TED 6 avril 2022 Entretien d'une heure avec Chris Anderson de TED à Giga Texas sur Optimus, Starship et Neuralink, et sur la vision de Musk pour l'avenir de l'humanité.
Entretien d'une heure avec Chris Anderson de TED à Giga Texas sur Optimus, Starship et Neuralink, et sur la vision de Musk pour l'avenir de l'humanité.
Transcription Chris Anderson
Elon Musk. Great to see you. How are you?
Elon Musk
Good, how are you?
Chris Anderson
I mean, we're here at the Texas Gigafactory the day before this thing opens. It's been pretty crazy out there. Thank you so much for making time. Busy day. I would love you to help us kind of cast our minds, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years into the future and help us try to picture what it would take to, to build a future that's worth getting excited about. You've often said, the last time you spoke at ted, you said that was really just a big driver. You talk about lots of other reasons to do what you're doing, but fundamentally you want to think about the future and not think that it sucks.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. I think in general there's a lot of discussion of this problem or that problem and a lot of people are sad about the future and that they're pessimistic and I think this is not great. I mean we really want to wake up in the morning and look forward to the future. We want to be excited about what's going to happen. And life cannot simply be about sort of solving one miserable problem after another.
Chris Anderson
So if you look forward 30 years, you know, this year, the year 2050 has been labeled by scientists as this kind of almost like this doomsday deadline on climate. There's a consensus of scientists, a large consensus of scientists who believe that if we haven't completely eliminated greenhouse gases or offset them completely by 2050, effectively we're inviting climate catastrophe. Do you believe there is a pathway to avoid that catastrophe and what would it look like?
Elon Musk
Yeah. So I am not one of the doomsday people, which may surprise. I actually think we're on a good path. But at the same time I want us to caution against complacency. So long as we are not complacent, as long as we have a high sense of urgency about moving towards a sustainable energy economy, then I think things will be fine. So I can't emphasize that enough. So long as we push hard and are not complacent, the future is going to be great. Don't worry about it. I mean worry about it. But if you worry about it, ironically, it will be a self unfulfilling prophecy. So like there are three elements to a sustainable energy future. One is obviously sustainable energy generation, which is primarily wind and solar. There's also hydro geothermal. I'm actually pro nuclear. I think nuclear is fine and, but it's going to be primarily solar and wind as the primary generators. Of energy. The second part is you need batteries to store the solar and wind energy because the sun doesn't shine all the time, the wind doesn't blow all the time. So you need a lot of stationary battery packs. And then you need electric transport. So electric cars, electric planes, boats, and then ultimately it's not really possible to make electric rockets, but you can make the propellant use in rockets using sustainable energy.
Elon Musk
So ultimately we can have a fully sustainable energy economy. And, and it's those three things. Solar, wind, stationary battery pack, electric vehicles. So then what are the limiting factors on progress? The limiting factor really will be battery cell production. So that's, that's going to, that's going to really be the fundamental rate driver. And then whatever the slowest element of the whole lithium ion battery cells supply chain for mining and the many steps of refining to ultimately creating a battery cell and putting it into a pack, that will be the limiting factor on progress towards sustainability.
Chris Anderson
All right, so we need to talk more about batteries because the key thing that I want to understand, like there seems to be a scaling issue here that is kind of amazing and alarming. You have said that you have calculated that the amount of battery production that the world needs for sustainability is 300 terawatt hours of batteries.
Elon Musk
That's the end goal. Very rough numbers. And I certainly would invite others to check our calculations because they may arrive at different conclusions. But in order to transition not just current electricity production, but also heating and transport, which roughly triples the amount of electricity that you need, it amounts to approximately 300 terawatt hours of installed capacity.
Chris Anderson
So we need to give people a sense of how big a task that is. I mean, here we are, the gigafactory. You know, this is what, this is one of the biggest buildings in the world. When what I've read and tell me if this is still right, is that the goal here is to eventually produce 100 gigawatt hours of batteries here a year.
Elon Musk
We'll probably do more than that, but yes, that's. Hopefully we get there within a couple of years.
Chris Anderson
Right, but I mean that. So that is 0.1 terawatt hours, but that's still 1 100th of what's needed. How much of the rest of that 100 is Tesla planning to take on between, let's say between now and 2030, 2040, when, you know, we really need to see the scale up happen?
Elon Musk
I mean, these are just guesses. I mean, so please, people shouldn't hold me to these things. It's not like this is like some, what does happen is I'll make some like, you know, best guess and then people will, in five years there'll be some jerk that writes an article Elon said this would happen and it didn't happen. He's a liar and a fool. Yeah, it's very annoying when that happens. So these are just guesses. This is a conversation
Elon Musk
I think Tesla probably ends up doing 10% of that.
Chris Anderson
Roughly 20, let's say 2050. We have this amazing, you know, 100% sustainable electric grid made up of, you know, some mixture of the sustainable energy sources you talked about. That same grid probably is offering the world really low cost energy, isn't it, compared with now. And I'm curious about should people, are people entitled to get a little bit excited about the possibilities of that world?
Elon Musk
People should be optimistic about the future. Humanity will solve sustainable energy. It will happen. If we are, you know, continue to, to push hard. The future is bright and good from an energy standpoint. And then it will be possible to also use that, that energy to do carbon sequestration. It takes a lot of energy to pull carbon out of the atmosphere just as. Because in putting it in the atmosphere it release energy. So now, you know, obviously in order to pull it out you need to use a lot of energy. But if you've got a lot of sustainable energy from wind and solar, you can actually sequester carbon. So you can reverse the CO2 parts per million of the atmosphere and oceans. And also you can really have as much fresh water as you want. Earth is mostly water, we should call earth water. It's 70% water by surface area now, most of that seawater, but it's still, it's like we just happen to be on. But that's land.
