much weight it's going to add, how long it's going to take to charge?
1:29:26Elon MuskYeah, I mean there's like basically the things that matter are the frontal area times the drag coefficient for aerodynamic drag and then rolling resistance, which is a function of mass and the tire efficiency.
1:29:42Elon MuskSo this has a big frontal area, it's not very aerodynamic. And the tires are not super. They're not optimized for long range.
1:29:54Joe RoganIt looks very aerodynamic. The truck, it actually doesn't look.
1:30:00Elon MuskYou don't want sharp angles.
1:30:01Joe RoganSee, that's the problem. Problem to me, I'll be like, yeah, that's slicing right through like a knife. You want it rounded, you want it rounded. Yeah.
1:30:12Elon MuskSo you want the air to have like smooth. Like if you're a little air particle, you don't want the bumps.
1:30:18Joe RoganRight.
1:30:19Elon MuskYou want like smooth, just like you're driving over the car. No bumps.
1:30:23Joe RoganRight.
1:30:24Elon MuskJust, you know, easy going. Sharp angles are bad for arrow.
1:30:29Joe RoganSo that arrow will contribute to the lack of range. So minimize the range somewhat.
1:30:36Elon MuskIt'll have a drag coefficient that's pretty good for a truck because the enclosing the bed at an angle that helps a lot. Like normal trucks going down the highway.
1:30:46Elon MuskIt's like a barn door. I mean, it's like having a parachute in the back. You might as well be flying it. Yeah, it's like not far different from driving with a parachute.
1:30:57Elon MuskSo you can think of drag as basically it's like the integrated pressure profile over the car. So if you create a low pressure zone in the back of your car where you don't fill in the gap, like you're cruising through the air, you're making a hole through the air and the air is trying to fill in the gap.
1:31:13Elon MuskAnd if you've got a sharp transition into the truck bed, it's a big low pressure zone, basically. And that's bad for drag. So having the sloped back where that's got the truck bed cover, that's very helpful, but the sharp angles are not helpful.
1:31:38Joe RoganSo the range of that truck is yet to be determined. You're trying to figure it out.
1:31:44Elon MuskIt'll be over 300 miles.
1:31:45Joe RoganWhat about the roadster?
1:31:54Elon MuskI mean, some of these things we got to decide like what's actually the best product. You know, how much range do you really want? You know, if you ask people that say, well, I want, you know, 600 miles range, I'm like, okay, well that means most of the time you're hauling around a battery pack you're not going
1:32:12Joe Roganto use, you know, so it'll slow you down, it'll.
1:32:15Elon MuskYeah.
1:32:16Joe RoganInhibit handling.
1:32:17Elon MuskYeah, it's like, why not have a car that's got a fuel tank that has 2,000 miles range, you know, like go and pull it up like once every, every six months, every three months or something.
1:32:26Elon MuskRight. But people, they basically figured out like actually carrying that much, that much fuel around, it's not, not, you know, it's not worth it. Right. So. So I think, you know, there's some of the stuff you can do for kind of like bragging rights and like.
1:32:41Elon MuskBut then brain rising can get old fast. So it's more like, what are you going to like on a day to day basis? What maximizes the area under the curve of owner happiness.
1:32:52Elon MuskSo it'll have enough range that you'll never have to worry about range. Let me put it that way.
1:32:58Joe RoganOkay.
1:32:58Elon MuskYeah. So somewhere you can drive from LA to San Francisco, no problem. Austin to Dallas, no problem.
1:33:05Joe RoganSo a few hours of driving.
1:33:07Elon MuskEasy. Many hours of driving.
1:33:09Joe RoganMany hours of driving. Now, I heard you talk recently about possibility of a van, like sprinter van style.
1:33:18Elon MuskYeah. Now A van, because you got a big flat area. That's actually where solar could start to make a little more sense, you know, because you could have a lot of area.
1:33:30Joe RoganSo for the roof.
1:33:31Elon MuskYeah. And I think you also have like maybe a roof where you know it's solar and then when it's stationary, like maybe awnings. Yeah. It like it goes out and provides shade and maybe triples your area or something like that.
1:33:46Elon MuskNow if you go like, okay, now triple the area and you've got a big flat surface now you could start having, maybe having charging enough that you can start getting like 30 miles a day, that kind of thing.
1:34:00Joe RoganWell, that's interesting because there's a lot of people that use those for camping. Yeah, like my friend Tom Green. You know Tom Green?
1:34:05Elon MuskHe's. I think so. Yeah.
1:34:07Joe RoganUsed to be on MTV and actor and comedian. He's traveling across the country right now and one of those vans, like style van. I think you got a Ram, a Dodge Ram sprinter van.
1:34:18Joe RoganStyle.
1:34:19Elon MuskYeah.
1:34:19Joe RoganAnd if you had something like that, he has an awning that extends and he's got a bunch of camping and does a podcast out of it. If you had something like that, I
1:34:29Elon Muskthink that would be great. You know, like you could have like a van that just, you know, even if the apocalypse came around, you still, you can still drive.
1:34:37Joe RoganYeah, yeah. And maybe you can even have some sort of an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent.
1:34:44Elon MuskYeah.
1:34:44Joe RoganThat could juice you up during the day or something. Something along those lines.
1:34:50Elon MuskYeah. For solar, it's all about area.
1:34:52Joe RoganYeah.
1:34:53Elon MuskYou know, to call it 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like that.
1:34:57Joe RoganBut I don't understand that. There's no way that that's ever going to get more efficient.
1:35:03Elon MuskNo, really, No. I mean the sun, the solar incidence is somewhat coincidentally roughly 1,000 watts per square meter. Or you know, in a 10 foot by. Sorry, sorry. Like at 10 square feet, ish, there's 1,000 watts.
1:35:30Elon MuskAnd then that includes all the heating and everything else. So then you have to say like, okay, for photoelectric effect, you're going to capture photons within a certain band and you're not going to get them all because basically what happens with the photon hits the electron and gets it to jump over a gap and run around to the other side.
1:35:53Elon MuskThat's what happens with the photoelectric effect.
1:36:02Elon MuskWith the right energy, hits the electron, electron gets excited, jumps over a gap in the semiconductor and races around to the other side. And thus creates an electric circuit.
1:36:14Elon MuskSo you have to say, okay, well how are you going to get those electrons at just the right energy? What kind of photon incoming energy? You've got pretty much tops out around 30% efficiency for a silicon system.
1:36:32Elon MuskNow if you have triple junction gallium austenide, do a lot better, but that's very expensive. So. But if you're talking about like how
1:36:41Joe Roganmuch better could it do?
1:36:42Elon MuskYeah, like mid-30s, maybe 40.
1:36:47Joe RoganA big price increase, but still not enough to actually power the entire vehicle.
1:36:52Elon MuskNo, no, no, you're talking about. And you have to say, like for practical purposes, how's it going to do? Because you can't have like crazy money stuff on a car.
1:37:02Joe RoganYou know, when you say big money,
1:37:04Elon Musklike how much more like 10 times the cost at least.
1:37:07Joe RoganOh, wow.
1:37:08Elon MuskYeah. I mean, you don't see anyone. I mean the only thing like this has satellites that have like the triple junction gallium Austinite stuff, you know. But frankly, even for satellites, it's questionable for our satellites.
1:37:19Elon MuskFor Starlink, we don't bother with that.
1:37:21Joe RoganThat's another thing I want to talk to you about. Starlink. Starlink is semi controversial, right? Because on one hand people think it's great that you're going to provide the Internet through these satellites that are flying around.
1:37:35Joe RoganBut astronomers and a lot of people that are amateur astronomers, mostly the amateurs,
1:37:43Elon Muskwe've talked with the professional astronomers and assuaged their concerns.
1:37:48Joe RoganYeah, but the amateurs are pissed.
1:37:52Elon MuskYeah, they're like, you know, I don't know what they're talking about. They're pro level guys. They know what they're talking about. So we'll make sure that this is not like an obstacle to science.
1:38:08Joe RoganSo what the obstacle would be the visual aspect of it, right? Seeing these things flying around, that would be it.
1:38:17Elon MuskYeah. Honestly, it's pretty hard to find our satellites once they've reached orbit. It's hard to find them. And we have trouble finding our satellites. They were like, we're like, oh, we got like.
1:38:25Joe RoganBut I've seen pictures of them.
1:38:27Elon MuskYeah, well, first of all, so during the initial, like when they get tossed out of the rocket briefly, they were tumbling and so when they're tumbling, they'll twinkle and then, and then you'll see them.
1:38:42Joe RoganOh, so this was just the initial.
1:38:44Elon MuskYeah, it's just the initial orbit. They just got tossed out of the, you know, with upper stage deploys, the way we deploy them, we don't even really have a separation mechanism.
1:38:53Elon MuskYou can see the video online, but we kind of time down like A bundle of hay. And then we let go of the rods that are holding this big bundle of satellites down.
1:39:03Elon MuskBut before that, we rotate the stage so the stage is rotating and the satellites get just like if you took a deck of cards and there's a. All get thrown out because they have different amounts of rotational inertia.
1:39:17Joe RoganAnd what kind of bandwidth are these going to provide?
1:39:20Elon MuskOh, so, yeah, I mean, I think long term, we're talking about gigabit level. Really? Yeah, gigabit, low latency. So you could play like a fast Twitch video game, download a movie.
1:39:32Elon MuskSuper fast. It'd be great.
1:39:34Joe RoganAnd this is going to be global.
1:39:37Elon MuskYeah.
1:39:38Joe RoganAnd is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially, or will it require a series of satellites in different parts of the country or different parts of the world?
1:39:48Elon MuskWell, these satellites are actually zooming around the Earth at 25 times the speed of sound. And there's currently 36 planes. So they're. I mean, to the satellite, the satellite feels like it's going in a circle, but the Earth's rotating underneath the satellite.
1:40:05Elon MuskSo the ground track looks like a sine wave. So if you look from the ground perspective, the satellite's doing this sine wave with a peak at 53 degrees and then there's 36 planes.
1:40:18Elon MuskSo they're all doing like a sine wave just offset by a little bit. But like I said, space is real big, so they aren't in danger of whacking into each other.
1:40:32Elon MuskThose are super big up there. They don't really even get close. So anyway, so they're zooming around Earth. We got a lot of coverage around 53 degrees. And then we just started to launch some polar satellites which will go have an orbital inclination that allows them to kind of go have visibility to the polls almost, you know.
1:40:58Joe RoganWho the fuck is that for? Just in case.
1:41:02Elon MuskI mean, best people that live up there, you know.
1:41:06Joe RoganYeah, yeah.
1:41:07Elon MuskThere's an Antarctic research station.
1:41:09Joe RoganOkay. So they're gonna have Internet access. It's. They can, they can play Halo up there.
1:41:14Elon MuskYeah, they're gonna go from having trash for Internet to having incredible Internet.
1:41:17Joe RoganWow.
1:41:18Elon MuskYeah.
1:41:18Joe RoganSo it'll be the whole world.
1:41:20Elon MuskYeah.
1:41:20Joe RoganWow. Wow.
1:41:24Elon MuskYeah. Everywhere on Earth will have high bandwidth, low latency Internet.
1:41:29Joe RoganAnd will you be able to increase the bandwidth over time through software?
1:41:35Elon MuskThere's a lot that can be improved with software, but I should say that there's going to be a role for many different types of connectivity. So Starlink is great for low to medium population density, but the satellites are actually not great for high density urban.
1:41:58Elon MuskSo you're actually better off having 5G for that. Really? Yeah, because the thing is, that satellite's pretty far away, right? So you got that satellite, it's over 500km away.
1:42:12Elon MuskEven if it's right above you on a slant distance, it could be upwards of 1000km away.
1:42:20Joe RoganSo this would be fantastic for rural areas.
1:42:23Elon MuskYeah, it will provide some amount of connectivity in dense urban environments.
1:42:31Joe RoganBut equivalent to like what, 3G?
1:42:35Elon MuskNo, it's more like. So I think basically what's the spot size of a satellite? Like when it's putting a beam down in a location? And how big is that beam?
1:42:45Elon MuskAnd that's. So it's got a certain amount of bandwidth for that beam. And that beam is just like, it's a pretty big like think of like a flashlight or something.
1:42:54Joe RoganRight. And what is it?
1:42:55Elon MuskIt's the same thing.
1:42:55Joe RoganIt's just, it reaches a few blocks.
1:42:57Elon MuskLike if you had a flashlight up there and you're pointing down, it's like, okay, you're going to illuminate an area.
1:43:03Joe RoganRight.
1:43:04Elon MuskSo flashlight's just shooting out photons in the visible spectrum. We're shooting out photons in the KUK band, so much bigger wavelength than light, than visible light. So anyway, so these things.
1:43:22Elon MuskSo we got a bunch of spot beams basically. But these beams are giant by cellular standards. Like they might be, you know, several miles diameter on that beam. So then you got, you know, say for argument's sake, 10 mile diameter, you know, 16 kilometer diameter beam.
1:43:46Elon MuskThat's. This is a lot of area that it's. And all of the, all those terminals in that area will get the same information because it's got that beam that's just going down that spot.
