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