The Joe Rogan Experience - #1609 - Elon Musk

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Elon Musk is a business magnate, designer, and engineer. His portfolio of businesses include Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, Neuralink, and many others.

the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day no that's the uh Sasha Baron Cohen movie yeah I never saw that one was a scene where he's uh they show him the new missile they've developed, but it has kind of a round head,

and he says, you need to make it more pointy to his engineers. Actually, that's what I also said. I said the same thing. You know, Starship, we need to make it more pointy. Did you say that?

Mm-hmm. Because of the movie? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Hold on. I just have the main camera on. Okay.

Okay. You literally told them to make the Starship more pointy because of the movie The Dictator. Yep. And they know it too. It's not like they're unaware of it everyone thought it would be funny if we made the rocket

more pointy so we did did it have any effect on the aerodynamics? no nothing no we can make it way blunter and be fine

but was is it better to be pointier? like if it wasn't for the movie it's arguably slightly worse but like but more fun for you yeah it looks cooler oh okay it does look cool

How long do you think it will be before Are you good Jamie? What's that? My head's maybe Yeah exactly How long My head is sticking out Is that where it's

Oh is that where it's supposed to be You're good How long do you think it's going to's right on the edge of the top. Oh, is that where it's supposed to be? Okay. You're good. All right. How long do you think it's going to be before you have, like, regular flights with that where you can take off and land, like an airplane, where it'll be very consistent? With our extra pointy rocket? With your extra pointy rocket. Do you mean Earth to Earth transport?

Or Just any kind of Yes people Anytime where you can just do it with people And have it land All the time I think probably Two years away

Two years away Yeah That's That's really nice Two years is pretty cool Two years for people We'll We'll have a lot of flights between now and then.

That's crazy. That's 2023 is not that far away. That'll be there before you know it. Yeah. Wow. 2023. Time flies. How many times have you had explosions with those things?

When you're on a rocket. I don't know, like quite a few. Six, maybe? Five or six? What are those like? What is it like when you watch it explode? When it's supposed to land and it just... This is a test program.

We expect it to explode. Of course. It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly. Really? Yeah. Because we're trying to develop advanced rockets at a high speed. And if you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge. And the whole rocket is evolving.

The engines, the structure, avionics, the software, the ground systems are all evolving simultaneously. And the whole production system, which is actually hotter than the rocket design by far. simultaneously, and the whole production system, which is actually harder than the rocket design by far. So the rocket and engine and avionics production system and the launch system is 1,000% harder than the initial design, like at least. Really? Yeah. Same with cars.

It's like 10,000%. It's easy to do a car prototype. It's hard to do production. 10,000%. It's easy to do a car prototype. It's hard to do production. So when you're looking and you're scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements, and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years. If current trends continue,

if you plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years. We're getting to orbit this year. Our goal is to get to orbit this year. And I'm not sure people totally understand. Starship is the largest flying object ever made. This thing will be about over 5,000 tons weight on liftoff. It's going to go straight up with 5,000 tons. This is much heavier than any aircraft by far.

No aircraft even comes close to this weight. And it's going straight up. The aircraft can't go straight up. So it's like the... It's got more than twice... It will have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V. Really? Yeah, yeah.

It's like a big rocket. Why does it need that much thrust? Oh, we're trying to... Because you want to go to Mars? Or is this like... We're trying to make life multi-planetary. You know, extend life beyond Earth. And in order to do that, you have to have high tonnage to Mars.

And that means you need a big rocket and you've got to fly a lot. So the reason why it has twice the thrust of the Saturn V is to plan for these interstellar trips. Interplanetary. Interplanetar trips. Interplanetary. So when you're doing this and you're developing these systems thinking about regular trips to other planets, but you're not just trying to get into orbit right now.

You're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually could scale up. Yeah, we know how to get to orbit. We've done that a lot. So the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where all elements of the rocket are reused and they're reused quickly like an aircraft. And this has never been done. This is the holy grail of rocketry is to have a fully reusable rocket. Then you need to go one step further.

It needs to be fully and rapidly reusable. Like a plane. Yeah, yeah. Like a plane lands, you refuel it and take off again. How do you have time? I never understand you in regards to the way you run multiple businesses simultaneously. I would think that something like this would require so much concentration. It would require...

I would think this would be your whole being trying to figure out how to work this. Yeah, well, I do work a lot. It's crazy. Yeah. And I thought just for a reason I was late as I was coming from some critical meetings. Normally I'd be meeting until I work until like 1 or 2 in the morning.

Every night? I mean, Saturday and Sunday, usually not, but sometimes. How much do you sleep? About six hours. Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's not that crazy. For you, that's, I mean, for someone who does as as you that's actually that's impressive that you can squeeze that in yeah i try i've tried sleeping less but then total uh productivity decreases yeah so you feel like

six is the number where it's yeah six six uh six or six is i can that that, I don't find myself needing, wanting more sleep than six. So when, like with the Saturn V and the space shuttles and all these other rockets, they would have these parts that would, they would get the ship up into space, but they would descend down to Earth and crash into the ocean and they would never use them again. That's right. How do you avoid that? Like what is the difference between the way these things are structured? Like the whole thing goes together and then it lands together?

Well, we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit. Right. I think one thing to appreciate is like space, getting to space is easy, Getting to orbit is hard. So you only need maybe 1% or 2% of the energy to get to space, to where the atmosphere is thin, compared to what you need to get to orbit. And if you get to orbit, now you've got to burn off all that energy, and you're coming in like a meteor.

So you need a powerful heat shield. So it's super difficult to get to orbit at all. And then if you get to orbit at all, then making those stages reusable means they've got to come back intact. And then the upper stage is especially difficult because it's got so much energy. All the energy you put into it, you have to take out. So it's, you know, you're literally coming in like a flaming meteor. And most things would just melt or vaporize. So, like if you as a human tried to come in from orbit, you'd just be pink mist. Yeah.

That's a funny way to put it. Yeah. Now, the space shuttle, they had tiles, right? That was the way they avoided the heat. They had these heat shield tiles. What do you use with the SpaceX rockets? Yeah, we have a more advanced version of the shuttle tile, but you've got to use some kind of ceramic, essentially.

It's usually some form of silicon oxide aluminum oxide some carbon perhaps thrown in there and is it like a one piece or is it in tiles the way the house yeah we're hexagonal tile so you can see the with each starship we've actually increased the size of the heat shield. So it's tough because the tiles are, they're kind of like, I don't know, that's not quite the right analogy, they're kind of like dinner plates. Like they're brittle and their coefficient of thermal expansion is different from metal. So metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles. And the tiles also get super hot, while metal can be super cold

because it's got cryogenic fluid behind it. So you have this differential expansion and contraction, which makes the gaps in the tiles expand and contract. But if the gaps get too big, then you get kind of the hot gas, sort of the plasma gets in down and get plasma in the crack and it's not as bad. And then you're going to melt the metal behind it. But if they're too close, then they bang together and they crack. So you've got to get it just right. Where the gap's just right and then they can

the way that they're attached to the body, they can move around a little bit. So there has to be some sort of room to move. It can't be one large piece of ceramic that you fit over the front. Yeah, you can't really make such a giant piece of ceramic, because you've got to, well, I guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven

but you really need you need expansion joints, expansion contraction joints so it's quite difficult to do a single piece tile. Think of it like tiles for a roof or something like that.

Why don't you just make one tile for a roof? It's like yeah, it doesn't work just make one tile for a roof? It's like, yeah, it's not going to work. Now, these things have multiple stages. How many stages in the rocket boosters when things are taking off? How many? Starship has two stages. So that's the minimum number that you could do on a planet like Earth. Gravity in Earth's gravity is quite strong.

And we have a thick atmosphere and strong gravity. Whereas if you took off from Mars it would be relatively easy. Mars is around just under 40% of Earth's gravity. The moon is about a sixth. And getting to lunar orbit from the surface of the moon is easy. Like during Apollo, the lunar lander, just the top half of the lunar lander was able to take off and get to lunar orbit.

But to get to Earth orbit, you need the giant rocket. It's very nonlinear. So what happens to the first, when you take off and it separates into stages, how does the first stage get reused? Well, have you seen how the Falcon 9 stages work, where they come back and land? No.

You haven't seen that? No. Wow. Yeah, I mean... Jamie's going to pull it up. So does it come down with parachutes? Does it... Like, how does it land?

No, it lands propulsively with the thrusters. With the engines. Really? Yeah. So it's designed to take off... Here it is. Yeah. Oh, wow.

So that is the bottom of the rocket that launches it straight up, and then afterwards it comes down and lands like that. Yeah. That's amazing. And then the top piece can then land separately. Yes. Well, in the case of Falcon 9, the upper stage burns up on reentry.

Falcon 9 has, there's the fairing, where the satellites are contained in the top and the fairing has, once it gets to space, where the atmosphere is thin, it's still a long way from orbit, but it's in space, so you no longer need the, the satellite doesn't need to be protected by the nose cone, the fairing. And so that, it sort of splits in two and falls away. And then, so with Falcon 9, we recover the fairing halves and recover the booster, but we lose the upper stage. On purpose? Did you design it that way?

Yes, but it's not really possible to, with Falcon 9, the architecture is, like, if we made the upper stage reusable reusable our payload to orbit would be dramatically less so in order to have meaningful payload to orbit scale is important like you need to make things big there are some there's there is value to scale um you know for the family you know like for a truck you wouldn't want like everything delivered by a small pickup truck you want semi-trailers you know you don't see you don't see ships in the ocean cargo ships you know coming along with one sea van on out with an outboard motor it It's like a giant ship. So scale has value in and of itself. Like the same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket.

So even just in terms of the computer, the computer and the electronics weight becomes vanishingly small in a big rocket, but it is significant in a small rocket. Do you think there'll ever be a time where there's an alternative source of propulsion outside of just a burning fuel? Like, is it possible that someone would develop

a nuclear propulsion or some other method other than just burning large amounts of gasoline or rocket fuel? There's no way around Newton's third law, really. So you basically have to expel mass. Like when you get, there's a, you know, for a car that you could push against the ground. For an aircraft, you can react against the air. For an aircraft, you can react against the air.

For a boat, you can react against water. In vacuum, there is nothing. So the only way to move is to react against yourself, to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity, and to transfer momentum from, you know, to that gas that is going that way very rapidly. So you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you, the large amount of mass, accelerate slowly. Momentum is conserved. So, yeah. So we're stuck with gas yeah until some insane breakthrough dealing with gravity or yeah i mean it's not gonna happen not not in our lifetime

no um yeah so so so ironically uh everything will go electric except for rockets. Now, you can make rockets indirectly electric by using electricity to create the fuel. So you can take CO2 and H2O and create methane and oxygen from that. So methane is CH4 and oxygen is O2. And for example, on Mars, which is a primarily CO2 atmosphere, and there's a lot of water ice, is you can mine the ice, take the ice and the CO2 from the atmosphere, simplifying this a lot, but run it over a catalyst and give it a lot of energy and

you can get CH4 and O2 and you can you can gracefully get your propellant on Mars. The rocket by the way is mostly So for Starship, we're almost 80% oxygen. It's only just over 20% fuel. Really? Yeah. So is this as efficient as you anticipate it being, you know, any time in our lifetime? Like, is it, the trip to Mars is like, what, six months? Is that what the idea is?

Yeah, it's about six months. Do you ever anticipate it being quicker than that? Is it possible to make these things faster? Would you have to have solar sails? No, solar sail would be very slow. Would it be? I mean, I'm trying to think of, like, a way to think about gravity here.

There's a lot of analogies. But, you know, like you can think like space itself is curved, like it's like a funnel. Like if there's something that has a lot of mass, it's creating like a funnel. a lot of mass, it's creating like a funnel. And so in the same way, like if you have a coin funnel, the coin thinks it's going in a straight line, pretty much. The physicists out there might have quibble with my analogies. But anyway, I'm trying to convey what gravity is like, like a funnel.

And so if you want to get out of that gravity well, you actually need to go very fast parallel to the Earth's surface. And the faster you go parallel to the Earth's surface, the further out you spin. Or you can think of it like a marble in a funnel. Like if you want to get that marble to go far out, you just spin it sideways and it'll spiral out. You just spin it sideways and it'll spiral out. And conversely, just due to the friction of the air friction and the rolling friction, it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any push and will slowly spiral in. And then as it gets closer, it spins faster and faster. This is how gravity basically works. This is how gravity basically works.

So all the things in the solar system are spinning around this gigantic funnel in space-time called the sun. And we're like these tiny little dust motes going around the sun. And the further you are away from the sun, the slower you move around in in terms of degrees per second so like the orbit of Mars which is further away from the Sun is about two years and it was one year because Mars is about 50% further away from the earth than the from the Sun than the earth is so it's like Mars we we're, Earth is at one astronomical unit, Mars is like one and a half-ish astronomical units. So we're about eight light minutes away from the Sun, Mars is about 12. And yeah, so when you want to

go to Mars, you basically accelerate in the, along the same path of Earth going around the Sun. And you time it such that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the Sun, where the tip of the ellipse intersects with Mars. So Mars is going around, and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your ellipse being Mars. And that turns out to be about a six-month journey. Now, you can speed that up. I think, I mean, I could sort of see a way to make it happen in, say, three months, where the intersection with Mars would not be at the tip of the ellipse,

but on the edge of the ellipse. Now, that would mean the tip of the ellipse is out near Jupiter. So if you miss Mars, you're going to end up at Jupiter. Jupiter's orbit. That's not good. Yeah. And you're going to be coming in hot.

But I think it probably can get down to three months. Not that big of a problem. Getting down to a month is hard. And then, Earth and Mars are only in the same sort of, there's only about a six-month period every two years when Earth and Mars are aligned such that you can do the transfer. You can certainly imagine that if Mars is on the other side of the sun, you can't get there because it's got to go through the sun.

That's not going to work. You've got to time it. This is like about a quarter of every Mars year is when you can do the transfer. Six months every two years. If we are able to build, or if humanity is able to build a city on Mars, um, people

will probably remember, you know, which planetary conjunction they came on, you know? Mm. Cause it's, it's not like you just go all the time. You can only go every two years. When do you anticipate, like how, how much time before there's regular travel back and forth to mars roughly like a real civilization on mars well i think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization the the real the real The threshold that really matters

is for getting past the Great Filter. Do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming... You can survive. Yeah. So I could only be just missing one little thing. You'd be like,

you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin C. It's only a matter of time. You know? Yeah. And then it's going to be curtains. So,

you got to have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars. And the reason that the shifts from Earth stopped coming could be World War III or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization. So civilization here on Earth could end with a bang or a whimper. Or natural disasters.

Yeah. Asteroid impacts. Yeah, that would be up in the bang category. But it could also be like a whole series of things So like what killed the dinosaurs It wasn't just one thing It was like a whole bunch of things Happened in a row

And You know They could have taken any one of those things They had like three things happen And no dinosaurs Which is kind of amazing that crocodiles are still here yeah those fuckers well they're resilient crocodiles they um they'll they live on decayed meat they love rotten meat and so in a any kind of disastrous situation there's a lot of dead creatures and the crocodiles love it.

So that's why they're around. Crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms. And shrews. Shrews, yeah. Which is why we're here. Yeah, exactly. Our great-great-great-great-great grandparents were shrews.

What a strange thing to come from. So there's hope. There's hope for all you rodents out there. Yeah. One day you can go to Mars. Just keep doing your homework. Absolutely. So there'll be, you say the great filter.

What did you mean by that? Well, so there's something called like the Fermi paradox of like, where are the aliens? Yeah. So where are the aliens? Yeah. So where are the aliens? Um, and, um, I think it was Carl Sagan that said like,

uh, if there either are a lot of aliens or none and the, the, either they're equally terrifying. Um, if there are a lot of aliens, well, I mean, the invasion ship slash, you know, bug infestation, just, you know, like... Starship trooper style? Well, yeah. I mean, it's like an alien civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation.

Right. You know, it's like, hey, we left that planet. It was fine. Now it's got a bunch of bugs. Just go fumigate it, you know, like we'd fumigate a house. That's certainly possible. And then, but if there are no aliens, well, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become interstellar, you know. So, and I want to be clear, like, to the best of my knowledge,

there is no evidence for alien life on Earth. There's no evidence for alien life. There's no direct evidence for alien life. No, you know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien for, you know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien, you know, sighting or whatever? I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 7-Eleven or ATM cam, okay? It's like if somebody's got at least like an iPhone 1 level camera, like something, you know? The problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too.

Yeah, sure. At least try hard Are you familiar with Commander David Fravor's Account of the Tic Tac UFO that he encountered Off of the coast of San Diego You know Lex

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman interviewed him on his podcast And I interviewed him as well And if you ever get a chance to listen to Lex's conversation with him, it's really excellent. But this guy is a naval fighter pilot and he talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than 60,000 feet above sea level to one foot in less than a second, shaped like a tic-tac, no visible sign of propulsion uh blocked radar uh actively jammed their tracking

systems and then went to their predetermined point that they were supposed to uh that the the fighter jet was supposed to scramble to went to it uh 30 miles away in you know a couple seconds like they have no idea how it did it they don't know what it is. And these guys that were working for the Navy off the coast said they encountered them several times. They didn't know what they were. They didn't know what to do. Do they have a photo or something? They do.

They have video of it. Okay. They have video of it. They have, there's, you ever see the New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff? I don't know. Yeah, there was a New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff? I don't know. Yeah, there was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this.

