#252 – Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI

Elon Musk is CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and Boring Company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – ButcherBox: https://butcherbox.com/lex to get offers & discounts – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off – ROKA: https://roka.com/ and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Elon’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:38) – Elon singing (08:26) – SpaceX human spaceflight (15:12) – Starship (23:48) – Quitting is not in my nature (25:23) – Thinking process (34:56) – Humans on Mars (40:27) – Colonizing Mars (44:13) – Wormholes (48:50) – Forms of government on Mars (55:54) – Smart contracts (57:24) – Dogecoin (58:55) – Cryptocurrency and Money (1:05:04) – Bitcoin vs Dogecoin (1:07:47) – Satoshi Nakamoto (1:10:10) – Tesla Autopilot (1:13:16) – Tesla Self-Driving (1:25:19) – Neural networks (1:34:16) – When will Tesla solve self-driving? (1:36:19) – Tesla FSD v11 (1:43:53) – Tesla Bot (1:54:33) – History (2:02:24) – Putin (2:08:04) – Meme Review (2:22:29) – Stand-up comedy (2:24:03) – Rick and Morty (2:25:42) – Advice for young people (2:33:39) – Love (2:36:33) – Meaning of life

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his third time on this, the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day. Second is ButcherBox, high-quality meat that makes up most of my diet. Third is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Fourth is Roka, my favorite sunglasses and prescription glasses. And fifth is Aidsleep, a self-cooling mattress cover I sleep on. So the choice is nutrition, food, health, style, or sleep. Choose wisely, my friends.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly-named AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced a multivitamin for me. It went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It's the first thing I drink every day. I drink it twice a day, in fact. I drink it after a long run. I recently did a 16-mile run, and I can't tell you how good it felt to get back and pour myself a refreshing Athletic Greens and start the day.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  I ran fasted, and that's probably one of my favorite things to do. Run for a long period of time on an empty stomach, thinking through the problems of the day, or the problems of life in general. And then get back to sort of ground, to normal life, by drinking Athletic Greens, getting in the shower, and just hitting the ground running with a little bit of coffee and focus. Anyway, they'll give you one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com/lex. That's athleticgreens.com/lex.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  This show is brought to you by ButcherBox. High-quality meat that is pretty much the only thing I eat. They ship a box of meat to your home, eight to 14 pounds of it. You can pick a pre-made box or customize one, which is what I do. And that's it. It's pretty simple. I've spoken about this before. I think meat of different kinds is a, makes up a large part of my diet. I just feel good when I consume a large amount of meat. It's not an allergy thing. It's not some kind of reducing inflammation thing. I don't know what it is because I also am pretty happy eating carbs as well. I just feel better. I'm happier.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  I can perform better, both physically and mentally, when I consume a large amount of meat, whether that's a carnivore or keto diet. I just feel great. And ButcherBox is just high-quality meat that I can rely on. There's all kinds of cuts there, but ground beef is the basics and the thing I love the most. For a limited time, ButcherBox is offering new members a great deal for the new year. Sign up at butcherbox.com/lex and you'll receive the ultimate New Year's bundle in your first box. This deal includes ground beef, chicken thighs, and more. That's more than seven pounds of meat added to your first box for free. Get this New Year's bundle before it's gone by going to butcherbox.com/lex.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms, I love the world of algorithms, that analyze your blood data, DNA data, and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Andrew Huberman, the great, the powerful Andrew Huberman, talks a lot about it. David Sinclair, he, by the way, was just on his podcast that you should check out, also talks a lot about it in my conversation with him and in his conversation with others. I love this idea. It feels like the future.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  You should definitely be making lifestyle and health decisions based on actual data connected to you, not just the general population. You are a special, unique biological fingerprint that requires unique treatment, unique lifestyle decisions. For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to insidetracker.com/lex. That's insidetracker.com/lex. This show is brought to you by Roka, the maker of glasses and sunglasses that I love wearing for their design feel and innovation on materials,

