乔·罗根体验 #1609：马斯克

0:01Joe Rogan, one pass, check it out. The Joe Rogan, experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day! No, that's the Sasso Baron calling movie? Yeah. I never saw that one. Well, it was a scene where he's... They show him the new missile they've developed, but it has kind of a round head, and he says, you need to make it more pointy.

0:31To his engineers. And actually that's what I also say is the same thing. Yeah, Starship, we need to make it more pointy. Did you say that? And we made one. Because of the movie? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Hold on. Okay. Okay. Look, you literally told them to make the Starship more pointy because of the movie

0:58dictator. Yep. And they know it too. It's not like they haven't, they're unaware of it. It would be funny if we made the rock in more pointy, so we did. Did it have any effect on the aerodynamics? No. Nothing. Now we can make it way blunter and be fine. But is it better to be pointy?

1:16If it wasn't for the movie... It's arguably slightly worse. But more fun for you. It looks cooler. It does look cool. Yeah. How long do you think it would be before? Are you good, Jimmy? What's that? My head's maybe? Yeah, exactly. How long is it? It's not supposed to be okay. How long do you think it's going to be before you have regular flights with that where you

1:51can take off and land like an airplane? Where it would be very consistent? With that extra point of your rocket? Yeah, with your extra point of your rocket. Do you mean Earth to Earth's transport? Or Earth to all the directions? I guess people are the people. Any time where you could just do it with people and have it land all the time.

2:16I think it'll probably two years away. Two years away. That's really nice. Two years is pretty cool. G.S. for people. We'll have a lot of flights between now and then. That's crazy. That's 2023 is not that far away. That'll be there before you know it. Yeah. Wow. 2023. That applies.

2:35How many times have you had explosions with those things? When you're on a rocket. I don't know, like, quite a few, six, maybe five or six. What are those like? What is it like when you watch it explode, when it's supposed to land and it just... No, these are the test program. We expect it to explode.

2:56It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly. Really? Yeah. Because we're trying to develop advanced rockets at a high speed. And if you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge. And the whole rocket is evolving. The engines, the structure, avionics, the software, the ground systems, all evolving simultaneously.

3:20So, and the whole production system, which is actually harder than the rocket design by far. So the rocket and engine and avionics production system is, and the launch system is a thousand percent hotter than the initial design, like at least. Really? Yeah. So when same with cars, it's like 10,000%. And it's easy to do a car prototype. It's hard to do production. So when you're looking

3:48at your scaling towards the future, and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements, and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years. If current trends continue, if we plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be

4:09doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years. So we're getting to over this year. I go to get to over this year. And I'd actually be able to tell you a stand. Starship is the largest flying object ever made. thing will be about over 5,000 tons of weight on liftoff. It's going to go straight up with

4:365,000 tons. This is much heavier than any aircraft by far. No aircraft even comes close to this weight. And it's going straight up, but aircraft can't go straight up. So it's like the... It's got more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's like a big rocket.

4:55Why does it need that much thrust? Oh, we're trying because you want to go to Mars or is this like we're trying to make life multi-planetary, you know, extend life beyond Earth. And in order to do that, you have to have high tonnage to Mars. And that means you need a big rocket and you got to fly a lot.

5:15So the reason why it has twice the thrust of the Saturn V is to plan for these interstellar trips or the interplanetary trips. So when you're doing this and you're developing these systems, thinking about regular trips to other planets, but you're not just trying to get into orbit right now.

5:36You're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually gets scaled up. Yeah, we know how to get to orbit. We've done that a lot. So the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where elements of the rocket are reused and they're reused quickly like in aircraft and this has

5:57never been done. This is the holy grail of rocketry. This is to have a fully reusable rocket. Then you need to go one step further, it needs to be fully and rapidly reusable. You know, it's like a plane. Yeah, yeah. Like a plane lands you, you know, refuel it and take off again. How do you have time? I've never understand you in regards to the way you run

6:20multiple businesses simultaneously. I would think that something like this would require so much concentration. I would think this would be your whole being trying to figure out how to work this. Yeah, well, I do work a lot. It's crazy. And I apologize for the reason I was late as I was coming from some critical meetings just doing, normally I'd be meeting until I'd

6:49working to like one or two in the morning. Every night. I mean Saturday, it's on day usually not, but sometimes. How much do you sleep? About six hours. Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah, not that crazy. For you, that's, I mean, for someone does as much as you, that's actually impressive that you can squeeze that in.

7:10Yeah. I've tried sleeping less, but then total productivity decreases. Yeah. So you feel like six is the number where it's not six. six or six or six. I can that. I don't find myself need it one thing more sleep than six. So when like with the Saturn five and the space shuttles and all these other rockets,

7:32they would they would have these parts that would they would get the ship up into space, but they would descend down to earth and crash into the ocean and they would never use them again. That's right. How do you avoid that? What is the difference between the way these things are structured?

7:51The whole thing goes together and then it lands together? Well, we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit. I think one thing to appreciate is getting to space is easy, getting to orbit is hard. So you only need maybe one or two percent of the energy to get to space, to where the

8:12atmosphere is thin compared to what you need to get to orbit. And if you get to orbit, now you've got a burn-off of that energy and you're coming in like a meteor. So you need a powerful heat shield. So it's like super difficult to get to orbit at all. And then if you get to orbit at all, then making those stages reusable means they got

8:31to come back intact. And then the upper stage is especially difficult because it's got so much energy. All the energy you put into it, you have to take out. So you're literally coming in like a flaming meteor, and most things would just melt or vaporize. Like if you as a human try to come in from orbit, you'd just be pink mist.

8:57Yeah. That's a funny way to put it. Now the space shuttle, they had tiles, right? That was the way they avoided the heat. They had these heat shield tiles. you use with the SpaceX rockets? Yeah, we have a more advanced version of the shuttle tab, but you go to use some kind of ceramic.

9:20Essentially, it's usually some form of silicon oxide, aluminum oxide, carbon, perhaps thrown in there. And is it like a one piece or is it in tiles the way? In tiles, yeah, we have hexagonal tiles. You can see that with each starship we've actually increased the size of the heat shield.

9:43The tiles are kind of like, I don't know, just not quite right now, they're kind of like dinner plates. They're brittle and they're coefficient of thermal expansion is different from metal, the metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles. And the tiles also get super hot while the metal can be super cold, because it's got

10:11cryogenic fluid behind it. So you have this differential expansion and contraction, which makes the gaps in the tiles expand and contract. But if the gaps get too big, then you get kind of the hot gas, sort of the plasma gets in down, and if we get plasma in the crack, and it's not that bad.

10:31and then you're going to melt the metal behind it. But if they're too close, then they bang together and they crack. So you've got to get it just right where the gaff's just right and then the way that they're attached to the body they can move around a little bit. So there has to be some sort of room to move.

10:50It can't be one large piece of ceramic that you fit over the front. You can't really make such a giant piece of ceramic, because you've got to, well I guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven. But you really need expansion joints, expansion contraction joints. So it's quite difficult to do a single piece tile.

11:17The thing about tiles for a roof or something like that, you know, like why don't you just make one tile for a roof? It's like, it doesn't work. Now, these things have multiple stages. How many stages? In these, the rocket boosters. When things are taking off, how many? So, I'm sure it has two stages.

11:36So, that's the minimum number that you could do on a planet like Earth. Gravity, Earth's gravity is quite strong. And we have a thick atmosphere and strong gravity. So, whereas like if you took off from Mars, it would be, it's like relatively easy. Mars is around just under 40% of Earth's gravity.

12:00The moon is about a sixth. And getting to lunar orbit from the surface of the moon is easy. When we're going to follow the lunar lander, just the top half of the lunar lander was able to take off and get to lunar orbit. But to get to Earth orbit, you need the giant rocket. Because it's very nonlinear.

12:24So what happens to the first, when you take off and it separates in the stages, how does the first stage get reused? Well have you seen how the Falcon Lion stages work, where they come back and land? No. You haven't seen it? No. Wow. Yeah, I mean. Jamie's going to pull it up. So does it come down with parachutes?

12:48Does it, like how does it land? No, it lands purposefully with the thrusters, with the engines. Really? Yeah. So it's designed to take off. Here it is. Yeah. Oh, wow. So that is the bottom of the rocket that launches it straight up. And then afterwards, it comes down and lands like that.

13:19That's amazing. And then the top piece can then land separately. Yes. Well, in the case of Falcon 9, the upper stage runs up on reentry. Falcon 9 has, there's the fairing, the top, where the satellites are contained in the top, and that the fairing has, once it gets to space, where the atmosphere is thin, it's a little long way from orbit, but it's in space.

13:49So you no longer need the, the satellite does need to be protected by the nose cone, the fairing. And so that, it sort of splits in two and falls away. And then so with Falcon 9 we recovered the the fairing house and we recover the booster, but we lose the upper stage On purpose

14:12Yes, but it's not really possible to if with Falcon 9 We the architecture is like if we made the upper stage reusable Opelite over would be dramatically less So in order to have meaningful payload to orbit, scale is important. Like you need to make things big. There is value to scale.

14:40For a truck you wouldn't want everything delivered by a small pickup truck. You want semi-trailers. You don't see ships in the ocean, cargo ships coming along with coming along with one Z-van out with an outboard motor. It's like a giant ship. So scale has value in and of itself.

15:10The same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket. So even just in terms of the computer, the computer and the electronics weight becomes vanishingly small in the big rocket, but it is significant in a small rocket. Do you think there'll ever be a time where there's an alternative source of propulsion outside of just a burning fuel?

15:33Like is it possible that someone would develop a nuclear propulsion or some other method other than just burning large amounts of gasoline or rocket fuel? There's no way around Newton's Third Law really. So you basically have to expel mass. Like when you get to, you know, for a car that you could push against the ground, for

16:02an aircraft, you can react against the air. But you can react against water. In vacuum, there is nothing. So the only way to move is to react against yourself, to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity, and to transfer momentum from, you know, to that gas that is going that

16:30way very rapidly. So you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you, the large amount of mass, accelerates slowly. Because momentum is conserved. So, yeah. So we're stuck with gas. Yeah. Until some insane breakthrough dealing with gravity or something.

16:54Yeah, that means it's not going to happen. Not in our lifetime? Not in our lifetime. No. Yeah. So ironically everything will go electric except for rockets. Now you can make rockets indirectly electric by using electricity to create the fuel. So you can take CO2 and H2O and create methane and oxygen from that.

17:29So methane and CH4 and oxygen is O2. And for example on Mars, which is a primarily CO2 atmosphere and there's a lot of water ice is you can mine the ice, take the ice, and the CO2F from the atmosphere. So we'll find this a lot, but run it over a catalyst and give it a lot of energy and

17:54you can get CH402 and you can gracefully get your propellant on Mars. The rocket by the way is mostly oxygen. So for Starship, we're almost 80% oxygen. It's only just over 20% fuel. Really? Yeah. So, is this as efficient as you anticipated being, you know, anytime in our lifetime?

18:22Like, is it the trip to Mars is like, what, six months? Is that what the idea is? Yeah, it's about six months. Do you ever anticipate it being quicker than that? Is it possible to make these things faster? Would you have to have solar sales? No, solar sales would be very slow. What it would be?

18:40Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of a way to think about gravity here with a lot of analogies. But you can think, like space itself is curved, like it's like a funnel. Like if there's something that has a lot of mass, So it's creating like a funnel. And so in the same way, if you have a coin funnel, and the coin thinks it's going on a straight line pretty much.

19:16The physicists out there might have quibble with my analogies. But anyway, I'm trying to convey what gravity is like a funnel. And so if you want to get out of that gravity well, you actually need to go very fast parallel to the Earth's surface. And if you go parallel to the Earth's surface, the further out you spin.

19:36So you can think like a marble and a funnel. Like if you want that marble to go far out, you just spin it sideways, and it'll spiral out. And conversely, if you, just due to the friction of the air friction and the rolling friction, it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any push, and will slowly spiral in.

19:56And then as it gets closer, it spins faster and faster. And this is how gravity basically works. So all the things in this solar system are spinning around this gigantic funnel in space time called the Sun. And we're like these tiny little dust motes going around the Sun. And the further you are away from the Sun, the slower you move around in terms of degrees per second.

20:27So like the orbit of Mars, which is further away from the sun, is about two years. And it's one year. Because Mars is about 50% further away from the Earth than the Earth is. So it's like Mars, where this is at one astronomical unit, Mars is like 1 and 1 half-ish. That's an astronomical unit.

20:51So we're about eight light minutes away from the sun. Mars is about 12. And yeah, so when you want to go to Mars, you basically accelerate along the same path of Earth going around the sun. And you time it such that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the sun where the tip of the ellipse intersects with Mars.

21:17So Mars is going around and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your ellipse being Mars. And that turns out to be about a six-month journey. Now you can speed that up. I think I could sort of see a way to make it happen in, say, three months, where the intersection with Mars would not be at the tip of the ellipse but on the edge of the ellipse.

21:40Now, that would mean the tip of the ellipse is out near Jupiter. So if you miss Mars, you're going to end up at Jupiter. Jupiter's orbit. So that's not good. Yeah. And you're going to be coming in hot. But I think probably you can get down to three months of that bigger problem.

22:01Getting out to a month, hard. And then, Earth and Mars are only in the same sort of, there's only about a six month period every two years when Earth and Mars are aligned such that you can do the transfer. You can certainly imagine that if Mars is on the other side the sun, you can't get there.

22:26Because you've got to go through the sun. That's not going to work. So you've got to time it. This is like about a quarter of every Mars year is when you can do the transfer. So six months every two years. So if we are able to build, or if humanity is able to build a city on Mars, people will probably remember which planetary conjunction they came on.

22:54Because it's not like you just go all the time. You can only go over tears. When do you anticipate, like, how much time before there's regular travel back and forth to Mars? Roughly. Like a real civilization on Mars. Well, I think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization.

23:21The real threshold that really matters is for getting past the great filter. Do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming, yeah. So I can only be just missing one little thing. You'd be like, you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin T.

23:51It's a lot good. It's only a matter of time, you know? Yeah. And then it's gonna be curtains. So you got to have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars. And the reason that the ships from the stopcoming could be World War III or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization.

24:14So civilization here on Earth could end with a bang or a wimper. Or natural disasters. Yeah. Asteroid impacts. Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, that would be cool. In the bank category. Yeah. like, so like what killed the dinosaurs? Well, it wasn't just one thing, you know. It was like a whole bunch of things happened in a row and

24:34you know Well, they could have taken any one of those things they had like three things happen and no dinosaurs Which is kind of amazing that crocodiles are still here. Yeah, those fuckers. Well, they're resilient crocodiles They all live on decayed meat. They love rotten meat and so

24:57In any kind of disaster situation, there's a lot of dead creatures, and the crocodiles love it. So that's why they're around crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms. And shrews. Shrews, yeah. Which is why we're here. Yeah, exactly. Great, great, great, great, great, great. Grandparents were shrews.

25:19What a strange thing to come from. So there's hope for all your rodents out there. Yeah. what day you can go to Mars. Just keep doing your homework. Absolutely. So there'll be, you say the great filter. What did you mean by that? Well, so there's something called like the Fermi paradox

25:43of like where are the aliens? Yeah. So where are the aliens? And I think it was Carl Sagan that said like, There either are a lot of aliens or none and the either they're equally terrifying If there are a lot of aliens well, I mean the invasion ship slash You know bug infestation just you know like

26:19Starship trooper style well. Yeah, I mean it's like it's an an an civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation I know it's like, hey, we left that planet. It was fine. Now it's got a bunch of bugs. Just go fumigate it, you know? Like, refumigate a house. That's certainly possible.

26:35And then, but if there are no aliens, well, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become interstellar? You know? So I want to be clear. To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence for alien life on Earth. There's no evidence for alien life. There's no direct evidence for alien life.

27:00No, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien for sighting or whatever, I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 7-Eleven or ATM cam. OK? If somebody's got at least like an iPhone 1 level camera, like something, you know? The problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too.

27:24yeah sure i would be the fish at least try hard and they're in taking you familiar with.. commander david freyvers account of.. the tiktak ufot the encountered off of the.. coast of san diego let you know lex lex friedman yeah lex friedman interviewed him on is podcast and i interviewed as well and if you ever get a chance to listen to lex's.. conversation with them it's really excellent with this guy is..

27:50naval fighter pilot and talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than sixty thousand feet above sea level to one foot in less than a second shaped like a tiktok no visible sign of propulsion .. blocked radar .. actively jammed their tracking systems and then went to their pre-determined

28:11point that they were supposed to.. that the.. the fighter jet was supposed to scramble to went to it.. thirty miles away in couple seconds. They have no idea how it did it. They don't know what it is. And these guys that were working for the Navy off the coast said they encountered them several times. They didn't know what they were. They didn't know what to do. They just did something. They do. They have video of it.

28:35They have video of it. You ever see the New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff? No. Yeah. There was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this and there's a couple of other, there's a couple other different sightings that were very similar. They were trying to figure out what these things were and why and it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release. Yeah, the politicians

29:04trying to figure out what all this shit is. And so they try to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days. Honestly, I think I would know if there are aliens. I would hope so. That's why I'm asking you. No, I I I I be jumping on that like you're like you should watch that conversation with Lex

29:22It's like here's the thing Do you think that they would want us to know? Or do you think they would just be observing and making sure we don't blow ourselves up with? Sure our subtle I mean if they wanted us to know obviously they could just for sure you know show up and walk down Main Street

29:43You know, okay, I'm an alien check me out. You know, right? He has my spaceship I just land in the middle of Times Square. I'll be like right okay, or hover over downtown LA. Yeah, yeah We were like okay. We believe you So whatever though there they are very subtle very subtle these aliens

30:00How often do you think about it? Zero zero even though you're thinking about interplanetary travel you don't really think about aliens No, I mean if they show up. I'm like great. Okay. No, this is new information But we... What an interesting way of putting it. This is new information.