And there's a couple other different sightings that were very similar. They were trying to figure out what these things were and why. And it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release. Yeah, the politicians are trying to figure out what all this shit is. And so they tried to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days. Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens.

I would hope so. That's why I'm asking you. No, I'd be jumping on that. You should watch that conversation with Lex. Sure. Here's the thing. Do you think that they would want us to know, or do you think they would just be observing

and making sure we don't blow ourselves up? I don't know, man. They sure are subtle. I mean, if they wanted us to know, obviously they could just show up and walk down Main Street. Hey, I'm an alien. Check me out. He has my spaceship. I just land in the middle of Times Street. Hey, I'm an alien. Check me out. Here's my spaceship.

I just land in the middle of Times Square. I'd be like, okay. Or hover over downtown LA. Yeah. We were like, okay, we believe you. So whatever, they are very subtle, very subtle, these aliens. How often do you think about it? Zero.

Zero? Even though you're thinking about interplanetary travel you don't really think about aliens no I mean if they show up I'm like great okay now this is new information what an interesting way of putting it this is new information

where were you guys up until now so anyway this is new information this is new information like where are you guys up till now yeah um so anyway uh listen i'm if if i see some evidence for aliens i'll be like i'll be the first to be like ah aliens you know right then you'll investigate but until then you think it's kind of a waste of time yeah yeah it definitely seems like a waste of time if nothing's happened so far you think about all the people that have been researching aliens for their whole life and they have very little to show for it. Well, you know, there's... Other than cool stories.

Yeah. I mean, we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things. You know, people, like, if we were to find something like, let's say, like a cube of titanium, just like a one-inch cube of titanium, let's say, in the middle of the pyramid, I'd be like, aliens for sure. There's no way they could have made titanium back then. There's no way. That's hard.

That's all. One little, you don't even need a computer. Like, a computer would be like, hey, wow, computers, they didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens. But even just, like, some, wow, computers, they didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens. But even just like some advanced metallurgy, anything, like anything like that. Right. Nothing like that that we could point to that we can't do. Everything that we found archaeologically is consistent with the time, the technology they had at that time archaeologically yes yeah so you just talk about old stuff yeah yeah just throughout history it's

not like yeah like like if aliens visited there'd be something buried somewhere i think um we haven't seen anything so anyway i mean maybe there are aliens but they're very subtle. If they are, they're just very, they're being pretty shy. So, as far as we can tell, there's none. So, nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that. So, now, and the thing is that on a galactic time scale, even with sublight travel, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy, even some of the neighboring galaxies. So if you gave, if you said a million years with, and say there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years? Absolutely. The entire galaxy.

galaxy in a million years absolutely the entire galaxy so you would start with mars build bases on mars then use mars to jump off to all these other planets set up places there and over thousands of years easily yeah kind of like you know hop from one solar system to the next and yeah that it seems like that's imperative like that has to happen if the human civilization is going to survive because our planet is just we're too subject to natural disasters and our own folly and if the species is going to survive we kind of have to escape it's mostly about the species i mean there have been some real doozies of like you know massive meteors and super volcanoes and the continents moved all over the place and earth's been a snowball and super hot the if you read like the geological history of earth it's like very long and complicated um so and then there've been so many extinction events not like just a few um yeah i mean the

the permian extinction event that was a real rough one where it's like well over 90% of all species died out. Um, and that doesn't tell the whole story cause a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and, um, you know, like sponges and stuff like that, you know? Uh, like if you, if, are you, are you a sponge? Okay. You're probably doing okay. They're still around. are you a sponge? Okay. You're probably doing okay. They're still around. Are you a mushroom? Do you like being in the dark and feasting on dead plant and animal matter?

Okay. But if you're like a human, you're screwed. Yeah. So. Well, didn't, people got down to, there was just a few thousand of us at one point in time because of a super volcano, I think Indonesia. I think it was only 60, 70,000 years ago. Yeah. There have been a number of sort of revolutionary choke points.

Yeah. And the last ice age must have been pretty rough too. A lot of species got wiped out then. Is that part of what motivates you? What motivates you to want to do this and to put people on Mars and to start traveling, get people traveling through the galaxy? Yeah, so philosophically, I'm in the Douglas Adams sort of school of thought, which is that the universe is the answer,

and we need to figure out what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe. So we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness, increase our understanding of the universe, like to understand why are we here, where do we come from, where are we going, what's this all about. And in order to, in order to, I don't know, just understand the meaning of life, we have to expand the scope and scale of life and the consciousness,

which may be digital and biological in the future and get past at least one of the great filters, which is to become a multi-planet species. A species that does not become multi-planetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external. So we've got to be a multi-planet species. Also, that's way more exciting.

That's like, do you want a future where we're out there among the stars exploring the universe, or do you want a future where we're stuck on Earth forever? I think we want the super exciting future where we're out there exploring the galaxy. That sounds great to me. And, you know, I think it's worth 1% of our resources, something like that. You know, maybe more, but at least 1%.

Well, it's in all the most exciting sci-fi movies. Yeah. If you saw a sci-fi movie and they didn't have spaceships, you'd be like, what's going on there? Something terrible must have happened. Well, we always assumed when we were kids that we would be traveling to the moon and back and traveling all over space by now.

Space 1999 was a show when I was a kid that was interplanetary travel. Remember they had spaceships out there and motherships? They thought 1999, by then, for sure, it would happen. The problem is we need more Elon Musks. There's not a lot of people that really dedicate all their time and energy to do something like this. It really does. It's a really fascinating thing about the species.

It takes a few unique individuals that are motivated to do something like this and have the resources and the intelligence and you can figure out how to organize people to get something like this done. Not a lot of you. Well, there's a lot of smart, talented people at SpaceX and at Tesla, and that's how we get things done. But, yeah, I mean, part of the reason why SpaceX is still privately held, although we have a lot of investors and everyone at the company is given stock,

is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long. is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long. You know, it's like, you know, what's the market for transporting things to Mars? Well, no market. There's no one there. So they're like, that sounds pretty risky. And a public company, you know,

the feedback loop tends to be, you know, maybe a year to four years or even quarterly and it's like uh well this is like 10 years 20 years out and i don't probably answer your question earlier which is like when we when i think we can go to mars i mean i think possibly as soon as five years from now um really yeah Yeah. But then to have a, then you've got to build out the base and then you've got to build out the city. So the first thing you've got to build is like, okay, you've got to generate energy. So you've got like a giant solar panel farm,

and then you've got to have propellant production. So you've got to make fuel and oxygen and you've got to have propellant production. So you've got to make the fuel and the oxygen, and you've got to grow food, grow plants, and all the things necessary for life support. So does everything have to be done in the greenhouse? Is it some sort of a dome? Yeah. So is there a long-term possibility of terraforming?

Yes, long-term. If you just warm Mars up, there's a lot of frozen CO2 and frozen water that would liquefy. The CO2 would densify the atmosphere. The liquid water would form oceans and lakes. So, basically a lot of frozen water and frozen CO2 on Mars. And how would you warm it up? Well, there's a few ways to tackle that problem. That'll obviously be up to the Martians, but I don't know.

You could have giant solar reflectors. You could create like miniature suns over the poles or something like that. What? create like miniature suns over the poles or something like that. What? Well, it can be gravitationally contained, but you could just have a, just have, you know, have it just do giant thermonuclear explosions every few seconds.

The sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky. If you want to know what like, hey, what is it like to be exposed to thermonuclear radiation go stand outside in the middle of the day my 10 year old said if space has no air and fire needs air how does the sun stay burning yeah she loves to do that she looks at you like she's super smart hmm right that's a good question little one yeah there's a lot of interesting things about the sun. The sun is converting, I think, four or five million tons of mass to energy every second.

So, you know, E equals mc squared. So that's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah, and it's not even a big sun. It's not even a big sun. So, you know, four or five megatons per second, every second, every day, for billions of years. So what kind of engineering would be involved in creating a mini sun that you hover above the poles? So, I mean, the sun is a gravitationally contained reaction.

So you need a lot of mass. So, if you don't have a lot of mass, you can just, that's why you'd have like, explosions, just like little, little pulsing things,

like a pulsing sun. And, you know, some people have like said, well, if you added up all the, the nuclear weapons on Earth, that's, that's,

that wouldn't even be that, that much. I'm like, yeah, because they're small. We can make way bigger nuclear, nuclear bombs than the current ones. It's like, what's the point? They said, well, if you want to make an artificial sun,

then you just use a lot more hydrogen. That would be something. They would have to construct on Mars? Yeah, yeah. And then figure out a way to launch it? Yeah. Jesus. Honestly, not that hard. I mean, they could do this without

even having computers. Back in the day. But you could also do it with solar reflectors. I don't know. Somehow, if you want to make it look like Earth, you've got to warm it up. Right. So,

in hundreds of years from now, or whatever it would take, people would eventually right you know um so so in hundreds of years from now or whatever it would take people would eventually you know figure some way out yeah you could terraform mars and make it be like earth um and we could bring we could take the life from earth and breathe life into mars um there's nothing living on the surface of Mars. Yeah, nothing. It's cold. Yeah. There's a lot of ultraviolet. The combination of being cold and having a lot of ultraviolet radiation, that's the killer combo. Just being cold, then bacteria could survive.

Or just UV, but warm, the bacteria can repair themselves. But if they're frozen and they get blasted with the UV, they can't repair themselves. They're frozen. And isn't the speculation that at one point in time Mars did have an atmosphere? Mars was different than it is now? Yeah. different than it is now? Yeah.

It once had quite a dense atmosphere and it would have seemed most likely to have had oceans and lakes. Now they're frozen and covered in dust. And the that orange color you see is iron oxide. So there's quite a lot of

iron, just rust. You know, for a while there they thought, thought well maybe mars was like some ancient civilization you know do you remember the face on mars that they sure um there's a guy that was completely he was fascinating um richard hoagland is that his name see if that's the guy's name but But he's, with all due respect, out of his fucking mind. Sure. And he was making all these incredibly bizarre connections, like measurements from this rock to that rock, and using all this mathematics to prove that this symmetry was impossible in nature,

and this was all created by civilization. This face was like some sort of ancient shrine to whatever being lived there before. There it is. Monuments to Mars. Richard Hoagland. That's the guy's name. I used to listen to him on Art Bell. It's crazy. It was just, I mean, I don't know if he's schizophrenic.

Maybe he's just smarter than all of us. But Jamie's shaking his head. I think aspirationally you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence, not inversely proportionate to the evidence. Well, he was definitely inversely proportionate to the evidence. It was very strange. It was one of those ones where I had to stop listening because I felt like I was going crazy too.

Yeah. He was so invested in this idea again maybe he's right i don't think so no i doubt it well then they they had subsequent voyages where they made high resolution scans of the exact same area and it looked very different without the same shadows it just just looked like rocks. Yeah, Mars kind of looks like, I don't know, like some Arizona desert or something like that. What do they think happened? They think it was hit?

Like an asteroid hit? Well, everything got hit with light asteroids over time. Do they think that that's what killed the environment there? The atmosphere? Well, the atmosphere, so Mars has lower gravity than Earth and it does not have a strong magnetic field. So over time, this is over billions of years, the atmosphere will be gradually eroded by the solar wind and having less gravity.

So the smaller you are, generally the less atmosphere you're going to have. So generating an atmosphere on Mars, it would eventually erode, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of years, billions of years type of thing. Plenty of time to figure things out for us yeah yeah yeah so but do you think that mars is their atmosphere eroded quicker because it's just smaller just that's a factor yeah i mean

like if you look at say uh asteroids or you know they don't really have like cirrus is a pretty big asteroid but doesn't really have an atmosphere the moon don't really have like cirrus is pretty big asteroid but doesn't really have an atmosphere the moon doesn't really have an atmosphere so that it doesn't have an atmosphere technically there are there's a tiny amount of rarefied gas but it's not a real atmosphere did you pay attention at all to uh the the guy was the chair of the harvard astronomy department avi lobe who uh it was recently there was a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our solar system in 2017 was possibly extraterrestrial in origin.

Yeah. The, whatever, your mommy burger. Yeah, they don't, he thinks that there's a 90, apparently there's a 91% possibility that it was shaped like a. Your mama asteroid. Yeah. Ooh.

Umau Mau. It was a Hawaiian name. Okay. Yeah. It was a Hawaiian name. It sounds like your mama. Yes. It was like your mama.

Yeah. Umau Mau or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was discovered in Hawaii. Sure. So they gave it a Hawaiian name.

Yeah. Well, anyway, so I think a fundamental test of human civilization is, are we going to become a multi-planet civilization before something cataclysmic happens? Now, to be clear, I'm pretty optimistic about the future. So I'm not thinking, like, we're, you know, civilization's about to end anytime soon. But there's a chance that it will. Like,

Stephen Hawking, before he died, was like, he thought it was, like, around 1% a century, something like that, I believe. So, you know, it's not it's not like, you know, 1% chance over 100 years, it's like 99% chance of making it. So I think he's probably about right.

So 1% chance per century. So as the centuries go on, there's less of a chance? No, it's more of a chance. So because we become more intelligent, more resources, and possibly the ability to escape Earth. Yeah, I mean, it's the ability to escape Earth. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I don't know, Russian roulette with, you know. Asteroids.

99 barrels are empty. Yeah. Click, click, click. Eventually. It's going to get us. Yeah. You said something that I thought was really interesting, the meaning of life. Do you think there is a meaning to life?

Well, I think arguably the meaning of life is to understand the nature of the universe and figure out what the meaning of life is. So, like I said, I think we don't quite know the right questions to ask. But if we learn more about the universe, if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to ask the questions about the answer that is the universe. But when you keep going with that, where does it go?

I don't know. That's why if I knew, we're like, okay, case closed. We can die now. The problem I always have with that is that, do I want there to be a meaning to this? Because it gives sense of purpose to finite life forms.

I think there's a lot to understand about the universe that we don't yet understand. Have a beverage. So let's see, alcohol is our one. What's our two? Our two? Well, I don't think marijuana is legal in Texas.

And the last time, I don't have to remind you, there was problems involved. Yes. Ultimately not, though, right? Well, it's like temporary. All that's soothed over, right? Didn't it? CBD is legal here. CBD doesn't do anything.

Does it? No. I think that's fake. Well, no. No, it definitely does something for inflammation. It does? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, how much CBD do you have to have before you notice it?

Well, physically or... Yeah. Yeah. Physically, you don't have to have a lot. physically or yeah yeah physically you don't have to have a lot physically cbd works great for people with arthritis and people with uh like sore muscles and things like that cheers yeah no cbd definitely works for that but as far as like psychoactive effects not much it relieves anxiety for people okay um it helps people sleep especially when it it's combined with things like melatonin, you know, things along those lines. But it doesn't get you high.

Yeah. No. People do mix CBD with THC for muscle creams, though, and that doesn't get you high either, but it increases the effectiveness. Okay. Yeah. There's some creams that are really good that people like that have THC and CBD in it. All right. So you have sunscreen or something, and then... I mean, why not?

Just throw it in there, you know? Why not? Yeah. Well, it's just great for soreness. You just smell like weed all day. Yeah. It doesn't smell like weed though It doesn't

No, no Some of it does though Some of it That's the thing about anything that's unregulated, right? Like hippies are making it That's always the problem Quality control Yeah, no quality control

That's the problem with edibles They're made by a bunch of crazy people Cooking them up in some, you know Chula Vista apartment somewhere You really don't know what's in there. Anyway, so we've got to make Life Multiplanetary before it's too late. Yeah. I think that makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, why not? Also, it's going to be fun and exciting. And even if you don't go, you can just watch it on TV. Yeah. Yeah. It's still cool. I mean, like, yeah.

I mean, you know, it's not like, you know, attendance is mandatory here. You know, and it'll be dangerous and people might die. Well, for sure they're going to die. Yeah. Like, sometimes, you'd be surprised. Some people think that the idea is like, oh, Mars is going to be an escape hatch, some luxury resort for rich people. I'm like, no, it's like high probability of death relative to Earth. It's's long journey

food's probably not great uh a lot of hard work no sunlight yeah it's i mean it's like it sounds like you know shackleton's out for the antarctic where it's like it's like it's dangerous it's a long journey the food's bad you know might not make it back but if you do it'll be glorious yeah it's interesting how much people adapt when they're faced with a real problem like if we knew that we only had a certain amount of time left like we knew an asteroid was absolutely headed our way and it was going to kill most of the people on this planet you would see people scrambling for something like that yeah like look uh i moved to texas just to get the fuck out of la because i felt like that was dying i was like we got to get out of here and i never thought i was going to move out of la like that yeah it

happened very quickly but people adapt when they realize that this is you have to do something yeah if we had to do something we had to go to Mars and had to set up shop there. Yeah, I think it's important for the future of humanity and consciousness, and like I said, we want to get past the Great Fulter. It might turn out that when we're out there exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one-planet civilizations, and they just never made it to the next planet.

Ghost towns. Yeah. Strange ghost towns of like, you know, it's like if you, you know, we're like we'll go through the archaeological ruins of like ancient Babylonians and Sumerians and like, you know, and like trying to decode their writing, like what the hell linear be and hieroglyphics. Isn't that a problem with us now that everything has become digital everything's stored on microchips and hard drives and and if something

catastrophic happened yeah and you don't have the ability to access all that stuff we're kind of starting from scratch yeah absolutely um it's kind of problematic that things aren't chilled in stone you know they used to be chilled in stone we're like okay now you know it's kind of problematic that things aren't chiseled in stone. You know, they used to be chiseled in stone. And we're like, okay, now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone. And stone lasts a long time. Yeah. So we still have a lot of writing from the ancient Romans because they chiseled a lot of stuff in stone. Or the Egyptians. Or the Egyptians, yeah, exactly.