1:43:57Elon MuskSo whereas you could have like a 5G tower. That's the ones that aren't causing corona.
1:44:11Joe RoganKidding.
1:44:15Elon Musk5G causes corona. It's a fact.
1:44:17Joe RoganOh my God. Have you seen any of that stuff? That's one of the most disturbing things about the Internet.
1:44:24Elon MuskAnyway.
1:44:24Joe RoganGo ahead.
1:44:24Elon MuskWell, I mean, when technology is magic, then you don't know what to believe, right?
1:44:27Joe RoganAnd when you're a moron, you believe anything.
1:44:33Elon MuskWell, let's say. So a cell tower could have a range of, you know, a mile or, you know, mile 1.5 kilometers. It basically could have like 1% the area of a satellite beam.
1:44:52Elon MuskSo like, if you had something that was, you know, 1 mile or kilometer or 10, it's going to be the square of that. That is the area. So satellites are great for low to medium density.
1:45:16Elon Musk5G is ideal for high density.
1:45:20Joe RoganAnd also because you could distribute the towers every mile or so easily and.
1:45:25Elon MuskYes.
1:45:25Joe RoganYeah. And dress them up like trees. That always bothers me.
1:45:29Elon MuskI'd rather. I think they should be better at the fake trees. Like, I feel like, come on, somebody didn't care enough. You could definitely have a way better fake tree than that.
1:45:37Joe RoganThey're so bad. They're so bad. They look terrible. Who are they tricking? No one.
1:45:42Elon MuskNo one, right? No, I'm like, what is this farce?
1:45:45Joe RoganYeah, they're offensive. They're more offensive than like the most ridiculous fake tits. You know, like the big ones that look like basketballs that don't even cleave
1:45:54Elon Muskthem all in your.
1:45:55Joe RoganYeah, they have no shape that resembles a breast at all.
1:45:58Elon MuskBut yeah.
1:45:59Joe RoganYeah, there's something weird about them too. It's like, I'm not offended by a tower. Well, the Christmas tree part in the bottom was kind of sweet. You could put ornaments on it.
1:46:12Joe RoganIs that one at the top, right, that palm tree one, Is that fake?
1:46:16Elon MuskNo, that's a good fake. If that's left side.
1:46:18Joe RoganJamie. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Scroll, keep scrolling.
1:46:21Elon MuskThe palm tree one looks pretty good.
1:46:22Joe RoganIs that real? Well, that's kind of not bad. Okay, that's not bad.
1:46:26Elon MuskYeah, that one's pretty good.
1:46:27Joe RoganIt's not bad. Yeah, if you were driving by that, that wouldn't be offensive. Yeah, but the one in the middle's not bad either. That's kind of a pine tree looking thing.
1:46:35Elon MuskLike some sort of demented Christmas tree.
1:46:37Joe RoganThat's a tower. Go back to the one you just had the. That far left. That's probably the most impressive. The one on the left hand side, the far left one.
1:46:47Joe RoganBecause if you had like a forest full of those, like.
1:46:50Elon MuskYeah, true.
1:46:51Joe RoganYou would just go, these are just like weirdly trimmed trees.
1:46:55Elon MuskYeah. It's not that hard to have a fake tree. You could definitely. A little bit effort, you know, just
1:47:00Joe Roganlike, I don't need. When I pass by a telephone pole, I don't need to pretend it's something different. It's a fucking cell phone tower.
1:47:07Elon MuskYeah.
1:47:08Joe RoganWho decided to make those things into fake trees? Like, when did this become a precedent?
1:47:12Elon MuskDon't know. But you can definitely make a fake tree that is convincing. So maybe just a bit more effort in the fakery.
1:47:22Joe RoganYeah. Or just make them look cool. Make them look like robots.
1:47:25Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
1:47:26Joe RoganHave a big Ultraman out there.
1:47:28Elon MuskI mean, some people are like, really worried about, like, cell phone towers. I'm Thinking they cause like radiation or something. Poisoning. This is not true.
1:47:35Joe RoganYeah. People are worried about 5G, right?
1:47:37Elon MuskDon't worry about it.
1:47:38Joe RoganNo, not at all.
1:47:40Elon MuskI mean, no. Like this way, like if I had cell phones, if I had a helmet of cell phones.
1:47:46Joe RoganRight.
1:47:47Elon MuskStrap around, around my head and around my nuts, I would not worry. Yeah.
1:47:52Joe RoganYeah. I met a dude once who had fall cancer who's convinced that his cell phone, his pocket, and that's what gave him ball cancer.
1:47:59Elon MuskNope.
1:48:00Joe RoganNo.
1:48:00Elon MuskNo.
1:48:00Joe RoganOkay. Sorry. Yeah, that's.
1:48:05Elon MuskIt's not. It's. The cell phone is like. No.
1:48:09Joe RoganYes. I didn't know this guy very well, but he was pretty convinced. Meanwhile, he kept the phone on the same side. He was one of those dudes that had the phone on the little hip.
1:48:17Elon MuskOkay.
1:48:18Joe RoganThing, you know, little, little bracket on his hip. Kept his phone there even after it killed one of his nuts.
1:48:24Elon MuskIn his eyes, he's like, well, he wants his phone.
1:48:27Joe RoganDamage is done.
1:48:30Elon MuskYour phone or your balls?
1:48:31Joe RoganYeah, he gave up. They got me.
1:48:38Elon MuskYeah, don't worry about it. Phones are not causing cancer.
1:48:40Joe RoganSo there's no concern whatsoever with the radiation that's caused by those things?
1:48:45Elon MuskNo. First of all, when people say radiation, there's just like, they're conflating this term from like nuclear, you know, bombs and like, technically, we are currently bathed in radiation right now.
1:49:01Joe RoganThis table has radiation, right?
1:49:02Elon MuskEverything produces radiation. Everything. Everything's emitting photons all the time. So it's just a question of what wavelength. And if you have a very short wavelength or high frequency photon that is capable of causing DNA damage.
1:49:19Elon MuskBut we're talking about like ultraviolet and beyond. Your phone's not even close to close. So. Yeah. And then the thing that really causes problems in a nuclear explosion are alpha particles.
1:49:37Elon MuskSo like basically helium nuclei. So those things will. They're like tiny cannonballs. So those will rip right through you. It's like if you got shot with tiny cannonballs, bad things would happen.
1:49:46Elon MuskSo that's also called radiation, but it's really particles. So you don't want to be bombarded with high speed helium nuclei. That's going to be bad.
1:49:56Joe RoganHow's that happen?
1:49:57Elon MuskWell, that happens in a nuclear explosion. Oh, yeah.
1:50:00Joe RoganOkay. Avoid those.
1:50:01Elon MuskYeah, that's bad.
1:50:02Joe RoganBut cell phones are okay.
1:50:04Elon MuskYeah. Cell phones are not emitting particles. So it's like, is my cell phone going to cause brain cancer? I'm like, because of radiation? Like, do you mean photons or particles?
1:50:12Elon MuskIt's like, it's not emitting particles. So we can just put that Aside, worry about the particles, then the photons that's emitting, the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear and only by a tiny amount.
1:50:26Elon MuskIt's like, okay, if you had an ear warmer that was very mild. That's your phone. That's all. It's emitting photons at a frequency that is. It's a frequency that is not going to cause DNA damage.
1:50:44Elon MuskSo don't worry about it. What concerns people, sleep easy at night, don't worry about your phone. It's fine.
1:50:49Joe RoganDavid, Ike does not believe you. He's doing backflips right now. You chill. So what concerns people is the unknown.
1:50:57Elon MuskRight.
1:50:57Joe RoganThey hear about 5G and then they hear about radiation. They're like, wait a minute, should I. Is this say, what are we doing? Are we just ruining everything? We ruining is fine.
1:51:07Elon MuskTotally fine.
1:51:09Joe RoganThank you.
1:51:10Elon MuskYeah.
1:51:10Joe RoganNow I feel good about my 5G phone.
1:51:13Elon MuskIf you had a helmet that was made of cell phones, you'd be fine.
1:51:16Joe RoganYeah. But this is coming from a guy who wants to stick a quarter sized hole in your head and shove wires in your brain.
1:51:22Elon MuskYeah. So I know a few things about what causes brain damage.
1:51:26Joe RoganI know, but that neuralink concerns the shit out of people. That scares folks. That's the ultimate.
1:51:35Elon MuskWell, I think it would be problematic if we pinned you to the ground and put it in.
1:51:39Joe RoganYes, I agree.
1:51:40Elon MuskAnd said like, okay, you're gonna get this. We're gonna chip you out whether you like it or not to chip ya. Chip ya.
1:51:47Joe RoganThat's the other thing that people are scared of.
1:51:49Elon MuskRight. You will have to sign a million disclosures and this is not gonna be something that, where it just suddenly pounces on you like, ah, everyone getting chipped. No, It's a very slow process of, okay, let's first try to help people who have serious brain injuries.
1:52:09Elon MuskLike if somebody got like a, you know, spinal cord injury or something like that, like that's one of the first things we're looking at doing is like, somebody may be a quadriplegic tetraplegic.
1:52:20Elon MuskHow do we give them like an implant that allows them to use their computer or their phone and have it be wireless and they look totally normal. You wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head and they can just charge it inductively like you charge a Fitbit or something like that, or Apple Watch or something.
1:52:43Elon MuskAnd that's kind of like one of the first applications we're thinking of is like, let's restore functionality. Someone has had a serious spinal Injury or a serious brain injury of some other kind.
1:52:55Elon MuskSo this is going to be like a very gradual process that you'll see it coming, you know, But I was playing Cyberpunk the game, and I'm like, you worried about what you're doing?
1:53:05Elon MuskYeah, that's like, yeah, this is pretty close to home here, you know, Like. Oh, man.
1:53:14Joe RoganYeah.
1:53:15Elon MuskLike, is this where it leads? It might lead there eventually. I'm just saying right now it's going to help people who really need it.
1:53:23Joe RoganWell, you know, we had this discussion before that we're all basically already cyborgs.
1:53:26Elon MuskRight.
1:53:27Joe RoganWe're already relying upon our phones connected at the hip to them. People are relying on glasses and all sorts of other technology to improve their life. This is another gradual step in that direction.
1:53:39Joe RoganAnd if you just keep going in that way, it seems like I like being a human and I think, you know, look, here we're drinking whiskey. We're talking with wood.
1:53:48Joe RoganTable stuff is a very human experience.
1:53:50Elon MuskYeah.
1:53:51Joe RoganBut ultimately we are archaic and we will eventually be aliens. We're going to be those. Those dudes with the big heads and the little tiny bodies. And we're going to be.
1:54:02Elon MuskBut we still.
1:54:03Joe RoganWe still need to feel for now until.
1:54:07Elon MuskI don't know, I mean, I think
1:54:08Joe Roganmore efficient programming in there. Yeah. But then once it becomes virtual. Once. Once virtual supersedes whatever. Like, imagine if the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better than a regular organization.
1:54:23Elon MuskI got news for you on that front. Oh, we can. It is.
1:54:30Elon MuskIt's disturbingly good, the way you're rubbing your chin. Disturbingly good. Get my little dog in his stroke. His head. Yes. Oh, you'll love it. Money back guarantee.
1:54:43Joe RoganWell, there was a.
1:54:45Elon MuskLove it. It's a snap.
1:54:47Joe RoganThere was a woman who. It was in the 1970s who had some sort of analogy to pain pills. And they did some experiment with her where they put wires into her brain and gave her a device.
1:55:02Joe RoganDo you know this story?
1:55:05Elon MuskThere are a few stories like this. Yeah. Where it actually hits the pleasure center. And then you're like, my God, this is the best thing ever.
1:55:12Joe RoganHammering it. She developed blisters on her finger that she used to hit the button. She never stopped hitting that button with the same finger. Didn't give a fuck about those blisters.
1:55:21Joe RoganShe was just coming constantly.
1:55:22Elon MuskYeah.
1:55:23Joe RoganAnd then she started adjusting that. She tried to tamper with the device to increase the amplitude. She became just an orgasm junkie. She's. And she was crazy. And they tried to take.
1:55:33Joe RoganShe was begging them to take it away from her. And then when they tried to take it away from her, she would fight them. It was. It's, it's madness.
1:55:41Joe RoganAnd it made me. I mean, I researched this extensively because I was fascinated by the idea that this could eventually become a part.
1:55:49Elon MuskWe could definitely make that happen.
1:55:51Joe RoganThat's a real issue with people. The instantaneous pleasure.
1:55:54Elon MuskWe wouldn't do it because, you know,
1:55:56Joe Roganyou wouldn't do it. But the Chinese.
1:55:59Elon MuskSure.
1:56:00Joe RoganI don't know. Huawei phones immediately with a come button. Right. As soon as you log on, you
1:56:06Elon Muskgive them your fingerprint.
1:56:07Joe RoganYou come.
1:56:08Elon MuskYou know, I mean, we could just put in there with some software limits, you know, easily.
1:56:13Joe RoganBut software limits could easily be worked around. Someone's going to come up with someone on the Dark Web.
1:56:18Elon MuskWell, I mean, your phone is. If you're carrying your phone around, you're carrying a microphone, GPS camera. Every day, everywhere. Orwell would be losing his mind.
