马斯克：值得期待的未来｜Tesla 得州超级工厂访谈｜TED

0:00You know Musk, great to see you. How are you? Good, how are you? 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. Very well. I would love you to help us kind of cast our minds, I don't know, 10, 20, maybe 30 years into the future.

0:21And help us try to picture what it would take to build a future that's worth getting excited about. You've often said it. The last time you spoke it, you said that that was really just a big driver. It's you know you can talk about lots of other reasons to do the work you're doing, but fundamentally you Want to think about the future and not think that it sucks

0:43Yeah, absolutely. I think in general You know there's a lot of discussion of like this problem with that problem and a lot of people are Sad about the future and then that they're pessimistic and I think this is not great. I mean we really want to wake up in the morning

1:08and 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. So if you look for 30 years, you know, this 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

1:39completely 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? Yeah, so I am not one of the dear of state people, which makes price.

2:03I actually think we're on a good path, but at the same time I want to caution against complacency. So, as 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.

2:27As 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 there are three elements to a sustainable energy future. is obviously a sustainable energy generation, which is primarily wind and solar. There's also

2:52a hydro geothermal, I'm actually pro-nuclear. I think nuclear is fine. But it's going to

3:04be primarily solar and wind as the primary generators of energy. The second part is you batteries to store the solar and wind energy because the sun is in China 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

3:29it's not really possible to make electric rockets but you can make the propellant use in rockets using sustainable energy. So ultimately we can have a fully sustainable energy economy and those three things, solar wind, stationary battery vehicles. So then what are the limiting factors on progress?

3:52The limiting factor really will be battery cell production. So that's going to really be the fundamental rate driver and then whatever the slowest element of the whole lithium ion battery cell supply chain from mining and the many steps of refining to ultimately creating a battery cell and putting it into a pack, that will be the limiting

4:13factor on progress towards sustainability. 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

4:31world needs for sustainability is 300 terawatt hours of battery. That's the end goal. Very rough numbers. And I certainly wouldn't invite others to check our calculations because they may arrive at a different conclusions. But in order to transition, not just current electricity production, but also heating and

4:56transport, which roughly troubles the amount of electricity that you need, it amounts to approximately 300 terawatt hours of installed capacity. So we need to give people a sense of how big a task that is. I mean, here we are, the Gigafactory. This is what, this is one of the biggest buildings in the world.

5:19When 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. We're probably doing more than that, but yes, that's, Hopefully we get there within a couple of years. Right. But I mean, so that is one.

5:411.1 terawatt hours. But that's still one 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 30, 2040, when we really need to see the scale up happen? I mean, these are just guesses. I mean, so please, you know, people just shouldn't hold me to these things.

6:06It's not like this is like some, what just happened is I'll make some like, you know, best guess and then people in five years, there'll be some jerk that writes the article. Elon said this would happen and it didn't happen. He's a liar in a fool. It's very annoying when that happens.

6:25So these are just guesses. This is a conversation. I think Tesla probably ends up doing 10% of that roughly. 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

6:52really low cost energy, isn't it, compared with now. And I'm curious about, like, should people, are people entitled to get a little bit excited about the possibilities of that world? People should be optimistic about the future. The humanity will solve sustainable energy. It will happen.

7:16If we are, you know, continue to push hard, the future is bright and good from an energy standpoint. And then it will be possible to also use that energy to do carbon sequestration. It takes a lot of energy to pull carbon out of the atmosphere just because in putting it in the atmosphere to release energy.

7:37So now, 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 peak parts per million of the atmosphere and oceans. And also, you can really have as much fresh water as you want.

7:57Earth is mostly water. We should call Earth water. It's 70% water by sofsteria. Now most of that sea water, but it's still, we just haven't been able to put that land. And with energy, you can turn sea water into irrigating water or whatever water you need. Absolutely. At very low cost.