• 4:56Speaker 00

  optics, and grip. Roka was started by two All-American swimmers from Stanford and was born out of an obsession with performance. Like I said, I love the word obsession and performance. And I got a chance to meet and hang out a bunch with one of those founders, Rob, an incredible human being here in Austin. They have a facility here in Austin. It's just cool to see people at the top of their game in terms of both design and manufacturing and all that kind of stuff. These glasses, first of all, look badass, look amazing, but they're also designed to be active in, extremely lightweight. The grip is comfortable but strong. And the style, I said badass, but it's badass in a classy way. It holds up in all conditions when

• 5:40Speaker 00

  I'm wearing a suit or wearing running gear, including on long runs in 100-degree Austin weather or in freezing Boston weather. Both work. Check them out for both prescription glasses and sunglasses at roka.com and enter code Lex to save 20% off your first order. That's roka.com and enter code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its PodPro mattress. It controls temperature with an app, it's packed with sensors, it can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. Given that I just got out of said bed, I could tell you, because it's short-term memory, that the thing feels incredible. There's

• 6:24Speaker 00

  very few things I enjoy in life. As much as a power nap or full night's sleep on a cooled bed with a warm blanket, my mind empty of thoughts, having fought the battles of the day, and just resting, escaping it all in a little bit of a dream world. Alice in Wonderland, but like Lex in Wonderland. They have a PodPro cover, so you can just add that to your mattress without having to buy theirs. But their mattress is nice, too. It can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but cooling alone is worth the money. Go to asleep.com/lex to get special savings.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  That's asleep.com/lex and I will meet you there, my friend, in the dream world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with Elon Musk.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, make yourself comfortable.

• 7:39Elon Musk?

  Boo.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 7:42Elon Musk?

  You don't do the headphones thing?

• 7:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 7:44Elon Musk?

  Okay. I mean, how close do I need to get to the thing?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  The closer you are, the sexier you sound.

• 7:49Elon Musk?

  Hey babe, can't get enough of the way you're all that baby?

• 7:54Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna clip that out any time somebody messages me about it.

• 7:58Elon Musk?

  If you want my body and you think I'm sexy, come right out and tell me so.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  So good. Okay, serious mode activate. All right.

• 8:14Elon Musk?

  Serious mode. Come on, you're Russian, you can be serious. Everyone's serious all the time in Russia.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  We'll get there, we'll get there.

• 8:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  It's gotten soft. Allow me to say that the SpaceX launch of human beings to orbit on May 30th, 2020, was seen by many as the first step in a new era of human space exploration. These human spaceflight missions were a beacon of hope to many and to millions over the past two years as our world has been going through one of the most difficult periods in recent human history.

• 8:49Lex Fridman?

  We saw, we see the rise of division, fear, cynicism, and the loss of common humanity, right when it is needed most. So first, Elon, let me say thank you for giving the world hope and reason to be excited about the future.

• 9:03Elon Musk?

  Oh, it's kind of easy to say. I do want to do that. Humanity has obviously a lot of issues and, and, you know, people at times do do bad things, but, you know, despite all that, you know, I love humanity and I think we should

• 9:22Elon Musk?

  make sure we do everything we can to have a good future and an exciting future and one where that maximizes the happiness of the people.

• 9:29Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask about Crew Dragon Demo 2. So that that first flight with humans on board, how did you feel leading up to that launch? Were you scared? Were you excited? What was going through your mind? So much was at stake.

• 9:45Elon Musk?

  Yeah, no, that was extremely stressful, no question. We obviously could not let them down in any way. So extremely stressful, I'd say, to say the least. But we did, I was confident that at the time that we launched, that no one could think of anything at all to do that would improve the probability of success. And we racked our brains to think of any possible way to improve the probability of success. We could not think of anything more and nor could NASA. And so then that's just the best that we could do. So then we, we had, we went ahead and launched. Now, I'm not a religious person,

• 10:30Elon Musk?

  but I nonetheless got on my knees and prayed for that mission.

• 10:35Lex Fridman?

  Were you able to sleep?

• 10:37Elon Musk?

  No.

• 10:39Lex Fridman?

  How did it feel when it was a success? First, when the launch was a success and when they returned back home? Or back to Earth?

• 10:48Elon Musk?

  It was a great relief.

• 10:51Elon Musk?

