E3 Coliseum
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (10)
Transcript
0:06Moderatorthis is going to be really special. You know, E3, I think, is a show about celebrating games, but it's also about talking about the impact games have on the world and people from all walks of life talking about what games mean to them.
0:22ModeratorAnd today, it's my honor to introduce one of our industry's most renowned designers with an individual who is charting the future of the world in so many incredible ways, who also happens to be a big gamer.
0:37ModeratorSo without further ado, please welcome Todd Howard and Elon Musk.
0:56ModeratorWelcome to E3.
0:58Elon MuskThank you.
0:59ModeratorGreat to have you guys. So I think when we announced this, the biggest question everyone had was, do these guys know each other? Why are they together? You guys are friends, right?
1:09ModeratorYeah, yeah. How did you get to know each other?
1:16Todd HowardPeople tried to connect us over several years. Like, do you know Elon? You should know Elon Musk. And we finally connected. I think it was when I bought my Tesla and somebody.
1:28Todd HowardI went into the store and actually you don't buy Tesla. You order them online when you go there. And you know on your PC when you select Ultra for all the settings, I click that button when ordering a Tesla and then we connected.
1:40ModeratorYeah.
1:42Elon MuskAnd yeah, I've actually been a big fan of your games for a long time and played Fallout 3 all the way. Like, I really played that game a lot.
1:56Elon MuskI think explored every corner of that game. Played obviously Skyrim. I did not complete Skyrim. That was intense. I was like, this is a big game. Played Fallout 4.
2:08Elon MuskThat was great. And then when I was having like a birthday, I asked for the. Hey, could I have that statue of that weird looking guy in the full hat, you know, with the 1950s guy
2:23Moderatorwith the,
2:25Elon Muskyou know that.
2:26ModeratorThat guy? Is that one?
2:28Elon MuskYeah, it's a life size statue of this 1950s dude in like a. I guess a Volt jumpsuit.
2:37Todd HowardIt's the Volt Boy.
2:38ModeratorVault. Vault Boy.
2:39Elon MuskExactly. Vault Boy.
2:42ModeratorAnd you have this at home.
2:43Elon MuskIt was so weird having that at a party because most basically there were like two nerds that knew what they referred to. And we were like, yeah, yeah, okay.
2:52Elon MuskAnd everyone else was like, man, that's weird.
2:56ModeratorNow, rolling back in time, when you were a kid, you programmed a game. Is that true? Like in the early 80s?
3:03Elon MuskYeah, I mean, primitive. I was just a kid.
3:06ModeratorYeah, you're like 12, I think, right?
3:09Elon MuskYeah, I think it was probably like 10 or 11 when I programmed that game, but it got published when I was 12.
3:14ModeratorBlaster, it's called.
3:15Elon MuskYeah, it's a simple Game. You have a space fighter and you fight an alien space freighter. Yeah, I wrote the game, did the graphics and the sound and everything.
3:27Elon MuskDidn't have anything else. So it was a very simple game.
3:30ModeratorI want to emphasize, when you were younger, did you ever aspire to make games or get into making games?
3:37Elon MuskYeah, that's actually one of the things that I thought about doing career wise.
3:39ModeratorSure. Wow.
3:41Elon MuskIt seemed like that would be super fun.
3:44ModeratorThen you went like rocket science are a few places where you kept doing a little bit of gaming stuff, right?
3:48Elon MuskYeah, actually I worked at a gaming startup which weirdly was called Rocket Science.
3:53ModeratorYeah,
3:56Elon MuskFate loves irony.
3:57ModeratorYeah.
3:58Elon MuskYeah. I worked rocket science programming games a long time ago. And that must have been like 93 or something.
4:08ModeratorOr 94.
4:11Elon MuskYeah, that was tricky.
4:15ModeratorNever applied to Bethesda.
4:16Elon MuskThus I didn't.
4:19Todd HowardHe was doing other things though, is that guy.
4:21Elon MuskWell, I was going to. My original plan was to go to grad school at Stanford and do study ultracapacitors for use in electric vehicles. So, you know, I always wanted to do electric cars and you know, work on like sustainable energy and then the rocks would be cool.
4:42Elon MuskI mean I can sort of talk a little about like, like basically it's like what are the things I think are like quite important for the future to be good.
4:49Elon MuskAnd obviously in order for the future to be good, we have to have sustainable energy. So we have to have sustainable production and consumption of energy. So that means making solar panels low cost and making electric cars appealing.
5:04Elon MuskAnd then we want to become multiplanet species in a space faring civilization. Those rockets and then there's some things that I thought will affect the future, but I'm not sure if this is good or bad.
5:19Elon MuskLike AI that scores me that one.