8:15Things will be good. Things will be good. Yes. And also, the benefits right to this non fossil fuel world where the air is cleaner. Yes, exactly. Because when you burn fossil fuels, there's all these side reactions and toxic gases of various kinds. And I'd like to say sort of little particulates that are bad for your lungs.

8:38There's all sorts of bad things that are happening that will go away. And the sky will be cleaner and quieter. If you're just going to be good. I want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence. But the segue there, you mentioned how an audience is when people haul you up for bad predictions in the past.

8:58So 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 amazing on the money and some art. 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,

9:22you said 2020, I think we will do half a million a year. Yeah, we did almost exactly half a million. 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 it produced.

9:44But five years ago, last time you came to town, I asked you about full self-driving. And you said, yup, this very year, we're home confident that we will have a car going from LA to New York without any intervention. Yeah, I don't want to blow your mind, but I'm not always right.

10:03But so talk a talk. What's the difference between those two? Why has full self-driving in particular been so hard to predict? I mean, the thing that really got me, and I think it's going to get a lot of other people, is that there are just so many false storms with self-driving, where you think you've got the problem,

10:25have a handle on the problem, and then it, nope, turns out you just hit a ceiling. Because if you were to plot the progress, the progress looks like a log curve. So it's like, yeah, a series of log curves. So, most people don't want to like COVID, I suppose, but it goes up sort of a fairly straight way.

10:50And then it starts tailing off. And you start getting diminishing returns. And you're like, oh, this, 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.

11:12So, and ultimately, these things, in retrospect, they seem obvious. But in order to solve full self-driving, probably you actually just, you have to solve real world AI. Because you said, what are the road networks designed to work with? The designed to work with a biological neural net our brains and with vision, our eyes.

11:40And 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 sort of like quite obvious that the only way to solve full self-driving is to solve real world AI and sophisticated vision.

12:17What 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 any time soon? Well, I mean, these may be an infamous last words, but I actually am confident that we will solve it this year. That we will exceed

12:36the probability of an accident, at what point do you exceed that of the average person? I think we will exceed that this year. What are you seeing behind the scenes that gives you that confidence? Or almost at the point where we have a high-quality unified vector space. In the beginning, we were trying to do this with image recognition on individual

13:01images. But if you look at one image out of a video, it's actually quite hard to see what's going on with ambiguity. But if you look at a video segment of a few seconds of video, that ambiguity resolves. So the first thing we have to do is tie all eight cameras together so they're synchronized. So all the frames are looked at simultaneously and labeled simultaneously

13:25by a 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 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 your labeling surround video.

13:48And this is actually quite difficult to do from a software standpoint. We had to write our own labeling tools and then create an order labeling software to amplify

14:05the efficiency of human labels because it's quite hard to label but 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

14:26corrections to the labeling of the video and then feeding back those corrections into the future order labeler so you get this flywheel eventually where the order labeler is able to take in vast amounts of video and with high accuracy automatically label the video for cars, lane lines, drive space.

14:46What you're saying is that you think, 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 predict what the quirky behaviors are,

15:11that when a pedestrian is walking down the road with a smaller pedestrian, that maybe that smaller pedestrian might do something unpredictable, or things like that, that you have to build into it before you can really call it safe. You basically need to have memory across time and space.

15:29So what I mean by that is if you, because the memory can't be internet because it's using up a lot of computers around basically. So you have to say how much are you going to try to remember? But like if it's very common for things to be occluded. So like if you talk about say a pedestrian walking past a truck where you saw the pedestrian

15:56on one side of the truck, then they're occluded by the truck. Right. But you need to think, you would know intuitively, okay, that pressure is going to pop out the other side, most likely. Right. And if you don't know, you can't slow down. I mean, a skeptic is going to say that every year for the last five years, you've

16:14kind of said, well, no, this is the year. I mean, we're confident that we're there in a year or two, or, you know, like it's, it's always been about that far away. But we've got a new architecture now. You're seeing enough improvement behind the scenes to make you not certain, but pretty confident that 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.