Chris Anderson
Right. And with energy you can turn seawater into. Yes, irrigating water or whatever. Water.
Elon Musk
Absolutely. At very low cost. Things will be good.
Chris Anderson
Things will be good.
Chris Anderson
And also there's other benefits, right to this non fossil fuel world where the air is cleaner and.
Elon Musk
Yes, exactly. Because when you burn fossil fuels there's all these side reactions and toxic gases of various kinds and sort of little particles, particulates that, that are bad for your lungs. Like there's, there's all sorts of bad things that are happening that will go away and the sky will be cleaner and quieter. Fear is going to be good.
Chris Anderson
I want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence. But the segue there, you mentioned how annoying it is when people haul you up for bad predictions in the past. So I'm possibly going to be annoying now, but I'm curious about your timelines and how you predict and how come some things are so amazingly on the money and some aren't. So when it comes to predicting sales of Tesla vehicles, for example, I mean, you've kind of been amazing. I think in 2014, when Tesla had sold that year 60,000 cars, you said 2020, I think we will do half a million a year.
Elon Musk
Yeah, we did almost exactly half a million.
Chris Anderson
You did almost exactly half a million. You were scoffed in 2014 because no one since Henry Ford with the Model T had come close to that kind of growth rate for cars. You were scoffed and you actually hit 500,000 cars and 510,000 or whatever produced. But five years ago, last time you came to Ted, I asked you about full self driving and you said, yep, this very year I'm confident that we will have a car going from LA to New York without any intervention.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I don't want to blow your mind, but I'm not always right.
Chris Anderson
What's the difference between those two? Why has full self driving in particular been so hard to predict?
Elon Musk
I mean, the thing that really got me and I think is going to get a lot of other people is that there are just so many false dawns with self driving where you think you've got the problem, have a handle on the problem, and then, nope, it turns out you just hit a ceiling. Because what happened if you were to plot the progress, the progress looks like a log curve. So it's like a series of log curves. So most people don't know what log curve is, I suppose, but it goes up sort of a fairly straight way and then it starts tailing off and you start getting diminishing returns and you're like, oh, it was trending up and now it's sort of curving over and not. And you start getting to these what I call local maxima where you don't realize basically how dumb you were and then it happens again. So, and ultimately these things, in retrospect, they seem obvious, but in order to solve full self driving properly, you actually just, you have to solve real world AI because you say, what are the road networks designed to work with? They're designed to work with a biological neural net, our brains and with vision, our eyes. And so in order to make it work with computers, you basically need to solve real world AI and vision because we need cameras and silicon neural nets in order to have self driving work for a system that was designed for eyes and Biological neural nets. I guess when you put it that way. It's quite obvious that the only way to solve full self driving is to solve real world AI and sophisticated vision.
Chris Anderson
What do you feel about the current architecture? Do you think you have an architecture now where there is a chance for the logarithmic curve not to tail off anytime soon?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, these may be infamous last words, but I actually am confident that we will solve it this year. That we will exceed the probability of an accident. At what point do you exceed that of the average person?
Elon Musk
I think we will exceed that this year.
Chris Anderson
What are you seeing behind the scenes that gives you that confidence?
Elon Musk
We're almost at the point we have a high quality unified vector space. In the beginning we were trying to do this with image recognition on individual images. But if you look at one image out of a video, it's actually quite hard to see what's going on with without ambiguity. But if you look at a video segment of a few seconds of video, that ambiguity resolves. So the first thing we had to do is tie all eight cameras together so they're synchronized so that all the frames are looked at simultaneously and labeled simultaneously by one person. Because we still need human labeling. So at least they're not labeled at different times by different people in different ways. And then so it's sort of a surround picture. Then a very important part is to add the time dimension so that you're looking at surround video and you're labeling surround video. And this is actually quite difficult to do from a software standpoint. We had to write our own labeling tools and then create an auto labeling. Create auto labeling software is to amplify the efficiency of human labelers because it's quite hard to label, but it takes. In the beginning it was taking several hours to label a 10 second video clip. This is not scalable. So basically what you have to have is you have to have surround video. And that surround video has to be primarily automatically labeled. With humans just being editors of making slight corrections to the labeling of the video and then feeding back those corrections into the future auto labeler. So you get this flywheel eventually where the auto labeler is able to take in vast amounts of video and with high accuracy automatically label the video for cars, lane lines, drive space.
Chris Anderson
What you're saying is that you think that. I mean the result of this is that you're effectively giving the car a 3D model of the actual objects that are all around it. It knows what they are and it knows how fast they are moving. And the remaining task is to, yes, is to predict what the quirky behaviors are. That you know that when a pedestrian is walking down the road with a smaller pedestrian, that maybe that smaller pedestrian might do something unpredictable or like things like that. You have to build into it before you can really call it safe.
Elon Musk
You basically need to have memory across time and space. So what I mean by that is if you, because the memory can't be infinite because it's using up a lot of computer's ram basically. So you have to say how much are you going to try to remember? But it's very common for things to be occluded. So like if you talk about say a pedestrian walking past a truck or where you saw the pedestrian start on one side of the truck, then they're occluded by the truck. But you would know intuitively, okay, that pedestrian is going to pop out the other side. Most likely the computer doesn't know. So you need to slow down.