5:23ModeratorSure.
5:27Todd HowardIn fact, I think I just made video games.
5:28Elon MuskIt's not bad.
5:29Todd HowardYeah, but I was going to do all that, but I actually don't know how to do that.
5:37Elon MuskI think it turned out in Fallout 3 the AI basically caused World War 3 as I recall or something like
5:43Todd Howardthat a little bit.
5:45Elon MuskI want to spoiler.
5:46ModeratorI mean, is there a link there, there between sort of, you know, you talk about AI and video game I and you know, the technology in video games. Is there anything there that sort of, you know, helps push technology that you think, I mean, you look at like, you know, self driving cars or other things.
6:01ModeratorLike are there things from video games that you know, you think help push technology forward?
6:07Elon MuskWell, I think, you know, part of the reason I got interested in technology, maybe the reason was Video games. So, you know, probably wouldn't have started programming if it wasn't for video games or wouldn't have been as interested in computers and technology if it wasn't for video games.
6:22Elon MuskI think actually video games are a very powerful force for getting young kids interested in technology. It has way bigger knock on effects than people may realize. And generally like if we're interviewing somebody for a software engineering role at Tesla or SpaceX, many times like, how'd you start programming?
6:43Elon MuskIt's like, oh, go to video games, you know, over and over again. And I think many of the best software engineers in the world are at or spent much of their career at video games houses.
6:56Elon MuskAnd you know, especially if people had to try to create incredibly realistic graphics using very little compute power, that's a hard problem. And so a lot of people had to write really tight code and come up with really clever ideas to do that.
7:13Elon MuskIf you look at someone like say John Carmack, you know, who's an amazing software engineer, but also actually a really good aerospace engineer and it shows like, you know, problem solving I think does transfer like you figure out software engineering, problem solving transfers to other things.
7:29Todd HowardCarmack told me the best anecdote between video games and rockets. He said rocket AI is actually for him quite easy. Just thrust left, thrust right. Gaming AI is so much harder.
7:37Todd HowardThe difference is when the game crashes, he presses reboot and when the rocket crashes, giant mess spread over several miles.
7:46Elon MuskYeah, there's some joke about like if reality was a video game, you know, it's sort of like the graphics are great, the plot's terrible and the spawn time's really long.
8:04ModeratorHow has the stuff Elon done inspired or affected what you do, Todd, in your world?
8:10Todd HowardWell, I mean the space stuff, as we look at Starfield, you know, that's where we kind of look. Okay, who is really, how are these things actually going to work in the future?
8:22Todd HowardGot to go to SpaceX last year. That place is like the Avengers meets NASA. Like if anyone ever gets it, it's incredible. But what do those things look like as we, you know, as we do a science fiction game.
8:36Todd HowardBut the other stuff in the cars and the self driving is something I'm very passionate about. But that doesn't affect the game stuff. And I know that now you're putting games on the Teslas, so that's different.
8:50ModeratorYeah,
8:53Todd Howardyeah.
8:54Elon MuskActually, thanks for helping out on that. Appreciate it.
8:56Todd HowardYeah, we are, we talked about that and we said hey, would it be pretty cool? So we are, we're actually working together Skyrim on it. That's a little. We're going to start a little smaller.
9:10Todd HowardSo we are. We are working on Fallout Shelter for the cars. Yeah. So it'll be free and you'll have your little. Your little dwellers on the screen, like they live in the car in some way.
9:23Todd HowardSo that's a great starting point.
9:25ModeratorSo how is this going to work with games you've talked about? Unity. Unreal. You're porting it all. Being able to put Tesla so you have to be parked when you play these.
9:34ModeratorOr how does this work?
9:36Elon MuskYeah, yeah, you have to park the car.
9:38ModeratorOk.
9:44Elon MuskThe fun. Please make us park the car. So. Yes. Yeah. Like, we're also going to enable people to watch, like, videos, like streaming through the browser. You'll be able to watch like, you know, Netflix or whatever, you know, YouTube, if the car is parked and connected to WI Fi.
10:05Elon MuskSo if you're like, say at a supercharger station and you want to watch something, you can watch it on the screen in the car. But the general principle is like, how do we, you know, what can we do to make the.
10:15Elon MuskThe car the most fun possible? And like, what would a car. What other cars just don't have, you know, and so it seems like, well, you know, it feels like you're just parked somewhere waiting for somebody finish an appointment or you're on a road trip.
10:30Elon MuskIt'd be pretty cool if you just like, you know, go to the car screen and play some like, some fun game and anyway, exploring like, you know, how do we make it as fun as possible?
10:41Elon MuskYou can. You can already play all of the old Atari games or almost all the old Atari games on the car. And we hooked it up so it can connect to Xbox or PS4 controller and like actually have some pretty good control feedback.
