乔·罗根秀 #1169：马斯克

Hey, welcome.

Nice to meet you too.

You’re welcome. That’s coming later.

Well, we didn’t put a lot of time into the flamethrower. This was an off-the-cuff thing. So it’s sort of a hobby company called the Boring Company, which started out as a joke and we decided to make it real and dig a tunnel. And then other people asked us to dig tunnels and so we said yes in a few cases. And then we have a merchandise section that only has one piece of merchandise at a time. And we started off with a cap and there was only one thing. It was just boringcompany.com cap or hat. That’s it. And then we sold the hats, limited edition. It just said the Boring Company. And then I’m a big fan of Spaceballs the movie. And in Spaceballs, Yogurt goes through the merchandising section and they have a flamethrower in the merchandising section of Spaceballs. And “the kids love that one.” That’s the line when he pulls out the flamethrower. It’s like, we should do a flamethrower. So we did.

Yeah. It’s a terrible idea. Terrible. Shouldn’t buy one. I said don’t buy this flamethrower. Don’t buy it. Don’t buy it. That’s what I said. But still people bought it. There’s nothing I can do to stop them.

I said don’t buy it. It’s a bad idea.

It’s dangerous, it’s wrong. Don’t buy it. Still, people bought it. I couldn’t stop them.

20,000. And they’re all gone in three, I think four days. We sold out in four days.

No.

Yes. I said we would do 20. We did 50,000 hats and that was a million dollars. And okay, well, we’ll sell something for 10 million. And that was 20,000 flamethrowers at $500 each. They went fast.

I mean, I didn’t spend much time on this flamethrower. I mean, to be totally frank, it’s actually just a roofing torch with an air rifle cover. It’s not a real flamethrower, which is—

That’s why we were very clear this is not actually a flamethrower. And also we were told that various countries would ban shipping of it, but they would ban flamethrowers. So we very—to solve this problem for all the customs agencies, we labeled it “not a flamethrower.”

I don’t know. I think so.

You cannot ship a flamethrower.

I mean, I’m not saying it’s going to be successful or, you know, I mean, it’s not like asserting that it’s going to be successful. But so far, I’ve lived in LA for 16 years and the traffic has always been terrible. And so I don’t see any other ideas for improving the traffic. So in desperation, we’re going to dig a tunnel and maybe that tunnel will be successful and maybe it won’t.

Yeah. I’m not trying to convince you it’s going to work.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s in LA because I mostly live in LA. That’s the reason. It’s a terrible place to dig tunnels. This is one of the worst places to dig tunnels because, mostly because of the paperwork. People think it’s, “what about seismic?” It’s actually, tunnels are very safe in earthquakes.

Earthquakes are essentially a surface phenomenon. It’s waves on the ocean. So if there’s a storm, you want to be in a submarine. So being in a tunnel is being in a submarine. Now, the way the tunnel is constructed is it’s constructed out of these interlocking segments, kind of a snake. It’s sort of a snake exoskeleton with double seals. And so even when the ground moves, the tunnel actually is able to shift along with the ground like an underground snake. And it doesn’t crack or break. And it’s extremely unlikely that both seals would be broken. And it’s capable of taking 5 atmospheres of pressure. It’s waterproof, methane proof, or gas proof of any kind, and meets all California seismic requirements.

I’m not sure what you mean by that.

Yeah. So there were some engineers from SpaceX who thought it would be cool to do this. And the guy who runs it day to day, Steve Davis—he’s a longtime SpaceX engineer. He’s great. So Steve was, “I’d like to help make this happen.” I was, “cool.” So we started off with digging a hole in the ground. He’s got a permit for a pit, big pit, and just dug a big pit.

Nice. Fill out this form. That’s it. Yeah, it was a pit in our parking lot.

Now we just started off with a pit.

And now, you know, there’s not really—you know, don’t really care about the existential nature of a pit. You just say, “I want a pit.”

And saw a hole in the ground. So then we got the permit for the pit and we dug the pit and we dug it in, I don’t know, three days. Two, three days, actually. I think 48 hours, something that. Because Eric Garcetti was coming by for the Hyperloop. He was going to attend the Hyperloop competition, which is a student competition we have for who can make the fastest pod in the Hyperloop. And he was coming. The finals were going to be on Sunday afternoon. And so Eric was coming by on Sunday afternoon. He was, you know, “we should take this pit and then show Eric.” So we—this was Friday morning and then—yeah. So it was about a little over 40 hours later we dug the pit. It was 24/7. Oh, 24, 48 straight hours, something that. And dug this big pit. And we showed Eric the pit. It’s, obviously it’s just a pit, but, hey, hole in the ground is better than no hole in the ground.

Nothing wrong with a hole in the ground. People dig holes in the ground all the time.

I got a million ideas.

There’s no shortage of that. Yeah.

You know, I do, basically—I think people don’t totally understand what I do with my time. They think I’m a business guy or something that. My Wikipedia page says “business magnate.”

Business Magnet. Can someone please change my Wikipedia page to Magnet?

So somebody has to be able to unlock it and change it to Magnet.

I want to be a magnet. I do engineering and manufacturing and that kind of thing. That’s 80% more of my time ideas.

That’s hardcore engineering, designing things, you know?

Structural, mechanical, electrical, software, user interface engineering, aerospace engineering.

Yes.

We’re all chimps.

We’re one notch above a chimp.

Because I’m an alien.

I might have some mutation or something that.

Not bad for a human. But I think we will not be able to hold a candle to AI.

That’s true.

Yeah, you could probably do that right now.

Probably not wise for retribution. Their memory is very good.

It’s really good. I bet it is, yes.

It’s really good.

Yes. It’s less of a worry than it used to be, mostly due to taking more of a fatalistic attitude.

Pretty much. No, it’s not necessarily bad. It’s just, it’s definitely going to be outside of human control.

Yes, it’s not necessarily bad. It’s just outside of human control. Now the thing that’s going to be tricky here is that it’s going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon. It’s going to be very tempting. In fact, it will be used as a weapon. So the on-ramp to serious AI, the danger is going to be more humans using it against each other. I think most likely that will be the danger.

Well, I mean you could argue that any group of people, like a company, is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. That’s what a company is. And then there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed. And then there’s this sort of collective AI in the Google search. You know, where we’re all sort of plugged in as nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree. And we’re all feeding this network with questions and answers. We’re all collectively programming the AI. And Google, plus the older humans that connect to it, are one giant cybernetic collective. This is also true of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these social networks. They’re giant cybernetic collectors.

Yes, constantly.

Yes, I made this comment some years ago, but it feels like we are the biological bootloader for AI. Effectively, we are building it and then we’re building progressively greater intelligence and the percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence. But the AI isn’t formed strangely by the human limbic system. It is in large part our ID writ large.

We mention all those things, the sort of primal drives. There’s all the things that we like, add hate and fear. They’re all there on the Internet. They’re a projection of our limbic system.

