EP #1 How to Save the World w/ Elon Musk

In this episode, Peter and Elon discuss what it will take to remove carbon from the atmosphere. You will learn about: How to solve climate change Can we save the planet? The impact of population collapse on society The next generation of world changers The ‘Carbon Removal’ X Prize Elon Musk is a businessman, founder, investor, and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Neuralink, and OpenAI, founded SpaceX, and is the CEO of Tesla inc. Check out Elon’s XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk Listen to Moonshots & Mindsets on: Diamandis.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages, all to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, going to Mars reads like that ad book for Shackleton going to the Antarctic. You know, it's dangerous. It's uncomfortable. It's a long journey. You might not, you know, come back alive.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  But it's a glorious adventure, and it'll be amazing, an amazing experience. And your name will go in history. Yes, you might die. And it's gonna be uncomfortable. And we probably won't have good food, and all these things, you know.

• 0:55Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm gonna do. This is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 1:08Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I'd like to share with you a conversation I had with Elon Musk in spring of 21, when we were in Florida near Kennedy Space Center. It was the morning before SpaceX launch. And we were launching a $100 million Gigaton Carbon Removal X Prize. If you don't know X Prize, it's an organization I started 28 years ago, where we challenged the world to solve the biggest problems on the planet. And there's no question that, you know, what's going on in the environment is one of our greatest challenges. I had a conversation with Elon a few months earlier about, you know, putting forward a $100 million prize to address carbon removal on the atmosphere. And literally a week later, he said, yes, let's do it. So if you don't know X Prize,

• 1:53Peter Diamandis?

  that's what we do. We put up grand challenges around the planet. You can check it out at xprize.org. This is a challenge in which we've already gotten 1,200 teams from around the world, almost every country coming into this, student teams, professional teams. We've given away $5 million of the $100 million prize to student teams already. We've given away $15 million to the top 15 teams, a million dollars each. The remaining 80 million is on the table for the team that can actually demonstrate megaton carbon removal, that can scale to gigaton carbon removal. Check out this conversation. I hope you like it. Please give it a thumbs up so others can hear about it. And check out Xprize.org as well. Thanks. Welcome. Welcome, everybody.

• 2:38Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to a special livestream on Earth Day.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Here we are on Earth.

• 2:43Peter Diamandis?

  On Earth in a beautiful nature preserve. Yeah, couldn't do it better for 21 Earth Day.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50Peter Diamandis?

  Here to talk about the launch of the largest prize ever. A $100 million X Prize for carbon capture. And here with a very special guest. Probably one of the greatest innovators and engineer of our time. The CEO of Tesla, of SpaceX, of a bunch of other companies. And someone I'm proud to call a friend. Elon.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Hey, Pierre.

• 3:09Peter Diamandis?

  Good to see you.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 3:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's the perfect setting for our conversation today.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've known each other for a long time now.

• 3:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. 21 years, I think. It was like 2000?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, whoa, it is. I think it was 2000 in like Brazil.

• 3:24Peter Diamandis?

  Brazil.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Actually, a similarly nice sort of setting.

• 3:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was a day of his birthday.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Florianopolis.

• 3:31Peter Diamandis?

  In Florianopolis.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're trying to convince me not to start a rocket company.

• 3:35Peter Diamandis?

  I was trying to convince you to fund the original X Prize before I met Anusha.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but you also like really advised me not to start a rocket company because I would lose all my money, which I thought you're probably right. So I thought, you know, a 10% chance of success. But anyway, seems to have worked out.

• 3:50Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sure glad you didn't follow my advice.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. So we're going to talk a little bit about the rules. Try and encourage teams around the world to register for this thing. And there's many innovators, students talking about it.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, our goal is like basically to do something that have it be sort of interesting, fun, and ultimately useful. And to spur creative ideas for what is actually the smartest way to take the trillions of tons of carbon that we've removed from the ground and will remove from the ground, from deep, deep underground. And we've placed that carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, which obviously changes the chemical constituency of the surface of the Earth.

• 4:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  And now I should sort of...

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Measure my statements in that I think we the Earth I don't think we're currently doomed, to be clear. Very importantly, you know, there are people in all parts of the spectrum ranging from nothing to worry about CO2 is just makes things better to we're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. I am somewhere in the middle. So my concern with the CO2 is not kind of where we are today or even the current rate of carbon generation, but really if it if we if carbon generation keeps accelerating

• 5:25Speaker 01

  and we keep getting a that increase in the Keating curve, you know, the CO2 possibility in the atmosphere, and if we keep going and if we're complacent, then I think we could there are some risk of of sort of nonlinear climate change. So so, you know, thus far, we've seen the CO2 possibility be fairly linear on our time scale, although it looks very exponential on geologic time scale. And but there are certain potential nonlinear events like if we raise the temperature to the point where we melt the Siberian Traps or something like that.

• 6:10Peter Diamandis?

  And methane escapes, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's just a massive amount of sort of frozen dead plant and animal matter in Siberia. There's potentially trapped gases deep in the ocean if the ocean warms that could be released. So, you know, this is just these are just risks that are not wise to take. And since we know that long term, we're going to have to have renewable energy anyway.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Because we'll run out of oil and gas. It's not going to last forever. So we know where this ends up. This has to end up with renewable, sustainable energy. It's tautological. Really just a question of do we try to get there sooner or later? And we should just try to get there sooner. It's obvious. Why run the... How long do you want to run this experiment?

• 7:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's also true that even if we stopped CO2 production, that's probably still not enough. That we do need mechanisms for extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans that don't exist right now.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  You know, as I said, I am... People sometimes think I'm sort of like... I'm kind of in the middle of the spectrum, you know? I think if we stop CO2 production today, which obviously we cannot do without civilization coming to a grinding halt and mass starvation and all sorts of terrible things happening. So we could not stop CO2 generation today. But I think at the, you know, at the sort of 400, possibly even 500 ppm level, I think it's probably okay. But if, you know, as the world industrializes and we're sort of at 8 billion people, get to 9 billion people, have a lot more industrial output per person, you could see the, you

• 7:57Speaker 01

  know, at what might be okay, sort of 400, 500, possibly millions of CO2 in the atmosphere might become quite dire at 1,000.