10:55Elon MuskAnd then we have like, genius moves. Like the Fart app, my finest work. And, you know, it's like there's. You can actually make. By the way, you can make the Fart sound like it's coming from any seat.
11:15Todd HowardThat actually is the funniest Easter egg, that one. Yeah, you can position it and then actually the names of the farts. There's the Falcon Heavy is one of them.
11:26Todd HowardYeah, I believe.
11:31Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
11:33ModeratorAnd I know you got. We got some clips, right, of what this is about.
11:37Elon MuskYeah, some clips of some upcoming games in the car. And, you know, it's just meant to be like, hey, what are some cool games that people might like to play?
11:45Elon MuskAnd depending upon how much people play them, we'll, you know, add them to the, like, higher on the list or maybe put it into sort of an archive that you can tap to download because the screen was not originally meant as a game player.
12:01Elon MuskSo it's just. It doesn't actually have that much storage, so it won't have that many games on it at any one time. But it will just be like, okay, what do people really enjoy playing?
12:09Elon MuskAnd that might be a good way to pass time. So.
12:12ModeratorAwesome. All right, let's take a look at games on Tesla.
12:49ModeratorAll right, let's cut that. And that's not all we got. Second one too, right?
12:55Elon MuskYeah. Got our racing game that you. It's. You can either play single player or two player.
13:01ModeratorAll right, Game two. Check it out.
13:24Elon MuskSam.
14:10ModeratorThe steering wheel. I wasn't prepared for that. That's pretty cool.
14:13Elon MuskYeah. I mean, if you have a racing game and you have a steering wheel sitting right there waiting to be steered,
14:22Moderatoryou try like, can you gas and brake, will that work too? Or it's like, oh, yeah.
14:25Todd HowardReally?
14:25ModeratorYeah.
14:27Elon MuskWell, I think we've got the brake is wired in and I think we will probably have maybe the scroll wheel for the gas pedal, just so he doesn't accidentally sipping on the brake if you're stationary is not a problem, right?
14:44ModeratorGas could be. That's amazing. Well, it's so cool that you're doing that inside the cars. I wanted to ask you guys about the idea. You know, you're both certainly known for a ton of incredible successes in your careers.
14:58ModeratorAnd, you know, you said before Elon, that sometimes, you know, you're. You're really only innovating if you're kind of, you know, ready to fail or have failure, you know, along the way shows that you are pushing for innovation.
15:08ModeratorTodd, you've been through kind of, you know, quite a year with sort of Fallout 76, and you've been pretty public about the challenges there. Could you guys maybe riff a little bit on that about the push for innovation and how sometimes failure is part of that journey?
15:23Todd HowardWell, usually when you get to take gaming the things that it's the first time you see it and they're new, they become successful, but you got there by trying big new things.
15:32Todd HowardAnd we're going to keep doing that, and other game makers do that, and I think it's good that the audiences are welcoming to that. They're going to try it out and support us as we, as we go through that process to figure out, hey, what's going to make this tick.
15:45Todd HowardAnd we had, you know, obviously had our ups and downs with Fallout 76, but that our fans are incredible and have really stuck with us. And now it's really turned into one of the best online communities that we've ever seen.
15:58Todd HowardIt's fantastic.
16:00ModeratorI mean, through your career, I'm sure you've seen that too, right? Where there have been projects that, you know, take time to evolve. But that's part of what. Part of what it takes, I guess, right.
16:09ModeratorIs kind of having that vision and pushing for it. Sure.
16:12Elon MuskI mean, if you're going to try something innovative, then you're in unexplored territories. So the odds that something will go wrong are pretty high. It's only if you try to do something that is already well understood that there's little chance of failure.
16:28Elon MuskBut then it will not be interesting or innovative. So, you know, for sure uncharted territory will result in failures necessarily. Otherwise, you're not trying hard enough.
16:45ModeratorSpeaking of uncharted territory, you mentioned Starfield, which we haven't seen much on Todd, besides one little trailer last year, but obviously space is going to be a part of that.
16:55ModeratorI'm curious. I don't know how much you can tell us about the game, but at least, you know, I should ask, what can you tell us about Star Scale?
17:02Todd HowardI do not have a clip. No, sorry. Everyone needs to be patient on that. But what I can say is, like, how we approach it. So it feels it's a game, but it still has an authenticity to.
17:14Todd HowardOkay, this could happen. You know, we talked, like, what kind of fuel do the ships use? Like, we're using helium 3, which we can debate whether that's a good power source for spaceships or.