Man, the Egyptians really went to town with the hieroglyphics. Or even the Sumerians, you know, the cuneiforms carved into clay tablets. Absolutely. Yeah. But us? I kind of wish they'd said more. Yeah, exactly. Like us.

And, like, our stuff is, yeah, it's not going to last for a long time. I mean, there's sort of aspects of us, of our stuff that would last for a long time. But a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever. of stuff that would last for a long time. But a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever. Yeah. You know, when we did the Falcon Heavy test flight, normally when aerospace companies do like a rocket test flight,

they put something boring on, like a concrete block, because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite. And so I was like, well, we've got to do something. That's not very inspiring. You know, concrete blocks are one of the least inspiring things to do. So I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, hey, well, what about putting a Tesla on that? You know, I was like, hey, that sounds like a good idea. I'm going to go in my garage.

I'll put that one in there. So I put my car on the rocket, and then we wanted to see how far the rocket could go so like just you know floor it let's go maximum delta b so i thought it would probably blow up and i had this image of like a man like you know this thing could go could blow up on the pad and then there's like a tire bouncing down the road and then the tesla logo just lands bam right in front of the camera it's like one of the things that like like, this is a movie, you know. That's kind of one of the possible outcomes. And unfortunately, it didn't blow up, and now my car is orbiting Mars.

Wow. Yeah. So now in that car, so now hopefully somebody in the alien civilizations in the future could find that, because it'll be, like, around for, like, millions of years. I've seen the images of it with the... That fake it looks that's how you know it's real is that how you know it's real yeah how do the images get to us it's it's the images are too lame to be to be to be fake uh or i mean they look good but you for example the the dynamic range of the camera is not enough to pick up the stars and the vehicle, you know, because, like, things are very bright in space.

There's no, like, we don't quite realize it, but in the atmosphere, like, the atmosphere is making everything a little fuzzy. And in space, things are super crisp and super, like, really reflective. Yeah. There it is. Yeah, exactly. So how is that getting to us? The image. Yeah, like really reflective. Yeah. There it is. Yeah, exactly. So how is that getting to us? The image. Yeah, with a radio.

Wow. So the rocket's got a... How many megapixels is that image? Not that many, actually. Really? No, I mean, it's probably a couple megapixels, something like that. So like an old flip phone. Yeah.

It's mostly just driven by the, what's the bandwidth of a video signal? So what do you have? These are frame grabs from the video signal. And where's the camera that's taking this photo? Oh man, our director of photography is awesome. But I mean, when this thing gets sent to us, what is taking an image of this?

There's a camera on a stick. Really? Yeah. And it didn't break off? No. I mean, we thought it might, but there's a camera. I mean, it's kind of like a fairly wide angle. And so the camera is actually not that far from the car.

What is that one up there that shows the whole car? Is that fake? That's fake. Is that real? That's real. Wow. Is this Don't Panic on the screen? Yes.

Don't Panic. Speaking of the Roadster, when is that thing going to be available? Next Generation Roadster. So we're finishing the engineering of it this year. And so hopefully start shipping them next year Really? Yeah And we're going to throw some rocket technology in that car

Yeah, I've heard about that What does that mean? So at a minimum it would be It would hover? I want it to hover I'm trying to figure out how to make this thing hover Without, you know, killing people Right, yeah, good call Yeah, exactly I thought maybe we could make it hover make this thing hover without, you know, killing people. Right.

Yeah. Good call. Yeah, exactly. I thought, like, maybe we could make it hover, but, like, not too high. You know? So, like, maybe it can hover, like, a meter above the ground or something like that. You know, like, if you plummet, you blow out the suspension, but you're not going to die. Oh.

Maybe you're six feet. I don't know. Six feet. Probably okay. You're not going to die either feet probably okay you're not gonna die either probably not probably not so if we just put a height limit on it probably probably fine and would it be able to travel while it's hovering yeah so you'll be able to go six feet off the ground and go how fast well uh you go pretty fast but the you're going to be time limited. Right.

Like a jet. There's going to be a super high pressure, like ultra high pressure air bottle. Oh. So the standard Roadster would have like two back seats, two like kid seats, you know, in the back. Like small seats like a back of a Porsche or something. or if you get the, I don't know, the SpaceX option package, then in that place where the two rear seats are would be as a high-pressure carbon-overwrapped pressure vessel. So, you know, I don't know, 10,000 PSI or something like that.

And then a bunch of thrusters. And so, like, at minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down, you know, James Bond style, and there's a rocket thruster behind it. And that gives you three tons of thrust. Oh, for acceleration. Yeah. So that would be on the ground.

That would be on the ground. This thing would move like a bat out of hell. Jesus Christ. But it already goes zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds, right? That's the sedan with the four-door. What? The new Model S Plaid that we start shipping next month

or this month is... We just tested it on the Motor Trend spec. 0-60 is 1.96 seconds. I have never driven my Tesla and go, why isn't this thing a little fucking faster? Yeah. I mean, the one I have, the Model S, is 2.4, right?

Yeah. Which is preposterous. It's so crazy. I take people in it. Yeah, they've never experienced anything like it. No. In their entire life. My friend Tim Dillon is like, so what's the deal with these Teslas?

And I go, you want to freak out? You want to see something fucking crazy? I picked him up at the improv. We drove to the comedy store. Yeah. And I took him up Laurel Canyon. Are you ready? Yeah. And I never take it out of ludicrous mode by the way I keep it in ludicrous mode all the time I stomped on the gas well not the gas the accelerator and he started screaming what the fuck yeah

it's what the fuck this is crazy it's crazy it's crazy yes so this is significantly faster than that just just for the Plaid. Yeah. So the new Plaid, yeah. It's a half second quicker to 60. Pretty close, yeah. Yeah. I mean, every millisecond really matters when you start getting that fast.

I thought Plaid was going to ship later in the year. Yeah, we managed to make it go faster. Oh, okay. We plaid to plaid and the plaid has a wider wheelbase too right it does yeah and so it handles better is that the idea behind that yeah it does have better handling um like we're trying to get to on the nobog ring get to like the low seven minute mark really yeah um and then you know with further improvements i think we could bust seven minutes on the Nürburgring

which would be a pretty wicked outcome. What is the record right now at the Nürburgring? Is it the Porsche 918? What has the record? Something crazy like that right? There's no production car. I think no production car has gotten under seven. Really? As far as I know.

And even the ones that are close that they say are production or they they do a bunch of changes right like change the tires yeah aerodynamics yeah yeah but it's like i think there's potential to have a car that as delivered can beat seven seconds on on nevergreen isn't it funny that there's this one track that's the gold standard for almost all vehicles like if you look at like yeah road and track or motor trend do you want to find out what how badass this new sports car is it's like what number does it do in the nerve ring well yeah now never agreeing to be totally frank is not representative of normal no it's not normal yeah um it's it's it's the hottest one to you can't game it you know right so um but i think for everyday driving it's the acceleration that

really matters like it's like you know you're at a you know the light goes green boom who's across the intersection fastest um the new plat will do uh you know a sub 9 second quarter mile and with it with an exit track speed in a quarter mile of 155 miles an hour and it's a sedan yeah it's a four-door it can hit 60 miles an hour before it's cleared the intersection that's insane insane yeah Wow it's uncomfortably fast is that steering wheel legit? Yeah. Is it legal?

Yeah. I mean, they use a yoke in Formula One. They don't have a steering wheel. But you're not on the highway in a Formula One car. Yeah, yeah. I like driving like this. Like resting my hand on the top of the wheel. Well, I think autopilot's getting good enough that you won't need to drive most of the time. Unless you really want to.

I like driving. Okay. Yeah. I use autopilot sometimes. I mean, but most of the time I drive. I find it's like you can rest your hand on your knee, that kind of thing, and it works great. Anyway, it looks awesome. It does look cool.

Yeah. Yeah, it's very spaceship-y. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And all the stuff is. It does look cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's very spaceship-y. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And all the stuff is on the steering wheel now, too, right? The blinkers and all that jazz. Even the horn is like a little button, right?

Yeah. And the horn is already kind of the center of the steering wheel anyway. Is it still the center of the steering wheel as well? Yeah, yeah. But isn't it a button? I thought on the yoke there's a button for the horn. Yeah, I... Which you have to really...

I used to have a car that had a button for the horn. I think it was an Acura NSX. Okay. And it had, instead of the center hub being the horn, there was a button. Yeah. I never remembered it. Well, with the...

There are no yokes. Sorry, there are no stalks. There's a yoke, but there's no stalks. So the car, for example, will default to driving in the... Like, if you just get in, when you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator,

it will figure out whether you want to go backwards or forwards. That's crazy. How's that possible? Well, it just looks and sees, is there an obstacle in front? Okay, you probably don't want to get it, so you probably want to go backwards. Right, but what if you want to go backwards and there's nothing in front of you?

Yeah, what if it's ambiguous? Right. So it would default to the inverse of whatever you started. And then you can just swipe on the screen and change direction. But isn't it easier to just hit like that way? Yeah, you'll see. It's like you almost never...

Do you do it? Yeah, yeah. So this is something you've driven and it's intuitive. Yeah, once you get rid of the stalk and have the car figure it out, it's annoying to have a stalk after that really it's annoying you're talking to a guy who likes manual gearboxes sure i like i like going yeah i mean i like to drive on manual too it's fun yeah it's cool yeah there's different kinds of cool though like i uh the one what i tell people about the tesla i go listen i love cars i love all kinds of cars but the tesla makes other cars seem dumb it does it makes them seem dumb yeah it just it's so fast it's so quiet everything about it the navigation screen it's so

big like why wouldn't it be big yeah it's better it's better to be big yeah it keeps the software keeps getting upgraded the navigation system the ability to just press that button and say navigate to and then it goes on the internet and finds out what you're looking for and finds it restaurants yeah whatever you're looking for it's fucking amazing oh there's like a little uh tip for the tesla if you just uh swipe down on the navigate button it automatically figures out if you want to go to home or work and navigates there so if you're if you're at at home and obviously you know how to get to work but do you know the fastest way to get to work mm-hmm taking circuit days type technology yeah take it like what's that on a traffic

adjusted basis what's the best way to go to go to work but how does it adjust like what is it getting a data from it's downloading traffic data from the internet okay so look ways uses traffic data from the internet plus user input. So, like, it takes an extra beat to get the traffic data from the internet. The idea of Waze is that you're getting it from users in real time. Like, there's a car accident. People program it in. Hey, folks, there's a fucking car accident here.

And then you get it right away. Whereas on the internet, you're a couple beats behind. Yeah, I mean, we get the traffic data from Google okay oh so it is for ways because well ways and google is slightly different but they have similar data sets yeah yeah yeah so basically like let's say there's an accident on the way to work or road closure or something like that uh we were helpful to know that before you encountered it so um if you just swipe down it'll automatically navigate to work and then also the the autopilot will work basically seamlessly on the way to work like we have the the beta out and beta is working pretty well it's going to get super good and it'll basically be able to drive you all the way to work um automatically you don't even like

you basically just get in and it'll assume you're going to work if it's Monday to Friday in the morning. Or you could say program maybe go to school, drop the kids off at school, then go to work. You just do this stuff automatically. You want to take the perspective of all input is error.

If you have to do something, it's an error. Make the error smaller. All input is error unless it's error smaller. All input is error, unless it's a game. All input is error. Well, that's the other thing, too. It has games. Like, you can play chess. Yeah, you can play chess.

We've got the backgammon with the aesthetic described in Lost. JJ Abrams asked for backgammon, so we put backgammon in with the aesthetic described in Lost. J.J. Abrams asked for it at Backgammon, so we put Backgammon in with the Lost aesthetic. It's got this really fun game called Polytopia. I would say that's my top recommendation for any game in the car is play Polytopia. What is that? It's a real fun strategy game.

You'll see, it's the top of the list. This is not something you can play while you're driving. Well, I mean, you're not supposed to play it while you're driving. That would be illegal. But will it work while you're on autopilot? So if you're on autopilot, can you also play chess? Well, you have to tap a button that says you're the passenger. Oh.

Kind of like Waze. Okay. Kind of like Waze. Okay. Kind of like Waze. Yeah, so it's open for interpretation. So if you are some chess freak, you could literally play chess on your way to work. Yeah. Wow. I mean, in the future, as the car becomes more and more autonomous,

it's going to be really about entertainment. Entertainment, productivity. Yeah. So it's just probably entertainment first and foremost, and then productivity as well. Do you have specific things that you do on your way? Do you listen to books on tape? Do you listen to music?

Yeah, I usually listen to music. Oh, those fucking pirate songs you like. The Sea Shanties? I thought you were joking about that until you played them. Yeah. Pretty catchy. They're pretty catchy. That's what's crazy.

I started researching Sea Shanties. It got stuck in your head. I did not know that it was really a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie. Yeah. Jamie, do you know? Do you know about the sea shanties?

Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually something really appealing about people singing in harmony. Yeah. It's actually way better than you think. It's also like it's got like a weird Renaissance fair type thing to it. You feel like you're all together in this old-timey thing you know pretending yeah very

strange yeah it's very odd so um it seems like one of the top reasons to be a pirate would be we have sea shanties and we have tropical tapirns and I don't know. Cool outfits. Cool outfits. Yeah. You get to dress up. Yeah. You get to dress weird.

Yeah. If you lose your leg, they got pegs for you. Yeah. You got a parrot. Yeah. Parrot. How did that happen? Now, what about the truck?

When is that thing going to happen? Cyber truck? Yeah. So we're building a big factory here in austin that's where we'll make the cyber truck yeah now did you decide to do this in austin from the jump or did along the way you decide to move the cyber factory the cyber truck factory here yeah well uh frankly i was just well austin is a bit like mini cal many California so I was like asking the team in California all right where where do you want to what's your top choice or you know next big U.S.

factory location like where do you want to spend time and uh the number one choice was Austin uh and then I was like okay okay, okay, what's number two? Silence. Yeah. So many California here in Austin. It is a lot, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hesitate talking about it because I've talked about it too much.

But it's very utopian. Yeah. Yeah. I think Austin is going to be the biggest boomtown that America has seen in half a century. I think it's a great response to the fucked up government in some of the other cities. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, yeah. I think we do need to make sure that Austin does not, you know, people moving from California don't inadvertently recreate the issues that they have moved, that caused them

to move in the first place. Yes. So. The balance of Austin is a blue city and a red state. And it's almost like it kind of has to stay red.

Not kind of has to. I think it does. You need the certain amount of freedoms, but then you need the philosophical, like there's a, there's a bend to Austin that's very progressive and open-minded and artistic.

And the restaurants are amazing. The people are really cool. But it needs to be sort of embraced by guns and God and freedom. That's part of the whole mixture that makes it work. And that's – it's kind of – there mixture that makes it work and that's you know it's it's kind of there's a there's a metaphor of life in there somewhere you know yeah that it's protected by the rest of the philosophy of texas which is a wild crazy place that has more tigers in private collections than in all of the wild of the world really yes i had a bit about it in my 2016 special

texas a lot of tigers man has more tigers in captivity than all of the wild of planet earth okay yeah well these are people's yards no bullshit you can you can in your place wherever you live you could get a fucking zebra no like i have a friend who lives out in dripping springs he saw a zebra okay a zebra got loose there's elk out there all right wild elk just roaming around somebody had an elk jump the fence now there's an elk out there there's axis deer in my neighborhood i saw an axis team i didn't see it my wife saw it She described it to me I know what it is

She's like It was like It had white spots Like a fawn But it was really big I'm like That's an axis deer So there's axis deer

Yeah They're from India Okay And tigers eat them Okay Wow But these animals Are

They're wild here Okay Because people bought them And they put them in the yard And they jump the fence This place is crazy but that's why it works the reason why it works is because people have so much freedom yeah and then you have the university of texas you have austin which is this long history of art and music stevie ray vaughan and sick street and so many great musicians have come from here that it's got both of these things together. It's got this

wild freedom and they embrace both parts of it. That's the cool thing about this place. Yeah, absolutely. I've never felt more at home. I fucking love it here. It's a cool city. Like I said, it's going to be the biggest boom town in the American scene in

50 years. I agree. Yeah. I think so. Mega boom. Comedy clubs are moving here like crazy. They're moving here left and right. Cap City's reopening. The Creek in the Cave just announced they're going to open here.

That's cool. I'm trying to open up a place here. There's other clubs I'm trying to open up here. Comedians are moving in here by the droves. It's a wild place. Yeah, well, I went and saw you and Dave Chappelle. That was great. That was fun. That's a wild place yeah well i you know when so uh you and and dave uh chapelle it was that was great that was fun that's a great venue yeah we did that monday and tuesday too that's cool it's it's just there's something special going on it just feels fun it feels fun to be a part of

the escape from this wretched dreariness of of you know the covid pandemic it was just like this horrible feeling of having no power and no autonomy and being controlled by the government and being told what to do and it didn't seem logical and you're watching all these businesses fail and you're like there's got to be a better way and like there is no better way wear an extra mask three masks wear three masks and stay indoors and holy shit. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't make any sense. No. You can't talk people out of a good panic.

