Daily Motivations - MIND BLOWING WORK ETHIC - Elon Musk

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

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Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook. Take a chance. No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. They should not do this. This is very painful. Painful in what sense? It hurts my brain and my heart. Particularly if you're starting a company, you need to work super hard.

So what does super hard mean? When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch. And we showered at the YMCA and we were so hot up we had just one computer. So the website was up during the day and I was coding at night. Seven days a week, all the time. And I sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she had to sleep in the office.

So work hard like, I mean, every waking hour. That's the thing I would say, particularly if you're starting a company. And, I mean, if you do simple math, say, like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company. Just work like hell. I mean, you just have to put in 80-100 hour weeks every week. And then all those things improve the odds of success.

If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that in one year you will achieve what they achieve. You will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve. What was your biggest failure, and how did it change you? 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. I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity. And that should be fine. I'll have $90 million. Like, 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 company's going to die. And so I ended up putting all the money in and borrowing money for rent from friends. 2008 was brutal.

Yeah, 2008, we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon rocket for SpaceX. Tesla almost went bankrupt. We closed our financing round 6 p.m. 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. 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. And one of the most difficult choices I have ever faced in life was in 2008. And I think I had maybe $30 million left or $30 or $40 million left in 2008. I had two choices. I could put it all into one company

and then the other company would definitely die or split it between the two companies. But if or split it between the two companies. But if I split it between the two companies then both might die. And when you put your blood, sweat and tears into creating something

or building something, it's like a child. And so it'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. Tesla really faced a severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ram. Essentially, the company was bleeding money like crazy,

and if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, we would die. And it was extremely difficult to solve them. How close to death did you come? Within single-digit weeks. 22 hours a day? How many hours? Yeah, seven days a week, sleeping in the factory. I worked in the paint shop, general assembly, body shop.

You ever worry about yourself imploding, like it's just too much? Yeah, absolutely. I think failure is bad. I don't think it's good. But if something is important enough, then you do it even though the risk of failure is high. Were you a little naive when you thought, I just like an easily build build an electric car and a rocket? I didn't think it would be easy. Like I said I thought they would probably fail but you know like creating a company is almost like having a child so it's sort of like how do you say your child should not have food. So once you have the company, you have to feed it and nurse it and take care of it even if it ruins you?

Yeah. But there were some tough times in 2008, end of 2008. How did you get through that period of crisis? Yeah. Can we just break for a second? Sure, sure, yeah, of course. You want to wait a little while? Yeah, I sure hope it was worth it. Sure hope so. Pardon me? Sure hope it was worth it.

Help me. I sure hope it was worth it. Well, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure. As I said, for SpaceX, the first three launches failed. And we were just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch. If that fourth launch had failed, we would have been dead. So, 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, but the good chief engineers wouldn't join, and the bad ones, well, there was no point in hiring in hiring them so i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket um so if i could have found somebody better then we would have maybe had less than three failures when you had that third failure in a row did you think i need to pack this in never why not i don't ever give up. I mean, I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. You know, there are American heroes who don't like this idea. Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan have both testified against commercial spaceflight in the way that you're developing it, and I wonder what you think of that.

I was very sad to see that because those guys are you know those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough. You know I wish they would come and visit and see the hardware that we're doing here and I think that would change their mind. They inspired you to do this, didn't they? Yes. And to see them casting stones in your direction? It's difficult. Did you expect them to cheer you on? Certainly hoping they would. Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree.

If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear. So, when starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%. And I just accepted that actually, probably, I would just lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward, even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward so that we'd still do some good. Yeah, same with Tesla.

I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low. In creating these companies, we thought that we would be successful. I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. But it was still worth doing, even though the odds of success were low. In fact, even for SpaceX, originally what I started doing was not creating a rocket company but actually was going to do a small mission to Mars, which was just a philanthropic mission where you would

send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated gel. Upon landing, hydrate the gel and you'd have this cool picture of green plants on a red background. And the public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives. So this would be the first life on Mars, furthest that life's ever traveled.