Chris Anderson
I mean a skeptic is going to say that every year for the last five years you've kind of said, well no, this is the year. We're confident that we're there in a year or two. Or you know, like it's, it's always been about that, that far away. But you're, we've got a new architecture now. You're seeing enough improvement behind the scenes to make you not certain. But, but pretty confident that, that this by the end of this year. What in most. Not in every city, in every circumstance, but in many cities and circumstances, basically, the car will be able to drive without interventions. Safer than a human?
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean the car currently drives me around Austin most of the time with no interventions. So it's not like. And we have over 100,000 people in our full self driving beta program. So you can look at the videos that they post online. Okay, great.
Chris Anderson
Some of them are great and some of them are a little terrifying. I mean, occasionally the car seems to sort of like veer off and scare the hell out of people.
Elon Musk
It's all better.
Chris Anderson
But, but you put that, but you're behind the scenes, looking at the data, you're seeing enough improvement to believe that this year timeline is real.
Elon Musk
Yes, that's what it seems like. I mean like, you know, we could be here talking again in a year. It's like, well, yet another year went by and it didn't happen. But I think this, I think this is the year.
Chris Anderson
And so in general when, when people talk about Elon, Elon time, I mean it Sounds like, like you can't just have a general rule that if you predict that something will be done in six months, actually what you, what we should imagine is it's going to be a year or it's like 2x or 3x. It depends on the type of prediction. Some things, I guess things involving software, you know, I, whatever, are fundamentally harder to predict than, than others. Is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive people to be ambitious? Without that, nothing gets done.
Elon Musk
Well, I generally believe in terms of internal timelines, that we want to set the most aggressive timeline that we can because it's sort of like a law of gases expansion where for schedules where whatever time you set, it's not going to be less than that. It's very rare that it will be less than that. As far as my predictions are concerned, what tends to happen in the media is that they will report all the wrong ones and ignore all the right ones.
Elon Musk
And when writing an article about me, I've had a long career in multiple industries, if you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on earth. But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense. So essentially, the longer you do anything, the more mistakes that you will make cumulatively, which if you sum up those mistakes, will sound like I'm the worst predictor ever. But for example, for Tesla vehicle growth, I said I think we're doing 50% and we've done 80%. So. But they don't mention that one. So I mean, I'm not sure what my exact track record is on predictions. They're more optimistic than pessimistic, but they're not all optimistic. Some of them are exceeded probably more or later, but they do come true. It's very rare that they do not come true. It's sort of like, you know, if there's some radical technology prediction, the point is not that it was a few years late, but that it happened at all. That's the more important part.
Chris Anderson
It feels like at some point in the last year, seeing the progress on understanding that the AI, the Tesla understanding the world around it led to a kind of an aha moment because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at Tesla this year is this robot, Optimus.
Chris Anderson
Many companies out there have tried to put out these robots, have been working on them for years and so far no one has really cracked it. There's no mass adoption robot in people's homes. There are some in manufacturing. But I would say that no one's kind of really cracked it. What is it something that happened in the development of full self driving that gave you the confidence to say, you know what, we could do something special here.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it took me a while to sort of realize that in order to solve self driving, you really needed to solve real world AI. At the point at which you solve real world AI for a car which is really a robot on four wheels, you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well. The two hard parts, I think. Like it's not obviously, companies like Boston Dynamics have shown that it's possible to make quite compelling, sometimes alarming robots.
Elon Musk
You know, so from a sensors and actuator standpoint, it's certainly been demonstrated by many that it's possible to make a humanoid robot. The thing that the things that are currently missing are enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed. So the missing things are basically real world intelligence and scaling up manufacturing. Those are two things that Tesla is very good at. And so then we basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a humanoid robot. People have no idea this is going to be bigger than the car.
Chris Anderson
So let's dig into exactly that. I mean, in one way, it's actually an easier problem than full self driving because instead of an object going along at 60 miles an hour, which if it gets it wrong, someone will die, this is an object that's engineered to only go at what, three or four
Elon Musk
or five miles an hour, but walking speed, basically.
Chris Anderson
And so a mistake isn't. There aren't lives at stake. There might be embarrassment at stake as
Elon Musk
long as AI doesn't take it over and rotor us now asleep or something.
Chris Anderson
Right. But talk about, I mean, I think the first applications you've mentioned are probably going to be manufacturing, but eventually the vision is to have these available for people at home.
Chris Anderson
If you had a robot that really understood the 3D architecture of your house and knew where every object in that house was or was supposed to be and could recognize all those objects. I mean, that, that's kind of amazing, isn't it? Like, like that the kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what, like tidy up?
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. Or make, make dinner, I guess. Mow the lawn, take.
Chris Anderson
Take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures.
Elon Musk
Exactly. Take care of my grandmother and make sure.
Chris Anderson
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it could recognize, obviously Recognize everyone in the home.
Chris Anderson
Could play catch with your kids.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, obviously we need to be careful that this doesn't become a dystopian situation. Like, I think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized ROM chip on the robot that cannot be updated over the air. We're. If you, for example, were to say, stop, stop, stop, that would. If anyone said that, then the robot would stop, you know, type of thing. And that's not updatable remotely. I think it's going to be important to have safety features like that.
Chris Anderson
Yeah, that sounds wise.
Elon Musk
And I do think there should be a regulatory agency for AI. I've said this for many years, I don't love being regulated, but I, you know, I think this is an important thing for public safety.
Chris Anderson
Let's come back to that. But I'm just, I don't think many people have really sort of taken seriously the notion of, you know, a robot at home. I mean, at the start of the computing revolution, you know, Bill Gates said there's going to be a computer in every home. And people at the time said, yeah, whatever, who would even want that?
Elon Musk
Now we have a computer in our pocket.
Chris Anderson
Do you think there will be basically like in say, say 2050, whatever. Like a robot in most homes is what they will be, and people will love them and count on them. You'll have your own butler, basically.