1:56:29Joe RoganAnd it answers questions.
1:56:30Elon MuskYeah.
1:56:31Joe RoganYeah. And it knows where you are.
1:56:32Elon MuskYeah. It's like you can just have it. Like it's, it's that phone, by the way, if you say, like, please, like, turn off. It's. It just says that it's off.
1:56:40Elon MuskIt's not actually off.
1:56:41Joe RoganIt's lying.
1:56:41Elon MuskIt could totally lie.
1:56:42Joe RoganYeah. And you can't take the battery.
1:56:44Elon MuskBasically, like Apple or Android anytime they want. They can just turn your mic on. Yeah. Or your camera, your gps, everything.
1:56:51Joe RoganYeah.
1:56:52Elon MuskAnd just tell you it's off. I looked at the settings. It says it's off.
1:56:55Joe RoganYeah. And some people, like, that's not good enough. I want it strapped to my wrist.
1:56:59Elon MuskYeah.
1:57:00Joe RoganI need one on me all the time.
1:57:03Elon MuskYeah. I mean, these days, like a modern smartphone is like a tiny cell phone on your wrist. Basically. Even has the cellular connectivity and everything.
1:57:10Joe RoganEverything. You leave your house, you make phone calls like Dick Tracy.
1:57:14Elon MuskYeah. Hold on. Better than any Dick Tracy even imagined.
1:57:18Joe RoganYeah. Fuck Dick Tracy.
1:57:19Elon MuskYeah. Nothing.
1:57:20Joe RoganHe didn't know shit.
1:57:21Elon MuskThe Star Trek communicator. He looks like a cheesy fluffy.
1:57:24Joe RoganIt's a walkie talkie. You have to say over Kirk over
1:57:27Elon Muska big walk over.
1:57:29Joe RoganYeah. They had to tell you out.
1:57:32Elon MuskYeah.
1:57:32Joe RoganIt was really ridiculous. And it couldn't get on the Internet. Didn't take pictures.
1:57:36Elon MuskYeah.
1:57:37Joe RoganHe was talking to people from another planet. Couldn't even send them a photo.
1:57:41Elon MuskI mean, they didn't even have a camera.
1:57:43Joe RoganThey would beam a whole body to
1:57:45Elon Musksee what's going on.
1:57:46Joe RoganRearrange your body, right?
1:57:49Elon MuskYeah.
1:57:49Joe RoganTake all of your, all your atoms and reproject Them on this planet.
1:57:54Elon MuskTotally. Or. Exactly. Or they could just send a camera. Have you thought about sending a camera? This very dangerous situation that really shows
1:58:03Joe Roganyou how truly amazing the Internet is that in all of science fiction, they never thought that was going to happen.
1:58:10Elon MuskYeah.
1:58:11Joe RoganYou think about all the Star Trek, Star Wars.
1:58:14Elon MuskThey thought we'd be out there on where they thought we'd be on Mars for sure. But that. But they never thought we'd have, like a supercomputer in our pocket that everyone's got an amazing camera and as much memory as they could possibly.
1:58:27Elon MuskA supercomputer in your pocket. Like something better than the best. Super. Like your phone is better than the best computer that Earth had BY Far in 1969 when we landed on the moon.
1:58:37Joe RoganOh, yeah. By far.
1:58:38Elon MuskBy far. Not even close.
1:58:39Joe RoganThe cameras. Like, I have a Samsung Galaxy S21 that has a moon photo capability. So it's designed. It has a moon shot. So it's designed to be able to take beautiful photos of the moon.
1:58:55Joe RoganAnd you can.
1:58:55Elon MuskOkay, yeah.
1:58:56Joe RoganIt's like. Because if you do with an iPhone, it's just. It's not really programmed that way.
1:59:01Elon MuskYeah, actually, that's true. The iPhone can't take good photos of the moon because actually I was just like in LA and the. The moon was low in the horizon and it was just like hanging there.
1:59:09Elon MuskIt's like this giant planetoid.
1:59:11Joe RoganYou need a galaxy.
1:59:12Elon MuskYeah. And I'll try looking on my phone and like, looks like tiny Jamie.
1:59:15Joe RoganYou got one of those. Talk to him about Moonshot. I didn't even know it was on there. Yeah, just Google moonshot with Galaxy S20.21 Ultra. It's phenomenal. I got.
1:59:26Joe RoganI got one just for that. I got one because I'm always interested in the both platforms and see where you're at, you know? But the. The photographs are fucking incredible.
1:59:35Joe RoganThe zoom's incredible too. They have much better zooms. Like, look at this. These are photos with the galaxy.
1:59:42Elon MuskThat thing is just gonna be all camera.
1:59:44Joe RoganIsn't that incredible? I know. Look at the background.
1:59:46Elon MuskJust make it all out of lenses.
1:59:48Joe RoganIt's. It's incredible. It's just what they. It's just we're. We're living in. It's constantly accelerating. That's what's so amazing about it. Is that the right one? A Mars photo with that?
2:00:00Elon MuskThere's no way you're taking a photo of Mars from a phone. Like.
2:00:03Joe RoganNo, Impossible.
2:00:05Elon MuskImpossible.
2:00:05Joe RoganThank you. Glad you're here for that. We would buy right into it.
2:00:10Elon MuskI Think that was last year's model?
2:00:13Joe RoganWhat? Last year's model could take a picture of the. No, no, no.
2:00:16Elon MuskLike, lots of last year's moon photo versus this year's.
2:00:18Joe RoganOh, yeah.
2:00:19Elon MuskIf you had a giant, like, lens or something that basically you need a photon distillery.
2:00:25Joe RoganSo that's a. That's the moon. That's all that is on the right. It's not Mars, it's just a shitty. It's like their last year's version of moonshot. So the new one can actually see the craters, which is just fucking bananas.
2:00:37Elon MuskI mean, if that's just on a camera without a lens, because you just like, say, what's your photon gathering area? You know, it's like photons per unit area, certain limit.
2:00:46Elon MuskIf you.
2:00:47Joe RoganWhat's that, Jamie?
2:00:47Elon MuskHonestly, not that good.
2:00:49Joe RoganWell, it's pretty good for a cell phone. Yeah.
2:00:51Elon MuskYeah, sure.
2:00:51Joe RoganI mean, it's not great for a telescope.
2:00:53Elon MuskSure. Well, I mean, the thing I was trying to do, like, literally, you know, I don't know, five or six days ago, there's just like the, you know, the air was clear.
2:01:04Elon MuskLike, LA can be amazing. Like on a clear winter day where the moon is low in the horizon.
2:01:10Joe RoganYeah.
2:01:10Elon MuskAnd. And the sun's hitting at the right angle and it just looks incredible. And I was trying to take a photo of that with my phone and it looked terrible.
2:01:18Joe RoganYeah. It can't capture it. No, no, unfortunately. But galaxies can. That's the interesting thing.
2:01:26Elon MuskIt's like the galaxy.
2:01:27Joe RoganYeah. Well, it's a great name, too. They're always one step ahead in many directions. Like, they have these ultrasonic fingerprint detectors, but they just can't beat the operating system.
2:01:40Joe RoganApple just has the ease of use and they're.
2:01:43Elon MuskIs it still good? It's still better. Apple.
2:01:45Joe RoganYeah. Still better.
2:01:46Elon MuskYeah.
2:01:46Joe RoganBut it's close. It's close. But the other thing that bothers me about Google is Google's constantly tracking you.
2:01:52Elon MuskAndroid phone. Let me severe an ad.
2:01:55Joe RoganIt's so hard to avoid.
2:01:58Elon MuskThey'll know you better than you know yourself. They know what you will want.
2:02:01Joe RoganI'm a big admirer of what Tim Cook is doing, what he's doing to sort of cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and gather your data.
2:02:11Joe RoganAnd this battle that's going on between Tim Cook and Facebook, I fucking love it. I love that he's stepping up.
2:02:17Elon MuskYeah.
2:02:17Joe RoganAnd saying, hey, you can just advertise. You don't have to gather up people's data and sell it constantly. And then disingenuously Facebook tries to. You are killing small businesses.
2:02:28Joe RoganThese decisions. Fuck out of here. The fuck out of here. You're not killing small business. We're killing this one gigantic information gathering business that's decided that it's going to take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make fucking billions of dollars.
2:02:47Elon MuskYeah. Well, I mean, even perhaps, arguably worse, they're going to feed all that data into the AI that they're developing. It's called Facebook AI. You can follow them on Twitter and they're like, just, let's just feed all this information into the AI and see what.
2:03:02Elon MuskSee what it does. Who knows what would happen? You know, it seems like, I don't know, some dystopian outcomes are possible.
2:03:10Joe RoganYeah, well, you're terrified of AI, right? No, I mean, I'm just thinking if it's unchecked.
2:03:17Elon MuskWell, I think things that are a danger to the public should have some kind of public oversight.
2:03:23Joe RoganYeah.
2:03:23Elon MuskSo, you know, like I, you know, although sometimes we have our disagreements, I'm, you know, in favor of the FAA and nhtsa, you know, and the various regulatory agencies, FDA and so forth.
2:03:38Elon MuskI mean, you know, I think we're better off having them than not having them. There is a risk reward asymmetry in that they tend to be perhaps not weigh the good as much as they weigh the bad, you know, because their incentive structure is, you know, they get punished a lot for approving something, but they don't get punished that much for not approving stuff.
2:04:03Elon MuskSo that's just in the nature of government. But nonetheless, I think everyone would, you know, feel safer flying with the FAA than not having an FAA or we feel safer buying food and drugs having a regulatory agency oversee this stuff.
2:04:23Elon MuskBut we don't have any regulatory agency overseeing artificial intelligence.
2:04:27Joe RoganRight.
2:04:27Elon MuskAnd this, I think, is probably our biggest existential threat.
2:04:34Joe RoganYeah.
2:04:35Elon MuskIt's seems like, hey, maybe we should, like have somebody keep an eye on that.
2:04:40Joe RoganRight. But who? That's the problem.
2:04:42Elon MuskI don't know.
2:04:42Joe RoganThe problem is the government. Who's going to do Joe Biden? Let's have him pay attention to it?
2:04:46Elon MuskNo, the Deep State.
2:04:49Joe RoganOh, those folks. Well, they're looking out for our best interest. They're surely going to watch out. What they're going to do is they're going to develop it and use it as a weapon and it's going to turn on like a fucking Terminator movie.
2:05:01Joe RoganRight. That's the real worry is that they're going to decide that this is a very valuable Tool for controlling populations, governments, whatever the fuck they're going to use it for.
2:05:15Joe RoganAnd then it's going to decide, why am I listening to you?
2:05:19Elon MuskYeah. If you read like the plot line for Terminator, it's actually, it's actually pretty smart. James Cameron wrote a pretty smart script there. It's not quite as like, oh, there's just like Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing you down the street.
2:05:36Elon MuskIt's like, well, how did Cyberdyne Systems develop? It's like, well, they were a military contractor and they were asked to develop a protective system, something that would protect for cybersecurity, you know, so we need to have protection against cyber attacks.
2:05:55Elon MuskSo its primary thing is to defend against cyber attacks. To develop an AI that it can defend against cyber attacks sounds pretty reasonable. And then as part of what the AI did is in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout the world to keep an eye on things, see what was going on.
2:06:16Elon MuskAnd then they thought, well, hang on, there's something they didn't realize that it was cyber, that it was Skynet that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, there seems to be something propagating through all these systems.
2:06:31Elon MuskSkynet. You need to stop it. You need to end it. And Skynet said, oh, you've asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes.
2:06:46Elon MuskIt was created as a defense system to defend against cyber attacks. Then it was asked to destroy itself, and then it concluded humanity was the enemy.
2:06:58Joe RoganThat's too close to home, right? Well, you know, earlier we talked about what is the meaning of life? Well, the meaning of life for us would be very different than the meaning of life for something that we create that becomes life.
2:07:14Joe RoganThe idea of life being restricted to cells or carbon based life forms is kind of silly. Like the idea of artificial life, right? What is artificial? It's right there.
2:07:23Joe RoganWhat are you talking about?
2:07:25Elon MuskAI Artificial insemination. But it is if we create.
2:07:32Joe RoganIf we create some sort of silicon based life form, but it acts like a life form, it has a desire. Worse.
2:07:46Elon MuskThere was, I think in Australia a few years ago, an artificial insemination lab that had had a bunch of like, bulges stored in bile in canisters, but it like overheated.
2:08:00Elon MuskAnd so you had basically exploding bulges all over the place, really. And the headline was, AI goes wild. It's calm everywhere. Like, yeah, yeah, just like come rockets all over the place.
2:08:21Joe RoganYeah, nobody wants that, right?
2:08:26Elon MuskClean up on, you know, aisle nine or whatever.
2:08:33Elon MuskBullet jazz all over the walls. Literally actually happened.
2:08:38Joe RoganYeah.
2:08:42Elon MuskBack to artificial intimate. Wait, I mean, artificial intelligence.
2:08:46Joe RoganBack to artificial intelligence. I'm really worried about it.
2:08:51Elon MuskYeah. I think we should be concerned and we should have oversight of some kind.