And you'd have this great money shot of green plants on a red background. So I thought that would get people's attention. But the expectation for that was no return. I thought we wouldn't get any, you know, just spend the money on that and it wouldn't happen. If you're creating a company or if you're joining a company, the most important thing is to attract great people. So either you join a group that's amazing, that you really respect,

or if you're building a company, you've got to gather great people. All a company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service. And so depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is and the degree to which they are focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company. So do everything you can to gather great people if you're creating a company.

Then I'd say focus on signal over noise a lot of companies get confused, they spend money on things that don't actually make the product better for example at Tesla, we've never spent any money on advertising

we put all of the money into R&D and manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible. And I think that's the way to go. So for any given company, just keep thinking about, are these efforts that people are expending, are they resulting in a better product or service? And if they're not, stop those efforts. Starting a business, I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold. That's it.

There's a friend of mine who's got a good saying, which is that starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. Okay, that's generally what happens. Because when you first start a company there's lots of optimism and things are great. So happiness at first is high, then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline. And then you'll go through a whole world of hurt.

And then eventually if you succeed, and in most cases you will not succeed, and Tesla almost didn't succeed, came very close to failure. Then if you succeed, then after a long time, you will finally get back to happiness. You've got to make sure that whatever you're doing is a great product or service. It has to be really great. And I go back to what I was saying earlier, where if you're a new company, I mean, unless it's like some new industry or new market, if it's an untapped market, then you have more ability to...

The standard is lower for your product or service. But if you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace against large entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and they say, why would you buy it as a consumer? You're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference. So a lot of times, you know, an entrepreneur will come up with something which is only slightly better. And it can't just be slightly better. It's got to be a lot better. A well-thought-out critique of whatever you're doing is as valuable as gold.

And you should seek that from everyone you can but particularly your friends usually your friends know what's wrong but they don't want to tell you because they don't want to hurt you it doesn't mean your friends are right but very often they are right and you at least want to listen very carefully to what they say and to everyone you're looking for basically you should take the approach that that you're wrong you know that that you the entrepreneur are wrong your goal is to be less wrong. Advice I'd give to people starting companies, entrepreneurs in general, is really focus on making a product that your customers love. It's so rare that you

can buy a product and you love the product when you bought it. There are very few things that fit into that category. And if you can come up with something like that, your business will be successful for sure. I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important. So being obsessive compulsive is a good thing in this context. Really liking what you do, whatever area that you get into, given that even if you're the best of the best, there's always a chance of failure. So I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing. If you don't like it, life is too short.

You know, I'd say... And also, if you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. I mean, it's something that your mind is drawn to. And if you don't like it, you just really can't make it work, I think. Welcome to Daily Motivation, where you get motivated and inspired. When I was young, I didn't really know what I was going to do when I got older. People kept asking me

and, but then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things would be really cool. And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, which said that a sufficiently

advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that's really true. If you go back, say, 300 years, the things that we take a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that's really true. Being able to see over long distances,

being able to communicate, being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively, with the internet, in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that, because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past. They weren't even in the realm of magic. So it actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well, if I can do some of those

things, basically if I can advance technology, then that's like magic and that would be really cool. And I was at sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean? Like, what's the purpose of things? And I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened.

And that's really the only way forward so so I studied physics and business because I figured in order to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something because it's very difficult to do something as an individual if it's a significant technology. So I originally came out to California to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of electric vehicles, basically to try to figure out if

there was an advanced capacitor that could serve as an alternative to batteries. And that was in 1995 and that's also when the internet started to happen and I thought, well, I can either pursue this technology where success may not be one of the possible that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started because initially, the initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services so if you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments. And whenever we'd show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part which was the

the agglomeration of financial services which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we'd show people email payments which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested. So we focused on email payments and really tried to make that work and that's what really got things to take off. But if we hadn't responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful.

So it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions. Going from PayPal, I thought, well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? It really wasn't from the perspective of what's the rank ordered best way to make money, which is okay, but it was really what I think is going to most affect the future of humanity. So I think the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is sustainable energy,

but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner. If we don't solve that this century, we're in deep trouble. And then the other one being the extension of life beyond Earth to make life multi-planetary. When I started SpaceX, initially I thought that there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company. I wasn't that crazy. But then I thought, well what is a way to increase NASA's budget? That was actually my initial goal. So obviously the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be zero.

