Transcript for:
Elon Musk's Vision for Space and Sustainability

[Laughter] [Music] all day no that's the uh sasha baron cohen movie yeah i never saw that one there's a scene where he's uh they show him the new missile they've developed and uh but it has kind of a round round head and he says uh you need to make it more pointy to his engineers and uh actually that's what i also decided the same thing um yeah starship we need to make it more pointy did you say that mm-hmm because of the movie yeah really yeah hold on [Laughter] i just have that main camera okay okay that's you literally told them to make the starship more pointy because of the movie the dictator yep um and they know it too it's not like they it's not like they haven't they're unaware of it everyone thought it'd 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 this arguably slightly worse but like but more fun for you it looks cooler well okay it does look cool yeah yeah how long do you think it'll be before are you good jimmy what's that uh is my head's maybe yeah exactly good how long my head is sticking out is that where it's right it's all good oh is that supposed to be okay you're good all right how long do you think it's gonna be before you have like regular flights with that where you can take off and land and like an airplane where it'll be very consistent with our extra pointy rocket you were your extra pointy rocket do you mean earth to earth transport or or any time where you could just do it with people and have them have it land all the time um i think you're probably two hours away two years away yeah that's that's that's really nice two years is pretty cool tears for people we'll we'll we'll have a lot of flights between down there that's crazy that's 20 23 is not that far away that'll be there before you know it yeah wow 2023 10 flies how many times have you had explosions when you're on a rocket um i don't know like uh 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 now this this is a test program actually we expect it to explode um it's weird if it doesn't explode frankly really yeah um because we're trying to develop advanced rockets uh at a high at a high speed and uh if you want to get payloads orbit uh you you have to run things close to the edge and um the whole rocket is evolving the engines the structure the avionics the software the ground systems are all evolving simultaneously so and the whole production system which is actually harder than the rocket design by far so the the rocket and engine and avionics production system is and the launch system uh is a thousand percent harder than the initial design like at least really yeah so when same with cars it's like ten thousand percent and it's easy to do a car prototype it's hard to do production um so when you're looking at you're scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or uh corrections improvements and all these different things that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years if current trends continue uh if we you know if you plot the points on the curve of progress then then we should be doing regular uh orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years so we're getting to orbit this year our goal is to get to over this year um so and and i'm not sure people totally understand like starship is the largest playing object ever made uh this thing will be about over 5000 tons of weight on liftoff it's going to go straight up 5.5 000 tons this is much heavier than any aircraft by far there's no no aircraft even comes close to this uh with weight um 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 try because you want to go to mars or is this like you know just 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 gotta fly a lot so the reason why it has twice the thrust of the saturn v is to plan for these interstellar trips uh interplanetary trips so when you when you're doing this and you're you're you're developing these systems thinking about regular trips to other planets but you're not 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 the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where the 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 this is uh to have a fully uh reusable rocket then you need to go one step further needs to be fully and rapidly reusable you know it's like like a plane yeah yeah like plane lands you uh you know refuel it and take off again how do you have time this i i never understand you in regards to the the way you run multiple businesses simultaneously i would think that something like this would require so much concentration it would require this i would think this would be your whole being trying to figure out how to work this um yeah well i do work a lot but it's crazy yeah and i thought just for a reason i was late as i was literally coming from from the uh you know some critical meetings just doing normally i'd be meeting until i work until like one or two in the morning every night not i mean saturday 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 does as much 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 um i i don't find myself needed wanting more sleep than six so when like with the saturn v and the space shuttles and all these other rockets you they would 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 this these things are structured like the the whole thing goes together and then it lands together um well we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit right um i think one thing to appreciate is like space getting to space is easy getting to orbit is hard so you only need maybe one or two percent 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 like super difficult to get to orbit at all and then if you get to orbit at all then making those the stages reusable means they're going to come back intact uh 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 um so it's a you know you're literally coming in like a flaming meteor uh and and most things would just melt and vapor melt or vaporize so like if you as a human try to come in from orbit you just be pink missed yeah that's a funny way to put it yeah now the the space shuttle they had tiles right that was the the way they avoided the the heat they had these heat shield tiles what what do you use with the spacex rockets yeah we're uh have a more advanced version of the shuttle tile but you got to use uh some kind of uh ceramic essentially uh it's a you know usually some form of uh silicon oxide aluminum oxide uh some carbon perhaps thrown in there um and is it like a one piece or is it in tiles the way tiles yeah with a hexagonal tile so you can see the with each uh starship we've actually increased the size of the heat shield so uh it's it's tough because the the tiles are um uh they're they're kind of like i don't know there's no quite the right analogy they're kind of like dinner plates like they're they're brittle and they're uh they're they they're the coefficient of thermal expansion is different from from metal so metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles and the tiles also get super hot while the metal it can be super cold because it's got cryogenic fluid behind it so you've got 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 uh kind of the hot gas sort of the plasma gets in down down to get plasma in the crack and it's not as bad and then you're gonna melt the metal behind it so but if they're too close then they bang together and they crack so you've got to get it just right where they're the gaps 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 yes you can't really make a such a giant piece of ceramic because you've got you got well i guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven um but but you you really need uh you need expansion joints expansion contraction joints so be very quite difficult to do a single piece tile um think of it like tiles for your for a roof or something like that you know like why don't you just make one tile for a roof second right didn't work now these things have multiple stages how many stages uh in these the rocket boosters when when things are taking off how many sunship has two stages so that's that's the minimum number that you could do on a plane on a planet like earth the gravity and earth's gravity is quite strong um and we have a thick atmosphere and strong gravity so uh whereas like if you took off from mars uh it would be it's like relatively easy mars is around just under 40 percent of earth's gravity uh the moon is about a sixth and uh getting to lunar orbit from the surface of the moon is easy um like but when during apollo the lunar lander uh just the top half of the lunar lunar lander was able to take off and get to lunar orbit but to get to earth orbit you need the giant rocket because it's very non-linear so what happens to the first when when you take off and it separates into stages how does the 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 them no wow um yeah i mean jamie's gonna pull it up so does it come down with parachutes does it like how does it uh how does it land no it lands uh propulsively with the thrusters so with the engines really yeah so it's it's designed to take off here it is 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 re-entry um falcon 9 has uh there's the the fairing the top the where the satellites are contained in the top and that the fairing halves uh once it gets to space where the atmosphere is thin it's still a long way from orbit uh but it's in space so you no longer need the the satellite doesn't need to be protected by the nose cone or the fairing and so that it sort of splits into and falls away um and then so with falcon9 we recovered the the fairing house and we recovered the booster but we lose the upper stage on purpose yes but it's not really possible to if with falcon 9 we the the architecture just like if if we made the alpha stage reusable our padlet 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 famous you know like for a truck you wouldn't want like everything delivered by a small pickup truck you want semi-trailers you know um you don't see um you don't see ships in the ocean cargo ships you know coming along with one sea van and out with an outboard motor it's like a giant ship you know so scale has value in and of itself um like the same the same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket so you know even just in terms of like the computer the computer and like the electronics weight becomes vanishingly small and 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 of 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 uh there's no way around newton's third law really so you you basically have to expel mass uh you you like when you get there's a you know for a car that you could push against the ground for an app for an aircraft you can react against the air um for boat you can react against water in vacuum there is nothing so you the only way to move is to react against yourself to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity uh so and and to transfer momentum momentum from you know to to that gas that is going that way very rapidly um so you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you the large amount of mass accelerates slowly because momentum is conserved so yeah um so we're stuck with gas yeah until some insane breakthrough dealing with gravity or yeah that means it's not gonna happen not not in our lifetime not in our lifetime no um yeah so so you so ironically uh everything will go electric except for rockets it's just 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 see it methane ch4 and oxygen is o2 so um 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 um and the co2 from the atmosphere um 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 the rocket by the way is mostly oxygen so for starship we're almost 80 oxygen um 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 is it the trip to mars is like what six months is that what the idea is yeah it's about six months is do you ever anticipate it being quicker than that is it possible to make these things faster would you have to have solar sails like would you know it'll be very slow would it be um the i mean i'm trying like the way to think about gravity here there's a lot of analogies um but you know uh like you can think like like space itself is is curved like it's like a funnel like if there's something that uh has a lot of mass it's it's it's creating like a funnel and um so in the same like like if you have a coin funnel and you the the the coins the the coin thinks it's going in a straight line uh pretty much um you know uh the physicists out there might have quibble with my analogies but anyway i'm trying to convey what gravity is like uh like a funnel and so if you 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 surface the further out you spin so or you can think like a marble in a funnel like if you want that get that marble to go far out you just spin it sideways and it'll it'll spiral out and conversely if you uh just due to the friction of of the air friction and the rolling friction it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any any push and will slowly spiral in and then as it gets closer it spins faster and faster because this is how gravity basically works so um all the things in the solar system are spinning around this gigantic funnel in space time called the sun and where there's 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 earth's one year um because mars is about 50 further away from the earth than the for from the sun than the earth is so it's like mars where this is at one astronomical unit moss is like one and a half ish astronomical union so we're about eight light minutes away from the sun mars is about 12. and um 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 as you you that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the sun where the tip of the ellipse uh intersects with mars so mars going around you and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your lips being mars and that 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 get make it happen in say three months um 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 at near jupiter so if you miss mars you're going to end up at jupiter jupiter's orbit so that's not good yeah and you're going to be coming in hot you know so but i think it probably can get down to three months of that bigger problem getting out to month sort of hard um and then earth and mars are only in the same sort of there's only about a six month period every two years when uh 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 so you got to time it this is like about a quarter of every mars year is when you can do the transfer so one six months every two years um so 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 is it because it's not like you just go all the time you can only go over 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 i the the real the real the threshold that really matters is for getting past the great filter is do we have enough resources on mars such that if the uh if the spaceships from earth stop coming you can survive yeah so now you can only be just missing one little thing you'll be like you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin c uh yeah it's lucky it's only a matter of time you know yeah and there's gonna be curtains so you gotta have uh all the things necessary to sustain civilization on mars and the reason that the shifts from earth stopped coming could be world war three or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization so civilization here on earth could end with a bang or a whimper um or natural disasters yeah asteroid impacts in the bank category yeah but it could also be like a whole series of things like say like what killed the dinosaurs well it wasn't just one thing you know it was like a whole bunch of things happened in a row and and uh you know um well 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 [ __ ] well they're resilient crocodiles they um they'll 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 um that's why they're around crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms and shrews true yeah which is why we're here yeah exactly our great great great great great great grandparents were shrews what a strange thing so like yeah 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 