Elon Musk
Yeah. You'll have your sort of buddy robot, probably. Yeah.
Chris Anderson
I mean, how much of a buddy do you like? Do you do. How many applications do you thought is there? You know, can you have a romantic partner, sex partner, a lot of money?
Elon Musk
It's probably inevitable. I mean, I did promise the Internet that I'd make cat girls. We could make a robot cat girl.
Chris Anderson
I mean, look at the Internet, you
Elon Musk
know, so, yeah, I guess it'll be whatever people want, really.
Chris Anderson
What sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first models that are actually made and sold?
Elon Musk
Well, the first units that we tend to make are for jobs that are dangerous, boring, repetitive and things that people don't want to do. And I think we'll have an interesting prototype sometime this year. We might have something useful next year, but I think quite likely within at least two years. And then we'll see rapid growth year over year of the usefulness of the humanoid robots and decrease in cost and scaling up production.
Chris Anderson
Initially just selling to businesses or when do you picture you'll start selling them where you can buy your parents one for Christmas or something?
Elon Musk
I'd say less than 10 years. Yeah.
Chris Anderson
Help me on the economics of this. So what do you picture the cost of one of these being?
Elon Musk
Well, I think the cost is actually not going to be crazy high like less than a car. Initially things will be expensive because it'll be new technology at low production volume. The complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot. So I would expect that it's going to be less than a car or at least equivalent to a cheap car.
Chris Anderson
So even if it starts at 50k, within a few years it's down to 20k or lower or whatever. And maybe for home they'll get much cheaper still book. But think about the economics of this. If you can replace a $30,000, $40,000 a year worker, which you have to pay every year with a one time payment of $25,000 for a robot that can work longer hours, a pretty rapid replacement of certain types of, of jobs. How worried should the world be about that?
Elon Musk
I wouldn't worry about the sort of putting people out of a job thing. I think we're actually going to have and already do have a massive shortage of labor. So I think we will have. Not people out of work, but actually still a shortage of labor even in the future. But this really will be a world of abundance. Any goods and services will be available to anyone who wants them. It'll be so cheap to have goods and services it'll be ridiculous.
Chris Anderson
And presumably it should be possible to imagine a bunch of goods and services that can't profitably be made now, but could be made in that world courtesy of legions of robots.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it will be a world of abundance. The only scarcity that will exist in the future is that which we decide to create ourselves as, as humans.
Chris Anderson
Okay. So A.I. is, is allowing us to imagine a differently powered economy that, that will create this abundance. What are you most worried about going wrong?
Elon Musk
Well, like I said, AI and robotics will, will bring, bring out what might be termed the age of abundance. Other people have used this word and, and, and that this is my prediction. It'll be an age of abundance for everyone. I guess there's the dangers would be the artificial general intelligence or digital superintelligence decouples from a collective human will and goes in a direction that for some reason we don't like. Whatever direction it might go. You know, that's sort of, sort of the, the idea behind neuralink is to try to more tightly couple the collective human world to digital superintelligence and also along the way solve a lot of brain injuries and spinal injuries and that kind of thing. So even if it doesn't succeed in the greater goal, I think it will succeed in the goal of alleviating brain and spine damage.
Chris Anderson
So the spirit there is that if we're going to make these AIs that are so vastly intelligent, we ought to be wired directly to them so that we ourselves can have those superpowers more directly. That doesn't seem to avoid the risk that those superpowers might turn ugly in an unintended way.
Elon Musk
No, I think it's a risk. I agree. I don't. I'm not saying that I have some certain answer to that risk. I'm just saying maybe one of the things that would be good for ensuring that the future is one that we want is to more tightly couple the collective human world to digital intelligence. The issue that we face here is that we are already a cyborg. If you think about it, the computers are an extension of ourselves. And when we die, we have like a digital ghost. What about text messages and social media and emails? And it's quite eerie actually, when someone dies, but everything online is still there. But you say, like, what's the limitation? What is it that inhibits human machine symbiosis? It's the data rate when you communicate, especially with a phone, you're moving your thumbs very slowly. So you're moving your two little meat sticks at a rate that's maybe 10 bits per second, optimistically 100 bits per second. And computers are communicating at the gigabit level.
Chris Anderson
Beyond, have you seen evidence that the technology is actually working? That you've got a richer sort of higher bandwidth connection, if you like, between external electronics and a brain than has been possible before.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So the, I mean, the fundamental principles of reading neurons sort of doing read, write on neurons with tiny electrodes have been demonstrated for decades. So it's not like this is. The concept is new. The problem is that there's no product that works well that you can go and buy. So it's all sort of in research labs. And it's not. It's like there's always like some cord sticking out of your head and it's quite gruesome. And it's really. There's no good product that actually does a good job and is high bandwidth and safe and something you'd actually, that you could buy and would want to buy. So. But in it, the way to think of the neuralink device is kind of like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. That's where we take out sort of a small section of skull about the size of a quarter. Replace that with what in many ways really is very much like Apple watch or some kind of smartwatch thing, But with tiny, tiny wires. Very, very tiny wires. Wires so tiny it's hard to even see them. And it's very important to have very tiny wires that when they're implanted, they don't damage the brain.
Chris Anderson
How far are you from putting these into humans?
Elon Musk
Well, we have put in our FDA application to have the aspirationally do the first human implant this year.
Chris Anderson
The first uses will be for neurological injuries of different kinds. Yes, but rolling the clock forward and imagining when people are actually using these for their own enhancement, let's say, and for the enhancement of the world. How clear are you in your mind as to what it will feel like to have one of these inside your head?