• 8:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And the trend is certainly in that direction if we don't do anything about it. So that's why I think it's just probably an unwise experiment to run. Even if you think that the... This is why I think it should be a compelling argument to even those who would assign a low probability to increase CO2 causing problems. Like, let's say you think it's 99.9% likely that adding all the CO2 to the ocean's atmosphere is going to be fine. So you're saying there's a 0.1% chance of disaster?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, there's only one, right now we only got one planet. Even a 0.1% chance of disaster, why run that risk? It's crazy. So, um, so I think what's likely to play out is that we will continue to add a lot of, a lot more CO2 to the ocean's atmosphere. And also, you know, ocean acidification, as you know, is also an issue. It's, you don't want to, you don't want to sort of add carbonic acid to the oceans and change the pH level, because it destroys reefs and all that, so.

• 9:18Peter Diamandis?

  Which it's actively doing right now as we're watching.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 9:22Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I remember when I first met you, Elon, you had, it was about 2000, and I remember you had two massively transformative missions. It was one, making humanity multi-interplanetary.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Peter Diamandis?

  And the second was bringing us to a sustainable economy.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:38Peter Diamandis?

  A sustainable energy economy.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 9:39Peter Diamandis?

  And I think you've done pretty damn good. Are you, are you happy with the progress you've made?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think it's, uh, it's hard to complain, this, you know, the outcome so far has been, been great. Although, obviously, you know, we've, we've not, we're not yet sent anyone to Mars.

• 9:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And, um, and hopefully will in the future. And, um, in fact, just, uh, a few days ago, or last, early last, late last week, I guess, NASA awarded SpaceX the contract.

• 10:08Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome, 2.8, 2.9 billion dollars?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Peter Diamandis?

  For the next lunar lander?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so SpaceX, SpaceX craft will be the, the next craft to put humans on, on the moon, and I believe the first human will be a woman, actually, this time.

• 10:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Uh, this is very, this is great.

• 10:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  So, um, but of course, we have to actually do it. Um, and, uh, and then we've got, tomorrow, we've got the, uh, our third astronaut launch to the space station.

• 10:34Peter Diamandis?

  Before we dive into the, to the carbon removal rules and so forth.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's obviously, it's a bit of a economy, because our rockets do produce carbon, you know?

• 10:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, true.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  And they're like, holy, what a hypocrite.

• 10:43Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, no, no.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  He's obviously just, he's obviously just there for the money, um, but.

• 10:48Peter Diamandis?

  But let's talk about, let's talk about the crew two, the crew two mission.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I feel like I should address this, this, you know, being a hypocrite by launching rockets that, that produce carbon. Here, here's, the problem is, right now, there is, there's really no way to get around the physics of a rocket. So, uh, I think it's important for the long-term.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Preservation and ultimately the expansion and extension of the scope and scale of consciousness. And the long term, probably the survival of humanity and life as we know it, we must become a multiplanet species. Because there are all these risks that we can't control. Existential risks. Asteroid strikes. Yeah, yeah, there's like. Super volcanoes. You know, we have World War III or something, you know, there's. Like, I'm optimistic about the future, but you could also say like, okay, well, so how long do you think civilization will last before there's a catastrophic event? If you say infinity, this is not correct. Yes. Okay. This is not, history does not suggest that.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  History just suggests we do dumb things to civilizations all the time, you know, and there's the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, ancient Romans, where are they now? Let's do the video series, where are they now? Babylonians, Sumerians, you name it, you know, so there's been many civilizations that risen and fallen. Anyway, we're going to preserve, we're going to become multiplanetary, and right now the only way to do that is with rockets that do burn fuel. But we do have a long term plan for sustainability of even rocket flights by generating propellant

• 12:25Speaker 01

  using sustainable energy, wind and solar, to generate, starting first with liquid oxygen. And for our starship vehicle, it's almost 80% liquid oxygen and 20% liquid methane. And the oxygen, it's obviously pretty easy to create that, you just use wind and solar electricity and you do air separator, because you've got the oxygen already in the air, the plants are making the oxygen, so you can just use electricity, basically, renewable electricity, to create 80% of the propellant on the rocket. And then for the remaining 20%, you can use the Sabatier process where you take CO2 out of the atmosphere and you combine that with water to create CH4 and more O2.

• 13:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And that's in fact what we would do on Mars.

• 13:13Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  To generate propellant.

• 13:14Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  So there is a long-term plan for sustainable generation of propellant for the rockets. I do want to emphasize that. And if there's some other way to do that now, we certainly would.

• 13:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  But I'm just trying to sort of address this apparent inconsistency in, you know, if generating carbon is bad, why are you doing that with rockets?

• 13:34Peter Diamandis?

  And listen, I think it's a moral imperative for the human race to be able to move off Earth while we have the opportunity. Everything we know is right here.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And just because it's like, it's not just one or the other. Sometimes it feels like, oh, is this some escape hatch for rich people? No. No, you know, they think, it's like, so, you know, going to Mars reads like that ad book for Shackleton going to the Antarctic. You know, it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable, it's a long journey, you might not, you know, come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be amazing, an amazing experience.

• 14:12Peter Diamandis?

  And your name will go in history.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yes, you might die, and it's going to be uncomfortable, and you probably won't have good food, and all these things, you know? So if an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure, sounds appealing.

• 14:28Peter Diamandis?

  And you still have thousands of volunteers, if not millions of volunteers who would want to go.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. It's tough sledding over there, you know?

• 14:39Peter Diamandis?

  We're an exploring species.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. We don't want to make anyone go, so it's like, volunteers only.

• 14:47Peter Diamandis?

  You have a Dragon capsule on the pad. Crew two is nominally, or you still go for launch tomorrow?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:54Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome. You want to just spend two minutes talking about the Crew Two mission?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've got, hopefully, a great mission planned for tomorrow. This will be our third flight of people to the space station. We had the test mission with two astronauts, then the first sort of operational mission with four, this second operational mission with four. It's an international crew.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Great group. I was just looking online, they're sort of, you know, picking their, sort of, hopefully not final meal, but, you know, they give them whatever their favorite food is, you know, from their country. So, I'm actually heading over there tonight just to wish them well.