16:43Yes, 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 theater program. So you can look at the videos that they post online. Okay, great. Some of them are great and some of them are a little terrifying, occasionally.

17:07The car seems to sort of like veer off and scatter hell out of people. That's still better. It's still better. But you put the, but you're, behind the scenes looking at the data, you're seeing enough improvement to believe that this year timeline is real. Yes, that's what it seems like.

17:25I mean, I'd like to, you know, who could be here talking again in a year. It's like, well, another year went by and it didn't happen. But I think this is the year. And so in general, 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 the angle will be done in six months, actually what you, what we should imagine is, it's gonna be a year or it's like two X or three X.

17:46depends on the type of prediction. Some things, I guess things involving software, you know, AI, whatever, are fundamentally harder to predict 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.

18:06Well, I generally believe in terms of internal timelines that we want to set, set the most aggressive timeline that we can because it's sort of like a law of gas expansion where for schedules where whatever time you set it's not going to be less than that it's very rare that it'll be less than that. As far as my predictions I

18:27can tell what has to happen in the media is that there were report all the wrong ones and ignore all the right ones. Right. 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

18:47much 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 50% and we've done 80%.

19:09Yes. But they don't mention that one. So 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.

19:31It's sort of like, 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. So it feels like at some point in the last year, seeing the progress on understanding that the Tesla AI, understanding the world around it, led to a kind of an aha moment it has.

20:00Because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at Tesla this year is this robot optimist. Many companies out there have tried to put out these robots, they've been working on them for years. So far no one has really cracked it.

20:18There's no mass adoption, robot in people's homes. There are some in manufacturing. Like 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.

20:37Yeah, exactly. So it took me a while to realize that in order to solve self-driving, you really needed to solve real world AI. And the point of 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.

20:58The two hard parts, I think, obviously companies like Boston Dynamics have shown that it's possible to make quite compelling sometimes alarming robots. So from a sense, there's an actuator standpoint. It's certainly been demonstrated by many that it's possible to make a humanoid robot.

21:16The things that are currently missing are enough intelligence, enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world 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.

21:37And so then we basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a human right robot. People have no idea. This is going to be bigger than the car. So let's dig into exactly that. I mean, in one way, it's actually an easier problem than force of 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, what, three or four or five miles an hour.

22:06We're walking speed basically. And so a mistake, there aren't lives at stake. There might be embarrassment at stake. As long as the AI doesn't take it over and... Right. We're going to rest now and sleep with something. Right. But so talk about, I mean I think the first applications you've mentioned are probably

22:25going to be manufacturing, but eventually the vision is to have these available for people at home. 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,

22:46That's kind of amazing, isn't it? Like the kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what? Like tidy up? Yeah, absolutely. Or make dinner, I guess, more the lawn. Take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures. Exactly, take care of like grandmother and make sure, yeah, exactly.

23:08When it could recognize, obviously, recognize everyone in the home, could play catch with your kids. Yes. So we need to be careful this doesn't become a dystopian situation. I think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized wrong ship on the robot that cannot be updated over the air, where if you, for

23:30example, would say, stop, stop, stop, that would, if anyone said that, then the robot would stop, you know, type of thing. And that's not updateable remotely. I think it's going to be important to have safety features like that. Yeah. That sounds wise. And I do think there should be a regulatory agency for AI.

23:46I've said this for many years. I don't love being regulated, but I think this is an important thing for public safety. Let's come back to that. But I don't think many people have really sort of taken seriously the notion of a robot at home. At the start of the computing revolution Bill Gates said, there's going to be a computer in every home and people at the time said, yeah, whatever.

24:07Who would even want that? They would have a computer in our pocket. do you think there will be basically like in say say 2050 or whatever that like a robot in most homes is what they will be and people will probably have them account on them you have your own butler basically yeah you'll have your sort of

24:23buddy robot probably yeah I mean how much for buddy do you like do you do how many applications you thought is that you know can you have a romantic partner sex partner I mean a lot of money and I mean I did promise the Internet that I'd make cat goals, we could make a robot cat goal.

