Elon Musk | SXSW 2018
Transcript
0:02Jonathan NolanWe, we met a number of years ago. In part, I was writing a movie. I was going into pitch, a movie called Interstellar. At the time, Steven Spielberg was the director and he wanted to do a grounded movie about the future of space travel.
0:19Jonathan NolanSo I came in and my pitch was very short. I said, the movie's going to be 10 minutes long because it's not happening. It was about 10 years ago.
0:27Jonathan NolanWe're not going. There's no money left. This is not a priority for us anymore. And then in the course of. And somehow I got the job in the course of writing the movie, working with Kip Thorne, a physicist, invited me to physics conference one night and I got seated next to Elon.
0:47Jonathan NolanWe've been friends ever since. The irony of that being, I wound up becoming friends with a guy who I think personally is moving the needle back in the other direction, kind of by himself at this point, more than anyone I can think of.
1:01Jonathan NolanSo the net result is I think we are going back to the moon, I think we are going to Mars, and I think a lot of it is because of you.
1:09Jonathan NolanSo one of the questions we've got
1:10Elon Muskhere today,
1:15Jonathan NolanOne of the questions that you guys have submitted that I love is, is it's simple, Mars. How can we help?
1:26Elon MuskLet's see. So in the short term, Mars is really about getting the spaceship built.
1:43Elon MuskWe're making good progress on, on the ship. And the booster codenamed bfr,
1:53Jonathan Nolanwhat does it stand for again?
1:55Elon MuskWell, it's a bit of a. It's like sort of a Rorschach test in acronym form, and it is very big.
2:10Elon MuskAnd I gave a presentation on this at the International Astronomical Congress in Australia last year, and that design is evolving rapidly. We're actually building that chip right now.
2:28Elon MuskI think right now the biggest thing that would be helpful is just general support and encouragement and good goodwill. I think once we build it, there will be. We'll have a sort of a point of proof, something that other companies and countries can then go and do.
2:55Elon MuskThey currently don't think it's possible. So if we show them that it is, then I think they will, they'll up their game and they will build interplanetary transport vehicles as well.
3:09Elon MuskNow, once that has been built and there is a. There is a means of getting cargo and people to and from Mars as well as to and from the moon, other places on the solar system, then I think that that's really where there's a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial resources that are needed because you've Got to build out the entire base of industry, everything that allows human civilization to exist.
3:37Elon MuskAnd it's going to be harder, a lot harder in a place like Mars or the Moon.
3:43Jonathan NolanWe need some volunteers to be colonists. Do we have any colonist volunteers here for Mars?
3:49Elon MuskActually not many hands raised, by the way.
3:55Elon MuskI mean, the moon of Mars often thought of as like, is this some escape, escape hatch for rich people? But I. It won't be that at all. It's in anyone who.
4:06Elon MuskFor the early people that go to go to Mars, it'll be far more dangerous. I mean really, it kind of reads like Shackleton's ad for Antarctic explorers. You know, it's like, difficult, dangerous, good chance you'll die.
4:26Elon MuskExcitement for those who survive, that kind of thing. And I think there's not many people who actually want to go in the beginning because all those things I said are true.
4:37Elon MuskBut there'll be some who will for whom the excitement of the frontier and exploration exceeds the concern of danger. And, and they will start off building the most elementary infrastructure.
4:49Elon MuskJust a base to create propellant, a power station,
5:00Elon MuskGlass domes in which to grow crops. All the sort of fundamentals without which you cannot survive. And then, and then really there's going to be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs.
5:26Jonathan NolanDefinitely pizza joints.
5:28Elon MuskI think Mars should really have great bars. The Mars Bar. Sorry. Look, I love dad jokes. I'm. Dad,
5:45Jonathan Nolanwhat do you think the timeline for this is?
5:49Elon MuskSo I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the timeline, although I can be a little. Sometimes my timelines are a little. You know, people have told me
6:04Audience Memberthat
6:05Elon Muskmy timelines historically have been optimistic. And so I'm trying to recalibrate to some degree here. But I can tell you what I know currently is the case, is that we are building the first ship, the first Mars or interplanetary ship right now.
6:27Elon MuskAnd I think we'll be able to do short flights, short sort of up and down flights probably sometime in the first half of next year. This is a very big booster in ship.
6:39Elon MuskThe liftoff thrust of this would be about twice that of a Saturn V. So it's capable of doing 150 metric tons to orbit and be fully reusable so that you.
6:55Elon MuskThe expendable payload is around double that number. So what's amazing about this ship, assuming we can make full and rapid reusability work, is that we can reduce the cost module cost per flight dramatically by orders of magnitude compared to where it is today.
7:19Elon MuskThis Question of reusability is so fundamental to rocketry. It is the, it is the fundamental, fundamental breakthrough that's needed. If you consider aircraft, for example, the. You can lease a 747 and do a return flight from bullet cargo from California to Australia for half a million dollars.
7:42Elon MuskThat's what it cost to lease a 747 fully round trip to Australia, which is far. To buy a single engine turboprop plane, a good one would be about one and a half million dollars, and that can't even reach Australia.
7:58Elon MuskAnd it's, and it's tiny compared to a 747. So what that means is like it costs less to take it to use a giant plane with huge cargo for a long trip than a.
8:14Elon MuskThat costs way less than buying a small plane for a short trip in the aircraft world. And the same actually is true of rocketry. A BFR flight will actually cost less than our Falcon 1 flight did back in the day.
8:33Elon MuskSo that was about a five or six million dollars marginal cost per flight. We were confident that BFR will be less than that. So that's profound. And that is what will enable the creation of a permanent base on the moon and a city on Mars.
8:50Elon MuskAnd that's the equivalent of like the Union Pacific Railroad or having ships that can cross oceans. Until you can get there, there's no way for all of the entrepreneurial energy to.
9:05Elon MuskYou can't do anything. There's no way for all the flowers to bloom. Once you can get there, the opportunity is immense. So we're going to do our best to get you there and then make sure that there's an environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish.
9:28Elon MuskAnd then I think it'll be amazing.