17:25Todd HowardOr how do the physics work in space and gravity and those kind of things. And that's where you get into. We have to gamify it some so that it's not as punishing as actual space travel, but that it feels like, hey, traveling in space in our game is still.
17:43Todd HowardLet's say it's like flight in the 40s. Like, it's dangerous. It's still dangerous to go and explore. But even though lots of people do it.
17:52Elon MuskYeah, space is far. That's the thing you have to, like, definitely cut that short. It's like 40 light years, man.
18:04ModeratorThis is a far.
18:06Elon MuskEven at light speed, that's pretty far. So, I mean, I think if you want to, Like a normal. Based on known physics, like an antimatter drive would be the best, but that's still going to limit you to lightspeed, which is a long time.
18:23Elon MuskYeah. I have to have Some kind of warp drive, otherwise you're going to be stuck in one star system. So I mean just honestly I sometimes feel like we're in some friggin video game, you know, I'm like why is it like just possible to get to Mars?
18:40Elon MuskWhy are the stars so far away? This is just what I'd do if I was in a position painting, doing a video game. Put those stars, little points of light, don't worry about it.
18:47Elon MuskYou can't see details. They're real far
18:50Moderatorlevels of detail. The stuff that you know, Elon is doing with SpaceX, how is, are you looking at that when you're building Starfield? I mean I don't know how far in the future it's set or sort of how that's looked.
19:01Todd HowardIt's further in the future. But I like that going back to that, risking failure and stuff. I think, I mean kind of honestly the world needs more people like Elon who say I'm not sure how that works, I'm going to try this a different way.
19:14Todd HowardAnd a lot of people will doubt that whether it's going to space in that way or self driving cars. But that's, I'm very passionate about those things. And as it comes to what's happening at SpaceX, it's, you know, what are the limits of the physics of like the new engines or things like that where you know, talking to Elon, how far could this go in current reality and then how would we move beyond that in a fictional way?
19:41ModeratorYeah, yeah, Jerry, talk a bit about that. Obviously you know, you're dealing with the reality of today, but you know, something futuristic like what Todd's doing. Does that get you excited to sort of think about like, you know, what is where space travel going to go and how can something like Todd's world simulate that or explore that even further off?
19:57Elon MuskYeah, I think like sci fi movies, video games or you know, and really I think people spend a lot more time on video games and movies these days. You know, can be pretty inspiring and thought provoking about what's the future that we want.
20:13Elon MuskWhat are some like impossible sounding technologies that maybe could work somehow? Like there's conceivably a way to do warp drive, but it's like it's such esoteric super out on the edge physics because technically you cannot go faster than the speed of light but.
20:34Elon MuskBut space can travel faster than the speed of light. That's what's meant by wolf drive. But the amount of energy you need to warp space is unbelievably gigantic. So you know, you'd have to like be converting matter to energy at a rate that is we cannot conceive really.
20:57Elon MuskYou know, it can't be like saying, well, if we just convert one Jupiter per second to energy, then problem solved. Like that's a lot. And there's not many Jupiters,
21:10Moderatorso.
21:11Elon MuskAnd there might be a bit of radiation around that. So like there are things like technically the universe did expand faster than the speed of light. That's why we can see light from all these super distant stars.
21:30Elon MuskSo it's kind of pretty wild that space expanded faster than speed of light. So I'm sure we'll figure out some strange breakthroughs and come to grips better with dark matter especially, which seems like something's fishy going on there.
21:52Todd HowardIt has bad branding.
21:54Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. The universe is mostly dark energy and dark matter according to current physics. But you know, this kind of plug in the, you plug them in the equations and they sort of work.
22:09Elon MuskAnd like this is not a good explanation of where you can find the dark matter. But I sort of figure like, hey, if this is a video game and somebody had a bug in their like Orbital Dynamics physics simulator, then it's like, oh no, we got to figure out some way for these minions in here to believe that they're in reality.
22:28Elon MuskSo insert dark matter.
22:33ModeratorBut the idea of, you know, a game as a simulation sort of, you know, predicting things or whatever, I mean, obviously it's entertainment on some level, but there are games where it's like it is more of simulation or maybe not, but is there value there in that?
22:49ModeratorIn sort of, in kind of, you know, testing things and exploring ideas inside of a game world?
22:55Elon MuskYeah, actually at Tesla we have a whole SIM team that tries to create a photorealistic world. And we're trying to be photorealistic about like actually the most boring things like skid marks on the road and like concrete curves, shadows, faded lines on.
23:17Elon MuskThe reason self driving is hard is because you have all these corner cases and things where the road should be a certain way, but it isn't. Like there should be painted lines, but there aren't painted lines or they took the painted lines away and then there's a skid mark that's offset from the painted line.