So anything better than that was on the upside. So I actually went to Russia three times to look at buying a refurbished ICBM. And I can tell you it was very weird going there in late 2001, 2002, going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, I'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets, but you can keep the nuke. And after making several trips to Russia, I came to the conclusion that actually my initial impression was wrong about, because my initial thought was, well, that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base and that kind of thing. But I came to the conclusion

that that was wrong. In fact, there's plenty of will, particularly in the United States, because the United States, because the United States is a nation of explorers, of people who came here from other parts of the world. I think the United States is really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. So after my third trip, I said, okay, what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem. And started SpaceX. And this was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. One friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up.

Let me tell you, he wasn't far wrong. It was tough going there in the beginning because I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I'd built like little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing, but I'd never had a company that built anything physical. So I had to figure out how to do all these things and bring together the right team of people. We did all that and then failed three times. It was tough going. Because the thing about a rocket is that the passing grade is 100%. You don't get to actually test the rocket

in the real environment that it's going to be in. So I think, so the best analogy for rocket engineering is like if you want to create a really complicated bit of software, you can't run the software as an integrated whole, and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on but the first time you put it all together and run it on that computer it must run with no bugs

the first launch I was picking up bits of rocket near the launch site it was a bit sad but we learned with each successive flight and were able to eventually with the fourth flight in 2008 reach orbit and that was also with the last bit of money that we had. So we got the Falcon 1 to orbit and then began to scale that up to the Falcon 9,

which is about an order of magnitude more thrust. It's around a million pounds of thrust. And we managed to get that to orbit and then developed a Dragon spacecraft, which recently was able to darken and return to Earth from the space station. So it's a huge relief. I still can't quite believe it actually happened. But there's a lot more that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to become a space-faring civilization,

ultimately a multi-planet species. And that's something I think is vitally important, and I hope that some of you will participate in that, either at SpaceX or at other companies, because it's just really one of the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness. It's worth noting, as I'm sure people are aware, that the Earth has

been around for four billion years and civilization, at least in terms of having writing, has been around for 10,000 years and that's being generous. So it's really somewhat of a tenuous existence that civilization and consciousness, as we know it, has been on Earth. And I think... I'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth, so I don't want people to have the wrong impression that I think we're all about to die. I think things will most likely be okay

for a long time on Earth. But not for sure, but most likely. But even if it's sort of 99% likely, a 1% chance is still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we've backed up the biosphere, planetary redundancy, if you will. And so I think it's really quite important. And in order to do that, there's a breakthrough that needs to occur,

which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable transport system to Mars, which is one of those things that's right on the borderline of impossible. But that's sort of the thing that we're going to try to achieve there with SpaceX. When I was a kid, I was wondering, kind of, what's the meaning of life? Like, why are we here? What's it all about and I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask and the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness the better we are able to ask these questions. So I think that there are certain things that are necessary to ensure that the future is good.

And some of those things are in the long term, having long-term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation. And to be a space-bearing civilization and for humanity to be out there among the stars, and be a multi-planetary species. I think being a multi-planetary species and being out there among the stars is important for the long-term survival of humanity.

And that's one reason, kind of like life insurance for life collectively, life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure and it makes people excited about the future. If you consider two futures, one where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens, or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond the solar system, I think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring. And there need to be reasons to get up in the morning. Life can't just be about solving problems.

Otherwise, what's the point? There's got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living. You're 47. What is the likelihood that you personally will go to Mars? 70%. We've recently made a number of breakthroughs that I'm just really fired up about.

And when does that happen? In our lifetimes? Yeah, yeah. I'm talking about moving there. So it's like, you get the price ticket maybe around a couple hundred thousand dollars. This could be an escape hatch for rich people. No. Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than Earth. Really, the app for going to Mars would be like Shackleton's app for going to the Antarctic. It's going to be hard. There's a good chance of death. Going in a little can through deep space.

You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you'll be working nonstop to build the base. So you don't have much time for leisure. And once you get there, even after doing all this, this is a very harsh environment. There's a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we're not sure.

Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people? And yet you would unhesitatingly go. You know, there's lots of people that climb mountains. Why do they climb mountains? Because people die on endeavors all the time. They like doing it for the challenge. I think the probable outcome for civilization on Earth is quite good for a long time. But I still think that we should try to extend life beyond Earth.