so there'll be the say the great filter what did you mean by that um well so there's something called like the fermi paradox of like where are the aliens yeah so yeah 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 either they're equally terrifying um if there are a lot of aliens well i mean the invasion ship slash uh uh you know bug infestation just you know like starship trooper style well yeah i mean it's like as an alien civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation right you know it's like hey we like that planet was fine now it's got a bunch of bugs just go fumigate it you know um like would fumigate a house um that's certainly possible and then uh but if there are no aliens well could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become inter inter stellar you know so uh and and i wanna be clear like to the best of my knowledge i there is no evidence for alien life on earth that alien there's no evidence 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 uh you know uh 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 one level camera like something you know the problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today too yeah sure they should at least try hard in their in fakie are you familiar with uh commander david fravor's account of uh the tic tac ufo that he encountered off of the coast of san diego you know lex lex friedman yeah 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 uh conversation with them 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 sixty thousand 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 actively jammed their tracking systems and then went to their predetermined point that they were supposed to 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 okay and these guys that were uh 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 or something they do they have video of it uh okay they have video of it they have um there's do 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 in 2017 that was detailing this and there's a couple of there's a 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 these the politicians are trying to figure out what all this [ __ ] is so they try 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 i i i'll be jumping on that like be like you should watch that conversation with lex like 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 would would i don't know man they're real civilization they sure are subtle [Laughter] i mean if they wanted us to know obviously they could just for sure you know show up and walk down main street you know okay i'm an alien check me out you know right uh he has my spaceship i just landed in the middle of times square i'll be like right okay or hover over downtown l.a yeah yeah we were like okay we believe you yeah um so whatever they're they're very subtle very subtle because 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 isn't your information but we [Laughter] yeah what an interesting way of putting it this is new information listen your information like where are you guys up till now yeah um so anyway uh listen 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 um i mean we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things you know there's this people like if if we were to find something like let's say like a cube of titanium just like a one inch cube of titanium it's in the middle of the pyramid i'd be like aliens for sure there's no way they could have made a titanium back then nope there's no way that's hard that's all one didn't even need a computer like your computer would be like hey wow computers they didn't have computers back then so it must be aliens but 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 uh the technology they had at that time archaeologically yeah yeah yeah so you're just talking about old stuff yeah yeah just throughout history it's not like you know like the like aliens visitors would be if 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 uh 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 um now and the thing is that um 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 car with with and say there's no there's no new physics could you colonize the 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 yeah kind of like you know 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 it the if you read like the geological history of earth it's like very long and complicated um so and then there have 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 ninety percent of all species uh died out um and that doesn't tell the whole story because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and um you know like sponges and stuff like that you know like if are you 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 dead mad dead 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 and i think it was only like 60 70 000 years ago yeah they've been a number of sort of revolutionary choke points yeah um and uh 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 what motivates you to want to uh to do this and to put people on mars and to start traveling and get people traveling through the galaxy yeah so philosophically i'm i'm in the douglas adams sort of school of thought uh which is that the universe is the answer and we need to figure out like 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 of the universe would like to understand why are we here where do we come from where are we going what what's this all about and in order to in order to i don't know just understand the meaning of life we we have to extend expand the scope and scale of of life and and the consciousness which may be digital about digital and biological in the future and um and again get past at least one of the great filters which is to become a multi-planet species you know any a species that does not become multi-planetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event either self-inflicted or external so so we got we gotta you know be a multi-planet species also that's like 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 you want the super exciting future where we're out there exploring the galaxy that's that sounds great to me um and you know i think it's worth one percent of our resources something like that you know maybe more but at least one percent well so it's in all the most exciting sci-fi movies yeah yeah if you saw a sci-fi movie and they didn't have spaceships you're like what's going on there yeah something terrible must happen 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 you know space 1999 was a show when i was a kid that was uh interplanetary travel remember they had spaceships out there and motherships and they thought 1999 by then for sure for sure it would happen the problem is we need more elon musk's 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 the intelligence and the you can figure out how to organize people to to get something like this done not a lot of you well it takes this there's a lot of smart talented people at spacex and a tesla and that's that's how we get things done um but yeah i mean part of the reason why spacex is still privately privately held although we have a lot of investors and everyone in the company has given stock uh is that the time for time horizon for spacex is is long you know it's it's like you know what's the market for uh transporting things to mars well there's no no market there's no one there right um they were like that sounds pretty risky [Laughter] and the 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'd probably answer a 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 but but then to have a you then you've got to build out the base and then you've got to build out the the city um so the first thing you gotta build is like okay you gotta um generate energy so you got like giant solar panel farm yeah and then you've got to have propellant production so you gotta make the fuel and oxygen and you gotta you know grow food grow plant your plants and like all the things industry for life support so does everything have to be done in the greenhouse is some sort of a dome yeah so there's is there a long term possibility of terraforming yes long term we can make we can walk if you just warm mars up there's a lot of a frozen co2 and frozen water that would liquify that the co2 would dance by the atmosphere the liquid water would form oceans and lakes so 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 um that'll obviously be up to the martians but i don't know you could have giant solar reflectors you could um 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 to you know have it just do giant thermonuclear explosions every few seconds um the sun is a giant right thermonuclear reactor in the sky if you want to know what like hey what is it like to be exposed to thermonuclear radiation and 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 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 um the sun is converting i think uh four or five million tons of mass to energy every second so you know e equals mc squared so it's uh it's a lot it's a lot yeah that'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 the it's a gravitationally contained uh reaction so uh 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 um and uh yeah some people have like said well if you added up all the nuclear weapons on earth that's uh that's that wouldn't even be that that much i'm like yeah because they're small we can make way bigger nuclear weap nuclear bombs in the current ones this is like what's the point but so well if you want to make an artificial sun you then you just use a lot more hydrogen that would be something or deuterium they would have to construct on mars yeah yeah and then figure out a way to launch it yeah jesus yeah honestly not that hard um [Laughter] i mean they could do this without rarely had even having computers uh so this is back in the day so um but you can also do it with like yes solar reflectors um i don't know somehow if you want to make it look like a earth you got to warm it up right you know 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 and then we could bring we could take the life from earth and breathe life into mars there's nothing living on the surface of mars yeah nothing it's cold yeah there's a lot of ultraviolet like the combination of being cold and um having a lot of ultraviolet radiation that's that's that's the that's that's the killer combo just being cold uh then bacteria could survive uh or just uv but warm the bacteria can repair themselves but if they're frozen and they get blasted with the uv the they can't repair themselves if they're frozen and isn't the speculation at one point in time mars did have an atmosphere mars was different than it is now yeah it it once had a quite a dense atmosphere and it would have it seemed most likely to have had oceans and lakes um now they're frozen and covered in dust and the um that orange color you see is iron oxide so there's there's quite a lot of iron just rust you know for a while there they thought well maybe mars was like some ancient civilization you know do you remember the face on mars i think sure um there's a guy that was completely con he was fascinating um richard hoagland is that his name see if that's the guy's name but he's with all due respect out of his [ __ ] mind sure and he was making all these incredible incredibly bizarre connections like measurements from this rock to that rock and using all this mathematics to prove that this was that this symmetry was impossible in nature and this was all created by our civilization that this face was like some sort of a you know uh ancient uh shrine to whatever being lived there before there it is monuments tomorrow's richard hoagland that's the guy's name i used to listen to him on art bell that's crazy it was just i i mean i don't know if he's schizophrenic maybe he's maybe he's just smarter than all of us but uh well jamie's shaking his head i think aspirationally uh you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence not inversely proportional 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 uh so invested in this idea again maybe he's right um i don't think so no i i doubt it well then 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 looked like yeah rocks yeah mars kind of looks like uh i don't know like some arizona desert or something like that what did they think happened they think it was hit like an asteroid hit well everything got hit with light asteroids over time they think that that's what killed the environment there the the atmosphere um well the atmosphere so mars has uh lower gravity than earth and it does not have a strong magnetic field so over time those over billions of years the atmosphere will be gradually eroded by the by the um you know by this by the solar wind um and um and and having less gravity so um you know the smaller you are the less generally the less atmosphere you're gonna have um so yeah so generating atmosphere on mars it would eventually erode but we're talking about hundreds of millions of years to you know 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 asteroids or you know they don't really have like serious there's a pretty big asteroid that 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 real atmosphere did you pay attention at all to uh the the guy who's the chair of the harvard astronomy department avi loeb who was recently there's a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our uh 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 percent possibility yeah it's shaped like a mama asteroid [Laughter] it was a hawaiian name okay yeah it was a hawaiian name it sounded like your mama yes it was like your mama yeah mao mao or something like that yeah yeah yeah because it was uh discovered in hawaii so you heard a hawaiian name well anyway so i think a fundamental test of human civilization is are we going to become a multi-planet uh civilization um before something cataclysmic happens now 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's like he he thought it was like around one percent a century something like that i believe you know it's not it's it's not like you know one percent chance over a hundred years it's like night or 99 chance of making it you know so i think he's probably about right so one percent 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 like i don't know russian roulette with uh you know asteroids barrels are empty yeah click click click eventually it's gonna 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 uh like i said i think we don't quite know the right questions to ask and if we 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 like where does it go i don't know that's why if i knew we were like okay the case closed we 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 it gives a sense of purpose to finite life forms well i think it's still there's a lot to understand about the the universe that we don't understand have a beverage absolutely so let's see alcohol is our one what's uh our two hour two well i don't think marijuana is legal in texas and the last time i don't have to remind you there was there's problems involved yes ultimately not though right well yeah it's like temporary oh that's sued though right didn't it cbd is legal here cbd cbd doesn't do anything does it no i think that's fair well it no no it does it definitely does something for inflammation it does yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure well how much do you have to have before you notice it well psycho 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's uh combined with things like melatonin you know things along those lines but it doesn't get you high [Laughter] but people that 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 some creams that are really good that people like that have uh thc and cbd in it all right so you like have like sunscreen or something and then i mean why not just throw it in there you know why not yeah well it's just it's great for soreness it just smells like wheat all day yeah it doesn't smell like weed it doesn't no no some of it does though so 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 a 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 so well anyway so we gotta make life multiplanetary before it's too late yeah um i think