• 15:35Peter Diamandis?

  I was out at pad 39A to see the stack yesterday. A couple of things, one, pad 39A historic.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is where people went to the moon.

• 15:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Apollo 11.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  From that pad.

• 15:46Peter Diamandis?

  From that pad, the first space shuttle launch back in 81, STS-1. And so, it's a lot of, like, karmic responsibility to be operating from there.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like Times Square, the Times Square of launch pads.

• 15:58Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing, amazing. And the first stage has a beautiful patina on it.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  It does, it's, yeah, it'll be, it's a reused stage, so, when the stages come back, they kind of get scorched. So, the black, so much people think, is that sort of something, no, that's, it got scorched from reentry.

• 16:19Peter Diamandis?

  Your team said they used to wipe it off to clean it, and then it's just like, why bother?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  It's kind of hard to wipe off, it doesn't wipe off easily. Because it's kind of like baked on there.

• 16:27Peter Diamandis?

  And it's interesting.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  You kind of have to repaint it, really.

• 16:29Peter Diamandis?

  We were having a discussion about, is it safer to use a stage that's flown already versus a used stage?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I think, what we'd say is like flight proven.

• 16:39Peter Diamandis?

  Flight proven, yes.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, if this was an airplane, do you want to be on the first flight of that airplane when it comes out of the factory? Or do you want to be on a later flight? I'd say, let somebody, you know, let the test pilots do their thing before you, you know, fly a plane. So, flying a plane, you want to see that plane is flown a few times before you get it, I think.

• 16:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  So, I think it should be on balance better.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And then, and then we'll also be reflying the, start reflying the spacecraft as well.

• 17:08Peter Diamandis?

  The Dragon, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  The Dragon spacecraft.

• 17:10Peter Diamandis?

  Beautiful.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So, we're trying to get, reusability is obviously very important, you know, in many arenas, so reusability is important. And reusability in rockets is important.

• 17:18Peter Diamandis?

  I remember being in Hawthorne, seeing your first, your Falcon 1 there, and it was just amazing.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  There's some funny pictures of, of basically the sort of SpaceX as a, as a kind of like a kindergartner.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And me, but me being like, whatever, 20 years younger.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And yeah, we're just in this tiny little warehouse in El Cindó.

• 17:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember it well. Before we go to jump into the guidelines, one last question, update on Starship. Because that's what, I mean, Starship's taking us to the moon, taking us to Mars.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  That's it all.

• 17:52Peter Diamandis?

  And it's the, it is audacious. Can you compare it to the Apollo?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  It is audacious, yes.

• 17:56Peter Diamandis?

  Compare it to the Apollo vehicle, the Saturn V, for a comparison for a second, for folks to know, get a sense of it.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Sure, well, I think the thing that's least obvious from when it's on the ground, from the front of videos and pictures, is the size of it. So, it's gonna be the largest flying object ever. So it'll be twice the thrust and weight of the Saturn V.

• 18:18Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  So, that's, and taller. So, including the launch escape tower, so it's a very tall rocket.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  120 meters tall and...

• 18:30Peter Diamandis?

  And because it's so wide, the proportions are obscure that fact, how big it is.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can see in some of the pictures that have been released when it's landing on the moon, and the people look like ants. It's a big rocket. This rocket is capable of, you know, at least 100 tons and probably closer to 200 tons of useful payload to the surface of the moon. So, we're designing to be far in excess of NASA's requirements. And so, it's really intended to be something that, you know, that can enable a permanently occupied base on the moon. So, you know, we've got a permanently occupied base in Antarctica, and it would be great to have one on the moon as well. And you can do, you know, I think, a lot more research if you have the scientists actually there.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And we can have some very powerful telescopes.

• 19:22Peter Diamandis?

  No, the moon, you know, there's some great sayings from Robert Heinlein that said, you know, "If God had wanted humanity to have spaceflight, she would have given us a moon."

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Exactly.

• 19:34Peter Diamandis?

  It's a great staging place.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Exactly, it's just off the coast.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Mars is much, much, much, much further. Actually, more important than the size of Starship is the fact that it is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable. So, this is the fundamental Holy Grail breakthrough needed for access to space. To make humanity a true spacefaring civilization, we must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. Now, we've made some progress in that direction with Falcon 9, where the booster is reusable and the Dragon spacecraft upper portion is reusable. But the second stage is not reusable.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  And I would say right now, I would not say the Falcon booster spacecraft and faring, they're not rapidly reusable. Like, it takes a fair bit of effort, much less effort than the Space Shuttle took.

• 20:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  But nonetheless...

• 20:36Peter Diamandis?

  That was a turnaround every year or so.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. We had four, and it took a year to turn them around. We're getting it down to a few months, basically, and soon, like, probably under a month to turn around a booster. But landing out to sea, and then having to bring it back, and then sort of taking a month or so to get it ready for launches, still, I wouldn't call that rapid by aircraft standards. Whereas Starship is intended to be both fully and rapidly usable. So, the booster comes right back to the launch pad, literally is caught by the launch tower.

• 21:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  So, it lands and is actually caught by the launch tower arms, aspirationally. I mean, this should be sitting...

• 21:24Peter Diamandis?

  That looks like science fiction.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Exciting guaranteed.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  So, the booster gets, it comes back about six or seven minutes later, and is caught, so it's right there, and then caught by the launch tower arms and placed right back onto the launch stand.

• 21:39Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And then the ship is, I actually want the ship also to be caught by the launch tower. Now the ship will take, it takes at least ninety minutes to orbit the Earth.

• 21:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And we may take more than one, it may take three or four orbits to get the ground track realigned with the.

• 22:00Peter Diamandis?

  Landing zone, yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Landing zone, depending on where you are. But the point is that the ship will come back and be right, land right by the tower and be placed right back on, and so.

• 22:11Peter Diamandis?

  Like a seven sixty-seven, just refuel and go.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  It's intended to be such that the booster can be used, I don't know, a dozen times a day, and the ship.

