Elon Musk at the World Energy Innovation Forum
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:01InterviewerIt's beyond extraordinary to see what Elon's accomplished already. I know there is so much more to come from him as he continues to re engineer our way of life on this planet, or should I say in this universe.
0:13InterviewerLadies and gentlemen, please welcome me joining Elon Musk.
0:30InterviewerFirst of all, as I said morning. Thanks for allowing us into your home and particularly in such a busy time. Our goal for this next period of discussion is really find out a bit more about where you came from, how you actually developed the person you came into, to learn about some of the ups and downs in Tesla and its energy autonomous vehicle aspects and then beyond that, trying to figure out your thoughts on where the world's going prognostication.
0:59InterviewerSo you've been called a lot of things. You've been called a visionary, an innovator, the real iron man. And I love the world's raddest man.
1:10Elon MuskLess flattering sometimes.
1:12InterviewerTake us back to your early childhood. How did you develop South Africa and college in the US and Canada to having this just bold and big ambition. What were some of the particularly influential moments or people?
1:28Elon MuskActually, I still didn't expect to be doing this when I was. I'll try to talk loudly since we've got a factory background, I still didn't expect that any of this would happen.
1:39Elon MuskWhen I was growing up in South Africa, I mostly just read a lot of comics, played video games, programmed computers,
1:46Interviewercreated a video game. Young man.
1:47Elon MuskYeah. Wrote a different. Wrote some games and sold them so I could get better computers and yeah, sort of built rockets and did some circuitry, built radios and that kind of thing.
2:04Elon MuskBut yeah, I just wanted to be involved the cutting edge of technology. And it looked that whenever there's something new that's invented, it's very often in Silicon Valley. So when I was a kid, I knew I wanted to ultimately end up here and be at the forefront of trying to create technologies that make the world better.
2:26InterviewerWell, a lot of people don't know this, but actually when you started your first company, you and Kimball actually slept at the company, actually used it as house and business.
2:34InterviewerIn those early days, a true entrepreneur,
2:37Elon Muskwe only had a. Between us, I think I had like $2,000 and people had like $5,000. So we had to make it last a long time. That was like our total capital.
2:49Elon MuskAnd it was cheaper to just sleep in the office than rent an apartment. So we just slept in the office and went to the HR for YMCA on page you all in Alcomints.
3:07InterviewerSo after that success, he went on to another success with pay and sold the company to ebay for about a billion and a half dollars. Pocketed about $165 million.
3:17InterviewerAnd for a lot of people the beach would have been attractive. But instead you decided to tackle the world's most pressing challenges. How did that unfold? How did you decide to go into energy space?
3:31Elon MuskYeah, so actually it kind of goes back to when I was in college. There were one of the things that would most affect the future of humanity. So can we like five things.
3:45Elon MuskOne was sustainable energy, both production and consumption and the other was making life multi planetary. Then there's the Internet of course. And then the other two items were rewriting human genetics and AI.
4:03Elon MuskAnd I wasn't too sure about the latter two. Sort of a double edged sword where it's not clear which ed where the positive edge get a bit of feedback.
4:14Elon MuskIt wasn't clear if the positive edge or the negative edge is stronger. So. And I was originally going to start off working on the electric vehicle problem. That's what brought me out to Silicon Valley.
4:28Elon MuskI was going to go to Stanford and do PhD in Applied Physics and material science to try to figure out advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles. And then ended up starting to put that on hold to try to do something on the Internet because I figured the Internet was, you know, it was really, the time was right for the Internet.
4:53Elon MuskIt was like 95. I knew it would be something really transformative and I didn't want to watch that happen while I was in grad school. Right. I figured I could always go back somewhere.
5:03Elon MuskWent out to permit at Stanford and I think I'm still on the permit, actually said I'd come back and I don't have to pay tuition.
5:10InterviewerThere's a lot of Stanford culture. Maybe we can figure out a way to get you back in at some point.
5:14Elon MuskYeah. So anyway, so kind of took a break from pursuing the electric vehicle thing to do a couple of Internet companies that you mentioned. And then after PayPal decided to return to working on the electric vehicle problem.
5:37Elon MuskPhotovoltaics and space exploration. Right. And yeah, so you know, and didn't sort of really plan on being CEO of two companies, but it kind of worked out that way.