30:21Listen, your information, like where are you guys up till now? So anyway, listen, if I see some evidence for aliens, I'll be the first to be like, ah, aliens, you know. Right, then you'll investigate, but until then you think it's kind of a waste of time? Yeah. It certainly seems like a waste of time if nothing's happened so far.

30:43You think about all the people that have been researching aliens for their whole life and they have very little to show for it. Well, you know, there's other than cool stories. Yeah. I mean, we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things, you know, where there's this people.

31:02If we would have find something like, let's say, like a cube of titanium, just like a one inch cubititanium, see in the middle of the pyramid, I feel like aliens for sure, there's no way they could have made a titanium back in it. There's no way, that's hard. That's all, one little, don't even need a computer.

31:20Like a computer would be like, hey, wow, computers, they didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens. But even just like some advanced metallurgy, anything. Like, we can say anything like that. Right. Nothing like that that we could point to that we can't do. Everything that we found archaeologically is consistent with the time,

31:43the technology they had at that time. Archaeologically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you just talked about old stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just throughout history. It's not like, like, like if aliens visit or there would be something buried somewhere, I think we haven't seen anything. So anyway,

32:00I mean, maybe they're aliens, but they're very subtle. If they're just very, they're being pretty shy. So, as far as we can tell, there's none. So, nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that. And the things that on a galactic time scale, even with sub-light travel, you could absolutely

32:27colonize the whole galaxy. some of the neighboring galaxies. So if you gave, if you said a million years with car, with, with, and say, there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years? Absolutely, the entire galaxy. So you would start with Mars, build bases on Mars, then use Mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily.

32:51Yeah, kind of like, you know, hop from one solar system to the next and yeah. It seems like that's imperative. That has to happen if the human civilization is going to survive. Because our planet is just, we're too subject to natural disasters and our own folly and if the species is going to survive, we kind of have to escape.

33:13It's mostly about the species. I mean, there have been some real doozies of like, you know, massive meteors and super volcanoes and continents of Moodle over the place and Earth's been a snowball and super hard. If you read the geological history of Earth, it's very long and complicated. And

33:36there have been so many extinction events, not just a few. The Permian extinction event, that was a real rough one, where it's well over 90% of all species died out. That doesn't tell the whole story because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and you know like sponges and stuff like that you know like if you if are you are you a sponge

34:03okay you're probably doing okay they're still around are you a mushroom you should do you like being in the dark and feasting on dead dead that dead plant and animal matter okay But if you're like a human, you're screwed. Yeah. So. Well, didn't people got down to, there was just a few thousand of us at one point in

34:24time because of a super volcano, I think Indonesia. I think it was only 60, 70,000 years ago. Yeah. They've been a number of sort of evolutionary choke points. And the last ice age must have been pretty rough too. And a lot of species got wiped out then. Is that part of what motivates you?

34:46motivates you to want to do this and to put people on Mars and to start traveling and get people traveling through the galaxy. Yeah so philosophically I'm I'm in the Douglas Adams sort of School of Thought which is that the universe is the answer and we need to figure out like what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe. So we want to expand the scope and scale of

35:16consciousness, increase our understanding of the universe, like to understand why we hear where we come from, where we go, and what's this all about. And in order to, I don't know, just understand the meaning of life, we have to expand, expand the scope open scale of life and the consciousness, which may be digital and biological in the

35:47future. And get past at least one of the great filters, which is to become a multi-panted species. You know, a species that does not become multi-ponetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event. be the self-inflicted or external. So we've got to be a multiplantist.

36:13Also, that's way more exciting. That's like, do you want a future where we're out there among the stars exploring the universe, or do you want a future where we're stuck on Earth forever? I think you want the super exciting future, where we're out there exploring the galaxy. That sounds great to me.

36:31And I think it's worth 1% of our resources, something like that. Maybe more, but at least 1%. Well, it's in all the most exciting sci-fi movies. Yeah. Yeah, if you saw a sci-fi movie and they didn't have spaceships, you'd be like, what's going on there? That's something terrible must have happened.

36:51Well, we always assumed when we were kids that we would be traveling to the moon and back and traveling all over space by now. So Space 1999 was a show when I was a kid that was interplanetary travel. Remember they had spaceships out there and mother ships. They thought 1999 by then for sure it would happen.

37:11The problem is we need more Elon Musk's. There's not a lot of people that really dedicate all their time and energy to do something like this. It really does. It's a really fascinating thing about the species. It takes a few unique individuals that are motivated to do something like this and have

37:28the resources and the intelligence and the, you can figure out how to organize people to get something like this done. Not a lot of you. Well it takes this, there's a lot of smart talented people at SpaceX and at Tesla and that's how we get things done. But yeah, I mean part of the reason why SpaceX is still

37:53privately, privately held, well we have a lot of investors and everyone at the company he's given stock is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long. It's like, what's the market for transporting things to Mars? Well, no market is no one there. That sounds pretty risky. And the public company, the feedback loop tends to be

38:25maybe a year to four years or even quarterly. And it's like, well, this is like 10 years, 20 years out. And I didn't probably answer your question earlier, which is like when we, when I think we can go to Mars, I mean, I think possibly as soon as five years from now. Really? Yeah, but then to have a, then you gotta build out the base and then you gotta build out the city.

38:51So the first thing you gotta build is like, Okay, you gotta generate energy. So you got like giant solar panel, farm, you know. And then you've gotta have propellant production. So you gotta make fuel in the oxygen and you gotta grow food, grow plants and like all the things in industry for life support.

39:11So does everything have to be done in the greenhouse? Is some sort of a dome? Yeah. So there's, is there a long-term possibility of terraforming? Yes, long term we can make, if you just warm Mars up, there's a lot of frozen CO2 and frozen water that would liquify, the CO2 would satisfy the atmosphere,

39:35the liquid water would form oceans and lakes. So basically a lot of frozen water and frozen CO2 on Mars. Now would you warm it up? Well, there's a few ways to tackle that problem. That'll obviously be up to the Martians, but I don't know. You could have giant solar reflectors. You could create like miniature suns over the poles or something like that.

40:04What? Well, it can't be gravitationally contained, but you could just have a, you know, have it just do giant thermonuclear explosions every few seconds. The sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky. If you want to know what like, hey, what is it like to be exposed to thermonuclear radiation?

40:23You can go stand outside in the middle of the day. My 10-year-old said, if space has no air and fire needs air, how does the sun stay burning? She loves to do that. She looks at you like she's super smart. Right. With this good question, little one. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things about the sun.

40:46The sun is converting, I think, four or five million tons of mass to energy every second. So E equals empty squared. So that's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. And it's not even a big sun. It's not even a big sun. So four or five megatons per second, every second, every day, for billions of years.

41:10So what kind of engineering would be involved in creating a mini sun that you hover above the poles? So I mean the sun is the, it's a gravitationally contained reaction. So you need a lot of mass. So if you don't have a lot of mass, you can just, that's why you'd have like explosions, just like little pulsing things, like a pulsing sun.

41:33And yeah, as some people have like said, well, if you add it up, all the nuclear weapons on Earth, that wouldn't even be that much. I'm like, yeah, because they're small. We could make way bigger nuclear bombs than the current ones. like what's the point? Well if you want to make an artificial sun you would then you just use a lot

41:49more hydrogen. That would be something. Right, Tim or deuterium. They would have to construct on Mars. Yeah, yeah. And then figure out a way to launch it. Yeah. Jesus. Yeah, honestly, not that hard. I mean they could do this without rarely even having computers. So it's back in the day.

42:11But you can also do it with like, yes, solar reflectors. I don't know, somehow if you want to make it look like Earth, you got to warm it up. So in hundreds of years from now or whatever it would take, people would eventually figure some way out. Yeah, you could tear for Mars and make it be like Earth.

42:34Then we could bring, we could take life from Earth and breathe life into Mars. There's nothing living on the surface of Mars. Yeah, nothing. It's cold. Yeah. There's a lot of ultraviolet. The combination of being cold and having a lot of ultraviolet radiation, that's the killer combo.

43:00Just being cold, then bacteria could survive. or just UV, but warm, the bacteria can repair themselves. But if they're frozen and they get blasted with the UV, they can't repair themselves if they're frozen. And isn't the speculation that at one point in time Mars did have an atmosphere?

43:19Mars was different than it is now? Yeah. It once had quite a dense atmosphere and it would have seemed most likely to have had oceans and lakes. now they're frozen and covered in dust. And that orange color you see is iron oxide. So there's this quite a lot of iron, just rust. For a while there they thought, well maybe Mars was like some ancient civilization.

43:50Do you remember the face on Mars, I think? Sure. There's a guy that was completely, he was fascinating. Richard Hoegland, is that his name? See if that's the guy's name, but he's with all due respect, out of his fucking mind. He was making all these incredibly bizarre connections,

44:12like measurements from this rock to that rock and using all this mathematics to prove that this symmetry was impossible in nature, and this was all created by civilization, that this face was like some sort of a ancient shrine ancient shrine to whatever being lived there before.

44:33There it is. Monument's Tomorrow is Richard Hoeglin, that's the guy's name. I used to listen to him on Art Bell. It's crazy. It was just, I mean, I don't know if he's schizophrenic. Maybe he's just smarter than all of us. But Jamie Shakin' is head. I think aspirationally, you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence, not inversely proportionate to the evidence.

44:53Well, he was definitely inversely proportionate to the evidence. It was very strange. It was one of those ones where I had to stop listening, because I felt like I was going crazy too. He was so invested in this idea. Again, maybe he's right. I don't think so. No. I doubt it. Well, then they had subsequent voyages where they made high-resolution scans of the exact same area, and it looked very different without the same shadows.

45:21It just looked like rocks. Yeah, Mars kind of looks like, I don't know, like some Arizona desert or something like that. What do they think happened? They think it was hit? What, an asteroid hit? Well, everything got hit with light asteroids over time. They think that that's what killed the environment there?

45:38The atmosphere? Well, the atmosphere, so Mars has lower gravity than Earth, and it does not have a strong magnetic field. So over time, there's over billions of years, the atmosphere will be gradually eroded by the solar wind and having less gravity.

46:06The smaller you are, the less atmosphere you're going to have. Generating the atmosphere on Mars, it would eventually erode. But we're talking about hundreds of millions of years to billions of years type of thing. There are plenty of time to figure things out. For us, we mean. Yeah, yeah.

46:28Yeah. So, but do you think that Mars is their atmosphere eroded quicker because it's just smaller? That's a factor. Yeah. I mean, like if you look at, say, asteroids or, you know, they don't really have, like Sirius, it was a pretty big asteroid, but they don't really have an atmosphere.

46:46The moon doesn't really have an atmosphere. So that doesn't have an atmosphere. Technically, there's a tiny amount of rarefied gas, but it's not a real atmosphere. Did you pay attention to all the guy who's the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, Avi Lobe, who was recently, there was a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our solar system in 2017 was possibly extraterrestrial

47:13in origin? Yeah, whatever, your mommy burger. Yeah, he thinks that there's a 90, apparently he's a 91% possibility he was shaped like a... Your mama asteroid. Yeah, umama, it was a Hawaiian name. Okay. Yeah, it was a Hawaiian name. It sounds like your mama. Yes, it was like your mama.

47:36Yeah. Umama or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. because it was discovered in Hawaii, so you could have a Hawaiian name. Yeah, well anyway, so I think a fundamental test of human civilization is are we going to become a multi-paint civilization before something cataclysmic happens?

48:01Now I'm pretty optimistic about the future, so I'm not thinking like we're, you know, civilization's about to end anytime soon. But there's a chance that it will. Like Stephen Hawking before he died was like, He thought it was around 1% of centuries, something like that, I believe.

48:18It's not 1% chance over 100 years. It's 99% chance of making it. I think he's probably about right. So 1% chance per century. As the centuries go on, there's less of a chance? No, it's more of a chance. So because we become more intelligent, more resources, and possibly the ability to escape Earth.

48:45Yeah, I mean, it's like, I don't know, Russian roulette with, you know, asteroids, nine barrels of empty. Quick, quick, quick. Eventually. It's gonna get us. Yeah. You said something that I thought was really interesting. The meaning of life. Do you think there is a meaning to life?

49:09Well, I think arguably the meaning of life is to understand the nature of the universe and figure out what the meaning of life is. So like I said, I think we don't quite know the right question to ask. And if we learn more about the universe, if we expand the scope and scale consciousness,

49:29then we are better able to ask the questions about the answer that is the universe. But when you keep going with that, like where does it go? I don't know. That's why if I knew we're like, okay, case closed. We can die now. The problem I always have with that is that do I want there to be a meaning to this because it

49:51gives sense of purpose to finite life forms? I think that there's a lot to understand about the universe that we don't understand. There is a good time there. I have a beverage. Absolutely. So let's see. Alcohol is our one. What's our two? Our two? Well, I don't think I think marijuana is legal in Texas.

50:09And the last time, I don't have to remind you, there was some problems involved. Yes. Ultimately not though, right? Well, it's like temporary. Oh, that's sued over, right? Didn't it? CBD is legal here. CBD doesn't do anything. Does it? No. I think that's fake. No, no, it definitely does something for inflammation.

50:34It does. Yeah, for sure. How much CBD do you have to have before you notice it? Well, physically or... Yeah. Yeah. Physically, you don't have to have a lot. Physically, CBD works great for people with arthritis and people with sore muscles and things like that. Cheers. Yeah, no.

50:53CBD definitely works for that. But as far as psychoactive effects, not much. It relieves anxiety for people. Okay. It helps people sleep, especially when it's combined with things like melatonin You know things on those lines, but it doesn't get you high Yeah The people that do mix CBD with THC from muscle creams though and that doesn't get you high either

51:22But it increases the effectiveness. Okay. Yeah, there's some some creams that are really good that people like that have THC and CBD in it Alright. So you like have like sunscreen or something and then I mean why not just throw it in there. Why not? Yeah. Well it's just it's great for soreness. It just smells like weed.

51:43Yeah it doesn't smell like weed doesn't. No. No. Some of it does though. So with that said thing about anything that's unregulated right like hippies are making it. That's always the problem. You're quality control. Yeah no quality control. That's the problem with edibles. They're made by a bunch of crazy people cooking them up in some you know

52:01Chula Vista apartment somewhere and really don't know what's in there So well anyway, so we're gonna make life multiplayer before too late. Yeah, I think that makes sense Yeah, I mean why not it's also it's be fun and exciting and even if you don't go you can just watch on TV. Yeah

52:18Yeah, yeah, it's all cool. I mean like yeah, I mean you know So, it's not like attendance is mandatory here. It'll be dangerous and people might die. Well, for sure they're gonna die, right? Yeah, yeah. Like sometimes, maybe you're surprised. So people think that the idea is like, oh, Mars is gonna be an escape hatch, some luxury

52:39resort for rich people. I'm like, no, it's like high probability of death relative to Earth. It's long journey. Food's probably not great. A lot of hard work. No sunlight. on like, yeah, it's like, it sounds like, you know, Shackleton's at for the Antarctic, where it's like, it's dangerous, it's a long journey, food's bad, you know, might not make it back.

53:04But if you do, it'll be glorious. Yeah, it's interesting how much people adapt when they're faced with a real problem. Like, if we knew that we only had a certain amount of time left, like we knew an asteroid was absolutely headed our way and it was gonna kill most of the people on this planet, you would see people scrambling for something like that.

53:24Like look, I moved to Texas just to get the fuck out of LA because I felt like that was dying. I was like we gotta get out of here. And I never thought I was gonna move out of LA like that. It happened very quickly, but people adapt when they realize that this is, you have to do something.

53:42If we had to do something, we had to go to Mars and had a set up shop there. Yeah, I think it's important for the future of humanity and consciousness. And like I said, we want to get past the Great Filter. It might turn out that when we got there exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations.

54:01And they just never made it to the next planet. Ghost towns. Yeah, strange ghost towns. It's like if you, we'll go through the archaeological ruins of like ancient Babylonians and Sumerians and trying to decode their writing, like what the hell would there be in hieroglyphics? Isn't that a problem with us now that everything has become digital, everything's stored on microchips and hard drives, and if something catastrophic happened, and you don't have the ability to access all that stuff, we're kind of starting from scratch.

54:38Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's kind of problematic that things aren't children's stone. You know, they used to be children's stone. They're like, okay, now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone and the stone lasts a long time. Yeah. So we still have a lot of writing from ancient Romans because they chose a lot of stuff in stone.

54:55Or the Egyptians. Or the Egyptians. Yeah, exactly. Man, the Egyptians were really went to town with the hieroglyphics. Even the Sumerians, you know, the cuneiforms carved in the clay tablets. Absolutely. Yeah. But I kind of wish they'd said more. Yeah, exactly. Like us. And like, our stuff is, yeah, it's not going to last for a long time.

55:16I mean, there's sort of aspects of us, of us, of us stuff that would last for a long time. But a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever. You know, for when we did the Falcon Heavy test flight, that normally when, you know, The first place companies do a rocket test flight, they put something boring on like a concrete block because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite.