  Yeah. It's for high-stress situations, I find it's not so much elation as relief. And, you know, I think once, as we got more comfortable and proved out the systems, because, you know, we really, you know, you've got to make sure everything works. I was, it was definitely a lot more enjoyable with the subsequent astronaut missions. And I thought the Inspiration mission was, was actually very inspiring. Inspiration four mission. I'd encourage people to watch the Inspiration documentary on Netflix. It's actually really good. And it really isn't, I was actually inspired by that.

• 11:34Elon Musk?

  And I, I, so that one, I felt I was kind of able to enjoy the, the actual mission and not just be super stressed all the time.

• 11:42Lex Fridman?

  So for people that somehow don't know, it's the all civilian, first time, all civilian out to space, out to orbit.

• 11:50Elon Musk?

  Yeah, and it was the, I think, the highest orbit that in like, I don't know, 30 or 40 years or something. The only one that was higher was the one shuttle, sorry, Hubble servicing mission. And then before that, it would have been Apollo in 72. It's pretty wild. So it's cool. It's good, you know, I think, you know, as a species, like, we want to be, you know, continuing to do better and reach higher ground and, and like, I think it would be tragic, extremely tragic, if Apollo was the high watermark for humanity, you know? And that, and that's as far as we ever got.

• 12:31Elon Musk?

  And it's, it's concerning that here we are, 49 years after the last mission to the moon. And so almost half a century, and we've not been back. And that's, that's worrying. It's like, is that, does that mean we've peaked as a civilization or what? So.

• 12:54Elon Musk?

  Like I think we've got to get back to the moon and build a base there. You know, a science base. I think we could learn a lot about the nature of the universe. If we have a proper science base on the moon. You know, like we have a science base in Antarctica and, you know, many other parts of the world. And so that, that, that's like, I think the next big thing, we've got to have like a, a serious like moon base. And then get people to Mars and, you know, get, get out there and be a spacefaring civilization.

• 13:23Lex Fridman?

  I'll ask you about some of those details, but since you're so busy with the hard engineering challenges of everything that's involved, are you still able to marvel at the magic of it all, of space travel? Of every time the rocket goes up, especially when it's a crewed mission? Or are you just so overwhelmed with all the challenges that you have to solve? And actually, sort of to add to that, the reason I, I wanted to ask this question of May 30th, it's, it's been some time. So you can look back and think about the impact already. It's already, at the time, it was an engineering problem, maybe. Now it's becoming a historic moment. Like it's a moment that, how many moments will be remembered about the 21st century?

• 14:05Lex Fridman?

  To me, that or something like that, maybe in space four, or one of those will be remembered as the early steps of a new age of space exploration.

• 14:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah. I mean, during the launches itself, so I mean, the, I think, I think maybe some people know, but a lot of people don't know. It's like, I'm actually the chief engineer of SpaceX. So the, you know, I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions. And, you know, so if there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle, it's fundamentally my fault, you know, so.

• 14:41Elon Musk?

  So I'm really just thinking.

• 14:44Elon Musk?

  About all the things that like so. So when I see the rocket, I see all the things that could go wrong and the things that could be better. And the same with the Dragon spacecraft. It's like other people will say, oh, this is a spacecraft or a rocket and that looks really cool. I'm like, I've like a readout of like, this is the, these are, these are the risks. These are the problems. That's what I see. Like

• 15:07Elon Musk?

  So it's not what other people see when they see the product, you know?

• 15:11Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask you then to analyze Starship in that same way. I know you have, you'll talk about in more detail about Starship in the near future, perhaps.

• 15:21Elon Musk?

  Yeah, we can talk about it now if you want.

• 15:23Lex Fridman?

  But just in that same way, like you said, you see, when you see a, when you see a rocket, you see a sort of a list of risks. In that same way, you said that Starship is a really hard problem. So there's many ways I can ask this, but if you magically could solve one problem perfectly, one engineering problem perfectly, which one would it be?

• 15:44Elon Musk?

  On Starship?

• 15:45Lex Fridman?

  On, sorry, on Starship. So is it maybe related to the efficiency, the, the engine, the weight of the different components, the complexity of various things, maybe the controls of the, the crazy thing it has to do to land?

• 15:58Elon Musk?