• 22:21Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  The ship could be, you know, like basically every couple hours, and that's mostly about reloading propellant and mounting the ship. And then the ship could probably be used, you know, probably every, in theory, every three hours if you can make the ground track match, but certainly every, say, six to nine hours, or call it twice a day for the ship. And we'll make more ships than there are boosters. So, and I think if, once we have the floating space platforms, we can set the, put the position them such that the ship can come back in a single orbit.

• 22:58Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  So then it could be like, you know, let's say if you get three ship launches per day, that's a thousand flights a year, each with a hundred to a hundred and fifty tons.

• 23:08Peter Diamandis?

  Now we're talking a real space program. So Elon, this is the largest prize ever, ever, largest incentive prize ever, and I would argue for one of the most largest civilization-scale challenges we have.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:22Peter Diamandis?

  And we're going to get into the rules in a second so that folks who are looking at creating teams can understand why, why we created those rules. But why did you fund this? Let's start with the why there.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I wanted to spur ideas and thinking about the long-term need to capture carbon, and, you know, I think this is one of those things that's going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is.

• 23:50Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And especially to figure out what the best economics are for CO2 removal.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And all the, think through all the consequences. You don't want the cure to be worse than the disease.

• 24:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So, you know, sometimes people say, well, just plant a bunch of trees. I'm like, that's not so easy, you know?

• 24:12Peter Diamandis?

  A trillion trees.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Sure, exactly. And then you gotta like, okay, well, you need fertilizer, you're gonna water them, where's the water gonna come from? What habitat are you potentially destroying where the trees used to be? It's not, it's not just a no-brainer of just go plant a bunch of trees.

• 24:26Peter Diamandis?

  But it's not to say that's not a good viable option.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  We should plant some trees. I'm in favor of planting trees. It's just not a question of like, okay, you know, there are like vast sections of like the Sahara Desert or, you know, the, some large barren areas, very dry areas in the US, where you couldn't plant a lot of trees, but you're gonna need a lot of water.

• 24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  And you're gonna need, like, you're gonna have to cultivate them. It's not like, they don't just throw some seeds in the ground.

• 24:58Peter Diamandis?

  Or drop them from orbit.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, so just, I think it'd be good to sort of, kind of frame the, frame the debate and understand, okay, what things are really gonna move the needle? How much are they gonna move the needle?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  If we're talking about getting tens or hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in what form will that carbon be?

• 25:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Will it be stable over time? And like I said, like, what is it gonna cost humanity to do? However it's paid for, what is it gonna cost? What's the thing that's gonna be, take the, you know, be most affordable? I think there are a lot of open questions on this.

• 25:38Peter Diamandis?

  There are. Let me, let me chunk the rules for, for those listening. And you and your team, amazing team, and Marcus Extravore and Xenia Tata and their team work really well together. So the first thing is that for a team to win this, and we'll talk about the prize amounts and so forth, they've gotta actually build something that works.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:59Peter Diamandis?

  And demonstrate something that can extract a thousand tons per year, a kiloton of carbon per year as a demo scale model.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think. By the way, we're very much open to adjusting the rules, to be clear to everyone. Like, meaning if things aren't working, or for whatever reason, like, we need to adjust rules, we'll adjust rules. But the fundamental goal is to have spent a hundred million, and actually it'll be probably like a hundred and twenty million, or whatever, with, you know, the cost of managing the prize and everything. So it'll be, you know, at the end of the day, probably something like a hundred and twenty million dollars spent. And hopefully that's spent well and usefully. And that what comes out of it is something that matters to the future. So that's the goal, to be clear. And so if people have, you know, ideas for adjusting the rules...

• 26:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're going out as guidelines, and we're gonna have, I think, till mid-May for get public feedback, tell us if we missed something. We will turn them from guidelines to rules once we get really feedback. And we've gone out to so many amazing climate scientists out there. And it's, yeah, unless the rules need to be valid for the four years of this prize duration.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're super open to critical feedback. Don't hesitate to, you know, yell and say, hey, this is how it should be different in some way, or whatever, you know. The goal is just to, like, let's have it be a useful exercise and have people have a good time trying to figure out this problem. I think it's sort of a, it's a fun problem to try to work on. And, yeah, we just want it to be useful at the end of the day, you know? And have it not be sort of an academic exercise or something that never amounts to anything.

• 27:45Peter Diamandis?

  I think one of the things that you've said, and I've said, is, you know, everything works on PowerPoint.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Everything works on PowerPoint. That's exactly. You can have a PowerPoint presentation for a teleportation system to the Andromeda Galaxy, and even have a simulation of like, look, here we are, boom, you're in the, according to the slide, you're now teleported to Andromeda. And like, but it doesn't actually work, you know?

• 28:03Peter Diamandis?

  So to win this prize, a team actually during the four years has to build something that can, at minimum... Pull out a thousand tons of carbon per year.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:13Peter Diamandis?

  So that they can show us that.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Do they have to? Do they have to pull out a thousand tons or just show that the rate it works?

• 28:19Peter Diamandis?

  No, they have to pull out.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Like a literal thousand tons, we'll weigh it.

• 28:22Peter Diamandis?

  We're.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  On a scale.

• 28:25Peter Diamandis?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna like, you know, maybe we could calculate it to be a thousand tons. But the rate at which, yes. They'll have to run it for a year to get a thousand tons out.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  But maybe if they run it for a month, that's okay.

• 28:36Peter Diamandis?

  Probably it's okay.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I mean, a month, they have, you know, like a hundred tons. And it needs to fit on our weighing machine or something, you know, like, I don't know, we're gonna weigh it somehow.

• 28:49Peter Diamandis?

  We'll use one of your ships.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  We'll go down to shipyard on that.

• 28:55Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, part of the, the actual physically doing it is that they can, they have enough data to calculate costs, which are gonna be important. Uh, but we're, we're not looking for theory, we're looking for practice. And you know how hard it is to make something real?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It's very hard to make something real. I think, in, in my view, prototypes are trivial and production is hard.

• 29:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Um, and there's, the, the general, um, generally people think it's the prototype that is the hard thing. Prototypes are, well, I mean, obviously you're gonna have that 1% of inspiration, but as the saying goes, it's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

• 29:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Um, ideas are plentiful, actually getting it done is very hard. You could say, for example, uh, what about the, you know, the idea of going to the moon? It's easy.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Going to the moon is hard. So it's, that's why, it's not the idea, man.