55:42And so it's like, well, we gotta do something, that's not very inspiring. It's concrete blocks, and one of the least inspiring things could do so. That's toward a friend of mine. And he said, hey, well, what about putting a Tesla on that? And I was like, hey, that's not a good idea.

55:56I'm gonna go into my garage. I'll put that one in there. So I put my car on the rocket. And then we we want to see how father rocket could go. So I'd like just you know floor it. Let's go maximum delta V. So I thought it would probably blow up and I had this image of like a man like you know

56:14this thing could go could blow up on the pad and then There's like a tire bouncing down the road and then the Tesla logo just lands bam right in front of the camera It's like one of the things that like this is a movie, you know So that's kind of one of the possible outcomes. And unfortunately, it didn't blow up.

56:31And now my car is orbiting Mars. Wow. Yeah. So now in that car, so not hopefully there's somebody in the alien civilization in the future could find that because it'll be like around for like millions of years. I've seen the images of it with the. That looks fake. It looks fake.

56:47That's how you know it's real. Is that how you know it's real? Yeah. How do the images get to us? But images are too lame to be fake. Or they look good, but for example, the dynamic range of the camera is not enough to pick up the stars and the vehicle. Because things are very bright in space.

57:11We don't quite realize it, but in the atmosphere is making everything a little fuzzy. And in space, things are super crisp and really reflective. Yeah, exactly. So how is that getting to us? With the image. Yeah, with a radio. So the rocket's got a... How many megapixels is that image?

57:36Not that many, actually. Really? No, I mean it's probably a couple megapixels or something like that. So like an old flip phone? Yeah. It's mostly just driven by the... What's the bandwidth of a video signal? So what do you have like... So these are frame graphs from the video signal.

57:53And where's the camera that's taking this photo? Oh man, our director of photography is awesome. But it means when this thing gets sent to us, what is taking an image of this? There's a camera on a stick. Really? Yeah. And it didn't break off? No. I mean, if you thought it might, but there's a camera.

58:16I mean, it's kind of like a fairly wide angle. And so the camera is actually not that far from the car. Well, what is that one up there that shows the whole car? Is that fake? That's fake. Is that real? That's real. Wow. This is Don't Panic on the screen. Yeah. Don't panic. Speaking of the Roadster, when is that thing going to be available?

58:41Next year, Shoroster. So we're finishing the engineering of it this year. And so hopefully, you start shipping them next year. Really? Yeah. And we're going to throw some rocket technology in that car. Yeah, I've heard about that. What does that mean? So at a minimum, it would be.

58:55I wanted to hover. And I'm trying to figure out how to make this thing hover with like killing people. Right. Yeah. Good call. Yeah, exactly. I thought maybe we could make it hover, but not too high. So maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground or something like that. If you plummet, well, out the suspension, but you're not going to die.

59:21So maybe you're a six feet, I don't know, six feet, probably okay, I'm not gonna die either. Probably not. Probably not. So if we just put a height limit on, it'd probably be fine. And would it be able to travel while it's hovering? Yeah. So you'll be able to go six feet off the ground and go how fast?

59:39Well, you go pretty fast, but you're gonna be time limited. Right. So. Like a jet. Like a jet fighter. There's gonna be a super high pressure, like ultra high pressure air bottle. Oh. So the standard roads would have like two back seats, two like kid seats, you know, in the back, like small seats like a back of a Porsche or something.

1:00:00Or if you get the, I don't know, the SpaceX option package, then in that place where the two rear seats are would be as a high pressure carbon over wrap pressure vessel. So high, very, you know, I don't know, 10,000 PSR's like that. And then a bunch of thrusters. And so at minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down James Bond's dial and there's a rocket thruster behind it.

1:00:30And that gives you three tons of thrust. Oh, for acceleration. Yeah. So that would be on the ground. That would be on the ground. Now this thing would move like a bad out of hell. Jesus crap, but it already goes 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds, right? That's the sedan with the four door.

1:00:45What? Yeah, the new model S model is plaid that we start shipping next month or this month. Yeah is We just tested it on the motor trans back zero to 60 is 1.96 seconds. I have never driven my Tesla and go my business thing a little fucking faster Yeah, that mean the one I have the model S is 2.4, right? Yeah, which is preposterous. It's so great

1:01:10I take people in it like yeah, they've never experienced anything like it. No in their entire life my friend And it's like, so what's the deal with these Teslas? I go, you want to freak out? You want to see something fucking crazy? I picked him up at the improv, and we drove to the comedy store.

1:01:23And I took him up Laurel Canyon. Are you ready? And I never take it out of ludicrous mode, by the way. I keep it in ludicrous mode all the time. I stomped on the gas, well not the gas, the accelerator. And he started screaming. And he's like, ah, what the fuck? I go, yeah, it's what the fuck, this is crazy.

1:01:41It's crazy. It's crazy. So this is significantly faster than that. Just for the plaid. Yeah, so the new plaid, yeah. It's a half second quicker to 60. Pretty close, yeah. Yeah, like every millisecond really matters when you start getting that fast. I thought plaid was going to ship later in the year.

1:02:00Yeah, we've. You just did it. We managed to make it go faster. Oh, OK. But we're both ways. We're both ways. And the plaid has a wider wheelbase, too, right? It does. Yeah. handles better, is that the idea behind that? Yeah, does that better handling? Like we're trying to get to, on the Notebook ring, get to like the low seven minute mark.

1:02:21Really? Yeah. And then, with further improvements, I think we could bust seven minutes on the Notebook ring, which would be a pretty wicked outcome. What is the record right now at the Nivere ring? Is it the Porsche 918? Like what has the record? Something crazy like that, right?

1:02:36There's no production car. I think no production car has got an under seven. Really? As far as I know. And even the ones that are close that they say all production are, they do a bunch of changes. Right. Like change the tires, aerodynamics. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like, I think there's potential to have a car

1:02:57that as delivered can beat seven seconds on November. Isn't it funny that this is one track that's the gold standard for almost all vehicles? Like if you look at like road and track or motor trends, Do you want to find out how bad ass this new sports car is? It's like what number does it do in the Nurburgring?

1:03:16Well, yeah. Now, Nurburgring to be totally frank is not representative of normal. No. It's not normal. Yeah. It's the hottest one to you can't game it. Right. So but I think for everyday driving, it's the acceleration that really matters. Like it's like you're at a, the light goes green, loom who's across the intersection fastest.

1:03:41The new pladdle do a sub nine second quarter mile and with an extra track speed in a quarter mile of 155 miles an hour. And it's a sedan. Yeah. It's a four door. It can hit 60 miles an hour before it's cleared the intersection. That's insane. Insane. That's insane. Yeah. Wow. It's not comfortably fast.

1:04:03Is that steering wheel legit? Yeah. Is it legal? Yeah, I mean, they use a yolk in Formula One. They don't have a straight-wheel. Right, but you're not on the highway, Formula One car. Yeah, yeah. I like driving like this. Like resting my hand on the top of the wheel. Well, I think autopilot's getting good enough that you want to need to drive most of the time, unless you really want to.

1:04:26I like driving. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I use autopilot sometimes, I mean, but most of the time I drive. I Find it's like you can rest your hand on your knee like that thing and it works great. Anyway, it looks awesome It does look cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's very space-shippy Yeah, yeah, that's great and all the stuff is on the steering wheel now too, right?

1:04:49The blinkers and all that jazz even the horn is like a little button, right? Yeah, when the horn is already Kind of the center of the the steering wheel anyway, but is it still the center of the steering wheel as well? Yeah, isn't it a button I thought on the yoke. I mean there's a button for the horn

1:05:08Yeah Which you have to really I used to have a car that had a button for the horn I think it was an accurate NSX okay, and it had instead of the center hub being the horn there was a button and I never remembered it Well with the There there are no yokes. I mean, they're sorry. There are no stalks there So what this right there's a yoke. There's a yoke, but there's no stalks So the car for example will default to driving in the like if you just get in

1:05:39When you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator It will figure out whether you want to go backwards and forward. That's crazy. How's that possible? Well, it's just you know It's just looks and sees is there an obstacle in front? Okay, probably don't wag it So you're probably going to go backwards right, but what if you want to go backwards and there's nothing in front of you

1:05:57Yeah, what if it's ambiguous right? So it would it would default to The inverse of whatever you you started and then you can just you can just swipe on the screen and change direction But isn't it easier to just hit like that way to have choice never you'll you'll see it's like you almost never do you do it?

1:06:17Yeah, yeah, so you've been this is something you've driven and it's intuitive Yeah, once you get rid of the stock and have the car figure it out, it's annoying to have a stock after that. Really? It's annoying. You're talking to a guy like manual gearboxes. Sure. I like going...

1:06:34Yeah, I mean I would drive on manual too. It's fun. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, there's different kinds of cool though. Like, the one where I tell people about the Tesla, I go, listen, I love cars. I love all kinds of cars. but the Tesla makes other cars seem dumb. It does. It makes them seem dumb.

1:06:53It's just so fast, it's so quiet. Everything about it, the navigation screen, it's so big. Like why wouldn't it be big? It's better. It's better to be big. It keeps the software keeps getting upgraded. The navigation system, the ability to just press that button and say navigate to, and then it goes on the internet and finds out what you're looking for.

1:07:11It finds it, restaurants, whatever you're looking for. It's fucking amazing. Oh, there's like a little tip for the Tesla. If you just swipe down on the navigate button, it automatically figures out if you want to go to home or work and navigate there. So if you're at home, and obviously you know how to get to work, but do you know the fastest way to get to work?

1:07:32So to use our- So to use our- Yeah, take it, like what's the on a traffic adjusted basis? What's the best way to go to work? But how does it adjust? Like what is it getting your data from? It's downloading traffic data from the internet. Okay, so the ways uses traffic data from the internet plus user input.

1:07:47So like it takes an extra beat to get the traffic data from the internet. The idea of ways is that you're getting it from users in real time. Like there's a car accident. People program it in, hey folks, there's a fucking car accident here. And then you get it right away. Whereas on the internet, you're a couple beats behind.

1:08:05Yeah, I mean we get the traffic data from Google. Okay. Also it is for ways. Well, waiting in Google is slightly different but they have some good data sets. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, like I say, there's an accident on the way to work or road closure or something like that. We were helpful to know that before you encountered it.

1:08:21So if you just swipe down, it'll automatically navigate to work. And then also the autopilot will work, basically seamlessly, on the way to work. We have the beta out and the beta is working pretty well. It's going to get super good. And it'll basically be able to drive you all the way to work.

1:08:41Automatically, you don't even like you basically just get in and It'll assume you're going to work if it's money to Friday in the morning Mmm, or you could say program maybe go to school drop the kids over school then go to work And you just do this stuff automatically you want to take it the perspective of all input is error

1:08:59If you have to do something it's an error make the error smaller Hmm well, then put all input all input is error unless there's a game all the way all input is error Well, that's the other thing too, it has games. Like you can play chess. Yeah, you can play chess. We got the backgammon with the aesthetic described in Lost.

1:09:23JJ Abrams asked for it backgammon, so we put it backgammon in. With the Lost aesthetic, it's got this really fun game called Polytopia. I would say that's my top recommendation for any game in the car is play polytopia. What is that? It's like it's a real fun strategy game. That's, you'll see like, it's the top of the list.

1:09:46This is not something you can play while you're driving. Well, I mean, you're not supposed to play while you're doing this. That would be illegal. But will it work while you're on autopilot? So if you're on autopilot, can you also play chess? Well, you have to tap a button that says you're the passenger.

1:10:02Oh. Kind of like waves. Okay, kind of like ways. Yeah, so it's open for interpretation. So if you are some chess freak, you could literally play chess on your way to work. Yeah. Wow. I mean, in the future, as the car becomes more and more autonomous, it's gonna be really about entertainment.

1:10:29Entertainment, productivity. Yeah. So it's just probably an entertainment first and foremost and then productivity as well. Do you have specific things that you do on your way? Do you listen to books on tape? Do you listen to music? Like. Yeah, you should listen to music. Oh, those fucking pirate songs you like.

1:10:49The C. Shati. I thought you were joking about that until you played them. Yeah. Yeah. And then I got pretty catchy. They're pretty catchy. That's what's crazy. I started researching. So you're stuck in your head. I did not know that it was really a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie do you know? Do you know about the C-Shanties? Oh my god. Yeah. Well, and it's actually something really appealing about people singing harmony. Yeah, but it's actually way better than you think. It's also like it's got like weird Renaissance fair type thing to it. Thank you for like you're you're all together in this old timey thing, you know pretending. Yeah, very strange. Yeah, it's very odd.

1:11:35So it seems like one of the top reasons to be a pirate would be. We have sea shanties and we have tropical taperns and I don't know. Cool outfits. Yeah. You get to dress up. Yeah, you get to dress up. Yeah. If you lose your leg they got pegs for you. Yeah, you got a parrot. Yeah, parrot.

1:11:55How did that happen? Now what about the truck? When is that thing going to happen? A cyber truck? Yeah. So we're building a big factory here in Austin, that's where we'll make the cyber truck. Yeah. Now, did you decide to do this in Austin from the jump or along the way you decided to move the cyber factory, the cyber truck factory here?

1:12:17Yeah, well, frankly, I was just, well, Austin is a bit like many California. So I was like asking the team in California, all right, where do you wanna, what's your top choice? Or, you know, next big US factory location? Like, where do you wanna spend time? And the number one choice was Austin.

1:12:40And then I was like, okay, okay, what's number two? Silence. Yeah. So. So many California here in Austin. It is a lot, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hesitate talking about it because I've talked about it too much. But it's very utopian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think Austin is going to be the biggest room town that America has seen.

1:13:07half century. I think it's a great response to the fucked up government in some of the other cities. Yeah I mean I think you know yeah I think we do need to make sure that Austin does not you know people moving from California don't inadvertently recreate the issues that they have moved that caused them to

1:13:28move in the first place. Yes so the balance of Austin is a blue city in a red state and it's almost like it kind of has to stay red. Not kind of has to I think it does. You need a certain amount of freedoms but then you need the philosophical like there's a there's a bend to Austin that's very progressive

1:13:47and open-minded and artistic and the restaurants are amazing the people are really cool but it needs to be sort of embraced by guns and God freedom. That's part of the whole mixture that makes it work. And it's kind of, there's a metaphor to life in there somewhere. That it's protected by the rest of the philosophy of Texas,

1:14:15which is a wild, crazy place that has more tigers in private collections than in all of the wild of the world. Really? Yes. I had a bit about it in my 2016 special. Texas... A lot of tigers man has more tigers in captivity than all of the wild of planet earth Okay, yeah, well, these are people's yards

1:14:41You can you can in your place wherever you live you could get a fucking zebra No, bro like I have a friend who lives out in dripping Springs. He saw a zebra. Okay a zebra got loose There's elk out there. All right wild elk just roaming around Somebody had an elk, jumped the fence, now there's an elk out there.

1:15:00There's an access deer. In my neighborhood, I saw an access deer. I don't see it, my wife saw it, she described it to me. I know what it is. I said, that's an, she's like, it was like, it had white spots, like a fawn, but it was really big. I'm like, that's an access deer. So there's access deer, yeah, they're from India.

1:15:15And tigers eat them, eventually. But these animals are, they're wild here, because people bought them and they put them in the yard, then they jumped the fence. This place is crazy But that's why it works the reason why it works is because people have so much freedom Yeah, and then you have the University of Texas you have Austin

1:15:36Which is a long history of art and music Stevie ray von and six street and so many great musicians come from here That it's got both of these things together It's got this wild freedom and they embrace both parts of it, you know, this is that's the cool thing about this place Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I've never felt more at home I fucking love it here.

1:15:56That's a cool city. Like I said, it's gonna be the biggest boom town in the American scene and I have 50 years at least. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I think so. Megaboom. Comedy clubs are moving here like crazy. They're moving here left and right. Cap City's reopening. The creek and the cave just announced they're gonna open here.

1:16:14That's cool. I'm trying to open up a place here. There's other clubs I'm trying to open up here. Comedians are moving in here by the droves. It's a wild place. Yeah. Well, yeah. you and Dave, that was great. That was fun. That's a great venue. Yeah, we did that Monday and Tuesday too.

1:16:32It's just, there's something special going on. It just feels fun to be a part of the escape from this wretched dreariness of the COVID pandemic. It was just like this horrible feeling of having no power and no autonomy and being controlled by the government and being told what to It didn't seem logical and you're watching all these businesses fail and you're like there's got to be a better way

1:16:56And like there is no better way wearing extra masks three masks where three masks and stay indoors and holy shit Yeah, yeah, it didn't make any sense. No You can't talk people out of a good panic they sure love it They love panic porn. Yeah fear porn is like that's people's favorite indulgence. Yeah, so I say rule number one

1:17:20Just like Douglas Adams. But there's always people that don't, and those people, they get together and they take solace in the fact that there's other people that also don't want to buy into this shit. Sure. You know? Yeah. Alright, so, or some cool. So the Cybertruck. Yeah, so we're going to build it, I factually is only like two miles away from the airport.

1:17:45Oh. Probably shouldn't tell people that. I mean, you can literally drive, you can see it from the highway. Do you anticipate visitors? Sure. I mean, we'll offer tours and that kind of thing. Will you offer, like, if someone wants to come and get their truck from the factory and drive it off the floor?