Yeah. This is in some measure, like the success of these online systems is sort of a function of how much limbic resonance they’re able to achieve with people. The more limbic resonance, the more engagement.

Limbic resonance.

Yes.

Yes. Things are getting more and more connected. They’re at this point constrained by bandwidth. Our input output is slow, particularly output. Output got worse with thumbs. You know, we used to have input with 10 fingers, now we have thumbs. But images are just, are also, they’re a way of communicating at high bandwidth. You take pictures and you send pictures to people that communicates far more information than you can communicate with your thumbs.

I tried to convince people to slow down. Slow down AI, to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years.

Nobody listened.

Maybe they will. So far they haven’t. I think people don’t like, normally the way that regulations work is very slow, very slow indeed. So usually it will be something, some new technology. It will cause damage or death. There will be an outcry, there will be investigation, years will pass. There will be some sort of insights committee, there will be rulemaking, then there will be oversight, eventually regulations. This all takes many years. This is the normal course of things. If you look at say automotive regulations, how long did it take for seat belts to be implemented, to be required? You know, the auto industry fought seat belts, I think for more than a decade, successfully fought any regulations on seat belts. Even though the numbers were extremely obvious. If you had a seatbelt on, you would be far less likely to die or be seriously injured. It was unequivocal. And the industry fought this for years, successfully. Eventually, after many, many people died, regulators insisted on seat belts. This time frame is not relevant to AI. You can’t take 10 years from the point at which it’s dangerous. It’s too late.

It’s not necessarily a doomsday countdown.

Out of control? Yeah. People call it the singularity and that’s probably a good way to think about it. It’s a singularity. It’s hard to predict like a black hole, what happens past the event horizon.

Change out of the bottle, what’s going.

Yes.

Yeah.

Ridiculous.

It could be terrible and it could be great. It’s not clear. But one thing is for sure, we will not control it.

Well, that’s the scenario. The merge scenario with AI is the one that seems like probably the best for us. Yes. If you can’t beat it, join it.

You know, so from a long term existential standpoint, that’s like the purpose of Neuralink, is to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI because we have a bandwidth problem. You just can’t communicate through your fingers, it’s too slow.

I think we’ll have something interesting to announce in a few months that’s at least an order of magnitude better than anything else, I think. Better than probably anyone thinks is possible.

I don’t want to jump the gun on that.

I think best case scenario we effectively merge with AI, where AI serves as a tertiary cognition layer where we’ve got the limbic system, kind of the primitive brain. Essentially you’ve got the cortex, so you’re currently in a symbiotic relationship. Your cortex and limbic system are in a symbiotic relationship. And generally people like their cortex and they like their limbic system. I haven’t met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or delete their cortex. Everybody seems to like both. And the cortex is mostly in service to the limbic system. People may think that the thinking part of themselves is in charge, but it’s mostly their limbic system that’s in charge. And the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy. That’s what most of that computing power is oriented towards. How can I make the limbic system happy? That’s what I was trying to do. Now, if we do have a third layer, which is the AI extension of yourself, that is also symbiotic and there’s enough bandwidth between the cortex and the AI extension of yourself, such that the AI doesn’t de facto separate, then that could be a good outcome. That could be quite a positive outcome for the future.

Yes, it will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition. Anyone who wants. This is not a matter of earning power, because your earning power would be vastly greater after you do it. So it’s just like anyone who wants can just do it in theory. That’s the theory. And if that’s the case, then, and let’s say billions of people do it, then the outcome for humanity will be the sum of human will, the sum of billions of people’s desire for the future.

It would be difficult to really appreciate the difference. It’s kind of like, how much smarter are you with a phone or computer than without? You’re vastly smarter, actually. You can answer any question if you’re connected to the Internet. You can answer any question pretty much instantly. Any calculation that your phone’s memory is essentially perfect. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos, pictures, everything perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You’re already a cyborg. You don’t even—well, most people don’t realize they are already a cyborg. That phone is an extension of yourself. It’s just that the data rate, the rate at which the communication rate between you and the cybernetic extension of yourself, that is your phone and computer is slow. It’s very slow. And that’s like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. And we need to make that tiny straw, like a giant river. Huge high bandwidth interface. It’s an interface problem. Data rate problem. Solve the data rate problem. Then I think we hang on to human machine symbiosis through the long term. And then people may decide that they want to retain their biological self or not. I think they’ll probably choose to retain their biological self versus some sort of—

You will be essentially snapshotted into a computer at any time. If your biological self dies, you could just probably just upload into a new unit, literally.

Down the rabbit hole.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, by the way.

Cheers. Yeah. This is a great whiskey.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was really going on the warning quite a lot. I was warning everyone I could. You ever met with Obama. And just for one reason, look, I—

Yes.

Worry about her first.

Everybody be quiet. No, he listened. He certainly listened to—I met with Congress. I met with—I was at a meeting of all 50 governors and talked about just AI danger. And I talked to everyone I could. No one seemed to realize where this was going.

Yeah, I think they didn’t quite understand it or didn’t think it was near term or not sure what to do about it. When I said, you know, an obvious thing to do is to just establish a committee, government committee, to gain insight before you do oversight, before you do, make regulations to try to understand what’s going on. And then if you have an insight committee, then once they learn what’s going on, get up to speed, then they can make maybe some rules or propose some rules. And that would be probably a safer way to go about things.

Who do you want to handle this?

Oh, geez.

But I don’t have the power to regulate other companies. What am I supposed to—

And whether—

For those reasons.

Chimps are mean.

F *ing mean.

I saw that movie Chimpanzee. I thought it was going to be some Disney thing.

Looks pretty cool. Chimpanzee.

Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of a documentary of, damn, these chimps are mean.

Yeah. They’re cruel.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I didn’t realize chimps did calculated cruelty.

I was pretty—I left that meeting kind of thinking, “Whoa, this is dark,” right?

I don’t know. How much do we think about chimps? Not much. Very little. It’s like these chimps are at war. These little—it’s like groups of chimps just attack each other and they kill each other. They torture each other. That’s pretty bad. They hunt monkeys. They’re—but this is probably the most—you know. I mean, when’s the last time you talked about chimps?

You do. Talking to the wrong guy, unfortunately.

Okay.

Yeah, exactly. And there’s the bonobos. They got a better philosophy.

They just seem to resolve everything with sex.

Okay, that’s it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I haven’t seen the bonobo movie.

They’re just constantly going—

Yeah.

Just won’t stop. Yeah.

What’s with these labels? I haven’t seen bonobos at a zoo. That’s probably not in the PG section. Yeah.

We’ve looked that up before, too. It’s probably pretty awkward.

San Diego’s in Wisconsin. Yeah.

Separate them. Yeah. I mean, how many other—in a cage it’s going to be pretty intense.

I think one of the issues with social media that’s been pointed out by many people is that I think maybe particularly Instagram people look like they have a much better life than they really do.