5:57Elon MuskIt is, I have to say, quite a difficult thing. I wouldn't recommend it.
6:05InterviewerWell, you know, people always ask me to describe you what kind of characteristics I observe and you just touched on perhaps the one that I always lead with, which is you are the hardest working person I know.
6:15InterviewerThat's been true from the day I met you and all the way through today, Elon sleeps less than anyone I know and works harder than anyone I know. And when you think about this hasn't just happened, you have just, you have literally put your blood, sweat and tears and that's not in the rearview mirror, that's today.
6:35Elon MuskYeah, I mean I think sort of my obligations kind of require putting in a huge amount of time. I mean I would like to reduce it by a little bit, maybe 20%.
6:49Elon MuskSo but like if you say like a 90 hour week, that's only 45 hours before SpaceX and Tesla, it's not that much really on a per company basis so but it ends up being quite a life on a personal basis and I mean I think they're both quite hard.
7:12Elon MuskI'm just like the thing about the car industry, the only two American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt are Ford and Tesla. So the net it's a car company, is sort of furthest thing from a natural monopoly.
7:31InterviewerYeah, well you know, it's interesting, it's not just that when you started getting involved in Tesla, it was just at the beginning of people saying hybrid electric cars were actually going to be the wave of the future.
7:42InterviewerSo in so many ways you know what seems so obvious today wasn't at all in areas of all three of the companies you're involved with today. And in Tesla's case, clearly people weren't championing electric cars.
7:53InterviewerBut you saw that.
7:54Elon MuskYeah, I think probably at the company at annual meeting will go through just recap the history of Tesla and how we started out and what led from one thing to the next because I think a lot of this stuff just needs to get lasted time.
8:15Elon MuskThe genesis for Tesla was actually a lunch in 2003 with me and J.B. straubel, right. One of the co founders and essentially we were talking about electric planes and space stuff and then, and then composition turned to electric vehicles.
8:37Elon MuskAs I mentioned, that was like 1, 2 interest of mine and it was what I was going to be working on at Stanford. And the JB had also worked on electricity vehicles and he mentioned like a little company in Southern California called AC propulsion which created a T0 which is like a prototype sports car.
8:59Elon MuskAnd so I got a custom test driving the T0 and then I tried to convince AC Propulsion to commercialize the T0 because it was a cool concept but it like didn't have a roof or any safety systems or anything quite primitive but it showed the basic fundamentals of what electric force car could do.
9:19Elon MuskSo they deserve a lot of credit, actually, for Tesla. Like without AC propulsion, I'm not sure. I mean, Tesla might have been started, but it would have been later.
9:30Elon MuskAnd then after AC propulsion, I couldn't convince them to commercialize the C0. They were so interested in making sort of prototypes. I said, well, okay, well, if you're not going to do that, then I'd like to do it.
9:44Elon MuskAnd they said, well, okay, well, there's some other people that also want to do it, so maybe you want to join up with them. And so we created Tesla.
9:56Elon MuskAnd I mean, interesting sort of little factoid. Like in the beginning, we didn't actually own the trademark Tesla Motors. It was owned by some dude in Sacramento. So we were like, okay, we're going to have to change the company name because we don't own the trademark.
10:15Elon MuskAnd we batted around various names and one of the names was actually Faraday. Like that. Faraday would have been my sort of second choice. Now, ironically, there's a competitor company called Faraday, and Faraday was the guy that invented the motor.
10:30Elon MuskAnd then Tesla invented the AC induction motor, which is the type of motor we use. And the monitoring. I'm starting by the roadster.
10:38InterviewerYou know, people don't often talk about the history of Tesla. People don't talk about it a lot today, but actually we started out as fellow board members and investors together, and we were actually the fourth CEO of Tesla.
10:50InterviewerAnd we talked about some of the hard work. Those early days were ones that actually you probably put as much work in those days to transition. Finally decided to take it over.
11:01Elon MuskYeah, yeah. My initial goal when we created Tesla was I was just going to be kind of working on the product design engineer, and I figured I would allocate 20% of my time to Tesla.
11:18Elon MuskAnd then sort of tried a succession of CEOs that didn't work out. And. And then I was like, well, either in 2008, I was faced with a choice of either Tesla's going to go bankrupt or I put all of my remaining capital in Tesla and more.