23:33Elon MuskSo that will cause the car, if it just listens to the lines, to crash into stuff. If you had clearly painted lines and could count on them, self driving would be trivial, like just piece of cake.
23:45Elon MuskBut the world is just filled with all these things that are not the way they're supposed to be. And then the real trick with self driving AI is to figure out why.
23:57Elon MuskWhat is the. Where should I be on this road that has no painted lines or lines been painted wrong and it's got, you know, skid marks and scratches and roadwork and all sorts of things that are unexpected.
24:13Elon MuskThat's the really hard part, otherwise it'd be child's play. So yeah, we do a lot of SIM at Tesla and we have found a good correlation. It's like does the car drive off the cliff in sim?
24:28Elon MuskYes. Does it drive off the cliff in reality? Well, we got close.
24:35Todd HowardI think you said it once. I like. It's not the lines it's looking for. Drivable space is more important than the markings in real life because that's how your mind's actually working.
24:43Todd HowardEven if there's a lane you can't. There's someone there. It's more drivable space. That's the problem.
24:48Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. So actually we recently found that we need, we have like pretty good recognition of lines and what's technically drivable space, but we actually need what is road and as opposed to what is like what is the most probably the road as opposed to drivable space and what is.
25:10Elon MuskAnd then a whole subset on curbs. We're really into curbs. Curbs right now. Some curbs are really subtle and something you should care about, something you shouldn't care about.
25:22Elon MuskSometimes you go into a driveway and it's got a little curb and then the car's like oh, curb. Can't go over that. Like operating on drive space, going through a neighborhood and then everyone's driveway is drive space technically true.
25:36Elon MuskBut you don't want to go through everyone's driveway. It's not good.
25:41Todd HowardI was going to say you think about like that a lot of that stuff started video game wise, like image processing and things like that and AI and what they're doing there is, you know, people look at technology now, they always underestimate how fast technology moves in the present day.
25:57Todd HowardThey don't cast back, you look at things. But I think the self driving of what's happening now is going to fundamentally change the world in ways that people can't even expect.
26:07Todd HowardAnd you think about our children might not even learn to drive because the cars will all be driving themselves around or how it affects cityscapes or parking lots, alcohol consumption.
26:17Todd HowardThere's just like all these studies that are fascinating. Exactly like so if you look at like what are the best self driving stocks Alcohol companies.
26:29ModeratorAnd more games to play too.
26:32Todd HowardGaming companies.
26:32ModeratorYeah, exactly.
26:33Elon MuskWell, I mean video games have drove computing technology, especially GPUs massively. It's like that's really the only thing you need a GPU for was to have the game look better.
26:44Elon MuskAnd so those massive resources put into rendering games to be more realistic and then those same GPUs ended up being very useful for neural nets and gave a huge boost to AI.
26:58Elon MuskSo it's sort of video games, better graphics to AI and then that same thing is sort of quite key to self driving.
27:09ModeratorI know you have OpenAI and I wanted to ask Todd a bit about AI and game AI and sort of where games are going. Right. So you know, you obviously have RPGs that are simulated worlds and people have done things with emergent behavior and other characters, radiant AI, things like that.
27:23ModeratorBut can you talk about maybe sort of where games are going in the next, you think in the next, you know, five, ten plus years in terms of the AI and the simulation and what's going to sort of happen there?
27:33Todd HowardI think that's the part of gaming that's going to make the biggest jump. I think the graphic fidelity most people react to instantly they're looking at a screenshot or a video.
27:42Todd HowardBut there's some laws of diminishing returns there as things start to look better and better and better and better. But as far as how a game feels, the other characters in the AI, you know, I think a lot of people, including us, have struggled with how do you make that feel real.
27:55Todd HowardAnd now that you can move some of that processing to the cloud, neural nets and other things, I think that's the part where it's going to get significantly better over the next generation.
28:04ModeratorThat means what characters know you better? Or I mean, what do you have
28:08Todd Howardany sense of how reacting to things that you, you did in a more realistic manner, they're more reactive to what you're doing or the situation around them. You know, the curb problem is to say you get that in a video game all the time.
28:23ModeratorYou know, we get to a point where these games become more sort of indistinguishable from reality. And I'm curious about, you know, what do you think sort of, you know, where do you think this goes ultimately as these games continue to improve, graphics get better, but then the simulation gets better.
28:37ModeratorDo we reach this sort of, you know, singularity at this point where sort of, you know, the game in the world is the same thing the simulation is.
28:44Elon MuskImagine if we were to reach such A situation that would be crazy.
28:53Elon MuskWhat are we playing now? I bet we see those, like these creatures in the game saying, wow, imagine if. Can you imagine if there was a simulation? Like, you're in a simulation.