Yeah. People are posting pictures of when they’re really happy. They’re modifying those pictures to be better looking. Even if they’re not modifying the pictures, they’re at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting, the best angle. So people basically seem they’re way better looking than they basically really are.

They’re way happier seeming than they really are. So if you look at everyone on Instagram, you might think, “Man, there are all these happy, beautiful people and I’m not that good looking and I’m not happy, so I must suck,” you know, and that’s going to make you feel sad. So when in fact those people you think are super happy, actually not that happy. Some of them are really depressed, they’re very sad. Some of the happiest seeming people, actually some of the saddest people in reality. And nobody looks good all the time. Doesn’t matter who you are.

Yeah, exactly. So I think things like that can make people quite sad just by comparison. Because people generally think of themselves relative to others. We are constantly re-baselining our expectations. And you can see this say if you watch some show like Naked and Afraid or if you just go and try living in the woods by yourself for a while and you’ll learn that civilization is quite great. People want to come back to civilization pretty fast on Naked and Afraid.

Yeah, well, happiness is reality minus expectations.

Ooh.

Emojis. Emojis. A lot of emojis.

Yeah. Do I live in the simulation? Yeah, maybe in the simulation.

It will be at some point indistinguishable from reality where we’ll lose this.

I hope you think so.

This could be some simulation.

Well, the argument for the simulation, I think is quite strong because if you assume any improvement at all over time, any improvement, 1%, 0.1%. Just extend the time frame. Make it a thousand years. A million years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. What would a civilization, if you counted, if you’re very generous, civilization is maybe 7 or 8,000 years old. If you count it from the first writing. This is nothing. This is nothing. So if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality or civilization will end. One of those two things will occur. Therefore, we are most likely in a simulation.

We could be in base reality. We could be in base reality.

Mason Johnson suede shoes.

Yes. But then people will go get a mason jar with a wine stem or a handle. That’s dark. Makes me lose faith in humanity.

Yes.

It was made with a wine stem made with a handle.

Yes.

So that would be fine if it was. They glued it on or something. But it was made that way.

Here it is right there. Yep.

Yeah. That’s almost what that is.

Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to sound like things are too dark because I think you kind of have to be optimistic about the future. There’s no point in being pessimistic. It’s just too negative. It doesn’t help. I think you want to be. My theory is you’d rather be optimistic. I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. At least. Or on that side.

Because if you’re pessimistic, you’re just going to be miserable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Enjoy the journey.

I mean, ultimately, even if we just sort of existed as humans forever, we’d be. We’d still. Eventually. That’d be like the heat death of the universe a zillion years from now. Right.

Eventually it’s going to end. It’s just a question of when. So it really is all about the journey.

The universe as we know it will dissipate into a fine mistake of cold nothingness eventually.

It’s just a very long time. So I think it’s really just about how can we make it last longer.

I think most likely this is just about probability. There are many, many simulations. These simulations are. We might as well call them reality, or you could call them multiverse.

They’re running on the substrate. So that substrate is probably boring.

Well, when we create a simulation like a game or a movie, it’s a distillation of what’s interesting about life. You know, it takes a year to shoot an action movie and then that’s all distilled down into two or three hours. So let me tell you, if you see an action movie being filmed, it’s boring. Super boring. Takes, there’s like lots of takes. Everything’s in a green screen. Looks pretty goofy, doesn’t look cool, but once you add the CGI and have great editing, it’s amazing. So I think most likely if we’re a simulation, it’s really boring outside the simulation because why would you make a simulation that’s boring? It makes simulation way more interesting than base reality.

Yes.

Yes.

This notion of place or where is a…

Yes, flawed like that. If you have this sort of that Vive that’s made by Valve and it’s really Valve that made it. HTC did the hardware, but it’s really a Valve thing.

Yes, Valve. Great company.

When you’re in that virtual reality, which is only going to get better, where are you? Where are you really? You aren’t anywhere. You’re in the computer.

Exactly right? It’s your perception.

You’re right here.

Why do you think you’re where you are right now? You might not be.

You think you’re in a studio in LA?

You might be in a computer.

Yeah.

Let’s find out. Well, I think we should take the actions, the set of actions that are most likely to make the future better.

And then reevaluate those actions to make sure they’re. That it’s true.

Sorry. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s cool.

Yeah.

You should see what the Tesla can do. You didn’t. You should. I’ll show you afterwards.

Yeah, but most people don’t know what—

Well, any car can do that.

I mean, the Model X can do this ballet thing to the Trans Siberian Orchestra. It’s pretty cool.

Yes.

Yes.

Seemed like fun.

Look at this, dude. A flamethrower.

I want to be clear. It’s definitely not a—

Well, I mean, in that case, there were some engineers at Tesla that said, “What if we make this car dance and play music?” I was like, “That sounds great. Please do it. Let’s try to get it done in time for Christmas.” We did.

No, it won’t do that.

Nope.

Nope. Actually, you have to. It’s an Easter egg.

Yeah. That’s why people don’t know about it. Including people who have the car. It could do lots of things. Lots of things.

Oh, everyone. If you search for it on the Internet, you will find out. But people don’t know that they should even search for it.

Yes. Yes. There’s so many things about the Model X and the Model S and the Model 3 that people don’t know about. We should probably do a video or something and explain it because I have close friends of mine and I say, “Do you know the car can do this?” And they’re like, “Nope.”

No, I think it’s probably not. We should tell people.

I mean, I think a Tesla is the most fun thing you could possibly buy ever. That’s what it’s meant to be. Our goal is to make—it’s not exactly a car, it’s actually a thing to maximize enjoyment, make it maximum fun.

Yeah.

And we’re going to put video games in it.

Yeah.

Well, you won’t be able to drive while you’re playing the video game. But for example, we’re just putting the Atari emulator ROM emulator in it so you’ll be able to play Missile Command and Lunar Lander and a bunch of other things.

It’s pretty fun.

Yeah. And we improved the interface of the Missile Command because it was too hard with the old trackball. So this is a touchscreen version of Missile Command. So you have a chance.

Yeah, how’d you know that? That’s 61 Series 1E type Jaguar.

It’s great.

Yeah, the only two. Only two gasoline cars I have are that and an old Ford Model T that a friend of mine gave me.

My only two gasoline cars.

Okay. I have the convertible.

Yes.

That is. It’s not mine. It’s extremely close to mine, but I don’t have a front license plate on mine.

Mine looks like that.

That’s what mine looks like. Maybe that is mine.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My E type is basically no electronics.

Yes.

Yes.

It’s driving itself better every day.

It’s like we’re about to release the software that will enable you to just turn it on and it’ll drive from highway on ramp to highway exit, do lane changes to overtake other cars to go from one interchange to the next. If you get on, say, the 405, get off 300 miles later and go through several highway interchanges and just overtake other cars and hook into the nav system and then—

It’s kind of eerie. It’s kind of eerie.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

We changed the software. That’s, I think, an old video. We changed software where if you don’t touch the wheel, it will gradually slow down and put the emergency lights on and wake you up.