11:39Elon MuskYeah. Borrowing money from friends and such. So at that point I was like, man, I got like my ships on the table. So I met her. If you got all the chips on the table, you've got to play the hand yourself.
11:56Elon MuskOkay, I got a vcu.
11:57InterviewerSo you've come a long way since that time. When you talk. When I think about some of the hallmarks of your success, a lot of things come to mind.
12:05InterviewerYou're someone who's, I think, fiercely independent, that you don't Follow the herd and actually I think one of the underappreciated characteristics is you're actually one of the best listeners of anyone I work with and take inputs from a wide variety of sources and ultimately make your decision based on it.
12:23InterviewerBut incredible listener people tend not to talk about as much.
12:26Elon MuskYeah. So.
12:30InterviewerThe other thing about you is you've managed to recruit a great team. You have a knack for hiring phenomenal people, sometimes unconventional hires. Think about your recruiting philosophy. Sometimes these are people who didn't actually have those roles before.
12:46InterviewerI can think of a number of our executives here at Tesla have been hugely successful, but they didn't have a history of having done it as many times before.
12:52InterviewerBut you saw the success in them.
12:55Elon MuskWell, I think the fundamental properties of is somebody really driven and smart and do they have a good feedback loop? Like do they, do they adjust their course of action based on their experiences or do they think that they're right even when they're wrong?
13:19Elon MuskSo I think just those are really the three things that are important. Driven, fundamental, sort of brain power and then being self critical. And if somebody has those three characteristics, they can fix something else.
13:37InterviewerGreat advice. Let's talk more about Tesla. Where we are today. When you think of. We think about. You referenced it. There just haven't been successful US car companies. I remember when the company went public, I think this was the first US auto OEM IPO in more than 50 years.
13:52InterviewerOf course you described the trend that's continued since then. What's enabled Tesla such a young company? Really young in this spectrum of car companies. A little over a decade plus old.
14:06Elon MuskYeah,
14:11Elon MuskSorry.
14:12InterviewerWhat do you think's enabled Tesla to compete against incumbency?
14:19Elon MuskI think the main thing is that the incumbents are resistant to new technology and I mean generally there's an opportunity for new companies when there's a. When there's a significant technology discontinuity, some sort of step change in technology is
14:36Interviewerwhat
14:39Elon Muskopens up an opportunity for a startup. Certainly the world didn't need another car company to make gasoline cars. There are plenty of those. But no one was doing electric cars.
14:55Elon MuskSo I mean the reason we started Tesla and put all the effort into it was not because we thought there was this huge opportunity in electric vehicles, but actually because no one was learning electric.
15:07Elon MuskI mean it was like everyone thought it was stupid and the big companies thought it was dumb and there weren't really any startups doing it. So it's like if big companies are not going to do electric vehicles, then it has to come from startup and, you know, so that's the only option.
15:26InterviewerI remember a dinner you and I had with an unnamed very large auto OEM CEO who was promoting that he couldn't actually create an electric car because it would cannibalize his business and would upset his employees dealer base.
15:40Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think because, I mean, some of them later did. I mean, Bob lads. I mean, after we demonstrated the Tesla Roadster, then Bob Labs kick off the vault program, which then also enabled the Nissan lead program.
15:54Elon MuskSo even though the Roadster was a very low production vehicle, they didn't make very many of them. It had a very leveraged effect in forcing GM and Nissan to do PD programs.
16:09Elon MuskAnd actually boblats was kind of prepared us with the inspiration for the Gold program. So we certainly haven't had an outsized effect on the industry even in the
16:19Interviewerearly days, which is one of the goals you have since the early days.
16:23Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. I always thought that the biggest effect that this would have would not be the cars that we made directly, but the cars we induced others to make.
16:31InterviewerSo speaking which, the transportation industry is actually undergoing massive change and perhaps nothing more important than autonomous driving. And no talk about the impact that's having and going to have on transportation, particularly given the unutilized asset base of the automobile industry.
16:49Elon MuskYeah, I think it's going to become common for cars to be autonomous a lot faster than people think. Probably, I guess, I don't know, seven or eight years from now, half of all cars produced will be fully autonomous.