24:43I'm going to see into that. So yeah, I guess it'll be what whatever people want, really. What sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first models that are actually made and sold? Well, the first thing we intend to make are for jobs that are dangerous, boring, repetitive,

25:09and 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 human-wide robots, and decreasing costs, and scaling up production.

25:29initially just selling to businesses, or when you do picture your cell, you'll start selling them where you can buy your parents' one for Christmas or something. I'll tell you, I listened 10 years. Yeah. How are you helping me on the economics of this? So what do you picture the cost of one of these being?

25:47Well, I think the cost is actually not going to be crazy high, 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

26:07car. 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 but think about the economics of this. If you can replace a $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

26:34of certain types of jobs. How worried should the world be about that? 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

26:57in the future. But this really will be a world of abundance. Any goods and services will be available to anyone who wants them. It will be so cheap to have goods and services. It will be ridiculous. And presumably it should be possible to imagine a bunch of goods and services that can't

27:16profitably be made now, but could be made in that world, courtesy of legions of robots. 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 humans. Okay. So AI is allowing us to imagine a differently powered economy that will create this abundance.

27:40What are you most worried about going wrong? Well, like I said, AI and robotics will bring out what might be the age of abundance. Other people abuse this word. And this is my prediction of being age of abundance for everyone. I guess the dangers would be the artificial general intelligence

28:08or digital super intelligence decouples from a collective human well and goes in the direction that for some reason we don't like of whatever direction might go. That's sort of the idea behind neural link is to try to more tightly couple collective human well to digital super intelligence.

28:33but 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 call, it will, I think it will succeed in the goal of alleviating brain and spine damage. 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.

28:59But that doesn't seem to avoid the risk that those superpowers might turn ugly in an unintended way. I think it's a risk, I agree. I'm not saying that I have certain answer to that risk. I'm just saying like maybe one of the things that would be good for ensuring that the future

29:25is one that we want is to more tightly couple a human world, 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 a digital ghost.

29:49You know, all of our text messages and social media, emails, it's quite eerie, actually, when someone dies and they're but everything online is still there. But you say, what's the limitation? What is it that inhibits human machines and viruses? It's the data rate. When you communicate, especially with a phone, you're moving your thumbs very slowly.

30:12So you're moving your two little meat sticks. At a rate that's maybe 10-bit per second, optimistically 100-bit per second. And computers are communicating at the gigabit level 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,

30:36than has been possible before? Yeah. So 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 the concept is new. The problem is that there's no product that works well that you can go and buy.

31:05So it's all sort of in research labs. And 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 that you could buy and would want to buy.

31:28So the way to think of the neural device is kind of like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch that's where we take out a sort of a small section of scale about the size of a quarter, replace that with what in many ways really is very much like a Fitbit Apple Watch or some kind of smartwatch thing.

31:58But with tiny wires, very, very tiny wires. To 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. How far are you from putting these into humans? What we have put in our FDA application

32:18to have the aspirationally do the first human apply this year? 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, for the enhancement of the world.

32:38How clear are you in your mind as to what it will feel like to have one of these inside your head? Well, I do want to have sides. We're out of an early stage. And so it really will be many years before we have anything approximating a high band with a neural interface that allows for AI human symbiosis.

33:07And for many years, we will just be solving brain injuries and spinal injuries for probably a decade. This is not something that will suddenly one day it will have this incredible sort of whole brain interface. It's going to be at least a decade of really just solving brain injuries and spinal injuries.

33:32And really I think you can solve a very wide range of brain injuries including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep, it's potentially schizophrenia. Like a lot of things that cause great stress to people, restoring memory in older people. If you can pull that off, that's the app I will sign up for.