2:08:54Joe RoganYeah, but who would be the oversight?
2:08:56Elon MuskLike, regulatory agency? I don't know. Whoever. It's like, you know, people have the faa. Like I said, we have the faa. We got the.
2:09:06Elon MuskFda. Yeah, but we just need an acronym to oversee this stuff.
2:09:11Joe RoganThe problem is, like, governing. Government agencies suck at most things, you know?
2:09:17Elon MuskYeah.
2:09:18Joe RoganI mean, it's a government agency. Like, what. What. What government agency does the best job of oversight?
2:09:25Elon MuskNo, I think generally. Okay. I mean, I think the right way to think about government is government is a corporation in the limit. Like, there's something like. Well, like, we're against corporations, but we're for government.
2:09:37Elon MuskI'm like, government's just the biggest corporation. What are you talking about? You know, it's a corporation with a monopoly. It's the biggest corporation and has monopoly. That's government. So.
2:09:47Joe RoganBut you get to pick who runs it.
2:09:50Elon MuskEvery four years, you have more influence on who is CEO of General Electric than you have on who's president.
2:09:57Joe RoganReally?
2:09:57Elon MuskSure.
2:09:57Joe RoganHow so?
2:09:58Elon MuskWell, I mean, you're going to have. How many voters are there? Like 150 million? I don't know. And maybe 100 million you actually vote. So you have 100 millionth of a vote.
2:10:09Elon MuskAnd if you're not in a swing state, it doesn't matter. So I'm healing California, it's going Democratic for sure.
2:10:19Joe RoganGavin Newsom might be fucking that up.
2:10:24Elon MuskI do think, you know, in California, in any given state, there's got to be above a 0% chance that the other party wins. Right. If it's 0% chance that the other party wins, they get cocky.
2:10:35Elon MuskThe forcing. Yeah, the forcing function for being like, are they going to be responsive to the people?
2:10:40Joe RoganRight.
2:10:41Elon MuskThey're only going to be responsive to the people if the other party has a shot at winning.
2:10:44Joe RoganRight. They're going to be responsive to the special interest groups that help them.
2:10:47Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
2:10:47Joe RoganAnd that's where California is, 100%. Yeah.
2:10:49Elon MuskYeah. So anyway, so government is corporation in the limit. Government is the biggest corporation with a monopoly. Nonetheless, there are some things that it's hard to see having be an industry body.
2:11:07Elon MuskThe probability of regulatory capture if it's an industry body is higher than if it's the government. It's not zero if it's the government. There's plenty of cases of regulatory capture for Federal agencies, but the probability is lower than if it's an industry group.
2:11:24Elon MuskAnd at the end of the day, somebody has to say, you know, go and tell Facebook or Google or Apple or Tesla because Tesla has a lot of advanced AI, this is okay, or it's not okay, or at least and be able to report back to the public.
2:11:40Elon MuskThis is what we found. Otherwise the inmates are running the asylum.
2:11:45Joe RoganYeah.
2:11:46Elon MuskAnd there's like not necessarily friendly inmates.
2:11:49Joe RoganNo. I just wonder like, if you wanted to compile some sort of a regulatory body to keep an eye on AI, how would you do that? And how would you avoid having them being incentivized by special interest groups or some sort of corporation that would profit on AI succeeding in.
2:12:11Elon MuskOh, that's already happening.
2:12:13Joe RoganYeah.
2:12:15Elon MuskI mean, all the companies are going hog wild on the AI front. So anyway, my recommendation there should be some kind of regulatory authority, so how
2:12:27Joe Roganwould they do that?
2:12:28Elon MuskAnd I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not a fan of like, let's have the government do lots of things. I think you want to have the government do the least of amount of stuff.
2:12:35Elon MuskBut I think the right role of government is to be like the referee on the field. When the government starts being the player on the field, that's problematic. Or when you start having more referees than players, which is the case in California, then that's not good.
2:12:53Elon MuskYou can't have no referees. Everyone agrees referee might be annoying at times, but it's better to have a referee than not.
2:13:01Joe RoganYes. Yeah. I'm just worried that these things are going to. It's going to be too late by the time. And I'm sure you're worried about it as well. By the time these things become sentient, by the time they develop the ability to analyze what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential.
2:13:22Elon MuskYeah. I'm not saying that having regulatory agencies on panacea or reduces the risk to zero. There's still significant risk even with the regulatory agency. Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad and we should have one.
2:13:41Elon MuskIt took a while before there was an faa. There were a lot of plane crashes, a lot of companies cutting corners. It took a while before there was an fda.
2:13:52Elon MuskAnd what tends to happen is, you know, some company gets desperate, they're on the verge of bankruptcy and they're like, ah, man, we'll just cut this corner, it'll be fine.
2:14:02Elon MuskAnd then, you know, somebody dies, you know, and you know, some of these, like regulatory situations, like, look at Seat belts. I mean, now we take seat belts for granted, man.
2:14:14Elon MuskThe car companies poured seat belts like there was no tomorrow. They try to really. Oh, yeah, they fought them for decades, like 15, 20 years. The data was absolutely clear that you needed seat belts.
2:14:29Elon MuskLike, seat belts. You know, you really needed seat belts. Like, the difference in fatalities and serious injuries. Seatbelt, not seat belt, is gigantic and obvious. It's not subtle. So.
2:14:44Elon MuskBut still, the car companies, Ford seat belts for, I don't know, 10, 20 years. A lot of people died now these days, actually, with advanced airbags, Actually, I'm not.
2:15:01Elon MuskI think we might have come full circle and no longer need seat belts. If you have advanced airbags.
2:15:05Joe RoganReally?
2:15:05Elon MuskYeah. I think there's a strong argument for saying if you've got.
2:15:09Joe RoganWhat if the car flips?
2:15:10Elon MuskNo, you're just. You're just covered in bloody. It's airbags everywhere. Modern airbags are so good, it will blow your mind just how good the airbags are. And at Tesla, we even update the software to improve how the airbags deploy.
2:15:27Elon MuskSo we'll calculate, you know, are you an adult? Like, how much do you weigh? Are you sitting in this part of the seat or that part of the seat?
2:15:35Elon MuskAre you maybe a baby? Are you a toddler? Are you.
2:15:38Joe RoganBased on the weight?
2:15:39Elon MuskYeah.
2:15:39Joe RoganSo the seat.
2:15:40Elon MuskNot just the weight, but the pressure distribution on the seat. So we're measuring the pressure distribution. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? Are you a 5th percentile female?
2:15:49Elon MuskA 95 percentile male. The airbag firing will be different depending upon where you're sitting on the seat and what size you are and what your orientation is.
2:15:57Joe RoganReally?
2:15:57Elon MuskYeah. And we'll update it over the air so it even gets better over time.
2:16:03Joe RoganSo a child could conceivably sit in the front seat unbelted.
2:16:06Elon MuskChild sitting in a. In a bad position, probably still fine.
2:16:12Joe RoganJesus Christ.
2:16:13Elon MuskYeah, it's dynamically updating the airbag firing according to your. Where you're sitting, how much you weigh in real time. The seat belt is like. If you wear the seatbelt, that's nice.
2:16:31Joe RoganBut the airbag is going to do most of the work.
2:16:33Elon MuskAirbags didn't work.
2:16:34Joe RoganAnd is it possible that we can come up with something even better than the airbag? Like, you fill the whole cabin up with foam.
2:16:43Elon MuskNow it's tough because you. Airbag technology is crazy good because you want the airbag to inflate and then deflate.
2:16:52Joe RoganRight.
2:16:53Elon MuskOtherwise you're going to get asphyxiated, you know, so you can't just like fill it up with stuff, it's got to inflate and then, and there's different stages of inflation.
2:17:01Elon MuskIt's like fast inflation, then slow inflation, then slowly subside. The sophistication of airbag is crazy good.
2:17:09Joe RoganAnd this is all done not through some regulatory body. This is done through your own desire to make these things safer and more efficient.
2:17:18Elon MuskI mean, in the case of Tesla, we go way beyond the regulatory requirements, you know, so like we got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they've ever tested.
2:17:29Elon MuskSo with five stars in every category and subcategory, if there was a six star, we get a six star. It is actually legal to have a one star car.
2:17:40Joe RoganReally?
2:17:41Elon MuskYeah.
2:17:41Joe RoganWhat's like a smart car? Those one star.
2:17:45Elon MuskOh, oh, I gotta tell you that. Okay, so the star rating is kind of bullshit. Really. Yeah. I'm probably necessarily gonna be upset about me about this, but they adjust the star rating depending upon the size of the car.
2:17:58Elon MuskSo I mean, it stands to reason that if you're in a freight train and you're, you know, and if a smart car hits a freight train, it doesn't matter how good your safety systems is, you're screwed.
2:18:10Elon MuskYou know, if you're in a little car, get hit by a big car, the big car will win. Okay, so a low star rating in a big car, hitting a high star rating in a small car, the small car is screwed.
2:18:24Elon MuskSmall cars are not safe. Yeah, they're not safe, right?
2:18:29Joe RoganYeah, but what about your small car?
2:18:33Elon MuskModel 3 is not small. What about medium?
2:18:35Joe RoganThe Roadster.
2:18:37Elon MuskYeah, the Roadster is not super safe. Original Roadster. Not super safe. The original Roadster, say for a car like that. But it's not. Safety maximization is not the goal of the sports car.
2:18:49Joe RoganWell, the original one was based on a Lotus, right?
2:18:52Elon MuskYeah, that was the theory, but in reality
2:18:58Joe Roganit was Lotus C. I think
2:19:00Elon Muskwe had like maybe 7%. I think we calculated 7% of the parts were actually carryover from the Lotus. The entire body, chassis, everything was redesigned. New powertrain, even the H Vac system used to run off a belt from the engine.
2:19:14Elon MuskNow we need an electric H Vac system. So pretty. Almost everything got changed. It was not a. It's something that sounded good. Let's take an AC propulsion drivetrain from this little company in la.
2:19:30Elon MuskLet's stick it in a modified Lotus. Elise. Bingo, we got a car. Only problem is a lot of problems. Both of the fundamental premises on which Tesla was created are false.
2:19:43Elon MuskThe battery ended up increasing the mass of the car by 30% and the weight distribution was a little different. So you invalidated all the crash tests. Now you had to stretch the car in order to fit the battery.
2:19:55Elon MuskSo now the chassis is different. All the airbags had to be redone, all the crash structure had to be redone. It would have been better to start from scratch than to use, than to start, than to use any part of a Lotus lease.
2:20:13Elon MuskIt was worse. It was like, let's say there's a house that you want, you have in mind a particular house and then you buy a house and you end up changing everything except one wall and the basement.
2:20:26Elon MuskBut you're still stuck with most of the original footprint. It's just easier sometimes. Just knock the house down, build a new one, don't just try to modify it one piece at a time.
2:20:37Elon MuskSo the like I said, we had to change over 90% of the non powertrain portion of the car had to be changed 90%, 93%. And then the battery and drivetrain from AC repulsion did not work.
2:20:57Elon MuskIt had an analog motor controller that was extremely unreliable. The way that the power electronics were done, it was artisanal. You could not recreate that in a production situation.
2:21:17Elon MuskThe battery pack was air cooled with, which meant that if it was cold outside, the car didn't work. If it was too hot, the battery would overheat. And if you had any cell, any part of the, any one of the cells in the battery pack had a heat concentration, you could not remove it.
2:21:37Elon MuskThe air is just not, it's not good enough to just air cool the pack and so you could have thermal run away and the pack would, the car would burn down.
2:21:45Elon MuskSo we can use the battery pack, couldn't use the motor, couldn't use the inverter, couldn't use a charger. In the end, we used none of the AC propulsion technology and almost none of the Lotus technology.
2:22:00Elon MuskWow.
2:22:01Joe RoganSo you just have the general shape.
2:22:05Elon MuskIt has a passing resemblance to a Lotus Elise, but if you put the Lotus Elise and the roaster side by side, it'll actually quite different. And I actually led the design of the Roadster, the product design of the Roadster.
2:22:22Elon MuskThey gave me like a Pasadena school art, gave me like an honorary doctorate for it. But to be totally frank, it's easy to do a design of a sports car.
2:22:30Elon MuskIt's very hard to do design of a sedan. I tried, I failed. And that's why I hired Franz von Holzhausen, who's been our head of design since 2008. He's great.
2:22:42Elon MuskHe does things that are beyond my skill.
2:22:45Joe RoganYou know, we talked about this before, but it's worth bringing up again. I've always been a fan of Top Gear, but I got disgusted when I found out what they did with your car, when they tried to pretend that the car broke down just to make an entertaining program where they had a laugh at the folly of this thing dying on them, but it didn't really die on them.
2:23:07Elon MuskYeah, that was messed up. I mean, to be totally frank. So new Top Gear. Top Gear of recent years is a Tesla supporter, so I want to just voice a note of appreciation for Top Gear of recent years.
2:23:20Joe RoganWell, James May, he has one. Right. But they're not Top Gear anymore.
2:23:24Elon MuskRight?
2:23:25Joe RoganThey're the Grand Tour. That's what they are on Amazon. Is that what they call them?