that makes sense yeah i mean why not it's also it's 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 uh you know and uh it'll be dangerous and people might die well for sure they're to die yeah like sometimes maybe surprise some people think that uh ideas 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 uh it's long journey food's probably not great 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 [ __ ] 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 realized 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 filter you know it might turn out that when we were out there exploring the galaxy we might find a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations you know and they were just 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 likes like ancient babylonians and sumerians and like you know like trying to decode their writing like what the hell linear be and in 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 children stone you know they used to be chills in a stone like okay now you know it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone and this don't last a long time yeah so we still have a lot of writing from the ancient romans because they chose a lot of stuff in stone or the egyptians well the egyptians yeah exactly man the egyptians really went to town with the hieroglyphics even the sumerians you know the cuneiforms carved in the clay tablets absolutely yeah um but i kind of wish they'd said more yeah exactly look at us and like our stuff is yeah it doesn't it's not going to last for a long time i mean 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 yeah um you know for when we did the falcon heavy test flight um that uh normally when you know aerospace companies do like a rocket test flight they put something boring on like a concrete block uh because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite and so i was like well we got to do something that's not very inspiring you know because concrete blocks are the least expensive inspiring things you could do so i was telling a friend of mine and he said hey uh well what about putting a a tesla on that you know i was like hey that sounds like a good idea i'm gonna go into my garage i'll put that one in there so i put my car on the rocket and then we we want to see how far the rocket could go so like just you know floor it let's go maximum delta v so i thought it would probably blow up and i had this image of like a man it was 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 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 uh orbiting mars wow yeah so now in that car so so now hopefully if 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 it looks fake it looks that's how you know it's real is that how you know 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 the vehicle you know because they're like things are very bright in space there's no uh like we don't quite realize it but in the app like the the atmosphere is making everything a little fuzzy and it's based things are super crisp and super like really reflective yeah there it is yeah exactly so so how is that getting to us with an image yeah with a radio wow yeah 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 or something like that so like an old flip phone yeah um it's mostly just driven by the what what's the bandwidth of a video signal so what do you have these are frame grabs from the from the video signal but and where's the 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 thought it might but there's a camera i mean it's it's kind of a like a fairly wide angle and looks like 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 it says don't panic on the screen yeah don't panic speaking of the roadster when is that thing going to be available uh next generation roadster so we're we're finishing the engineering of it this year and so hopefully start shipping them next year really yeah um and that we're going to throw some rocket technology in that car so yeah i've heard about that what does that mean um so at a minimum it would be uh hover i wanted to hover and like i'm trying to make this thing hover with that you know killing people right yeah good call yeah exactly i thought like maybe we could make it hover but like uh not too high you know so like maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground or something yeah you know like if you plummet you blow out the suspension but you're not gonna die so maybe you're six feet i don't know six feet probably fully 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 gonna be time limited right so like a jet like like it's just gonna be a super high pressure like ultra high pressure air bottle in the oh so so the standard roadster would have like two 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 uh i don't know the spacex option package uh then in that place where the two rear seats are would be is a a high pressure carbon overwrap pressure vessel so high very uh you know i don't know 10 000 psi or something like that and uh and then a bunch of thrusters and so like at minimum i'm confident we could do a thruster where the the license plate flips down you know james bond style and there's a rocket thruster behind it and that and that gives you three tons of thrust and oh for acceleration yeah so that would be on the ground that'll be on the ground and this thing would move like about out of hell jesus correct but it already goes 0-60 in 1.9 seconds right that's the sedan or the four-door what yeah how fast this is the new model s model s plaid that we start shipping next month or this month is uh we just tested it on the motor trend spec 0 to 60 is 1.96 seconds i have never driven my tesla and go why is this thing a little [ __ ] faster yeah i mean the one i have the model s is 2.4 right yeah which is preposterous it's so great i take people in it like 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 you want to freak out you want to see something [ __ ] crazy i picked him up at the improv we drove to the comedy store yeah and i i took him up laurel canyon are you ready i never take it out of ludicrous mode by the way i keep it in ludicrous mode all the time that's fine i stomped on the gas well not the gas the accelerator and he started screaming what the [ __ ] i go yeah it's what the [ __ ] this is crazy it's crazy it's crazy yes so this is significantly faster than that just for the plaid yeah so the the new the new plaid yeah it's a half second quicker to 60. pretty close yeah yeah like uh i mean every millisecond really matters when you start getting that that fast i thought plaid was going to ship later in the year yeah we've juiced it we managed to make it go faster oh that's better 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 nurburgring get to like the low seven minute mark really yeah um and then you know with further improvements i think we could we could bust seven minutes on the nurburgring which would be a pretty wicked outcome what is the record right now at the nurburgring is it the porsche 918 like what has the record something crazy like that right some there's no no production car i think no production car has gotten under seven um really as far as i know and even the ones that are close that they say our production are they they do a bunch of changes right like change the tires the aerodynamics yeah yeah but it's like yeah i think there's potential to have a car that as delivered can beat seven seconds on on nurburgring isn't it funny that this is one track that's the gold standard for almost all vehicles like if you look at like 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 nurburgring well yeah now never going to be totally frank is not representative of normal no it's not normal yeah um it's it's the hottest one to you can't game it you know 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 bloom who's across the intersection fastest um the new plan will do uh you know a sub nine second quarter mile and with a with an extra trap speed and a quarter mile of 155 miles an hour and it's a sedan yeah it's a four door it it can hit 60 miles an hour before it's cleared the intersection that's insane insane that's insane yeah wow it's uncomfortably fast is that steering wheel legit yeah is it legal yeah i mean formula they they use a a yoke in formula one they don't have a strawberry but you're not on the highway formula one car yeah yeah i like driving like this like resting my hand on the top of the wheel well you i think the autopilot is 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 i i find it's like you can rest your hand on your knee that kind of thing and uh it it works great anyway it looks awesome it does look cool yeah yeah it's very space shippy yeah yeah it'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 uh yeah when the horn is already kind of the center of the the steering wheel anyway but 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 uh instead of the center hub being the horn there was a button and yeah i never remembered it well with the there there are no yokes okay they're sorry there are no stalks there's so with this right there's a there's a yolk but there's no stalks so the car for example will default to driving in the like if you just get in um when you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator uh it will figure out whether you want to go backwards and forward that's crazy how's that possible well just you know it's just looks and sees is there an obstacle in front okay probably don't wag 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 um so it would it would default to um the invoice of whatever you you started um and then you can just you can just swipe on the screen and change direction but isn't it easier to just hit like that way to get almost never you'll see it's like you almost never do you do it yeah so you've been 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 real it's annoying you're talking to a guy likes manual gearboxes sure i like i like going yeah i mean i learned drive on manual too it's fun yeah it's cool yeah there's different kinds of cool though like i uh the one when 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 is 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 [ __ ] amazing oh there's a 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 uh at at home and obviously you know how to get to work but do you know the fastest way to get to work today's type technology yeah 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 your data from it's downloading traffic data from the internet okay so waze 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 [ __ ] car accident here and then you get it right away whereas on the internet you're a couple beats behind yeah i mean we we get the traffic data from google okay oh so it is for waze because google well 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 the autopilot will work basically seamlessly on the way to work like we have the the beta out and beta's working pretty well it's going to get super good and it'll basically be able to drive you all the way to work 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 over at school then go to work but 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 um well they're all input all input is error unless it's a game although all input is error well that's the other thing too it has games like you play chess yeah you can play chess we got we got the backgammon with the same with the aesthetic described uh in lost uh j.j evans asked for backgammon so we put it back avenue with the lost aesthetic uh it's got uh this a really fun game called polytopia that's i would say that's my top recommendation for any game in the car is play polytopia what is that it's like it's a real fun strategy game uh that's uh you'll you'll see like just 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 white that would be illegal but would 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 yeah so it's open for interpretation so if you are uh 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 you know 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 like yeah you should listen to music oh those [ __ ] pirate songs you like the sea shanties i i thought you were joking about that until you played them yeah yeah and catchy they're pretty catchy that's what's crazy i started researching stuck in your head i did not know that it was really a thing yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] jamie do you know do you know about the sea shanties oh my god yeah well and there's actually something really appealing about uh people singing in harmony yeah but 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 uh 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 taverns and um i don't know cool outfits cool outfits yeah sure you get scarves 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 a parrot how'd that happen now what about uh the truck when is that thing gonna happen uh 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 i frankly i just well austin is a bit like many california so i was like asking the team in california all right where where do you want to what's your top choice for you know a next big u.s factory a 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 what's number two uh silence [Laughter] yeah so many california here in austin it is a lot right yeah yeah it's it's i mean i i i hesitate talking about it because i've talked about it too much but it's it's very utopian yeah um yeah i think austin's going to be the biggest boomtown that america has seen in half a century i think it's a great response to the [ __ ] up government in some of the other cities yeah i mean i think you know yeah um 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 moved yeah caused them to move in the first place yes so the balance of austin is a blue city in 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 freedom that's part of the whole mixture that makes it work and that's you know it's it's kind of there's a there's a metaphor to life in there somewhere you know yeah that'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 it's 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 they could attack in your place wherever you live you could get a [ __ ] 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 jumped the fence now there's an elk out there it was an axis deer in my neighborhood i saw an axis i didn't see it my wife saw it she described to me i know what it is i said that's an act she's like it was like it had white spots like a fawn but it was really big i'm like that's an access deer so there's axis deer yeah they're they're from india okay and tigers eat them okay emily wow but these animals are they're wild here because people bought them and they they put them in their yard then 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 a long history of art and music stevie ray vaughan and sixth 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 you know this is that's the cool thing about this place yeah yeah absolutely i've never felt more at home i [ __ ] love it here that's a cool city um like i said it's gonna be the biggest broom town in that america scene in i have 50 years ago i agree yeah 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 and 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 other clubs of trying to open up here comedians are moving in here by the droves it's a wild place yeah well yeah i went to uh you and dave chapelle it was that was great it 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 [ __ ] yeah yeah it didn't make any sense no um you can't talk people out of a good panic they sure love it they love panic porn yeah fear porn is like that's 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 that don't and those people they get together and they they take solace in the fact there's other people that also don't want to buy into this [ __ ] do you know yeah um anyway so orson's origin is cool um so the cyber truck yeah so we're gonna build it uh our our factories only like two miles away from the airport oh um probably shouldn't tell people that no i mean you can literally drive you can see it from the highway do you do you anticipate visitors sure i mean we'll 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 to drive it off the floor you better that's exciting yeah that's