Elon Musk
Well, I do want to emphasize we're at an early stage and so it really will be many years before we have anything approximating a high bandwidth neural interface that allows for AI human symbiosis. For many years. We will just be solving brain injuries and spinal injuries for probably a decade. And this is not something that will suddenly one day we'll have this incredible sort of whole brain interface. It's going to be like I said, at least a decade of really just solving brain injuries and spinal injuries. And really I think you can solve a very wide range of brain injuries, including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep, potentially schizophrenia. Like a lot of things that cause great stress to people. Restoring memory in older people, if you
Chris Anderson
can pull that off, that is. That's the app I will sign up for. I would please hurry, actually.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean the, the emails that we get at Neuralink are heartbreaking. I mean, they'll send us just tragic where someone was sort of in the prime of life and they had an accident on a motorcycle and someone who's 25 can't even feed themselves. And this is something we could fix.
Chris Anderson
But you have said that AI is one of the things you're most worried about and that neuralink may be one of the ways where we can keep abreast of it.
Elon Musk
Yes, the short term thing, which I think is helpful on an individual human level with injuries, and then the long term thing is an attempt to address the civilizational risk of AI by bringing digital intelligence and biological intelligence closer together. I mean, if you think of how the brain works today, there are really kind of two layers to the brain. There's the limbic system and the cortex. You've Got the kind of animal brain where it's kind of like the fun part really, that's where most of Twitter
Chris Anderson
operates, by the way.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, we're, I think like Tim Oven said this, like, we're like somebody, you know, stuck a computer on a monkey, you know, so we're like if you gave a monkey a computer, that's not cortex, but we still have a lot of monkey instincts, which we then try to rationalize is, no, it's not a monkey instinct. It's something more important than that. But it's often just really a monkey instinct. We're just monkeys with a computer stuck in our brain. So even though the cortex is sort of the smart or the intelligent part of the brain, the thinking part of the brain, people are quite. I've not yet met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or their cortex. They're quite happy having both. Everyone wants both parts of their brain. And people really want their phones and their computers, which are really the tertiary, the third part of your intelligence. It's just that it's like the bandwidth, the rate of communication with that tertiary layer is slow. And it's just a very tiny stroll to this tertiary layer. And we want to make that tiny stroll a big highway. And I'm definitely not saying that this is going to solve everything or this is, you know, it's the only thing, it's something that might be helpful. And worst case scenario, I think we solve some important brain injury, spinal injury issues, and that's still a great outcome.
Chris Anderson
Right? Best case scenario, we may discover new human possibility. Telepathy, you've spoken of, in a way, connection with, with, with a loved one, you know, full memory and, and much faster thought process, maybe all these things. It's very cool. If AI were to take down Earth, we need a plan B. Let's, let's shift our attention to, to, to space. We, we spoke last time we talked about reusability and you, you had just demonstrated that spectacular for the first time. Since then, you've gone on to build this monster rocket, Starship, which kind of changes the rules of the game in spectacular ways. Tell us, tell us about Starship.
Elon Musk
Yes, Starship is extremely fundamental. So the holy grail of rocketry or space transport is full and rapid reusability. This has never been achieved. The closest that anything's come is our Falcon 9 rocket, where we are able to recover the first stage, the boost stage, which is probably about 60% of the cost of the vehicle, of the whole launch, maybe 70%. And we've now done that over 100 times. So with Starship we will be recovering the entire thing, or at least that's the goal and more of a recovering it in such a way that it can be immediately reflown. Whereas with Falcon 9 we still need to do some amount of refurbishment to the booster and to the fairing one nose cone. But with Starship the design goal is immediate reflight. So you just refill propellants and go again. And this is gigantic, just as it would be in any other mode of transportation.
Chris Anderson
And the main design is to basically take what, 100 plus people at a time, plus a bunch of things that they need to Mars. So first of all, talk about that piece. What is your latest timeline? One, for the first time a starship goes to Mars, presumably without people, but just equipment, two, with people. Three, the sort of, okay, 100 people at a time, let's go.
Elon Musk
Sure. And just to put the cost thing into perspective, the cost of the expected cost of Starship putting 100 tons into orbit is significantly less than what it would have cost or what it did cost to put our tiny Falcon 1 rockets into orbit. Just as the cost of flying a 747 around the world is less than the cost of a small airplane, you know, a small airplane that was thrown away. So it's really pretty mind boggling that the giant thing costs less, way less than the small thing. So it doesn't use sort of exotic propellants or things that are difficult to obtain on Mars. It uses methane as fuel and it's primarily oxygen. So sort of roughly 77, 78% oxygen by weight. And Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and has water ice which is CO2 plus H2O. So you can make CH4 methane and O2 oxygen on Mars.
Chris Anderson
Presumably one of the first tasks on Mars will be to create a fuel plant that can create the fuel for the return trips of many starships.
Elon Musk
Yes, and actually it's mostly going to be an oxygen plant, but it's because it's 78% oxygen, 22% fuel. But the fuel is a simple fuel that is easy to create on Mars and many other parts of the solar system. So basically, and it's all propulsive landing, no parachutes, nothing thrown away, that has a heat shield that's capable of entering on Earth or Mars. We could even potentially go to Venus, but you don't want to go there. Venus is hell, almost literally, but you could. It's a generalized method of transport to anywhere in the solar system, because the point at which you have a propellant depot on Mars, you can then travel to the asteroid belt and to the moons of Jupiter and then to Saturn and ultimately anywhere in the solar system.