17:06Elon MuskSomething like that. Ten years for sure. And it would just be like something that would be odd if it's not in your car.
17:15InterviewerIt's like not having GPS in the car.
17:16Elon MuskYeah, not having gps, but even bigger, it'll just be normal.
17:22InterviewerAnd what kind of impact does that have to the asset base?
17:26Elon MuskIt will certainly have higher utilization of cars. I still think most people are going to want to have their own farm. It's like most people want to have their own house and they don't want to sort of.
17:38Elon MuskI mean, in theory you could, you know, just do Airbnb and live in somebody else's house all the time, but that would. People don't like that. I think there's.
17:51Elon MuskI mean, there's sharing. The sort of whole sharing economy is significant, but not the bottom for all Europe. Most of the people will still want their own car, just as they want their own house and they want their own clothes.
18:05Elon MuskI mean, you know, share everything. You don't.
18:11InterviewerSo we're sitting here in a 5 1/2 billion square foot facility. But a bit further north is actually the gigafactory born out of necessity to actually power our next fleet of vehicles and transforming not just the automobile industry, but the energy industry.
18:27InterviewerTalk a little bit about what's going on at Tesla Energy and the impact it's having.
18:32Elon MuskYeah, well, I mean in order to solve these sort of energy quality, you have to get the cost to be competitive with fossil fuels or close enough to be competitive inclusive of incentives.
18:46Elon MuskI mean the fundamental issue with fossil fuels is that there's, there's effectively an implied incentive. Every use of fossil fuels comes actually with a subsidy. This is what people don't totally appreciate asset is whenever you're not paying the true cost of an unpriced externality, you're effectively subsidizing something.
19:12Elon MuskIt would be like if you could just dump garbage in the street and not pay for garbage pickup. Well that's obviously a subsidy. So every gasoline car on the road, every one of them has a subsidy.
19:24Elon MuskIt's a subsidy of the public good. And so now the right way to address that gasoline car subsidies is with a carbon tax. And talk to any economist, they will tell you of course that's the right way to fix the price.
19:44Elon MuskBut passing a carbon tax is usually politically difficult, particularly when you have enormous lobbying power on a part of the fossil fuel industry preventing that from occurring. So then politicians usually choose the easier path of providing subsidies to electric vehicles which are usually don't equal the implied subsidy of gasoline vehicles.
20:12Elon MuskAnd then of course get attacked like water, as though EVs are being subsidized but gasoline cars are not, when in fact gasoline cars are receiving a bigger subsidy of the public good than EVs are.
20:24Elon MuskThis is a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding. So
20:31Intervieweryou know, at DBL we think we got to embrace policy. DBL did an extraordinary white paper on subsidy of fossil fuels and works very hard to focus on important policy objectives in addition to the technology.
20:44InterviewerThat's been something you and Tesla and SolarCity have really taken seriously and spent a significant amount of time as you're advising our community thinking about how we actually can push the agenda forward.
20:57InterviewerPeople talk about how great the cars are, but we actually need policy initiatives to push the agenda to any kind of vision you have.
21:04Elon MuskYeah, I mean the, I mean the tough thing is that because gasoline and oil is like so cheap in a cracking technology, it's really driven the cost down dramatically.
21:17Elon MuskWhat this effectively does is weaken the economic forcing function to transition to sustainable transport and to Sustainable energy in general. So, I mean, it's really quite bad for the world.
21:37Elon MuskI was encouraged by the Paris tools, at least countries that have committed, you know, globally, to do something to sort of address the unpriced externality of changing the chemical composition of the oceans and atmosphere.
21:56Elon MuskBut it is happening slowly. And then, unfortunately, technology advancements and the extraction of fossil fuels have improved tremendously, driving the cost down. So it is quite worrying for the future of the world.
22:14Elon MuskI think the only thing that we don't hear is to try to appeal to the people, educate people to sort of revolt against this and to sort of fight the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry, which is unrelenting and enormous.
22:36Elon MuskIn fact, one thing that happened was like, after the IMF came out with their study showing that fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of $6 trillion a year.
22:44Elon MuskLike 6 trillion trillion per year. Yeah. Then some representative of the oil and gas industry added up all incentives that Tesla has received and will receive in the future, which happens to coincide with 6 billion.