• 29:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. There's plenty of ideas out there, it's execution. So the second thing.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  This is my idea to go to the moon, I patented it, okay, good.

• 29:55Peter Diamandis?

  See you there.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:56Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, the second thing is, and this is a term that you, that you use first, is that the teams have to be able to calculate the fully considered costs of pulling out the CO2. And what does that mean to you?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think fully considered cost actually just means that if there are, um, you wanna look at both the benefits and the, the cost, actually. So if, uh, if in, um, sequestering carbon or removing it from the atmosphere or oceans, uh, uh, has, has some, uh, perhaps some environmental impact, uh, which might be small, but it's not negative, that certainly needs to be taken into account.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And then by the same token, if what's done is in extracting carbon is a useful product from which you can generate revenue, then that should count too.

• 30:46Peter Diamandis?

  Alright.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  So, I don't know, I'm just sort of saying for argument's sake, like, let's say you could create, you know, construction material.

• 30:56Peter Diamandis?

  Cement.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Cement, yeah.

• 30:59Peter Diamandis?

  Which we just, I'll talk about that later.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Some kind of useful rocks that are useful, or sand, or I don't know. Something that's useful for construction, then you could say, okay, well, this is what we could sell it for, and, you know, and then just fully consider pros and cons and say, okay, this is what, you know, if we need to pay to have it done in the future, which we probably will have to do, then what's the lowest net cost?

• 31:31Peter Diamandis?

  And to be clear, the working teams, what they do has to be net negative, right? It's not a break even, it's not play a thousand tons and then emit a thousand tons. And in fact, one of the things we talked about...

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 31:47Peter Diamandis?

  One of the things we talked about is how...

• 31:50Speaker 01

  It could be worse than a disease.

• 31:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. How long do you need to sequester the carbon for us? We had a big debate. You want to share what you came up with there? What the team came up with?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  The rate of carbon sequestering needs to far exceed the rate at which, say, it is potentially dissolving back into the atmosphere. So, you know, like, if, yeah.

• 32:19Peter Diamandis?

  And so, one of the rules is that you have to sequester for at least 100 years, right? So, we set a target, doesn't need forever, you know, a year is not long enough. So, we said, you have to demonstrate that your methodology is going to contain the CO2 in some fashion for 100 years at least.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe with, maybe there's a small amount that has lasted, maybe it's not perfect. I think we probably don't want to set it to, you know... A hundred percent for a hundred years, but if it's like, I don't know, ninety percent for a hundred years, that's probably okay.

• 32:51Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  You know, so it just needs to be something that if we scaled it up, would it work?

• 32:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and that's the third part.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 32:58Peter Diamandis?

  That's the third part, which is...

• 32:59Speaker 01

  It's a common sense test, really.

• 33:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, and the hardest thing is that the winning team has to prove to our judges that their approach can actually scale to a gigaton level. Otherwise, it's not going to be useful.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, it can't be niche.

• 33:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  It can't be inherently niche.

• 33:17Peter Diamandis?

  And if anybody knows about scaling up, I think...

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Peter Diamandis?

  You do.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, scaling is hard.

• 33:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what the answer is here, really. But I think if a lot of smart people work on this, there could be some really creative solutions.

• 33:32Peter Diamandis?

  Something generally useful for the world in that regard.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, and I think just to be clear, like, we're looking for pragmatic solutions. It doesn't need to be perfect.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  You know, but it's got to be something that just fundamentally, if we scaled it up, would it work? Yeah, that's it.

• 33:48Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about the prizes that are up for grabs. Um, first place is going to be fifty million.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:54Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, which is significant. Our hope is that it's going to attract enough cognitive surplus out there to focus in on this.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:03Peter Diamandis?

  Thirty million for a split between sort of a second, third, and fourth place prize. And one of the things that you and your team put forward is maybe it might be split into different categories. Right? Different approaches.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we want to reward people who have done great work.

• 34:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Uh, fundamentally, I'm open to increasing the prize size too over time. So if it turns out like, hey, somebody really, really kicked ass and somehow there's not a prize for them, I'll add some more to the prize.

• 34:32Peter Diamandis?

  That's extraordinary.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I want somebody to have like, spent like, you know, massive blood, sweat, and tears, have done something useful, and then get nothing for it, that would be pretty bad.

• 34:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  So, but I think also, um, you know, this, somebody's going to probably get a company out of this, you know, because I think this will be a need long-term. And, you know, so...

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And so this is kind of like, you can also think of it as like, you know, free venture money.

• 35:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, non-dilutive venture capital.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, free money for a company.

• 35:04Peter Diamandis?

  And hopefully, we're also creating a massive marketplace and proving to people that there is, there's a there there here.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:10Peter Diamandis?

  So fifty million for the first, thirty million split among second, third, and fourth. In the next year, we're taking fifteen million dollars and distributing a million dollars to the top fifteen teams that appear to be making the most progress, the most real.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Just giving some people some seed money, basically, yeah.

• 35:28Peter Diamandis?

  And then you've set aside five million for student teams.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:31Peter Diamandis?

  Which is real important. You want to talk about student teams? I know you're passionate about that.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we've done a lot of student competitions, for example, Hyperloop. Just trying to, you know, spur ideas in advanced transportation. And it's really just basically an electric car and a vacuum tube.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  To be precise, I mean, and we've had several of them. And, you know, the last Hyperloop competition, they actually got like, I think, halfway to the speed of sound. So, yeah, it's pretty impressive. And as the thing was, you had to get to the fastest speed and then, and then stop without crashing.

• 36:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  So that's pretty, it's kind of exciting. It's like, is this thing gonna, you know, get, what speeds are you gonna get up to? Are they gonna slam the brakes on in time, or is it gonna hit the crash barrier at the end? So it's pretty fun. And then we kind of got to, we put that on pause, and now we're doing tunneling competitions.