They sure love it. They love panic porn. Yeah. Fear porn is like people's favorite indulgence. Yeah, that's why I say rule number one, just like Douglas Adams, don't panic. But there's always people that don't. And those people, they get together and they take solace in the fact there's other people that also

don't want to buy into this shit. Sure. You know? Yeah. Anyway, so Orson's cool. So the Cybertruck. Yeah, so we're going to build it. Our factory's only like two miles

away from the airport. Oh. Probably shouldn't tell people that. No, I mean, going to build it. Our factory is only like two miles away from the airport. Oh. Probably shouldn't tell people that. No, I mean, you can literally drive. You can see it from the highway. Do you anticipate visitors? Sure. I mean, we'll offer tours and that kind of thing.

Will you offer, like, if someone wants to come and get their truck from the factory and drive it off the floor? You bet. Ooh, that's exciting. Yeah. That's exciting. We've got a lot of land. Yeah. No, I know you.

About 2,500 acres right next to the airport. That's fucking cool. Yeah. That's amazing. It's cool. So when you're designing this Cybertruck, you had your launch and you showed the shape of it. There was a lot.

I sent you a picture. I remember I sent you a picture. I was like, this is fucking cool. And you're like, that's not real. And I was like, oh, okay. There's a lot like i sent you a picture i remember i sent you a picture i was like this is fucking cool and you're like that's not real and i was like oh okay like there's a lot of fake pictures before the the initial launch oh yeah you tricked a lot of people because people thought it was going to look much even though the the picture that i sent you was pretty fucking cool yeah what you designed was is that ultimately going to be what it really looks like it's going to be what it really looks like?

Is it going to be that shape? Has there been any revisions? No, that's pretty much what it'll look like with very small differences. You know, we adjusted the size a few percent. In what way? Well, it's, I don't know, like around 3% smaller. Why did you decide to do that? Well, you know, it would be a couple inches too big for the tunnel.

Oh, okay. For the boring tunnel. Well, I mean, we did actually drive through the boring tunnel in a cyber truck with Jay Leno, which was hair-raising. Because it was a little bit too big? It was pretty snug. Oh, no. Imagine if you killed Jay Leno. Yeah, that'd be awkward.

How do we ever explain that? He's the biggest petrolhead ever, and he even loves your car. Yeah. The Cybertruck is like CGI in real life. You're standing right in front of it, and it looks like this is special effects. You're standing right in front of it and it looks like this is special effects.

So that's cool. It'll change the look of the roads. It'll look like anything. It looks like alien technology. Yeah, and when is that coming out? We'll have probably limited production end of this year

and volume production hopefully next year. Have you ever considered something alternative to air-inflated tires? Have you seen some of these alternatives that have essentially spaces in between the upper wall and the wheel? Have you thought about that? Yeah, we haven't found a tire that –

because you've got to worry about road noise you've got to take out potholes and bumps you've got to have good grip but you also want to have low rolling resistance so that you get good range those are a lot of

things to try to put into one tire then if you also say and it can't have air, it's like, this is hard. But you're talking, I'm talking to a guy who's putting people on Mars. You can't figure out an airless tire?

It's an incremental constraint. I'm not saying there won't be such a thing. I think there will be, to be precise. Because it seems like We've just gotten way too comfortable With this idea that tires blow out And you get flats It's very annoying

Flats are annoying Yeah Very annoying Yeah Non-sport tires by the way Are much less likely to have flats Sure They have more bounce

Yeah Let's say you hit the edge of a pothole If you've got more rubber wall You've got a longer way to go to have flats because they're more bounce. Yeah. Like you, let's say you hit, you hit the edge of a pothole. If you got more rubber wall, you know, you got a longer way to go before you pinch the tire. So, um, sport tires tend to have more flats.

Um, and especially in LA potholes, that's the worst. There was one particular pothole on sunset Boulevard. It would just take out so many model S like a boom, boom, both sides of the car. Really? Yeah. Damn.

Yeah, Steven Spielberg was actually one. It's like, hey, Steven Spielberg is like two tires went. I was like, God damn it, I know that pothole. I feel like you can pay to fix that. I, I know that pothole. I feel like you can pay to fix that. I mean, Fix that pothole. It seems like, that's actually,

it would be like, man, there sure are a lot of taxes in California for roads this bad. Yeah. The place is a mess. Yeah. So,

ultimately, one day, that's a possibility of having some sort of an airless tire because I've seen prototypes. I've never seen one on an actual car and physical in in real life yeah i think we're the technology is gradually getting there um and i think for something like a robo taxi where you want to

have the tires last for a long time and not go flat um it's gonna make a lot of sense yeah um but other than that essentially most of what we saw in the demo is the same. It's still going to have... Oh, yeah. There was the issue with the glass when it accidentally shattered. How annoying was that? That was shocking. I mean, we literally spent hours beforehand with lots of people throwing steel balls at the window. Right. I mean, we must have thrown at least a dozen people must have thrown steel balls at the window.

At the same window, though? Yeah, same damn window. Isn't that the problem? Yeah, it turns out that might be the problem. If you keep throwing steel balls, eventually it's going to break. And I did ask Frans to really wind up and give it all. I should have like, oh, take it easy. Give me a fake wind up.

Yeah, we don't need the fast ball. But I did ask for the fast ball. And I'm like, okay, let's go for the slightly slower ball. Do you think it was because you guys were hitting the side wall with a sledgehammer first? Yeah, that could be... We're trying to figure out how the hell this thing broke because we were just bouncing steel balls off it all day. And we think

possibly what might have happened there was that hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it. And once you crack the base of it, it loses all its strength. And then it would just have a hairline fracture and then you hit it anywhere and it's going to shatter. Did you recreate that?

We didn't. It's also hard with test glass. When you actually do production glass it's much more robust than uh demo glass uh because production glass you you you know um you're like demo glass you just can't you you have to have like massive tools and ovens and everything to to make the production glass it's it's like and if you don't you know that takes a while to do so the production glass is always better than than the than demo glass nonetheless it should have worked um and it was probably because we racked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel ball at it but but uh it will be bulletproof to a handgun now why did

you decide to do all that make it bulletproof and make it like you could hit it with a sledgehammer like what what was the motivation to make it different than just like a model s i mean i think you know it's like what's cool about a truck trucks are tough and like okay what's tougher than a truck a tank what about a tank from the future okay now you have a tank from the future okay yeah that's bulletproof yeah and how's that compared to you know it's way tougher than a regular truck like it's fucking cool yeah there's no doubt having a character from the future that should be like halo with a rocket launcher in the back have you thought about doing something like that somebody's gonna do it for sure for military use yeah seems like it i mean i don't know that sounds like it would be fun.

Cruising around the field and lobbing, shooting rockets. Now, is there ever a possibility that these things are going to be solar-powered? Is that someday? Is the solar technology going to get to a point where... It's kind of a surface area issue. I think we could possibly put the cover of the truck bed,

put some solar cells in that. So if you just leave it out in the sun, you know, probably, you know, recharges a few miles a day type of thing. Oh, it would only be a few miles. But what about one day? Is it possible the technology could evolve to the point where they could extract more? No. No? Really? No. No? Really? No, so there's about one kilowatt per square meter of solar energy,

and then you're going to get probably 20%, 25% efficiency, so you've got 200 watts per square meter. And then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun, so at the right angles, basically, are you facing the sun or not? So when you add all those things up you say how many square meters can you really get and then uh how many watt hours per mile so it has basically if you could do 10 miles a day you'd be lucky really yeah and that's not going to change no wow that sucks it'd be cool if it just ran...

I mean, is it possible to make a car entirely of solar panels? Like the entire surface of it solar panels? Like in a place like L.A. or somewhere where it's never cloudy? And drive around in that thing? No. You're going to burn off energy faster than you can drive. If you don't drive that often, that's a different story. The only option is to have a solar paneled

home and extract the power that way and charge your car. A solar paneled house has a lot of area. You could possibly have some solar thing that unfurls that has a lot more surface area.

So when you park it at work or something like that, it can unfurl. It more surface area. So when you park it at work or something like that. Yeah. But it just needs area. Right. You know, so, like I said, think about like maybe 200 watts a square meter, you know, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like that.

Now, the range of the new cars is much longer. Yes. Like, what is the range of the standard Model S that's available right now? It's like 300 and... Yeah, 350, 360. I don't know. It's a lot. Actually, the new one, the new long-range Model S is over 400 mile range. The new one.

Even the old one. The old one was even 400 miles. The new one is 400 miles, too. But the Plaid will get you up to... So the current Plaid is going to be around 400 miles range. There's Plaid Plus. That's maybe a year from now. That'll be on the order of 500 miles.

That's a lot. I hear you drive 500 miles anyway. Well, if you drive it across country. Yeah. It's pretty rare. I mean like... Yeah. for most commuters yeah i mean even if you're driving 100 miles an hour you know like it's still you know uh you're still gonna drive drive for a while before you run out of battery and the truck what is the the cyber trucks range going to be? We have to pick a range, actually, for the initial version.

It'll be some number over 300 miles. Now, when you say pick a range, is it in terms of, like, the battery array that you put in? Yeah, so, like, what's the pack size? So, do you have to take into account, like, how much weight it's going to add add how long it's going to take to charge yeah um i mean there's like basically the things that matter are the frontal area times the drag coefficient uh for aerodynamic drag and then rolling resistance which is a function of mass and the tire efficiency um so this this has a big frontal area. It's not very aerodynamic. And the tires are not super...

They're not optimized for long range. It looks very aerodynamic, the truck. You actually don't want sharp angles? You don't want sharp angles. See, that's the problem. To me, I'd be like, yeah, that's slicing right through like a knife. You want it rounded. You want it rounded.

Yeah. So you want the air to have like smooth, like if you're a little air particle, you don't want the bumps. Right. You want it like smooth, just like you're driving over the car, no bumps. Right. Just, you know, easy going. the car. No bumps. Right. Just easy going. Sharp angles are bad for aero. So that aero will contribute to the lack of range.

So it'll minimize the range somewhat. It'll have a drag coefficient that's pretty good for a truck. Because enclosing the bed at an angle, that helps a lot. Like normal trucks going down the highway, it's like a barn door. Right, right. I mean. It's like having a parachute in the back. You might as well be flying it.

Yeah. It's like not far different from driving with a parachute. Yeah. So you can think of like drag as basically, it's like the integrated pressure profile over the car. So if you create a low pressure zone uh in the back of your car where you don't like fill in the gap like you're cruising through the air you're making a hole through the air and the air is trying to fill in the gap and if you've got a if you've got like a sharp you know sharp transition that into the truck bed it's like a it's a big low pressure

zone basically um and that's uh that's bad for drag hmm so having the slope back where that's got the the truck bed cover that's it that's very helpful but the sharp angles are not helpful so the range of that truck is yet to be determined you're trying to figure it out man it'll be over 300 miles what about the roadster um i mean some of these things we got to decide like what's actually the best product you know how much range you really want you know And if you ask people, they say, well, I want, you know, 600 miles range. I'm like,

okay, well, that means most of the time you're hauling around a battery pack you're not going to use. You know, so. And it'll slow you down.

Yeah. Inhibit handling. Yeah. It's like, I was like, why not have a car that's got a fuel tank that has 2,000 miles range?

You know, like, go and fill it up like once every six months or every three months or something. But people, they basically figured out actually carrying that much fuel around is not

worth it. So I think there's some of the stuff you can do for bragging rights, but then bragging rights are going to get old fast. So it's more like, what are you going to like on a day-to-day basis what's like what maximizes the area under the curve of owner happiness so it'll have enough range that you'll never have to worry about range let me put it that way okay yeah so somewhere you can drive from la to san francisco

no problem austin to Dallas, no problem. So a few hours of driving, easy. Many hours of driving. Many hours of driving, easy. Now, I heard you talk recently about the possibility of a van, like sprinter van style. Yeah. Now, a van, because you've got a big, flat area, that's actually where solar could start to make a little more sense. You know, because you could have a lot of area.

So for the roof. Yeah. And I think you'll also have, like, maybe a roof where, you know, it's solar, and then when it's stationary, like maybe... Awnings? Yeah, it, like, it goes out and, like and provides shade and maybe triples your area or something like that. Now, if you go like, okay, now triple the area and you've got a big flat surface. Now you could start having, maybe having charging enough that you, you know, you can start getting like 30 miles a day.

That kind of thing. Well, that's interesting because there's a lot of people that use those for camping. Yeah. Like my friend, Tom Green, you know, people that use those for camping. Yeah, yeah. Like my friend Tom Green. You know Tom Green? I think so, yeah. He used to be on MTV and actor and comedian. He's traveling across the country right now in one of those vans, like style van. I think he got a Ram, a Dodge Ram, Sprinter van style.

Yeah. And if you had something like that, and he has an awning that extends, and he's got a bunch of camping and does a podcast out of it. If you had something like that, and he has an awning that extends, and he's got a bunch of camping, and he does a podcast out of it. If you had something like that, it seems like... I think that would be great. You could have a van that just... Even if the apocalypse came around, you can still drive. Yeah.

And maybe you can even have some sort of an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent that could juice you up during the day or something along those lines. Yeah. There's options. For solar, it's all about area. Yeah. You know, call it 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot, something like

that. But I don't understand that there's no way that that's ever going to get more efficient? No. Really? No. Really? No. I mean, the sun, the solar incidence is, somewhat coincidentally, roughly 1,000 watts per square meter.

Or, you know, in a 10-foot by, sorry, like 10 square feet-ish, there's 1,000 watts. And then that includes all the heating and everything else. So then you have to say, okay, for a photoelectric effect, you're going to capture photons within a certain band, and you're not going to get them all, because basically what happens with the photon, you know, hits the electron and gets it to jump over a gap and run around to the other side. That's what happens with the photoelectric effect. It just hits a photon

with the right energy, hits the electron, electron gets excited, jumps over a gap in the semiconductor, and races around to the other side. And that creates an electric circuit. So you have to say, okay, well, how are you going to get those electrons at just the right energy? What kind of photon incoming energy you've got. And I was like, yeah, it basically pretty much tops out around 30% efficiency for a silicon system. Now, if you have triple junction gallium austenide, you can do a lot better, but that's very expensive.

So, but if you're talking about like... How much better could it do? Yeah, like mid-30s, maybe 40. A big price increase. But still not enough to actually power the entire vehicle. No, no, no. You're talking about... And you have to say like for practical purposes,

how's it going to do? Because you can't have like crazy money stuff in a car. When you say big money, how much more? Like 10 times the cost, at least. Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, you don't see anyone... I mean, the only thing...

There's satellites that have the triple junction galleon last night stuff, but frankly, even for satellites, it's questionable. For our satellites, for Starlink, we don't bother with that. That's another thing I want to talk to you about, Starlink. Starlink is semi-controversial, right? Because on one hand, people think it's great that you're going to provide the internet through these satellites that are flying around.

Sure. But astronomers and a lot of people that are amateur astronomers. It's mostly the amateurs. We've talked with the professional astronomers and assuaged their concerns but the amateurs are pissed yeah they're like you know

they don't know what they're talking about the pro level guys they know what they're talking about so we'll make sure that this is not like an obstacle to science so the obstacle would be the visual aspect of it right the seeing these

things flying around that would be it yeah honestly it's pretty hard to find our satellites once they've reached orbit it's hard to find them and we have trouble finding our satellites they were like uh, we got like... But I've seen pictures of them. Yeah. Well, first of all,

during the initial... Like, when they get tossed out of the rocket, briefly, they're tumbling. And so when they're tumbling, they'll twinkle. And then you'll see them. Oh, so this was just the initial... Yeah, it's just the initial

they just got tossed out of the upper stage deploys. The way we deploy them, we don't even really have a separation mechanism. You can see the video online but we kind of time down like a bundle of hay and then we let go of the rods that are holding this big bundle

of satellites down but before that we rotate the stage. So the stage is rotating and the satellites get just like if you took a deck of cards and they all get thrown out with because they're different amounts of rotational uh inertia so and what kind of bandwidth are these going to provide oh so yeah i mean i think long term long term we're talking about gigabit level. Really? Yeah, gigabit low latency. So you could play like a fast-twitch video game, download a movie super fast.

It would be great. And this is going to be global? Yeah. And is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially or will it require a series of satellites in different parts of the country or different parts of the world? Well, these satellites are actually zooming around the Earth at 25 times the speed of sound.

And there's currently 36 planes. So they're... I mean, to the satellite, the satellite feels like it's going in a circle, but the Earth's rotating underneath the satellite. So the ground track looks like a sine wave. So if you look from the ground perspective, the satellite's doing this sine wave with a peak at 53 degrees. And then there's 36 planes.

So they're all doing like a sine wave, you know, just offset by a little bit. you know, just offset by a little bit. And, but like I said, like space is real big. So they're not in danger of whacking into each other. It's super big up there. They don't really even get close. So anyway, so they were zooming around Earth. We got a lot of coverage, around 53 degrees.

And then we just started to launch some polar satellites, which will have an orbital inclination that allows them to kind of go, have visibility to the poles almost, you know. Who the fuck is that for? Just in case? I mean, best people that live up there, you know? I guess a few. Yeah.

Yeah. There's Antarctic Research Station. Okay. So they're going to have internet access. It's spectacular. They can play Halo up there. Yeah, they're going to go from having trash for internet to having incredible internet. Wow.

Yeah. So it'll be the whole world. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Everywhere on Earth will have high bandwidth, low latency internet. And will you be able to increase the bandwidth over time through software?