Yeah, that’s hilarious. Yeah.

Well, it’s sort of more of a—it sort of honks.

Yeah.

We could gently wake you up with a sultry voice.

“Wake up, sunshine.”

Exactly. Why don’t you wake up like—you could pick your—pick what you want.

Do you want it seductive?

What flavor of—do you want her to be angry? Could be anything.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like, you know, we’re like, “Well, you know, people just falling asleep. We’ve got to do something about that.”

People fall asleep in cars all the time and crash.

At least our car doesn’t crash. That’s better. It’s better not to crash. Imagine if that guy had fallen asleep in a gasoline car. They do it all the time.

Then they would crash into somebody.

In fact, the thing that really got me to—it’s like, man, we better get autopilot going and get it out. There was a guy in an early Tesla driving down the highway, and he fell asleep and he ran over a cyclist and killed him. And the cyclist was—I was like, “Man, if we had autopilot, wouldn’t have run out of—he might have fallen asleep, but at least he wouldn’t have run over that cyclist.”

Yes. Yeah. You can program it to be more or less, more conservative, more aggressive driver, and you can say what speed you want it to—what speed is—

Well, for lane changes, it’s tricky because if you’re in LA, unless you’re pretty aggressive, it’s pretty hard to change lanes sometimes.

You got to be a little pushy. Yeah. Especially if you’re angry. If you’re a little angry, they don’t want you in. They speed up sometimes.

Do you think the neural link will help that? Everybody be locked in together. This hive mind.

That’ll help a lot.

Nice thing about tunnels is you can go 3D, so you can go many levels.

So until you hit hell. Yeah. But you could go. You could have 100 levels of tunnel, no problem.

This is one of the fundamental things people don’t appreciate about tunnels, is that it’s not like roads. The fundamental issue with roads is that you have a 2D transport system and a 3D living and workspace environment. So you got all these tall buildings or concentrated work environments, and then you want to go into this 2D transport system. Hugely inefficient, pretty low density, because cars are spaced out pretty far. And so that obviously is not going to work. You’re going to have traffic, guaranteed. But if you can go 3D on your transport system, then you can solve all traffic. You can either go 3D up with a flying car or you can go 3D down with tunnels. You can have as many tunnel levels as you want. You can arbitrarily relieve any amount of traffic. You can go further down with tunnels than you can go up with buildings. You’re 10,000 feet down if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it, but—

Batman.

Batman fought dragons.

Reign of Fire.

No. Terrible movie. Terrible movie, but good. I wouldn’t recommend drilling super far down. Yeah, but you get rid of it, it gets hot.

Molten earth is a giant ball of lava with a thin crust on the top, which we think of as the surface, this thin crust, and it’s mostly just a big ball of lava. That’s Earth. But 10,000 feet is not a big deal.

Ha. I think that’s a troll situation.

I mean, if it works for them, sure, fine.

The next generation Roadster. Standard edition. Yeah.

That’s what that.

Yeah. Without the performance package.

Yes.

We’re going to put rocket thrusters on it.

Yes.

Nothing. Ultra high pressure compressed air.

Just cold gas thrusters.

It’s an electric pump. Whoa. Pump it up to 10,000 psi.

How fast do you want to go?

Make it fly.

Too noisy and there’s too much airflow. So the fundamental issue with flying cars, if you get one of those toy drones, think of how much, how loud those are and how much air they blow. Now imagine if that’s a thousand times heavier. This is not going to make your neighbors happy. Your neighbors are not going to be happy if you land a flying car in your backyard. It’ll be very helicopter-like or on your roof. They’re just really going to be, “What the hell? That was annoying.” You can’t even—if you want a flying car, just put some wheels on a helicopter.

Nope.

Yes.

Yeah. There’s a fundamental momentum exchange with the air, so you must accelerate. There’s a certain—you have a mass and you have gravitational acceleration. And mass, mass times your mass times gravity must equal the mass of airflow times the acceleration of that airflow to have a neutral force. So it’s impossible to go down and then you won’t move. But if MG is greater than MA, you will go down, and if MA is greater than MG, you will go up. That’s how it works.

There is definitely no way around it.

Technically, yes, you could have a strong enough magnet, but that magnet would be so strong that you would create a lot of trouble.

I mean, you’d have to repel off of either material on the ground or in a really nutty situation, off of Earth’s gravitational field and somehow make that incredibly light. But that magnet would cause so much destruction. You’d be better off with a helicopter.

Ha ha ha. Yes. Yes, you can have a magnet road.

No, it would work. You could do that. I would not recommend it.

I would super not recommend that. Not wise, I think. No magnet roads. No, no, no. Definitely not. Definitely not. That would cause a lot of trouble.

Oh, it’ll work for sure.

Yes.

You know, it’s just a hole in the ground.

Yeah, you can go real fast. You can go as fast as you want. And then if you want to go long distances, you can just draw the air out of the tunnel, make sure it’s real straight, draw the air out of the tunnel. Yeah. So vacuum tunnel. And then depending on how fast you want to go through these wheels, or you could use air bearings, depending upon the ambient pressure in the tunnel. Or you could mag-lev if you want to go super fast.

Yes, but underground. Magnet roads.

Otherwise you’re going to really create a lot of trouble with—because there’s metal things.

If you want to go really fast underground, you would be maglev in a vacuum tunnel.

Magnetic levitation in a vacuum tunnel. Pardon?

No, I would not recommend putting any exhaust gas in the tunnel.

No, you have a pressurized pod. It’d be like a little tiny underground spaceship, basically.

It is, yes.

Yeah, they have a pump.

Yeah.

Yes.

And it’s—the air is—airplanes have it easy because essentially you can—they’re pretty leaky, but—Jesus. Yeah, but as long as they—as long as the air pump is working at a decent speed, they have backup pumps. So they’ll have three pumps or four pumps or something. And then that—then there’s—it exhausts through the outflow valve and through whatever seals are not sealing quite right. Usually the door doesn’t seal quite right on a plane, so there’s a bit of leakage around the door, but the pumps exceed the outflow rate, and then that sets the pressure in the cabin.

I have a design for a plane.

Yes.

I mean, probably. I think it is. Yeah.

And I’ve talked to friends.

Friends.

Girlfriends.

Well, I mean, the exciting thing to do would be some sort of electric vertical takeoff and landing supersonic jet of some kind.

Yes. The trick is that you have to transition to level flight and then you—the thing that you would use for vertical takeoff and landing is not suitable for high speed flight.