• 36:25Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, nice. Change that, yeah, that technology has not changed that much in a century.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  No, honestly, I think we're, we're gonna, you know, I mean, for, I don't know, five or seven years. For a long time, I was like, people asked me, what opportunities do you see? I said tunneling. And they would think I was joking, but I think this is the way to solve traffic in congested cities. And almost every major city is congested. So, and then with, as autonomy gets better and better, and you have robotaxis and everything, the robotaxis will be cheaper than a bus or subway. And people will want it, and it'll take you point to point, you know, even when it's raining and snow. And it's, you know, so it's, it's gonna be better also, I think, for, you know, from a public health standpoint, like if there's another pandemic and, you know, how do you get around? You know, it's like, you, you know, it's just difficult to go in crowded spaces.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  So then, anyway, so I think tunnels are gonna be really important in the future for relieving congestion in cities. So.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  You know, I hope others start tunneling companies and just improve tunneling technology. You can have like these walk tunnels just going all the way through 3D, multiple levels. We're the first operational one in Vegas that's going to go into operation, I think, in a few months.

• 37:42Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we could sit here and talk about macaque monkeys playing pong as well on Neuralink. That was amazing.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:49Peter Diamandis?

  That was awesome. Yeah, but I'm not going to go there. I'm going to focus still on our...

• 37:53Speaker 01

  I played monkey pong against a monkey.

• 37:55Peter Diamandis?

  You did, did you?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  No. But it hadn't practiced as much yet, so now it might be able to beat me. Monkeys have very good agility.

• 38:02Peter Diamandis?

  They've got to catch the branch.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  They can swing through the trees, we cannot. Not very well, you know? Yeah. So I think a monkey actually could play like a fast twitch video game really well.

• 38:13Peter Diamandis?

  That's great.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Maybe better than a human.

• 38:15Peter Diamandis?

  You can sponsor a team.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Esports, it's just monkeys.

• 38:19Peter Diamandis?

  Macaques against the best teams.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, monkeys actually love playing video games and...

• 38:25Peter Diamandis?

  So do my nine-year-olds.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And drinking smoothies. No, it's just like humans. I mean, basically, humans love snacks and video games, and so do monkeys.

• 38:32Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, that's awesome. I just wanted to hit on, there are four categories that teams can put their approaches forward. First is direct air capture. Pull it out of the air. Any comment on that?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Sure, well, you can certainly pull it out. There's lots of ways to get carbon out of the air. It adds over many different ways.

• 38:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, category two is oceans, sort of algae, kelp, plankton. A lot of CO2 in the oceans, people don't realize that. Category three, land, trees. I mean, Mark Benioff has, you know, been backing a trillion trees project, I mean...

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Where are they going to be planted?

• 39:14Peter Diamandis?

  We'll find out.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:16Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, when people say the Earth is being overpopulated...

• 39:21Speaker 01

  It's not true.

• 39:23Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, look out the window, and I know you and I have had this conversation, that you're more worried about underpopulation of planet.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Earth is going to face a massive population collapse over the next 20, 30 years. Massive.

• 39:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And it's this is definitely, you know, well civilization, you know, question of like, civilization can die of the bang or whimper. This would definitely be dying with a whimper.

• 39:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we need.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  The birth rate is very low.

• 39:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's been dropping, right? It used to be five, six children per family. Globally, it's like 2.4. In the US, it's below, below replacement levels.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I mean, in, in, in most of Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, you know, it's, it's well below replacement.

• 40:08Peter Diamandis?

  But I would still say, are you, I mean, when we spoke last about this, are you still a sort of abundance optimist that the world is getting better on many levels?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think the, the world is generally getting better. You know, I have some concerns about advanced AI, like, you know, that, that's a risk. If I say like existential risks, I'd, I'd say super advanced AI is one. And, and probably the second biggest risk after that is population collapse.

• 40:43Peter Diamandis?

  Not asteroid impact?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  No. The population collapse, the thing about demographics and birth rates, you know what's going to happen in 20 years because you know the birth rate last year. It takes like 20 years for a person to grow up.

• 40:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  So, we, we know what the adult population is going to be 20 years from now because we know what kids were born last year. I think it's, we have a serious issue with population collapse. That's far bigger than people realize. And, and, you know, this the, the social networks and everything, I mean, the, the social support networks were not really set up for a, a high ratio of retirees to workers. Somebody, so then...

• 41:25Peter Diamandis?

  Well, thank God we got robots coming in.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the robots, exactly. We'll need those, we'll need those robots. But you don't want to have the, the youth effectively enslaved to take care of the elderly. You know, which is what would kind of happen if you have an upside down demographic pyramid.

• 41:40Peter Diamandis?

  All right, we're going to go to some questions. Let's, we have some over here. The first one is from Chuck Brady in Austin. Chuck is one of our innovation board members, one of the earliest funders that did the background work in the climate. So I found this question super fascinating. So he says, if the bogey is 10 gigatons per year and the global economic output is 87 trillion dollars, at least it has been the last year, then at $200 per ton to sequester, cost sequestration is 2 trillion or about 2% of the global GDP. So it seems like a reasonable drag on overall economy if we could stop or reverse climate change. The shortcoming right now is we don't

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  have a scalable way yet to capture and sequester CO2. So that's the background. That seems like a reasonable estimate. So here's his first question. Should competing teams prioritize scalability over cost? And what lessons from Tesla and SpaceX have you learned to help teams thinking about the design of their solutions?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's not, unless the cost is affordable, it's not scalable. I mean, I thought the prior math was was pretty sensible there. You know, we could, we could afford something perhaps which is 1 or 2% of GDP, but it would be extremely painful if it was 20% of GDP.

• 43:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  We'd start having to cut into healthcare and all sorts of, you know, social care programs. And if it's 200% of GDP, it's not happening at all.

• 43:12Peter Diamandis?

  Chuck has a second question I also thought was really important. He says, while we want the lowest cost that will do a gigaton per year or more, inevitably there are going to be trade offs between cost and scalability.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  No, actually, I think if something's not scalable unless the cost is is low.

• 43:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  So, or at least if the cost at scale is low.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess trust and scalability, you could say like, I could plant a tree. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, yeah, but we just need to solve the problem. And so both cost and scalability need to be addressed. It's like, is it gonna be, remove enough carbon to matter? And can we afford it as a civilization?

• 44:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Those are the two things that matter.