23:04Elon MuskBut this increase, if you count everything Tesla will receive over the next 20 years, I guess like calling somebody who
23:11Interviewerowns and I think the loan that was paid back.
23:13Elon MuskYeah, including the loan that was paid back, that was added in there as well.
23:16InterviewerRight.
23:16Elon MuskLike what the. Paid that back. So with interest. And it was like, you know, your taxes went down as a result of that, not up. So. But. But they wanted it to sound to start with a six.
23:33Elon MuskSo then. So basically, once we welcome to half the IMF study, they started chopping that story around to journalists. Tesla's getting a $6 billion subsidy. And it sounds a bit like the $6 trillion subsidy because it has a six in it.
23:48Elon MuskIt's got a six in it and trillion trillion, you know, kind of close by the same level. And that's a 6 billion over 20 years. There's 6 trillion per year.
23:58Elon MuskYeah, but you know, cops and they come to LA Times to buy a ton of bullshit since earned that was totally nonsensical and unfortunately that, you know, so that's like just one example of this sort of propaganda war.
24:14InterviewerIt's important you keep fighting back and everyone needs to do their part to do the same. Let's switch gears before we wrap up to just some of your other things about how you think.
24:23InterviewerAnd one of you referenced it earlier. You talked a bit about AI. You know, Ray Kurzweil talked about the law of accelerating terms where the notion that analysis of the history of technology is exponential, not linear, and over time the potential of machines actually to take over human learning.
24:41InterviewerGive us your thoughts on AI.
24:45Elon MuskThat's a complicated answer.
24:57Elon MuskIt's pretty obvious that she intelligence is on a track to bash the AC given intelligence there. I mean, and one of the things about an exponential is that close up an exponential looks linear.
25:12Elon MuskIf you sort of zoom in it looks linear. But actually if you plot the points on a curve, it's a closely exponential. And there's some argument of if you say it's exponential, what's the Y answer?
25:24Elon MuskAnd I think you can arguably say it's a recursive Y axis. So in any given year, if you think that AI is going to happen sooner rather than, you know, if your predictions for the investment of AI are converging with each passing year.
25:38Elon MuskRight. Then it's fair to say that it is an exponential growth. And that certainly is, I think been the case. So, so it's a really interesting question. I think there's.
25:54Elon MuskEven in the benign scenario there is tremendous upheaval in terms of employment. You have self driving cars. Then what happens to the 12% of the population whose job it is to drive a car or drive a truck or something like that?
26:12Elon MuskI mean, I think that these are really profound, profound questions we're going to have to face in the future. But it's going to go beyond self driving cars. That's the case of narrowing out and cars aren't going to take over the world or do anything.
26:25Elon MuskIt's going to feel like an elevator used to have elevator operators and yes, we'd like to train the elevator expert to operate the elevator now just scan it, press a button and we don't worry about it.
26:39Elon MuskIt's going to be the same thing, just like that. But other eventually if digital intelligence becomes superhuman, which like I said, it's not a track to be, then we'll be able to do everything that we can do better at the end of the day.
26:58InterviewerActually let me go back to SpaceX room because since we gathered here two years ago, what SpaceX has accomplished in the last few years is nothing short of staggering.
27:08InterviewerThe recent landing has been described as perhaps the most significant event in Aries space in decades. But what's interesting is if you look out over the coming year, the coming years perhaps even more exciting.
27:21InterviewerJust give folks a bit of a previous to what's coming down the pike. September and what's going on at SpaceX.
27:27Elon MuskYeah, so we're aiming to re fly one of the land boosters later this year and that'll be significant We've got Falcon Heavy, which will be the biggest rocket, the highest payload to orbit since Saturn V.
27:47Elon MuskAnd that'll be a fun one to watch. If you're taking from Cape Canaveral, I'd recommend coming. You won't need to be close to really experiencing this line. That'll be pretty epic.
28:05Elon MuskAnd then actually we're going to try to bring back all three boosters, all three side boosters in the center core. So it's going to be like this orbital gymnastics, synchronized gymnastics.
28:21Elon MuskI mean, we'll see what happens. Rocks are tricky. Then next year, if schedules hold, we'll be transporting astronauts to the space station for the first time. And apparently the US is dependent on Russia for transporting astronauts to the space station.