1:18:01Ooh, that's exciting. Yeah. That's exciting. We've got a lot of land. Yeah. No, I know. We're 25 hundred acres right next to the airport. That's fucking cool. Yeah. That's amazing. It's cool. So when you're designing this Cybertruck, you had your launch and you showed the shape of it.

1:18:21There was a lot, like I sent you a picture. I remember I sent you a picture. I was like, this is fucking cool. And you're like, this aren't real. And I was like, oh, okay. There's a lot of fake pictures before the initial launch. You tricked a lot of people because people thought it was going to look much, even

1:18:37though the picture that I sent you was pretty fucking cool. you designed was is that ultimately going to be what it really looks like? It's going to be that shape or has there been any revisions? No, that's pretty much what it'll look like with very small differences. You know, we adjusted the size a few percent.

1:18:59But in what way? Well, it's I don't know, like I think around 3% smaller. Why would you decide to do that? Well, you know what would be a couple inches too big for the tunnel. Oh, okay. For the boring tunnel. Well, I mean, we did actually drive through the boring tunnel in a cyber truck with Jay Leno,

1:19:22which was a hair-raising. Because it was a little bit too big. It was pretty snug. Oh, no. Imagine if you killed Jay Leno. Yeah, that'd be awkward. How do we ever explain that? He's the biggest petrol head ever and he even loves your car. Yeah. The Cybertruck is like CGI in real life.

1:19:43You're standing right in front of it and it looks like this is special effect. So that's cool. It'll change the look of the road. Then it looks like anything. It looks like alien technology. Yeah. And when is that coming out? We'll have probably limited production end of this year and blowing production hopefully next year.

1:20:02Have you ever considered something alternative to air inflated tires? Have you seen some of these alternatives that have essentially spaces in between the upper wall and the wheel? Have you thought about that? Yeah, we haven't found a tire that, because you've got to worry about road noise, you've

1:20:27You got to take out potholes and bumps. You got to have good grip. You also want to have low rolling resistance so that you get good range. Those are a lot of things to try to put into one tire. Then if you also say, and it can't have air, it's like this is hard. But you're talking, I'm talking to a guy who's putting people on Mars.

1:20:53You can't figure out an airless tire? It's just, it's an incremental constraint. I'm not saying there won't be such a thing. I think there will be, too precise. Because it seems like we've just gotten way too comfortable with this idea that tires blow out and you get flats. It's very annoying.

1:21:12Flats are annoying. Yeah. Very annoying. Yeah. It non-sport tires, by the way, are much less likely to have flats. Sure. They're more balanced. Yeah. you hit it the edge of a pothole. If you got more rubber wool, you got a longer way to go before you pinch the tire. So sport tires tend to have more flats,

1:21:36and especially in LA potholes, that's worse. Yeah, well, nice. There was one particular pothole on Sunset Boulevard. It would just take out so many more to last, like a boom boom, both sides of the car. Really? Yeah. Damn. Yeah, Stephen Spielberg was actually once. It's like, Stephen Spielberg is like two tires when I was like,

1:22:00God damn it, I know that pothole. I feel like you can pay to fix that. I mean, fix that pothole. It seems like that's actually, you'll be like, man, there sure are a lot of taxes in California if a road is as bad. Yeah. It's the place of mass. Yeah. So ultimately one day that's a possibility of having some sort of an airless tire.

1:22:23Because I've seen prototypes. I've never seen one on an actual car and physical in real life. Yeah, I think the technology is gradually getting there. And I think for something like a robo-taxi where you want to have the tires last for a long time and not go flat, this is going to make a lot of sense.

1:22:40Yeah. But other than that, essentially most of what we saw in the demo is the same. and it's still gonna have, now. Oh yeah. There was the issue with the glass when the accidently shattered. How annoying was that? That was shocking. Yeah. I mean, we literally spent, you know, hours beforehand

1:23:02with like lots of people throwing steel balls at the window. Right. I'm really much of a thrown at least, at least a dozen people must have thrown steel balls. At the same window though? Yeah, same damn window. Isn't that the problem? Yeah, that might, it turns out that might be the problem.

1:23:19If you keep throwing steel bowls, eventually it's gonna break. And I did ask Franz to really wind up and give it all. You know, I should have, I should have, like, take it easy. You know, you don't need to wind up. Yeah, we don't need the fast bowl. But I asked him, I did ask for the fast bowl.

1:23:37And I'm like, okay, let's go for the slightly, not slightly slower bowl. Do you think it was because you guys were hitting the side wall with a sledgehammer? Yeah, yeah. That could be, Like we're trying to figure out how the hell this thing break because I mean we were just bouncing steel balls off at all day.

1:23:53And we think possibly what might have happened there was that hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it. And once you crack the base of it it loses all its strength. And then we just have a hairline fracture and then you hit it anywhere it's going to shatter.

1:24:10Did you recreate that? We didn't. It's also hard with test glass. When you actually do production glass, it's much more of us than demo glass. Because production glass, you have to have massive tools and ovens and everything to make the production glass. That takes a while to do.

1:24:41So the production class is always better than demo glass. Nonetheless, it should have worked. And it was probably because we racked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel bullet at it. But it will be bulletproof to hang on. Now why did you decide to do all that, make it bulletproof and make it like, you could hit it with a sledgehammer?

1:25:05Like what was the motivation to make it different than just like a model S? I mean, I think it's like what's cool about a truck? Trucks are tough. And I'm like, okay, what's tougher than a tank? What about a tank from the future? Okay, now you have a tank from the future. Okay. Yeah.

1:25:22That's bulletproof. Yeah. And how's that compared to, you know, way tougher than a regular truck? Look, it's fucking cool. Yeah. I mean, how does it all have character from the future? That shit. I mean, like, Halo with a rocket launcher in the back. Have you thought about doing something like that?

1:25:39Somebody's going to do it for sure. For military use? Yeah, seems like it. I mean, I don't know. That sounds like a refund. I mean, you're cruising around the field and like loving shooting rockets. Now, is there ever a possibility that these things are going to be solar powered?

1:25:54Is that someday, is this solar technology going to get to a point where? It's kind of a surface area issue. So I mean, I think possibly put the cover of the truck bed, you know, put some solar cells in that. So if you just leave it out in the sun, you know, probably recharges a few miles a day

1:26:11type of thing. Oh, it would only be a few miles. But what about one day? Is it possible that technology could evolve to the point where they could extract? No, really? No, it's a, so there's about one kilowatt per square meter of solar energy and then you're going to get, I don't know, probably 20, 25% efficiency.

1:26:31So you got 200 watts a square meter. And then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun. So, you know, like your, you know, at the right angles, basically like, oh, you're facing the sun or not. So you know, when you add all those things up, you say, how many square meters can you really get?

1:26:47And then how many watt hours per mile? So it's basically, if you could do 10 miles a day, you'd be lucky. Really? Yeah. And that's not going to change? No. Mile. That sucks. It'd be cool if it just ran I mean is it possible to make a car entirely of solar panels like the the entire surface of it solar panels

1:27:11Like in a place like LA or somewhere where it's never cloudy and drive around that thing Now you can wait you're gonna burn off energy fast and you can drive if you don't drive that off and that's a different story The only option is to have a solar paneled home and extract the power that way. Yeah, it's a whole panel room

1:27:29How's it got a lot of a lot of area? Yeah? So, you could possibly have some solar thing that unfurls, that has a lot more surface area. So when you park it at work or something like that, it's unfurl. Yeah. But it just needs area. So like I said, think about maybe 200 watts a square meter, maybe 20 watts a square foot,

1:27:57something like that. Now the range of the new cars is much longer. Yes. Like what is the range of the standard model S that's available right now? It's like 300 and... Yeah, 353, 60, I don't know, it's a lot. And what's actually the new one, the new Long Range Model S is over 400 mile range.

1:28:18The new one. But then, even the old one, the old one was even 400 miles. The new one was 400 miles too. But the plaid will get you up to... So the current plat is going to be around 400 miles range. There's plat plus. If you, that's maybe a year from now, that'll be on the order of 500 miles.

1:28:38That's a lot. I hear drive 500 miles anyway. Well, if you drive across country. Yeah. Pretty rare. I mean, like, you know. For most commuters. Yeah. I mean, even if you're driving 100 miles an hour, you know? It's still, you know, you still gonna be driving for a while before you run out of battery.

1:28:59And the truck, what is the Cybertrux range gonna be? We have to pick a range actually for the initial version. It'll be some number over 300 miles. Now when you say pick a range, in terms of like the battery array that you put in? Yeah, actually like what's the pack size? So do you have to take into account how much weight it's going to add, how long it's going

1:29:24to take to charge? Yeah. I mean, there's basically the things that matter are the frontal area times the drag coefficient for aerodynamic drag and then rolling resistance, which is a function of mass and the tire efficiency. So this has a big frontal area. It's not very aerodynamic and the tires are not super,

1:29:52but they're not optimized for long range. It looks very aerodynamic, the truck. You actually don't want, if you don't want truck angles. You don't want truck angles. See, that's the problem. It looks to me, yeah, that's slicing right through, like a knife. You want it rounded. You want it rounded.

1:30:10Yeah. So you want the air to have like smooth, If you're a little air particle, you don't want the bumps. Right. You want to smooth, just like you're driving over the car. No bumps. Right. Just easy going. Sharp angles are bad for aero. So that aero will contribute to the lack of range.

1:30:34So it'll minimize the range somewhat. It'll have a drag coefficient that's pretty good for a truck. Because in closing the bed at an angle, that helps a lot. like normal trucks go down the highway, it's like a barn door. Right, right. I mean, it's like having a parachute in the back.

1:30:51You might as well be flying it. Yeah. It's like not far different from driving with a parachute. Yeah. So you can think of like drag as basic. It's like the integrated pressure profile over the car. So if you create a low pressure zone in the back of your car, where you don't like fill

1:31:07in the gap, like you're cruising through the air, you're making a hole through the air, and the air is trying to fill in the gap. And if you've got like a sharp transition into the truck bed, it's a big low pressure zone basically. And that's bad for drag. So having the slope back where that's got the truck bed cover, that's very helpful.

1:31:36But the sharp angles are not helpful. So the range of that truck is yet to be determined. You're trying to figure it out. Man, it'll be over 300 miles. What about the Roadster? I mean, some of these things, we got to decide, like, what's actually the best product? How much range do you really want?

1:32:03If you ask people that say, well, I want 600 miles range. I'm like, OK, well, that means most of the time you're rolling around a battery pack you're not going to use. And it'll slow you down. It'll inhibit handling. Yeah. Others, like why not have a car that's got a fuel tank that has 2,000 miles range?

1:32:21You know, go and pull it up like once every three months or something, you know? But they basically figured out actually carrying that much fuel around is not worth it. Right. So I think there's some of the stuff you can do for kind of like bragging rights and like, but then, you know, bragging rights are going to get old fast.

1:32:44So it's more like, what are you going to like on a day to day basis? What's like, what maximizes the area under the curve of under happiness? So it'll have enough range that you will never have to worry about range. Let me put it that way. Okay. Yeah. So someone who can drive from LA to San Francisco, no problem, Austin to Dallas, no problem.

1:33:05So a few hours of driving. many hours driving. Now I heard you talk recently about the possibility of a van, like sprinter van style. Yeah, now a van, because you got a big flat area, that's actually where solar could start to make a little more sense. Yeah, because you could have a lot of area.

1:33:30So for the roof. Yeah. And I think you also have like maybe a roof where It's solar and then when it's stationary, maybe it goes out and provides shade and maybe triples your area or something like that. If you go like, okay, now tripling area and you've got a big flat surface, you could start

1:33:53having maybe charging enough that you could start getting like 30 miles a day. That's interesting because there's a lot of people that use those for camping. My friend Tom Green. Tom Green. I think so, yeah. He used to be on MTV and actor and comedian. He's traveling across the country right now and one of those vans. Like Style Van, I

1:34:15think he got a Ram, a Dodge Ram for a Sprinter Van style. Yeah. And if you had something like that and he has an awning that extends and he's got a bunch of camping and does a podcast out of it. If you had something like that, it seems like... I think that would be great. You know, like you could have like a van that just, you

1:34:33Even if the apocalypse came around, you still, you can still drive. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe you can even have some sort of an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent that could juice you up during the day or something on those lines. Yeah. There's options. There's options.

1:34:52Solar, it's all about area. Yeah. Yeah. It's called 200, watch the square meter, maybe 20, watch the square foot. And I don't understand that there's no way that that's ever going to get more efficient. No. No, I mean, the sun, the solar incidence is somewhat coincidentally roughly 1,000 watts

1:35:15per square meter. Or, you know, in a 10 foot by, sorry, I'd like, it's 10 square feet ish, there's 1,000 watts. And then that includes all the heating and everything else. So they have to say, OK, for a photoelectric effect, you're going to capture photons within a certain band.

1:35:41And you're going to get them all. Because basically, what happens with the photon hits the electron and gets it to jump over a gap and run around to the other side. That's what happens with the photoelectric effect. It's just, it hits a photon with the right energy, hits an electron, electron gets excited, jumps over a gap

1:36:07in the semiconductor, and races around to the other side. That's the electron, and then just creates an electric circuit. So you have to say, OK, well, how are you going to get those, you know, electrons with just the right energy, what kind of photon incoming energy you've got.

1:36:26I say, yeah, it feels pretty much top style, around 30% efficiency for a silicon system. Now, if you have triple gun junction galley-mossenide, you do a lot better, but that's very expensive. So, but if you're talking about like, how much better could it do? Yeah, like mid 30s, maybe 40.

1:36:47Where a big price increase. But still not enough to actually power the entire vehicle? No, no, you're talking about any of the stuff for practical purposes. How's it going to do? Because you can't have like crazy money stuff in a car, you know, when you say big money, like how much?

1:37:0610 times the cost, at least. Oh, wow. I mean, you don't see anyone. I mean, the only thing like this, satellites that have like the trouble junction, gallium, all this night stuff, you know, but frankly, even for satellites is questionable. I for our satellites for Starlink, we don't bother with that.

1:37:20That's another thing I want to talk to you about, Starlink. Starlink is semi-controversial, right? Because on one hand, people think it's great that you're going to provide the internet through these satellites that are flying around. But astronomers and a lot of people that are amateur astronomers.

1:37:40Mostly the amateurs. I think it's the, we've talked with the professional astronomers and Swagleyr concerns. Yeah. Yeah. So, we'll make sure that this is not like an obstacle to science.

1:38:09The obstacle would be the visual aspect of it, right? The seeing these things flying around, that would be it? Yeah, honestly, it's pretty hard to find our satellites once they've reached orbit. It's hard to find them. And we have trouble finding our satellites. They were like, oh, we got like...

1:38:25But I've seen pictures of them. Yeah. Well first of all, so during the initial... When they get tossed out of the rocket, briefly, they were tumbling. And so when they're tumbling, they'll twinkle. And then you'll see them. Oh, so this was just the initial... Yeah, it's just the initial orbit.

1:38:45They just got tossed out of the, you know, with office stage deploys. The way we deploy them, we don't even really have a separation mechanism. You can see the video online. But we kind of timed down like a bundle of hay. And then we let go of the rods that are holding this big bundle of satellites down.

1:39:03But before that, we rotate the stage. So the stage is rotating. And the satellites get just like if you took a deck of cards and then they'll all get thrown out with it because they have different amounts of rotational inertia. And what kind of bandwidth are these going to provide?

1:39:21Oh, so, yeah, I mean, I think long term, long term, we're talking about gigabit level. Really? Yeah, gigabit low latency. So you could play like a fast switch video game, download a movie super fast. It'd be great. And this is going to be global? Yeah. And is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially or will require

1:39:43a series of satellites in different parts of the country or different parts of the world? Well these satellites are actually zooming around the earth at 25 times the speed of sound. And there's currently 36 planes. So, I mean to the satellite, the satellite feels like it's going in a circle, but the

1:40:02earth's rotating underneath the satellite. So the ground track looks like a sine wave. So if you look at the, from the ground perspective, the satellite's doing this like sine wave with a peak at 53 degrees. And then there's 36 planes. So they're all doing like a sine wave, you know, just offset by a little bit.

1:40:24And, but like I said, space is real big. So they're not in danger of wacking it into each other. It's super big up there. I don't really even get close. So anyway, so they're just doing around Earth. There's a lot of coverage around 53 degrees. And then we just started to launch some polar satellites, which will have an orbital inclination that allows them

1:40:54to go have visibility to the poles almost. Who the fuck is that for? Just in case. I mean, best people that live up there, you know? I guess a few. Yeah. this Antarctic research station. Okay. So they're going to have internet access. It's spectacular. They can play Halo up there.

1:41:14Yeah, they're going to go from having trash for internet to having an incredible internet. Wow. Yeah. So it'll be the whole world. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah, everywhere on Earth we'll have high bandwidth low latency internet. And will you be able to increase the bandwidth over time through software?

1:41:35There's a lot that can be improved with software. But I should say that there's going to be a role for many different types of connectivity. So Starlink is great for low to medium population density. But the satellites are actually not great for high density urban. So you're actually better off having 5G for that.

1:42:01Really? Yeah. Because these things, that's satellite's pretty far away. Right. You know, so you got that satellite. It's over 500 kilometers away, even if it's right above you. On a slant distance, it could be, you know, upwards of 1,000 kilometers away. So this would be fantastic for rural areas.