And the thing to do is to establish a base on Mars and try to make that a self-sustaining base as soon as possible. So I don't expect that SpaceX is going to do that single-handedly, but I think we're going to try to advance the technology of space travel to the point where we can at least send some number of people to Mars, which is not currently possible. On the Tesla front, the goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people's perception of an electric vehicle, because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range,

kind of like a golf cart. So that's why we created the Tesla Roadster, to show that you can be fast, attractive, and long range. And it's amazing how, even though you can show that something can be fast, attractive, and long-range. And it's amazing how, even though you can show that something works on paper, and the calculations are very clear, until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it,

it doesn't really sink in for people. So that, I think, is something worth noting. If you're going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint. You can make anything work on PowerPoint. But if you have an actual demonstration article, even if it's in primitive form, that's much, much more effective for convincing people. Now is the time to overrule this administration's pledge to mediocrity.

Listen, Tesla's a sell, sell, sell. You don't want to own this stock. You shouldn't even rent the darn thing. Why? Because beyond the hype, there's just not much going on here. Tesla still has yet to turn a profit. That'd be a $1.5 billion company with no profit. Its most recent quarter actually lost more money than it did the year before, $1.5 billion, losing more money than the year before.

This is a company with limited visibility. You put $90 billion, like 50 years worth of breaks, into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said, you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers. Private enterprise will not ever lead a space frontier. Not because I don't want them to, but my read of history tells me they can't. It's not possible. One of the biggest mistakes people generally make, and I'm guilty of it too, is wishful thinking. You know, like you want something to be true even if it isn't true. And so you ignore the things that...

You ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true. This is a very difficult trap to avoid. And like I said, it's certainly one that I find myself in having problems with. But if you just take that approach of you're always to some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong and solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends. Like friends,

if somebody loves you, they want the best for you. They don't want to tell you the bad things. So you have to ask them, you know, and say, really, I really do want to know. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be? Well, first of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society,

I think that's a good thing. Like it doesn't have to change the world. Like, you know, if you're doing something that has high value to people, and frankly, even if it's something, if it's like just a little game or, you know, some improvement in photo sharing or something, if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, that's, I mean, I think that's fine. Like, stuff doesn't need be changed the world just to be good.

But in terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the future of humanity, I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity. So it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way. That is something that if you could look at the crystal ball and see the future you would like that outcome. Because it is something that could go wrong and as we've talked about many times. And so we really need to make sure it goes right.

That's, I think, AI, working on AI and making sure it's a great future. That's the most important thing, I think, right now. The most pressing item. Then, obviously, anything to do with genetics. If you can actually solve genetic diseases, Then, obviously anything to do with genetics. If you can actually solve genetic diseases, if you can prevent dementia, Alzheimer's or something like that with genetic reprogramming, that would be wonderful.

So I think genetics might be the sort of second most important item. I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain. We're currently bandwidth limited. We have a digital tertiary self in the form of our email capabilities, our computers, phones, applications. We're effectively superhuman. But we're extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself. And helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be, I think, very important for the future as well.

What have you done or what did you do when you were younger that you think sort of set you up to have a big impact? Well, I think first of all, I should say that I did not expect to be involved in all these things. So the five things that I thought about at the time in college, quite a long time ago, 25 years ago, you know, making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet, broadly speaking, and then genetics and AI. I didn't expect to be involved in all of those things.

Actually, at the time in college, I sort of thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And that's actually what I worked on as an intern, was advanced ultra-capacitors, to see if there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage in cars. And then when I came out to go to Stanford, that's what I was going to be doing my grad studies on, was working on advanced energy storage technologies for electric cars. And I put that on hold to start an internet company in 1995 because there does seem to be a time for particular technologies

when they're at a steep point in the inflection curve. And I didn't want to do a PhD at Stanford and then watch it all happen. And I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. And I wanted to you know just

I really was just trying to be useful that's the optimization it's like what what can I do that would actually be useful how should someone figure out how they can be most useful whatever this thing is that you're trying to create what would what would be the utility Delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect. So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people. When you're trying to estimate probability of success, so you say this thing will be really useful, good area under the curve, I guess to use the example of SpaceX.