I’ve thought about this quite a lot. An interesting thing about an electric plane is that you want to go as high as possible, but you need a certain energy density in the battery pack because you have to overcome gravitational potential energy. Once you’ve overcome gravitational potential energy and you’re at a high altitude, the energy you use in cruise is very low. And then you can recapture a large part of the gravitational potential energy on the way down. So you really don’t need any kind of reserve fuel, if you will, because you have the energy of height, gravitational potential energy. This is a lot of energy. So once you can get high, the way to think about a plane is it’s a force balance. So the force balance, so a plane that is not accelerating is a neutral force balance. You have the force of gravity, you have the lift force of the wings. Then you’ve got the force of the whatever thrusting device, the propeller or turbine or whatever it is, and you’ve got the resistance force of the air. Now, the higher you go, the lower the air resistance is. Air density drops exponentially, but drag increases with a square. An exponential beats a square. The higher you go, the faster you will go for the same amount of energy. And at a certain altitude, you can go supersonic with less energy per mile. Quite a lot less energy per mile than an aircraft at 35,000 feet because it’s just a force balance.

It makes sense, though.

Well, I have a lot on my plate.

Electric airplane isn’t necessary right now. Electric cars are important. Solar energy is important. Stationary storage of energy is important. These things are much more important than creating electric supersonic VTOL. Also the planes, naturally, you really want that gravitational energy density for an aircraft and this is improving over time. So it’s important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. That’s why electric cars, it matters whether electric cars happen sooner or later. We’re really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans. We’re taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this in the atmosphere. This is crazy. We should not do this. It’s very dangerous. So we should accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. I mean the bizarre thing is that obviously we’re going to run out of oil in the long term. There’s only so much oil we can mine and burn. We must have a sustainable energy transport and energy infrastructure in the long term. So we know that’s the end point. We know that. So why run this crazy experiment where we take trillions of tons of carbon from underground and put it in the atmosphere and oceans? This is an insane experiment. It’s the dumbest experiment in human history. Why are we doing this?

The things like oil, coal, gas, it’s the easy money. It’s the easy money.

You know, it’s very difficult to put that CO2 back in the ground. It doesn’t like being in solid form. It takes a lot of energy.

No, it’s not possible. Nope, definitely not.

No, we’re not f *ed. I mean this is quite a complex question. We’re really just, the more carbon we take out of the ground and add to the atmosphere and a lot of it gets permeated into the oceans, the more dangerous it is. I don’t think right now, I think we’re okay right now. We can probably even add some more. But the momentum towards sustainable energy is too slow. There’s a vast base of industry, vast transportation system. There’s 2.5 billion cars and trucks in the world. And the new car and truck production, if it was 100% electric, that’s only about 100 million per year. So it would take, if you could snap your fingers and instantly turn all cars and trucks electric, it would still take 25 years to change the transport base to electric. Makes sense because how long does a truck, car, truck last before it goes into the junkyard and gets crushed? About 20 to 25 years.

Well, the thing that is going on right now is that there is an inherent subsidy in any oil burning device. Any power plant or car is fundamentally consuming the carbon capacity of the oceans and atmospheres, or just say atmosphere for short. So you can say, okay, there’s a certain probability of something bad happening past a certain carbon concentration in the atmosphere. And so there’s some uncertain number where if we put too much carbon in the atmosphere, things overheat, oceans warm up, ice caps melt, ocean real estate becomes a lot less valuable. Things are underwater, but it’s not clear what that number is. But it’s definitely a scientist riddle. It’s really quite, the scientific consensus is overwhelming, overwhelming. I mean, I don’t know any serious scientists, actually zero, literally zero, who don’t think that we have quite a serious climate risk that we’re facing. And so there’s fundamentally a subsidy occurring with every fossil fuel burning thing. Power plants, aircraft, car, frankly, even rockets. I mean, rockets use up, they burn fuel, but there’s just, with rockets there’s just no other way to get to orbit, unfortunately. So that’s the only way. But with cars, there’s definitely a better way with electric cars and to generate the energy. Do so with photovoltaics because we’ve got a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky called the sun. It’s great, sort of shows up every day, very reliable. So if you can generate energy from solar panels stored with batteries, you can have energy 24 hours a day and then you can send it to the poles or near to the north with high voltage lines. Also, the northern parts of the world tend to have a lot of hydropower as well. Anyway, all fossil fuel powered things have an inherent subsidy, which is their consumption of the carbon capacity of the atmosphere and oceans. So people tend to think, why should electric vehicles have a subsidy? But they’re not taking into account that all fossil fuel burning vehicles fundamentally are subsidized by the cost, the environmental cost to Earth. But nobody’s paying for it. We are going to pay for it. Obviously in the future we will pay for it. It’s just not paid for now.

Yeah, I’ve got to scale up production. Got to make the car compelling, make it better than gasoline or diesel cars.

Yeah, you got to be able to go far enough, recharge fast.

Yeah, yeah. 600 miles.

No, we could totally make one right now that would do 600 miles. But the thing is it’s too expensive. So the car’s…

Well, you know, just have a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack and you can go 600 miles.

330 mile range. So that’s plenty of mile range.

Well, that would be for Model S, 100 kilowatt hour pack. We’ll do about 330 miles, maybe 335. But some people have hypermiled it to 500 miles.

Yeah, just go on 45 miles an hour or something.

With you pump the tires up really well and go on a smooth surface. And you can go for a long time, but you can definitely comfortably do 300 miles.

This is fine for most people. Usually 200 or 250 miles is fine. 300 miles is, you don’t even think about it really.

Well, the surface area of a car is, without making the car really blocky or having some like a G wagon. Yeah. And just having a lot of surface there where maybe solar panels fold out or something.

The E type.

Well, at the beginning of Tesla, I didn’t want to have this unfolding solar panel thing that you’d press a button and it would just unfold these solar panels and recharge your car in the parking lot. Yeah, we could do that. But I think it’s probably better to just put that on your roof.

And then it’s going to just be facing the sun all the time. Because otherwise your car could be in the shade. You know, it could be in the shade. It could be in a garage or something like that.

Yeah, I mean, I think it could recharge two miles a day or something.

They got what?

Is that with a flood in Jersey?

I didn’t watch the video, but I did see it. I stuck a picture of the…

Yeah, we made our battery waterproof, so that doesn’t happen. Smart activity.

Yeah. There was a guy in Kazakhstan that, I think it was Kazakhstan that he just boated through a tunnel, under an underwater tunnel, a flooded tunnel, and just turned the wheels to steer and pressed the accelerator and it just floated through the tunnel and he steered around the other cars. You’re like, that’s amazing. It’s on the Internet.

Oh, yeah. It’s got great traction control.

Oh, yeah. No, it’s really good.

Yeah.

It’s pretty crazy.

Yeah.

It generally won’t go sideways.

No.

It will correct itself before it goes sideways.

Yeah. This video is where you can see the car. The traction control system is very good. It makes you feel like Superman. It’s great. You feel like you can. It will make you feel like this incredible driver.

Yeah.

We do our testing on an auto ice lake in Sweden.

Yeah. And like Norway and Canada and a few other places.

New Zealand as well.