exciting we got a lot of land yeah no no 2500 acres uh right next to the airport that's [ __ ] cool yeah that's amazing it's cool so when you're designing this cyber truck you know you had your your launch you showed the shape of it there was a lot like i sent you a picture i remember i sent you a picture i was like this is [ __ ] 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 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 [ __ ] cool yeah what you designed was is that ultimately 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 um you know we adjusted the size a few percent um but uh in what way well we it's a i don't know like i think around three percent smaller why why'd you decide to do that uh well you know to be a couple inches too big for the tunnel oh okay so for the boring tunnel well i mean we did actually drive through the pouring tunnel in a cyber truck with jay leno which was a 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 petrol head ever and he even loves your car yeah the cyber truck is like cgi in real life it looks you're standing right in front of it and it looks like uh this is special effect so that's cool it'll it'll change the look of the roads that look like anything it looks like alien technology yeah and when is that coming out um we'll we'll have probably limited production end of this year and volume production hopefully next year have you ever considered something alternative to uh air inflated tires have you seen some of these these alternatives that have essentially spaces in between the upper wall and the wheel have you thought about that yeah we've had we haven't found a you know uh a tire that because you gotta worry about road noise uh you gotta take out potholes and bumps um you gotta have like a good grip but you also want to have low rolling resistance so that you know 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 um so 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 just it's it's an incremental constraint um so i'm not saying there won't be such a thing i think there will be too 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 that's annoying yeah very annoying yeah um in non-sport tires by the way i'm much less likely to go to have flats because they're sure they're more bounce yeah i like you let's say you hit you hit the edge of a pothole if you've got more rubber wall you know you've got a longer way to go before you pinch the tire so um sport tires tend to that have more flats um and especially in l.a potholes that's the worst yeah like there was one particular pothole on sunset boulevard they would just take out so many model s like boom boom both sides of the car really yeah damn um yeah steven spielberg was actually once it's like hey steven's people focus like two tires went i was like god damn it i know that pothole [Laughter] i feel like you can pay to fix that i mean fix that pothole it seems like that that's actually it'll be like man there sure a lot of taxes in california for roads this bad yeah the place is a mess yeah um so 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 in 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 gonna have now oh yeah there was the issue with the glass when yeah that accidentally shot that how annoying was that that was shocking yeah i mean we literally spent you know hours beforehand with like lots of people throwing uh steel balls at the window right um i mean we must have thrown at least at least a dozen people must have thrown steel balls at the same window though yes isn't that the problem yeah that might turns out that might be the problem if you keep throwing steel balls eventually it's going to break and i did i did ask franz to really wind up and give it all you know and i should she was sort of like oh take it easy yeah you know give me you don't need to wind up yeah we don't need the fastball but i asked for i did ask for the fastball and like okay let's go for the slightly not slightly slower ball do you think it was because you guys were hitting the sidewall with a sledgehammer yeah yeah that could be like we're trying to figure out how the hell this thing break because i mean we were just bouncing steel balls off it all day right um and we think possibly what what might have happened there was that uh hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it and once you crack the base of it it loses all the strength right um and then it and then we just have a hairline fracture and then then you hit he hit it anywhere it's gonna shatter did you recreate that we didn't um it's also hard with uh test glass like with uh you know that like when you actually do production glass it's much more robust than uh demo glass uh because production glass you you you um like demo glasses you just can't make 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 class is always better than than than demo glass nonetheless it should have worked um and it was probably because we whacked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel ball at it 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 [Laughter] okay now you have a tank from the future okay yeah that's bulletproof yeah and how's that compared to you know it was way tougher than a regular truck look it's [ __ ] cool yeah there's no doubt that i don't have some character from the future being like a 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'd be fun like you know cruising around the field and like lobbying shooting rockets now is there ever a possibility that these things gonna be solar powered is that is that someday is the solar technology going to get to a point where it's kind of a surface area issue so i mean i think we could possibly put the the cover of the truck bed um you know put some solar cells in that so if you just leave it out in the sun you know probably bring you know recharges a few miles a day type of thing it was only it would only be a few months but what about one day is it possible the technology could evolve to the point where they could extract no really no it's a so there's about one kilowatt per square meter of solar energy and then you're gonna get uh probably 20 25 efficiency so you got 200 watts of square meter and then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun so you know like you're you know at the right angles basically like are you facing the sun or not so you know we add all those things up you say how many square meters can you really get and then how many watt hours per mile so it is 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 the entire surface of it solar panels like in a place like la or somewhere where it's never cloudy and drive around that thing now you can only you're going to burn off energy faster 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 charging room how's it going a lot of area yeah so um now you could possibly have like some you know solar thing that unfurls uh that has a lot 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 you know think about like maybe 200 watts a square meter uh you know maybe 20 watts a square foot something like that now the range of the new cars is much longer um like what is the range of uh 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 um and actually the new one the new uh long-range model s is over 400 mile range the new one but actually even the old one the old one was even 400 miles the new one's 400 miles too but the plaid will get you up to so the current plaid is going to be around 400 miles range uh there's a plat plus if you that's maybe a year from now that'll be on the order of 500 miles um that's a lot i here drive 500 miles anyway well if you're driving across the country yeah yeah 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 gonna be um we have to pick a range actually for the initial version um it'll be some number over 300 miles now when you say pick a range is it in terms of like what the battery array that you put in next like what's the pack size so do you have to take into account like like how much weight it's going to 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 for aerodynamic drag and then rolling resistance which is a function of mass and the tire efficiency so this this this has a big frontal area it's not very aerodynamic and the tires are not super uh they're not not optimized for long range it looks very aerodynamic the truck like if i actually have a [ __ ] you don't want your angles you don't want sharp angles see that's the problem it looks to me i'll be like yeah that's slicing right through like a knife um you want it rounded you want it around it yeah um 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 to like smooth just like you're driving over the car no bumps right just just you know easy going sharp sharp angles are bad for arrow so that arrow 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 um because the enclosing the bed at an angle that helps a lot like normal trucks going down the highway it's like a barn door right i know right i mean it's like having a parachute in the back you might as well be flying it yeah it's like not not far different from driving with a parachute yeah um so you can think of like drag is 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 uh 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 if you've got like a sharp you know sharp transition into the truck bed it's like it's a big low pressure zone basically um and that's uh that's bad for drag um so having the slope back where where that's got the the truck bed cover um 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 what how much range do you really want you know um if you ask people i say well i want you know 600 miles range i'm like okay well that 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 it'll yeah inhibit handling yeah it's like otherwise like why not have a car that's got a fuel tank that has two thousand miles range then i go and pull it up like once every every six months or every three months or something right but people they they basically figured out like actually carrying that much that much fuel around it's not not yeah it's not worth it right so um so i think you know there's some other stuff you can do for kind of like bragging rights and like but then you know brainwashing's 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 um okay yeah so someone can drive from l.a 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 now i i heard you talk recently about uh the possibility of a van like sprinter van style yeah now a band um because you 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 also have like maybe a roof where you know it's solar and then when it's stationary like like maybe mornings yeah it like it goes out and like provides shade and and maybe triples your area or something like that now if you go like okay now triple a area and you've got a big flat surface um now you could start having maybe having charging enough that you 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 tom green he's i think so yeah he used to be on mtv and actor and comedian he's uh 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 uh if you had something like that 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's it's i think that would be great you know like you could have like a van that just you know even if if the apocalypse came around you still you can still drive yeah yeah and maybe you can even have some sort of uh an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent yeah that could juice you up during the day or something something along those lines yeah for solar it's all about area yeah yeah it's called 200 watts a square meter maybe 20 watts a square foot something like that and but i don't understand that this there's no way that that's ever gonna get more efficient no really no i mean the sun the solar incidence um is somewhat coincidentally roughly a thousand watts per square meter or you know uh in a hundred you know in a ten foot by oh sorry sorry i'd like it ten square feet ish um there's a thousand watts um and then that that that includes all the heating and everything else so so then you say like okay for photoelectric effect you're only 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 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's just it hits a just it hits the hit 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 that's the electro and then thus creates an electric circuit so you say okay well how are you going to get those uh you know electrons it's just the right energy what like what's what kind of photon incoming energy you've got i was like yeah it basically pretty much tops out around 30 efficiency for a silicon system now if you have triple gun junction gallium arsenide you 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 uh mid 30s maybe 40 before a big price increase but still not enough to actually power the entire vehicle no no you're talking about any fc like for practical purposes how's it going to do um because you can't have like crazy money stuff in a car you know when you say big money like like 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 like this uh satellites that have like the treble junction gallium last night stuff you know but frankly even for satellites is questionable um for our satellites for starlink we don't bother with that that's another thing i want to talk to you about scarlet style starlink uh starlink is semi-controversial right because on one hand people think it's great that you're going to provide the internet through these uh satellites that are flying around sure but astronomers and a lot of people that are you know amateur astronomers mostly the amateurs i think we've talked with the the the professional astronomers and assuage their concerns yeah yeah but the amateurs are pissed yeah they're like you know the the the they don't know what they're talking about they're pro-level guys they know what they're talking about um so um we'll make sure that this is not like an obstacle to science so what 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're like we're like oh we got like but i've seen pictures of them yeah well first of all so during the initial like when they get tossed out of the rocket briefly uh they're tumbling um and so when they're tumbling they'll twinkle and then and then you'll see them oh so this was just the initial yeah it's just the initial orbit they just got tossed out of the you know with upper stage deploys the way we deploy them we don't even really have a separation mechanism you can see the video online uh 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 and the satellites get just like if you took a deck of cards and those all get thrown out with because they have different amounts of rotational 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 can play like a fast twitch video game uh download a movie super fast um it'd be great and this is going to be global yeah and it is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially or will require a series of satellites in 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 uh which so they're they're i mean to to the satellite the satellite feels like it's going in a circle um but the earth's rotating underneath the satellite so the ground track looks like a sine wave so that if you if you look say like the from the ground perspective the satellite's doing this like sine wave with a peak at 53 degrees and then there's there's there's 36 planes so they're all doing like a sine wave you know uh just offset by a little bit um and but but like i said like space is real big so they're not in danger of whacking it into each other it's super big up there um they don't really even get close so anyway so they're zooming around earth um as we got a lot of coverage around 53 degrees um and then we just started to launch some polar satellites which will uh go have a orbital inclination that's that allows them to kind of go have visibility to the poles almost you know who the [ __ ] 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 stations okay so they're going to have internet access it's it's they're going to hack 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 every everywhere on earth we'll have high bandwidth low latency internet and will you be able to increase the bandwidth over time through software uh there's a lot that can be improved with software but but i should