There's a lot that can be improved with software. But I should say that there's going to be a role for many different types of connectivity. So Starlink is great for low to medium population density. But the satellites are actually not great for high density urban. So you're actually better off having 5G for that. Really? Yeah. Because the other thing is that satellite is pretty far away right you know so you got that satellite

it's over 500 kilometers away even if it's right above you on a slant distance it's like could be

you know upwards of a thousand kilometers away so so this would be fantastic for rural areas yeah

it will provide some amount of connectivity in dense open environments. Equivalent to, like, what, 3G? No, it's more like, so think of, like, basically, like, what's the spot size of a satellite? Like, it's putting a beam down in a location, and how big is that beam? Like when it's putting a beam down in a location, and how big is that beam? And that's, so it's got a certain amount of bandwidth for that beam. And that beam is just like, it's a pretty big, like think of it like a flashlight or something. Right, and what is it?

It's the same thing. It's just. It reaches a few blocks? Like if you had a flashlight up there and you're pointing down, it's like, okay, you're going to illuminate an area. So a flashlight is just shooting out photons in the visible spectrum. We're shooting out photons in the KUK band. So much bigger wavelength than light, than visible light. So anyway, so these things, so we got a bunch of spot beams, basically. But these beams are giant by cellular standards.

Like they might be, you know, several miles diameter on that beam. So then you got, you know, for argument's sake, 10 mile diameter, 16 kilometer diameter beam. This is a lot of area. And all of the terminals in that area will get the same information because it's got that beam that's just going down to that spot. So whereas you could have like a 5G tower that's the ones that aren't causing corona. Kidding. 5G causes corona.

It's a fact. Oh, my God. Have you seen any of that stuff? That's one of the most disturbing things about the internet. Anyway, go ahead. Well, I mean, when technology is magic, then you don't know what to believe. Right. And when you're a moron, you believe anything.

Well, let's say, so a cell tower could have a range of, you know, a mile or, you know, a mile or, you know, mile slash one and a half kilometers. It basically could have like 1% the area of a satellite beam. So like if you had something that was, you know, one mile or, if I can say, kilometer or 10, it's going to be the square of that. That is the area. So satellites are great for low to medium density. 5G is ideal for high density.

I see. Yeah. And also because you could distribute the towers every mile or so easily and dress them up like trees. That always bothers me. I think they should do better at the fake trees. I feel like, come on, somebody doesn't care enough. You could definitely have a way better fake tree than that. They're so bad.

They're so bad. They look terrible. Who are they tricking? No one. No one. I'm like, what is this farce? They're offensive They're more offensive than the most ridiculous fake tits You know like the big ones

That look like basketballs They have no shape That resembles a breast at all Yeah There's something weird about them too It's like I'm not offended by a tower That is the fake there's something weird about them too. It's like, I'm not offended by a tower. What is that?

That's a fucking stupid thing. That is the fake. It's true. Well, the Christmas tree part at the bottom was kind of sweet. You could put ornaments on it. Is that one at the top right? That palm tree one? Is that fake? No, that's a good fake if that's a...

The left side, Jamie? Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Scroll. Keep scrolling. The palm tree one looks pretty good. Is that real? Yeah.

Wow, that's kind of not bad. Okay. That's not bad. Yeah, that one looks pretty good. Is that real? Yeah. Wow, that's kind of not bad. Okay. That's not bad. Yeah, that one's pretty good. It's not bad. Yeah, if you were driving by that, that wouldn't be offensive. Yeah. But the one in the middle's not bad either.

That's kind of a pine tree looking thing. It looks like some sort of demented Christmas tree. That's a tower? Go back to the one you just had, that far left. That's probably the most impressive. The one on the left-hand side. The far left that's probably the most impressive the one on the left hand side the the far left one because if you had like a forest full of those like yeah true you would just go these are just like weirdly uh trimmed trees yeah it's not that hard to have a fake tree

you could definitely a little bit of effort i don't need that you know just like i don't need when i pass by a telephone pole i don't need to pretend it's something different. It's a fucking cell phone tower. Yeah. Who decided to make those things into fake trees? Like, when did this become a precedent? Don't know. But you can definitely make a fake tree that is convincing.

So maybe just a bit more effort in the fakery. Yeah. Or just make them look cool. Make them look like robots. Yeah. Yeah. Have a make them look cool. Make them look like robots. Yeah. Yeah. Have a big Ultraman out there. I mean, some people are really worried about cell phone towers.

Thinking they cause radiation or something poisoning. This is not true. Yeah, people are worried about 5G, right? Don't worry about it. No? Not at all? I mean, no. Let me put it this way.

If I had cell phones, if I had a helmet of cell phones. Right. Strapped around my head and around my nuts, I would not worry. Yeah. Yeah, I met a dude once who had ball cancer who was convinced that his cell phone was in his pocket and that's what gave him ball cancer. Nope. No? No.

Okay. Hey, buddy. Sorry. Yeah. No, it's not. The cell phone is not. No. Okay. Hey, buddy. Sorry. Yeah. The cell phone is not... No. Yeah, I didn't know this guy very well, but he was pretty convinced.

Meanwhile, he kept the phone on the same side. He was one of those dudes that had the phone on the little hip thing. You know, a little bracket on his hip. Kept his phone there, even after it killed one of his nuts in his eyes. He's like, well, damage is done. Your phone or your balls? Yeah, he gave up. They got me.

Yeah, don't worry about it. Phones are not causing cancer. So there's no concern whatsoever with the radiation that's caused by those things? No, first of all, when people say radiation, they're just like conflating this term from nuclear bombs. Technically,

we are currently bathed in radiation right now. This table has radiation, right? Everything produces radiation. Everything's emitting photons all the time so it's just a question of what wavelength and if you have

a very short wavelength or high frequency photon that is capable of causing DNA damage but we're talking about like ultraviolet and beyond your phone is not even close so yeah and then about like ultraviolet and beyond. Your phone's not even close. So, yeah. And then the thing that really causes problems in, let's say, a nuclear explosion are alpha particles. So like it's basically helium nuclei. So those things will, they're like tiny cannonballs.

So those will rip right through your, it's like if you got shot with tiny cannonballs, bad things would happen. So that's also called radiation, but it's really particles. So you don't want to be bombarded with high-speed helium nuclei. That's going to be bad. How does that happen? Well, that happens in a nuclear explosion. Oh. Yeah.

Okay, avoid those. Yeah, that's bad. But cell phones are okay. Yeah, cell phones are not emitting particles. So if it's like, if my cell phone can cause brain cancer, I'm like, because of radiation, I'm like, do you mean photons or particles?

It's like, it's not emitting particles, so we can just put that aside, don't worry about the particles. Then the photons that are emitting, the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear. And only by a tiny amount. It's like, okay, if you had an ear warmer that was very mild, that's your phone.

That's all. It's emitting photons at a frequency that is not going to cause DNA damage. So don't worry about it. You can sleep easy at night. Don't worry about your phone. It's fine. David Icke does not believe you. He's doing backflips right now. You fucking chill. So what concerns people is

the unknown, right? They hear about 5G and then they hear about radiation. They're like, wait a minute. Is this sane? What are we doing? Are we just ruining everything? We ruining people? No, it's fine.

Fine. Totally fine. Thank you. Yeah. Now I feel good about my 5G phone. I was a little worried. If you had a helmet that was made of cell phones, you'd be fine. Yeah, but this is coming from a guy who wants to stick a quarter size hole in your

head and shove wires in your brain. Yeah, so I know a few things about what causes brain damage. I know, but that, like, Neuralink concerns the shit out of people. That scares folks. That's the ultimate. Well, I think it would be problematic if we pinned you to the ground and put it in. Yes, I agree.

And said, like, okay, you're going to get this. We're going to chip you whether you like it or not. We're going to chip you whether you like it or not. To chip you. We're going to chip you. That's the other thing that people are scared of, right? You're chipped. You will have to sign a million disclosures.

And this is not going to be something where it just suddenly pounces on you. Like, ah, everyone's getting chipped. No. It's a very slow process of, okay, let's first try to help people who have serious brain injuries. Like if somebody got like a spinal cord injury or something like that, like that's one of the first things we're looking at doing is like somebody may be a quadriplegic, tetraplegic. How do we give them like an implant that allows them to use their computer or their phone and have it be wireless? They look totally normal.

You wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head. They can just charge it inductively like you charge a Fitbit or something like that or Apple Watch or something. And that's kind of like one of the first applications we're thinking of is like let's restore functionality. Someone has had a serious spinal injury or a serious brain injury of some other kind. So this is going to be like a very gradual process. You'll see it coming. But I was playing Cyberpunk, the game, and I'm like,

yeah, geez. How are you worried about what you're doing? Yeah, that's like yeah this is pretty close to home here you know like oh man um yeah like is this where it leads might it might lead there eventually I'm just saying for right now it's gonna help people who really need it well you know we had this discussion before that we're all basically already cyborgs, right? We're already relying upon our phones. They're connected at the hip to them.

People are relying on glasses and all sorts of other technology to improve their life. This is another gradual step in that direction. And if you just keep going in that way, it seems, like like i like being a human and i think you know look here we're drinking whiskey we're talking yeah wood table this is a very human experience yeah but ultimately we are archaic and we will eventually be aliens we're going to be those those dudes with the big heads and the little tiny bodies and we're going to be but we still we still need to feel for now until i don't know i mean, and we're going to be... But we still need to feel. For now.

Until it becomes more efficient to do it inside the mind. Yeah, but then once it becomes virtual, once virtual supersedes whatever... Like, imagine if the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better than a regular orgasm. Oh, I got news for you on that front. Oh. We can, it is.

It's disturbingly good. The way you're rubbing your chin. Disturbing. Get my little dog in it. Stroke his head. Yes. Oh, you'll love it. Money back guarantee.

You'll love it. Money back guarantee. You'll love it. It's a snap. There was a woman who, it was in the 1970s, who had some sort of analogy to pain pills. And they did some experiment with her where they put wires into her brain and gave her a device. Do you know this story? There are a few stories like this, yeah.

Where it actually hits the pleasure center, and then you're like, my God, this is the best thing ever. She just kept hammering it. She developed blisters on her finger that she used to hit the button. She never stopped hitting that button with the same finger. Didn't give a fuck about those blisters. She was just coming constantly. And then she started adjusting.

She tried to tamper with the device to increase the amplitude. She became just an orgasm junkie. She was crazy. And they tried to take... She was begging them to take it away from her. And then when they tried to take it away from her, she would fight them. It's madness.

It made me... I mean, I researched this extensively because I was fascinated by the idea that this could eventually become a part of your phone. We could definitely make that happen. That's a real issue with people. The instantaneous desire for pleasure. Yeah, we wouldn't do it because it's bad.

You wouldn't do it, but the Chinese. Sure. I mean, I don't know, man. Huawei phones immediately with a come button. Right? As soon as you log on, you give them your fingerprint, you come. You know, I mean, we could just put in there with some software limits. Easily.

But software limits could easily be worked around. Someone's going to come up with it. Someone on the dark web. Well, I mean, your phone is, if you're carrying a phone around, you're carrying a microphone, a GPS, a camera. Yeah. Every day, everywhere. Everything.

Orwell would be losing his mind. And it answers questions. Yeah. Yeah, and it knows where you are. Yeah, it's like you can just have it. That phone, by the way, if you say, like, please turn off, it just says that it's off. It's not actually off. It's lying.

It could totally lie. Yeah, and you can't take the battery out anymore. Basically, like Apple or Android, anytime they want It's lying. It could totally lie. Yeah. And you can't take the battery out anymore. Basically, like Apple or Android, anytime they want, they can just turn your mic on. Yeah. Or your camera, your GPS, everything. Yeah. And just tell you it's off. I looked at the setting, it says it's off.

Yeah, and some people are like, that's not good enough. I want it strapped to my wrist. Yeah. I need one on me all the time. Yeah, I mean, these days, like a modern smartphone, it's like a tiny cell phone on your wrist. It is. It even has the cellular connectivity and everything. Everything.

It has everything. You leave your house, you make phone calls like Dick Tracy. Yeah, come on. Better than any Dick Tracy even imagined. Yeah, fuck Dick Tracy. Yeah, nothing. He didn't know shit. The Star Trek communicator.

It looks like a cheesy flip phone. It's a walkie-talkie. You have to say over. Kirk over. A big walkie-talkie. Yeah, they had to tell you out. It's gigantic. You couldn't just hang up.

Yeah. Yeah, it was really ridiculous. And it couldn't get on the internet. It couldn't take pictures. Yeah. He was talking to people from another planet. He couldn't even send them a photo. He couldn't even send them a photo.

It's like they didn't even have a camera. They would beam a whole body. To see what's going on. Rearrange your body. Right? Yeah. Take all of your atoms and reproject them on this planet. Totally. Or they could just send a camera.

Have you thought about sending a camera to this very dangerous situation? That really shows you how truly amazing the internet is. That in all of science fiction, they never thought that was going to happen. Yeah. You think about all the Star Trek, Star Wars.

They thought we'd be out there on, well, they thought we'd be on Mars for sure, but they never thought we'd have a supercomputer in our pocket and everyone's got an amazing camera and as much memory as they could possibly a supercomputer in your pocket like something better than the best super like your phone is better than the best computer that earth had by far in 1969 when we landed on oh yeah by

far by far not even close the cameras like i have a samsung galaxy S21 that has moon photo capability. So it's designed, it has a moon shot. So it's designed to be able to take beautiful photos of the moon. Okay. Yeah. Because if you do it with an iPhone, it's not really programmed that way. Yeah. Actually, that's true.

The iPhone can take good photos of the moon. Actually, I was just in LA, and the moon was low in the horizon and it was just like hanging there it's like this giant planetoid you need a galaxy yeah and i'll try looking on my phone and like looks like tiny jamie you got one of those talk to him about the moonshot i didn't even know it was on there yeah just google moonshot with galaxy S21 Ultra. It's fucking phenomenal. I got one just for that. I got one because I'm always interested in both platforms and see where they're at. But the photographs are fucking incredible.

The zoom is incredible too. They have much better zooms. Look at this. These are photos with the Galaxy S21 Ultra. That thing is just going to be all camera. Isn't that incredible? I know. Look at the back of it.

Just make it all out of lenses. It's incredible. It's just what they... It's just... We're living in... It's constantly accelerating. That's what's so amazing about it. Is that the right one, a Mars photo with that?

I don't... No. There's no way you're taking a photo of Mars from a phone like that. Not a chance. No. Impossible, right? Impossible. Thank you. Glad you're here for that. Because Mars from a phone like that. Not a chance. No. Impossible, right? Impossible. Thank you.

Glad you're here for that. Because we would buy right into it. Not a chance. I think that was last year's model. What? Last year's model could take a picture of Mars? No, no, no, no. Like last year's moon photo versus this year's moon photo.

Oh, yeah. If you had a giant lens or something, basically you need a photon distillery so that's a that's the moon that's all that is on the right it's not Mars it's just a shitty it's like their last year's version of moon shot so the new one can actually see the craters which is just fucking bananas I mean if that's just on a camera without a lens because you're so I can say what's your photon gathering area you know it's like photons per unit area it's honestly a certain limit if you what's that jamie it's honestly not that good well it's pretty good for a cell phone yeah yeah sure i mean it's not great for a telescope sure

well i mean the thing i was trying to do like literally uh you know i don't know five or six days ago there's just like the i don't know you know the air was clear like la can be amazing like on a clear winter day where the the moon is low in the horizon yeah and the sun's hitting at the right angle and just looks incredible um and i was trying to take a photo of that with my phone it looked terrible yeah it's just never yeah i can't capture it no no unfortunately but galaxies can this is that's the interesting thing. It's like... The galaxy.

Yeah. Well, it's a great name, too. They just... They're always one step ahead in many directions. Like, they have these ultrasonic fingerprint detectors, but they just can't beat the operating system. Apple just has the ease of use, and they're... Is it still good?

It's still better, Apple? Yeah, it's still better. Yeah. Is it still good? It's still better, Apple? Yeah, it's still better. But it's close. It's close. But the other thing that bothers me about Google is Google is constantly tracking you. Android phones are so hard. Let me serve you an ad. It's so hard to avoid.

They'll know you better than you know yourself. They know what you will want. I'm a big admirer of what Tim Cook is doing. What he's doing to sort of cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and gather your data and this battle that's going on between Tim Cook and Facebook. I fucking love it. I love that he's stepping up and saying, hey, you can just advertise. You don't have to gather up people's data and sell it constantly.

And then disingenuously Facebook tries to say, you are killing small businesses with these decisions. Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. You're not killing small business. We're killing this one gigantic information-gathering business that's decided that it's going to take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make fucking billions of dollars yeah well i mean even perhaps arguably worse they're gonna feed all that data into their um the ai that they're developing it's called facebook ai you can follow them on twitter um and they're like just let's just feed all this information into the ai and see what just see what

it does and who knows what would happen? It seems like, I don't know, some dystopian outcomes are possible. Yeah, well, you're terrified of AI, right? No, I mean, I'm just thinking... A little bit? If it's unchecked? Well, I think things that are a danger to the public should have some kind of public oversight. Yeah.

So, you know, like, I... You know, although sometimes we have our disagreements, I'm, you know, in favor of the FAA and NHTSA, you know, and the various regulatory agencies, FDA and so forth. I'm in favor, you know, I think we're better off having them than not having them. There is a risk-reward asymmetry in that they tend to be perhaps not weigh the good as much as they weigh the bad. Because their incentive structure is they get punished a lot for approving something, but they don't get punished that much for not approving something. So that's just in the nature of government. But nonetheless, I think everyone would feel safer flying with the FAA than not having

an FAA. Or we feel safer buying food and drugs, having a regulatory agency oversee this stuff. But we don't have any regulatory agency overseeing artificial intelligence. Right. And this, I think, is probably our biggest existential threat. Yeah, it's... It seems like, hey, maybe we should have somebody keep an eye on that. Right, but who?