1:42:23Yeah. And we'll provide some amount of connectivity in dense open environments. but equivalent to like what, 3G? No, it's more like, so I think like basically like what's the spot size of a satellite? Like when it's putting a beam down in a location and how big is that beam? And that's, so it's got a certain amount of bandwidth for that beam and that beam is just like, it's a pretty big, like they were like a flashlight or something.

1:42:54Right, and what is it? It's the same thing. It's just, it reaches a few blocks or? If you had a flashlight up there and you're pointing down, It's like, okay, you're gonna illuminate an area. Right. So flashlights just shooting out photons in the visible spectrum. We're shooting out photons in the KUK event.

1:43:12So much bigger wavelength than visible light. So, anyway, so these things, we got a bunch of spot beams, basically. And, but that's, these beams are giant by cellular standards. Like they might be, you know, several miles diameter on that beam. So then you got, you know, say for argument's sake, 10 mile diameter,

1:43:43you know, 16 kilometer diameter beam. That's, this is a lot of area that is, and all of the, all of those terminals in that area will get the same information because it's got that beam that's just going down. that spot. So, whereas you could have like a 5G tower that's the ones that aren't

1:44:05cores in Corona. Kidding! 5G cores Corona, it's a fact! Oh my god, have you seen any of that stuff? That's one of the most disturbing things about the Internet. Anyway, well I mean And when technology is magic, then you don't know what to believe. Right. And when you're more on anything.

1:44:33Well let's say, so a cell tower could have a range of, you know, a mile or, you know, a mile slash one half kilometers. It basically could have like one percent the area of a satellite beam. So like if you had something that was, you know, one mile or, or if I'm going to take a kilometer or 10, it's going to be the square of that.

1:45:05That is the area. So satellite are great for low to medium density. Five G is ideal for high density. I say. And also because you could distribute the towers every mile or so easily and dress them up like trees. That always bothers me. I'd rather have them. I think they should be better at the fake trees. I would rather have them.

1:45:33I feel like, come on, somebody doesn't care enough. You could definitely have a way better fake tree than that. They're so bad. They're so bad. They look terrible. Who are they tricking? No one. No one. No one. No, I'm like, what is this far? They're offensive. They're more offensive than

1:45:48like the most ridiculous fake tits. You know, like the big ones that look like basketballs, they don't even cleaved a melanin. Yeah, they have no shape that resembles a breast at all. But yeah, there's something weird about them too. It's like, I'm not offended by a tower. Stupid. That is the best. Well, the Christmas tree part in the bottom was going to sweet.

1:46:11You could put ornaments on it. Is that one at the top right that palm tree one? Is that fake? No, that's a good fake if that's a left side Jamie. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry scroll keeps growing the palm tree one looks pretty good Is that real? Well, that's kind of not bad. Okay. They're that's not bad. Yeah, that one's pretty good. It's not bad

1:46:28Yeah, if you were driving by that that wouldn't be offensive. Yeah, but the one in the middle is not bad either That's kind of a pine tree with a thing. It's like some sort of demented Christmas tree. That's a talent Go back to the one you just had the that far left. That's probably the most impressive the one on the left-hand side

1:46:45the far left one. Because if you had like a forest full of those, like, you would just go, these are just like weirdly trimmed trees. Yeah, so that's hard to have a fake tree. You could definitely have a little bit of effort. I don't need that. You know, just like I don't need when I pass by a telephone pole, I don't need

1:47:03to pretend it's something different. It's a fucking cell phone tower. Yeah. Who decided to make those things into fake trees? Like when did this become a precedent but.. you can definitely make a fake tree that is convincing so it was a bit more than that fake re or just make them look cool make them look like robots

1:47:27of a big ultra man out there i think some people are like really worried about like cell phone towers thinking they caused like radiation or something poisoning that's not true if you were worried about five g it don't worry about it no not at all I mean, no. Like, if I had cell phones, if I had a helmet of cell phones,

1:47:47strap around my head and around my nuts, I would not worry. Yeah. Yeah, I met a dude once who had bowel cancer who's convinced that his cell phone was in his pocket and that's what gave him bowel cancer. Nope. No. Okay. Hey buddy. Sorry. No. No, it's not. The cell phone is not. No.

1:48:08No. Yeah, I didn't know this guy very well, but he was pretty convinced. Meanwhile, he kept the phone on the same side. He was one of those dudes that had the phone on the little hip thing, you know, a little little bracker on his hip. Kept his phone there even after it killed one of his nuts in his eyes.

1:48:25He said, well, he really wants his phone. Damn, it's just done. Your phone or your balls? Yeah, he gave up. They got me. Yeah, don't worry about phones and our, I'm not causing cancer. So there's no concern whatsoever with the radiation that's caused by those things? No, first of all, when people say radiation, there's just like, they're conflating this,

1:48:50you know, term from like nuclear bombs and like technically we are currently bathed in radiation right now. The table has radiation, right? Everything produces radiation, everything. are emitting photons all the time. So this is a question of what wavelength. And if you have a very short wavelength of high frequency photon, that is capable of causing DNA damage.

1:49:19But we're talking about ultraviolet and beyond. Your phone is not even close. And then the thing that really causes problems in, say, nuclear explosion are alpha particles. So like it's basically helium nuclei. So those things will, they're like tiny cannibals. So those will rub right through you. It's like

1:49:43if you guys start with tiny cannibals, bad things should happen. So that's, that's also cold radiation, but it's really particles. So you don't want to be bombarded with high speed helium nuclei. That's going to be bad. How's that happen? Well, it happens in a nuclear explosion. Oh, yeah. Okay, avoid those. Yeah, that's bad. But cell phones are okay. Yeah, cell phones are not emitting particles. So if it says like, as my cell phone can of course brain cancer, I'm like, because of radiation, like, do you mean photons or particles? It's like, it's not emitting particles. So we can just put that aside and worry about the particles. Then the photons that are that's

1:50:18emitting, the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear. And only by a tiny amount, it's like, okay, if you had an ear warmer that was very mild that's your phone. That's all. It's many photons at a frequency that is not going to cause DNA damage. So what concerns people you're thinking about?

1:50:47Don't worry about your phone. It's fine. David Ike does not believe you. He's doing backflips right now. You fucking chill. So what Well, concerns people is the unknown, right? They hear about 5G and then they hear about radiation and they're like, wait a minute, should I, is this safe?

1:51:02What are we doing? Are we just ruining everything? We ruining people. It's fine. Totally fine. Thank you. Yeah. Now I feel good about my 5G phone. If you had a helmet that was made of cell phones, you'll be fine. Yeah, but this is coming from a guy who wants to stick a quarter size hole in your head and shove wires in your brain.

1:51:22Yeah, so I know a few things about what cause of brain damage. I know but that that like neural link concerns a shit out of people that that that that scares folks. That's the ultimate. Well, I think we're problematic. We've penned you to the ground and put it in. Yes. I agree. And said like, okay, you're gonna get this. We're gonna check you out whether you'll like it or not.

1:51:45The champion. We're gonna check you out. That's the other thing that people are scared of right now. It's you will have to Sign a million disclosures and this is not going to be something that where it just suddenly pounces on you like, ah, everyone getting chipped. No, it's a very slow process of, okay, let's first try to help people who have serious brain

1:52:08injuries. Like, if somebody got like a, you know, a spinal cord injury or something like that, like that's one of the first things we were looking at doing is like somebody maybe a quadriplegic tetraplegic, how do we give them an implant that allows them to use their computer or their

1:52:26phone, and have it be wireless, and they look totally normal. You wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head, and they can just charge it inductively, like you charge like a foot bit or something like that, or Apple Watch, something. That's one of the the first application we're thinking of is like, let's restore functionality.

1:52:50Someone has a serospinal injury or a serious brain injury or some other kind. So this one's going to be like a very gradual process. You'll see it coming. But I was playing Cyberpunk the game and I'm like, yeah. You're worried about what we're doing. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's pretty close to home here.

1:53:08You know? I'm like, oh man. Yeah. Like, is this where it leads? It might lead there eventually. I'm just saying for right now, it's going to help people who really need it. Well, you know, we had this discussion before that we're all basically already cyborgs, right? We're already relying upon our phones.

1:53:29He connected it to hip to them. People are relying on glasses and all sorts of other technology to improve their life. This is another gradual step in that direction. And if you just keep going in that way, it seems in that... Like I like being a human and I think you know look here. We're drinking whiskey. We're talking yeah wood table

1:53:49This is very human experience. Yeah, but ultimately we are archaic and we will eventually be aliens We're gonna be those those dudes with the big heads and the little tiny bodies and we're gonna be but we still we still need to feel For now until I don't know I mean I think we're a program in there at the mine

1:54:10Yeah, but then once it becomes virtual once once virtual Super seeds whatever like imagine if the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better I got news for you on that front. Oh we can it is It's disturbing me good you're rubbing your kid I'm going to get my little dog in this. I struck his head.

1:54:39Oh, you'll love it. Bonnie back guarantee. There was a lot of it. It's a snap. There was a woman who was in the 1970s who had some sort of analogy to pain pills. And they did some experiment with her. They put wires into her brain and gave her a device. Do you know the story? There are a few stories like this. Yeah, and where it actually hits the pleasure center Yeah, and then you're like my god This is the best thing ever I kept hammering it she developed blisters on her finger that she used to hit the button

1:55:17She never stopped hitting that button with the same finger didn't give a fuck about those blisters She was just coming Constantly, yeah, and then she started adjusting that she tried to tamper with the device to increase the amplitude She became just an orgasm junkie. She's and she was crazy and they tried to take she was begging them to take it away from her

1:55:36And then when they tried to take it away from her she would fight them It was it's it's madness and it made me. I mean I researched this extensively because I was Fascinated by the idea that this could eventually become a part of the phone. We can definitely make that happen That's the that's a real issue with people the instantaneous desire for pleasure bad, you know

1:55:55You wouldn't do it, but the Chinese. Sure. I mean, I don't know. Huawei phones immediately with a come button. Right as soon as you log on, you give them your fingerprint, you come. You know, I mean we could just put in there with some software limits, you know. Easily. But software limits could easily be worked around. Someone's gonna come up with someone on the dark web.

1:56:18Well, I mean your phone is, if you're carrying a phone right, you're carrying a microphone. GPS. Yeah, camera. Yeah, every day everywhere everything I mean all well would be losing his mind and it answers questions. Yeah Yeah, and he knows where you are. Yeah, it's like you can just make you have it like it's it's

1:56:34That phone by the way if you say like please like turn off it's it just says that it's off It's not actually off flying it could totally lie. Yeah, and you can't take the bad Basically like Apple or Android anytime they want they could just turn your mic on yeah Or your camera your GPS everything. Yeah, and just tell you it's off

1:56:53Well, I look at the setting, it says it's off. Yeah, and some people, that's not good enough. I want it strapped to my wrist. Yeah, I need one on me all the time. Yeah, I mean, these days are like a modern smartphone. It's like a tiny cell phone on your wrist. It is. It even has a cellular connectivity and everything.

1:57:10Everything. Everything. Everything. You leave your house, you make phone calls like Dick Tracy. Yeah, hold on. Rather than any Dick Tracy even imagined. Yeah, fuck Dick Tracy. Yeah, nothing. He didn't know shit. The stock truck communicator. No, it looks like a cheesy fluffy walkie talking. Yeah, it's over perk over a big old kirk. I'll be yeah

1:57:29They had to tell you how you can you hang up? Yeah, it's really ridiculous, and it couldn't get on the internet good pictures. Yeah, he was talking to people from another planet He couldn't even send them a photo. Good. I mean they would have a camera. They would beam a whole body

1:57:45Did we see what's going on rearrange your body, right? Yeah take all of your cell your atoms and and repreject them on this plan. Totally, exactly. Well, they could just send a camera. If you thought about sending a camera to this very dangerous situation. That really shows you how truly amazing the internet is,

1:58:06that in all of science fiction, they never thought that was gonna happen. Yeah. You think about all the Star Trek, Star Wars? Yeah, they thought we'd be out there on, well, they thought we'd be on Mars for sure, but they never thought we'd have a super computer in our pocket that everyone's got an amazing camera and as much memory as they could possibly, a super computer in your pocket, something better than the best super, like your phone is better than the best computer that Earth had by far in 1969 when we landed on the phone.

1:58:37Oh yeah, by far. By far, not even close. The cameras, like I have a Samsung Galaxy S21 that has a moon photo capability. So it's designed, it has a moon shot. So it's designed to be able to take beautiful photos of the moon. And you can, yeah. It's like, because if you deal with an iPhone, it's not really programmed that way.

1:59:01Yeah, actually it's true. The iPhone can't take good photos of the moon. Because actually I was just like in LA and the moon was low in the horizon and it was just like hanging there. It's like this giant planetoid over the, yeah, and I'll try looking at my phone. It looks like tiny.

1:59:15Jamie, you got one of those. Talk to me about the moon shot. I didn't even know it was on there. Yeah, just Google moon shot with Galaxy S21 Ultra. It's fucking phenomenal. I got one just for that. Well, I got one because I'm always interested in both platforms and see where they're at.

1:59:32But the photographs are fucking incredible. The zoom's incredible too. They have much better zooms. Like, look at this. These are photos with a Galaxy S21 Ultra. That thing is just gonna be old camera at this. Isn't that incredible? Look at the back of it. Just make it all out of lenses.

1:59:48It's incredible. It's just what they, it's just, we're living in, it's constantly accelerating. That's what's so amazing about it. Is that the right one, a Mars photo with that? I don't, I don't. That's why you're trying to photo a Mars photo. Like a Mars photo. Like a chance photo.

2:00:04No. Impossible, right? Impossible. Thank you. Glad you're here for that. We would buy right into it. Not a chance. I think that was last year's model. What? Last year's model could take a picture of the Mars? No, no, like last year's moon photo versus this year's. Oh, yeah. If you had a giant lens or something, basically you need a photon distillery.

2:00:25So that's the moon. That's all that is on the right. It's not Mars. It's just a shitty. It's like their last year's version of moon shot. So the new one can actually see the craters, which is just fucking bananas. I mean, if that's just on a camera without a lens, because you're just like, say, what's your photon gathering area?

2:00:42analysts like photons per unit area. It's a certain limit if you were. What's that, Genevieve? It's not that good. Well, it's pretty good for a cell phone. Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, it's not great for a telescope. Sure. Well, I mean, the thing I was trying to literally, I don't know, five or six days ago, there was just like the error was clear.

2:01:04LA can be amazing. Like on a clear winter day where the moon is low in the horizon. and the sun is hitting at the right angle. And it just looks incredible. And I was trying to take a photo of that with my phone and it looked terrible. Yeah, I just never, yeah, I can't capture it.

2:01:21No. No, unfortunately. But galaxies can. That's the interesting thing. It's like the galaxy. Yeah, well, it's a great name too. There are always one step ahead in many directions. Like they have these ultrasonic fingerprint detectors, but they just can't beat the operating system.

2:01:40Apple just has the ease of use and there is is it so good it's so better Apple yeah so better yeah it's but it's close it's close but the other thing that bothers me about Google is Google's constantly tracking you and so hard to avoid they'll know you better than you know yourself I'm a they know what you will want I'm a big admire of what Tim Cook is doing what what he's doing to sort of

2:02:06cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and gather your data and this battle that's going on between Tim Cook and Facebook, I fucking love it. I love that he's stepping up and saying, hey, you can just advertise. You don't have to gather up people's data and sell it constantly. And then disingenuously Facebook tries to you are killing small businesses

2:02:28with these decisions. Fuck out of here. The fuck out of here. You're not killing small business. is we're killing this one gigantic information gathering business that's decided that it's going to take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make fucking billions of dollars.

2:02:47Yeah, well, I mean, even perhaps arguably worse, they're going to feed all that data into the AI that they're developing. It's called Facebook AI. You can follow them on Twitter. And they're like, just feed all this information to the AI and see what it does. Who knows what would happen, you know? It seems like I don't know some dystopian outcomes are possible. Yeah, well you're terrified

2:03:11Yeah, right? No, I mean I just think if it's unchecked Well, I think things that are Apo a danger to the public should have some kind of public oversight. Yeah, so you know like I You know although sometimes we have our disagreements. I'm you know in favor of the FAA and And it's the various regulatory agencies, FDA, and so forth.

2:03:39I think we're better off having them than not having them. There is a risk-reward asymmetry in that they tend to be not way the good as much as they weigh the bad. Because their incentive structure is they get punished a lot for approving something, but they don't get punished much for not proving stuff. So this is just in the nature of government. But nonetheless,

2:04:08I think everyone would feel safer flying with the FAA than not having an FAA or we feel safer buying food and drugs, having a regulatory agency oversee this stuff. But we don't have any regulatory agency overseeing artificial intelligence. And this I think is probably biggest existential threat. Yeah it's seems like hey we should like have

2:04:37somebody keeping out on that. Brad but who that's the problem. I don't know the problem is the government. Who's gonna do Joe Biden let's have him pay attention to it. No I mean it's like just the deep state. Oh those folks. Well they're looking out for our best interest. They're surely gonna watch out. What they're gonna do is they're gonna develop it and use it as a weapon and it's gonna turn on like a fucking Terminator movie.

2:05:02Right? That's the real worry is that they're gonna decide that this is a very valuable tool for controlling populations, governments, whatever the fuck they're gonna use it for. And then it's gonna decide why am I listening to you? Yeah. If you read like the plot line for Terminator, it's actually pretty smart.