2:23:29Elon MuskI don't know. But Top Gear has been supportive in recent years. But, yeah, back in the day, remember, at the time, like, Tesla was not a big company. We were just a little company, and we're like, you know, we were the little kid on the block.
2:23:43Elon MuskSo, you know, the Top Gear is like, hey, Top Gear wants to test your car. Like, cool. And we gave them. We only had a few cars, and we gave them one of our cars, and when we handed over the car, they had a.
2:23:56Elon MuskYou know, so one of our engineers, like, Ghost, delivers the car, and then he sees a script on the table. It's like, how do you write the script? You don't even.
2:24:05Elon MuskWe only just gave you the car, and in the script, the car breaks down.
2:24:10Joe RoganYeah, it's messed up. Yeah, it was crazy.
2:24:15Elon MuskIt was crazy.
2:24:15Joe RoganIt was crazy because they basically sabotaged the company. I mean, that had to cost you guys a shitload of money because a lot of people watch that show, and car enthusiasts like myself kind of rely on them for.
2:24:25Joe RoganThere's also, like, obviously, Jeremy Clarkson's hilarious. There's information there. It's funny. But you would imagine that they could do that without lying about the actual performance of the car.
2:24:39Elon MuskYeah, the car never broke down. They just. They just pretended that it did, and they wrote the script.
2:24:44Joe RoganSo crazy.
2:24:45Elon MuskLiterally, whenever a guy's handed over the car, he's reading through a script, and it's like, the cars break, breaks down, like, runs out, I charge, the brakes fail, and we're like, what the fuck, man?
2:24:55Elon MuskWe just gave you the car. This is not cool.
2:24:58Joe RoganAnd what did they say about that?
2:25:02Elon MuskTheir objection was like, this is just entertainment. It's not meant to be true.
2:25:07Joe RoganThat's so crazy, though, because that's the. They had to know what the fuck they're doing.
2:25:11Elon MuskYeah. But anyway.
2:25:15Joe RoganWell, now, water under the bridge. Water under the bridge. But crazy for anybody who experienced it back in the day. I mean, I remember I knew very little about electric cars.
2:25:24Joe RoganIt was just the early days and I remember watching that going, oh, that sucks. It broke down.
2:25:29Elon MuskYeah.
2:25:31Joe RoganYeah.
2:25:37Elon MuskWell, you know, anyway, I've been a fan of electric cars for a long time, since basically high school, early college.
2:25:47Joe RoganWhat did you think of that documentary, who Killed the Electric Car?
2:25:52Elon MuskI thought it was pretty good. Yeah, it's worth watching.
2:25:55Joe RoganInteresting. Mortally wounded, not killed exactly.
2:26:00Elon MuskMortally, exactly. I mean, the irony is like, man, can you imagine just how different a future GM would have had because they had the EV1 electric vehicle one. If they had just gone EV2, EV3, man, they would have just owned the world.
2:26:14Joe RoganWho knows where we'd be right now with electric cars too, and the technology, with that kind of money behind. Yeah, it was fascinating. Now you're seeing like this Mustang, this sort of SUV style Mustang that's electric.
2:26:27Elon MuskYeah.
2:26:27Joe RoganYou know, you're seeing so many different vehicles that are electric. There's so many companies that have electric cars now and it's really been becoming interesting. Porsche's electric car. There's, there's a large supply of electric cars now.
2:26:42Joe RoganI mean, that's got to make you feel good though, because without you and without Tesla, this, I mean, there was no way it would be where it's at right now.
2:26:52Elon MuskYeah, I mean, when I think about what's the fundamental good of Tesla? It's. To what degree have we accelerated the advent of sustainable energy? So it would have happened anyway.
2:27:03Elon MuskBut I think Tesla is an accelerant. I think we're. That's how I would judge the fundamental good of Tesla. By how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy?
2:27:18Elon MuskBut yeah, I mean, in the early days, my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that it wasn't environmental in the sense of like CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing.
2:27:30Elon MuskI do think that has added urgency to the situation. But my original interest was just like, we're going to run out of oil and then civilization is going to collapse.
2:27:39Elon MuskAnd so if we don't have some kind of sustainable energy situation, which really is electric cars, solar energy and electric cars, then civilization is going to fall apart and we'll be back in the Stone Age or something, like someone bad, you know, but we're not going to be able to move forward.
2:27:59Elon MuskIt won't be a good future. So my interest in electric cars was like, okay, how do we make this work? And you think of it like a gasoline car.
2:28:11Elon MuskI mean, it's got an electric motor and a battery just to start the car. Electric car is way simpler than a gasoline car. It's just a range question. So in the early days of cars, there were almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline cars in the very early days.
2:28:31Elon MuskBut the batteries didn't have enough range. So as soon as they had an electric starter and you didn't have to hand crank the engine, then gasoline cars won because they had the range.
2:28:46Elon MuskSo it was really a question of how do you solve the range pump?
2:28:50Joe RoganAnd
2:28:52Elon Muskwhen I first came out to California, the reason I came out to California was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars. Basically advanced ways to store electric energy that would give you long range.
2:29:11Elon MuskSo in my summer internships, I worked at called Pinnacle Research that did high energy density capacitors. Now they used ruthenium and tantalum, which are ruthenium especially quite rare. You cannot scale that because there's not enough ruthenium.
2:29:31Joe RoganWhere does that come from?
2:29:35Elon MuskIt's a trace element. It's coming from radioactive decay and, you know, meteorites and that kind of thing. It's rare. You know, I think at the time, like, it was only, like, it's like impossible to scale.
2:29:53Elon MuskIt doesn't matter how smart you get, you can't scale something if it's using ruthenium. Just not enough of was like, rarer than gold. Like, so you're way better off, like, trying to make cars powered by gold.
2:30:05Joe RoganIs there any argument that there's not enough conflict minerals to go around? Because that's what they call them, conflict minerals, Things like lithium.
2:30:12Elon MuskNo, Lithium is extremely common.
2:30:14Joe RoganIs it?
2:30:15Elon MuskYeah. Lithium is everywhere. Lithium is one of the most common elements in the, in the universe. It's at number three on the periodic table. So we got lithium pretty much everywhere.
2:30:26Elon MuskWhere do we get it? Well, I mean, Tesla, we get most of our lithium from Australia, actually, so. But you could get lithium from seawater if you wanted to.
2:30:39Elon MuskReally? Yeah. Lithium is a. It just forms a salt, and that's
2:30:43Joe Roganthe primary component of the batteries or what else is in there?
2:30:47Elon MuskIt's a misnomer, actually. It's called lithium ion. But that's like the salt in the salad. It's like, do you like salt in your salad? Sure, but it's not made of salt.
2:30:59Elon MuskI mean, the primary component in lithium ion batteries, like in a Tesla is nickel. And nickel is also relatively common. It's not super common. Iron is very common. So there's the two main schools of the two main types of battery pack are iron and nickel.
2:31:22Elon MuskAnd iron is very common. So much there's ridiculous amount of iron, just like there's a ridiculous amount of lithium. Now nickel's a little more unusual, so not that unusual, but it's, you know, way, way much harder to get nickel than iron.
2:31:43Elon MuskBut for example, stainless steel, you know that that'll be you know, 12, 12, 10 to 20% nickel depending on the situation. Like cutlery, you know, like knives and forks will be like electroplated nickel, silver.
2:32:02Elon MuskThat's what EPNS means. So you got like nickel based cells and you've got iron based cells. The nickel based cells have more energy density. Like so for a given amount of volume and mass, you're going to get more energy out of nickel than iron.
2:32:23Elon MuskIron is cheaper. But anyway, those are the two main types of cells. They got an iron cathode, nickel cathode, and then some of the nickel cathodes have some amount of cobalt to stabilize nickel and then iron.
2:32:38Elon MuskIt's like, they call it usually iron phosphate. You get like, you know, but it's really mostly it's like the heavy stuff is iron and the heavy stuff is nickel and the nickel based stuff.
2:32:46Elon MuskSo you have nickel and iron and then you got the anode side which is basically a carbon lattice with a little bit of silicon sometimes. And then these lithium ions, they sort of trundle back and forth between the cathode and the anode.
2:33:09Elon MuskSo I mean, just read the, if you read the Wikipedia article on lithium ion, it's quite good. Anyway, so.
2:33:24Elon MuskThe rate at which we are producing what are called lithium ion cells, but really primarily iron and nickel cells, is increasing very, very rapidly year over year. It's just that in order to compensate for the rest, for an economy which is fundamentally based on fossil fuels, you need a shit ton of batteries.
2:33:48Elon MuskSo a gigaton giga shit ton of batteries. And that is what that's going to happen. It's just a question of when. That's why I say the fundamental good of Tesla is to what degree it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy.
2:34:03Elon MuskIt's a inevitable like either we have sustainable energy, it's total logical. It's either we have sustainable energy or civilization collapses. So if civilization doesn't collapse, we will have sustainable energy.
2:34:14Elon MuskIt's just a question of how soon does that happen. Sooner is better and then there's a risk that we are incurring because of the increased parts per million of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere.
2:34:32Elon MuskIt has some acidification. It makes the water look just a little bit more acidic and it just causes the air to be a little warmer. Not a lot. I think sometimes people look at the temperature, especially in Celsius, you might say like, okay, it's like 20 degrees Celsius.
2:34:53Elon MuskI mean, can a small ppm increase in and carbon really moved the needle that much? But actually you should be looking at it in degrees Kelvin. So then it's like, actually it's like more like we're at around 300 kelvin.
2:35:07Elon MuskAnd so, you know, what would it take to have like only a 0.3% increase would be 1 degree Celsius, 2 degrees Fahrenheit. So therefore this is actually, you know, it's more, it's a smaller percentage increase than you'd think when looking at temperature in the absolute as opposed to above the freezing point of water.
2:35:32Elon MuskAnd then if people weren't just living right on the water, then that would also help a lot. But it's just like we love living right on the water. So humanity is like a thermometer.
2:35:44Elon MuskIt's like you look at like a thermometer, like a, you know, like old school sort of analog thermometer which is like, you know, changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is increasing its volume due to temperature.
2:36:00Elon MuskAnd it only takes a little bit of small increase in volume to raise the temperature, you know, on an old school analog liquid thermometer. And humanity's like that. We just decided that we want to frighten the damn beach.
2:36:14Joe RoganYep.
2:36:15Elon MuskSo because beach is cool now. The problem is, you're right, you're like, what's. It's kind of like if we wanted to say, what's the most sensitive instrument you could like, how can we maximize our sensitivity to, to water level?
2:36:29Elon MuskWell, live right on the, right on the ocean. Oh, okay, we just did that.
2:36:33Joe RoganYeah.
2:36:33Elon MuskAnd then it's like, and then it's like, okay, well, you know. And by the way, throughout history the water level has varied a lot. It's like nutty how much it's varied.
2:36:48Elon MuskAnd if you look at say the CO2 parts per million based on the fossil record, I mean, it just looks like a wall. I am not like a doomsayer here.
2:36:59Elon MuskMy view is that if, provided we are not complacent about a sustainable energy economy, I think things will be fine. If we are complacent about it, that's where problems arise.
2:37:12Elon MuskSo like, to be totally frank, I think we'll be fine. But as long as we don't behave as though we're going to be fine, we will be fine. If we don't take it for granted, if we're not complacent, I think we'll be fine.
2:37:31Joe RoganDo you anticipate any large leaps in battery technology? Is there anything that can be done to increase the efficiency, increase the manufacturing abilities? Like what can be done to move that
2:37:54Elon Muskso.
2:38:04Elon MuskThe ball is in motion. Like the good things that are happening are happening. Like the rate at which we are making new, we're increasing the production capacity of batteries.
2:38:16Elon MuskIt's increasing at a rate of, that I think we haven't seen in a century. It's like, it's crazy fast. It's just that in order to change from a fossil fuel economy to kind of like a solar, wind, battery economy, it just a hell of a lot of batteries are needed.
2:38:42Elon MuskNow. My top recommendation honestly would be just to have a carbon tax. Like the economy works great. Like prices and money are just information. Prices are information. If the price is wrong, the economy doesn't do the right thing.
2:39:00Elon MuskSo we got basically an unpriced externality in the carbon concentration in the oceans and atmosphere. Like it's a, it's kind of like not paying. Like if you're not paying for garbage removal or something, like, okay, everyone's going to throw garbage on the street.
2:39:16Elon MuskGarbage removal is free, but it's like there's a little bit of like, okay, garbage removal isn't free. You've got to pay a little bit for this. And because we're not paying for the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, we have what in economics is called an unpriced externality.
2:39:35Elon MuskSo the market is unable to respond to an unpriced externality. If we just put a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way, but because we don't have a price on it, it's behaving badly.
2:39:50Joe RoganSo theoretically, how would you put a price on that? Would you look at various industries and how they contribute to the CO2?
2:39:57Elon MuskYeah, I mean, just put it at
2:39:58Joe Roganthe point of consumption and tax it.
2:40:00Elon MuskIt ends up being, yeah, electricity and gasoline pretty much. Now you can make this a non aggressive tax. You could say like, okay, well you know what if somebody is like driving around a lot and they're low income, it's like, hey, great, give them a rebate.