9:31Jonathan NolanA big part of that, and we've talked about this, is inspiring people to look again at this. You know, we were talking about this yesterday. It was our grandparents who went to the moon and we have not gone back since.
9:43Jonathan NolanYou know, in my lifetime, no one's gone to the moon. You and I were having a conversation last year about what to put in Falcon Heavy and, and kind of what's the cargo.
9:56Jonathan NolanAnd the idea was to use that as an opportunity to inspire people again. Carl Sagan had a beautiful thought many, many years ago that if you just get enough people to look at the Earth from a distance, that it would get them to focus on the problems here and on the possibilities of space exploration.
10:15Jonathan NolanI was fortunate enough to be with you at launch control when Falcon Heavy launched a few weeks back. And we made a little movie. We called it A trailer that sums up that experience.
10:26Jonathan NolanWe have it here. We thought we'd play it for you guys again. This is two minutes. That does a pretty good job of giving you the feeling of what it was like to be there when Falcon Heavy launched.
10:35Audience MemberYeah.
10:35Elon MuskReally wanted to get the public you. We wanted you to get excited about the possibility of something new happening in space, of the space frontier getting pushed forward. The goal of this was to inspire you and make you believe, again, just as people believed in the Apollo era, that anything's possible.
10:56Elon MuskThank you.
11:08Jonathan NolanThat picture at the end is a picture of one of the circuit boards inside the roadster. Right.
11:14Elon MuskWe try to confuse the aliens as well, much as possible. There's a. If you look carefully, there's also a little Hot Wheels version of the roadster with a tiny little astronaut in the Hot Wheels roadster on the dashboard.
11:32Elon MuskThat was just by a friend of ours called Nora's. Just that. And so if you guys have any suggestions, let us know.
11:43Jonathan NolanI think for me, watching those two boosters come down side by side felt like a transformative moment. It felt like a, oh, we can do anything. And that's the culmination.
11:54Jonathan NolanI was really struck there by the culmination of, you know, a singular vision and hundreds or thousands of very talented people working together to make sure everybody sitting in launch control and looking at the sheer amount of variables that you guys are clocking in those moments before the launch, wind speed at different altitudes and the status of all the different 27 engines.
12:15Jonathan NolanIn that, in that, I mean, how do you manage, how do you. You're very hands on with the details, but you're also looking at the bigger, bigger picture. How do you manage your time?
12:27Jonathan NolanHow do you, how do you, how do you parse, you know, how do you zoom in and zoom out and make sure that all these things are coming beginner.
12:36Elon MuskWell, at SpaceX, almost all my time is spent on engineering and design. It's probably 80, 90%. And then Gwynne Shotwell, who's president, chief operating officer, takes care of the business operations of the company, which is what allows me to do that.
12:52Elon MuskAnd yeah, I think in order to make the right decisions, you have to understand something. If you don't understand something at a detailed level, you cannot make a decision.
13:05Elon MuskSo. But I'd like to just put out like the, you know, what you saw there as a result of an incredible team at SpaceX. Super talented people who really work like crazy to make that happen.
13:21Elon MuskYou know, I think my role is to make sure that they have an environment where they can, they can really, where the talents can really come to the fore and, you know, and, but I can't tell you how honored and grateful I am to work with such a great team.
13:39Jonathan NolanEveryone in this room is inspired by you. Who are you inspired by?
13:44Elon MuskWell, Kanye west, obviously.
13:50Elon MuskSomething you say?
13:57Jonathan NolanMe too.
13:58Elon MuskFred Astaire. Fred Astaire would, you know, you should see my dance moves.
14:03Jonathan NolanWe, we may, we may see some dance moves.
14:04Elon MuskUnless I do love Fred Astaire. He's amazing. If you haven't watched his movies, they're amazing.
14:08Jonathan NolanYeah. I think for me, when I look at all of the things you've undertaken to do, the commonality is with Tesla, with SpaceX, SolarCity, now with the Boring Company, it feels like you're seeing a firmly established and mature industry that is ripe for sort of a quantum shift that's, there's, there's an opportunity there for, you know, in the case of cars, it's electrification, which drastically changes, you know, the complexity of an automobile and potentially down, down the line the expense of it.
14:59Jonathan NolanWith rockets, it's the reusability of it. With, with solar, it's about a firmly established energy system that's about to be massively disrupted. This is happening. And with the Boring Company, it's about looking at infrastructure projects which typically take decades and billions of dollars and looking to reduce the complexity of that.
15:19Jonathan NolanIs that how you, is that how you, you know, is that how you see the world? Do you see the things that don't work and can be made better?
15:27Elon MuskNo. I mean, I don't sort of like look at things and say, okay, what's the rank ordered business opportunity from a financial standpoint or anything like that? It's really just like there's some things that don't seem to be working that are important for the, for our life and for the future to be good.
15:57Elon MuskAnd I'd say that if,
16:03Elon MuskIf you wanted to say, like, where is the. If one were to do a risk adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put errors like basically building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list.
16:20Elon MuskThat they would have to be the dumbest things to do. Just because you look at the auto industry and in the US auto industry, the only two companies that haven't gone bankrupt, at least at some point are Tesla and Ford.
16:39Elon MuskEvery other company got bankrupt or was failing and got acquired. There's only two companies that haven't gone bankrupt and there's a big graveyard of companies that did. So you're going up against entrenched competitors.
16:52Elon MuskThere's no. I gave basically both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning a probability of less than 10% likely to succeed.
17:02Jonathan NolanSo why do it?
17:06Elon MuskWell, in the case of SpaceX, I just kept wondering why we were not making progress towards sending people to Mars, why we didn't have a base on the moon.
17:19Elon MuskWhere are the space hotels that were promised in 2001? The movie, it's like, you know, this just wasn't happening. Year after year, it was getting me down. I look at the NASA website, I was like, where does it say when we go to Mars?
17:37Elon MuskIt doesn't. So initially for SpaceX, for example, I thought, well, the genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company, but really how do we get NASA's budget to be bigger?
17:50Elon MuskThat was initially the goal. So I came up with this little small philanthropic mission which would be to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars. It's called Mars Oasis.