Well, electric cars have really great traction control because the reaction time is so fast. So with a gasoline car, you’ve got a lot of latency. It takes a while for the engine to react. But for electric motors, incredibly precise. That’s why you imagine if you had a printer or something, you wouldn’t have a gasoline engine printer. That would be pretty weird. Or a surgical device. It’s going to be an electric motor on the surgical device, on the printer. Gasoline engine’s going to be just chugging away. It’s not going to have the reaction time. But to an electric motor, it’s operating at the millisecond level, so it can turn on and off traction within inches of getting on the ice. Let’s say you drive a patch of ice, it’ll turn traction off and then turn it on a couple inches right after the ice, like a little patch of ice. Because in the frame of the electric motor, you’re moving incredibly slowly. You’re a snail. You’re just moving so slowly because it can see at 1,000 frames a second. And so it’s like, say, “one Mississippi.” It just thought about things a thousand times.

Yes. In milliseconds.

Yes. It is.

Yes.

F * motors.

The S, X and 3 have the lowest probability of injury of any cars ever tested by the US government. This is, yeah, but it’s pretty funny. It’s pretty crazy. We, you know, people still sue us. Like they’ll have some accident at 60 miles an hour where they twisted an ankle and they sue. Like they’d be dead in another car. They still sue us.

It is to be expected.

Tell you, I’ve got quite a lot of respect for the justice system. Judges are very smart and they see. I haven’t so far. I found judges to be very good at justice. And juries are good, too. They’re actually quite good. You know, people you read about occasional errors in the justice system. Let me tell you, most the time, they’re very good. And the guy I mentioned who fell asleep in the car and he rode over a cyclist, and that was what encouraged me to get autopilot out as soon as possible. That guy sued us.

Yes. I’m not kidding. He blamed it on the new car smell.

This is a real thing that happened.

Yes, he got a lawyer and he sued us. And the judge was like, “you, this is crazy. Stop bothering me.”

Tell you, judges are.

No.

Was this an elected judge or?

Said, you have a judge that’s actually a politician?

Two judges.

Yeah.

So I think they are elected.

Oh.

In the youth centers, builder.

I do think it’s this private prisons thing is creating a bad incentive, right? Yes, but I mean, that judge is in prison, thank God. Yes, but for people who think perhaps the justice system consists entirely of judges like that, I want to assure you this is not the case. The vast majority of judges are very good.

And they care about justice and they could have made a lot more money if they wanted to be a trial lawyer. And instead they cared about justice and they made less money because they care about justice. And that’s why they’re judges.

No, most police are very honest.

And the military personnel that I know are very honorable, ethical people, and much more honorable and ethical than the average person. That’s my impression.

And that’s not to suggest that we be complacent and assume everyone’s honest and ethical. And obviously, if somebody is given a trusted place in society, such as being a police officer or a judge and they are corrupt, then we must be extra vigilant against such situations and take action. But we should not think that this is somehow broadly descriptive of people in that profession.

Yes, yes. I mean, if you’re a prosecutor, you should not always want to win. There are times when you should, like, okay, I just should not want to win this case and then just pass on that case. Sometimes people want to win too much. That is true. I think also it becomes tough. If you’re like a district attorney, you tend to sort of see a lot of criminals and then your view of the world can get negatively, have a negative view of the world because, you know, you’re just interacting with a lot of criminals. But actually, most of society does not consist of criminals.

And I actually had this conversation at dinner several years ago with just Rio Tony. I was like, “man, it must sometimes seem pretty, pretty dark because, you know, man, there’s some terrible human beings out there.” And he was like, “yep.” And he was dealing with some case which consisted of a couple of old ladies that would run people over somehow for insurance money. It was rough. I was like, “wow, that’s pretty rough.” It’s hard to maintain faith in humanity if you’re a district attorney. But, you know, it’s only a few percent of society that are actually bad. And then if you go to the worst, say 0.1% of society or the worst, one in a thousand, one in a million. You know, like, how bad is the millionth worst person in the United States? Pretty damn bad. Like damn evil. Like the millionth. Like the millionth. Well, one in a million of evil is so evil, people cannot even conceive of it. But there’s 330 million people in the United States, so that’s 330 people out there somewhere. By the same token, there’s also 330 people who are incredible angels and unbelievably good human beings.

On the other side.

Yes.

It is. It is a very dangerous pattern. I really think, you know, people should give other people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re good until proven otherwise. And I think really most people are actually pretty good people. Nobody’s perfect.

Yeah.

I mean, here are these weapons. But how many times, nobody’s presumably tried to murder you and you’re nobody yet. Yes. Nobody’s like. But the sword’s right there.

So it’ll liven things up for sure. Guaranteed to make any party better.

Yeah.

Yes. Don’t make somebody angry. Don’t know what’s going to happen.

Better off.

Yeah, yeah. You know, we got a big test site in central Texas near Waco. Yeah. SpaceX in McGregor about 15 minutes away from Waco.

Okay, cool. Yeah, we have lots of fire, loud explosions and things. And people, they’re cool with it.

They’re very supportive.

Yeah, it’s dangerous.

It’s free.

Yeah, yeah. I kind of like Texas, actually.

Yeah, exactly.

Most people are good.

I think you should give people the benefit of the doubt. For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ah, sure. Thank you.

Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I wish politicians were better at science. That would help a lot.

Yes.

There isn’t, actually, you know, they’re pretty good at science in China, I have to say. Yeah. The mayor of Beijing has, I believe, an environmental engineering degree and the deputy mayor has a physics degree. I met them. And the mayor of Shanghai is really smart.

Oh, I like phones. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Well, I think, like, I guess if you have like, top secret stuff, then you want to be pretty careful about what hardware you use. But, you know, like, most people do not have top secret stuff and like, nobody really cares what porn you watch. Or it’s like nobody actually cares.

National spy agencies do not give a rat’s ass what porn you watch. They do not care. So what secrets does a national spy agency have to learn from the average citizen? Nothing.

Not really. I don’t think we should worry too much about Huawei phones. You know, maybe our national security agencies shouldn’t have Huawei phones. Maybe that’s a question mark. But I think for the average citizen it doesn’t matter. They’re not—I’m pretty sure the Chinese government does not care about the goings on of the average American citizen.

Do people want privacy? Because they seem to put everything on the Internet.

I think we really need to worry about security in that situation. For sure. That’s like a security we paramount, sure.

I mean, I think the things that we think are important to keep private right now we probably will not think are important.

I mean, I think like I don’t know, maybe it’s like embarrassing stuff.

But there’s actually like, I think people, there’s like not that much that’s kept private that people—that is actually relevant. That people, other people actually care about. You think other people care about it, but they don’t really care about it and certainly governments don’t.

She seems to be doing okay.

Yeah. I mean, I’m sure she’s like not happy about it, but she’s clearly doing fine.

I think the things that we think are important now will probably not be important in the future, but there will be things that are important. What will be more important things? There might be some war of ideas potentially. I don’t think Darwin’s going away.