Chris Anderson
Right, but your main focus, and SpaceX's main focus is still Mars. Like that is the mission, that is where most of the effort will go. Or are you actually imagining a much broader array of uses, even in the coming, you know, the first decade or so of uses of this, where we could go, for example, to other places in the solar system to explore? Perhaps NASA wants to use the rocket for that reason.
Elon Musk
Yeah, NASA is planning to use a starship to return to the moon, to return people to the moon. And so we're very honored that NASA has chosen us to do this. So. But I'm saying it is a generalized, it's a general solution to getting anywhere in the greater solar system. It's not suitable for going to another star system, but it is a general solution for transport anywhere in the solar system.
Chris Anderson
Before it can do any of that, it's got to demonstrate it can get into orbit around Earth. What's, what's your latest advice on the timeline for that?
Elon Musk
It's looking promising for us to have an orbital launch attempt in a few months. So we're actually integrating the, we'll be integrating the engines into the booster for the first orbital flight starting in about a week or two. And the, the launch complex itself is ready to go. So assuming we get regulatory approval, I think we could have an orbital launch attempt within a few months.
Chris Anderson
And a radical new technology like this, presumably there is real risk on those early 100%.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. I mean the joke I make all the time is that excitement is guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed, but excitement certainly is.
Chris Anderson
But the last I saw in your timeline, you've slightly put back the expected date to put the first human on Mars till 2029, I want to say.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, so let's see, I mean we are, we have built a production system for starship, so we're making a lot of ships and boosters.
Chris Anderson
How many are you planning to make actually?
Elon Musk
Well, we're currently expecting to make a booster and a ship roughly every, well, initially roughly every couple months and hopefully by the end of this year, one every month. So it's giant rockets, but a lot, and a lot of them just in terms, talking in terms of rough orders of magnitude. In order to create a self sustaining city on Mars, I think we'll need something on the order of a thousand ships and we just need a Helen of Sparta, I guess on Mars or something.
Chris Anderson
This is not in most people's heads.
Elon Musk
Elon, the planet that launched a thousand ships,
Chris Anderson
that's nice. But this is not in most people's heads. This picture that you have in your mind that. So there's basically a two year window. You can only really fly to Mars conveniently every two years.
Chris Anderson
You are still, you are picturing that during the2030s, every couple years something like a thousand starships take off, each containing 100 or more people. I mean that picture is just completely mind blowing to me. That sense of this armada of humans
Elon Musk
going, yeah, like Battlestar Galactica, the fleet of departs.
Chris Anderson
And you think that it can basically be funded by people spending maybe a couple hundred grand on a ticket to Mars. Is that price about where, where it has been?
Elon Musk
Well, I think if you say what's required in order to get enough people and enough cargo to Mars to build a self sustaining city and it's where you have an intersection of sets of people who want to go. Because I think only a small percentage of humanity will want to go and can afford to go or get sponsorship in some manner. That intersection of sets, I think it needs to be a million people or something like that. And so it's what can a million people afford or get sponsorship for or. Because I think governments will also pay for it and people take out loans. But I think at the point at which you say, okay, like if moving to Mars costs fragments take $100,000, then I think almost anyone can create, can work and save up and eventually have $100,000 and be able to go to Mars if they want. We want to make it available to anyone who wants to go.
Elon Musk
So it and very important to emphasize that Mars, especially in the beginning, will not be luxurious. It will be dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work. It's kind of like that Shackleton ad for going to the Antarctic, which I think is actually not real, but it sounds real and it's cool. It's sort of like the sales pitch for going to Mars is dangerous, it's cramped, you might not make it back, it's difficult, it's hard work. That's the sales pitch, right?
Chris Anderson
You will make history, but it'll be glorious. Right on that kind of launch rate you're talking about over two decades you could get your million people to, to Mars essentially. Whose city is it? Is it NASA city? Is it SpaceX's city?
Elon Musk
It's the people of Mars city. The reason for this, I mean, I have to say we feel like well, why do this thing? I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness. Human civilization could come to an end for external reasons like a giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change or World War 3 or you know, any one of a number of reasons. And with the probable lifespan of civilizational consciousness as we know it, which we should really view as this very delicate thing, like a small candle in a vast darkness. That is what appears to be the case. We're in this vast darkness of space and there's this little candle of consciousness that's only really come about after four and a half billion years and it could just go out.
Chris Anderson
I think that's powerful and I think a lot of people will be inspired by that vision. So the reason you need the million people is because there has to be enough people there to do everything that
Elon Musk
you need to survive. It's really like the critical threshold is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason.
Elon Musk
Does it, does the Mars city die out or not? And so we have to pass that. That's, you know, people talk about like the sort of the great filters, the things that perhaps, you know, we talk about the Fermi paradox and where are the aliens and like, well, maybe the aliens didn't. There are various great filters that the aliens didn't pass and so they eventually just cease to exist. And one of the great filters is becoming a multi planet species. So we want to pass that filter. And I'll be long dead before this is a real thing, before it happens, but I'd like to at least see us make great progress in this direction.
Chris Anderson
Given how tortured the Earth is right now, how much we're beating each other up. Shouldn't there be discussions going on with everyone who is dreaming about Mars to try to say we've got a once once in a civilization's chance to make some new rules here is that should someone be trying to lead those discussions to figure out what it, it means for this to be the people of Mars City?
Elon Musk
Well, I think ultimately this will be up to the people of Mars to decide what, how they want to rethink society. Yeah, there's certainly a risk there and hopefully the people of Mars will be more enlightened and will not fight amongst each other too much. I mean, I have some recommendations, but which people of Mars may choose to listen to or not? And I would advocate for more of a direct democracy, not a representative democracy and laws that are short enough for people to understand. And where it is, it is harder to create laws than to get rid of them.