18:03Elon MuskAnd upon landing, the seeds would be a dehydrated nutrient gel, hydrated upon landing, and you have this little greenhouse. And then the money shot would be green plants against a red background.
18:16Elon MuskRecently learned that money shot has a meaning that I wasn't aware of, but.
18:26Elon MuskI think that would get people excited about rekindles the spirit of Apollo, essentially. And as I got more and more into what it would take to do that, I learned that the following fundamental issue is actually the cost of access to space.
18:41Elon MuskRockets were super expensive and the cost per pound a kilogram to orbit had actually gone up over the years, not down. And it was like, okay, well, it won't matter if we are able to do this philanthropic mission and it generates a lot of will to go to Mars.
19:01Elon MuskThat's not going to matter if there's no way. So after my second or third trip back from Russia, I was like, whoa, there's got to be a way to build rockets.
19:14Elon MuskThere's got to be a way to solve this rocket problem. I started reading a lot of books on rockets and did a sort of a first principles analysis of a rocket.
19:22Elon MuskJust broke down materials that are in a rocket. What would it cost to buy those materials versus the price of the rocket? And there's a gigantic difference between the raw material cost of the rocket and the finish cost of the rocket.
19:34Elon MuskSo there must be something wrong happening in going from the constituent atoms to the final shape. And I found that certainly to be true. And then why weren't people trying to make reusability work?
19:51Elon MuskIt was very difficult to make rocket reusability work. And then unfortunately, the Space Shuttle ended up being a counterexample of don't try to make reusability work, because Space Shuttle ended up costing more per flight than an expendable vehicle of equivalent capability.
20:07Elon MuskSo for a long time, people were using the Space Shuttle as an example of why reusability is dumb. You can't take a single case example and make an entire theory out of it.
20:17Elon MuskSo there's no question in my mind that if you could reuse the rocket's, it has to be true reuse, which means rapid and complete reuse. The problem with the Space Shuttle is only a portion of the system came back, like the big orange tank, which was also the primary airframe, was discarded every time.
20:37Elon MuskAnd the parts that were reused were incredibly difficult to refurbish. So the only kind of reuse that matters is if it's rapid and complete. The only thing you're changing between flights, apart from scheduled maintenance, is the propellant.
20:56Elon MuskSo we embarked upon that journey to create SpaceX in 2002. And in the beginning, I wouldn't actually, wouldn't even let my friends invest because I don't want to lose their money.
21:07Elon MuskI thought it was like, I'd rather lose my own money. So. And then we almost did die at SpaceX, actually. So I budgeted for three flights. I mean, technically I did have a plan where I had the money from PayPal, I had like about 180 million from PayPal and I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity and that should be fine.
21:41Elon MuskI'll have 90 million likes. That's lots, you know. But then what happened is things cost more and took longer than I thought. So I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are going to die.
21:57Elon MuskAnd so I ended up putting all the money in and borrowing money for rent from France. 2008 was brutal. Yeah, 2008, we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon rocket for SpaceX.
22:17Elon MuskTesla almost went bankrupt. We, we closed our financing round 6pm, Christmas Eve 2008. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would have gone bankrupt two days after Christmas otherwise.
22:31Elon MuskAnd I got divorced. That was like rough, man, Domino's clot issue there.
22:37Jonathan NolanIt poses a question, or maybe you just answer the question of why is no one else doing these things?
22:47Elon MuskWhat's your pain threshold? It's real high. So, Yeah, I mean, SpaceX is alive by the skin of its Teeth. So is Tesla. If things had just gone a little bit the other way, both companies would be dead.
23:06Elon MuskAnd one of the most difficult choices I've ever faced in Life was in 2008, I think I had maybe $30 million left or 30 or $40 million left. In 2008, I had two choices.
23:26Elon MuskI could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die or split it between the two companies. But if I split it between two companies, then both might die.
23:40Elon MuskAnd when you put your blood, sweat and tears into creating something or building something, it's like a child.
23:51Elon MuskIt's like, which one? Am I going to let one starve to death? I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I split the money between the two. Fortunately, thank goodness, they both came through.
24:03Jonathan NolanWe've got a question from the audience that builds on that. What was your biggest failure and how did it change you? What was your biggest failure and how did it change you?
24:14Elon MuskI have to really think hard about that failure. Never heard of it.
24:19Jonathan NolanThere's your answer.
24:23Elon MuskWell, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure.
24:29Elon MuskAs I said for SpaceX, the first three launches failed and we're just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch. That both launch had failed, we would have been dead.
24:45Elon MuskSo multiple failures along the way. I tried very hard to get the right Expertise in for SpaceX. I tried hard to find a great chief engineer for the rocket.
24:57Elon MuskBut the good chief engineers wouldn't join and the bad ones, well, there was no point in hiring them, so I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket. So if I could have found somebody better, then we would have made maybe had less than three failures.
25:15Jonathan NolanHow do you plan a business where, you know, the rocket business, you know, some of these things are going to blow up on the launch pad. How does the business plan work?
25:25Elon MuskI don't really have a business plan.
25:35Elon MuskYeah, I haven't had a business. I had a business plan way back in the zip two days. But these things are just always wrong. So I just didn't bother with business plans after that.
25:53Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think wishful thinking for sure is a source of many problems in many walks of life. Business or business or personal. Wishful thinking causes a lot of trouble.
26:14Elon MuskYou really have to ask whether something is true or not. Does it make sense? If it ever feels like too easy, it probably is, you know, the. Yeah, But for all the drama of SpaceX, I think Tesla's actually been probably 2/3 of my total drama dose over time.
26:45Elon MuskFred Tesla's drama magnet. It's crazy.
26:49Jonathan NolanHow do you. I mean a lot of people want to know, you know, you're managing three or four companies now, each of them trying to do something revolutionary, each of them challenging business that has historically been regarded as impossible to challenge or disrupt.
27:06Jonathan NolanHow do you prioritize? How do you prioritize between the different companies? How do you prioritize? How do you spend your time?
27:14Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. As you could probably for water. I've got a bit of a cold, so my voice is a bit hoarse.