28:42Elon MuskSo we're looking forward to doing that mission. And then recent military contract when, yeah, we finally won Air Force launch, which was a tough battle. Boeing and Lockheed had been fighting for years to prevent us from being able to compete.
29:00Elon MuskSo they kept getting these exclusive sole Source contracts with DoD and finally it was opened up to competition, not the whole contract, but just a few of them. And we won our first sort of serious Air Force launch contract.
29:21Elon MuskSounds great. Looking forward to doing a lot of launches with the Air Force in the future. And then we also announced that we're going to be doing our first mission to Mars probably in 2018, so only a couple years away from now.
29:39Elon MuskSo we send one of our Dragon 2 spacecraft to the surface of Mars using our Falcon Heavy rocket. And Dragon 2 is designed to land propulsively and it's got a heavy duty heat shield.
29:51Elon MuskSo in order to land on Mars, you really need a powerful heat shield that can withstand extreme heat and then be able to land impulsively. So this will be an important pathfinder for ultimately the Mars plugging on.
30:11InterviewerSo I began by describing you as engineering our future. And you've heard a lot of examples the way you're doing it. But I think what's most interesting to me about watching what you and Tesla have done is what I talked about before is debunking this notion of trade off, debunking this notion that you have to compromise what you want to accomplish in the world and what you want to accomplish from a business perspective.
30:33InterviewerTesla was clearly founded as a purpose driven company. As with SolarCity, SpaceX and you know, at DBL, it's built on the premise of mission driven companies and backing the kind of impact entrepreneurs that you and Tesla represent.
30:52InterviewerCan you just talk about that? That's such an important theme of your Leadership and your philosophy about how you marry the two and how you're actually showing both within the products as well as the kind of companies you're involved with, that it is not about trade off or compromise, but the first and second bottom line go hand in hand.
31:11Elon MuskSure. Well, I mean, I think generally, I mean, I consider sort of any aid product that other people in society find useful. I mean, I think that's a great thing too.
31:23Elon MuskSo, you know, I wouldn't want to sort of, you know, claim some great morality or anything. So I think anything that's done that's useful to other people is good.
31:36Elon MuskSo, I mean, I think that's like one of the hardest things is just being doing something that is useful and that makes a difference. It makes people's lives better.
31:46Elon MuskAll sorts of products do that. But, you know, the theatrical battle for Tesla and SolarCity, the real uphill battle there is because of, you know, the reason that it felt that, like, greed needed a lot of sort of entrepreneurial skill on the part of, say, the, you know, Linden and keaton, others at SolarCity and the team we have here at Tesla was that it's just fundamentally an economic uphill battle because you have.
32:17Elon MuskBecause carbon is not priced correctly, it fundamentally makes the problem much harder. It's like just competing against something which get, you know, which has a 6 trillion dollar a year subsidy of the public good.
32:35Elon MuskThat's just really difficult. And yeah, so in order to overcome that, at Tesla, we try to make a car as compelling as possible, even though it's a little more expensive than a gasoline car capability or a little bit more expensive, but we can overcome that by just making the car very compelling.
33:03Elon MuskAnd then solar is sort of harder because it's harder to get product differentiation on solar. And that's why this whole industry has been a difficult, really difficult industry. But nonetheless, I mean, with a lot of effort, you can get to, you can make a viable company, but it's just considerably harder when the rules of the game do not favor sustainable energy.
33:33Elon MuskThat's the fundamental problem. The way the rules are set up. They do not favor sustainable energy. And yeah, that's something that we really need to fix collectively. Few people will need to fix that collectively.
33:54Elon MuskI'm sort of excited by what I see, like the level of energy about this with millennials, not younger people, is, I mean, get it. Yeah. So I do think it's just a matter of time before this happens.
34:10Elon MuskAnd the question is just how long, in fact, in terms of thinking of, say, the fundamental good of Tesla SolarCity. I would characterize it through fundamental good and to what degree how many years could it accelerate?
34:25InterviewerWould anyone tell any of that?
34:26Elon MuskYeah, like electric vehicles and solar, all that stuff would happen no matter what. But the fundamental good in the stark context. Context can be measured by to what degree did Tesla accelerate the advent sustainable transport?
34:45Elon MuskIt's like if we were able to accelerate it by like a decade, that would be amazing, that would be