say that there's there's going to be a role for many different types of connectivity so starlink is great for low to medium population density uh but the satellites are actually not great for high density urban uh so you're actually better off having 5g for that um really yeah because that satellite's pretty far away right yeah so you got that satellite it's uh over 500 kilometers away even if it's right above you um on a slant distance it's like could be you know uh upwards of a thousand a thousand kilometers away so so this would be fantastic for rural areas yeah it will provide some kind of amount of connectivity in urban environment dense urban environments but um equivalent to like what 3g no it's more like so i think like basically like what's the spot size of a satellite like when it's putting a beam down in a location and how how big is that beam um and that's that's that's it's so it's got a certain amount of bandwidth for that beam and that that beam is just like it's a pretty big i think 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 right um so flashlight's just shooting out photo photons in the visible spectrum um we're shooting out photons in the k uk event um so um much bigger wavelength than light than visible light um so anyway so these things um so we got we got a bunch of spot beams basically um and and but that's these beams are giant by cellular standards like they might be you know several miles uh diameter on on that beam so then you got you know say for argument's sake 10 mile diameter you know 16 kilometer diameter uh beam that's this is a lot of area that's and and all of the all those terminals in that area will get the same information because it's got that that beam that's just going down that spot so um whereas you could have like a 5g uh tower that's uh the ones that aren't causing corona um kidding 5g courses 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 well i mean when technology is magic then you don't know what to believe right and when you're a [ __ ] you believe anything [Laughter] well let's say so uh a cell tower could have a range of um you know a mile or you know miles one and a half kilometers um it basically could have like uh one percent the area of of a satellite beam so like if you had something that was about um you know one mile or five minutes a kilometer or two or ten it's going to be the square of that that is the area so uh satellites are what are great for low to medium density uh 5g is ideal for high density i say yeah and also because you could distribute the towers every mile or so easily and yes yeah and dress them up like trees that always bothers me i'd rather i think they should do better at the fake trees i feel like come on somebody didn't care enough uh 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 right no i'm not like what is this part yeah they're offensive they're more offensive than like the most ridiculous fake tits you know like the the big ones that look like basketballs they don't cleave them yeah they have no shape that resembles a breast at all but yeah yeah there's something weird about them too it's like i'm not offended by a tower well the christmas tree part 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 effect left side jamie yeah yeah i'm sorry scroll keeps growing the palm tree one looks pretty good is that real yeah well 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 the one in the middle is not bad either that's kind of a pine tree looking like some sort of demented christmas tree that's a tower go back to the one you just had the that 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 have 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 [ __ ] cell phone tower yep who decided to make those things into fake trees like when did this become a precedent i don't know but you can definitely make a fake tree that is convincing so maybe just put more effort in the fakery yeah or just make them look cool make them look like robots yeah yeah have a big ultraman out there i mean some people are like really worried about like cellphone towers i'm thinking they cause like 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 uh like let me put this way like if i had cell phones if i had a helmet of cell phones right strap around around my head and around my nuts i would not worry yeah yeah i met a dude once who had ball cancer who's convinced that his cell phone no was in his pocket and that's what gave him ball cancer nope no no okay sorry yeah no it's not it's the cell phone is not um no um yes i didn't know this guy very well but he was uh 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 okay thing you know a little little little bracket on his hip kept his phone there even after he killed one of his nuts in his eyes he's like wow he wants his phone well damage is done [Laughter] your phone or your balls yeah he gave up uh they got me um yeah don't worry about phones not causing cancer so there's no concern whatsoever with the radiation that's caused by those things uh no first of all uh when people say radiation they're uh there's just like they're conflating this uh you know term from like nuclear you know bombs and like technically we are currently bathed in radiation right now the this table has radiation right everything produces radiation everything everything is emitting photons all the time um so this is a question of what wavelength and uh if you have a very short wavelength of high frequency photon that is capable of uh causing dna damage but we're talking about like ultraviolet and beyond your phone is not even close um so yeah um and and then the thing that really causes problems in let's say a nuclear explosion are uh alpha particles so like basically helium nuclei so those things will they're like tiny cannonballs so those will rip right through you it's like if you guys shot with tiny cannibals bad things would happen so that's that's also called radiation but it's really particles so you don't want to be bombarded with uh 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 says like as my cell phone can cause brain cancer i'm like because of radiation 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 that's emitting uh the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear and only by a tiny amount it's like it's like okay if you had an ear warmer that was very mild that's your phone that's all it's it's many photons at a frequency that are that that is it's a a frequency that can that is not going to cause dna damage so don't worry about it concerns people leave the easy at night don't worry about your phone it's fine david ike does not believe you he's doing backflips right now you [ __ ] chill um so what concerns people is the unknown right they hear about 5g and then they hear about radiation they're like wait a minute should i is this say what are we doing are we just ruining everything we're ruining it's fine fine totally fine um thank you yeah now i feel good about my 5g phone if you had a helmet that was made of cell phones you'll be fine yeah but this is coming from a guy who wants to stick a quarter-sized hole in your head and shove wires into your brain yeah so i know if a few things about what caused the brain damage i know but that like uh neural link concerns the [ __ ] out of people that that that that scares folks that's the ultimate 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 gonna get this we're gonna chip you out whether you'll like it or not the chip that's the yeah thing that people are scared of right now you will have to sign a million disclosures and it this is not going to be something that where where it just suddenly pounces on you like ah everyone getting chipped no it's it's it's a very slow process of okay let's first try to help people who have serious brain injuries like like if somebody got like a you know broken spinal cord injury or something like that like that's one of the first things we're looking at at doing is like somebody maybe a quadriplegic tetraplegic how how do we give them uh like an implant that allows them to use their computer or their phone and uh and have it be wireless and uh you know like they look totally normal you wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head um and uh they could just charge it inductively like you charge like a fitbit or something like that or apple watch something um and uh that that's kind of like one of the first applications we're thinking of is like let's let's uh restore uh functionality someone has had a serious spinal injury or a serious brain injury or some other kind you know so this is going to be like a very gradual process you'll see it coming you know but i was playing cyberpunk the game and i'm like [Laughter] are you worried about where you're going 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 my it might lead there eventually i'm just saying 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 either connected it's a 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 yeah it seems and 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 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 yeah we still need to feel for now until i don't know i mean i think more efficiently yeah but then once it becomes virtual once once virtual supersedes whatever like imagine if uh the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better than a regular orchestra i got news for you on that front oh we can it is it's disturbingly good when you're rubbing your chin oh you'll love it money back guarantee um do we 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 uh they uh did some experiment with her with a uh they put wires into her brain and gave her a device do you know the story there are a few stories like this yeah yeah and where it actually hits the pleasure center yeah and then you're like my god this is the best thing ever 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 [ __ ] about those blisters she was just coming constantly yeah and then she started adjusting that she tried to tamper with the device to increase the amplitude she became just an orgasm junkie she's and 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 was it's it's madness and it made me i mean i researched this extensively because i was fascinated by the idea that this could eventually become a part we could definitely make that happen that's the that's a real issue with people the instrumentation we wouldn't deserve because you know you wouldn't do it but the chinese uh sure i mean i i don't know my way phones immediately with a come button [Music] 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 you know easily but software limits could easily be worked around someone's going to come up with someone on the dark web well i mean your your phone is you're if you're carrying a phone around you're carrying a microphone gps yeah camera yeah every day everywhere everything i mean orwell would be losing his mind and it answers questions yeah yeah and he knows where you are yeah it's like you can just maybe have it like it's it's that phone by the way if you say like uh please like turn off it's it just says that it's off it's not actually all it's lying it could totally lie yeah and you can't take the back basically like apple or android anytime they want they could just turn your mic on yeah or your camera your gps everything yeah and just tell you it's off well i looked at the setting it says it's off yeah and some people like that's not good enough i want it strapped to my wrist i need one on me all the time yeah i mean these days like the modern smartphone is it's like a tiny cell phone on your wrist it is yeah even has low cellular connectivity and everything everything it is everything you leave your house you can make phone calls like dick tracy yeah yeah rather than anything tracy even imagined yeah [ __ ] it crazy yeah nothing he didn't know [ __ ] stop track communicator it's like it looks like a cheesy flower so walkie-talkie you have to say over kirk over a big one yeah they had to tell you out you couldn't just hang up yeah it was really ridiculous and they couldn't get on the internet couldn't take pictures yeah he was talking to people from another planet they couldn't even send them a photo i mean they'd even have a camera they would beam a whole body just to see what's going on rearrange your body right yeah take all of your all your atoms and reproject them on this planet totally or exactly well they could just stand a camera if you thought about that 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 it would be out there on where they thought we'd be on mars for sure but that but they never thought we'd have like a super computer in our pocket that and everyone's got a you know an amazing camera and yeah as much memories they could possibly a super computer 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 a moon photo capability so it's it's designed it has a moon shot so it's designed to be able to take beautiful photos of the moon and you can okay yeah it's like because if you do with an iphone it's it's not really programmed that way yeah actually that's true the iphone cam can't take good photos of the moon because actually i was just like in l.a and the 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 at my phone like it looks like tiny jimmy you got one of those talk to him about the moonshot didn't even know it was on there yeah just google moonshot with galaxy s21 ultra it's [ __ ] phenomenal i got i got one just for that i got one because i'm always interested in the both platforms and see where you're at you know but the uh the the photographs are [ __ ] incredible the zoom's incredible too they have much better zooms like look at this these are photos with the galaxy and that thing is just going to be all camera out there isn't that incredible i know look at the background just to make it all out of lenses it's 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 to mars photo with that i don't i don't know that's why you're taking a photo of marshall phone like yeah no no impossible thank you glad you're here for that because we would buy right into it i think that was last year's uh model what last year's model could take a picture of the no no no like lots last year's moon photo versus this year's oh yeah i mean if you had a giant like uh lens or something after basically you need a photon distillery so that's some 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 moonshot so the new one can actually see the craters which is just [ __ ] bananas i mean if that's just on a camera without a lens because you're just like saying what's your photon gathering area you know it's like photons per unit area certain limit if you were what's that jamie'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 was just like the i don't know you know the air was clear like l.a can be amazing like on a clear winter day where the moon is low in the horizon yeah and the 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 and it looked terrible yeah it 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 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 there is is it still good it's still better apple yeah it's still better yeah it's but it's close it's close but the other thing that bothers me about google is google is constantly tracking you android phones there's like so let me see if you're an ad it's so hard to avoid but 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 what he's doing to sort of cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and and gather your data and this battle that's going on between tim cook and facebook i [ __ ] love it i love that he's stepping up yeah 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 here the decisions out of here you're not killing small business we're killing this one gigantic information gathering business that's decided that it's gonna take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make [ __ ] billions of dollars yeah well i mean even perhaps arguably worse they're going to feed all that data into their um the ai that they're developing it's called facebook ai you can follow them on twitter and they're like just let's just feed all those informations into the ai and see what to see what it is yeah who knows what would happen you know it seems like i don't know some dystopian outcomes are possible yeah well you're terrified of