27:27Elon MuskIn terms of time priority.
27:33Elon MuskFor business time, almost all of it is really dedicated to SpaceX and Tesla. It may sound like I've got a lot of different endeavors, but it's overwhelmingly SpaceX Tesla in terms of time allocation.
27:51Elon MuskSo it's. And then non business stuff. It's almost entirely kid stuff. My kids are here today. Actually brought them on to south by Southwest. Hope they're having a good time.
28:04Elon MuskThey went and saw the Westworld exhibit or it's just really amazing. If you haven't seen the Westworld, what do you call it? Exhibit or a. I don't know what you call it.
28:14Elon MuskI think you just call it Western at this point. Theme park. It's really incredibly well done. Took kids there yesterday, they had a great time. But yeah, I think probably one of the biggest misunderstandings is that I'm actually not an investor.
28:33Elon MuskSometimes people think I'm an investor or I invest in things. I don't actually don't invest in anything. In fact, the only public security that I own of any kind is Tesla.
28:43Elon MuskAnd then the Next biggest is SpaceX. And then the boring company kind of started it more as a joke because that would be a funny name for a company.
28:57Elon MuskYou know, we put the zero in bring. I mean it's sort of like that doesn't make any sense.
29:08Jonathan NolanBut when we talk. I remember when you first told me that you were thinking about tunnels.
29:14Elon MuskWhen did I first tell you about that?
29:16Jonathan NolanYears ago.
29:16Elon MuskOkay. It's like a long time ago.
29:18Jonathan NolanI thought you were joking.
29:20Elon MuskIt was. I was joking.
29:21Jonathan NolanBut
29:25Elon Muskit's not because of some epiphany that I had one day driving down the 405. That's how it gets translated somehow. I was talking about tunnels for years and years, for probably five years or four years at least.
29:40Elon MuskWhenever I'd give a talk and people would ask me about what opportunities do you see in the world? I'd say, tunnels. Can someone please build tunnels? So after Four or five years of begging people to build tunnels and still no tunnels.
29:55Elon MuskI was like, okay, I want to build a tunnel. Like, maybe I'm missing something here. So, yeah, so I was like, basically talking people's ears off of tunnels for several years and then said, well, let's find out what it takes to build a tunnel.
30:15Elon MuskAnd, yeah, so I started digging a tunnel. I wanted to start the tunnel from where I could see it from my office at SpaceX. So I said, well, let's just carve off a part of the parking lot across the road so I can see if anything's happening or not.
30:32Elon MuskAnd then we named our first boring machine Godot, because I kept waiting for it. It never came.
30:42Elon MuskFinally it did and we got it going, and now we're making good progress and we're funding the company for merchandise sales. So thank you for anyone who's bought our flamethrower.
31:01Elon MuskYou will not be sorry. Or maybe you will. It won't be boring.
31:09Jonathan NolanWe have a video, I think here of the latest video vision for the boring company in terms of how it planned. You know, the hopes.
31:16Elon MuskI didn't even know this. Great.
31:26Elon MuskWe've added seats.
32:02Jonathan NolanI think, you know, when we were first talking about the concept, you know, tunnels feel like a resolutely old school solution to a problem.
32:09Elon MuskI invented tunnels
32:13Jonathan Nolanand I was still holding out hope for the flying car. And then you asked me one simple question that answered the question for me about flying cars kind of forever, which was, would you want your neighbor to have a flying car?
32:24Elon MuskYes, exactly. This is exactly the question. Oh, you want a flying car? How about everyone around you has a flying car, too? Oh, that doesn't sound so good.
32:34Jonathan NolanYeah, and I think one of the interesting things about tunneling is it's one of these things that, you know, there's not a lot of market competition there. It's not a.
32:41Jonathan NolanYou know, it's something that's ripe for change. So how do you. I remember you talked about the philosophy with Godot was to just keep running it, basically until you figured out why it can't run any faster.
32:54Elon MuskYeah. So, I mean, the boring company, to be clear, it's like literally 2% of my time. It's probably 20% of my tweets, but tweets do not correlate to actual time spent.
33:16Elon MuskI mean, I sort of just have fun with the boring company, but my time allocation is about, literally about 2%.
33:24Jonathan NolanTalk about your time allocation. I think one of the things you spend an awful lot of time thinking about I know is artificial intelligence. It's something that you and I have as a shared interest and it's something that our audience is interested in as well.
33:39Jonathan NolanThe question here is a lot of experts in AI don't share the same level of concern that you do about the dangers.
33:48Elon MuskFamous last words.
33:50Jonathan NolanWhat specifically do you believe that they don't?
33:58Elon MuskWell, the biggest issue I see with so called AI experts is that they, they think they know more than they do and they think they're smarter than they actually are.
34:08Elon MuskIn general, we are all much smarter than we think we are, but much less smart, dumber than we think we are by a lot.
34:17Audience MemberSo.
34:22Elon MuskThis tends to plague smart people. They just can't. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don't like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them.
34:32Elon MuskSo they discount the idea, which is fundamentally flawed. That's the wishful thinking situation. I'm really quite close to, very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me.
34:50Elon MuskIt's capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows. And the rate of improvement is exponential. You can see this in things like AlphaGo, which went from, in the span of maybe six to nine months, it went from being unable to beat even a reasonably good GO player, to then beating the European world champion who was ranked 600, then beating Lisa Dole 4, 5, who had been world champion for many years, then beating the current world champion, then beating everyone while playing simultaneously.
35:22Elon MuskThen there was AlphaZero, which crushed AlphaGo 100 to 0. And AlphaZero just learned by playing itself. And it can play basically any game that you put the rules in for whatever rules you give.
35:38Elon MuskIt literally read the rules, play the game and be superhuman for any game. Nobody expected that greater improvement. If you ask those same experts who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying, I think you will find that their predictions for things like GO and other AI advancements have their batting average is quite weak, not good.
36:06Elon MuskWe'll see this also with self driving, I think probably by end of next year, self driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100 to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year.