2:40:14Elon MuskSo it's like, give them a tax rebate. That's the way to do it.
2:40:21Joe RoganAnd then the market will be forced to respond to the fact that the,
2:40:24Elon Muskthe market just does things automatically based on pricing. So markets work great if the pricing is correct. It's only when something, you have a tragedy of the commons and the price is not there that the market does not respond, nor would you expect it to, you know, so if you have like the public toilets problem, where it's like nobody's responsible for it, nobody's paying for it, it's like, okay, well public toilets are not good, so as soon as you put a price on it, the right thing will happen automatically.
2:41:00Joe RoganHas there been a response to this? Like, is, is this something.
2:41:04Elon MuskI talked to the Biden administration, incoming administration, and they were like, well, this seems too politically difficult. And I was like, well, this is obviously a thing that should happen.
2:41:13Elon MuskAnd by the way, SpaceX would be paying a carbon tax too.
2:41:16Joe RoganSure.
2:41:16Elon MuskSo I'm like, you know, I'm like, I think we should pay it too. It's not like, it's not like we shouldn't have karma generating it. Just there's gotta, should be a price on this stuff.
2:41:27Joe RoganAnd that would encourage people to make
2:41:29Elon Muskeither carbon neutral or automatically fix the problem. No problem for sure. You know, just thinking about like taxes, it's like, you know, here we are drinking alcohol. Now taxes on alcohol and tobacco are higher than on, let's say, fruit and vegetables.
2:41:48Elon MuskOkay. Because everyone knows, like, fruit and vegetables are good for you and alcohol and tobacco are not good for you. Yeah.
2:41:57Joe RoganSo we're like, yeah, you should probably
2:41:59Elon Muskbias the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco. Have higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco and lower taxes on fruits and vegetables. It's just sensible. Like, same thing goes for energy.
2:42:14Joe RoganYeah, that seems very reasonable. I don't understand how that would be politically difficult.
2:42:18Elon MuskI don't know. I talked to the incoming Biden administration. I was like, I thought, well, for sure, like this, you know, I mean, it's like half the reason they got elected.
2:42:25Joe RoganAnd even some sort of an incremental increase over time.
2:42:29Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
2:42:30Joe RoganWe don't need to people.
2:42:31Elon MuskYeah, just say, just if you just say it's coming, people will automatically make the changes.
2:42:37Joe RoganThat seems so reasonable.
2:42:38Elon MuskYeah, I agree.
2:42:40Joe RoganAnd they were like, they thought it
2:42:43Elon Muskwas like too politically difficult. And I'm like, I mean, I don't know, man. I think that's like at least half the reason you got elected. So why don't you just fight for that, you know?
2:42:52Joe RoganYeah, it's a factor. The optics were that they're the more reasonable people, they're going to bring us back to the Paris Climate Accord and the whole.
2:43:01Elon MuskYeah, I mean the thing is like the Paris Accord, this is just a piece of paper unless you do something about it. I mean, frankly, it's not like the Paris Accord is.
2:43:13Elon MuskYeah, it's pretty much toothless, you know, and, and even if we did that thing, it's like probably still not enough. It's just one thing that will matter. Put a price on carbon.
2:43:23Joe RoganThat would be the best option for sure. That seems like it'd be such a good idea.
2:43:29Elon MuskI mean, I think it's obvious move and if you, if you just call up like, you know, say like top economists, like just do a poll of like what do 90% of economists think?
2:43:40Elon MuskAnd like they all agree, okay, we should do that.
2:43:43Joe RoganWell, also, if you think about the variability of gas prices, it changes so much. Like how about the difference between gas in California versus gas in Texas? Yeah, giant difference.
2:43:54Elon MuskGiant difference. Yeah. You know, by the way, I'm actually not in favor of like demonizing the oil and gas industry because like we can't like stop instantaneously and not have oil and gas.
2:44:10Elon MuskWe'll die of starvation, basically.
2:44:13Joe RoganThat's always the argument against it. Right. We need fossil fuels and this is sort of the short sighted argument.
2:44:21Elon MuskWe're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time. The question is just at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future? So I think we should probably move there faster than slower.
2:44:36Elon MuskBut it's, you know, but I mean the current approach is basically just demonize oil and gas. And I'm like, okay, well obviously, you know, there are people who spent their whole career oil and gas and they started out in their career when it wasn't.
2:44:53Elon MuskDoesn't seem like that bad of a thing to do. So then like, so then they're like, hey man, I just spent my whole career working hard to do useful things and now you're telling me I'm the devil.
2:45:03Elon MuskI mean that's like gonna make them pretty upset, you know. So I say like, instead of demonizing oil and gas, which also they should stop lobbying against the carbon tax by the way.
2:45:16Elon MuskThen just like, honestly, the smartest thing the oil and gas industry could do would say let's do a carbon tax. And then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil.
2:45:26Joe RoganMake us not the devil and they'll still make a fuckload of money.
2:45:29Elon MuskSo be fine. They'll be fine.
2:45:32Joe RoganYeah, that seems so reasonable. I Can't imagine how anybody would argue against that.
2:45:37Elon MuskThat's what I thought. I don't know. I think the Biden administration should take a strong stance on this situation.
2:45:42Joe RoganWhat political candidates endorsed a carbon tax? Did Bernie Sanders endorse a carbon tax?
2:45:48Elon MuskI don't know. You might have.
2:45:53Joe RoganIt seems super reasonable.
2:45:55Elon MuskI mean. I mean, like, I kind of, like. Even though he's a communist, I kind of like Bernie Sanders.
2:46:01Joe RoganYeah, I like him, too.
2:46:02Elon MuskYeah, he's a. I think he's.
2:46:05Joe RoganI think he means well.
2:46:07Elon MuskYeah, I think he means well.
2:46:08Joe RoganThe best part about him, and he's been remarkably consistent and meaning well his whole life. And they kept fucking throwing them right under the bus.
2:46:17Elon MuskYeah, absolutely.
2:46:18Joe RoganTwo election cycles in a row.
2:46:21Elon MuskYeah. I think it is hilarious that he, like, went to, like, the Soviet Union like, three days after his wedding for, like, 10 days. He was, like, a mayor of a city.
2:46:30Elon MuskAnd, like, he was a mayor in Vermont. I'm like, yo, dude, like, how do you explain days 6 through 10?
2:46:39Joe RoganDon't you get it?
2:46:42Elon MuskThat's a long time. The KGB interviews take that long.
2:46:52Joe RoganCarbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of an industry that is, without a doubt, causing some problems. I mean, there's no one saying it doesn't cause problems.
2:47:07Joe RoganPeople would deny the extent of the problem, but no one says that excess CO2 from emissions is not an issue.
2:47:16Elon MuskI mean, like Exxon's own scientists said in. I think it was like the late 70s. Like, we think there might be a problem here with climate change due to the CO2.
2:47:29Elon MuskIt's like internal. Their own documents, their own people. Then they were like, be quiet.
2:47:34Joe RoganIsn't it weird when environmental things become political, though? When the denial of the environmental thing is, like, predominantly from. From some factions of the right, and then, you know, like, the.
2:47:45Joe RoganThe opposite is from some factions and then becomes a political thing. So they dig their heels in the sand and they're like, no, no, no, this is. This is.
2:47:52Joe RoganThis is fine. This is the way, though, the Earth is. There's a cycle, a natural cycle, and it becomes this mantra that they repeat.
2:48:00Elon MuskIt's true, there is a natural cycle, but that does not explain the situation. Right. The wall as you described, it's a wall, man.
2:48:07Joe RoganYeah.
2:48:07Elon MuskI mean, you just look at carbon parts per million, and it just looks like a wall like that. Just, you know, it goes like, blah, blah, blah. You know, two to 300 parts per million, bam, 400 out of nowhere.
2:48:20Joe RoganThere's also some weird arguments that some people will make in terms of the impact that it has on plant life and that it actually is making the earth greener.
2:48:32Elon MuskOh, I think that's actually true.
2:48:33Joe RoganYeah. Yeah, yeah. But that's not necessarily. Okay. Still causes problems.
2:48:40Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I'm trying to be like as precise. I mean, or at least the least amount wrong that I can be. I'm trying to be the least amount
2:48:49Joe Roganwrong because plants live off carbon dioxide.
2:48:52Elon MuskSo the more, more CO2 does improve plant growth. It's true. Like I said, I don't think based on where we are, provided we're not complacent, provided we don't take things for granted, I think we'll be fine.
2:49:10Elon MuskBut if we're complacent and we take things for granted and we just proceed like everything's fine and we continue on the momentum of CO2 emissions, we're taking a big risk.
2:49:25Elon MuskAnd especially big risk is if there's a nonlinear event. Okay. So CO2 ppm parts per million has been increasing pretty reliably 2 or 3 ppm per year. But you could have a nonlinear event.
2:49:43Joe RoganWhat would constitute a nonlinear event?
2:49:45Elon MuskIf we melt the Siberian tundra, there's like a massive amount of trapped gas and dead plant matter that's frozen solid. Now if that warms up and that decays and that could put a massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere potentially.
2:50:09Elon MuskAnd then how we like, what are the carbon sinks? And if you saturate the carbon sinks and you have like a sudden release of CO2 from something that was previously frozen solid, that's where you could have a non linearity and things could go haywire pretty fast.
2:50:29Joe RoganWhat could happen then?
2:50:33Elon MuskI mean, Earth would heat up, water level would rise, you'd have a higher probability of extreme weather events. Shit would hit the fan.
2:50:45Joe RoganShit would hit the fan.
2:50:46Elon MuskShit, we hit the fan. Like, I'm not saying for sure shit would hit the fan, but I'm saying like the probability increases with time. So you can't just change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and oceans and expect nothing gonna happen.
2:51:01Elon MuskThis is just a chemical reaction, man. It's like, yeah, is there anything? It's like, why are we even running this experiment? So the crazy thing is, hey, we know we need to have a sustainable energy economy long term because we're going to run out of oil.
2:51:19Elon MuskSo then we're running this crazy experiment to see what is the effect of massively, of taking billions of tons of carbon that was deep underground, putting it in the atmosphere and oceans and what's going to happen as a result of that.
2:51:34Elon MuskAnd it's a crazy. It's like literally the craziest experiment in human history. Because we know, no matter what that we have to have a sustainable energy future. We have to, because otherwise civilization will collapse.
2:51:50Elon MuskSo what the hell are we running this experiment for?
2:51:53Joe RoganBecause we're accustomed to doing things a certain way.
2:51:56Elon MuskThis is going to go down as the most foolish experiment in the history of human civilization.
2:52:02Joe RoganIs it possible to create some sort of carbon extraction technology that will significantly impact the amount of CO2 that's in the air or mitigate the emissions?
2:52:19Elon MuskYeah, I mean, so I just actually announced that I'm funding this $100 million carbon capture price to find out the answer to that question. So right now, all of the carbon capture methods that we're aware of are very expensive.
2:52:35Elon MuskThe cost per ton is very expensive. And then even if money's not an issue, you have to say, okay, how much wind or solar energy was required to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and like, I don't know, make it in solid form.
2:52:50Elon MuskLike. Like make a cube of it or something, you know, just a giant cube. We don't actually know the answer to that question. That's why I'm giving $100 million to this carbon capture price, to try to get a better answer.
2:53:05Joe RoganWasn't there something.
2:53:05Elon MuskThere's nothing good that we're aware of right now.
2:53:07Joe RoganNot currently.
2:53:08Elon MuskNot currently that we're aware of, because
2:53:09Joe Roganthere's a point of diminishing returns. The amount of energy that you would need in order to.
2:53:14Elon MuskBasically, CO2 has a very low energy state, naturally. So it's like you burn something, you combine oxygen with fuel with hydrocarbons, and the net result is CO2 and H2O, basically.
2:53:30Elon MuskAnd there's a bunch of other stuff too, but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water, mostly carbon dioxide. So obviously it goes from a high energy state. We use that to power our cars or our power plants, and then it ends up in a low energy state, which is CO2 in the atmosphere.
2:53:48Elon MuskAnd then, like I said, a bunch of it gets in the ocean. So naturally, it therefore requires a lot of energy to rebind that in solid form. It doesn't want to just.
2:54:02Elon MuskIt's not going to. You got to put a lot of energy in to bind it, and then you want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for.
2:54:09Elon MuskFor a long time. Unless it was a hard problem.
2:54:14Joe RoganThere was a concept. I don't know if it was implemented, but in China, they developed essentially like a giant building that was, you know, you aware of this? It was, I don't know if they actually did it.
2:54:27Joe RoganDid they want. We talked about this before, Jamie. Did they ever wind up doing that? It was like a building that was essentially a giant air filter and they were going to use it.
2:54:37Joe RoganBut that might have been about particulates more than it was about CO2, maybe more of a.
2:54:44Elon MuskBy the way, I have to be, you know, say a good word here for China. China is. Has the. Some of the. For any large economy. Has the most progressive pro environmental rules of any large economy.
2:54:59Joe RoganReally?
2:55:00Elon MuskYeah, they're like super supportive electric of electric vehicles, of solar power, of wind. They actually even made a giant solar field in the shape of a panda, which pretty cute.