When you made the go decision that you were actually going to do that, this was kind of a very crazy thing at the time. Very crazy, for sure. Very crazy. Yeah, people were not shy about saying that. But I kind of agreed with them that it was quite crazy. Crazy if the objective was to achieve the best risk-adjusted return, starting a rocket company is insane. But that was not my objective. I had simply come to the conclusion that if something didn't happen

to improve rocket technology, we'd be stuck on Earth forever. And the big aerospace companies had just had no interest in radical innovation. All they wanted to do was try to make their old technology slightly better every year. And in fact, sometimes it would actually get worse. And particularly in rockets, it's pretty bad. In 69, we were able to go to the moon with the Saturn V,

and then the space shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit, and then the space shuttle retired. That trend is basically trends to zero. People sometimes think technology just automatically gets better every year, but it actually doesn't. It only gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better. That's how any technology actually gets better. And by itself, technology, if

people don't work on it, actually will decline. I mean, you can look at the history of civilizations, many civilizations, and look at, say, ancient Egypt, where they were able to build these incredible pyramids, and then they basically forgot how to build pyramids. And then even hieroglyphics, they forgot how to read hieroglyphics. Or you look at Rome and how they were able to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing. And they forgot how to do all of those things.

And there are many such examples in history. So I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side. You may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles, which is rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine, and you reason up from there and this is a good way to figure out if if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing it's hard to think that way you can't think think that way about everything takes a lot of effort but if you're trying to do

something new it's the best way to think. And that framework was developed by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics. So it's really a powerful, powerful method. How do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea? Where do you get the internal strength to do that? Well, first of all, I'd say I actually think I feel fear quite strongly. So it's not as though I just have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But there are times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of fear. People shouldn't think, well, I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it in spite of fear. People shouldn't think, well, I feel fear about this

and therefore I shouldn't do it. It's normal to feel fear. Like you'd have to do something mentally wrong if you didn't feel fear. If you have an advice to the young people globally who want to be like Elon Musk, what's your advice to them? I think that probably they shouldn't want to be you.

I think it sounds better than it is. Okay. Yeah. It's not as much fun being me as you'd think. I don't know. You don't think so? No. There's definitely, it could be worse for sure.

But it's, I'm not sure I would would i'm not sure i want to be me so when everybody leaves it's just elon sitting at home brushing his teeth just a bunch of ideas bouncing around your head when did you realize that that's not the case with most people i think when i was i don't know five or six or something i thought i was insane It was just strange. Because it was clear that other people do not, their mind wasn't exploding with ideas. It was like, hmm, I'm strange. I don't think, I don't think you'd necessarily want to be me. People would like it that much. It's very hard to turn it off. It's like a never-ending explosion.

All the time. What do you think the odds of the Mars colony are at this point today? Well, oddly enough, I actually think they're pretty good. At this point, I am certain there is a way. I'm certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, in fact, a growing Mars colony. I'm certain that that is possible. Whereas until maybe a few years ago, I was not sure that success was even one of the possible outcomes.

Some meaningful number of people going to Mars, I think this is potentially something that can be accomplished in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years. I need to make sure that SpaceX doesn't die between now and then, and that I don't die, or if I do die, that someone takes over who will continue that. You shouldn't go on the first launch.

Yeah, exactly. The best of the available alternatives that I can come up with and maybe somebody else can come up with a better approach or better outcome is that we achieve democratization of AI technology, meaning that no one company or small set of individuals has control over advanced AI technology. I think that that's very dangerous. It could also get stolen by somebody bad, you know, like some evil dictator of a country could send their intelligence agency to go steal it and gain control.