  No, it's actually the, by far, the, the biggest thing absorbing my time is, uh, engine production. Not, not the design of the engine, but I've often said prototypes are, are easy, production is hard.

• 16:16Elon Musk?

  So we have the most advanced rocket engine that's ever been designed.

• 16:23Elon Musk?

  The, because I'd say currently the, the best rocket engine ever is probably the RD one eighty or RD one seventy.

• 16:31Elon Musk?

  That, that's the Russian engine, basically.

• 16:35Elon Musk?

  And, and still, I think an engine generally can't if it's gotten something to orbit. So our engine has not gotten anything to orbit yet. But it is, it's the first engine that's actually.

• 16:48Elon Musk?

  Better than the Russian RD engines, which were amazing design.

• 16:54Lex Fridman?

  So you're talking about Raptor engine. What makes it amazing? What are the different aspects of it that make it like, what are you the most excited about? If the whole thing works in terms of efficiency, all those kinds of things?

• 17:08Elon Musk?

  Well, it's the Raptor is a full flow staged combustion

• 17:17Elon Musk?

  engine and it's operating at a very high chamber pressure. So one of the key figures merit, perhaps the key figure of merit is

• 17:28Elon Musk?

  what is the chamber pressure at which the rocket engine can operate? That's the combustion chamber pressure. So a Raptor is designed to operate at 300 bar, possibly maybe higher, the standard atmospheres. So

• 17:44Elon Musk?

  the record right now for operational engine is the RD engine that I mentioned, the Russian RD, which is, I believe, around 267 bar. And the difficulty of the chamber pressure is increases on a nonlinear basis. So 10% more chamber pressure is more like 50% more difficult.

• 18:08Elon Musk?

  But that chamber pressure is that is what allows you to get a very high power density for the engine. So enabling

• 18:21Elon Musk?

  a very high thrust to weight ratio and a very high specific impulse. So specific impulse is like a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine. It's really the

• 18:37Elon Musk?

  exhaust, the effective exhaust velocity of the gas coming out of the engine.

• 18:44Elon Musk?

  So with a very high chamber pressure, you can have a compact engine that nonetheless has a high expansion ratio, which is the ratio between the exit nozzle and the throat. So you know, engines got like, you see a rocket engine's got like, sort of like a hourglass shape. It's like a chamber and then it necks down and there's a nozzle. And the ratio of the exit diameter to the throat is expansion ratio.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  So why is it such a hard engine to manufacture at scale?

• 19:22Elon Musk?

  It's very complex.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  So a lot of, what does complexity mean here? There's a lot of components involved.

• 19:28Elon Musk?

  There's a lot of, a lot of components and a lot of unique materials that, so we had to invent several alloys that don't exist in order to make this engine work.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  So it's a materials problem, too?

• 19:46Elon Musk?

  It's a materials problem. And in a staged combustion, a full flow staged combustion, there are many feedback loops in the system. So basically, you've got propellant and hot gas flowing simultaneously to so many different places on the engine. And they all have a recursive effect on each other. So you change one thing here, it has a recursive effect here, it changes something over there. And it's quite hard to control. Like, there's a reason no one's made this before.

• 20:27Elon Musk?

  But, and the reason we're doing a staged combustion full flow is because it has the highest, the highest theoretical possible efficiency. So in order to make a fully reusable rocket, which that's really the holy grail of orbital rocketry.

• 20:56Elon Musk?

  You have to have, everything's got to be the best. It's got to be the best engine, the best airframe, the best heat shield, extremely light avionics,

• 21:09Elon Musk?

  you know, very clever control mechanisms. You've got to shed mass in any possible way that you can. For example, we are, instead of putting landing legs on the booster in ship, we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing legs. So that's like, I mean, we're talking about catching the largest flying object ever made

• 21:33Elon Musk?

  with, on a giant tower with, with chopstick arms. It's like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger.

• 21:43Lex Fridman?

  I mean, pulling something like that.

• 21:44Elon Musk?

  This probably won't work the first time.

• 21:48Elon Musk?

  Anyway, so this is bananas. This is banana stuff.

• 21:51Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned that you doubt, well, not you doubt, but there, there's days or moments when you doubt that this is even possible. It's so difficult.