That's the problem. I don't know. The problem is the government. Who's going to do it? Joe Biden? Let's have him pay attention to it. You know what I'm saying? It's the problem. I don't know. The problem is the government. Who's going to do it? Joe Biden? Let's have him pay attention to it. You know what I'm saying? It's like who?

The deep state. Oh, those folks. Well, they're looking out for our best interests. They're surely going to watch out. What they're going to do is they're going to develop it and use it as a weapon, and it's going to turn on like a fucking Terminator movie. Right? That's the real worry is that they're going to decide that this is a very valuable tool for

controlling populations governments whatever the fuck they're going to use it for and then it's going to decide why am i listening to you yeah have you if you read like the plot line for terminator it's actually it's actually pretty smart. James Cameron wrote a pretty smart script there. It's not quite as like, oh, there's just Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing you down the street. It's like, well, how did Cyberdyne systems develop? It's like, well, they were a military contractor, and they were asked to develop a protective system, something that would protect for cybersecurity.

You know, so we need to have protection against cyber attacks. So its primary thing is to defend against cyber attacks. To develop an AI that can defend against cyber attacks. Sounds pretty reasonable. to develop an AI that can defend against cyber attacks. Sounds pretty reasonable. And then as part of what the AI did is, in order to defend itself,

it propagated throughout the world to keep an eye on things, see what was going on. And then they thought, well, hang on, there's something... They didn't realize that it was Skynet that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, there seems to be something propagating through all these systems. Skynet, you need to stop it. You need to end it.

And Skynet said, oh, you've asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes. you must be destroyed that's how Terminator actually goes like it was created as a defense system to defend against cyber attacks then it was asked to destroy itself and then it concluded humanity was the enemy hmm that's too close to home right well you know earlier we talked about what is the meaning of life. Well, the meaning of life for us would be very different than the meaning of life for something that we create that becomes life.

The idea of life being restricted to cells or carbon-based life forms is kind of silly. Like the idea of artificial life, right? What is artificial? It's right there. What are you talking about? AI, artificial insemination. But it is. That's what you ask.

If we create some sort of silicon-based life form, but it acts like a life form, it has a desire. A desire. A desire. What? There was, I think in Australia a few years ago, an artificial insemination lab that had a bunch of like bulges stored in canisters, but it like overheated. Oh, no. And so you had basically exploding bulges all over the place. Really? And that line was, AI goes wild.

There's cum everywhere. Yeah, just like cum rockets all over the place. Yeah. Nobody wants that, right? How's that helping? Clean you know aisle nine or whatever bulges all over the walls literally actually happened yeah back to artificial wait I mean Artificial intelligence Yeah

Back to artificial intelligence I'm really worried about it Yeah I think we should be concerned And we should have Oversight of some kind Yeah but who would be The oversight

I don't know Like regulatory agency I don't know Whoever It's like you know We have the FAA Like I said We have the FAA

We got the FDA Yeah but They just We have the FAA. Like I said, we have the FAA. We got the FDA. Yeah, but they just... We just need an acronym to oversee this stuff. The problem is government agencies suck at most things. You know? Yeah. I mean, it's the best government agency.

What government agency does the best job of oversight? No, I think generally, okay. I mean, I think the right way to think about government is government is a corporation in the limit. Like there's some people like, well, we're against corporations, but we're for government. I'm like, government's just the biggest corporation. What are you talking about? It's a corporation with a monopoly. It's the biggest corporation and has a monopoly.

That's government. But you get to pick who runs it every four years. You have more influence on who's CEO of General Electric than you have on who's president. Really? Sure. How so? Well, I mean, you're going to have, how many voters are there? Like 150 million?

I don't know. And maybe 100 million who actually vote. So you have 100 millionth of a vote. And if you're not in a swing state, it doesn't matter. So if you live in California, it's going Democratic. That's for sure. Gavin Newsom might be fucking that up. I do think, you know, california in any given state there's got

to be uh above a zero percent chance that the other party wins right if it's zero percent chance that the other party wins they get cocky the forcing yeah the forcing function for being like are they going to be responsive to the people right they're only going to be responsive to the people if the other party has a shot at winning. Right. They're going to be responsive to the special interest groups that helped them. Yeah, exactly. And that's where California is.

Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, so government is a corporation in the limit. It's, government is the biggest corporation

with a monopoly. Nonetheless, it, there are some things that it's hard to see having be an industry body. The probability of regulatory capture, if it's an industry body, is higher than if it's the government. It's not zero if it's the government.

There's plenty of cases of regulatory capture for federal agencies. But the probability is lower than if it's an industry group. But the probability is lower than if it's an industry group. And at the end of the day, somebody has to say, you know, go and tell Facebook or Google or Apple or Tesla, because Tesla has a lot of advanced AI, this is okay or it's not okay. Or at least be able to report back to the public, this is what we found. Otherwise, the inmates are running the asylum. Yeah. And there's like not necessarily friendly inmates. No. I just wonder like if you wanted to compile some sort of a regulatory body to keep an eye on AI how would you do that and how would you avoid having them being incentivized by special interest groups

or some sort of corporation that would profit on AI succeeding? Oh, that's already happening. Yeah. I mean, all the companies are going hog wild on the AI front. Anyway, my recommendation is there should be some kind of regulatory authority. So how would they do that? And I'm not a fan of like let's have the government do lots of things. I think you want to have the government do the least amount of stuff.

But I think the right role of government is to be like the referee on the field. When the government starts being the player on the field, that's problematic. Or when you start having more referees than players, which is the case in California, then that's not good. Yeah. So you can't have no referees. Yeah. Everyone agrees. Referee might be annoying at times, but it's better to have a referee than not.

Yes. Yeah. I'm just worried that these things are going to be it's going to be too late by the time, and I'm sure you're worried about it as well, but by the time these things become sentient, by the time they develop the ability to analyze what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential. Yeah. I'm not saying that having regulatory agencies on panacea or reduces the risk to zero,

there's still significant risk even with a regulatory agency. Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad, and we should have one. You know, it took a while before there was an FAA. You know, there were a lot of plane crashes, a lot of companies cutting corners. It took a while before there was an FDA. You know, and what tends to happen is, you know, some company gets desperate,

they're on the verge of bankruptcy, and they're like, ah, man, we'll just cut this corner. It'll be fine. And then, you know, somebody And then you know somebody dies. And you know some of these like regulatory situations like look at seatbelts. I mean now we take seatbelts for granted. Man the car companies fought seatbelts

like there was no tomorrow. Really? Oh yeah. They fought them? For decades. Like 15 20 years. The data was absolutely clear that you needed seatbelts, like seatbelts, you know, you really need seatbelts. Like the difference in fatalities and serious injuries of seatbelt, not seatbelts, gigantic and obvious. It's not subtle.

So, but still, the car companies fought seatbelts for, I don't know, 10, 20 years. A lot of people died. Now, these days, actually, with advanced airbags, actually, I think we might have come full circle and no longer need seatbelts if you have

advanced airbags. Really? Yeah. I think there might have come full circle and no longer need seatbelts if you have advanced airbags. Really? Yeah. I think there's a strong argument for saying if you've got... What if the car flips? No, you're just covered in bloody... It's airbags everywhere. Modern airbags are so good, it will blow your mind just how good the airbags are. And at Tesla, we even update the software to improve how

the airbags deploy so we'll calculate you know are you an adult like how much do you weigh are you sitting in this part of the seat or that part of the seat are you maybe a baby are you a toddler are you based on the weight yeah so the seat not just the weight but the pressure distribution distribution on the seat so we're measuring the pressure distribution. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? Are you a fifth percentile female, a 95th percentile male? The airbag firing will be different depending upon where you're sitting on the seat and what size you are and what your orientation is.

Really? Yeah. And we'll update it over the air. So it even gets better over time. So a child could conceivably sit in the front seat. Unbelted child sitting in a bad position, probably still fine. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. It's dynamically updating the airbag firing according to where you're sitting, how much you weigh in real time. The seatbelt is like, if you wear the seatbelt, that's nice. But the airbag is going to do most of the work. Airbag is going to do the work. And is it possible that we can come up with something even better than the airbag?

Like you fill the whole cabin up with foam? No, it's tough because airbag technology is crazy good because you want the airbag to inflate and then deflate. Right. Otherwise, you're going to get asphyxiated. Okay. So you can't just like fill it up with stuff. It's got to inflate and then there's different stages of inflation.

It's like fast inflation, then slow inflation, then slowly subside. The sophistication of airbags is crazy good. And this is all done not through some regulatory body. This is done through your own desire to make these things safer and more efficient. I mean, in the case of Tesla, we go way beyond the regulatory requirements. We got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they've ever tested. Um, so we,

we, we have five stars in every category and subcategory. And if there was a six star, we'd get a six star. it's, it's, it is actually legal to have a one star car. Really?

Yeah. What's a, like a smart car? Those one star. Oh, Oh, I got to tell you. Okay. So the star rating is kind of bullshit. Really?

Yeah. You're probably not going to be upset about me about this, but they adjust the star rating depending upon the size of the car. So, I mean, it stands to reason that if you're in a freight train and you're, you know, if a smart car hits a freight train, it doesn't matter how good your safety systems is, you're in a freight train and you're you know and if a smart car hits a freight train it doesn't matter how good your safety systems is you're screwed um you know like if you're in a little car get hit by a big car the big car will win okay so a low star rating in a big car hitting a high star rating in a small car, the small car is screwed. Small cars are not safe. Yeah, they're not safe.

Right. Yeah. But what about your small car? Our Model 3 is not small. What about the Roadster? Yeah, the Roadster is not super safe. Original Roadster, not super safe. The original Roadster...

It's pretty safe for a car like that, but it's not it's it's safety maximization is not the golden sports car well the original one was based on a lotus right yeah that was the theory but in reality it was low to see i think we had like maybe seven percent i think we calculated seven percent of the parts were actually carryover from the Lotus. The entire body, chassis, everything was redesigned. New powertrain.

Even the HVAC system used to run off a belt from the engine. Now we need an electric HVAC system. So pretty almost everything got changed. It was not a... It's something that sounded good. got changed. It was not a, it's something that sounded good. Let's take an AC propulsion drivetrain from this little company in LA. Let's stick it in a modified Lotus Elise. Bingo, we got a car. Only problem is, a lot of problems. Both of the fundamental premises on which Tesla was created are false. The battery ended up increasing the mass of the car by

thirty percent. So then, and the weight distribution was all different. So you invalidated all the crash tests. Now you had to stretch the car in order to fit the battery. So now the chassis is different. All the airbags had to be redone. All the crash structure had to be redone. It would have been better to start from scratch than to use any part of a Lotus lease. It was worse. It was like, let's say there's a house that you want. You have in mind a particular house. And then you buy a house and you end up changing everything except one wall and the basement. But you're still stuck with most of the original footprint.

It's just easier sometimes. Just knock the house down and build a new one. Don't just try to modify it one piece at a time. So we had to change over 90% of the non-powertrain portion of the car. It had to be changed 90%, 93%. And then the battery and drivetrain from AC propulsion did not work. It had an analog motor controller that was extremely unreliable. You know, an analog motor controller, that was extremely unreliable. The way that the power electronics were done, it was artisanal.

You could not recreate that in a production situation. The battery pack was air-cooled, which meant that if it was cold outside, the car didn't work. If it was too hot, the battery would overheat. And if you had any cell, any one of the cells in the battery pack had a heat concentration, you could not remove it. The air was just not good enough to just air cool the pack. And so you could have thermal runaway and the car would burn down. So we couldn't use the battery pack, couldn't use the motor, couldn't use the

inverter, couldn't use the charger. In the end we used none of the AC propulsion technology. And almost none of the Lotus technology. Wow. So you just had the general shape. It has a passing resemblance to a Lotus Elise. But if you put the Lotus Elise in the Roadster side by side, they look actually quite different. And I actually led the design of the Roadster, the product design of the Roadster. They gave me like a, Fasti in the School of Art gave me like an honorary doctorate for it. But to be totally

frank, it's easy to do a design of a sports car. It's very hard to do a design of a sedan. I tried. I failed. And that's why I hired Franz von Holzhausen who's been our head of design since 2008. He's great. He does things that are

beyond my skill. You you know we talked about this before but it's it's worth bringing up again um i've always been a fan of top gear but i got disgusted when i found out what they did with your car when they tried to pretend that the car broke down just to make an entertaining program where they had a laugh at the folly of this thing dying on them but it didn't really die on them yeah that was messed up i mean to be totally frank like so you know new top gear in top gear of recent years um is a tesla supporter so i want to like just waste a note of appreciation for top gear of recent years well james may he has one right but they're not top gear anymore right they're the grand tour

that's what they are on amazon is that what they call them i i don't know but the top gear has been supportive in recent years but um yeah back in the day uh and remember at the time like tesla was not a big company we're just a little company and we're like you know we're the little kid on the block so um and we you know we're so we the top gear block. So, you know, so Top Gear was like, hey, Top Gear wants to test your car. We're like, cool. And we gave them, we only had a few cars and we gave them one of our cars. And when we handed over the car, they had a, you know, so one of our engineers like goes, delivers the car and then he sees a script on the table. It's like, how did you write the script?

We only just gave you the car. And in the script, the car breaks down. Yeah. It's messed up. Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. It was crazy because they basically sabotaged the company.

I mean, that had to cost you guys a shitload of money. Because a lot of people watch that show. and car enthusiasts like myself kind of rely on them for there's also like obviously jeremy clarkson's hilarious there's information there there's funny but you would imagine that they could do that without lying about the actual performance of the car yeah the car never broke down they just they just pretended that it did and they wrote the script so crazy literally whenever a guy's handed over the car he's reading through a script and it's like the car's brake breaks down like runs out i charge the brakes fail and we're like what the fuck man we just gave you the car this is not cool and what did they say about that

uh their their objection was like this is just entertainment it's not meant to be true that's so crazy though because that's they they had to know what the fuck they're doing yeah yeah but anyway well now we're under the bridge water under the bridge but crazy for for anybody who experienced it back in the day i mean i remember i knew very little about electric cars it was just the early days and i remember watching that going oh that sucks broke down yeah yeah well you know anyway i've been a fan of electric cars since for you know for a long time since uh basically high school, early college. What did you think of that documentary?

Who Killed the Electric Car? I thought it was pretty good. Yeah. I thought it was worth watching. Interesting. Mortally wounded, not killed. Exactly. Mortally, exactly.

I mean, the irony is like, man, can you imagine just how different a future GM would have had? Because they had the EV1, electric vehicle 1. If they had just gone EV2, EV3, man, they would have just owned the world. Who knows where we'd be right now with electric cars, too, and the technology with that kind of money behind it. What's fascinating now, you're seeing like this Mustang, this sort of SUV style Mustang that's electric. Yeah. You know, you're seeing so many different vehicles that are electric. There's so many companies that have electric cars now.

And it's really been becoming interesting. Porsche's electric car. There's a large supply of electric cars now. I mean, that's got to make you feel good, though. supply of electric cars now. I mean, that's got to make you feel good, though. Because without you and without Tesla, there was no way it would be where it's at

right now. Yeah, I mean, when I think about what's the fundamental good of Tesla, it's to what degree have we accelerated the advent of sustainable energy. You know, so it would have happened anyway, but I think Tesla is an accelerant. You I think we're that's how I would judge the fundamental good

of Tesla by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy but yeah I mean in the early days my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that it wasn't was not it wasn't environmental in the in the sense of like co2 uh you know parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing i do think that has added urgency to the situation but um my original interest was was just like we're going to run out of oil and then civilization is going to collapse and so if we don't have some kind of sustainable energy situation, which really is electric cars, solar energy and electric cars, then civilization is going to fall apart, and we'll be back in the Stone Age or something, like someone bad.

But we're not going to be able to move forward. It won't be a good future. So my interest in electric cars was like, okay, how do we, how do we make this work? And you think of like a gasoline car, I mean, it's got an electric motor, and a battery just to start the car, you know, like electric cars, like way simpler than a gasoline car, just need, it's just a range question. So in the early days of cars, there were, you know, almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline cars in the very early days. But the batteries didn't have enough range.

So, you know, as soon as they had an electric starter and you didn't have to hand crank the engine, then gasoline cars won because it had the range. So it was really a question of how do you solve the range problem. And when I first came out to California, the reason I came out to California was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars, basically advanced ways to store electric energy that would give you long range. So in my summer internships I worked at this company called Pinnacle Research that did

high energy density capacitors. Now they used ruthenium and tantalum which are ruthenium especially quite rare you cannot scale that because there's just not enough ruthenium where does that come from um it's a trace element it's uh it's coming from like radioactive decay and like uh you know meteorites and that kind of thing. It's rare. You know, I think at the time, like, there was only, like, it's, like, impossible to scale. It doesn't matter how smart you get.

You can't scale something if it's using ruthenium. There's just not enough of it. So it was, like, rarer than gold. Like, it was way better for, like, trying to make cars powered by gold. Is there any argument that there's not enough conflict minerals to go around? Because that's what they call them, conflict minerals, things like lithium. No, lithium is extremely common. Is it? Yeah.