ai right no well i mean i just think if it's unchecked no 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 uh nitsa you know the the various regulatory agencies fda and so forth you know i think it's we're better off having them than not having them um um there is a risk a risk-reward asymmetry in that they're that they tend to be perhaps not not weigh the good as much as they weigh the bad um you know yeah because their their incentive structure is uh you know they get punished a lot for approving something but they don't get punished that much for not approving stuffing so that's just in the nature of government um but nonetheless i think everyone would would you know 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 our probably our biggest existential threat yeah it's it seems like hey we should like have somebody keep an eye on there you know right but who that's the problem i don't know the problem is the government who's going to do joe biden let's have him pay attention to it no i mean this is like 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 it's going to turn on like a [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] they're going to use it for and then it's going to decide why am i listening to you yeah if you read like the plot line for terminator it's actually it's actually pretty smart like james cameron wrote a pretty smart script there it's not it's not quite as like or there's just like arnold schwarzenegger chasing you down the street it's like well how did cyber dying systems develop it's like well they were a multi-military contractor and they were asked to develop um a a a protective system something that would protect it for cyber security 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 um and then as part of the what the ai did is it it in order to defend itself it it propagated throughout the world to keep to keep an eye on things see what was going on and then they they the then they've thought well hang on this is there's something they didn't realize that it was cyber that it was skynet that was propagating through all these systems and i said okay uh the 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 uh you are the enemy you must be destroyed that's how uh 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 a 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 the the meaning of life for us would be very different in the meaning of life or 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 i think it's but it is expensive you ask if we create if we create some sort of silicon based life form but it acts like a life form it has a desire [Laughter] it was i think in australia a few years ago um an artificial insemination lab that had had a bunch of like bulges stored in bile in in canisters but it like overheated and so that you had basically exploding bulges all over the place really and that line was ai goes wild has come everywhere [Laughter] yeah just like come rockets all over the place yeah [Applause] nobody wants that right yeah does that help them clean up on uh you know all nine or whatever [Laughter] bullet joe's all over the walls literally it actually happened yeah back to artificial insight wait i mean artificial intelligence back to artificial intelligence i'm really worried about it yeah i think we should be concerned and we should have uh oversight of some kind yeah but who would be the oversight like i don't know like the regulatory agency i don't know whoever yeah it's like you know people have the faa like i said we have the faa we got the um fda yeah but uh we just need an acronym to oversee this stuff the problem is like governing government agencies suck at most things you know yeah what i mean it's the best government agency like what what what government agency does the best job of oversight no i i think generally um 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 like we're against corporations but we're for government i'm like governor's just the biggest corporation what are you talking about you know it's a corporation with a monopoly it's the biggest corporation and has monopoly that's government so but you get to pick who runs it yeah you have more influence on who is ceo of general electric than you have on who's president really sure how so well i mean you're gonna have how many voters are there like 150 million i don't know and maybe a hundred 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 um so i'm here live in california it's going democratic this is for sure gavin newsom might be [ __ ] that up um i do think you know in california in any given state there's got to be uh above 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 reset like are they going to be responsive to the people right they're only going to be responsible 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 help them yeah exactly and that's where california yeah yeah so anyway so government is corporation in the limit it's a it's the government is the biggest corporation with a monopoly nonetheless uh it there are some things that it's hard to see having be an industry buddy the probability of regulatory capture if it's an industry body is higher than if it's the government this it's not zero if it's the government there's plenty of cases regulatory capture uh for for federal agencies but um but the probability is lower than if it's an industry group and at the end of the day somebody asked to say you know go and tell facebook or google or apple or tesla tesla has a lot of advanced ai this is okay or it's not okay uh or at least and be able to report back to the public this is what we found uh 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 [Music] 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 um i mean all the companies are going hog wild on the air front so anyway i i my recommendation that should be some kind of regulatory authority so how would they do that and i'm not you know i'm not i'm 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 and i think the the you know right role of government is to be like the referee on the field you know when the governor 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 um so you can't have no referees yeah everyone agrees the referee may be it might be annoying at times but it's better that referee than not yes yeah i'm i'm just worried that these things are gonna it's gonna 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 the regulatory agency nonetheless i think the good outweighs the bad of and we should have one um the the the 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 um it took a while before there's an fda you know this and and is what tends to happen is you know some company gets desperate they're on the verge of bankruptcy and they're like ah man uh we'll just cut this corner it'll be fine um and then you know somebody dies you know and you know some of these like regulatory situations like look at seat belts i mean now we take seat belts for granted man the car company sports seat belts like there was no tomorrow uh they tried everything oh yeah they fought them for decades like 15 20 years the data was absolutely clear that you needed seat belts like seat belts you know you really needed seat belts like the difference in fatalities and serious injuries seat belt not seated well it's 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 ain't actually with advanced airbags actually i'm not i think we might have come full circle and no longer need seat belts if you have advanced airbags really yeah um i think there's a strong argument for saying if you've got what if the car flips no you're just you're just covered in plenty it's airbags everywhere bottom airbags are so good you you blow your mind just how good the airbags are and tesla we up 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 distribute 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 and 95 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 uh 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 in a bad position probably still fine jesus christ yeah it's dynamically updating this the airbag firing according to your where you're sitting how much you weigh in real time the seat belt is like if you wear the seat belt that's nice but the airbag is going to do most of the work airbag's doing 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 now yeah it's tough because airbag technology is crazy good um because you want the airbag to inflate and then deflate right so otherwise you're going to get asphyxiated you know okay so you can just like fill it up with stuff it's got to inflate and then and there's different stages of inflation it's like uh fast inflation and slow inflation then slowly subside i 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 you know so like we got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they've ever tested um so it was five stars in every category and subcategory and if there was a six star we get a six star um it's total it is actually legal to have one star car really yeah what's like a smart car are those one star oh oh i got to tell you this okay so the star rating is kind of [ __ ] really yeah i'm probably necessarily gonna be upset about me about this but um 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 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 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 is medium the roadster yeah the roadster is not super safe original roadster not super safe the original roadster 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 c i think we had like maybe seven percent i think we calculated seven percent of the parts were actually carry over 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 um it was uh not a it's something that sounded good let's take an ac propulsion drivetrain from this little 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 the battery ended up increasing the the mass of the car by 30 percent so then and the weight distribution was all different so you invalidated all the crash tests now you have to stretch the car in order to fit the battery so now the chassis is different uh all the airbags have to be redone all the crash structure had to be redone um it would have been better to start from scratch than to use than to start to then to use any part of a lotus lease it was worse it was like like let's say there's a house that you want you haven't mined a particular house and then you buy you buy a pr 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 build a new one um don't just try to modify it one piece at a time so the like so we had to change over 90 percent of the the non-power train portion of the car had to be changed 90 93 um and then the the the battery and drivetrain from ac propulsion did not work uh the the it had a you know an analog motor controller that was extremely unreliable um the the the way that the power electronics were done it was artisanal you could not recreate that in a production situation uh the battery pack was air-cooled which meant that if it was cold outside the car didn't work if it was uh hot too hot the battery would overheat and if you had any cell any part of this any one of the cells in the battery pack had a heat concentration you could not remove it the air was just not it's not good enough to just air cool the pack and so you could have thermal runway in the pack with the carbon down so we can use the battery pack couldn't use the motor you can use the inverter you can use a charger in the end we used none of the ac propulsion technology and almost none of the lotus technology wow so you just have the general shape it it has a passing resemblance to a lotus elise but if you put the lotus leaves in the roaster side by side they look actually quite different and i actually led the design of the the rose so the product design of the roadster they gave me like a fasting school art gave me like a honorary doctorate for it but be totally frank it's easy to do a design of a sports car it's very hard to do design of a sedan i tried i failed and that's why i hired um bronson holzhausen who's been our head of design since 2008. he's great he does things like i that are beyond my skill 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 friendly so you know new top gear in top gear of recent years is a tesla supporter so one of like just voice a note of appreciation for top gear of recent years 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 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 yeah we're the little kid on the block so um and we you know we're so we the top gear is like hey top gear wants to test your car 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 right you know so one of our engineers like ghost delivers the car and then he sees a script on the table it's like how'd you write the script you don't even yo 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 this also like obviously jeremy clarkson's hilarious there's information there it'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 is handed over the car is reading through a script it's like the cars break breaks down it like runs out i charge the brakes fail and we're like what the [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 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 early college um what'd you think of that documentary who killed the electric car i thought it was pretty good yeah yeah it's worth watching interesting mortally wounded not killed exactly exactly but 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 one if they had just gone eb2 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 yeah it's fascinating now you're seeing like this mustang this uh 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 there's a large supply of electric cars now i mean that's got to make you feel good though because without you and without tesla this i mean there was no way it would be where it's at right now uh yeah i mean when i think about like what's the final 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 know i think we're that's how we judge the fundamental good of tesla by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy um but yeah i mean in the early days my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that uh wisdom was not it wasn't environmental in the sense of like co2 uh you know parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing i do think the artist added urgency to the situation but um my original interest was it was just like we're going to run out 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 the solar energy and electric cars um then civilization's gonna fall apart and and we'll be back in the stone age or something like someone bad you know um but we're not going to be able to move forward it won't be a good future so so my interest in electric cars was like okay how do we how do we make this work um 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 um you know almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline cars in the very early days but the the batteries weren't didn't have enough range so um you know as soon as they had an electric starter and you didn't have to hand crank the engine then gasoline cars won um because i had the range so it's really a question of like how do you solve the range palm and um you know when i first came out it came out to california the reason i came out of california was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars basically advanced um about ways to store electric electric energy that would give you long range so in my summer internships i worked at this company called pinnacle research that that did high energy density capacitors um now they use the ruthenium and tantalum which are ruthenium especially quite rare you cannot scale that because there's 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 it's it's rare um you know i think at the time like it 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 um there's not enough of it uh it was like rarer than gold like it's 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 it like conflict minerals things like lithium now lithium is extremely common is it yeah lithium is everywhere lithium is one of the most common elements in the in the universe it's at number three on the periodic table so it's got a lithium ion pretty much everywhere where do we get it uh well i mean tesla we get