36:29Elon MuskWe're talking maybe 18 months from now. NHTSA did a study on, on Tesla's autopilot version one, which is relatively primitive, and found that it was a 45% reduction in highway accidents.
36:44Elon MuskAnd that's despite autopilot one being just version one. Version two, I think will be at least two or three times better. That's the current version that's running right now.
36:56Elon MuskSo the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital superintelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity.
37:07Elon MuskI think that's the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.
37:13Jonathan NolanAnd how do we do that? If we take it that it's inevitable at this point that some version of AI is coming down the line, how do we steer through that?
37:24Audience MemberWell,
37:26Elon MuskI'm not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight. I mean, I think one should generally go on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public.
37:39Elon MuskAnd therefore there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight on to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot.
38:03Elon MuskAnd nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane. And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.
38:16Audience MemberFar.
38:17Elon MuskSo why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.
38:22Jonathan NolanWhat's a question you've been asking for a long time? I think it's a question that's come to the forefront over the last year where you begin to realize that it doesn't necessarily.
38:28Jonathan NolanI think if we, we've all been focused in on the idea of artificial superintelligence, right, which is clearly a danger, but maybe, you know, a little further out. What's happened over the last year is you've seen artificial calling, artificial stupidity, talking about, you know, algorithmic manipulation of social media.
38:45Jonathan NolanLike we're in it now. It's starting, it's starting to happen. How do we, how do we. Is it. What's the intervention? At this point,
39:00Elon MuskI'm not really all that worried about the short term stuff, things that are like narrow. AI is not a speed, species level risk. It will result in dislocation in lost jobs and, you know, sort of better weaponry and that kind of thing.
39:20Elon MuskBut it is not a fundamental species level risk, whereas digital superintelligence is. So it's really all about laying the groundwork to make sure that if, if humanity collectively decides that creating digital superintelligence is the right move, then we should do so very, very carefully.
39:46Elon MuskVery, very carefully. This is the most important thing that we could possibly do.
39:59Jonathan NolanBuilding on that, other than AI and the other issues that you're tackling Transportation, energy production, aerospace. What issues should our next generation of leaders be focused on solving? What else is coming down the line?
40:20Elon MuskWell, there are other things that are on a longer time scale.
40:28Elon MuskAnd obviously the things that I believe in, like extending life beyond Earth, making life multi planetary. I'm a big believer in sort of Asimov's foundation series or the principle that you really want to.
40:44Elon MuskI recommend reading the foundation series, but it's like if you, if you know that there's likely to be. We don't know, but there's likely to be another dark ages, which it seems my guess is there probably will be at some point.
40:59Elon MuskI'm not predicting that we're about to enter dark ages, but that there's some probability that we will. Particularly if there's a third world war. Then we want to make sure that there's enough of us of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to, to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of the dock ages.
41:24Elon MuskI think that's why it's important to get a self sustaining base, ideally on Mars, because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive.
41:38Elon MuskIt's more likely to survive than a moon base. But I think a moon base and a Mars base that could help regenerate life back here on Earth would be really important and to get that done before a possible World War iii.
41:55Elon MuskYou know, last century we had two massive world wars, three if you count the Cold War. I think it's unlikely that we will never have another world war again.
42:06Elon MuskIt probably will be at some point
42:07Jonathan Nolanor if we have another one, it'll be the last.
42:10Elon MuskYeah, it just could be radioactive rubble. So again, I'm not predicting this. Seems like. Well, if you say given enough time, will it be most likely? Given enough time.
42:24Elon MuskThis has been our pattern in the past. So like I really believe in the 0th law of Asimov, 0 flaw. Take the set of actions most likely to support humanity in the future.
42:43Elon MuskBut I think sustainable energy is also obviously really important as tautological. If it's not sustainable, it's unsustainable.
42:51Jonathan NolanHow close are we to solving that problem?
42:53Elon MuskWell, I think that the core technologies are there with the wind, solar, with batteries. The fundamental problem is that there's an unpriced externality in the cost of CO2. The market economics works very well if things are priced correctly.
43:17Elon MuskBut when things are not priced correctly and something that has a real cost, has zero cost, then that's where you get distortions in the market that inhibit the progress of other technologies.
43:32Elon MuskSo essentially anything that produces carbon, it puts carbon into the atmosphere, which includes rockets, by the way. So I'm not excluding rockets from this. It has to be a price and that you can start off with a low price, but then that, and then depending upon whether that price has any effect on the pots per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, you can adjust that price up or down.
43:59Elon MuskBut in the absence of a price, we sort of pretend that digging trillions of tons of fossil fuels from deep under the earth and putting it into the atmosphere, we're pretending that has no probability of a bad outcome.
44:16Elon MuskThe entire scientific community is saying, obviously it's going to have a bad outcome. Obviously you're changing the chemical constituency of the atmosphere.
44:32Elon MuskSo it's really up to people and governments to put a price on carbon and then automatically the right thing happens. Really straightforward.
44:46Jonathan NolanWhat do we do with the carbon that's already up there?
44:49Elon MuskI actually think we can manage with the current carbon level or even a little bit higher.
44:57Elon MuskAnd this is going to sound like I'm backtracking, but there's actually an argument that more carbon in the atmosphere is actually good, but up to a point. So we might actually arguably have been a little carbon starved.
45:18Elon MuskIf you go back 200 years ago and say, okay, a few hundred years ago, we had like 280, 290 parts per million of carbon, we're probably a little carbon starved now.
45:29Elon MuskWe're about 400, just past 400 mark. I think somewhere in the 400s, probably. Okay. We don't have to worry about sequestering carbon or anything like that. Now. If this momentum keeps going and we start going up to 600, 800, 1000, 1500, that's where things get really squirrely.
45:52Elon MuskAnd the sheer momentum of the world's energy infrastructure is leading us in that direction.
46:03Elon MuskSo it's just very important that the public and the government's push to ensure the correct price of carbon is paid.
46:15Elon MuskSo that will be the thing that matters.
46:22Jonathan NolanYeah, our audience is very interested in knowing how many hours of sleep you got last night.
46:28Elon MuskI don't know, about six, five or six. I think five.