Lithium is everywhere. Lithium is one of the most common elements in the universe. It's at number three on the periodic table. So we've got lithium here pretty much everywhere. Where do we get it? Well, I mean, Tesla, we get most of our lithium from Australia, actually. But you can get lithium from seawater

if you wanted to. Really? Yeah. Lithium, it just forms a salt. And that's the primary component of the batteries? No. Or what else is in there? It's a misnomer, actually.

It's called lithium ion, but that's like the salt in the salad. Oh. It's like, do you like salt in your salad? Sure. But it's not made of salt. I mean, the primary component in lithium ion batteries, like in a Tesla, is nickel. And nickel is also relatively common. It's not super common.

Iron is very common. So the two main types of battery pack are iron and nickel. And iron is very common. There's a ridiculous amount of iron, just like there's a ridiculous amount of lithium. Now nickel's a little more unusual. Not that unusual, but it's much harder to get nickel than iron. But for example,

stainless steel. you know, that'll be, you know, 12, 12, it's quote 10 to 20% nickel, depending on the situation. Like cutlery, you know, like knives and forks will be like electroplated nickel silver. That's what E means so so you got like nickel based uh cells and you got iron based cells um the nickel based cells have more energy density like so for a given amount of volume and mass you're going to get more energy out of nickel than iron um iron's cheaper and so but anyway those are two two main types of cells they got a iron cathode nickel cathode and then some of the nickel cathodes have some amount of cobalt to stabilize nickel and then iron it's like they call it usually iron phosphate you're like you know but it's really mostly it's like like the heavy stuff is. And the heavy stuff is nickel and the nickel-based stuff.

So you have nickel and iron, and then you've got the anode side, which is basically a carbon lattice with a little bit of silicon sometimes. And then these lithium ions, they sort of trundle back and forth between the cathode and the anode. So, I mean, just read the Wikipedia article on lithium ions. It's quite good. Anyway, so the rate at which we are producing what are what are called lithium ion cells but really primarily the iron and nickel cells is improved it's increasing very

very rapidly year over year it's just that in order to compensate for the rest for an economy which is fundamentally based on fossil fuels you need a shit ton of batteries so a gigaton giga shit ton of batteries and that is what uh that's going to happen it's just a question of when that's why i say like the fundamental good of tesla is to what degree it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy. It's inevitable. Like either we have sustainable energy, it's tautological. It's either we have sustainable energy or civilization collapses. So if civilization doesn't collapse, we will have sustainable energy. It's just a question of how soon does that happen?

Sooner is better. And then there's a risk that we're incurring because of the increased parts per million of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere. It has some acidification. It makes the water just a little bit more acidic. And it just causes the air to be a little warmer, not a lot. I think sometimes people look at the temperature, especially in Celsius. You might say, like, okay, it's like 20 degrees Celsius.

I mean, can a small ppm increase in carbon really move the needle that much? But actually, you should be looking at it in degrees Kelvin. So then it's like, actually it's like more like we're at around 300 Kelvin. And so, you know, what would it take to have like only a 0.3% increase would be one degree Celsius, two degrees Fahrenheit. So therefore this is actually, you know, it's more,

it's a smaller percentage increase than you'd think when looking at temperature in the absolute as opposed to, you know, above the freezing point of water. So, and then if people weren't just living right on the water, then that would also help a lot. But it's just like we love living right on the water. So, like the humanity is like a thermometer. So, like, humanity is like a thermometer. It's like, you look at like a thermometer, you know, like an old school sort of analog thermometer, which is like, you know, changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is increasing its volume due to temperature. And it only takes a little bit of a small increase in volume to raise the temperature on an old-school analog liquid thermometer.

And humanity is like that. We've just decided that we want to live right on the damn beach. Yep. Because the beach is cool. Now, the problem is you're like, it's kind of like if we wanted to say, what's the most sensitive instrument you could, like how can we maximize our sensitivity to to water level well live right on the right on the ocean well okay we just did that yeah and and then it's like and then it's like okay well

you know and and by the way like throughout history like the water level has varied a lot. It's like nutty how much it's varied. And then if you look at, say, the CO2 per million based on the fossil record, I mean, it just looks like a wall. I'm not like a doomsayer here. My view is that provided we are not complacent about a sustainable energy economy, I think things will be fine. If we are complacent about it, that's where problems arise. So, like, to be totally frank, I think we'll be fine. But as long as we don't behave as though we're going to be fine, we will be fine.

Oh, yeah. behave as though we're going to be fine, we will be fine. If we don't take it for granted, if we're not complacent, I think we'll be fine. Do you anticipate any large leaps in battery technology? Is there anything that can be done to increase the efficiency, increase the manufacturing abilities?

What can be done to move that? So, the ball is in motion. Like, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, in a century. It's like, it's crazy fast. It's just that in order to change from a fossil fuel economy to kind of like a solar, wind, battery economy, it just, a hell of a lot of batteries are needed.

Now, it would, I mean, my top recommendation honestly would be just to have a carbon tax. Like, the economy works great. Like, prices and money are just information. Prices are information. If the price is wrong, the economy doesn't do the right thing. So we got basically an unpriced externality in the carbon concentration in the oceans and atmosphere like it's a it's kind of like not paying like if you're not paying for for garbage removal or something like okay everyone's gonna throw garbage in the street it's like garbage

removal is free um but it's like there's a little bit of like okay garbage removal isn't for you got to pay a little bit for this um and because we're not paying for the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, we have what in economics is called an unpriced externality. So the market is unable to respond to an unpriced externality. If we just put a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way. But because we don't have a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way. But because we don't have a price on it, it's behaving badly. So theoretically, how would you put a price on that? Would you look at various industries and how they contribute to the CO2?

Yeah. I mean, just put it at the point of consumption. And tax it. It ends up being electricity and gasoline, pretty much. Now, you can make this a non-regressive tax. You can say, like, okay, well, you know, what if somebody is, like, driving around a lot and they're low income? It's like, hey, great, give them a rebate. You know, so it's like, give a tax rebate.

That's the way to do it. And then the market will be forced to respond to the fact that the... The market just does things automatically based on pricing. So markets work great if the pricing is correct. It's only when something... You have a tragedy of the commons and the price is not there that the market does not respond,

nor would you expect it to. You know, so... If you have like the public toilets problem where it's like nobody's responsible for it nobody's paying for it it's like okay well public toilets are not good so as soon as you put a price on it the right thing will happen automatically is there been a response to this like is is is this something that's... I talked to the Biden administration, incoming administration, and they were like, well, this seems too politically difficult. And I was like, well, this is obviously a thing that should happen.

And by the way, SpaceX would be paying a carbon tax, too. Sure. So I'm like, you know, I'm like, I think we should pay it, too. It's not like we shouldn't have carbon generating things. It just, there's got to, should be a price on this stuff. And that would encourage people to make either carbon neutral or... It will automatically fix the problem. No problem.

For sure. You know, just think about taxes. It's like, here we are drinking alcohol. Now, taxes on alcohol and tobacco are higher than on, let's say, fruit and vegetables. Okay? Because everyone knows, like, fruit and vegetables are good for you, and alcohol and tobacco are not good for you. Vice. Yeah.

So we're like, yeah, you should probably bias the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco. Have higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco. And lower taxes on fruits and vegetables. It's just sensible. Like, same thing goes for energy. Yeah, that seems very reasonable. I don't understand how that would be politically difficult. I don't know. I talked to the incoming Biden administration.

I was like, I just thought, well, for sure. You know, I mean, it's like half the reason they got elected and even some sort of an incremental increase over time yeah exactly we don't need to learn people yeah just say just if you just say it's coming yeah people automatically make the changes that seems so reasonable yeah i i agree and they were like uh-uh they thought it was like too politically difficult and i'm like uh i mean i don't know man i think that's like half at least half the reason you got elected so why don't you just fight for that you know yeah it's it's a factor it's the the the the optics were that they're the more reasonable people they're going to bring us back to the paris climate accord

and the the whole yeah i mean the thing is like the Paris Accord, this is just a piece of paper unless you do something about it. Right. I mean, frankly, it's not like the Paris Accord is. It's pretty much toothless,

you know. And even if we did that thing, it's probably still not enough. If it's just one thing that will matter, put a price on carbon. That would be the best option. For sure.

Hmm. That seems like it would be such a good idea i mean i think it's an obvious move and if you if you just call up like you know say like top economists like just do a poll of like what do 90 percent of economists think and like they all agree okay we should do that well also if you think about the variability of gas prices yeah it changes so much like how about the difference between gas in california versus gas in texas it's a giant difference giant difference yeah you know by the way i i i'm actually not in favor of like demonizing the oil and gas industry. Because we can't stop instantaneously and not have oil and gas. Right. We'll die of starvation, basically. That's always the argument against it, right?

We need fossil fuels. And this is sort of the short-sighted argument. We're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time. The question is just at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future? So I think we should probably move there faster than slower. But, I mean, the current approach is basically just to demonize oil and gas. And I'm like, okay, well, obviously, you know, there are people who have spent their whole career in oil and gas,

and they started out in that career when it didn't seem like that bad of a thing to do. So then they're like, hey, man, I just spent my whole career working hard to do useful things, and now you're telling me I'm the devil. I mean, that's going to make them pretty upset, you know? So I say, like, instead of demonizing oil and gas, which also they should stop lobbying against the carbon tax, by the way, then just, like, honestly,

the smartest thing the oil and gas industry could do, we'd say, let's do a carbon tax. And then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil. Make us not the and and then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil make us not the devil and they'll still make a fuckload of money so we'll be fine that'll be fine yeah that seems so reasonable i can't imagine how anybody would argue against that that's what i thought i don't know i think the biden administration should take a strong stance on this situation what political candidates endorsed a carbon tax?

Did Bernie Sanders endorse a carbon tax? I don't know. He might have. It seems super reasonable. I mean, I kind of like, even though he's a communist, I kind of like Bernie Sanders. Yeah, I like him too.

Yeah. He's a, I think he's, I think he means well. Yeah, I think he means well yeah i think he means well the best part about him and he's been remarkably consistent in meaning well his whole life and they kept fucking throwing him right under the bus yeah absolutely two election cycles in a row yeah i think it is hilarious that he like to the Soviet Union three days after his wedding for like 10 days. And he was like a mayor of a city.

He was a mayor in Vermont. I'm like, yo, dude, how do you explain days six through 10? Don't you get it? Didn't you see everything you needed to see?

That's a long time. Can't you be interviews take that long? Carbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of an industry that is, without a doubt, causing some problems. I mean, there's no one saying it doesn't cause problems. People would deny the extent of the problem, but no one says that excess CO2 from emissions is not an issue. I mean, like Exxon's own scientists said in, I think it was the late 70s, like, we think there might be a problem here with climate change due to the CO2.

It's like internal, their own documents, their own people. Then they were like, be quiet. Isn't it weird when environmental things become political, though? When the denial of the environmental thing is like predominantly from some factions of the right. And then, you know, like, the opposite is from some factions, and then it becomes a political thing. So they dig their heels in the sand. And they're like, no, no, no, this is fine.

This is the way the Earth is. There's a cycle, a natural cycle, and it becomes this mantra that they repeat. It's true there is a natural cycle, but that does not explain the situation. Right. The wall, as you described. It's a wall, man.

Yeah. I mean, you just look at carbon parts per million, and it just looks like a wall. Like, that just, you know, goes like blah, blah, blah. You know, 200 to 300 parts per million. Bam, 400. Out of nowhere. There's also some weird arguments that some people will make in terms of the impact that it has on uh on plant life and that it actually is making the earth greener oh i think that's

actually true yeah yeah yeah but that's not necessarily okay still causes problems yeah i mean i'm trying to be like as precise i mean mean, or at least the least amount wrong that I can be. I'm trying to be the least amount wrong. Because plants live off carbon dioxide, so the more... Yeah, yeah. The more CO2 does improve plant growth. It's true. Yeah.

Like I said, I don't think, based on where we are, provided we're not complacent, provided we don't take things for granted, I think we'll be fine. But if we're complacent and we take things for granted and we just proceed like everything's fine and we continue on the momentum of CO2 emissions, we're taking a big risk. And the especially big risk is if there's a non-linear event. Okay, so CO2 ppm, parts per million, has been increasing pretty reliably, 203 ppm per year. But you could have a non-linear event. What would constitute a non-linear event? you could have a nonlinear event.

What would constitute a nonlinear event? If we melt the Siberian tundra, there's like a massive amount of trapped gas and dead plant matter that's frozen solid. Now, if that warms up and that decays, that could put a massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, potentially. And then you have, like, how we, like, what are the carbon sinks? And, like, if you saturate the carbon sinks and you have, like, a sudden release of CO2 from something that was previously frozen solid,

that's where you could have a non-linearity and things could go haywire pretty fast. What could happen then? I mean, Earth would heat up, the water level would rise. You'd have a higher probability of extreme weather events. Should we hit the fan? Should we hit the fan? Should we hit the fan? I'm not saying for sure should we hit the fan should we hit the fan should we hit the fan like i'm not saying for sure should we hit the fan but i'm saying like the probability increases with time so you can't just change the the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and oceans and expect nothing

gonna happen this is just a chemical reaction man it's like yeah so is there anything it's like why we even run this experiment like so the crazy thing is like hey we need we know we need to have a sustainable energy economy long term because we're going to run out of oil so so then we got we're running this crazy experiment to see what is the effect of massively of taking billions of tons of carbon that was deep underground putting in the atmosphere and oceans and and and what's going to happen as a result of that and and it's a crazy it's like literally the craziest experiment in human history because we know no matter what that we have to have a sustainable energy future. We have to because otherwise civilization will collapse.

So what the hell are we running this experiment for? Because we're accustomed to doing things a certain way. This is going to go down as the most foolish experiment in the history of human civilization. Is it possible to create some sort of carbon extraction technology that will significantly impact the amount of CO2 that's in the air or mitigate the emissions? Yeah. I mean, so I just actually announced that I'm funding

this $100 million carbon capture prize to find out the answer to that question. So right now, all of the carbon capture methods that we're aware of are very expensive. The cost per ton is very expensive. wind or solar energy was required to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and and like I don't know make it in solid form like like make a cube of it or something you know just a giant cube we don't actually know the answer to that question that's why I'm giving our million dollars to this carbon capture price to try to get a better answer. Wasn't there some sort of... There's nothing good that we're aware of right now.

Not currently. Not currently that we're aware of. Because there's a point of diminishing returns, the amount of energy that you would need in order to... Basically, CO2 has a very low energy state. Naturally. So it's like you burn something, you combine oxygen with fuel, with hydrocarbons, and the net result is CO2 and H2O, basically. And there's a bunch of other stuff too, but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water, mostly carbon dioxide. So obviously it goes from a high energy state, we use that to power our cars or our power plants,

and then it ends up in a low energy state, which is CO2 in the atmosphere. And then, like I said, a bunch of it gets in the ocean. So naturally, it therefore requires a lot of energy to rebind that in solid form. It doesn't want to just... You've got to put a lot of energy in to bind it. And you want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for a long time.

And this is a hard problem. There was a concept, I don't know if it was implemented, but in China they developed essentially like a giant building that was, you know, are you aware of this? It was, I don't know if they actually did it. Did they want... We talked about this before, Jamie. Did they ever wind up doing that? It was like a building that was essentially

like a giant air filter. And they were going to use it. But that might have been about particulates more than it was about CO2. Maybe more. By the way, I have to be to say a good word here for China. China, for any large economy, has the most progressive pro-environmental rules of any large economy.

Really? Yeah. They're like super supportive of electric vehicles, of solar power, of wind. They actually even made a giant solar field in the shape of a panda, which is pretty cute. So it's actually funny that it happened. Like for a long time, China was like not, you know, was not buying into the carbon thing. You know, like they were like, oh, it's just like a bunch of soft Westerners. They're like, they're just a bunch of environmental softies um and then at some point like senior members

of the chinese government they you know so well let's like ask the you know engineering professors like at the universities like what do they think they're like oh yeah no it's definitely real they're like wait you mean it's real like they're like, yeah, yeah, it's real. So then like, holy shit, immediate change. Well, that's the power of having the government and business inexorably intertwined. Yeah. So they can kind of decide how business is going to react and what's going to happen. Right? Yeah.

I think people don't realize China is super pro-environment right now. Like way more than America. Is that their thing? Skyscraper-sized air purifier is the world's tallest. Look at that thing. So that's an air purifier. But that's the thing. Is that pulling particulates out of the atmosphere?

Or is that actually taking carbon out? You know, an air purifier. Air purifier, not the same thing. It's super hard to capture carbon. Look at that thing. Jesus Christ. Imagine falling into that yeah i mean naturally it's just fundamental thermodynamics like yeah you know you release a lot of energy that resulted in the co2 so now you gotta use a lot of energy to capture it yeah um made a particulate matter no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter.

Yeah. Yeah. That's like a hard, that's particularly difficult to filter 2 microns. Oh, you know, so, I don't know, most people probably don't know, but like Model S and X have hospital-grade HEPA filters, Like Model S and X have hospital-grade HEPA filters, and they'll actually drop the two micron PPM level to almost undetectable in the car. Really? Yeah.