2:05:27like James Cameron wrote a pretty smart script there. It's not quite as like, oh, there's just like, Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing you down the street. It's like, well, how did Cyberdine systems develop? It's like, well, they were a military contractor and they were asked to develop a protective system,

2:05:46something that would protect for cyber security. So we need to have protection against cyber attacks. So it's primary thing is to defend against cyber attacks. To develop an AI that can defend against cyber attacks. That's pretty reasonable. And then as part of what the AI did is, in order to defend itself,

2:06:10it propagated throughout the world to keep an eye on things, see what was going on. And then they thought, well hang on, they didn't realize that it was cyber that it was Skynet that was propagating through all these systems. And I said, okay, that seems to be something propagating through all these systems.

2:06:31Skynet, you need to stop it. You need to end it. And Skynet said, oh, you've asked me to destroy myself. You are the enemy. You must be destroyed. That's how Terminator actually goes. It was created as a defense system to defend against cyber attacks. then it was asked to destroy itself, and then it concluded humanity was the enemy.

2:06:58That's too close to home. Right. Well, earlier we talked about what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life for us would be very different than the meaning of life or something that we create that becomes life. The idea of life being restricted to cells or carbon-based life forms is kind of silly.

2:07:20like the idea of artificial life, right? What is artificial? It's right there. What are you talking about? AI, artificial insemination. It's, but it is. It's what I said to you ask. If we create, if we create some sort of silicon based life form, but it acts like a life form, it has a desire.

2:07:41So it's, it was. But there was, I think in Australia a few years ago, an artificial insemination lab that had a bunch of bulges stored in canisters, but it overheated. And so it's that you had basically exploding bulges all over the place. Really? And that line was AI goes wild.

2:08:08It's calm everywhere. It's like... Like... Oh yeah... Yeah, just like, come rockets will over the place. Yeah. Nobody wants that, right? Does that help? Clean up and I, you know, I'll lie to whatever. Bullages all over the walls. Literally. It actually happened. Yeah. In fact, a artificial intelligence.

2:08:44Wait, I mean, artificial intelligence. Yeah, back to artificial intelligence. I'm really worried about it. Yeah. I think we should be concerned and we should have oversight of some kind. Yeah, but who would be the oversight? I don't know, like, regulatory agency, or whoever. It's like, you know, people have the FAA.

2:09:00Like I said, we have the FAA. We got the FDA. Yeah, but I do think so. we just need an acronym to oversee this stuff. The problem is, government agencies suck at most things. I mean, it's the good argument. I mean, it's the best government agency. Like, what government agency does the best job of oversight?

2:09:25No, I think generally, okay, I mean, I think the right way to think about government is government is a corporation in the limit. Like, there's some people like, well, like, we're against corporations, but we're for government. I'm like, government's just the biggest corporation.

2:09:39What are you talking about? It's a corporation with a monopoly. It's the biggest corporation and has monopoly. That's government. But you get to pick who runs it every four years. You have more influence on who's CEO of General Electric than you have on who's president. Really? Sure. How so?

2:09:58Well, I mean, you're gonna have, how many voters are there? Like 150 million? I don't know. And maybe 100 million you actually vote. so you have one hundred million of vote if you're not in a swing state it's a matter i'm feeling california's going down this for sure gavinson might be fucking that up ..

2:10:24i do think you know in california any given state it's got to be above zero percent chance that the other party wins if it's zero percent chance that the other party wins they get cocky the forcing yeah the forcing function for being reset like all they're gonna be responsive to the people right now they're gonna be responsive to people if the other party has a shadow running right they're gonna be responsive to the special interest groups that help me exactly and that's what California said yeah so anyway so governor's corporation in the limit it's a it's the governor's the

2:10:56biggest corporation with a monopoly nonetheless it there are some things that it's hard to see having be an industry body, the probability of regulatory capture, if it's an industry body, is higher than if it's the government. It's not zero as the government. Just plenty of cases of regulatory capture for federal agencies.

2:11:20But the probability is lower than if it's an industry group. And at the end of the day, somebody asked to say, you know, go and tell Facebook or Google or Apple or Tesla, because Tesla has a lot of advanced AI. This is okay or it's not okay. Or at least be able to report back to the public. This is what we found. Otherwise,

2:11:43the inmates are running the asylum. Yeah. And there's like not necessarily friendly inmates. No. I just wonder, like if you wanted to compile some sort of a regulatory body to to keep an eye on AI. How would you do that? And how would you avoid having them being incentivized by special interest groups or some sort of corporation that would profit on AI succeeding in this?

2:12:11Oh, that's already happening. Yeah. I mean, all the companies are going hog wild on the AI front. So anyway, my recommendation, that should be some kind of regulatory authority. So how would they do that? And I'm not a fan of like, let's have the government do lots of things. I think you want to have the government do the least amount of stuff.

2:12:35But I think the right role of government is to be like the referee on the field. When the government starts being the player on the field, that's problematic. Or when you start having more referees than players, which is the case in California, then that's not good. So, you can't have no referees.

2:12:55Yeah. Everyone agrees, referee might be annoying at times, but it's better not referee than not. Yes. Yeah. I'm just worried that these things are gonna, it's gonna be too late by the time, and I'm sure you're worried about it as well, by the time these things become sentient, by the time they develop the ability to analyze

2:13:17what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential. Yeah, I'm not saying that having regulatory agency, some panacea, or reduces the risk to zero, this little significant risk, even with the regulatory agency. Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad of, and we should have one.

2:13:41It took a while before there was an FAA. There were a lot of plane crashes. A lot of companies cutting corners. took a while before there's an FDA. And what tends to happen is some company gets desperate, they're on the verge of bankruptcy, and they're like, oh man, we'll just cut this corner, it'll be fine.

2:14:03And then somebody dies. And some of these regulatory situations, like look at seat belts. I mean, now it takes seat belts for granted. Man, the car companies for seat belts, likely there was no tomorrow. They tried to... Oh yeah. They fought them for decades. Like 15, 20 years. The data was absolutely clear that you needed seat belts.

2:14:29Like seat belts, you know, you really needed seat belts... There's like the difference in fatalities and serious injuries of seat belt, not seat belts are gigantic and obvious. It's not subtle. So, but still the car company's four seat belts for, I don't know, 10, 20 years. A lot of people died. Now, these days actually with advanced airbags, actually I think we might

2:15:01have come full circle and no longer need seat belts if you have advanced airbags. Really? Yeah. I think there's a strong argument for saying if you've got an... What if the car flips? Now, you just covered it in plenty. It's airbags everywhere. Why don't airbags are so good? You, blow your mind, just how good the airbags are.

2:15:22And, you know, Tesla, we even update the software to improve how the airbags deploy. So we'll calculate, you know, are you an adult? Like, how much do you weigh? Are you sitting in this part of the seat? Or that part of the seat? Are you maybe a baby? Are you a toddler? Are you...

2:15:38Based on the weight? Yeah. So the seat... Not just the weight, but the pressure distribution on the seat. So we're measuring the pressure distribution. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? Are you a fifth percentile female, a 95 percentile male? The airbag firing will be different depending upon where you're sitting on the seat and what size you are and what your orientation is. Really? Yeah. And we'll update it over the air so it even gets better

2:16:02over time. So a child could conceivably sit in the front seat. Unveilted child sitting in a in a bad position, probably still fine. Jesus Christ. Yeah. It's dynamically updating the airbag firing according to where you're sitting, how much you weigh in real time. And the seat belt is like, eh, if you wear the seat belt, that's nice.

2:16:31But the airbag is going to do most of the work. Airbags in the work. And is it possible that we can come up with something even better than the airbag? Like you fill the whole cabin up with foam. Now, it's tough because airbag technology is crazy good. Because you want the airbag to inflate and then deflate.

2:16:52Otherwise, you're going to get disphyxiated. So again, it's like filling up with stuff. It's got to inflate. And then there's different stages of inflation. It's like fast inflation, then slow inflation, then slowly subside. The sophistication of airbags is crazy good. And this is all done not through some regulatory body.

2:17:13This is done through your own desire to make these things safer and more efficient. I mean, the case of Tesla, we go way beyond the regulatory requirements. So we got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they've ever tested. So we're five stars in every category and subcategory.

2:17:33If there was a six star, we get a six star. It is actually legal to have one-star car. Really? What's a smart car? Those one-star? Oh, oh, I got to tell you that. OK, so the star rating is kind of bullshit. Really? Yeah, I'm probably going to be upset about me about this. But they adjust the star rating depending

2:17:56on the size of the car. So I mean, it stands to reason that if you're in a freight train and you're in a, you know, if a smart car is a freight train, That doesn't matter how good your safety system is. You're screwed. If you're in a little car, get hit by a big car, the big car will win.

2:18:16Okay, so a low star rating in a big car, hitting a high star rating in a small car, the small car is screwed. Small cars are not safe. Yeah, they're not safe. Right. Yeah. But what about your small car? Model 3 is not small. What is medium? The Roadster. Yeah, the Roadster is not super safe. Original

2:18:39Roadster? Not super safe. The original Roadster. It's not safe for a car like that, but it's not, it's, it's safety maximization is not the golden sports car. Well, the original one was based on a Lotus, right? Yeah, that was the theory. But in reality, it was low We had like maybe 7%, I think we calculated 7% of the parts were actually carryover from

2:19:06the Lotus. The entire body, chassis, everything which we designed, new powertrain, even the HVAC system used to run off a belt from the engine, now we need an electric HVAC system. So pretty almost everything got changed. It was not a, it's something that sounded good. Let's take an AC propulsion drive train from this little company in LA.

2:19:30Let's stick it in a modified Lotus Elise finger. We got a car. Only problem is a lot of problems. Both of the fundamental premises on which Tesla was created are false. The battery ended up increasing the mass of the car by 30%. And the weight distribution was all different. So you invalidated all the crash tests.

2:19:53Now you had to stretch the car in order to fit the battery. So now the chassis is different. All the airbags had to be redone. All the crash structure had to be redone. It would have been better to start from scratch than to use any part of a Lotus Least. It was worse. Like let's say there's a house that you want.

2:20:16You have in mind a particular house. And then you buy a house, and you end up changing everything except one wall and the basement. But you're still stuck with most of the original footprint. It's just easier sometimes. Just knock the house down and build a new one. Don't just try to modify it one piece at a time.

2:20:41We had to change over 90% of the non-palatrain portion of the car had to be changed, 90%, 93%. And then the battery and drivetrain from AC repulsion did not work. It had an analog motor controller that was extremely unreliable. The way that the power electronics were done was artisanal.

2:21:13You could not recreate that in a production situation. The battery pack was air cooled, which meant that if it was cold outside the car didn't work. If it was too hot, the battery would overheat. And if you had any cell, any part of the, any one of the cells in the battery pack had

2:21:35a heat concentration, you could not remove it. The air was just not, it's not good enough to just air cool the pack. And so you could have them run away and the pack would burn down. So we can use the battery pack, can use the motor, can use the inverter, can use the charger. In the end we use none of the AC propulsion technology and almost none of the Lotus technology.

2:22:00Wow. So you just had the general shape. It has a passing resemblance to a Lotus Elise. But if you put the lotus lease in the roster side by side, they look actually quite different. And I actually led the design of the roster, the product design of the roster. They gave me like a fast inner-school art, gave me like an honorary doctorate for it.

2:22:26But we totally frank, it's easy to do a design of a sports car. It's very hard to do a design of a sedan. I tried, I failed. And that's why I hired Franz Van Halzhausen, who's our head, being our head of design. of design since 2008. He's great. He just thinks I better be on my skill.

2:22:45You know we talked about this before but it's worth bringing up again. I've always been a fan of top gear but I got disgusted when I found out what they did with your car. When they try to pretend that the car broke down just to make an entertaining program where they had a laugh at the folly of this thing dying on them. But it didn't really die on them.

2:23:07Yeah, that was messed up. I mean, to be totally frank, so, you know, new top gear, top gear of recent years is a Tesla supporter. So I want to like just waste a note of appreciation for top gear of recent years. Well, James May, he has one, right? But they're not top gear anymore, right?

2:23:25They're the grand tour, that's what they are on Amazon. Is that what they call them? I don't know, but top gear has been supportive in recent years, but yeah, back in the day, remember at the time, like Tesla was not a big company. So we were just a little company and we were like, you know, we were the little kid on the

2:23:42block. So, you know, we said the top gear was like, hey, top gear wants to test your car, cool. And we only had a few cars and we gave them one of our cars and when we handed over the car, they had a, you know, so one of our engineers like Ghost levels the car and then he sees a script on the table.

2:24:01It's like, how do you write the script? Yeah, I mean your whillings gave you the car and in the script The car breaks down. Yeah It's messed up. Yeah It was crazy. It was crazy It was crazy because they basically sabotaged the company I mean that had to cost you guys a shitload of money because a lot of people watch that show and car enthusiasts like myself

2:24:24Kind of rely on them for and there's also it look Obviously Jeremy Clarkson's hilarious. There's information there. It's funny But you would imagine that they could do that without lying about the actual performance of the car Yeah The car never broke down. They just they just pretended that it did and they wrote the script

2:24:44So crazy literally Or a guy's handed over the car is reading through a script and it's like the car's break breaks down like runs out like Charge the brakes fail and we're like what the fuck man. We just gave you the car. This is not cool And what did they say about that? There are, there objection was like this is just entertainment. It's not meant to be true

2:25:06That's so crazy though because that's they had to know what the fuck they're doing. Yeah, yeah But anyway, well now we're under the bridge water under the bridge But crazy for for anybody who experienced it back in the day I mean I remember I knew very little about electric cars. It was just the early days and I remember watching that call

2:25:27Oh, that sucks broke down. Yeah. Yeah Yeah. Well, you know, anyway, I've been a fan of electric cars since for a long time since, basically, high school, early college. What do you think of that documentary? Who killed the electric car? I thought it was pretty good. Yeah. I thought it was worth watching.

2:25:55Interesting. Mortally wounded, not killed. Exactly. Mortally, exactly. But I mean, the irony is like, man, can you imagine just how different a future GM would have Yeah, they had the EV1, electric vehicle one. If they had just gone EV2, EV3, man, they would have just owned the world.

2:26:14Who knows where we'd be right now with electric cars too, and the technology with that kind of money behind it. It's fascinating now, you're seeing like this Mustang, this sort of SUV style Mustang that's electric. You're seeing so many different vehicles that are electric. There's so many companies that have electric cars now.

2:26:34And it's really been becoming interesting. Porsche's electric car. There's a large supply of electric cars now. I mean, that's got to make you feel good though. Because without you and without Tesla, I mean, there was no way it would be where it's at right now. Yeah, I mean, when I think about what's the final good of Tesla, it's to what degree have we accelerated the advent of sustainable energy?

2:27:01So it would have happened anyway. But I think Tesla is an accelerant. I think that's how I would judge the fundamental good of Tesla, by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. But in the early days, my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that it

2:27:24wasn't environmental in the sense of CO2, you know, parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing. I do think we had us add urgency to the situation. My original interest was just like we're going to run out of oil and then civilization is going to collapse and so if we don't have some kind of

2:27:42sustainable energy situation which really is electric cars solar energy and electric cars then civilization is going to fall apart and we'll be back in the Stone Age or something like someone bad you know but we're not going to be able to move forward. It won't be a good future. So my interest in electric cars was

2:28:04like, okay, how do we make this work? And you think of it like a gasoline car. I mean, it's got an electric motor and a battery just to start the car. You know, electric cars like way simpler than a gasoline car just need, it's just a range question. So In the early days of cars, there were almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline

2:28:29cars in the very early days. But the batteries didn't have enough range. So as soon as they had an electric starter, you didn't have to crank the engine, then gasoline cars won because they had the range. So it was really a question of how do you solve the range problem. And when I first came out to California, the reason I came out to California was to work

2:28:58on energy storage solutions for electric cars, basically advanced, about ways to store electric energy that would give you a long range. So in my summer internships I worked at this company called Pinnacle Research that did energy density capacitors. Now they used a ruthenium and tantalum which are

2:29:26ruthenium especially quite rare. You cannot scale that because there's not enough ruthenium. Where does that come from? It's a trace element. It's coming from like radioactive decay and like you know meteorites and that kind of thing. It's rare. I think at the time, it was only like, it's like impossible

2:29:52to scale. It doesn't matter how smart you get. You can't scale something. It was using Rethium. This is not enough of it. It was like rarer than gold. It's way better for like trying to make cars than powered by gold. Is there any argument that there's not enough conflict minerals to go around?

2:30:09Because that's what they call them, like conflict minerals, things like lithium. Now, lithium is extremely common. Is it? Yeah. Lithium is everywhere. Lithium is one of the most common elements in the universe. It's at number three on the periodic table. So we've got to lithium in pretty much everywhere.

2:30:26Where do we get it? Well, I mean, Tesla, we get most of our lithium from Australia, actually. But you can get lithium from sea water, if you wanted to. It's really, yeah. Lithium just forms a salt. And that's the primary component of the batteries? Or what else is in there? It's a misnomer, actually.

2:30:48It's called lithium-ion. That's like the salt in the salad. It's like, do you like salt in your salad? Sure. But it's not made of salt. I mean, the primary component in lithium-ion batteries, like in a Tesla, is nickel. And nickel is also relatively common. It's not super common.

2:31:10Iron is very common. So the two main types of battery pack are iron and nickel. And iron is very common. So much as a ridiculous amount of iron, just like this ridiculous amount of lithium. Now, nickel's a little more unusual. So not that unusual, but it's way much harder to get nickel than iron.