Darwin’s going to be there. Darwin will be there forever.

It would just be a different arena. Different arena.

Different arena. Darwin’s not going away.

Well, it’s quite hard to run companies.

Especially car companies. I have to say. It’s quite challenging.

Yes.

SpaceX is no walk in the park, but a car company. It’s very difficult to keep a car company alive. It’s very difficult. You know, there’s only two car companies in the history of American car companies that haven’t gone bankrupt. And that’s Ford and Tesla. That’s it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Same with Tesla. We barely survived.

Very close. We—2008 is not a good time to be a car company, especially a startup car company and especially an electric car company. That was like stupidity squared.

Yeah, we had like use a highly modified Elise chassis. The body was all completely different, by the way. That was a super dumb strategy that we actually did.

It was based on two false premises. One false premise was that we’d be able to cheaply convert the Lotus Elise and use that as a car platform and that we would be able to use technology from this little company called AC propulsion for the electric drivetrain and the battery. Problem is the AC propulsion technology did not work in production and we ended up using none of it in the long term. None of it. We had to redesign everything. And then once you add a battery pack, an electric motor to the car, it got heavier, it got 30% heavier. Invalidated the entire structure, all the crash structure, everything had to be redone. Nothing like—I think it had less than 7% of the parts were common with any other device, including cars or anything less than 7%.

Yeah, even steering wheel. The steering wheel was—I think the steering wheel was almost the same. Yes. The windscreen different? No, I think the windscreen was the same.

I think we were able to keep—

So that’s basically every body panel was different. The entire structure was different. We couldn’t use the HVAC. The HVAC system, the air conditioner was a belt driven air conditioner. So now we needed something that was electrically driven. We needed a new AC compressor and—

Yeah. We needed a small, highly efficient air conditioning system that fit in a tiny car and was electrically powered, not belt driven. It was very difficult.

I think it was about 2,700 pounds. It’s still very well, depending on British version, 2,650 to 2,750 pounds, something like that.

It was about 50. Well, there were different versions of the car. So it was about 55 on the rear. It was rear bias.

Well, I mean, yeah, the 911, I think the joke is like they managed to do it despite Newton not being on their side. Yeah. If you’re fighting Newton, it’s very difficult. Well, like you’ve got this. The moments of inertia on a 911 don’t make any sense.

You don’t want to hang the engine off the ass. This is not a wise move.

The problem with something that’s where the engine is mounted over the rear axle or off the rear axle towards the rear, is that your polar moment of inertia is fundamentally screwed. You cannot solve this. It’s unsolvable. You’re screwed. Polar moment of inertia, you’re screwed.

Like essentially if you spun the car like a top. That’s your polar moment of inertia. You’re just. I promise I wouldn’t swear on this show, by the way.

To who? So it’s my friend.

A friend.

Yes, tell me.

I’ll swear in private. Swear up a storm.

Yeah. But anyway, like the Porsche. It’s kind of incredible how well Porsche handles given that. It’s the physics. The moments of inertia are so messed up. To actually still make it work well is incredible.

The car I had before Tesla was a 911.

Yeah, 997.

Yeah. I mean, particularly on the Porsche turbo when they had the variable vanes. The turbo. And you didn’t have the turbo lag. That was great. That was really great. The turbo lag was like you floor it, phone home, call your mom. The older one, about an hour later.

It had a good feel to it. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, you should try Model S P100D. It’ll blow your mind or your skull.

Model S P100D.

It will blow your mind out of your skull.

How far can I. About 300 miles.

You’ll never notice the battery.

Never.

No, it’s super easy. It’s like a dryer plug. It’s like a dryer outlet.

Yeah, yeah, I have it on my roof right now, actually. I’m just trying it out. It’s like. It. The thing is, it takes a while to test roof stuff because roofs have to last a long time. So, like, you want your roof to last, like, at least 30 years.

So there’s two versions. There’s like the solar panels you put on a roof. So, like, depends on whether your roof’s new or old. So if your roof’s new, you don’t want to replace the roof. You want to put, like, solar panels on the roof, right? So that’s like retrofit. And then we’re trying to make the retrofit panels look real nice. But then the new product we’re coming out with is if you have a roof that’s either you’re building a house or you’re going to replace your roof anyway, then make the tiles have solar cells embedded in the tiles. And then it’s quite a tricky thing because you want to not see the solar cell behind the glass tile. So you have to really work with the glass and the various coatings and layers so that you don’t see the solar cell behind the glass. Otherwise it doesn’t look right.

So it’s really tricky.

See, like if you look closely, you can see, if you zoom in, like, you can see the. You can see the cell, but if you zoom out, you don’t see the cell. Right.

That’s hard. That’s really hard because you have to have sunlight go through.

But when it gets reflected back out, it doesn’t. It hides the fact that there’s a cell there.

Well, we have, I think those on.

Yes.

Yeah.

That one’s hard.

I like that. That’s French slate.

Does it all actually work? I believe you.

It depends on your energy, on how expensive expenditure. Yeah, yeah. So generally, yes, I would say it’s probably for most it’s going to vary, but anywhere from more than you need to, maybe half, like call it half to 1.5 of the energy that you need depending on how much roof you have relative to living space and how.

TV is no problem. Air conditioning, air conditioning is the problem. If you have an efficient air conditioner and you don’t. And depending on how like, are you air conditioning rooms when they don’t need to be air conditioned, which is very common because it’s a pain in the neck. You know, it’s like programming a VCR. It’s like it’s just the blinking 12. So people are just like, hell with that. I’m just going to make it this temperature all day long.

Right? Yeah. It should predict when you’re going to be home and then cool the room. The rooms that you’re likely to use with a little bit of intelligence. We’re not talking about, like genius home here we’re just talking like elementary basic stuff, you know, like if you could hook that into the car, like it knows you’re coming home. Like there’s no point in cooling the home, keeping the home really cool when you’re not there, but it can tell that you’re coming home. It’s going to cool it to the right temperature.

Yeah, yeah, we do. But we need to hook it into air conditioning to really make the air conditioning work.

Cannot answer questions about future potential.

That would be an interesting idea.

It’s able to fully power that way.

Yeah, well, you know, like there’s the self winding watches where it’s just got a weight in the watch and as you move your wrist, the weight moves from one side to the other and it winds the watch up. That’s a pretty cool thing.

Yeah, you could do the same thing and create a little charger that’s based on wrist movement. It really depends on how much energy your watch uses.

It seems like they should recalibrate that thing.

Okay. It seems like they should really recalibrate that because if it’s always fast, you could just delete those minutes.

It’s kind of amazing that you can keep time mechanically on a wristwatch with these tiny little gears.

I like gears.

Yeah, I think they’re beautiful.

Yeah, I agree.

No, I agree. It’s beautiful. Yeah. Love it.

Yes.

No.

I used to have a watch.

My phone tells the time.