29:07Elon MuskAnd the simulation's all the way down. The simulation and the simulation. And the simulation seems likely. I mean, well, if you assume any rate of improvement of video games at all, then one or two things are going to happen.
29:22Elon MuskCivilization will end or games will be so realistic you can't tell the difference between them and reality. I postulate. Does this sound correct or does it sound correct?
29:37ModeratorYeah, yeah.
29:39Todd HowardI don't know.
29:39Elon MuskI mean, if it's a good thing. But it's just we could be somebody's like, video game right now, right?
29:47ModeratorIt's true.
29:48Elon MuskWhose avatar are you?
29:52ModeratorWhen you think of kind of, you know, never know. But, you know, when you look at games and the games you play now, I mean, what are the things you want to see in games that don't happen right now?
30:05ModeratorIs there anything that, like, when you play a game, you're like, I wish it did this, or I wish I. You know, you're obviously thinking about, you know, lots of things.
30:12ModeratorBut when you play games, are you satisfied? Are there things that frustrate you about games? What do you want to see games do in the future?
30:19Elon MuskI don't know if I should say.
30:21ModeratorYeah. You working on a game too? No. Okay.
30:26Elon MuskNo, no, no, but I mean, like, I don't know. I mean, like, I mean, I was a bit more R rated.
30:34ModeratorI don't know. Okay.
30:36Elon MuskI'm trying to be honest here.
30:42Elon MuskPopular theme.
30:46ModeratorTodd.
30:48Audience MemberI don't know.
30:49Todd HowardI can follow that up exactly.
30:54ModeratorI mean, when you look at, you know, the stuff that you play now, I guess you talked about Todd's games, but I'm curious. Kind of, you know, wider spectrum, you know, your kids play games, you play games.
31:02ModeratorLike, what are you, you know, what excites you? Like, what games are you looking forward to? What are you. What have you played recently? Like what? There are a lot of games out there.
31:10ModeratorWhat does it take for a game to attract your interest?
31:14Elon MuskSure. I mean, last couple years, actually I haven't played a lot of games because it's been super intense. Work, situation. So work, see the kids for a bit and then get like, not enough sleep.
31:27Elon MuskSo that's been the situation for a couple years. So just haven't had much time to pay games a lot, you know, the. Probably. Actually, let's say that the last game that I played a lot was probably Fallout 4.
31:47Elon MuskSo that was a good one.
31:51Todd HowardThen he was like, I'm done.
31:52ModeratorThat's good.
31:56Elon MuskI've heard a lot about this game, Cyberpunk. I like the theme.
32:00Todd HowardIt's awesome.
32:03Elon MuskAnd we're actually. That weirdly was what we decided to have our pickup truck as kind of like a cyberpunk themed pickup truck that we'll be unveiling with hopefully end of the summer.
32:14ModeratorOkay.
32:15Elon MuskYeah. Yeah, it looks weird.
32:17ModeratorReally?
32:17Elon MuskYeah, it looks like normal.
32:19ModeratorOkay.
32:20Elon MuskYeah.
32:20ModeratorInspired directly about the theme of cyberpunk and the game A little bit.
32:23Elon MuskIt was inspired. I learned about the game afterwards. This is something we've been working on for a while.
32:28ModeratorYeah.
32:29Elon MuskBut I just sort of like the general idea and. Yeah, so it's. It's sort of. Yeah, like sort of, you know,
32:40Todd Howardsort
32:40Elon Muskof has a slight Blade Runner feel to it and so it definitely does. It doesn't look like a normal car. It looks like it should not be on the roads and it came out of a movie or something, but so, you know, won't appeal to everyone, but it'll be something that's different and you know, it'll be, you know, probably appeal to.
33:02Elon MuskI think I would buy it. So. Yeah, I think if you're trying to work on something, and my experience is it's really hard to. If you're trying to figure out what others love but you don't love it, it's really hard to make that great.
33:20Elon MuskSo when you work on something, if you fall in love with it, that's a good sign. And then don't worry about. If you do, others will imagine the same.
33:33Todd HowardAbsolutely.
33:33ModeratorThat's right. How you probably feel about making games too, Todd, that idea that you have to love and play it.
33:39Todd HowardAbsolutely. And it's not just me, it's the whole team at Bethesda Game Studios who. These are the kind of things we would line up at midnight to go play and buy.
33:47Todd HowardAnd that's what, you know, drives your passion to do it. You have to be your own kind of tastemaker day in and day out. If you're always focus testing with someone like this, you.
33:57Todd HowardYou often miss the mark.
33:58ModeratorYeah. One thing to talk about is online play and you've got these a lot in the news recently. Elon, about the Starlink satellites and the idea of Internet around the world, low latency and gaming could be, I think one of the sort of beneficiaries of this.