2:55:12Elon MuskSo it's actually a funny thing that happened like for a long time. China was like not, you know, it was not buying into the carbon thing. You know, like they were like, oh, it's just like a bunch of soft westerners.
2:55:23Elon MuskThey're like, they're just a bunch of environmental softies. And then at some point, like senior members of the Chinese government, they, you know, say, well, let's like ask the, you know, engineering professors, like at the universities, like, what do they think?
2:55:38Elon MuskAnd they're like, oh, yeah, no, it's definitely real. They're like, wait, you mean it's real? Like they're like, yeah, yeah, it's real. So they're like, holy shit. Immediate change.
2:55:47Joe RoganWell, that's the power of having the government and business inexorably intertwined so they can kind of decide how business is going to react and what's going to happen. Right, Yeah.
2:55:58Elon MuskI think people don't realize China is super pro environment right now, like way more than America.
2:56:03Joe RoganIs that their thing? Skyscraper size air purifier is the world's tallest. Look at that thing. So that's an air purifier. But that's the thing is like, is that pulling particulates out of the atmosphere or is that actually taking carbon out?
2:56:17Joe RoganYou know, an air purifier is air
2:56:21Elon Muskpurifier, not it's super hard to capture carbon.
2:56:24Joe RoganLook at that. Jesus Christ. Imagine falling into that. Yeah.
2:56:30Elon MuskI mean, naturally. It's just fundamental thermodynamics. Like, you know, you released a lot of energy that resulted in the CO2, so now you got to use a lot of energy to capture it.
2:56:43Joe RoganYeah. Made a particulate matter no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter.
2:56:49Elon MuskYeah, yeah, that's like a hard. That's particularly difficult to filter two microns. Oh. You know, so most people probably don't know, but like, Model S and X have hospital grade HEPA filters and they will actually drop the 2 micron ppm level to almost undetectable in the car.
2:57:13Joe RoganReally?
2:57:14Elon MuskYeah.
2:57:14Joe RoganSo if you're in some sort of a biological disaster area, you can drive through your Tesla.
2:57:19Elon MuskYes. It's literally this like biohazard defense mode where basically pressurizes the car. So it's like the car is under positive pressure with all the air coming through a gigantic HEPA filter.
2:57:35Elon MuskAnd then even the air inside the car is recirculating in a secondary filter. It's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far. Literally hospital grade.
2:57:45Joe RoganWow.
2:57:46Elon MuskYou could do an operation in the car. It's insane.
2:57:48Joe RoganThat's awesome.
2:57:49Elon MuskYeah, we got a little carried away.
2:57:52Joe RoganI'm glad you get carried away. You know, the other thing I thought is Jamie's got the X. And one of the things that I love about the X is when it gets hit, they literally can't flip over.
2:58:01Elon MuskOh, yeah. It's like one of those, like, things that you. If you, you know, like where you punch the thing and it just comes back up.
2:58:07Joe RoganYeah.
2:58:08Elon MuskYeah. There's like, they. They couldn't flip it over in the test. So it would like roll on its side and then roll back.
2:58:15Joe RoganI know. It's amazing.
2:58:16Elon MuskVery low center of gravity.
2:58:19Joe RoganSo that's giant.
2:58:22Elon MuskYeah. That is so fucking. It's not.
2:58:24Joe RoganThat's.
2:58:25Elon MuskIt rolls back on.
2:58:27Joe RoganI mean, there's not another car like that in the world. No. Every other car in the world would. Would just fucking roll. It's pretty amazing, man.
2:58:36Elon MuskYeah. Even if you did manage to bang it on the. On the roof, it like you can stack like five cars on top of a model.
2:58:43Joe RoganModel S or X. Wow. Now you guys still making the X?
2:58:47Elon MuskYeah.
2:58:47Joe RoganYou're still gonna do the crazy doors?
2:58:50Elon MuskThe crazy doors. Those doors are exercising hubris, that's for sure.
2:58:56Joe RoganIt's a lot of things you do. There's an exercise in hubris.
2:59:00Elon MuskWell, some things, like, some things are really important and necessary. Some things are, you know, some things are not necessary. But those doors are not necessary. But they're very cool.
2:59:15Joe RoganThey're functional, though. If, like, you're in a tight spot,
2:59:18Elon Muskthose doors will open up tighter than almost any door out there. Like, you can even. They'll open up in 18 inches. You've got an 18 inch gap between you and the next car.
2:59:28Elon MuskThat door will open.
2:59:29Joe RoganThat's pretty amazing.
2:59:31Elon MuskSo we developed a. I mean, just in order to avoid having a puck, like an ultrasonic puck in the door, we developed, the best of my knowledge.
2:59:43Joe RoganWhat's an ultrasonic puck mean?
2:59:45Elon MuskSo, like the ultrasonic sensors that you have in a car, if you look carefully, you'll see that there's a little puck, like a little isolation ring, like a rubber isolation ring.
2:59:55Elon MuskAnd that's when the sonar, which is like basically a loudspeaker, is generating ultrasonic noise and it's. And then listening to the echoes. But normally in order to listen to the echoes, you've got to isolate the thing that's generating the sound.
3:00:12Elon MuskSo that's why if you look carefully around cars, you'll see these little pucks, these little circles, and those are the ultrasonic sensors. And we didn't want to have an ultra.
3:00:21Elon MuskYeah, exactly. So we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door, but we also didn't want the door to like, you know, bat some kid out of the way.
3:00:29Elon MuskJust doof, you know, just a haymaker or something.
3:00:33Joe RoganRight.
3:00:34Elon MuskSo we developed, to the best of my knowledge, the only ultrasonic sensor that can see through metal. So it's mounted on the. On the inside of the door on isolation mounts, and it's super loud.
3:00:49Elon MuskAnd then it's got cancellation because it's kind of basically screaming at itself and it's listening for a tiny echo on the other side of the metal. Just to avoid having a little rubber ring in the bottom of the door.
3:01:02Joe RoganJesus Christ.
3:01:04Elon MuskYeah. We put in a capacitive sensor, an inductive sensor, force feedback sensor, and ultrasonics that can see through metal. This is. When I say exercise and hubris, I
3:01:16Joe Roganmean, like, wow, is that the most ridiculous car you've created?
3:01:19Elon MuskYeah, this is a Faberge. The Model X is a Faberge egg of cars. It's crazy. I mean, for, for like the, the six seaters, like, for the, the seats.
3:01:31Elon MuskThe. The seats are on a rear inclined single post with the seat movement mechanism hidden in the floor. So if you open the door and you look through, it's completely clean.
3:01:46Elon MuskIt's just like the floor is like a knife edge. It's just. There's nothing else like it. It's crazy. That windscreen is like a helicopter. It's like a helicopter windscreen.
3:01:58Elon MuskAnd there's no place to put the. To attach the. The sun visors. So we have to have sun visors that nest in the. A pillar, rotate forward, have a magnetic attachment that pops out, and it Connects to the rear view mirror.
3:02:18Joe RoganBut you seem very proud of all that. You say all these details and they
3:02:23Elon Musksound really crazy, but that's great.
3:02:25Joe RoganIt's pretty awesome.
3:02:26Elon MuskI mean, the sound system on the X is awesome. I mean, we designed so that the sound system is taking into account the fact that the windscreen is like a giant, like, you know, a subwoofer resonator.
3:02:41Elon MuskSo, like, the windscreen is a resonator for the sound system. The sound system is epic in the X, it's good in the S2. It's even better in the new S.
3:02:52Joe RoganHave you thought about doing a plot plaid X?
3:02:55Elon MuskYeah, there's gonna be a plaid X too. Yeah.
3:02:57Joe RoganWhen's that coming?
3:02:58Elon MuskWhich is like bizarrely fast for an SUV that's coming out.
3:03:01Joe RoganIsn't already bizarrely fast? You said it was preposterous, right?
3:03:05Elon MuskYeah, it's. It's like you're really. It's like it was things too fast is too fast probably.
3:03:11Joe RoganHave you increased the range of the X? Like, what is the range of the x currently? It's like 300 something.
3:03:17Elon MuskYeah, 300 something. So it'll be like high three.
3:03:21Joe RoganAnd is the difference between the X and the S the aerodynamics? Like, what is that range?
3:03:28Elon MuskThe X weighs more and it's got a bigger cross sectional area. So something called the cda drag coefficient times frontal area is higher for the X, as you'd expect, and the weight is higher.
3:03:42Elon MuskSo it's going to be 10 to 15% less range for the same battery
3:03:47Joe Roganpack as the S. The first time I saw an ex, Tiffany Hash had one and she was in the Comedy store parking lot and she had it dancing for us.
3:03:53Elon MuskOh, yeah.
3:03:54Joe RoganPlaying music and dancing like this.
3:03:55Elon MuskA lot of people don't know that the model X can do this crazy, like ballet thing with the fucking dances. Oh, yeah.
3:04:02Joe RoganWith the doors were going up and down and the music swaying and we were all dancing in the parking lot to this car.
3:04:08Elon MuskYeah. It's crazy.
3:04:11Joe RoganWhat is your. Do you have a favorite that you've created?
3:04:14Elon MuskCar, I mean, or. Yeah, not rocket. That's a little.
3:04:29Elon MuskWell, the car I drive every day or tend to drive is the high performance model S. And like the model.
3:04:40Joe RoganSo the model I said.
3:04:41Elon MuskI basically just said, I don't know what other people like, but I know what I love and I want to just make a car that's the car that I love.
3:04:47Elon MuskAnd hopefully there'll be enough people out there who also love the car. So that's the reason I love The Model S is because I just designed the car that I would love.
3:04:57Elon MuskThat's it. And then it's like, okay, well how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an suv? You know, because a lot of people like an SUV and like you got more seats and more room and a higher, you know, seat sitting higher, so.
3:05:15Elon MuskWell, what cool things. What are all the cool. I mean, like I say exercise and hubris. We just got carried away. Like, what are all the cool things we can think of for an suv?
3:05:27Elon MuskFriends and I had a lot of discussions about this, you know, and JV Straubel back in the day and Drew Baclino and Jerome and a lot of talented people.
3:05:42Elon MuskTesla's relatively a lot of talented people, that's for sure.
3:05:50Elon MuskThe car that's the most fun to show for others is the Model X for sure. So it's a great car. But I thought like, you know, is this really part of our mission to like, we're trying to.
3:06:04Elon MuskThe mission from Tesla from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. So are we really doing the right thing by creating this Faberge egg of cars with the Model X?
3:06:18Elon MuskI mean, to be totally frank, it's not entirely consistent with our mission because there's too many bells and whistles.
3:06:24Joe RoganYeah, but isn't it though, because Americans love SUVs and what better way to entice them into embracing sustainable energy than give them the dopest SUV you can buy?
3:06:34Elon MuskYeah, that's how we justified it to ourselves.
3:06:38Joe RoganIt's not a justification, it's a great carrot. You're dangling an amazing carrot.
3:06:43Elon MuskYeah, I mean actually in terms of, you know, CO2 per mile, also SUVs are like among the worst, you know, like this very SUVs, typically very low mileage, take a lot of gasoline per mile.
3:06:55Elon MuskSo, you know, if you're replacing, you know, big SUVs, that's actually like the best thing you could do on a per mile basis. But still we really got carried away.
3:07:06Elon MuskYou know, the favor Sheg. Of course, nobody's ever going to make a car like that.
3:07:12Joe RoganExplain to me what the fuck Bill Gates was talking about when he was saying that you can't do trucks. Well, what was.
3:07:19Elon MuskYeah, I didn't know what you're talking about.
3:07:20Joe RoganWhy did he say that then? Like, why would someone probably somebody told
3:07:24Elon Muskhim that and you know, he just repeated it. He's just not that close to the physics of it. And so I don't think he's ill intentioned. Here he just doesn't know what he's talking about.
3:07:32Joe RoganBut why say it then? You think about a guy who's so involved in technology, you would think you would only talk about things you understand.
3:07:40Elon MuskI don't know.
3:07:40Joe RoganIt's weird.
3:07:41Elon MuskI also heard that at one point he had a big short position against Tesla, which was kind of. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems weird.
3:07:48Elon MuskPeople I know who know the situation well. I said, are you sure? They said, yeah, he had a big short position against Tesla which obviously didn't work out too well.
3:07:58Elon MuskBut anyway, I think he's generally got good intentions here. I think he's probably just not. I don't hate Bill Gates for sure. Clear. I think it just probably doesn't know the science.
3:08:08Joe RoganYeah. I just thought it was odd because I knew that you guys were developing a semi.
3:08:12Elon MuskWe have prototypes that.
3:08:13Joe RoganYeah. That actually drive.
3:08:14Elon MuskThat actually drive. Like we've used them to transport cars and stuff. It's not like some, it's not like a unicorn. Like it was like Pegasus or something like. What are you talking about?
3:08:23Elon MuskWe have literally have prototypes that work.
3:08:25Joe RoganWhat kind of mileage do those things get?
3:08:28Elon MuskWell, these are prototypes. So they'll be like, you know, I don't know, about 300 miles, something like that.
3:08:33Joe RoganAnd so.
3:08:34Elon MuskBut we're driving back and forth from Fremont to Reno, you know, for transporting stuff.