33:56I would, please hurry. Yeah, I mean, the emails that we get at Neuralink are heartbreaking. I mean, they'll send us just a project where someone was sort of in the prime of life and they had an accident on a motorcycle and someone who's 25 is, you know, it can't even feed themselves.

34:22And this is something we could fix. 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. Yes, it's this 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

34:50of 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. The limbic system and the cortex. You've got the kind of animal brain where it's kind of like the fun part, really.

35:08And it's one of the most of Twitter operates, by the way. Yeah, I mean, we're, I think like Tim Oven said this, like we're like somebody stuck a computer on a monkey. Right. You know, so we're like, if you gave a monkey a computer, that's our cortex. But we still have a lot of monkey instincts.

35:25Right. So we should then try to rationalize this. No, it's not a Mikey instinct. It's something more important than that. But it's often just really a monkey instinct. We're just monkeys with a computer side in our brain. So even though the cortex is sort of the smart or the intelligent part

35:43of the brain, the thinking part of the brain, I've not yet met anyone who wants to delete the 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.

36:02It's just that it's like say 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 something that might be helpful.

36:30And worst case scenario, I think we solve some important brain injury, spinal injury issues, and that's still a great outcome. Right. Best case scenario, we may discover new human possibility telepathy you've spoken of in a way in a way with a loved one, you know, full memory and much faster thought processing

36:51maybe. It's very cool. If AI were to take down Earth, we need to plan B. Let's shift our attention to space. We spoke last time about reusability and you had just demonstrated that spectacular for the first time. Since then, you've gone on to build this monster rocket and starship, which kind of

37:17changes the rules of the game in spectacular ways. Tell us about Starship. 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 has come is our Falcon 9 rocket where we

37:37are able to recover the first stage, the boost stage, which is probably about 60% of the cost of the vehicle or the whole launch, maybe 70% and we've not done that over a hundred times. So with Starship we will be recovering the entire thing. That's the goal. And more of a recovering it in such a way that it can be immediately

38:06refloaned. Whereas with Falcon 9 we still need to do some amount of refurbishment to the booster and to the ferry when it was cone. So with Starship, the design goal is immediate reflate. Right. So you just refill propellants and go again. And this is gigantic. It just as it would be in any other mode of transporting.

38:33And the main design is to basically take, what, 100 plus people at a time? plus a bunch of things that they need, two 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.

38:57Two with people, three, the sort of, okay, 100 people at a time, let's go. Sure, well, and just to put the cost thing perspective, the cost of, the expected cost of Starship putting a hundred tons into orbit is significantly less than what it would have cost, or what it did cost to put out

39:22our tiny Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. Just as the cost of flying a 747 around the world is less than the cost of a smaller airplane. A smaller airplane that was thrown away. So it's really pretty mind-boggling that the giant thing costs way less than the small thing. So it doesn't use exotic propellants

39:50or things that are difficult to obtain on Mars. It uses methane as fuel. And it's primarily oxygen. This is roughly 78% oxygen by weight. 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. There's only one of the first tasks on Mars will be to create a fuel plant that can create

40:17the fuel for the return trips of many starships. And actually, it's mostly an oxygen plant, but it's because it's called 78% oxygen, 22% fuel. But the fuel is a simple fuel that is easy to create on Mars and while that many other parts of this whole system. So basically, and it's all propulsive landing, no parachutes, nothing thrown away, It has a heat shield that's capable of entering on Earth or Mars.

40:52We 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 of which you have a pellant depot on Mars, and then travel to the asteroid belt and to the moons of Jupiter and then to Saturn and ultimately anywhere in the solar system.

41:19Right, but your main focus and SpaceX's main focus is still Mars, that is the mission, that is where most of the foot will go. Or are you imagining a much broader array of uses even in the coming, you know, the first decade or so of use is of this. These are why we could go, for example, to the places and solar system to explore perhaps

41:49NASA wants to use the rocket for that reason. Yeah, NASA is planning to use 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

42:17the 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. Before it can do any of that, it's got to demonstrate it can get into orbit around Earth. Yeah. What's your latest advice on the timeline for that?