• 22:01Elon Musk?

  The possible part is, well, at this point, we'll, I think we'll, we'll get Starship to work.

• 22:12Elon Musk?

  There's a question of timing. How long will it take us to do this? How long will it take us to actually achieve full and rapid reusability? Cause it will take probably many launches before we are able to have full and rapid reusability.

• 22:29Elon Musk?

  But I can say that, that the physics pencils out, like, like we're not,

• 22:36Elon Musk?

  like, at this point, I'd say we're confident that, like, let's say, I'm very confident success is in the set of all possible outcomes.

• 22:46Lex Fridman?

  It's not an all set of.

• 22:48Elon Musk?

  For a while there, I was not convinced that success was in the set of possible outcomes,

• 22:53Elon Musk?

  which is very important, actually. But, so we were.

• 22:59Lex Fridman?

  You're saying there's a chance.

• 23:01Elon Musk?

  I'm saying there's a chance, exactly.

• 23:04Elon Musk?

  Just not sure how how how long it will take. We're a very, very talented team. They're working night and day to make it happen. And like I said, the the the critical thing to achieve for the revolution in spaceflight and for humanity to be a spacefaring civilization is to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket, orbital rocket. There's not even been any orbital rocket that's been fully reusable ever. And this has always been the the the the holy grail of rocketry. And many smart people, very smart people, have tried to do this before and they've not succeeded. So because it's such a hard problem.

• 23:47Lex Fridman?

  What's your source of belief in situations like this? When the engineering problem is so difficult, there's a lot of experts, many of whom you admire, who have failed in the past.

• 24:00Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 24:01Lex Fridman?

  And a lot of people, you know, the a lot of experts, maybe journalists, all the kind of, you know, the public in general have a lot of doubt about whether it's possible. And you yourself know that even if it's a non-null set, non-empty set of success, it's still unlikely or very difficult. Like, where do you go to, both personally, intellectually, as engineer, as a team, like, for source of strength needed to sort of persevere through this and to keep going with the project, take it to completion?

• 24:49Elon Musk?

  A source of strength. Hmm. I just really not how I think about things. I mean, for me, it's simply this, this is something that is important to get done. And we we should just keep doing it or die trying. And I I don't need a source of strength.

• 25:07Lex Fridman?

  So quitting is not even like.

• 25:09Elon Musk?

  That's not, it's not in my nature.

• 25:11Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 25:12Elon Musk?

  And I I don't care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that, we're gonna get it done.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  Gonna get it done.

• 25:23Lex Fridman?

  Can you then zoom back in to specific problems with Starship? Or any engineering problems you work on? Can you try to introspect your particular biological neural network? Your thinking process? And describe how you think through problems? The different engineering and design problems? Is there like a systematic process? You've spoken about first principles thinking. But is there a kind of process to it?

• 25:45Elon Musk?

  Well, um.

• 25:48Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like saying like, like physics is law and everything else is a recommendation. Like, I've met a lot of people that can break the law, but I haven't met anyone who could break physics. So, uh, so first, for, you know, any kind of technology problem, you have to sort of just make sure you're not violating physics. And, you know, uh, first principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, uh, any, anything really. It's just, it's, it's really just saying, um, you know, let's, let's boil something down to the most fundamental, uh, principles. The things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level.

• 26:33Elon Musk?

  And that sets your, sets your axiomatic base. And then you reason up from there. And then you cross check your conclusion against the, the axiomatic truths. So, um, you know, some basics in physics would be like, are you violating conservation of energy or momentum or something like that? You know, then you, it's not gonna work. So, uh, that's, you know, so that's just to establish, is it, is it possible? And then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit. If you, if you take a particular thing and you, uh, scale it to a very large number or to a very small number, how does, how do things change?

• 27:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's like temporal, like in number of things you manufacture or something like that, and then in time?

• 27:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like let's say, take example of like, um, like manufacturing, which I think is just a very underrated problem. And, and, uh, like I said, it's, it's much harder to.

• 27:38Elon Musk?