It just becomes a very unstable situation. I think if you've got any any incredibly powerful AI, you just don't know who's going to control that. So it's not as I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat. I think it's more the concern is that someone may use it in a way that is bad. Or even if they weren't going to use it in a way that's bad, that somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that's bad. That I think is quite a big danger. So I think we must have democratization of AI technology and make it widely available. And that's the reason that obviously the rest of the team created OpenAI, was to help with the democracy,

help spread out AI technology so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few. But then of course that needs to be combined with solving the high bandwidth interface to the cortex. Humans are so slow. Humans are so slow. Humans are so slow. Yes, exactly. But we already have a situation in our brain

where we've got the cortex and limbic system. And the limbic system is kind of the, that's the primitive brain, it's kind of like your instincts and whatnot. And then the cortex is the thinking upper part of the brain. Those two seem to work together quite well. Occasionally your cortex and limbic system may disagree. It generally works pretty well and it's rare to find someone who, I've not found someone who wishes to either get rid of their cortex

or get rid of their limbic system. So I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving the neural link between your cortex and your digital extension of yourself, which already exists, just has a bandwidth issue and then then effectively you become an AI human symbiote and and if that then is widespread with anyone who wants it can have it then we solve the control problem as well we don't have to worry about some sort of evil dictator AI because kind of we are the AI collectively that seems like the best outcome I can think of I think we've got some sort of evil dictator AI, because we are the AI collectively. That seems like the best outcome I can think of.

I think we've got a really talented group at OpenAI. Yeah, a really talented team, and they're working hard. OpenAI is structured as a 501c3 nonprofit, but many nonprofits do not have a sense of urgency. It's fine, they don't have to have a sense of urgency, but OpenAI does. I think people really believe in the mission. I think it's important.

It's about minimizing the risk of existential harm in the future. And so I think it's going well. I'm pretty impressed with what people are doing and the talent level. And obviously, we're always looking for great people to join. When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career and what

are some of the tougher problems that they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points. And usually that's enough for me to get a very good gut feel about someone. And what I'm really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. So did they face really difficult problems, overcome them? And then, of course, you want to make sure

that if there was some significant accomplishment, were they really responsible or was somebody else more responsible? And usually the person who's had to struggle with the problem, they really understand it. And they don't forget, you know, if it was very difficult. So you can ask them detailed, very detailed questions about it and they will know the answer. Whereas the person who was not truly responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details. There's no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school.

I mean, if somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. If you look at, say, people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn't graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them, of course, these guys didn't graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them of course that would be a good idea. So you know just really looking just for evidence of exceptional ability and if there's a track record of exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue

into the future. What sort of things do you look for in people or in processes that make the workforce better? Well, I think the massive thing that can be done is to make sure your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished. So you've got to be a carrot and a stick. So if somebody is innovating and making good progress, then they should be promoted sooner. And if somebody is completely failing to innovate, not every role requires innovation, but if they're in a role where innovation should be happening

and it's not happening, then they should either not be promoted or exited. And let me tell you, you'll get innovation real fast. Does that carrot and stick approach help? Do you think people be more risk-averse or less risk-averse? When trying different things, you've got to have some acceptance of failure. Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely

conservative choices, and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation. Things may go backwards. What you really want is, you want reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek. So if what you're seeking is innovation, then you should reward success and innovation. And only there should

be minor consequences for lack of minor consequences for trying and failing. They should be minor. Significant rewards for trying and succeeding. Minor consequences for trying and not succeeding. And major negative consequences for not trying. If you have that incentive structure, you will get innovation like you can't believe. The purpose of Neuralink, like what do we what's our goal? Our goal is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly seamlessly implant implant device. So you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head

and feel and look totally normal. But it solves some important problem in your brain or spine. So going into the Neuralink Octecture, what we've done over the past year is dramatically simplify the device. So about a year ago, we had a device which had multiple parts, including a piece that had to sort of sit behind your ear. And it was complex, and you wouldn't still look totally normal.

You'd have a thing behind your ear. So we've simplified this to simply something that is about the size of a large coin. And it goes in your skull, replaces a piece of skull, and the wires then connect within a few centimeters or about an inch away from the device. And this is sort of what it looks like. This is that little device. I mean, frankly, to sort of simplify this, what we're...

I mean, it's more complicated than this, but it's in a lot of ways, it's kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires. Our current prototype, version 0.9, has about a thousand channels, so that's about a hundred times better than the next best

consumer device that's available. And it's a 23 millimeters by 8 millimeters. It actually fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick. So it fits, it goes flush with your skull, it's invisible, and all you can see afterwards is this tiny scar. And if it's under your hair, you can't see it at all.