That’s correct. Living on the edge. Living on the edge without a case.

That’s right.

Okay.

Wow.

Right.

Does it do anything? It seems open. It just opens a hole. Get stored, store things in there.

So is that a joint or is it a cigar?

Okay.

Okay, so it’s like posh pot tobacco. Posh.

Yeah, I think I tried one once.

I mean, it’s legal, right? It’s totally legal. Okay.

That’s all it is.

Plus whiskey. Ha ha. Exactly.

Alcohol is a drug. It’s been grandfathered in.

Well, I mean, our cars break. Automatically break? Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Well, the wheels work pretty well. The wheels do, yeah. Yeah, they work pretty well. Decelerated at 1.1 to 1.2 Gs, that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think it’d be sort of like it was a time of transition where there were horses and gasoline cars on the road at the same time. Must have been pretty weird.

Yeah. I mean, horses were tricky. You know, back in Manhattan had like 300,000 horses. You figure like a horse lives 15 years, got 20,000 horses dropping dead every day or every year. I should say every year it’s 20,000 horses. If there’s 300,000 horses in 15 year lifespan.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot of dead horses. And you need a horse to move the horse. Right. And they’ll probably get pretty freaked out if they have to move a dead horse.

Yeah. That’d be like pretty weird.

Why am I dragging this horse around? And I’m a horse.

Yeah.

This is a great clock. Yeah.

Sure.

I like weird things like this.

What is this?

Yeah. Yeah.

My study is filled with weird devices.

Cool.

All right, I’ll take one.

Okay?

Oh, yeah, sure.

It more than once, results in very rapid technology innovation, that’s for sure.

Yeah, that’s true.

And then things would advance very quickly, right?

Hmm. I don’t think—I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me. Well, what’s the worst part about it? I don’t think people would like it that much.

It’s very hard to turn it off.

Might sound great if it’s turned on, but what if it doesn’t turn off?

No, I’m getting text messages from friends saying, “What the hell are you doing smoking weed?”

It’s legal.

It’s not—you know, I’m not a regular smoker of weed.

Almost never. I mean, I don’t actually notice any effect.

I doubt that I would say that.

No, you know, I know a lot of people like weed, and that’s fine, but I don’t find that it is very good for productivity for you, not for me.

Right.

Yeah, it’s more like the opposite of a cup of coffee. It’s like a cup of coffee in reverse.

Yeah.

I like to get things done, like to be useful. That is one of the hardest things to do is to be useful.

Doing something useful for other people that I like doing.

Yes.

Why it doesn’t stop? I don’t know what would happen if I got into a sensory deprivation tank. Let’s try it. Sounds concerning. It’s like running the engine with no resistance, that seems.

Maybe it’s fine. I don’t know. I’ll try it. I’ll try it.

Yes.

I mean, you just sort of sit there and be quiet and then repeat some mantra which acts as a focal point. It does still the mind, it distill the mind, but I don’t find myself drawn to it frequently.

It’s like a never ending explosion.

Never ending explosion.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, all the time.

I think when I was, I don’t know, five or six or something, I thought I was insane.

Because it was clear that other people did not. Their mind wasn’t exploding with ideas all the time.

No, it was just strange. It was like, hmm, I’m strange. That was my conclusion. I’m strange.

I hope they wouldn’t find out because they might like put me away or something.

Yes.

Yeah. I knew they put people away. What if they put me away?

Yes.

Yeah.

But, you know, I was only like five or six.

Right, I agree.

Well, that would be very, very weird.

Yeah, it’d be pretty weird. I agree. Real weird. Definitely.

What if there were a million Joe Rogans?

Yeah. I mean, but my goal is try to do useful things. Try to maximize the probability the future is good. Make the future exciting. Something you look forward to, you know. With Tesla, we’re trying to make things that people love, you know, it’s like, not how many things can you buy that you really love, that really give you joy? So rare. So rare. I wish there were more things. That’s what we try to do. Just make things that somebody loves.

Yeah.

What are the set of things that can be done to make the future better? I think a future where we are a space faring civilization and out there among the stars. This is very exciting. This makes me look forward to a future. This makes me want that future, you know, the things there needs to be. Things that make you look forward to waking up in the morning, you wake up in the morning, you look forward to the day, look forward to the future. A future where we are a space faring civilization and out there among the stars. I think that’s very exciting. That is a thing we want. Whereas if you knew we would not be a spacefaring civilization, but forever confined to Earth, this would not be a good future. That would be very sad. I think it would be sad.

Well, it’s probably if you’re saying when does the sun boil the oceans?

About 500 million years.

No, I just think like if there are two futurists and one futurists who are out there among the stars and the things we read about and see in science fiction movies, the good ones, are true. We have these starships and we’re going to see what other planets are like. We’re a multi planet species and the scope and scale of consciousness is expanded across many civilizations and many planets and many star systems. This is a great future. This is a wonderful thing to me and that’s what we should strive for.

Yes.

No.

We can definitely go to the moon and Mars.

Do you think we will go to the asteroid belt and we can go to the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, we can even get to Pluto.

Great, that’d be great. It’s potent, there’s magical.

Be easy, but yes.

You could just warm it up.

Could be a multi planet species.

Multi planet species. That’s what we want.

I’m pro human.

I love humanity. I think it’s great.

I mean, you know, strangely, I think a lot of people don’t like humanity and see it as blight, but I do not.

This may sound corny, it does sound corny. But love is the answer.

Yep.

Sure.

Wouldn’t hurt to have more love in the world.

Yeah, we should do that.

Really?

No, but probably spend more time with your friends and less time on social media.

I think probably something like that. Yeah.

I mean the only thing I’ve kept is Twitter because I kind of need some means of getting a message out. That’s about it. So far, so good.

Yeah.

Good question.

Right.

It’s mostly, I think it’s on balance, more good than bad, but there’s definitely some bad.

Hopefully the good outweighs the bad.

Yeah.

I mean, there’s a lot of negativity on Twitter.

I mean, there are a vast number of negative comments. For the vast majority, I just ignore them. The vast majority. Every now and again, you’re drawn in. It’s not good.

Make mistakes.

Make some mistakes.

Yeah, I’m not sure why people think that anyone would think that deleting a tweet makes it go away. It’s like, hello, been on the Internet for a while.

That sh you wrote underneath. It’s on your permanent record.

Like high school. “We’ll put this on your permanent record.”

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it’s way easier to be mean on social media than it is to be mean in person.

Way easier. Yeah.

It’s cheating.

Yes.

Most people.

Yes.

Yeah, likewise.

It’s been an honor. Thank you for having me.

It’s not bad.

Exactly.

Cheers.

No, I think, you know, I think people should be nicer to each other and give people—and give more credit to others and don’t assume that they’re mean until you know they’re actually mean. You know, just—it’s easy to demonize people. You’re usually wrong about it. People are nicer than you think. Give people more credit.

You’re welcome.

Thank you, Elon. Thank you.