• 44:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And then, just obviously making sure that in supressing the carbon, we're not, at the same time, creating some new environmental issue. So.

• 44:13Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, that's an important point, right? That we're not creating a new environmental issue at the same time that we are.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Or maybe it is, but it can only be, basically, a cure is gonna be much better than a disease.

• 44:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 44:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  So, you know, you take some medication, maybe there's like slight side effects, but you generally want the medication to be much better than the disease.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  So, it just gotta make sense. Like, we can see a path to this, to working at scale and solving a problem.

• 44:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  It has to have some chance of that.

• 44:44Peter Diamandis?

  Peresh Galani from Los Angeles, one of our Vision Circle members, says, "Who do you think should be paying for the cost of carbon capture? Is it government, oil industry, attacks across everyone? Do you have a sense about that?"

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Well, generally, the market system has worked very well when prices are accurate. And the problem we have right now is that we're not correctly pricing the cost per ton of CO2 in the atmosphere or oceans. So, and there are various attempts to try to get at this with subsidies and whatnot, but really, the market system will work well if the, market systems work well if there is not a pricing error.

• 45:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And we have a pricing error in that we are not paying for this externality. It's in classic economics, it's just an unpriced externality in the, we're not paying for our garbage removal. So, then garbage piles up. You know, so.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And so the logical thing to do, and I think the vast majority of economists would agree, is to put a tax on carbon. And then you can find ways with tax rebates and whatnot to make sure it's not a regressive tax, that it does not unfairly, you know, negatively, just proportionally negatively affect people on low incomes with tax rebates and stuff.

• 46:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I think that's the way to, that's the thing that systemically I think is important to address it. If you correctly price something, the market system works.

• 46:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Prices are just information. You have the wrong information.

• 46:16Peter Diamandis?

  Giulio from Dublin says, "Do you expect the technologies coming out of this competition to have any use on Mars, for example?" And P.S. Thank you for what you're doing for humanity.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, so, interesting thing on Mars is that Mars is a primarily CO2 atmosphere, but it also has some nitrogen and carbon and other trace elements. Nitrogen and argon, I should say, in addition to primarily CO2. So in order to produce propellant on Mars, we would take the CO2 from the atmosphere, combine that with water ice. Mars has a lot of ice under the dust.

• 46:57Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing that we didn't, that 20 years ago, that wasn't known. I mean, we're discovering it every place now.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Mars is just, is basically covered in ice.

• 47:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  It's just got dust, too. So, you know, it's hard to see the ice under the dust, but there's, I believe, if you warmed Mars up, you'd have an ocean with an average depth, I think, of almost a mile or something like that.

• 47:21Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  On the northern part of the planet. It's like something like 40% of the planet would have an ocean potentially up to a mile, mile deep or something like that.

• 47:28Peter Diamandis?

  Extraordinary.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Like a, like a lake. It wouldn't be like just a little lake or something like that. So. So you take the water ice, H2O, and you combine that with the CO2 in the atmosphere. You use something like this Bodya process where you run it over a rethenian catalyst and you get basically...

• 47:50Peter Diamandis?

  Methane.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get methane, it's CH4 and O2 oxygen. And that's actually why we designed the starship to use methane oxygen is because we can actually create that...

• 48:03Peter Diamandis?

  And refuel on Mars.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, in fact, literally by pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere, combining it with water and then using that as propellant. And so, actually by its very nature, Mars has to have a sustainable rocket propellant.

• 48:22Peter Diamandis?

  Let's go to India. Rohan Kumar from Mumbai says, "Why don't you simply implement the available technologies on a larger scale?"

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Like which technologies?

• 48:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, tree planting.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I think there should be more trees.

• 48:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think, I would say that there currently does not exist technologies that can scale to the gigaton level at a reasonable cost. And that's the underlying purpose of this competition is to either demonstrate existing technologies can and teams can use whatever technologies they want, or to really innovate and come up with new approaches.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the thing is that generally, if trees can grow somewhere, they usually do grow. You know, they're generally...

• 49:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's no one there pulling them out other than humans in the Amazon.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the Amazon is quite a thick jungle. I've flown over the Amazon many times and that is one hell of a jungle. In fact, you would fly for long periods of time and see nothing, no lights, no fires, no nothing, just darkness. And then eventually like fly over Brasilia, the capital, and like out of nowhere, there's a bunch of lights. But there's just, you know, in order to have a big increase in tree biomass, we would have to irrigate and...

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Provide manure, you know, like basically fertilizer and we'd have to cultivate.

• 49:59Peter Diamandis?

  Make it habitable for the trees to grow.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and then you say, okay, well, what's the energy cost of the fertilizer and the getting the fresh water there and, you know, just making it habitable for trees. It's, you've got to factor in the, you know, the energy cost of fertilizer and the energy cost of the water and all that. So it's like, okay, what's the actual net carbon result? It's not as good as people might think. It's, again, I'm not saying I'm anti-tree, I'm pro-tree. But it would just be very difficult to blanket the Sahara with trees.

• 50:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so this is an important one here. As teams are coming together, so Grant in Washington D.C. says, what is Elon's and Peter's process of building a strong team? And ultimately, I think the quality of your team is everything.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely. That's how you get things done.

• 50:47Peter Diamandis?

  So what you, I mean, when you start a new company like Neuralink or Boring, how do you recruit that first core team?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Neuralink and Boring are very small companies. Like, these are tiny compared to SpaceX and Tesla, which is...

• 51:05Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Well, over 90% of what I do is just SpaceX and Tesla. So, you know, Neuralink and Boring Company are each just a few hundred people.

• 51:16Peter Diamandis?

  But how do you, but these teams are going to be...

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Tesla's 80,000 people.

• 51:19Peter Diamandis?

  That's incredible, dude.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, SpaceX is like over 8,000 people, so...

• 51:25Peter Diamandis?

  But how do you recruit that, your initial team, to work on something? Is it, do you put out word? Do you, do you know somebody typically? Do you build around somebody else? Do you pull from your existing companies?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Well, it varies. I mean, my, I mean, the first company way back in the day, Zip2, what I did was...