2:31:40But for example, stainless steel, you know, that'll be, you know, 12, 12, it's a quote of 10 to 20 percent nickel, depending on the situation. Like, cutlery, you know, like knives and forks will be like electroplated nickel silver. That's what EPNS means. So you've got like nickel based cells and you've got iron based cells.

2:32:13The nickel based cells have more energy density like so. For a given amount of volume and mass you're going to get more energy out of nickel than iron. Iron is cheaper. And so anyway those are two main types of cells. They've got an iron cathode, nickel cathode. And then some of the nickel cathodes have some of them on a cobalt to stabilize nickel.

2:32:37And then iron, it's like the, usually iron phosphate, you go like, you know, but it's really mostly, it's like the heavy stuff is iron. And the heavy stuff is nickel and the nickel based stuff. So you've got nickel iron and then you've got the anode side, which is basically a carbon

2:32:53lattice with a little bit of a silken sometimes. So and then these, these, these, lithium ions, they like, they, they sort of trundle back and forth between the cathode and the anode. So I mean, just read the wick, if you read the Wikipedia article on lithium ion, it's quite, quite good.

2:33:18anyway, so the, the, the, the, the channel, like the rate of which we are producing what what are cold lithium ion cells, but really primarily iron and nickel cells, is increasing very, very rapidly year over year. It's just that in order to compensate for an economy which is fundamentally based on

2:33:43fossil fuels, you need a shit ton of batteries. So a gigaton, giga shit ton of batteries. And that is what, that's going to happen. This is a question of when. That's why I say the fundamental good of Tesla is to what degree it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy. It's inevitable.

2:34:05We have sustainable energy. It's total logical. It's either we have sustainable energy or civilization collapses. So if civilization doesn't collapse, we will have sustainable energy. This is a question of how soon does that happen? Sooner is better. And then the, you know, there's a risk that we're incurring because of the increased

2:34:26parts per million of CO2 and the oceans and atmosphere. It has some acidification. It makes the water look a little bit more acidic. And it just causes the air to be a little warmer, not a lot. I think sometimes people look at the temperature, especially in Celsius. you might say like okay it's like 20 degrees Celsius I mean can a small PPM

2:34:55increase in carbon really move the needle that much but but actually you should be looking at it in degrees Kelvin so then it's like actually it's like more like we're at around 300 Kelvin and so you know what would it take to have like only a point 3% increase would be 1 degree Celsius 2

2:35:15degrees Fahrenheit. So therefore, this is actually, you know, it's more, it's a smaller percentage increase than you'd think when looking at temperature in the absolute as opposed to, you know, above the freezing point of water. So, and then if people weren't just living right on the water, then that would also help a lot. But it's just like,

2:35:38We love loving right on the water. So humanity is like a thermometer. It's like, you look at like a thermometer, like old school sort of analog thermometer, which is like changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is increasing its volume due to temperature.

2:36:00It only takes a little bit of a small increase in volume to raise the temperature on an old school analog liquid of thermometer and humanities like that. We've just decided that we want to write on the damn beach. So because the beach is cool. Now the problem is you're like, it's kind of like if we wanted to say what's the most

2:36:22sensitive instrument you could like how can we maximize our sensitivity to water level? Well live right on the ocean. Well okay we just did that. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, well, you know, and by the way, throughout history, the water level has varied a lot. It's like nutty, how much it's varied.

2:36:49And then if you look at, say, the CO2, parts per million, you know, based on the fossil record, I mean, it just looks like a wall. I'm not like a doomsayer here. My view is that if provided we are not complacent about a sustained energy economy, I think things will be fine. If we are complacent about it, that's where our problems arise.

2:37:12So, like to be totally frank, I think we'll be fine. But as long as we don't behave as though we're going to be fine, we will be fine. If we don't take it for granted, if we're not complacent, I think we'll be fine. Do you anticipate any large leaps in battery technology? Is there anything that can be done to increase the efficiency, increase the manufacturing

2:37:44abilities? What can be done to move that? that the the the ball is in motion in this like the good things that are happening are happening like the the rate at which we are making new we're increasing the production capacity of batteries it's it's increasing at a rate of that I think we haven't seen

2:38:19in a century it's like it's crazy fast it's just that in order to change from a fossil I feel economy too, kind of like a solar wind battery economy. It just halved a lot of batteries needed. I mean, my top recommendation, honestly, would be just to have a carbon tax. The economy works great.

2:38:50Prices and money are just information. Prices are information. If the price is wrong, the economy doesn't do the right thing. So we got basically an unpriced externality in the carbon concentration in the ocean's atmosphere. It's kind of like not paying for garbage removal or something.

2:39:13Like, OK, everyone's going to throw a garbage in the street. It's like, garbage removal is free. But there's a little bit of like, OK, garbage removal isn't for you. You've got to pay a little bit for this. And because we're not paying for the CO2 capacity of the ocean as an atmosphere, we have what an economics is called an unpriced externality.

2:39:34So the market is unable to respond to an unpriced externality. If we just put a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way. But because we don't have a price on it, and it's doing just baving badly. So theoretically, how would you put a price on that? Would you look at various industries and how they contribute to the CO2?

2:39:57Yeah, I mean, just put it at the point of consumption. And tax it. It ends up being, yeah, electricity and gasoline, pretty much. Now, you could make this an on aggressive tax. You could say, OK, well, what if somebody is driving around a lot and they're low income? It's like, OK, great, give them a rebate.

2:40:14So it's like, tax rebate. That's the way to do it. And then the market will be forced to respond to the fact The market would just this things automatically based on pricing. So markets work great if the pricing is great. It's only when something, you have a tragedy of the commons and the price is not there that

2:40:37the market does not respond. Nor would you expect it to. So if you have like the public toilets problem where it's like nobody's responsible for it, nobody's paying for it. like, okay, we'll probably tell that they're not good. So, as soon as you put a price in it, the right thing will happen automatically.

2:41:01Is there been a response to this? Like, is this something that's- I talked to the Biden administration and coming to the administration and they were like, well, this seems politically difficult. And I was like, well, this is obviously a thing that should happen. And by the way, SpaceX would be paying a carbon tax too.

2:41:15Sure. So I'm like, you know, I'm like, I think we should pay it too. It's not like we shouldn't have carbon generating things. There's got to be a price on this stuff. And that would encourage people to make either carbon neutral or automatically fix the problem. No, for sure. I was thinking about taxes.

2:41:37It's like, here we are drinking alcohol. Now, taxes on alcohol and tobacco are higher than on, let's say, fruit and vegetables. Okay, because everyone knows like food and vegetables are good for you. And alcohol and tobacco are not good for you. Nice. Yeah. So we're like, yeah, you should probably buy us the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco, have higher tax than alcohol and tobacco, and lower taxes are fruits and vegetables.

2:42:08Yeah, it's just sensible. Like same thing goes for our energy. Yeah, that seems very reasonable. I don't understand how that would be politically difficult. I don't know. I talked to the incoming Biden administration. I was like, I just thought, well, for sure. I mean, it's like half the reason they got elected.

2:42:25And even some sort of an incremental increase over time. Yeah, exactly. We don't need to learn people. Yeah, just say it just if you just say it's coming, people will automatically make the changes. That seems so reasonable. Yeah, I agree. And they were like, - They thought it was like too politically difficult.

2:42:44I'm like, I mean, I don't know, man. I think that's like at least half the reason you got elected. So why don't you just fight for that? You know? Yeah, it's a factor. It's the optics where they're the more reasonable people. They're going to bring us back to the Paris Climate Accord and the whole.

2:43:01Yeah. I mean, the thing is, the Paris Accord, that doesn't just a piece of paper unless you do something about it. I mean, it's probably the Paris Accord is, Yeah, it's pretty much toothless, you know. And even if we did that thing, I probably still don't know if, it's just one thing that would matter, put a price in a carbon.

2:43:23That would be the best option. For sure. That seems like it'd be such a good idea. I mean, I think it's obvious move. And if you just call up like, you know, say like top economists, like just do a poll of, like what do 90% of economists think? and they all agree, okay, we should do that.

2:43:43Well, also, if you think about the variability of gas prices, it changes so much. Like, how about the difference between gas in California versus gas in Texas? So, a giant difference. Giant difference. Yeah, you know, by the way, I'm actually not in favor of like demonizing the, well, on gas industry, because we can't like stop instantaneously and not have oil and gas.

2:44:08Right. We'll like diastorivation basically. That's always the argument against it, right? We need fossil fuels and this is sort of the short-sighted argument. We're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time. The question is just what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future?

2:44:30So I think we should probably move there faster than slower. But I mean the current approach is basically just to demonize oil and gas. And I'm like, okay, well, obviously, there are people who spend their whole career and oil and gas and they started out in their career when it didn't seem like that bad of a thing to do.

2:44:55So then they're like, hey man, I just spent my whole career working hard to do useful things and now you're telling me I'm the devil. I may have that's like gonna make them pretty upset you know so I say like instead of demonizing oil and gas which also they should stop lobbying against the carbon

2:45:13tax by the way then just like honestly the smartest thing the oil and gas industry could do we'd say let's do a carbon tax and then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil. Meg is not the devil and they'll still make a fuckload of money. So we'll be fine. We find. Yeah. That seems so

2:45:34reasonable. I can't imagine how anybody would argue against that. That's what I thought. I don't know. I think the Biden administration should take a strong stance on this situation. What political candidates endorsed a carbon tax? Did Bernie Sanders endorse a carbon tax? I don't know. He might have. It seems super reasonable. I mean, I mean, like I

2:45:57I kind of like, even though he's a communist, I kind of like Bernie Sanders. Yeah, I like him too. I think he means well. Yeah, I think he means well. The best part about him. And he's been remarkably consistent in meaning well his whole life. And they kept fucking throwing him right under the bus.

2:46:17Yeah, absolutely. Two election cycles in a row. Yeah, I think it is hilarious that he went to the Soviet Union three days after his wedding for like 10 days. It was like a mayor of a city, like a mayor in Vermont. I'm like, you're a dude. How do you explain days six through 10? Don't you get it?

2:46:40Didn't you see everything you needed to say? That's a long time. I'm like KGB interview is taking that long. Carbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of an industry that is without a doubt causing some problems. I mean, there's no one saying it doesn't cause problems.

2:47:07People would deny the extent of the problem, but no one says that XSCO2 from, you know, from emissions is not an issue. I mean, like, like, like, like, Exxon's own scientists said, in like the, I think like the late 70s, like we think there might be a problem here with climate change due to the CO2.

2:47:29It's like internal, their own documents, their own people, and they were like, be quiet. Isn't it weird when environmental things become political though, when the denial of the environmental thing is like predominantly from some factions of the right, and then, you know, like the opposite is from some factions, and then it becomes a political thing, so they

2:47:48dig their heels in the sand. And they're like, no, no, no. This is fine. This is the way the earth is a cycle, a natural cycle. And it becomes this mantra that they repeat. It's true there is a natural cycle, but that does not explain the situation. Right. The wall. It's a wall, man. I mean, you just look at carbon parts per million, and it just looks

2:48:11like a wall. Like that just goes like blah blah blah. You know, two to three hundred parts per million. Bam, 400. I don't know where. There's also some weird arguments that some people will make in terms of the impact that it has on plant life and that it actually is making the earth greener. Oh, I think that's actually true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's

2:48:35not necessarily okay still causes problems. Yeah I mean I'm trying to be like as precise I mean or at least the least amount wrong that I can be I'm trying to be the least amount wrong. Plants live off carbon dioxide so the more it more CO2 well that does improve plant growth it's true yeah like

2:49:00like I said I don't think based on where we are provided we're not complacent provided we don't take things for granted I think we'll be fine but if we're complacent and we take things for granted and we just proceed like everything's fine and we continue on the momentum of CO2 emissions we're taking a big risk and

2:49:24especially big risk is if there's a non-linear event okay so CO2 PPM Watch for a million has been increasing, you know, pretty reliably two or three PPM per year, but you could have a nonlinear event. What would constitute a nonlinear event? If we melt the Siberian tundra, there's like a massive amount of trapped gas and dead plant

2:49:54matter that's frozen solid. Now if that warms up, and that decays, and that could put a massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, potentially. And then, it's like, how are we, what are the carbon sinks? And if you saturate the carbon sinks, and you have a sudden release of CO2 from something that was previously frozen solid, That's where you could have a non-linearity and things could go haywire pretty fast.

2:50:29What could happen then? I mean, earth it heat up, the water level would rise. You'd have a higher probability of extreme weather events. Sure, we hit the fan. Sure, we hit the fan. Sure, we hit the fan. Like, I'm not saying for sure, sure we hit the fan, but I was saying like the probability increases with time.

2:50:53So you can't just change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and oceans and expect nothing going to happen. This is just a chemical reaction, man. It's like, yeah. Is there anything to think of? It's like, why are we even running this experiment? Right. So the crazy thing is like, hey, we know we need to have a sustainable energy economy long term because we're going to run out oil.

2:51:17So then we got, we're running this crazy experiment to see what is the effect of massively, of taking billions of tons of carbon that was deep underground, putting in the atmosphere and oceans, and what's going to happen is result that. And it's a crazy, it's like literally the craziest experiment in human history because

2:51:41we know no matter what that we have to have a sustainable energy future, we have to, otherwise civilization will collapse. So what the hell are we running this experiment for? Because we're accustomed to doing things a certain way. This is going to go down as the most foolish experiment in the history of human civilization.

2:52:02Is it possible to create some sort of carbon extraction technology that will significantly impact the amount of CO2 that's in the air or mitigate the emissions? Yeah, I mean, so I just actually announced that I'm funding this $100 million carbon capture prize to find out the answer to that question.

2:52:30So right now, all of the carbon capture methods that we're aware of are very expensive. The cost per ton is very expensive. And then even if money's not an issue, you have to say, OK, how much wind or solar energy was required to pull carbon out of the atmosphere And I don't know, make it in solid form, make a cube of it or something, just a giant cube.

2:52:56We don't actually know the answer to that question. That's why I'm giving 100 million dollars to this carbon capture price to try to get a better answer. But there's nothing good that we're aware of right now. Not currently. Not currently that we're aware of. Because there's a point of diminishing returns, the amount of energy that you would need in order to.

2:53:13You basically, CO2 has a very low energy state. And naturally, so it's like you burn something, you combine oxygen with fuel, with hydrocarbons, and the net result is CO2 and H2O, basically, and there's a bunch of other stuff too, but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water, mostly carbon dioxide.

2:53:40So obviously it goes from a high energy state, we use that to power our cars or our power plants, and then it ends up in a low energy state, which is CO2 in the atmosphere. And then, like I said, much more gets in the ocean. So naturally, that therefore requires a lot of energy to rebind that in solid form.

2:54:00It doesn't want to just, you've got to put a lot of energy in to bind it. And then you want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for a long time. This is a hard problem. There was a concept. I don't know if it was implemented, but in China they developed essentially like a giant building that was, you know, you wear this?

2:54:25I don't know if they actually did it. Did they want, we talked about this before Jamie, did they ever wind up doing that? It was like a building that was essentially like a giant air filter. And they were gonna use it, but that might have been about particulates more than it was about CO2.

2:54:42Right, maybe more of it. By the way, I have to be, you know, Say a good word here for China. China has the Some of them for any large economy has the most progressive Pro-environmental rules of any large economy really yeah They're like super supportive of electric vehicles of solar power of wind

2:55:05They actually even made a giant solar field in the shape of a panda, which break you So, and it's actually funny thing that happened. Like for a long time, China was like not, you know, was not buying into the carbon thing. You know, like they were like, oh, it's just like a bunch of soft westerners there.

2:55:23Like they're just a bunch of environmental softies. And then at some point, like, senior members of the Chinese government, they, you know, they say, well, let's like ask the, you know, engineering professors like at the university. Like, what do they think? Oh, yeah, no, it's definitely real.

2:55:40Like, wait, you mean it's real? Well, like, yeah, yeah, it's real. And then like, holy shit, immediate change. Well, that's the power of having the government in business inexorably intertwined, so they can kind of decide how business is gonna react and what's gonna happen, right?

2:55:57Yeah, I think people don't realize, China is super pro-environment right now, like way more than America. Is that their thing? The skyscraper size air purifier is the world's tallest. Look at that thing. So that's an air purifier. But that's the thing is like is that pulling particulates out of the atmosphere or is that actually taking carbon out? You know an air purifier.

2:56:19So, air purifier not. It's super hard to capture carbon. Look at that. Jesus Christ imagine falling into that. I mean naturally it's just fundamental thermodynamics like you know you release a lot of energy that resulted in the CO2. So now you got to use a lot of energy to capture it.

2:56:42Yeah. Made a particulate matter no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter. Yeah. Yeah. That's like a hard, particularly difficult to filter two microns. Oh, you know, so I don't know. Most people probably don't know, but like model S and X have a hospital grade HEPA filters, so and they will actually drop the

2:57:08two mark on PPM level to almost undetectable in the car. Really? Yeah. So if you're in some sort of a biological disaster area, you can drive through your Tesla. Yes. It's literally this like biohazard defense mode where it basically pressurizes the car. So it's like the car is is that under positive pressure with all the air coming through a gigantic HEPA filter.

2:57:35And then even the air inside the car is recirculating in a secondary filter. It's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far. It literally hospital-grade. You could do an operation in the car. It's insane. That's awesome. Yeah, we've got a little carried away. I'm glad you get carried away.