most of our lithium from australia actually um so um but it's you could get lithium from seawater if you wanted to it's really yes yeah lithium is a it just forms assault and that's the primary component of the batteries or what else is in there it's a misnomer actually the it's called lithium lithium ion but that's like that's like the salt in the salad you know it's like it's like do you like salt in your salad sure but it's not made of salt uh the i mean the primary component in lithium-ion batteries like in a tesla is nickel um and nickel is also relatively common it's not super common iron is very common so there's that the two main schools of of the main the two main types of battery pack are um iron and nickel and iron is very common uh so much eyes ridiculous amount of iron just like this ridiculous amount of lithium now nickels a little a little more unusual still not not that unusual but it's uh you know way way much harder to get nickel and iron um but for example stainless steel you know that that'll be you know i don't know 12 12 it's quote 10 to 20 nickel depending on the situation uh like uh cutlery you know like knives and forks will be like electroplated nickel silver that's what epns means so so you got like nickel based cells and you got iron-based cells 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 and iron iron is cheaper and so anyway those are two two main types of cells they've 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 get like you know but it's it's really mostly it's like like the heavy stuff is iron and the heavy stuff is nickel and the nickel based stuff so your nickel iron and then you got the anode side which is um basically a carbon lattice with a little bit of uh silicon sometimes so and then these these these uh lithium ions they like they they sort of trundle back and forth between the cathode and the anode so um i just read the if you read the wikipedia article on destiny mines quite quite good um anyway so the the the the challenge like the rate at which we are producing what are what are called lithium ion cells but really primarily iron and nickel cells uh is improv it's increasing very very rapidly year over year it's just that in order to uh compensate for the rest for for an economy which is fundamentally based on fossil fuels you need a [ __ ] ton of batteries so a gigaton giga [ __ ] ton of batteries and that is what uh that's gonna happen it's just a question 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 uh inevitable like either we have sustainable energy is totally logical it's either we have sustainable energy or civilization collapses and 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 um and then the you know the there's a risk that we're incurring because of the increased parts per million of co2 in the oceans and atmosphere um you know it has some acidification of it makes the water looks a little bit more acidic um and uh you know 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 and carbon really moved the needle that much but 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 uh you know what would it take to have like only a point three percent increase would be one degree celsius two degrees fahrenheit so therefore this is actually you know it's 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 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 it's like you look like a thermometer you know like a you know that like like old-school sort of analog thermometer which is like you know to judge changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is uh increasing its volume due to temperature and it only takes a little bit of small increase in volume uh to raise the temperature you know on an old-school analog liquid thermometer and and humanity's like that we we've just decided that we want to ride on the damn beach yep so because the beach is cool now the problem is you're right you see you you're like what's 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 we'll live right on the right on the ocean okay we just did that yeah and and then it's like and then it's like okay well you know and by the way like throughout history like the water level is varied a lot like it's like nutty how much it's buried um so and then if you look at say the co2 parchment million you know based on the fossil record i mean it just looks like a wall um i i'm not like a doomsayer here i'm like my view is that if um 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 yeah don't 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 in in battery technology like is is there anything that can be done to increase the efficiency increase the the manufacturing abilities like what what can be done to to to move that so the ball is in motion in this like like the the good things that are happening are happening like the the the rate at which we are making new we're increasing the production capacity of batteries it's it's increasing at a rate of that i think we haven't seen in a century it's like it's crazy fast it's just that in order to change from a fossil fuel economy to um kind of like a solar wind uh battery economy uh it just a hell of a lot of batteries needed um now it would 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 or 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 going to 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 free we've got to pay a little bit for this and because we're not paying for the co2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere we have what in economics uh 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 in it and it's doing just behaving badly so theoretically how would you put a price on that like would you look 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 yeah electricity and gasoline pretty much now you could make this a non-aggressive tax you could say like okay well you know what if somebody's like driving around a lot and they're low income it's like eight great give them a rebate you know so it's like give a tax rebate that's the way to do it um 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 or nor would you expect it to you know so if you 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 probably toilets are not good so as soon as you put a price on it the right thing will happen automatically has there been a response to this like is is is this something i i talked to the biden administration incoming administration and they they were like well this seems to 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 uh it's not like we shouldn't have karma generating things it just there's god it should be a price on this stuff and that would encourage people to make either carbon neutral automatically fix the problem no for sure you know just think about like taxes it's like you know 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 nice yeah so we're like yeah you should probably buy us the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco have higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco and lower taxes on fruits and vegetables that's just sensible like same thing goes for energy um 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 thought well for sure like this 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 join people yeah just say just if you just say it's coming people will automatically make the changes that seems so reasonable yeah i agree and they were like 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 record that this is just a piece of paper unless you do something about it i mean apparently the it's not like the paris accord is yeah it's pretty much toothless you know and and even if we did that thing it's like probably still not enough there's just one thing that will matter put a price on carbon that would be the best option for sure um that seems like it'd be such a good idea i mean i think it's 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 it changes so much like how about the difference between gas in california versus gas in texas yeah giant difference giant difference yeah and you know by the way i i i'm actually not in favor of like demonizing the oil and gas industry because like we can't like stop instantaneously and not have oil and gas right you know like we'll like die of starvation basically so that's always the argument against it right we need fossil fuels and this is sort of the short-sighted argument we we we're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time the question is just what at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future um so i think we should probably move there faster than slower but it's you know um but but i i mean the current approach is is basically just to demonize oil and gas and i'm like okay well obviously and you know there are people who spent their whole career in oil and gas and they started out in that career when it wasn't doesn't seem like that bad of a thing to do right so then like 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 that's like gonna make him 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 would say let's do a carbon tax and and then we'll just do a carbon tax and it make us not the devil meg is not the devil they'll still make a [ __ ] load of money so we'll be fine they'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 white 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 you might have um it seems super reasonable i mean i mean like 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 yeah i think he means well yeah i think he means well the best part about him and he's been remarkably consistent and meaning well his whole life and they kept [ __ ] throwing them right under the bus yeah absolutely two election cycles in a row yeah i think it is larry's that he like went to like the soviet union like three days after his wedding for like 10 days he was like a mayor of a city and i guess i'm here in vermont i'm like yo dude like how do you explain day 6 to 10. don't you get it didn't you see everything you needed for a long time will the kgb interviews take that long yeah carbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of uh an industry that is without a doubt causing some problems i mean there's no no one's saying it doesn't cause problems people will deny the extent of the problem yeah but no one says that excess co2 from you know from emissions is not an issue no i mean like like like exxon's own scientists said uh in like the i think it was like 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 from some factions of the right and then you know like the 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 this is this is this is fine this is the way the the earth is a 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 um 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 it just you know goes like blah blah blah you know uh two to three hundred 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 or at least um uh the least amount wrong that i can be i'm trying to be the least amount wrong because um plants live off carbon dioxide so the more more co2 well it 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 um and we continue on the momentum of co2 emissions we're taking a big risk um and the especially big risk is if there's a non-linear event okay so the co2 ppm parts per million has been increasing you know pretty reliably two or three ppm per year but you could have a non-linear event what would constitute a non-linear event if we melt the siberian tundra there's like a massive amount of trapped gas and and dead plant matter that's frozen solid now if that warms up and and that decays and that that that could put a massive amount of co2 into the atmosphere potentially um and then you have like how we like room what are the carbon sinks and like if you saturate the carbon sinks and you have like a sudden release of co2 um 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 yes i mean earth would heat up before water level would rise uh you'd have you'd have a higher probability of extreme weather events um sure we hit the fan [ __ ] we did the fan sure hit the fan like i'm not saying for sure she would 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's gonna happen this is just a chemical reaction man it's like yeah so is there anything it's like why are we even running this experiment right 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 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 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 or mitigate the emissions yeah i mean so i just actually uh announced that i'm funding this 100 million dollar common capture prize to find out the answer to that question um so right now all of the carbon capture methods that we're aware of uh are very expensive the cost per ton is very expensive and then even if money is not an issue you have to say okay how much wind or solar energy was required to pull carbon out of the uh atmosphere um 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 um i we don't actually know the answer to that question that's why i'm giving 100 million dollars to this carbon capture price to try to get a better answer wasn't there there's nothing good that we're aware of right now not currently not currently that world because there's a point of diminishing returns the amount of energy that you would need you need basically a co2 has a very low energy state and naturally so it's like you burn something you combine oxygen with fuel with with hydrocarbons and the net result is co2 and h2o or basically and there's a bunch of other stuff too but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water mostly carbon dioxide uh so so like it 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 once it gets in the ocean so um naturally that it therefore requires a lot of energy to rebind that in solid form it doesn't want to just it's not gonna you've got to put a lot of energy in to bind it and and then you want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for a long time this is a hard problem the there was a concept i don't know if it was implemented but in china they developed essentially like a giant building that was uh you know you wear 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 a giant air filter and they were going to use it but that might have been about particulates more than it was about that co2 maybe more of a i by the way i have to be you know say a good word here for for china china is has them some of them for any large economy has the most progressive pro-environmental rules of any large economy really yeah they're like super supportive elect 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 uh so and it's actually funny it happened like for for a long time china was like not uh you know it was not buying into the carbon thing uh you know like they're like oh it's just like a bunch of soft westerners they're like uh they're just a bunch of environmental softies um and then at some point like senior members of the chinese government they they you know say 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 like wait you mean it's real like they're like yeah yeah it's real so then like holy [ __ ] immediate change well that's the power of having the government and business inexorably intertwined yeah 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 the thing the skyscraper size air purifier is the world's tallest look at that thing so that's an air purifier but that's the thing is like is that pulling particulates out of the atmosphere or is that actually taking carbon out you know an air purifier air purifier not uh it's super hard to capture carbon look at that though jesus christ imagine falling into that yeah i mean naturally it's just fundamental thermodynamics like you know you released a lot of energy that resulted in the co2 so now you gotta use a lot of energy to capture it um yeah um made a particulate matter no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter yeah yeah that that's like a hard it's particularly difficult to filter two microns oh you know so i don't know most people probably don't know but like a model s and x have a hospital grade hepa filters uh so and they'll they'll actually drop uh 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 your tesla yes it's literally this like bio has a defense mode where it basically pressurizes the car so it's like like the car