42:35It'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 launch complex itself is ready to go. So assuming we get regulatory approval, I think we could have an orbital launch attempt within

43:09a few months. And then a radical new technology like this, presumably there is real risk on those early attempts. I'm upset. Yeah, yeah. I mean the joke I make all the time is that excitement is guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed, but excitement certainly is. But the last I saw in your timeline, you've slightly put back the expected date to put

43:29the first human on Mars till 2029, I want to say. Yeah, so let's see. We have built a production system for SARS-HIP, so we're making a lot of ships and boosters. How many are you planning to make, actually? Well, we're currently expecting to make a booster and 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 and a lot of them. Just in talking in terms of

44:03rough 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. We just need a Helen of Sparta, I guess, on Mars. This is not in most people's heads, Elon. The planet that launched the thousand ships. That's nice. But this is not in most people's heads. This picture that you have in your mind that so there's there's basically a two-year window you can only really fly to Mars conveniently every two years yes you are still you were picturing

44:36that during doing the 2030s every couple years something like a thousand starships take off each containing a hundred or more people I mean that that that picture is just completely mind-blowing to me yes that that sense of this armada of humans going to battle star galatika the fleet of the parts

44:57And you think that it can basically be funded by people spending maybe a hub a hundred grand on a ticket to meet your Mars? Is that price about where it has been? Well, I think it's like what's required in order to get enough people and enough cargo to Mars to build a self-sustaining city?

45:17And 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 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

45:41I think governments will also pay for it and people can take out loans. But I think at point of which you say okay okay like if moving to Mars costs are for I'm gonna take a hundred thousand dollars then I think you know almost anyone can can work and save up and and and eventually have a hundred thousand dollars and be able

46:04to go to Mars if they want we want to make it available to anyone who wants to go yeah so it and 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's Shackleton Ave, we're 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 we're going

46:31to Mars is it's dangerous, it's cramped, you might not make it back. It's difficult, it's hard work. That's the sales pitch. that you will make history. One more. But it'll be glorious. Right. So on that kind of launch rate, you're talking about it over two decades, you could get your million people to Mars, essentially.

46:54Who's city is it? Is it NASA city? Is it SpaceX? It's the people of Mars city. The reason for this, I mean, I have to say, we feel like, why do this thing? I think this is important for maximizing the problem lifespan of humanity or consciousness. Human civilization could come to an end for external reasons like giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change or World War III

47:27or any one of a number of reasons. And the probable lifespan of civilization consciousness as we know it, which we should really view as this very delicate thing, like a small candle and 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.

47:59And it could just go out. I think that's powerful and I think a lot of people will be inspired by that vision. And the reason, so the reason you need the million people is because there has to be enough people there to do everything that you need to survive. Really, the critical threshold is,

48:17if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the Marist city die out or not? And so we have to pass that. People talk about the great filters, the things that perhaps to go out the Fermi Paradox and where are the aliens and like well maybe the aliens didn't, there is various great filters that the aliens didn't pass and so they eventually just cease to

48:46exist 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 real thing, before it happens but I'd like to at least see us make a great progress in this direction. 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 to once, once in a civilizations chance

49:24to make some new rules here? Is that, should someone be trying to lead those discussions to figure out what it means for this to be the people of Mars' city? Well, I think ultimately this will be after the people of Mars to decide how they want to rethink society. Yet there's certainly risk there.

49:45And 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 of democracy, and laws that are short enough for people to understand, and where it is harder to create laws than to get rid of them.

50:14Coming back a bit near a term, I'd love you to just talk 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. Yes. So we've just launched the James Webb Telescope, which is an incredible thing.