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I just wrote software, you know, so I didn't have any money. So I came out to, was at two, I came out to go do grad studies at Stanford. I had a hundred thousand dollars in like student debt and one computer. And I was gonna actually work on advanced capacitors for used electric vehicles.

• 52:08Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that, you're saying that.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, way, way back in the day.

• 52:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  So, and I spent a couple summers working on that before, in Silicon Valley before going to Stanford. And then, that, that summer, I was like, well, you know, the internet's gonna be something that really changes. The, it's gonna be one of the biggest impacts on, on humanity, you know, it's like humanity. Communication will go from being like osmosis to humanity having a nervous system where you could access any part of humanity's knowledge from, from anywhere, from any connection, anywhere. You could be in the middle of the Amazon jungle and have access to all of humanity's information. More, more than if somebody was living in the Library of Congress. So it's like, well, I, I wanna be part of creating that. And so I just started writing software. I've been writing software for a long time, but I actually wrote the first maps and directions on the internet. The first white pages, first yellow pages. By myself.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And then, you know, we hired a few interns, and then my brother joined. Another friend of mine, Greg Curry, who's passed away. And, and then we got some venture funding. I thought it was crazy that these guys were gonna give us like, they gave us like three million dollars. And I was like, this is insane. It's just us and some interns.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And they're giving us three million dollars, this is crazy.

• 53:22Peter Diamandis?

  They must be mad. So I, I think what I'm hearing you say is if, you know, the, the first, most critical part of the team is you, as the, as the founder and the passionate individuals.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not do useful things. For SpaceX, it was just literally like, okay, we, we, we should become multi, you know, multiplanet species and, but, but these are like long answers, so. But, but I think in general, if you wanna recruit people that are, you know, really talented and driven, you have to say, you have to state what, what's the mission, what's the problem we're trying to solve?

• 53:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  And, and, and just be clearly willing to, you know, pour a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it. And have a convincing argument for why it matters.

• 54:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  You know, there's, you know, say like there's three, three major things for.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  In terms of motivation, it's like, first of all, somebody's got to look forward to coming to work in the morning. Like, if they're, like, are they enjoying the work itself intrinsically? That's very important.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And the right work environment can really make a big difference there. I think the idea is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive fair financial compensation, like that they're, that the financial rewards are good and fair. And then third, for the really, for the best people in the world, they'll want to know, is what they're doing going to matter?

• 54:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Like, so if they spend 10 years doing this, will it make a difference to the world? Or, you know, will people notice? Or will it matter?

• 54:56Peter Diamandis?

  Lee from San Diego says, "The X Prize just awarded 20 million in prize money related to carbon removal. Can you explain what the difference is between that and the Musk Foundation's X Prize? We had a $20 million Energy COSIA Prize for pulling CO2 out of the smokestack of a natural gas and coal plant and turning it into a product more profitable in the cost of extraction. And we just, the two teams that won that were creating concrete and they're up in scaling. So it's, you know, now it's, instead of just out of the plants right now, and thank you to Wyoming for their support there, it's now, can we pull it on a global, a global level?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:40Peter Diamandis?

  Nandan from India says, "Can a 17-year-old register, given that I have the resources and ideas?" Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  I think so, sure.

• 55:50Peter Diamandis?

  I think.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  There's no age limit, right?

• 55:52Peter Diamandis?

  There's no age limit, where in fact, student teams are going to be important. Oli from London says, "Technology is a piece of the climate change solution, but how do you change behavior and habits?" What do you think about that?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I think changing people's behavior and habits is tough.

• 56:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Basically, if you're trying to convince people to make life more measurable for themselves, this is a hard argument to win.

• 56:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  So with Tesla, when we created Tesla, we're like, okay, look, we're going to make a car that's exciting and fun and looks good. And then people don't have to, if you're trying to convince people to, that in order to save the environment, you have to wear a hair shirt. And make life miserable and your food's gonna be terrible. It's that's this is an uphill battle, okay? So it tells you like we're just gonna make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars.

• 56:39Peter Diamandis?

  Faster, lower cost for maintenance.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  They look beautiful, they're faster, then they have also, you know, cool advanced technology, more fun. And you don't have to go to gas stations, which are nasty. And so, you know, but you gotta solve long distance problem with superchargers. So I think it is actually, you know, gonna be way more palatable to people if it's a if whatever solution is removing carbon does not make their quality of life worse.

• 57:08Peter Diamandis?

  One last question here from Godfrey in New York. I know Godfrey, he has got ALS. And he is loving his fully self-driving Model S.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Okay, well, it's not fully self-driving yet.

• 57:22Peter Diamandis?

  I know, but

• 57:23Speaker 01

  It's getting there.

• 57:24Peter Diamandis?

  It's getting there, it's getting there. And so he's, I mean, for people who are disabled, it's extraordinary technology, it's coming. And he's a brilliant, brilliant human being. Says, hi Elon, big fan of your work, massively and eternally grateful to you for being a powerful source of inspiration to me. Can you please share who and what inspires you and drives you to be so insanely productive at a superhuman level?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know, I think I was, I was always kind of like a crazy kid, I suppose.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  I was just very curious about the world and

• 57:59Speaker 01

  how do we come to be here? What's the meaning of life and all that? And

• 58:06Speaker 01

  I always had a really intense desire to understand things and learn. Yeah, I mean, I had sort of an existential crisis, I guess, when I was 11 or 12 or something, to try and figure out what it's all about, you know? And ultimately came to the conclusion that we don't really know the answer, but but if we increase the scope and scale of civilization, then we we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here, or even what are the right questions to ask. So therefore, we should strive to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.

• 58:44Peter Diamandis?

  Well, on behalf of

• 58:48Peter Diamandis?

  The human race. I'm happy for everybody watching. Elon, thank you for all that you do. I know you work 24/7 and driven by passion, so.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 58:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I'm just grateful for what you've done and thank you for supporting and launching this X Prize. It's meaningful beyond belief and hopefully now it's everybody else's turn to try and dig in and form teams.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope you all have a good time and get some productive stuff comes out of it. That'd be great.

• 59:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that would be awesome. Elon.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  All right.

• 59:19Peter Diamandis?

  Thanks, Peter. My pleasure. Thank you.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.