In fact, I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn't know. It's also inductively charged so it's charged in the same way that you charge a smartwatch or a phone and so you can use it all day, charge it at night and have full functionality so you would really, it would be completely seamless and yeah no wires. In terms of getting a link link, you need to have the device, a great device. And you also need to have a great robot that puts in the electrodes and does the surgery. So you want the surgery to be as automated as possible.

And the only way you can achieve the level of precision that's needed is with an advanced robot. The link procedure, the installation of a link done in under an hour so you can basically go in in the morning and leave the hospital in the afternoon and it can be done without general anesthesia. So this is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do essentially the entire surgery. So everything from incision, removing the skull, inserting the electrodes, placing the device, and then closing things up and having you ready to leave. So we want to have a fully automated system. How do you spend your days now? Like what do you allocate most of your time to? My time is mostly split between SpaceX and Tesla.

And of course, I try to spend part of every week at OpenAI. So I spend basically half a day at OpenAI most weeks. And then I have some OpenAI stuff that happens during the week. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things, but actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.

Engineering and design, so it's developing next generation product, that's 80% of it. I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine, business is fine, but really it's, it's like it's SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is chief operating officer, she kind of manages legal, finance, sales, and kind of general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving the

Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial Architecture. And then at Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and some in the design studio, typically half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look and feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Because the biggest epiphany I've had is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory, and that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself. What are the scenarios that scare you most?

Humanity really has not evolved to think of existential threats in general. We're evolved to think about things that are very close to us near term, to be upset with other humans, and not really to think about things that could destroy humanity as a whole.

But then in recent decades, just really in the last century, we had nuclear bombs which could potentially destroy civilization, obviously. We have AI, which could destroy civilization. We have global warming, which could destroy civilization, or at least severely disrupt civilization. Excuse me, how could AI destroy civilization?

You know, it would be something the same way that humans destroyed the habitat of primates. I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be destroyed, but it might be relegated to a small corner of the world. When Homo sapiens became much smarter than other primates, it pushed all the other ones into small habitats. Couldn't AI, even in this moment, just with the technology that we have before us, be used in some fairly destructive ways? You can make a swarm of assassin drones for very little money

by just taking the face ID chip that's used in cell phones and having a small explosive charge and a standard drone and have them just do a grid sweep of the building until they find the person they're looking for, ram into them, and explode. You can do that right now. No new technology is needed right now. People just think this stuff is of sci-fi novels and movies

and it's so far away, but every time I hear you speak, it's like, well, no, this stuff is sitting... It's right here. Probably a bigger risk than being hunted down by a drone is that AI would be used to make incredibly effective propaganda. That would not seem like propaganda. So these are deep fakes. Yeah. Influence the direction of society, influence elections, artificial intelligence. Just honesificial intelligence just hones the message, hones the message, looks at the feedback,

makes this message slightly better. Within milliseconds, it can adapt this message and shift and react to news. And there's so many social media accounts out there that are not people. Like, how do you know it's a person, not a person? People look like they have a much better life than they really do. People are posting pictures of when they're really happy.

They're modifying those pictures to be better looking. Even if they're not modifying the pictures, they're at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting the best angle so people basically seem they're way better looking than they basically really are and they're way happier seeming than they really are so if you look at everyone on instagram you might think man they're all these beautiful people, and I'm not that good looking, and I'm not happy. So I'm a suck, you know, and that's going to make people sad. When in fact, those people you think are super happy, actually not that happy. Some of them are really depressed. They're very sad.

Some of the happiest seeming people, actually some of the saddest people in reality. So I think things like that can make people quite sad. This may sound corny, but love is the answer. Wouldn't hurt to have more love in the world. I think, you know,

I think people should be nicer to each other and give more credit to others. And don't assume that they're mean until you know they're actually mean. It's easy to demonize people. You're usually wrong about it. People are nicer than you think. Give people more credit.

There's going to be some amount of failure. But you want your net output, net useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic. The final thing I would encourage you to do is now is the time to take risk. As you get older, your obligations increase. And once you have a family, you start taking risk

not just for yourself, but for your family as well. It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that before you have those obligations. So I would encourage you to take risks now. Do something bold. You won't regret it. Thanks for listening. Kindly support the movement of this podcast by supporting us or subscribing to our premium content for more exclusive stuff. When you do so, you also get a shout out in our next episode. Thank you.