So if you're in some sort of a biological disaster area, you can drive through with your Tesla? Yes. Hmm. It's literally this like biohazard defense mode where it basically pressurizes the car. So it's like the car is under positive pressure with all the air coming through a gigantic HEPA filter. And then even the air inside the car is recirculating in a secondary filter. It's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far. Literally hospital grade. Wow. You could do an operation in the car. It's insane. That's awesome. filter it's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far literally hospital grade wow you could do an operation in the car it's insane that's awesome yeah we got a little

carried away i'm glad you get carried away you know another thing i thought is jamie's got the x and one of the things that i love about the x is when it gets hit they literally can't flip over oh yeah it's incredible it's like one of those like things that you if you you know like where you punch the thing and it just comes back up yeah yeah there's like they they couldn't flip it over in the test so it would like roll on its side and then roll back and now it's amazing very low center of gravity um so that's giant yeah i mean that is so fucking cool it's not that's giant. Yeah, exactly. That is so fucking cool. I mean, it's not, it just rolls back on. I mean, um,

there's not another car like that in the world. No, every other car in the world would, would just fucking roll. It's pretty amazing, man. Yeah. Even if you did manage to bang it on the,

on the roof, uh, it like, you can stack like five cars on top of a model, model S or X. Wow. Now, are you guys still S or X. Wow. Now, are you guys still making the X?

Yeah. Are you guys still going to do the crazy doors? The crazy doors. Those doors are exercise and hubris. That's for sure. That's a lot of things you do is exercise and hubris. Well, some things are really important and necessary. Some things are not necessary. And the doors.

But the thing is... Those doors are not necessary, but they're very cool. They're functional, though, if you're in a tight spot. Those doors will open up tighter than almost any door out there. They'll open up in 18 inches. You've got an 18-inch gap between you and the next car. That door out there. Like, you can even... They'll open up in 18 inches. You've got an 18-inch gap between you and the next car, that door will open. That's pretty amazing.

So, we developed a... I mean, just in order to avoid having a puck, like an ultrasonic puck in the door, we developed the... To the best of my knowledge... What's an ultrasonic puck mean? So, like the ultrasonic puck in the door, we developed the, to the best of my knowledge. What's an ultrasonic puck mean? So like the, the, the, the ultrasonic sensors that you have in a car, if you look carefully, you'll see that there's a little puck, like a little, um, isolation ring, like a rubber

isolation ring. And, um, that's when the, the, the sonar, which is like basically a loudspeaker is generating ultrasonic noise and it's, uh, and then listening to the echoes. generating ultrasonic noise and then listening to the echoes. But normally in order to listen to the echoes, you've got to isolate the thing that's generating the sound. So that's why if you look carefully around cars, you'll see these little pucks, these little circles,

and those are the ultrasonic sensors. And we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door, but we also didn't want the door to bat some kid out of the way. Right. Just doof. Just a haymaker or something. Right. So we developed, to the best of my knowledge, the only ultrasonic sensor that can see through metal.

So it's mounted on the inside of the door on isolation mounts, and it's super loud, and then it's got cancellation because it's kind of basically screaming at itself and it's listening for a tiny echo on the other side of the metal just to avoid having a little rubber ring in the bottom of the door. Jesus Christ. Yeah. We put in a capacitive sensor an inductive sensor a force feedback sensor and and ultrasonics that can see through metal this is when i say exercise and hubris i mean like wow is that the most ridiculous car you've

created yeah this is a fabuze the model x is a Fabergé egg of cars. It's crazy. I mean, for like the six-seaters, like for the seats, the seats are on a rear-inclined single post with the seat movement mechanism hidden in the floor. So if you open the door and you look through, it's completely clean. It's just like the floor is like a knife edge. It's just, there's nothing else like it. It's crazy. That windscreen is like a helicopter. It's like a helicopter windscreen. And there's no place to put the, to attach the sun visors.

So we had to have sun visors that nest in the A-pillar, rotate forward, have a magnetic attachment that pops out and connects to the rear view mirror. But you seem very proud of all that. You say all these details and they sound really crazy, but... That's great. That's pretty awesome i mean the sound system and the x is awesome um i mean we designed so that the sound system is taking into account the fact that the windscreen is like a giant like you know a subwoofer resonator

so like the windscreen is a resonator for the sound system yes the sound system is epic in the in the x it's good in the s2 it's even better in the new s have you thought about doing a plaid x yeah there's gonna be a plaid x2 yeah when's that coming which is like bizarrely fast for an suv that's coming out well isn't it already bizarrely fast you said it was preposterous, right? Yeah. It's like it really is like, well, this thing's too fast. It's too fast, probably.

Have you increased the range of the X? What is the range of the X currently? It's like 300-something? Yeah, 300-something. So it'll be like high 300s. And is the difference between the X and the S the aerodynamics the X and the S aerodynamics? what limits the range?

the X weighs more and it's got a bigger cross-sectional area something called the CDA drag coefficient times frontal area is higher for the X as you'd expect and the weight is higher so it's going to be 10% to 15% less range for the same battery pack as the S. The first time I saw an X, Tiffany Haddish had one,

and she was in the Comedy Store parking lot, and she had it dancing for us. Oh, yeah. She was playing music and dancing like this. A lot of people don't know that the Model X can do this crazy ballet thing with the... It fucking dances. Oh, yeah.

With the doors were going up and down, and the music swang and we were all dancing in the parking lot to this car yeah it's crazy um what is your do you have a favorite that you've created car i mean or yeah um not rocket that's a little Well, the car I drive every day, or tend to drive, is the high-performance Model S. So the Model S, I basically just said, I don't know what other people like, but I know what I love. And I'm going to just make a car that's the car that I love. And hopefully there'll be enough people out there who also love the car. So that's the reason I love the Model S is because I just designed the car that I would love.

That's it. And then it's like, okay, well, how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an SUV? well, how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an SUV? Because a lot of people like an SUV and you've got more seats and more room and a higher seat at sitting higher. So what cool things? What are all the cool things?

I mean, like I said, exercise and hubris. We just got carried away. What are all the cool things we can think of for an SUV? Franz and I had a lot of discussions about this. And JV, Straubel back in the day, and Drew Bacalino, and Jerome, and just a lot of talented people. Tesla's a relative of a lot of talented people now tells us relative a lot of talented people that's for sure

The car that's the most fun to show for others is the Model X for sure So it's a great car But I thought like you know Is this really part of our mission to like we we're trying to, the mission from Tesla from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. So, are we really doing the right thing by creating this Fabergé egg of cars with the Model X? I mean, to be totally frank, it's not entirely consistent with our mission because there's too many bells and whistles. Yeah, but isn't it, though, because Americans love SUVs, and what better way to entice them into embracing sustainable energy than give them the dopest SUV you can buy?

Yeah. That's how we justified it to ourselves. I mean, it's not a justification. It's a great carrot. You're dangling an amazing carrot. Yeah. I mean, actually, in terms of you know cr2 per mile also suvs are like among the worst you know like this very suvs typically very low

mileage take a lot of gasoline per mile so uh you know if you're replacing you know big suvs that's actually like the best thing you could do um on a per mile basis uh but still we we really got carried away you know the faber-shayag of cars uh nobody's ever gonna make a car like that uh explain to me what the fuck bill gates was talking about when he was saying that you can't do trucks well what was yeah i didn't know what you're talking about why did he say that then like why would someone probably somebody told him that and you know he just repeated it he's just not that close to the physics of it and so i don't think he's ill-intentioned here he just doesn't know what he's talking about but why say it then are you thinking about a guy who's so involved in technology you would think

you would only talk about things you understand i don't know it's weird i also heard that at one point he had a big short position against tesla which was kind of i don't know, it's weird. I also heard that at one point he had a big short position against Tesla, which was kind of, I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems weird. People I know who know the situation well, they said, are you sure? They said, yeah, he had a big short position against Tesla, which obviously didn't work out too well. But anyway, I think he's generally got good intentions here. I think he's probably just not, I don't hate Bill Gates, to be clear. I think he just probably doesn't know the science.

Yeah, I just thought it was odd because I knew that you guys were developing a semi. We have prototypes that... That actually drive. That actually drive. Like, we've used them to transport cars and stuff. It's not like a unicorn. It was like Pegasus or something.

I was like, what are you talking about? We literally have prototypes that work. What kind of mileage do those things get uh well these are prototypes so they'll be like you know i don't know about 300 miles something like that and so what we're driving back and forth from fremont to reno you know for transporting stuff but generally when semi-truck drivers when when it's a human being driving them they drive for long periods of time far more than 300 miles right no actually most trucking is short range really yeah majority okay the majority like shipping things around cities and things like yeah it'll be like take stuff from the port to the straight forwarding. Would you have a long range, like cross-continental version of it?

And so it'll be much more batteries and... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you want something on the order of like probably a 500 kilowatt hour pack. Like what we have in the S and the X is a 100 kilowatt hour pack. And you probably want like, I don't know,

500 kilowatt hour pack for a semi. But this is not a game changer on the mass, especially for a structural pack where the pack itself is the structure, is the primary load carrying element in the vehicle. Is it potentially... It's not a game. It definitely works 100%, no question about it.

Would it be possible to have a safer semi because of this whole... Yeah. Well, we can also... Like you have with the X? Yeah. The center of gravity would be really low, so that would certainly help.

We can also... We'd have motors individually controlling the wheels, so we can just automatically, and this was part of our seminar presentation, the computer will automatically prevent it from jackknifing. Jackknifing on a low-traction surface is like truck drivers' worst nightmare. You're on some icy road icy mountainous road that the trailer slides slides you know with jackknifes like that and you could slide off the edge of the hill and you could stop that from happening even on an icy road yeah wow so because you have individual control over over each of the wheels so you can like you can just make

sure it's it's stable and doesn't a jackknife it wears that you've got just one engine is very difficult to do that so do you anticipate that eventually these things would be completely autonomous like some like they won't actually truck drivers eventually it will be autonomous but we're still a ways away from that but in the in the in the short term I think we can certainly see convoys. So, you know, where you've got one truck driver and then there's like a whole bunch of trucks following that truck. And, you know, keeping like a distance so that other cars can pass in between them.

It's sort of like having a train but on the highway. It's like linked where it's just like one, like you got one, you know, truck driver in the front and then a whole series of trucks behind it that are following in a convoy. Whoa. But the trucks behind it are autonomous. And how much space in between? You could like wheel slip in there?

You could put like, you know, 40, 50 feet between them, no problem. Oh, wow. Yeah, and those trucks will just follow the lead. And it's just like having trains on the road. And they'll be following through, like just they know where the trucks ahead of them are at all times? It's very easy to follow. Oh. You just say, follow this thing.

No problem. What's next after this? You mean after what product or something? Yeah. Ultimately, do you think that you could have planes i thought about plans for a long time that my brain will explode if i do planes literally it's just like this is too crazy man just my my brain is overloaded so um overloaded because of the complexity or overloaded because you have too much right yeah um i'm glad

there's a limit i'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further. There's only so many hours in the day. Yeah. So, I mean, I think there are improvements happening over time for the energy density of batteries, like what hours per, or should really be joules, but like joules per kilogram, joules per liter. It's improving a little bit every year, you know, so, uh, planes really need a high energy density because you got to get up to altitude. Um, like most of the energy is getting up to altitude. And then once you're in a low density, low air density situation, you can cruise along with very, it takes very little energy to, you're in cruise. That's a massive amount of energy to get up there. So, um, man, I

thought about this a lot. Um, yeah, I mean, an aircraft in cruise is a neutral force balance so it's not accelerating so basically if you've got a motor of a given force for a given force you will just go faster as you go higher so you've got the

air resistance, the air resistance is dropping exponentially as you go higher if you have a constant force from your motor and propeller or turbine or whatever, then you will just go faster. The higher you go, the faster you go for the same amount of power. So the key would be achieving a high altitude. Yeah, it's all about altitude. Like the air is very thick at sea level. Like for the same amount of force that would you would go say like you know half the speed of

sound at sea level you could go you know twice the speed of sound at, let's say, 100,000 feet. Same amount of energy in cruise. Is it possible to fly a commercial plane at 100,000 feet? Would that be possible? Oh, yeah, yeah. You just go fast. The great thing about that is you could bring flat earthers up there. Ha ha.

Yeah. earthers up there haha um yeah the the faster you go the like like you just want to go the higher you go the faster you want to go right um so um like you're thinking about like the sr71 is that it's it's uh it's most fuel efficient speed was its fastest speed pretty much or pretty you know pretty close um because that's when it could go the highest altitude so because it could go faster at higher altitude it got better miles per gallon um at at high speed than low speed that's pretty wild yeah so altitude because air density decays exponentially and drag increases with the square. And so the exponential beats the square.

Do you think there would ever be a time where Tesla could run itself in a sense of like you have enough talented people running it and you wouldn't have to devote all your resources to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes? and maybe you would think about planes? Yeah, I mean, I'm committed to run Tesla for several years into the future, and there's still a lot of things we've got to get done. Could Tesla possibly expand to planes? It could.

It is a different regime. I mean, there are no car companies that are aircraft companies, really. But I think there is a way, ultimately, to have a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic electric jet. Wow. That would be cool. But what about the weight? That's where it comes from. Energy density of the pack is important. You need to get high.

Quickly. Yeah. Get high. Get high fast. Yeah. um yeah so um and you can get rid of most of the things that are on a plane

um if you just if you if you gimbal the uh the fan yeah to have the fan

change direction like you do with a rocket. You don't need a rudder. You mostly don't need an elevator. You just need some trim tabs. You basically have a flying wing.

It's pretty easy to do a flying wing. Wow. Or, you know, a flying wing with a little bit of fuselage. So you make it lighter, make the pack structural as well. So the pack is the wing. You've got to basically pull a few tricks like that.

This is all about, like, how do you make the non-cell portion of the aircraft as light as possible anyway this is like there's like a lot of regulatory things you have to go through and and this is counting on a watt hours per kilogram

you'd want watt hours per kilogram at the pack level to be over 400. Yeah. So we're pretty close to that. So it's like it's, you know, at the pack level, not at the cell level, but at the pack level and with high cycle life. Well, listen, you're doing plenty.

You don't necessarily have to get into planes right now. Yeah. I think you're busy enough. Planes will be the last of the things. Cars and trucks and then, you know, boats and then planes. Well, it's interesting because plane technology in terms of commercial air travel has probably increased, at least visibly, to the consumer the least in the last 30, 40, 50 years. It's not much difference. The experience is pretty similar.

Yep. In fact, it's got slower. Right after the Concorde. Not even the Concorde. The 747 was the fastest plane. Oh, really? Yeah. It had swept wings

like those so the wings we've like what's the wing angle that's that big factor in like what its crew speed is gonna be so the 747 had a you know pretty steep wing but it's its fuel efficiency is not as good as something like 777 or 787. I mean, there's some basic things in physics that are present almost everywhere. They sometimes take different form, but they're basically referring to the relationship between momentum and kinetic energy. Kinetic energy goes as a square. momentum is linear, and then there's surface-to-volume ratio. Surface-to-volume ratio and the momentum-to-kinetic energy ratio

drive so much of mechanics, it's insane. It's like the reason that you don't have like a single-celled creature that is gigantic is because of surface-to-volume ratio. Like there's a certain surface-to-volume ratio where diffusion works, and beyond that, diffusion does not work,

and you have to have a circulatory system. For aircraft, or just generally generally you want to move a large mass of air slowly so you can reduce the velocity component of kinetic energy which goes as the square you want to move a large amount of mass slowly not a small amount of mass fast so the way you make aircraft engines more efficient

is you move a lot of air slowly, like big fans, basically. Big, slow fans work great. Small, tiny, fast-moving jets are very inefficient. So, like, the, you know, something like a 777, it's really just a propeller and a shroud. So high bypass, what's called bypass ratio. Like how much of it is jet versus propeller. You want it to be mostly propeller. So this is clearly something you've been thinking about a lot. Oh sure. Yeah, like for

13 years. Do you think it's going to be the next thing for you? I hope not. I hope not. There's some smart people I could try and tackle it in. I hope they are successful. But just try to get high.

Get high. Go fast. Get high. You will automatically go fast as you go higher. It's just air density is dropping exponentially. And you think of like in the limit, you've got like a satellite. Satellites going around the Earth, you know, low Earth orbit satellites going around the Earth 25 times the speed of sound. No propulsion. So if you get high enough, you just keep going.

Obviously, you just want to go super high. Higher the better. Now, the thing, like you said, well, why don't planes do that already? Well, so if you've got a combustion engine, it's got an aperture issue. So you're like, okay, how big is the hole in which you're ingesting air? And then bear in mind, air is mostly nitrogen, not oxygen. So you got a lot more chaff than you got wheat. And that's why, you know, it's like you're going to design, this thing's got to work at sea level, it's going to work at altitude.

And then it's going to drop off in efficiency quite a lot as you go higher. Otherwise, and then there's also like, well, if the air, there's some other issues relating to depressurization, like how fast can you descend. But you really just want to go super high. And it's very difficult to design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitudes. So like the air density at 100,000 feet is approximately 1% that is effective at a wide range of altitudes.

So like the air density at 100,000 feet is approximately 1% that at sea level. So how the hell do you design a combustion, like an air burning, it's like an air, there's something that's taking in air combining with fuel and burning to work when you have a hundred-fold difference in air density.

This is an intractable problem but if you have an electric fan it's not burning anything so aperture doesn't matter mmm big it's a big deal it seems like it would be the best way to fly yeah someone can figure out how to do it um we're like well over three hours in here. Oh, wow. Amazing. Time flies when you're here. Yeah. Wasted.

Well, thank you very much. As always, it's a pleasure. Always fun to talk to you, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you're welcome. If you ever want to talk about something, I'm here for you. Thanks. All right.

Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.