46:32Jonathan NolanI feel like we know part of the answer to this because you were trapped in WESTP for a while, but. But how? I mean, on a regular day for you.
46:41Jonathan NolanAre you, are you, are you sleeping? You're not sleeping a lot, right?
46:44Elon MuskWell, geez, do I look that bad?
46:47Jonathan NolanYou look great. But we just imagine with the amount of responsibilities, with the amount of, you know, with what you've got going on. Do these problems still keep you up at night or do you think we're on our way to solving?
47:00Elon MuskWell, right now the only things that are really stressing me out in a big way are AI, obviously that's like always there and, and working really hard on Tesla Model 3 production.
47:11Elon MuskAnd we're making good progress. But it's hugely hard work. But those are the two most stressful things, things in my life right now. Yeah.
47:21Jonathan NolanOur audience really wants to know,
47:25Audience Memberwhat
47:26Jonathan Nolando you hope the world will look like for children born today when they're your age? What do you hope for the world to look like? What's the best case scenario?
47:34Jonathan NolanSay we solve these problems. What's that world look like?
47:42Elon MuskLet's see. I think a good picture would look like we've really substantially transferred to sustainable generation and consumption of electricity so that the CO2 risk and the ocean rising risk is mitigated.
48:01Elon MuskAnd we're not looking at like, you know, having Florida and sort of large portions of the world underwater. That'd be great. That not. But to have addressed that risk, that'd be enormous for us to have a base on the moon, base on Mars, to be out there exploring the solar system, start building industry on essentially having human civilization go out there and have it be such that anyone can go to the moon on Mars or out to the solar system if they want, making it really affordable.
48:37Elon MuskI do think it's important that there's competition, that there are multiple companies doing this, not just SpaceX, and that AI risk is, I guess it's the sort of a benign AI, and that we're able to achieve a symbiosis with that AI, Ideally the AI.
48:58Elon MuskThere's somebody who, I can't remember his name, but had a good suggestion for what the optimization of the AI should be. What's its utility function? You have to be careful about this because you say maximize happiness and the AI concludes that happiness is a function of dopamine and serotonin.
49:16Elon MuskSo it captures all humans, injects your brain with logical amounts of dopamine and serotonin. Like. Okay, it's not what we meant.
49:24Jonathan NolanIt sounds pretty good though.
49:25Elon MuskOh, you'll love it. I like the definition of like. The AI should try to maximize the freedom of action of humanity. Maximize the freedom of action, Maximize freedom, essentially.
49:45Elon MuskI like that definition. But we do want a close coupling between collective human intelligence and digital intelligence.
49:57Elon MuskNeuralink is trying to help in that regard by creating an interface between a high bandwidth interface between AI and human brain. We're already a cyborg in the sense that your phone and your computer are kind of an extension of you.
50:19Jonathan NolanJust low bandwidth input output.
50:21Elon MuskExactly. It's just low bandwidth, particularly output. I mean, two thumbs, basically.
50:29Jonathan NolanSo how do we solve that problem?
50:34Elon MuskThe, the bandw bandwidth thing?
50:36Jonathan NolanIt's a bandwidth issue. I mean we've all, we've all succumbed to it now. We're all, we're all cyborgs. We're just low efficiency cyborgs. So how do we, how do we make it better?
50:46Elon MuskI think we've got to build a. We've got to build an interface. Like we didn't evolve to have a communications jack, you know, or some. So there's going to be essentially vast numbers of tiny electrodes that are able to read write from your brain.
51:08Elon MuskOf course, you know, security is pretty important the situation, to say the least.
51:13Jonathan NolanI was going to say I'm not coming with. I'm keeping my brain air gapped.
51:16Elon MuskYeah, well, I think a lot of people will choose to do that. But it's a bit like in Banks's neural lace, but not. But in the case of neural.
51:28Elon MuskIt's sort of that, that's there from when you're born. Or it's sort of. It's not a. It's more of a backup.
51:33Jonathan NolanSorry, it's a backup.
51:34Elon MuskYeah, kind of a backup. This would be. There's a digital extension of you that is an AI, the AI extension of you, a tertiary layer of intelligence. So you've got your limbic system, your cortex and the tertiary layer, which is a digital AI extension of you.
51:53Elon MuskAnd that high bandwidth connection is what achieves a tight symbiosis. I think that's the best outcome. I hope so. If anybody's got better ideas, I'd love to hear it.
52:08Jonathan NolanTalk about another project that you're working on that our audience wants to know a little bit more about. Starlink.
52:14Elon MuskOh, can you tell us anything? Do you mean Skynet?
52:23Jonathan NolanHopefully not Skynet.
52:26Elon MuskIt's Internet in the sky.
52:34Elon MuskWell, we don't talk that much about Starlink, but essentially it's intended to provide low latency, high bandwidth Internet connectivity throughout the world. There actually will not be enough cognitive processing power onboard the satellite system to in any way be a Skynet thing.
52:55Elon MuskLike it's digital AI requires a lot of super intelligence, requires a lot of big servers on the ground. It's too power intensive. But this is intended to be to provide people with.
53:08Elon MuskWho don't have any Internet connectivity. With Internet connectivity. And it's very Good for spas and sparsely populated and moderate, moderately sparsely populated areas and for giving people in cities a choice of low cost, choice of Internet access.
53:25Elon MuskBut I do think it's going to be important, the Starlink system will be important in providing the funding necessary for SpaceX to develop interplanetary spacecraft and at the same time helping people who have either no or super expensive connectivity and giving people in urban areas more of a competitive choice.
53:47Jonathan NolanVery cool. I have to ask it because it's the number one question, just going back to Mars, what kind of government do you envision for the first Martian colony?
54:04Jonathan NolanAnd what's your title?
54:05Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. Emperor or God? Emperor. I don't know, might be too much. I don't know if you've watched my jokes here. Not everyone gets irony, you know, Must remember.
54:24Elon MuskSo I think the, I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where you vote on issues, where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government.
54:41Elon MuskWhen the United States was formed, representative government was the only thing that was logistically feasible because it was no way for people to communicate instantly. A lot of people didn't even have really access to mailboxes or there wasn't even really.