2:57:54You know the other thing I thought is that Jamie's got the X. And one of the things I love about the X is when it gets hit, they literally can't flip over. Oh yeah. It's like one of those things that you punch the thing and it just comes back up. Yeah, they couldn't flip it over in the test.

2:58:12So it would roll on a side and then roll back. And it's amazing. It's a very low center of gravity. That's giant. Yeah, exactly. That is so fucking cool. That's so fucking cool. It's not exactly it's rolls back on. I mean, there's not another car like that in the world. No, every other car in the world would just fucking roll.

2:58:35It's pretty amazing, man. Yeah, even if you did manage to bang it on the roof, it like you can stack like five cars on top of a Model S or X. Wow. No, you guys still making the X? Yeah. You're still gonna do the crazy doors? The crazy doors. Those doors are exercising hubris. That's for sure.

2:58:55Well, that's a lot of things you do. There's an exercise in hubris. Well, some things are really important and necessary. Some things are, you know, some things are not necessary. So the doors, but the thing is... The doors are not necessary, but they're very cool. I'll say functional though, if you're in a tight spot.

2:59:18Yeah, those doors will open up tighter than almost any door out there. Like you can even, they'll open up in 18 inches. You got an 18 inch gap between you and the next car, that door will open. That's pretty amazing. So, we developed, I mean, just in order to avoid having a puck,

2:59:39like an ultrasonic puck in the door, we developed the best of my knowledge. What's an ultrasonic puck mean? So, like the ultrasonic sensors that you have in a car, if you look carefully, you'll see that there's a little puck, like a little isolation ring, like a rubber isolation ring.

2:59:55And that's when the sonar, which is like basically a loudspeaker, is generating ultrasonic noise and then listening to the echoes. But normally, in order to listen to the echoes, you've got to isolate the thing that's generating the sound. So that's why if you look carefully around how as you'll see these little pucks, these little circles.

3:00:17And those are the ultrasonic sensors. And we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door, but we also didn't want the door to bat some kid out of the way. It's like just doofy. There's a haymaker or something. So we developed the best amount of knowledge. The only ultrasonic sensor that can see through metal.

3:00:42So it's mounted on the inside of the door on isolation mounts, and it's super loud and then it's got cancellation because it's kind of basically screaming at itself and it's listening for a tiny echo on the other side of the metal just to avoid having a little rubber ring in the bottom of the door. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

3:01:04We put in a capacitive sensor, an inductive sensor, a four-speed back sensor, and ultrasonic so I can see through metal. This is what I say exercise in hubris. I mean, I'm like, Wow. Is that the most ridiculous car you've created? Yeah. This is a Faberge. The Model X is the Faberge Egg of cars.

3:01:24It's crazy. I mean, for like the six-seaters, like for the seats, the seats are on a rear incline single post with the seat movement mechanism hidden in the floor. So if you open the door and you look through, It's completely clean. It's just like in the floors like a knife edge.

3:01:49There's nothing else like it. It's crazy. That windscreen is like a helicopter windscreen. And there's no place to attach the sun visors. So we have to have sun visors that nest in the A pillar rotate forward, have a magnetic attachment that pops out, and it connects to the rear view mirror.

3:02:18But you seem very proud of all that. You say all these details and they sound really crazy. That's great. It's pretty awesome. I mean, the sound system and the X is awesome. I mean, we designed so that the sound system is taking into account the fact that the windscreen is like a giant subwoofer resonator.

3:02:41Like the windscreen is a resonator for the sound system if the sound system is epic in the X It's good on the s2. It's even better in the new s Have you thought about doing a plaid X? Yeah, there's gonna be a plaid X to yeah Which is like bizarrely fast for an SUV that's coming out. Well isn't already bizarrely fast. You said it was preposterous right?

3:03:05Yeah It's like, it really is like, it was two fast probably. Have you increased the range of the X? Like what is the range of the X currently? It's like 300 something? Yeah, 300 something. So it'll be like high 300. And is the difference between the X and the S, the aerodynamics?

3:03:26Like what is the range? Yeah, the X weighs more and it's got a bigger cross-sectional area. So something called the CDA drag coefficient, drag coefficient times a frontal area, is higher for the X as you'd expect and the weight is higher so it's gonna be 10 to 15% less range for the same battery pack as the S. The first time I saw an X Tiffany Haddish had one and she was in the comedy store parking lot and she had it dancing for us. Oh yeah music

3:03:54and dancing like this. A lot of people don't know that the Model X can do this crazy like ballet thing with the fucking dances. Oh yeah. With the doors we're going up and down and the music and we were all dancing in the parking lot to this car. Yeah, it's crazy. What is your, do you have a favorite that you've created?

3:04:14Car, I mean, or? Yeah. Not rocket. That's a little... Well, the car I drive every day, or tend to drive is the high performance Model S. And like the Model S, so the Model S, I basically just said, I don't know what other people like, but I know what I love. And I want to just make a car that's the car that I love.

3:04:47And hopefully there'll be enough people out there who also love the car. So the reason I love the Model S is because I just designed the car that I would love. That's it. And then it's like, OK, well, how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an SUV? Because a lot of people like an SUV, and you've got more seats and more room and a higher seat

3:05:11sitting higher. So, what cool things, what are the cool things, I mean like I said, excising hubris, we just got carried away, what are all the cool things we can think of for an SUV? Frans and I had a lot of discussions about this. And JV struggled back in the day and drew back Lino and Jerome

3:05:39and it's a lot of talented people. Tesla's relative to a lot of talented people, that's for sure. The car that's the most fun to show for others is the Model X for sure. So, it's a great car. But I thought, like, you know, is this really part of our mission? Like we're trying to, the mission from Tesla from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.

3:06:11So, all we really do in the right thing by creating this Faberge egg of cars with the Model X. Ehh, me too. Totally, Frank. It's not entirely consistent without mission because there's too many bells and whistles. Yeah, but isn't it though, because Americans love SUVs and what better way to entice them

3:06:29into embracing sustainable energy than give them the dopest SUV you can buy? Yeah. That's how we justify it in terms of... That means it's not a justification. It's a great carrot. You're dangling an amazing carrot. Yeah. Actually, in terms of, you know, CR2 per mile, also SUVs are like among the worst, you know, like this very, SUVs typically very low mileage, take a lot of gasoline per mile.

3:06:55So, you know, if you're replacing, you know, big SUVs, that's actually like the best thing you could do on a per mile basis. But still, we really got carried away, you know. The Faber-Shay Ag of cars. Nobody's ever gonna make a car like that. Explain to me what the fuck Bill Gates was talking about when he was saying that you can't do trucks.

3:07:17Well, what was... Yeah, I didn't know what he was talking about. Why did he say that then? Like, why would someone... Probably somebody told him that and, you know, he's not... He just repeated it. He's just not that close to the physics of it and so... Because I remember... I don't think he's ill-intentioned here.

3:07:30Right. He just doesn't know what he's talking about. But why say it then? I mean, you're thinking about a guy who's so involved in technology, you would think you would only talk about things you understand. I don't know, I'm swear. I also heard that at one point he had a big short position against Tesla, which was kind of I don't know if that's true or not

3:07:45but it seems weird People I know who know no situation well there that said are you sure they said yeah He's a big short position against Tesla, which obviously didn't work out too well But anyway, I think he's generally got good intentions here. I think he's probably just not Well, I don't hate Bill Gates to be clear. I think he's just probably is no the science

3:08:08Yeah, I just thought it was odd because I knew that you guys were developing this semi. We have prototypes that actually drive. That actually drive. Like we've used them to transport cars and stuff. It's not like a unicorn. Like it was like a Pegasus or something. Like what are you talking about?

3:08:23We literally have prototypes that work. What kind of mileage do those things get? Well, these are prototypes. So they'll be like, you know, I don't know, about 300 miles, something like that. And so we drive them back and forth from Fremont to Reno, you know for transporting stuff. But generally when semi truck drivers, when it's a human being driving them, they drive for long periods of time, far more than 300 miles, right?

3:08:50No, actually most trucking is short range. Really? Yeah, majority. Okay. The majority, like, shipping things around cities and things on those sides. Yeah, it'll be like take stuff from the port to the straightforwarding. Will you have a long range like cross-continental version of it?

3:09:05Yeah, absolutely. And so it'll be much more batteries. And yeah, the, yeah. I mean, you want something on the order of like probably a 500 kilowatt hour pack. Like what we have in the S and the X is 100 kilowatt hour pack. And I probably want like, I don't know, 500 kilowatt hour pack for semi.

3:09:31But this is not a game changer on the mass, especially for a structural pack where the pack itself is, is the structure is the primary load carrying element in the vehicle. Is it potentially? It's not a game. It's definitely works 100% no question about it. Would it be possible to have a safer semi because of this whole way?

3:09:56Well, we can also like you have with the X. Yeah, the center of gravity would be really low. So that would certainly help. We can also We'd have motors individually controlling the wheels so we can just automatically and this was part of our semi presentation We can just the computer will automatically prevent it from jackniping like you know jackniping on a low

3:10:19Traction surfaces like truck drivers worst nightmare, you know, you're like some icy road icy mountainous road but the trailer slides, you know, where jacknives like that and you can slide off the edge of the hill. And you could stop that from happening even on an icy road? Yeah.

3:10:34Wow. So, because you have individual control over each of the wheels. So you can just make sure it's stable and it doesn't do jacknive. Whereas if you've got just one engine, it's very difficult to do that. So... Do you anticipate that eventually these things would be completely autonomous?

3:10:53like some like the one truck drivers. Eventually it will be autonomous, but we're still a way away from that. But in the short time, I think we can certainly see convoys. So, you know, we've got one truck driver and then there's like a whole bunch of trucks following that truck and you know, keeping like a distance so that other cars can pass in between them.

3:11:18It's sort of like having a train, but on the highway. It's like linked where it's just like one, like you got one, you know, truck driver in the front and then a whole series of trucks behind it that are following a convoy. But the trucks behind it are on time. And how much space between you could like, with the

3:11:39Oh, wow. Yeah, and those trucks just follow the lead. And it's just like, it's like having trains on the road. And they'll be following through, like just they know where the trucks ahead of them are at all times. easier to do a follow. You say follow this thing, no problem. What's next after this?

3:12:01Even after what products or something? Ultimately, do you think that you could have planes? I thought about planes for a long time. But my brain will explode if I do planes. literally, it's just like, this is too crazy, man. It's my brain is overloaded. So overloaded because of the complexity?

3:12:33Yeah, it's got too much stuff in my plate. Right. Yeah. I'm glad there's a limit. I'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further. There's only so many hours in the day. Yeah. So I mean, I think there's, there There are improvements happening over time for the energy density of batteries, like the wet hours per,

3:12:58or should really be jewels, but like jewels per kilogram, jewels per liter, it's improving a little bit every year. So planes really need a high energy density, because you got to get up to altitude, because most of the energy is getting up to altitude. And then once you're in a low air density situation,

3:13:21you can cruise along with fairly, it takes very little energy to once you're in cruise. That's a massive amount of energy to get up there. So, man, I thought about this a lot.

3:13:43Yeah. I mean, an aircraft increases in neutral force balance. So it's like, it's not accelerating. So basically, if you've gotten a motor of a given force, then for a given force, you will just go faster as you go higher. So you've got the air resistance. The air resistance is dropping exponentially as you go higher.

3:14:05If you have a constant force from your motor and propeller or turbine, whatever, then you will just go faster. the higher you go, the faster you go, for the same amount of power. So to the key would be achieving a high altitude. Yeah, it's whole about altitude. Like the air is very thick at sea level.

3:14:34Like for the same amount of force that you would go say like half the speed of sound at sea level, you could go twice the speed of sound at like let's say at 100,000 feet. same amount of energy in cruise. This is a fly commercial plane at 100,000 feet. Would that be possible? Oh yeah, yeah.

3:14:57You just go fast. The great thing about that is you could bring flat earthers up there. Ha ha. The faster you go, the higher you go, the faster you want to go. Right. So like you're just thinking about the SR-71 is that it's most fuel efficient speed, was its fastest speed pretty much, or pretty close,

3:15:24because that's when it could go the highest altitude. So because it could go faster at higher altitude, it got better miles per gallon at high speed than low speed. That's pretty wild. So altitude, because air density decays exponentially, and drag increases with the square. And so the exponential beats the square.

3:15:48Do you think there would ever be a time where Tesla could run itself in a sense of like you have enough talent that people running it and you wouldn't have to devote all your resources to to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes? Yeah, I mean I'm committed to run Tesla for several years into the future.

3:16:12And there's still a lot of things we got to get done. could Tesla possibly expand the planes? It could. It is a different regime. I mean, there are no car companies that are aircraft companies, really. But I think there is a way, ultimately, to have a vertical take over landing supersonic electric jet.

3:16:44Wow. That would be cool. But what about the weight? That's where energy density of the pack is important. You need to get high. Quickly. Get high fast.

3:17:12And you can get rid of most of the things that are on a plane. If you gimbal the fan, you have the fan change direction, like you do with a rocket. You don't need like a rudder and you mostly don't need an elevator. You just need like some trim tabs. You basically have a flying wing.

3:17:37It's pretty easy to do a flying wing. Or a flying wing with a little bit of fuselage. So you make it lighter, make the pack structural as well. So the pack is the wing. You've got to basically pull a few tricks like that. is all about like, how do you make the non-cell portion of the aircraft as light as possible?

3:18:09Anyway, this is like a lot of regulatory things you have to go through and this is counting on a White House per kilogram. You'd want White House per kilogram at the pack the pack level to be over 400. Yeah. So we're pretty close to that. So it's like it's, you know, at the pack level, not at the cell level, but at the pack

3:18:36level and with high cycle life. Well, listen, you're doing plenty. You don't necessarily have to get into planes right now. Yeah. I think you're busy enough. This will be the last of the things, cars and trucks and then boats and then planes. Well, it's interesting because plane technology in terms of what commercial air travel has probably increased, at least visibly, to the consumer, the least in the last 30, 40,

3:19:1050 years. It's not much difference, the experience. Yeah. Pretty similar. Yep, in fact it's got slower. Right after the Concord. So right after the Concorde. I know you were the Concorde. Like the 747 was the fastest plane. Oh really? Yeah. Had a swept wings. So the wing sweep, like what's the wing angle?

3:19:30That's a big factor in what its cruise speed is going to be. So the 747 had a pretty steep wing. But its fuel efficiency is not as good as something like, you know, 777 or 787. I mean, there's some basic things in physics that are present almost everywhere. They sometimes take different form, but they're basically referring to the relationship between momentum and kinetic energy.

3:20:04Kinetic energy goes as a square of momentum as linear. And then the surface-to-volume ratio. service volume ratio and the momentum to kinetic energy ratio drives so much of mechanics is insane. It's like the reason that you don't have a single cell creature that is gigantic is because of surface volume ratio.

3:20:32There's a certain service volume ratio where diffusion works, and beyond that, diffusion does not work. you have to have a circulatory system. For aircraft or just generally you want to move a large mass of air slowly so you can reduce the velocity component of kinetic energy which

3:20:55goes as the square. You want to move a large amount of mass slowly, not a small amount of mass fast. So the way you make aircraft engines more efficient is you move a lot of air slowly, Like big fans, basically big slow fans, work great. Small, tiny, fast moving jets are very inefficient.

3:21:16So like, something like a 777, it's really just a propeller in a shroud. High bypass ratio. It's called a bypass ratio. Like how much of it is jet versus propeller? You want it to be mostly propeller. So this is clearly something you've been thinking about a lot. Oh sure, yeah, like for 13 years.

3:21:43Do you think it's going to be the next thing for you? No, I hope not. I hope not. There's some smart people I have to try and tackle it in. I think I hope they are successful. But just try to get high. Get high. Go fast. Get high. You will automatically go fast as you go higher.

3:22:05It's just air density is dropping exponentially. And you think of like in the limit, you got like a satellite. Satellite's going around the low earth over satellite's going around the earth 25 times the speed of sound. No propulsion. So if you get high enough, you just keep going.

3:22:26Obviously, you just want to go super high or the better. Now, like I said, why don't planes do that already? Well, so if you've got a combustion engine, it's got an aperture issue. So you're like, okay, how big is the hole in which you're ingesting air? And then bear in mind, air is mostly nitrogen, not oxygen.

3:22:47So you got a lot more chaff than you got wheat. And that's why, you know, it's like you're gonna design, and this thing's gonna work at sea level, it's gonna work in altitude, and then it's gonna drop off in efficiency quite a lot as you go higher. Otherwise, and then there's also like, if the air, some other issues are relating to depressurization, like how fast can you

3:23:10descend. But you really just want to go super high. And it's very difficult to design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitude. So like the air density at a hundred thousand feet is approximately 1% at sea level. So how the hell do you design a combustion, like an air burning, it's like an air, an air, there's something that's taking an air of combining with fuel and burning to work when you have a hundred fold difference in air density.

3:23:45Those like, this is an intractable problem. But if you have an electric fan, it's not burning anything. So aperture doesn't matter. It's a big deal. It seems like it would be the best way to fly. Yeah. Someone can figure out how to do it. We're like well over three hours in here.

3:24:07Wow. Amazing. That flies when you're here. Yeah. Wasted. Well thank you very much. As always it's a pleasure. Always fun to talk to you man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you're welcome. If you ever want to talk about something, I'm here for you. Thanks. Alright, thank you. Alright. Bye everybody.