Chris Anderson
Coming back a bit nearer term, I'd love you to just talk a bit about some of the other possibility space that starship seems to have created. So given suddenly we've got this ability to move 100 tons plus into orbit.
Chris Anderson
So we've just spent, we've just launched the James Webb telescope, which is an incredible thing. It's unbelievable piece of technology, exquisite piece of technology, but people spent two years trying to figure out how to fold up this thing. It's a three ton, it's a three ton telescope.
Elon Musk
We can make it a lot easier if you've got more volume and mass.
Chris Anderson
Well, let's ask a different question, which is what? How much more powerful a telescope could someone design based on using starship, for example?
Elon Musk
I mean roughly, I would say it's probably an order of magnitude more resolution if you've got 100 tons and 1,000 m3 volume, which is roughly what we have.
Chris Anderson
And what about other exploration through the solar system?
Elon Musk
I mean I'm, you know, Europa or Europa.
Chris Anderson
Right. So there's an ocean there. Right. And what you really want to do is to drop a submarine into the ocean.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Maybe there's like some squid civilization under a cephalopod civilization under the ice of Europa. That would be pretty interesting.
Chris Anderson
I mean Elon, if you could take a submarine to Europa and we see pictures of this thing being devoured by a squid, that would honestly be the happiest moment of my life.
Elon Musk
Pretty wild. Yeah.
Chris Anderson
What other possibilities are out there? It feels like if you're going to create a thousand of these things, they can only fly to Mars every two years. What are they doing the rest of the time? It feels like there's this explosion of possibility that I don't think people are really thinking about.
Elon Musk
I mean, I don't know if. We've certainly got a long way to go as you alluded to earlier. We still have to get to orbit and then after we get to orbit we have to really prove out and refine full and rapid reusability. That'll take a moment. But I do think we will solve this. I highly confident we will solve this at this point.
Chris Anderson
Do you ever wake up with the fear that there's going to be this Hindenburg moment for SpaceX where we've had many Hindenburg.
Elon Musk
Well, we've never had Hindenburg moments with people, which is very important. Big difference.
Chris Anderson
Right there is.
Elon Musk
We've blown out quite a few rockets, so there's a whole compilation online that we've put together and others put together, it's showing rockets are hard. I mean, the sheer amount of energy going through a rocket is. Boggles the mind. So getting out of Earth's gravity well is difficult. We have a strong gravity and a thick atmosphere. And Mars, which is less than 40% of it's like 37% of Earth's gravity and has a thin atmosphere. The ship alone can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth, whereas getting to Mars requires a giant booster and orbital refilling.
Chris Anderson
So, Elon, as I think more about this incredible array of things that you're involved with, I keep seeing these synergies, to use a horrible word, between them. For example, the robots you're building from Tesla could possibly be pretty handy on Mars doing some of the dangerous work and so forth. I mean, maybe there's a scenario where your city on Mars doesn't need a million people, it needs half a million people and half a million robots. Sure. And that's a possibility. Maybe the Boring Company could play a role, helping create some of the subterranean dwelling spaces that you might need.
Chris Anderson
Back on planet Earth, it seems like a partnership between Boring Company and Tesla could offer an unbelievable deal to a city. To say we will create you a 3D network of tunnels populated by robo taxis. Yeah. That will offer fast, low cost transport to anyone. You know, full self driving may or may not be done this year and in some cities, like somewhere like Mumbai, I suspect won't be done for a decade.
Elon Musk
Some places are more challenging than others.
Chris Anderson
But today with what you've got, you could put a 3D network of tunnels under that.
Elon Musk
Oh, if we're just in a tunnel, that's the sole problem, basically.
Chris Anderson
Exactly. Full self driving is a sole problem. So to me there's amazing synergy there. With Starship Gwynne Shotwell Talked about by 2028 having from city to city transport on planet Earth. Yeah.
Elon Musk
This is a real possibility.
Chris Anderson
It's a. Yeah.
Elon Musk
The fastest way to get from one place to another, if it's long distance, is a rocket. It's basically an ICBM with a landing delete the nuke.
Chris Anderson
Because it's an icbm, it has to land probably offshore.
Chris Anderson
Because it's loud. So why not have a tunnel that then connects to the city and neuralink. I mean, if you're going to go to Mars having a telepathic connection with loved ones back home, even if there's a time delay, I mean, these are
Elon Musk
not intended to be connected, by the way. But there certainly could be some synergies. Yeah.
Chris Anderson
Surely there is a growing argument that you should actually put all these things together into one company and just have a company devoted to, to creating a future that's exciting and let a thousand flowers bloom. Have you, have you been thinking about that?
Elon Musk
I mean, it is tricky because Tesla is a publicly traded company and the investor base of Tesla and Space X and certainly Boring Company and Neuralink are quite different. Boring Company Neuralink are tiny companies. Just right the audience. Yeah, Tesla's got 110,000 people. SpaceX I think, is around 12,000 people. Boring Company and Neuralink are both under 200 people. So they're little tiny companies, but they will probably get bigger in the future. They will get bigger in the future. It's not that easy to sort of combine these things.
Chris Anderson
Traditionally you've said that for SpaceX especially, you wouldn't want it public because public investors wouldn't support the craziness of the idea of going to Mars or whatever and you want to.
Elon Musk
Making life multi planetary is outside of the normal time horizon of Wall street analysts, to say the least.
Chris Anderson
I think something's changed, though. What's changed is that Tesla is now so powerful and so big and throws off so much cash that you actually could connect the dots here. Just tell the public that X billion dollars a year, whatever your number is, will be diverted to the Mars mission. I suspect you'd have massive interest in that company and it might, it might unlock a lot more possibility for you.