50:34It's unbelievable. It's two decades. It's an exquisite piece of technology. It's an exquisite piece of technology. But people spent two years trying to figure out how to fold up this thing. It's a three ton telescope. Yeah. We can make it a lot easier if you've got more volume and mass.

50:46So let's ask a different question, which is how much more powerful a telescope could someone design based on using Starship, for example? I mean, roughly OTA is probably in order of magnitude more resolution. If you've got 100 tons and 1,000 cubic meters volume, which is roughly what we have.

51:08And what about other explorations with the solar system? I mean, I'm, you know, well, you're open. You're open. It's a big, big question mark. Right. So there's an ocean there, right? Yeah. And what you really want to do is to drop a submarine into the ocean. Yeah. And maybe there's like some squid civilization under the cephalopod civilization under the

51:27ice of Europe, but that would be pretty interesting. I mean, Elon, if you could take a submarine to Europa and we see pictures of the same being devoured by a squid, that would honestly be the happiest moment of my life. Pretty well, yeah. That would be, what are the possibilities out there?

51:43Like, if you're gonna 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 I don't think people are really thinking about. I mean, I don't know. We've certainly got a long way to go.

52:01As you alluded to earlier, we've 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 as that will take a moment. But I do think we will solve this. I'm highly confident we will solve this at this point. Do you have a wake up with the fear that there's going to be this Hindenburg moment for SpaceX where...

52:31We've had many Hindenburg moments. Well, we've known that we've had Hindenburg moments with people, which is a very important big difference. Right, there is. We've blown out quite a few rockets. There's a whole compilation of line that we've put together and others put together.

52:45Showing rockets are hard. I mean, the sheer amount of energy going through rocket is well-balanced in line. So, you know, getting out of both gravity well is difficult. We have a strong gravity in the thick atmosphere. And Mars, which is less than 40%, it's like 37% of Earth's gravity and has a thin atmosphere.

53:07The ship alone can go all the way from the surface to the surface of Earth. Whereas getting two Mars requires a giant booster and orbital refilling. So Elon, 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.

53:31For example, the robots you're building from Tesla could possibly be pretty handy on Mars, doing some of the dangerous work and so forth. 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. That's a possibility.

53:49Maybe the boring company could play a role, helping create some of the subterranean dwelling spaces that you might need. 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 a 3D network of tunnels

54:12populated by robo-taxis that will offer fast low-cost transport to anyone. Full self-driving may or may or may not be done this year. And in some cities, like someone like Mumbai, I suspect won't be done for a decade. So this is our margin in others. But today, with what you've got, you could put a 3D network of tunnels under that.

54:35Oh, if we're just in a tunnel, that's the sole problem, basically. And exactly, full self-driving is the sole problem. So to me, there's amazing synergy there. With Starship, you know, Gwyn Chatewell talked about by 2028, having from city to city, you know, transport on planet Earth.

54:52Yeah, this is a real possibility. It's a, yeah, the fastest way to get from one place to another, if it's a long distance is a rocket. It's basically ICBM with the landing to lead to new. because it's an ICBM, it has to land probably offshore. Yes, it's just a good loud. So why not have a tunnel that then connects to the city

55:18with the test. So it's a, and, and, and, NewerLink, I mean, if you're gonna go to Mars, having a telepathic connection with loved ones back home, even if there's a time delay, I mean. I'm not, these are not intended to be connected to be, by the way, they're just, but I, there's certainly could be some synergies, yeah.

55:35Surely there is a growing argument that you should actually put all these things together into one company and just have a company devoted to creating a future that's exciting and let a thousand flowers bloom. Have you been thinking about that? I mean it is tricky because Tesla is a publicly traded company and the investor base of Tesla

56:00and SpaceX and certainly the boring company and Neuralink are quite different. Worry company and Neuralink are tiny companies. Right. Like a person. The audience made it. Yeah. Tesla's got 110,000 people. SpaceX I think is around 12,000 people. Boring company and Neuralink are both under 200 people.