34:14ModeratorCan you maybe talk a bit about that project and how it will tie into potentially gaming?
34:19Elon MuskSure. We actually one of the Design criteria for Starlink is to have latency for the initial constellation on the order of 20 milliseconds or below, which is important for real time gaming.
34:32Elon MuskAnd then the later sort of second generation, third generation constellations are aiming for sub 10 milliseconds. So this would be really great for any kind of real time gaming.
34:44ModeratorYeah. And it is the across the world you'll be able to sort of access that.
34:48Elon MuskYeah. Anyone on Earth.
34:49ModeratorWow.
34:50Elon MuskPretty amazing.
34:52ModeratorThat's, you know what's exciting? We look at, you know, these cloud platforms, streaming something like that. I mean, Todd, from a designer perspective, that must open up so many possibilities, I think, about where games are going to go in the future.
35:05ModeratorRight.
35:06Todd HowardI think it's about democratizing who can play right now. There's still a lot of barriers to I want to play that game. Okay. I got to buy that. I have this, I have to be somewhere.
35:15Todd HowardSo having that be that you can approach it like any other entertainment. Like, okay, I listen to music. It's quite, you don't think about it. There's so many ways to do it and that's where, you know, games need to be, where it's ubiquitous.
35:25Todd HowardIt's not just in our part of the world where people are connected. Well, it's other parts of the world that are growing and these, you know, billions of gamers who are coming into the scene who don't have the access that we take for granted.
35:39ModeratorSure. All right, we're going to do maybe a couple audience Q and A, a little AMA here. If you want to raise your hand, we'll get a mic to you and we can have a couple questions for these guys.
35:47ModeratorThis is a rare opportunity.
35:49Audience MemberHello. How you doing?
35:50ModeratorGood.
35:51Audience MemberWe're streaming on Twitch right now. By the way, shout out to Twitch.
35:55ModeratorHello.
35:55Audience MemberI had a question about the possibility of living in a simulation. When you think about like all the quirks, every individual personality, how things work on a cellular level, like the universe, everything, doesn't it start to seem more far fetched when you see how intricate and individual things are?
36:17ModeratorOkay, good about that, the idea.
36:27ModeratorThank you, I appreciate it. Next question. Let's go over here. Yep. Hi. Big fan. That's live. Wow. Charles, wear your tusk.
36:42Elon MuskYeah, yeah, I, I, you know, I. Tusk. You saying this. Elon Tusk.
36:50ModeratorElon Tusk.
36:51Elon MuskYeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before.
36:58Elon MuskUpcoming episode of Rick and Morty.
37:01ModeratorHey, Justin Roiland's up next.
37:03Elon MuskHey.
37:04Todd HowardHey, Elon.
37:05Elon MuskThanks for coming.
37:05ModeratorThanks, guys.
37:06Todd HowardElon. So if we want to get to Mars. It's going to take a long time to get astronauts out there.
37:12ModeratorWhat kind of entertainment plan do you have? I mean, hopefully they're going to be able to play games on their way to Mars. What do you think about that?
37:19Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. Sure.
37:21ModeratorAwesome.
37:24Elon MuskLand party in space.
37:26Audience MemberLet's do it.
37:26Elon MuskYeah.
37:27ModeratorAll right. Yeah. The woman right there.
37:31Audience MemberYeah.
37:32Todd HowardMine is simple.
37:33ModeratorElon Musk.
37:34Todd HowardHow much do I have to beg to get a selfie with you?
37:39Elon MuskSure, I'll do a selfie. Sure.
37:42ModeratorAll right, next question. It's going to be as far back there. Yeah, the red shirt Upstairs, too.
37:53Elon MuskIt's for Elon. How do I sign up to test out your neural net program? Well, you just put this USB C port in your head and then. Don't worry, I'm in.
38:07Elon MuskIt'll be fine. Might sting a little.
38:12ModeratorAll right. Another one? Sure. Right over there. Yeah, sure.
38:18Todd HowardQuestion for Todd Howard. I live in the west in Rockville, Maryland. Are you looking for any interns by chance? Go to our website. There's a lot of job postings there.
38:27ModeratorAll right, maybe just a couple more. Yeah, sure. Right over there. You got a mic? Yeah.
38:33Todd HowardHey.
38:33ModeratorHey, Elon.
38:35Elon MuskWow, this is crazy.
38:37ModeratorYeah. So right now I'm trying to build, like, a tokenized game economy for gamers. So my question is for two karma points, and on behalf of our simulation overlords, can you sign my cyberpunk hat?
38:49ModeratorSure. We'll get it up here for him.