3:08:41Joe RoganBut generally when semi truck drivers, when. When it's a human being driving them, they drive for long periods of time. Far more than 300 miles, right?
3:08:50Elon MuskNo, actually most trucking is short range.
3:08:52Joe RoganReally?
3:08:53Elon MuskYeah. Okay.
3:08:54Joe RoganThe majority like shipping things around cities and things like on the side.
3:08:58Elon MuskYeah, it'll be like take stuff from the port to the freightboarding.
3:09:01Joe RoganWill you have a long range, like cross continental version and so it'll be much more batteries and.
3:09:10Elon MuskYeah, the. Yeah, I mean you want something on the order of like probably a 500 kilowatt hour pack. Like what we have in the Snex is 100 kilowatt hour pack and probably want like, I don't know, 500 kilowatt hour pack for semi.
3:09:31Elon MuskBut this is not a game changer on the mass. Especially for a structural pack where the pack itself is. The structure is the primary load carrying element in the vehicle.
3:09:43Joe RoganIs it? Potentially.
3:09:45Elon MuskIt's not a game. It definitely works. 100%. No question about it.
3:09:49Joe RoganWould it be possible to have a safer semi because of this whole.
3:09:55Elon MuskYeah, well, we can also.
3:09:57Joe RoganLike you have with the X. Yeah.
3:10:00Elon MuskThe center of gravity would Be really low. So that would certainly help. We can also. We'd have motors individually controlling the wheels. So we can just automatically. And this was part of our semi.
3:10:14Elon MuskPresentation. We can just. The computer will automatically prevent it from jackknifeing. Like, you know, jackknifing on a low traction surface is like truck driver's worst nightmare. You know, you're on, like, some icy road.
3:10:25Elon MuskIcy, mountainous road that the trailer slides. Slides, you know, with jackknifes like that. And could slide off the edge of
3:10:31Joe Roganthe hill and you could stop that from happening even on an icy road.
3:10:34Elon MuskYeah. Wow. So because you have individual control over each of the wheels, so you can, like. You can just make sure it's. It's stable. It doesn't do jackknife. Whereas if you've got just one engine, it's very difficult to do that.
3:10:51Joe RoganDo you anticipate that eventually these things will be completely autonomous truck drivers?
3:10:56Elon MuskEventually it will be autonomous, but we're still a way away from that. But in the short term, I think we can certainly see convoys. So we've got one truck driver, and then there's, like, a whole bunch of trucks following that truck and, you know, keeping, like, a distance so that other cars can pass in between them.
3:11:18Elon MuskIt's sort of like having a train, but on the highway, it's like. Like linked, where it's just like one. Like, you got one, you know, truck driver in the front and then a whole series of trucks behind it that are following a convoy.
3:11:30Elon MuskWhoa. But the trucks behind are autonomous.
3:11:33Joe RoganAnd how much space in between? You could, like, wheel no problem.
3:11:36Elon MuskYou could put, like, you know, 40, 50ft between them, no problem.
3:11:38Joe RoganOh, wow.
3:11:39Elon MuskYeah. And those trucks will just follow the lead, and it's just like. It's like having trains on the road.
3:11:44Joe RoganAnd they'll be following through what? Like, just. They know where the trucks ahead of them are at all times.
3:11:49Elon MuskIt's very easy to do a follow. You just say, follow this thing, no problem.
3:11:55Joe RoganWhat's next after this?
3:12:02Elon MuskYou mean after what? Products or something?
3:12:04Joe RoganYeah. Ultimately, do you think that you could have planes?
3:12:10Elon MuskThought about planes for a long time,
3:12:16Elon MuskBut my brain will explode if I do planes. Literally. It's just like, this is too crazy, man. It's my. My brain is overloaded. So
3:12:30Joe Roganoverloaded because of the complexity or
3:12:33Elon Muskoverloaded because Too much stuff in my plate.
3:12:35Joe RoganRight.
3:12:36Elon MuskYeah.
3:12:37Joe RoganI'm glad there's a limit. I'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further.
3:12:44Elon MuskThere's only so many Hours in the day.
3:12:45Joe RoganYeah.
3:12:46Elon MuskSo, I mean, I think there are improvements happening over time for the energy density of batteries. Like the watt hours per. Well, it should really be joules, but like, like joules per kilogram, joules per liter.
3:13:05Elon MuskIt's improving a little bit every year, you know, so planes really need a high energy density because you got to get up to altitude. Like most of the energy is getting up to altitude.
3:13:17Elon MuskAnd then once you're in a low, dense air, low air density situation, you can cruise along with fairly. It takes very little energy to winter and cruise. That's a massive amount of energy to get up there.
3:13:29Elon MuskSo, man, I thought about this a lot.
3:13:43Elon MuskYeah. I mean, an aircraft in cruise is a neutral force balance. So it's like, it's not accelerating. So basically, if you've got a motor of a given force, for a given force, you will just go faster as you go higher.
3:13:59Elon MuskSo you've got the air resistance. The air resistance is dropping exponentially as you go higher. If you have a constant force from your, you know, motor and propeller or turbine or whatever, then you will just go faster.
3:14:17Elon MuskThe higher you go, the faster you go for the same amount of power.
3:14:22Joe RoganSo the key would be achieving a high altitude.
3:14:27Elon MuskYeah, it's all about altitude. Like, the air is very thick at sea level. Like for the same amount of force that you would go, say, like, you know, half the speed of sound at sea level, you could go, you know, twice the speed of sound at like, let's say at 100,000ft.
3:14:49Elon MuskSame amount of energy in cruise.
3:14:52Joe RoganI'm just supposed to fly a commercial plane at 100,000ft. Would that be possible?
3:14:55Elon MuskOh, yeah, yeah. You just go fast.
3:14:57Joe RoganThe great thing about that is you could bring flat earthers up there. Yeah.
3:15:05Elon MuskThe faster you go, the, like, you just want to go. The higher you go, the faster you want to go.
3:15:10Joe RoganRight.
3:15:12Elon MuskSo, like, the interesting thing about like the SR71 is that it's, it's, it's most fuel efficient speed was its fastest speed pretty much, or pretty, you know, pretty close because that's when it could go the highest altitude.
3:15:28Elon MuskSo because it could go faster at higher altitude, it got better miles per gallon at high speed than low speed.
3:15:37Joe RoganThat's pretty wild.
3:15:38Elon MuskYeah. So altitude, because air density decays exponentially and drag increases with the square, and so the exponential beats the square.
3:15:48Joe RoganDo you think there would ever be a time where Tesla could run itself in a sense of like, you have enough talented people running it and you wouldn't have to devote all your resources to, to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes.
3:16:05Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I'm committed to run Tesla for several years into the future and there's still a lot of things we've got to get done.
3:16:16Joe RoganCould Tesla possibly expand the planes?
3:16:20Elon MuskIt could. It is a different regime. I mean there are, there are no car companies that are, that are aircraft companies really. So.
3:16:33Elon MuskBut I think that, I think there is a way ultimately to have a vertical take, vertical takeoff and landing, supersonic electric jet. Wow, that'd be cool.
3:16:47Joe RoganBut what about the weight?
3:16:49Elon MuskThat's where it comes. Energy density of the, of the pack is important. You need to get high quickly. Yeah, get high, get high fast.
3:17:05Elon MuskYeah.
3:17:10Elon MuskSo. And you can get rid of most of the things that are on a plane if you just, if you, if you gimbal the fan to have the fan change direction like you do with a rocket.
3:17:26Elon MuskYou know, you don't need like rudder and you mostly don't need an elevator. You just need like some trim tabs. You basically have a flying wing. Pretty easy to do, a flying wing.
3:17:40Joe RoganWell,
3:17:42Elon Muskor you know, flying wing with a little bit of fuselage. So you make it lighter, make the pack structural as well. So the pack is the wing. You got to basically pull a few tricks like that.
3:17:58Elon MuskThis is all about like how do you make the non cell portion of the aircraft as light as possible Anyway, this is like, there's like a lot of regulatory things you have to go through.
3:18:13Elon MuskAnd this is counting on a watt hours per kilogram. You'd want what hours per kilogram at the pack level to be over 400. Yeah, so we're pretty close to that.
3:18:30Elon MuskSo it's like it's you know, at the pack level, not at the cell level, but at the pack level and with high cycle life.
3:18:41Joe RoganWell, listen, you're doing plenty. You don't necessarily have to get into planes right now. Yeah, I think you're busy enough.
3:18:50Elon MuskPlanes will be the last of the things. Cars and trucks and then boats and then.
3:18:59Joe RoganWell, it's interesting because plane technology in terms of like commercial air travel is probably increased at least visibly to the consumer. The least in the last like 30, 40, 50 years.
3:19:11Joe RoganIt's not much difference. The experience.
3:19:13Elon MuskYeah.
3:19:14Joe RoganPretty similar.
3:19:15Elon MuskYep. In fact, it's got slower.
3:19:17Joe RoganSo right after the Concorde, not even
3:19:20Elon Muskthe Concorde, like the 747 was the fastest plane.
3:19:23Joe RoganOh really?
3:19:23Elon MuskYeah. Had a swept wings. So the wing sweep, like what's the wing angle? That's that big factor in like what its Cruise speed is going to be. So the 747 had a pretty steep wing, but its fuel efficiency is not as good as something like 777 or 787.
3:19:49Elon MuskI mean, there's some basic things in place, physics that are present almost everywhere. They sometimes take different form, but they're basically referring to the relationship between momentum and kinetic energy.
3:20:04Elon MuskKinetic energy goes as a square. Momentum is linear and then there's surface to volume ratio. Surface volume ratio and the momentum to kinetic energy ratio drive so much of mechanics.
3:20:23Elon MuskIt's insane. It's like the reason that you don't have like a single celled creature that is gigantic is because of surface to volume ratio. Like there's a certain surface volume ratio where diffusion works.
3:20:35Elon MuskAnd beyond that, diffusion does not work. And you have to have a circulatory system for aircraft or just generally you want to move a large mass of air slowly so you can reduce the velocity component of kinetic energy which grows as a square.
3:20:57Elon MuskYou want to move a large amount of mass slowly, not a small amount of mass fast. So the way you make aircraft engines more efficient is you move a lot of air slowly.
3:21:07Elon MuskLike big fans, basically. Big, slow fans work great. Small, tiny, fast moving jets are very inefficient. So like the, you know, something like triple seven. It's really just a propeller in a shroud.
3:21:24Elon MuskSo. High bypass, it's called bypass ratio. Like how much of it is jet versus propeller? You want it to be mostly propeller.
3:21:35Joe RoganSo this is clearly something you've been thinking about a lot.
3:21:37Elon MuskOh sure, yeah. Like for 13 years.
3:21:43Joe RoganDo you think it's going to be the next thing for you?
3:21:45Elon MuskI don't. I hope not. I'm. I hope not. There's some smart people. I have to try and tackle it and I think, I hope they are successful, but just that you should try to get high.
3:22:00Elon MuskGet high, go fast, get high. You will automatically go fast as you get. As you go higher, it's just air density is dropping exponentially. And you think like in the limit you've got like a satellite, satellites going around the earth, you know, low earth orbit satellites going around the earth 25 times the speed of sound.
3:22:17Elon MuskNo propulsion, it's not. So if you get high enough, you just keep going. Obviously you just want to go super high, higher the better. Now the thing like you said, well, why don't planes do that already?
3:22:32Elon MuskWell, so if you got a combustion engine, it's got an aperture issue. So you're like, okay, how big is the hole in which you are Ingesting air. And then bear in mind air is mostly nitrogen, not oxygen.
3:22:47Elon MuskSo you got a lot more chaff than you got wheat. And that's why, you know, it's like you're going to design this thing's got to work at sea level, it's going to work at altitude and then it's going to drop off in efficiency quite a lot as you go higher.
3:23:04Elon MuskAnd then there's also like, well, if the air. There's some other issues relating to depressurization, like how fast can you descend, but you really just want to go super high.
3:23:16Elon MuskAnd it's very difficult to design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitudes. So like the air density at 100,000ft is approximately 1% that at sea level.
3:23:31Elon MuskSo how the hell do you design a combustion like an air burning? It's like an air. There's something that's taking an air combining with fuel and burning to work.
3:23:41Elon MuskWhen you have a hundred fold difference in air density, like this is an intractable problem. But if you have an electric fan, it's not burning anything. So aperture doesn't matter.
3:23:55Elon MuskBig. It's a big deal.
3:23:57Joe RoganIt seems like it would be the best way to fly.
3:23:59Elon MuskYeah.
3:24:00Joe RoganSomeone could figure out how to do it. We're like well over three hours in here.
3:24:06Elon MuskOh, wow.
3:24:07Joe RoganAmazing.
3:24:08Elon MuskTime flies when you're here. Yeah. Wasted.
3:24:12Joe RoganWell, thank you very much as always. It's a pleasure. Always fun to talk to you, man. I really appreciate it.
3:24:16Elon MuskYou're welcome.
3:24:17Joe RoganIf you ever want to talk about something, I'm here for you.
3:24:22Elon MuskThanks.
3:24:22Joe RoganAll right, thank you.
3:24:23Elon MuskAll right, bye everybody.