is is at under positive pressure with all the air coming through a a gigantic hepa filter and then even the air in 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 yeah we got a little carried away i'm glad you get carried away you know the other thing i thought is that 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 yeah it's like one of those like things that you if you you know like where you punch the thing it just comes back up yeah yeah those like that they they they couldn't flip it over in the test so they would like roll on its side and they roll back i know it's amazing very low center of gravity um so that's giant yeah that is so [ __ ] funny it's nice 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 [ __ ] 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 making the x yeah you're still going to do crazy doors the crazy doors that those doors are exercising hubris that's for sure well that's a lot of things you do is an exercise in hubris well some things like where some things are really important and necessary some things are you know uh some things are not necessary so the doors but the thing is those doors are not necessary but they're very cool functional though if like you're in a tight spot those doors will open up uh yeah tighter than almost any door out there like you 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 um we developed a i mean just in order to avoid having a a puck like an ultrasonic puck in the door we developed the uh that's the best of my knowledge what's an ultrasonic puck so like this 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 that's when the the sonar which is like basically a loudspeaker is generating ultrasonic noise and it's uh and then listening to the echoes but but normally in order to listen to the echoes you've got to isolate the the thing that's generating the sound so that's why if you look carefully around round cars you'll see these little pucks these little circles and those are the ultrasonic sensors and we didn't want to have an ultra exact name so we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door but we also didn't want the door to like you know bat some kid out of the way you know like just you know there's a hay maker or something right so we uh we developed the best of my knowledge the only ultrasonic sensor that can uh see through metal uh so it's it's it's mounted on the on the inside of the door on on isolation mounts and it's super loud and then it's got cancellation it's 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 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 favorite the model x is the favorite egg of cars it's crazy um i mean for for like the the six seaters like for the the seats the the seats are on a rear inclined single post um with the 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 never it's crazy that 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 have to have sun visors that that nest in the a pillar rotate forward have a magnetic and a magnetic attachment that pops out and it and and 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 it's pretty awesome i mean the sound system on 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 it's like a windscreen is a resonator for the sound system it's the sound system is epic in the in the x it's good on the s2 it's even better in the new s have you thought about doing a plaid x yeah there's gonna be a platex too yeah when's that coming which is like bizarrely fast for an suv that's coming out isn't it already bizarrely fast you said it was preposterous right yeah it's it's like it really it's like those things too fast it's too fast probably have you increased the range of the x like what is the range of the x currently it's like 300 something yeah three or something so it'll be like uh high 300s yeah and is the the difference the between the x and the s the aerodynamics like what is uh what what will you say the x weighs more and it's got a bigger cross-sectional area so the the something called the cda drag efficient drag coefficient times uh frontal area is higher for the x as you'd expect and um the weight is higher so it's going to be yeah 10 to 15 percent uh less range for the same battery pack as the s the first time i saw an x tiffany hash had one and she was in the comedy store parking lot and she had it dancing for us oh yeah playing music and dancing like this a lot of people don't know that that the model x can do this crazy like ballet thing with the [ __ ] dances oh yeah with the doors we're going up and down and the music's playing 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 and like the model the hi so the model i said i basically just said i don't know what other people like but i know what i love and i want 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 um you know because a lot of people like an suv and like you got more seats and more room and a higher you know you see that sitting higher um so well what cool things what a little cool i mean like i said exercising hubris we just got carried away like what are all the cool things we can think of in the if we're for an suv or you know friends and i had a lot of discussions about this um you know and jv struggled back in the day and drew back leno and um jerome and there's a lot of a lot of talented people now it has this 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're trying to the mission from tesla from the beginning uh has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy so are we really doing the right thing by creating this faberge egg of course with the model x uh real let me do 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 but that's how we justified it to us it's not a justification it's a great carrot you're dangling in an amazing carrot yeah i mean actually in terms of you know co2 per mile also suvs are like among the worst you know like those very sovs 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 fabric of cars uh nobody's ever gonna make a car like that uh explain to me what the [ __ ] bill gates was talking about when he was saying that you can't do trucks well what was yeah i didn't know what to talk about why did he say that then like why would somebody 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 it was because he's still intentioned here he just doesn't know what he's talking about but why say it then you think 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 if that's true or not but it seems weird people i know who know know the situation well they said are you sure they said yeah he's a big short position against tesla which obviously didn't work out too well um but anyway i i think he's generally got good intentions here i think he's probably just not um i don't hate bill gates to be clear i think he just probably doesn't know the the science yeah i just thought it was odd because i knew that you guys were developing yeah semi we have prototypes that yeah that actually drive that actually drive like we've used them to transport cars and stuff it's not like some [ __ ] it's not like a unicorn like it was like with pegasus or something i was like what are you talking about we literally have prototypes that work what kind of mileage does 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 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 oh okay the majority like shipping things around cities and things like that yeah it'll be like take stuff from the port to the straight straightforwarding will you have a long range like cross-continental conversion absolutely and so it'll be much more batteries and yeah um the yeah um i mean you want something on the order of like uh probably a 500 kilowatt hour pack like what we have in the s and the x is 100 kilowatt hour pack um and yeah i 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 uh is the structure is the primary load carrying element in the vehicle is it potentially because 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 you have with the x yeah the the center of gravity would be really low so that would certainly help uh we can also um we would have motors individually controlling the wheels so we can just automatically and this is part of our semi presentation we can just the computer will automatically prevent it from jackknifing like you know jackknifing on a low traction surface is like truck driver's worst nightmare you know you're like some icy road icy mountainous road that the trailer slides slides and you know you know where jackknife's like that and it 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 attract knife um you know whereas if you've got just one engine it's very difficult to do that so do you anticipate that eventually these things would be completely autonomous like some like there won't be truck drivers eventually it will be autonomous but we're still a ways away from that um but in the in the uh in the short term i think we can certainly see convoys so you know we've got uh 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 um it's sort of like having a train but on the highway it's like like it 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 get like wheels so probably 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 it's 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 do a follow oh you say follow this thing no problem what's next after this um you mean after what products or something or yeah like what ultimately do you think that you could have planes i thought about plants for a long time but my brain will explode if i do planes literally it's just like this is too crazy man it's my my brain is overloaded so um overloaded because of the complexity right yeah um i'm glad there's a limit i'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further um there's only so many hours in the day yeah so i mean i think there's there there are improvements happening over time for the uh energy density of batteries like what hours per or should really be joules but like like joules per kilogram joules per liter um it's it's improving a little bit every year you know so uh planes really need a high energy density because you gotta get up to altitude um like most energy is getting up to altitude and then once you're in the lower dense low air density situation you can cruise along with fair it takes very little energy to once you're increased that's a massive amount of energy you get up there so um man i thought about this a lot um yeah i mean an aircraft increases a neutral force balance so it's like it's not accelerating so basically if you've got an um you know a a motor of a given uh force the then like for 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 accelerating a constant force from your you know 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 so the key would be achieving a high altitude uh yeah it's all about altitude like the air is very thick at at sea level um like for the same amount of force that would you would get go say like you know uh half the speed of sound at sea level you could go you know twice the speed of sound at like let's say at 100 000 feet same amount of same amount of energy in cruise is it is that i'm just like 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 um yeah the the faster you go the 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 sr-71 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 at the highest altitude so because it could go faster at higher altitude it it got better miles per gallon 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 to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes yeah i mean i i'm committed to run tesla for you know several years into the future um and there's still a lot of things we got to get done um could tesla possibly expand the planes it could i it is a different regime i mean there are there are no car companies that are there are aircraft companies really so um but i think that i think there is a way ultimately to have a vertical tape vertical takeover landing supersonic electric jet wow that would be cool but what about the weight that's where it comes energy density of the of the pack is important um you need to get high quickly yeah good eye get high fast um 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 gimble the uh the fan you have the fan change direction like you do with a rocket you know you don't need like uh your rudder and uh you mostly don't need an elevator you just need like some trim tabs so you basically have a flying wing pretty pretty easy to do a flying wing wow um or you know flying wing with a little bit of fuselage um so you make it lighter make the pack structural as well so the pack is though is the wing yeah you got to basically put pull a few tricks like that this is all about like how do you make the non-cell portion of the of the aircraft as light as possible um anyway this is like there's like a lot of regulatory things you have to go through and um and this is counting on a what else per kilogram you'd want white house program 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 pac level and with high cycle life well listen you're doing plenty you don't you don't necessarily have to get into planes right now yeah i think you're busy enough planes will be the 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 like commercial air travel is probably increased at least visibly to the consumer the least in the last like 30 40 50 years it's not much difference the experience yeah pretty similar yep in fact it's got slower so right after the concord not even the concord like the 747 was the fastest plane oh really yeah i had a uh swept wings like those of the wing sweep like what's the wing angle that's a big factor in like what it's cruise speed is gonna be so the 747 had a you know pretty steep wing uh but it's it's fuel efficiency is not as good as um something like uh you know triple seven or seven eight seven um i mean there's some some like basic things in physics that that uh 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 the square of momentum is linear and then there's surface to volume ratio surface volume ratio and the momentum to kinetic energy ratio uh drives so much of of of the mechanics that's insane um it's like the reason that you don't have like a single cell creature that is gigantic is because of surface volume surface volume ratio like there's a certain surface volume ratio where diffusion works and beyond that diffusion does not work and you have to have a circulatory system um for for aircraft or just generally you want to move um a large mass of air slowly um so you can reduce the the velocity component of kinetic energy which right which grows 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 triple seven it's really just a propeller in a shroud um so um high bypass was 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 no i don't i hope not i hope not there's some smart people i have to try and tackle it in i think i hope they are successful um but just uh it's just right try to get high get high go fast get high you will automatically go fast as you get as you go higher it's just air density is dropping exponentially and you think like in the limit you've got like a satellite satellites going around the earth you know low earth over satellites going around the 25 times the speed of sound no propulsion so if you get high enough you just keep going um 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 um and that's why you know it's like you're going to design and 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 um otherwise and then there's also like well if the error 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 de design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitudes so like the the air density at a hundred thousand feet is approximately one percent that at sea level so how the hell do you design a combustion a like an air burning that's like an air an air there's something that's taking an air of combining with fuel and burning to work when you have a hundred fold difference in air density this is like this is an intractable problem but if you have an electric fan it's not burning anything so aperture doesn't matter 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 alright welcome um if you ever want to talk about something i'm here for you thanks all right thank you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]