56:22So they're little tiny companies but they will probably get bigger in the future. future. It's not that easy to sort of combine these things. 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.

56:43Making life multi-planetary is outside of the normal time horizon of Wall Street analysts. 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

57:11to the Mars mission. I suspect you'd have massive interest in that company and it might unlock a lot more possibility for you now. I mean, I would like to give the public access to ownership of SpaceX. But I mean, the overhead associated with Poly Company is high. So I mean, as a Poly Company, you're just constantly sued.

57:41It does occupy a fair bit of time and effort to deal with these things. Right. But you would 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. I'm actually not even on the Neuralink or Warren Company boards.

58:01Oh, well. Yeah. And I don't really attend the SpaceX board meetings. We only have two a year. And I just stopped buying chat for an hour. So the board I've had for a public company is much higher. Right. I think some investors probably worry about how your time is being split and they might be excited by that.

58:21Anyway, I just woke up the other day thinking 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 in other words, which is person.

58:48That's not a sovereign. I think it's fair to say that if somebody is like the king or the factor of a country they're wealthier than I am. But it's just harder to measure. But what people do, so $300 billion, your net worth on any given day is rising or falling by several billion dollars. How do you say, how insane is that? How do you handle that

59:15psychologically? There aren't many people in the world who have to even think about that. 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

59:43as much as possible to the edge of sanity basically because Tesla is getting to the point where, probably we'll get to the point data this year, where 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 sort of two billion dollars a

1:00:20week let's say in revenue is sort of three hundred million dollars a day, seven days a week. It's... If you can change that by 5% in an hours brainstorm, that doesn't be valuable. That's a pretty valuable hour. I mean, there are many instances where a half hour meeting, I was able to improve the financial

1:00:44outcome of the company by $100 million in a half hour meeting. There are many other people out there who can't stand this world of billionaires. 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. If they examine sort of the sort of, I think there's some axiomatic flaws that are leading

1:01:12to 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 is where most of the tells of 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. So it's not

1:01:44as though there's... that my postal consumption is high. The one exception is a plane, but If I don't use the plane, then I have less hours to work. So I personally think you have shown that you are mostly driven by really quite a deep sense of moral purpose. Like, you've tried your attempts to solve the climate

1:02:07problem 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

1:02:26that some people go to. Philanthropy is a hard topic. How do you think about that? I think if you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. SpaceX, Tesla, Neural Electric Board, and company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy.

1:02:49Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy. This is a love of full enthalpy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long term survival of humanity with multi-planets species. This is love of humanity. Neuralink is to help solve brain injuries and existential risk with AI, love of humanity.

1:03:13Boring company is try to solve traffic, which is health for most people. And that also is the humanity. It's like how upsetting is it to you to hear this constant drumbeat of billionaires, my god Elon Musk, oh my god, like is it, do you just shrug that off or does it, does it actually hurt?

1:03:36I mean, at this point, it's water off it ducks back. You know, I'd like to, as we wrap up now, just pull the camera back and just think You're a father now of seven surviving kids. Well, I mean, I'm trying to say 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.

1:04:01Yeah, you've talked about this a lot. The deep population is a big problem. And we people don't understand the big collapse. Population collapse is one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization. And that is what is going on right now. What drives you on a day-to-day basis to do what you do?

1:04:17I 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.

1:04:47Certainly it must not diminish or go out. We certainly wouldn't understand this. So I would say I'm motivated by curiosity more than anything and just desire to think about the future and not be sad, you know. And- And are you not sad? I'm sometimes sad. I'm feeling, I guess, relatively optimistic about the future of these days.

1:05:15There are certainly some big risks that humanity faces. I think the population collapses 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 yeah, there's obviously, we need to take action on climate sustainability, which is

1:05:43being 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. There's a whole generation coming through who seem really sad about the future.

1:06:04What would you say to them? 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. Elon thank you for all this time. That is a beautiful place to end. Thanks for all that you're doing. You're welcome.