54:56Elon MuskThe post office was very primitive. A lot of people couldn't write. So you had to have some form of representative democracy or things just wouldn't work at all. But I think most likely it's going to be people.
55:09Elon MuskEveryone votes on every issue and that's how it goes. There are a few things I'd recommend, which is keep laws short, long laws. It's like that's something suspicious is going on if there's a long law, you know, if the size of law exceeds the word count of Lord of the Rings, which it does amazingly, then it's like something's wrong.
55:37Elon MuskSo there should be a limit to the size of the law that you should be able to digest it. Like how come you can read the Constitution and all of the amendments, like you can read those in maybe an hour.
55:51Elon MuskAnd we govern so much of our civilization by that. And yet modern law is this obtuse, super boring tome that's indecipherable to almost anyone. So I think direct democracy, laws that are comprehensible, I think having some kind of hysteresis on, like it should be easier to remove a law than create one because things just get to inertia.
56:21Elon MuskYou have to have something that's going to overcome inertia. So probably, I don't know what the right number would be, Maybe it's like 60, 40. Maybe it requires 60% to get a law in place.
56:29Elon MuskBut any number above 40% can remove a law. Otherwise you just get. Laws just accumulate over time. Accumulate over time. And it's sort of like Gulliver, where you just get trapped by all these tiny strings and you can't move.
56:44Elon MuskYou get hardening of the arteries of civilization with rules and rules and rules, rules, rules. So it should be just easier to get rid of rule than to put one in.
56:54Elon MuskMaybe they should even have like some kind of sunset clause so that they just automatically expire unless there's enough of an impetus to keep them around.
57:06Jonathan NolanI know there's a fair amount of interest. I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about the very early days with Tesla and how it came together. Your brother Kimball is here.
57:17Jonathan NolanThought we'd bring him out, you guys could talk a little bit about it.
57:29Audience MemberYou guys might get lucky tonight.
57:32Jonathan NolanI notice you have a guitar. I'm going to ignore that.
57:38Elon MuskWe got hats, we've got a guitar.
57:40Jonathan NolanI guess there are a fair number of entrepreneurs here today and a fair number of people interested looking at Tesla, which now. Extraordinary, extraordinary success of it. You know, how did this come together when you guys were looking at.
57:54Jonathan NolanI know, famously, you know, you guys were. You were looking at problems you could solve. What does conversations look like?
58:05Elon MuskYeah, so the. Let's see. So I'm talking. Kimmel, thanks for coming on. About the things that I thought would be most important to work on for a long time, all the way back to college days and electric cars are something I've been interested in since I was 18, 19.
58:29Elon MuskWhen do you first recall hearing me talk about electric cars?
58:33Audience MemberFirst time was. Well, you talked about in the 90s a lot. We, we used to brainstorm a lot randomly, even in, I think we were 20, 20 years old.
58:42Audience MemberAnd the first thing I remember us brainstorming was solving connectivity amongst doctors. And we were on a road trip from long time ago. We had a lot of doctors in the family, so we had information, but the idea was really to solve that problem where we.
58:58Audience MemberFrom Silicon Valley to Philadelphia, brainstorming how you do it. This is before the Internet, so we, you know, in our minds, designing network computers, doctors talking. This has all happened, of course, over 25 years, but it's one of.
59:08Audience MemberThat's sort of the first time I remember us really trying to solve a world problem. And unless it was a world problem that was really important, it just wasn't that interesting to US electric cars you talked about for a long time.
59:20Audience MemberBut I remember walking into your house once at point some in probably 2002 or 2003, and you had these plans laid out that the team at Tesla had or the earlier guys had basically said, you know, we're going to take this Lotus lease, we're going to convert it into an electric car.
59:37Audience MemberAnd yeah, we sat down and talked about it for a bit and it wasn't so much that it could be done. I think we all believed it could be done.
59:44Audience MemberIt was more just the attitude that it should be done and that it went from there.
59:51Elon MuskYeah, well, the first internships that I had that were interesting were on ultracapacitors for use in electric cars. So that's why I first came out to Silicon valley in like 93 or 92 or something like that was to work at a company called Pinnacle Research on advanced ultracapacitors with the idea that this could be a solution to the energy storage problem.
1:00:15Elon MuskElectric vehicles. And then when I graduated from Penn, I was going to be doing a PhD at Stanford in material science and physics, trying to figure out if there's a way to solve for an ultra high density solid state capacitor that would have enough range to powered electric vehicle.
1:00:42Elon MuskSo.
1:00:48Elon MuskThat's a 95. And then I wasn't sure. This is one of those things where you could work on it for a long time and discover that there's actually no good solution.
1:00:58Elon MuskYou publish a paper and you get a PhD in all that, but it would be academic in its value. So in 95 I had a choice of either work on this energy storage system for electric vehicles or try to play a role in building the Internet.
1:01:20Elon MuskBut the Internet stuff was happening right then and there, whereas the electric vehicle technology was going to progress slowly on its own, whether I was there or not. So I thought, well, I'll put the grad studies on hold and do something to help build the Internet or do something useful on the Internet.
1:01:40Elon MuskAnd that's when I talked to Kimball and you were working in Canada at the time and said, hey, why don't we try to do this company in Silicon Valley?
1:01:52Elon MuskIt's pretty cool.
1:01:53Audience MemberWe built the. We were the first to see maps in door to door direction. Built by a company, NavTech, but never been on the Internet. And it was so cool to be the first two humans to see it.
1:02:05Audience MemberYou can draw a map, type in an address, get directions, things you probably all did about 50 times today each. And we were the first to see that. And Put it on the Internet.
1:02:14Audience MemberSo it was really cool.
1:02:17Elon MuskIt was the first maps and directions, yellow pages and white pages on the Internet.
1:02:23Audience MemberSo.
1:02:24Elon MuskAnd then we ended up helping bring a lot of publications online, so as investors and customers, the New York Times company, Knight, Ridder, Hearst, and a number of others.