Elon Musk
Now, I mean, I would like to give the public access to ownership of Space X, but I mean, the thing that, like the overhead associated with a public company is high. So I mean, as a public company you're just constantly sued. It does occupy like a fair bit of, you know, time and effort to deal with these things.
Chris Anderson
Right. But you still only have one public company. It would be bigger and have more things going on, but instead of being on four boards, you'd be on one.
Elon Musk
I'm actually not even on the Neuralink or Boring Company boards.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And I, I don't really attend the SpaceX board meetings. We only have two a year and I just stopped by and chat for an hour.
Elon Musk
the board overhead for a public company is much higher.
Chris Anderson
Right. I think some investors probably worry about how your time is being split and they would be, they might be excited by, you know, that. Anyway, I just woke up the other day thinking just there are so many ways in which these things connect and just the simplicity of that mission of building A future that is worth getting excited about might appeal to an awful lot of people. Elon, you are reported by Forbes and everyone else as now the world's richest person.
Elon Musk
That's not a sovereign. You know, I think it's fair to say that if somebody is like the king or de facto king of a country, they're wealthier than I am.
Chris Anderson
So. But it's just harder to measure. But what people do. So $300 billion, I mean, your, your net worth on any given day is rising or falling by several billion dollars. How insane is that? Yeah, I mean, does that, how do you handle that psychologically? There aren't many people in the world who have to even think about that.
Elon Musk
I actually don't think about that too much. But the thing that is actually more difficult, and that does make sleeping difficult, is that every good hour or even minute of thinking about Tesla and SpaceX has such a big effect on the company that I really try to work as much as possible, you know, to the edge of sanity, basically, because the Tesla is getting to the point where probably we'll get to the point later this year where every good, every high quality minute of thinking is a million dollars to impact on Tesla. So, which is insane. So I mean the basic, you know, if Tesla's doing, you know, of a sort of $2 billion a week, let's say in revenues, sort of $300 million a day, seven days a week, you know, it's.
Chris Anderson
If you can change that by 5% in an hour's brainstorm, that's a pretty valuable hour.
Elon Musk
I mean, there are many instances where a half hour meeting, I was able to improve the financial outcome of the company by $100 million in a half hour meeting.
Chris Anderson
There are many other people out there who can't stand this world of billionaires. They are hugely offended by the notion that an individual can have the same wealth as, say, a billion or more of the world's poorest people.
Elon Musk
If they examine sort of the sort of. I think there's some axiomatic flaws that are leading to them to that conclusion. For sure. It would be very problematic if I was consuming billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that is not the case. In fact, I don't even own a home right now. I'm literally staying at friends places. If I travel to the Bay Area, which, where most of Tesla engineering is, I stay in my, I basically rotate through friends, spare bedrooms, I don't have a yacht, I really don't take vacations.
Elon Musk
it's not as though that my personal consumption is high. I mean, the one exception is a plane, but if I don't use the plane plane, then I have less hours to work.
Chris Anderson
I personally think you have shown that you are mostly driven by really quite a deep sense of moral purpose. Your attempts to solve the climate problem have been as powerful as anyone else on the planet that I'm aware of. And I actually can't understand, personally, I can't understand the fact that you get all this criticism from the left about oh my God, he's so rich, that's disgusting. When climate is their issue. Philanthropy is a topic that some people go to. Philanthropy is a hard topic. Like how do you think about that?
Elon Musk
I think if you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy. Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy. This is a love of philanthropy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long term survival of humanity with multi planet species. This is love of humanity. Neuralink help solve brain injuries and existential risk. With a love of humanity. Boring company is trying to solve traffic which is health most people. And that also how, how upsetting is
Chris Anderson
it to you to hear this constant drumbeat of billionaires. My God, Elon Musk. Oh my God. Like, is that, do you, do you just shrug that off or does it, does it actually hurt?
Elon Musk
I mean at this point it's. What if it looks back?
Chris Anderson
You know, I'd like to, as we wrap up now, just pull the camera back and just think, you're a father now, seven surviving kids.
Elon Musk
And well, I mean, I'm trying to set a good example because the birth rate on Earth is so low that we're facing civilizational collapse unless the birth rate returns to a sustainable level.
Chris Anderson
Yeah, you've talked about this a lot. That depopulation is a big problem and
Elon Musk
we people don't understand. Population collapse is one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization. And that is what is going on right now.
Chris Anderson
What drives you on a day to day basis to do what you do?
Elon Musk
I guess, like I really want to make sure that there is a good future for humanity and that we're on a path to understanding the nature of the universe, the meaning of life. Why are we here? How do we get here? And in order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. Certainly it must not diminish or go out. We won't understand this. So I always say I'm motivated by curiosity more than anything and just desire to think about the future and not be sad, you know?
Chris Anderson
And, and are you, are you not sad?
Elon Musk
I'm sometimes sad. Mostly I'm. I mean, I'm feeling, I guess, relatively optimistic about the future these days. There are certainly some big risks that humanity faces. I think the population collapse is a really big deal that I wish more people would think about because the birth rate is far below what's needed to sustain civilization at its current level. And there's obviously we need to take action on climate sustainability, which is being done, and we need to secure the future of consciousness by being a multi planet species. We need to address the. Essentially it's important to take whatever actions we can think of to address the existential risks that affect the future of consciousness.
Chris Anderson
There's a whole generation coming through who seem really sad about the future. What would you say to them?
Elon Musk
Well, I think if you want the future to be good, you must make it. So take action to make it good. And it will be.
Chris Anderson
Yvonne, thank you for all this time. That is a beautiful place to end. Thanks for all that you're doing.