38:52Todd HowardAll right.
38:52Elon MuskTwo and a half karma points.
38:56ModeratorAll right. Another one right here. Mike, down here. You have the glasses.
39:02Elon MuskKarma does seem real.
39:05ModeratorI'm just wondering, with all the noise you deal with, there's lots of craziness. How do you stay focused? Because I can't imagine.
39:18Elon MuskYeah, it's insane.
39:21Todd HowardHis premise was, you do stay focused.
39:25Elon MuskYeah, pretty focused. It's so many things, man. I feel like the levels keep level, keeps ratchet. Can we just turn that difficulty level down one notch? That would be really helpful.
39:38Elon MuskIt keeps dialing up the difficulty medium. That's like off nightmare level.
39:49ModeratorSo this is a question for both of you.
39:50Elon MuskActually, you mentioned failures before.
39:52ModeratorWhat's the actual biggest failure that you.
39:54Elon MuskThat you've gone through to get to where you are?
39:57ModeratorQuestion.
40:08ModeratorWho goes first?
40:10Todd HowardThat's a tricky question. It's funny. It's an interview question. I ask people, right? And I don't.
40:16ModeratorYou don't know your response.
40:19Todd HowardPeople who are in the military have the best failures. Meaning, like they crash satellites and tanks and things like that. I do not have a good answer for That,
40:33Elon MuskI mean, we blew up three rockets in the beginning.
40:42Elon MuskThat was bad. We actually only had enough money. Originally. I basically took all the money I made from PayPal, put it into SpaceX, to creating SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity.
40:57Elon MuskAnd initially I figured I'd keep half of it and then I'd spend the other half on these crazy adventures that would probably fail. And then unfortunately, they needed all the money, so I had to give them all the money.
41:11Elon MuskAnd then I didn't have a house or had to borrow money for rent. That was pretty difficult. That was back in 2008. And then we managed to scrape enough spare parts together to do a fourth launch at SpaceX.
41:24Elon MuskAnd that worked. And if it had not worked, SpaceX would have died, probably would have lacked the credibility to raise the remaining money for Tesla, and we wouldn't be here today.
41:35Elon MuskOr maybe like not this ending
41:41Todd Howardfor me, then it would be.
41:47Todd HowardI guess for me it'd have to be this similar. The games we made in the period after Daggerfall, we made a bunch of games that just didn't land. And the company was going to go out of business and we got a lifeline.
41:59Todd HowardAnd then like, hey, let's see this game, Morrowind. This is what we should do. And that saved the company.
42:08ModeratorAll right, one more question. Last question. You want to pick? You know, Todd, see up top. Oh, there's everyone up there.
42:18Elon MuskCan't see the. Through the lights.
42:19ModeratorI know they're way up there.
42:20Todd HowardAll right.
42:21ModeratorYeah. Maybe the hand way up there. Yeah, yeah. Yell at your question. Hi.
42:28Todd HowardHi.
42:37Todd HowardThat was amazing because it was crazy. Plus, it went like that.
42:40Elon MuskAnd
42:44Moderatorwhat is your next launch and what is your next favorite launch or what do you have coming up as far?
42:52Elon MuskActually, we launch all the time. We do kind of 20 to 30 launches a year, most of them from Cape Canaveral. Some are from Vandenberg here in California. And in order for people to really see a launch like that, super crazy visible, kind of looked like a nuclear alien invasion from North Korea.
43:18Elon MuskSome of the YouTube videos are pretty funny. Yeah, 911 lines went ballistic. They broke down the 911 system. So we went. Actually, for us, we knew what was happening.
43:32Elon MuskSo it was like, oh, so right launch. But the, the next thing is probably the Falcon Heavy launch at the end of this month. That's at. Out of Cape Canaveral.
43:43Elon MuskSo that's got the two side boosters that come back and land. This will be
43:49Moderatorthe.
43:49Elon MuskThe most. We're pushing the envelope a little bit with, with Falcon Heavy. So it's more side load from the boosters and, you know, higher diamonds, dynamic pressure, meaning the ascent air pressure will be higher.
44:03Elon MuskIt's just like pushing harder through the air. So that'll be an exciting launch to see if you're at the Cape. And then hopefully later this year, we should be doing test flights of Starship out of South Texas and the Cape.
44:20Elon MuskThis is a crazy looking vehicle. Wow.
44:23ModeratorAmazing. All right, well, I think we're unfortunately out of time, although this. Keep going on. Elon, thank you so much for coming to E3, being a part of this.
44:32ModeratorThis is so cool to have you here. Todd Howard, thanks for doing this once in a lifetime. Todd and Elon, thanks, everyone. Appreciate it, guys.