1:02:35Elon MuskAnd yeah, but I always wanted to get back to electric vehicles because that was a primary interest of mine from undergrad and grad days. And. And so after Zip2, still took one more Internet company because I thought Zip2 had not achieved its full potential.
1:03:00Elon MuskWe built this incredible technology, but it wasn't being used by the customers in the right way. It was a bit like building F22 fighter jets, and then you sell them to people and they roll them down the hill at each other.
1:03:14Elon MuskLike, that's really not the way to use it. Okay. That's where I decided you really want to go to the end consumer. If you've got great technology, you want to go all the way to the end consumer.
1:03:27Elon MuskDon't tell it to some bonehead legacy company that doesn't understand how to use it. So, yeah, so with Exacom, which became PayPal, that's where we tried to do something significant with the Internet.
1:03:52Elon MuskAnd it got sort of part of the way towards its objective. After PayPal went public and it got bought by eBay in 2002, that actually freed up me and a bunch of other people to go and create companies.
1:04:10Elon MuskAnd I started debating between either solar, electric car, or space. I thought space was like the least likely to have somebody, at least likely to attract entrepreneurial talent. I thought, nobody is going to be crazy enough to do space, so I better do space.
1:04:34Elon MuskSo I started off with space first,
1:04:40Elon MuskAnd then about a year and a half later in 2003, I had lunch with JB Straubel and Harold Rosen, and it was at this fish restaurant in El Segundo.
1:04:52Elon MuskAnd Hal Rosen had been involved in space and electric vehicles. And JB was just graduated from college. I was working with him. And the conversation turned to electric vehicles because Harold had done something called Rosen Motors, which was like an attempted EV startup.
1:05:14Elon MuskAnd I said, well, I've always been super interested in electric vehicles. I was going to do my PhD on advanced energy storage.
1:05:26Elon MuskI was going to do grad studies on advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles. And so JV said, well, have you heard of this company called AC Propulsion? Because they had created the T0 electric sports car as a prototype.
1:05:45Elon MuskI was like, wow, that's great. Lithium ion batteries had really achieved a level of energy density that for the first time could allow you to have significant range in an electric car.
1:05:57Elon MuskAnd they had a sports car that had 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds, a 250 mile range, and it was pretty cool. Now it was just made of.
1:06:06Elon MuskIt was just a kit car, so it didn't have a roof or airbags or thermal control system. And it was extremely unreliable. It wasn't productized, but it was a proof of concept.
1:06:19Elon MuskSo I got the test drive from AC repulsion and I was like, wow, you guys should really commercialize this. This would show people what electric cars can do. And I tried for months to get AC Propulsion to go into production with the T0.
1:06:35Elon MuskAnd like, they just were not interested in doing that. Amazingly, they wanted to do an electric Scion, you know, like that boxy car. But the problem is, like, the electric Scion would cost $70,000 or you could build a sports car for $100,000.
1:06:55Elon MuskOkay, but like, nobody's going to buy the electric Scion, but people might buy the electric sports car. So after hounding them for months, I finally said, like, look, if you guys are not going to commercialize the T0, would you mind if I did that?
1:07:14Elon MuskThey said, no, no problem, go ahead. It's like, great, so I'm going to do that with jv. And they said, but if you're. They said, if you're going to,
1:07:22Audience Memberif
1:07:22Elon Muskyou're going to go and try to prioritize T0, there's some other teams you should talk to that are also interested in doing that. So that's where Mark Topping and Ian Wright came in.
1:07:36Elon MuskAnd I think that was probably the biggest mistake of my career, quite frankly.
1:07:47Elon MuskI think whenever you think you can have your cake and eat it too, that's something you're probably wrong. So I thought, I can keep running SpaceX, I'll dedicate 20% of my time to Tesla and that'll be fine.
1:08:04Elon MuskBut actually it didn't. Things really melted down, went through hell. We had to recapitalize the company. Kim was there seeing it in real time.
1:08:18Jonathan NolanSo Silicon Valley, accurate or not accurate?
1:08:22Elon MuskThe show, yeah, it starts to get very accurate around episode four. So it took a few episodes to kind of get grounded. The first few episodes struck me as Hollywood making fun of Hollywood's idea of Silicon Valley, which is like not, you know, not on point.
1:08:42Elon MuskBut then by about the fourth or fifth episode, season one, it really starts to get good. And then by season two, it's amazing. In fact, reality, the truth is stranger than Fiction.
1:08:55Elon MuskAll the crazy stuff you see in that show, Silicon Valley. The reality is way crazier than that. Yeah. You've seen it too, right? Yeah. It's like, wow.
1:09:04Audience MemberWhat?
1:09:05Jonathan NolanWill have to be a story for another time. Unfortunately, as we've been asked to wrap it up, I got one last question from the audience. It is. What is your favorite song from the movie Three Amigos?
1:09:16Audience MemberWell, we only do it if you guys are willing to sing along.
1:09:21Elon MuskOkay.
1:09:23Audience MemberSo Jonah actually is the dancer of the three
1:09:29Elon Muskbehind the camera.
1:09:29Audience MemberThree of us have been. We've been playing and singing and dancing this song since we were kids. And so we're going to do that on stage. And if you guys can sing along, we'll do the first verse, and then you guys can sing along on the second verse.
1:09:43Elon MuskOkay. This is gonna be real bad.
1:09:47Audience MemberWe promised that it would be terrible.
1:09:49Elon MuskYeah, exactly. I said terrible. It's gonna be terrible.
1:09:53Jonathan NolanI'm nixing the dancing thing.
1:09:54Audience MemberOh,
1:10:11Elon MuskThis is gonna hurt.
1:10:26Elon MuskCome with me.
1:10:27Audience MemberWhen moonbirds hits the sky
1:10:33Elon MuskThen you walk with me along the.
1:10:38Audience MemberOkay, all together now.
1:10:41Elon MuskMy little buttercup.
1:10:51Elon MuskMy little buttercup where do you stay a while? Won't you stay a while?
1:11:01Elon MuskThe sky and you and I will walk the by on by our by well, this is really winning.
1:11:25Audience MemberThank you.