  Take an advanced technology product and bring it into volume manufacturing than it is to design it in the first place. My words magnitude. So, so let's say you're trying to figure out is like, why is this this part or product expensive? Is it because of something fundamentally foolish that we're doing? Or is it because our volume is too low? And so then you say, okay, well, what if our volume was a million units a year? Is it still expensive? That's what I'm thinking about things in the limit. If it's still expensive at a million units a year, then volume is not the reason why your thing is expensive. There's something fundamental about the design.

• 28:15Lex Fridman?

  And then you then can focus on the reducing complexity or something like that in the design.

• 28:20Elon Musk?

  Change the design to change the part to be something that is not fundamentally expensive. But like, that's a common thing in rocketry because the unit volume is relatively low. And so a common excuse would be, well, it's expensive because our unit volume is low. And if we were in like automotive or something like that or consumer electronics, then our costs will be lower. I'm like, I'm like, okay, so let's say we skip now you're making a million units a year. Is it still expensive? The answer is yes, then economies of scale are not the issue.

• 28:52Lex Fridman?

  Do you throw into manufacturing, do you throw like supply chain? Talked about resources and materials and stuff like that. Do you throw that into the calculation of trying to reason from first principles like how we're going to make the supply chain work here?

• 29:05Elon Musk?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:07Lex Fridman?

  And then the cost of materials, things like that? Or is that too much?

• 29:10Elon Musk?

  Exactly. So like another, like a good example, I think of thinking about things in the limit is if you take any, you know, any, any product, a machine or whatever, like take a rocket or whatever and say,

• 29:30Elon Musk?

  If you've got, if you look at the raw materials in the rocket, so you're gonna have like aluminum, steel, titanium, inconel, specialty alloys, copper, and you say, what are the, what's the weight of the constituent elements of each of these elements? And what is their raw material value? And that sets the asymptotic limit for how low the cost of the vehicle can be unless you change the materials. So, and then when you do that, I call it like maybe the magic wand number or something like that. So that would be like, if you had the, you know, like just a pile of these raw materials here and you could wave the magic wand and rearrange the atoms

• 30:15Elon Musk?

  into the final shape, that would be the lowest possible cost that you could make this thing for unless you change the materials. So then, and that is always, almost always a very low number. So then, what's actually causing things to be expensive is how you put the atoms into the desired shape.

• 30:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, actually, if you don't mind me taking a tiny tangent, I often talk to Jim Keller, who's somebody that worked with you.

• 30:44Elon Musk?

  Oh, yeah, Jim was, yeah, did great work at Tesla.

• 30:49Lex Fridman?

  So I suppose he carries the flame of the same kind of thinking that you're talking about now. And I guess I see that same thing at Tesla and SpaceX folks who work there. They kind of learn this way of thinking and it kind of becomes obvious almost. But anyway, I had an argument, not an argument. He educated me about how cheap it might be to manufacture a Tesla bot. We just, we had an argument. What is, how can you reduce the cost of scale of producing a robot? Because I've gotten a chance to interact quite a bit, obviously in the academic circles with humanoid robots and then my Boston Dynamics and stuff like that.

• 31:33Lex Fridman?

  And they're very expensive to build. And then Jim kind of schooled me on saying like, okay, like this kind of first principles thinking of how can we get the cost of manufacturing down? I suppose you do that, you have done that kind of thinking for Tesla bot and for all kinds of, all kinds of complex systems that are traditionally seen as complex. And you say, okay, how can we simplify everything now?

• 31:58Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, I think if you are really good at manufacturing, you can basically make at a high volume, you can basically make anything for a cost that asymptotically approaches the raw material value of the constituents, plus any intellectual property that you need to license. Anything.

• 32:18Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 32:20Elon Musk?

  But it's hard. It's not like that's a very hard thing to do, but it is possible for anything. Anything in volume can be made, like I said, for a cost that asymptotically approaches its raw material constituents, plus intellectual property license rights. So what will often happen in trying to design a product is people start with the tools and parts and methods that they are familiar with, and then and try to create a product using their existing tools and methods.

• 32:52Elon Musk?

  The other way to think about it is actually imagine the, try to imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology, whatever it might be. And so what is this, what is the perfect arrangement of atoms that would be the best possible product? And now let us try to figure out how to get the atoms in that shape.

• 33:15Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's, it sounds,

• 33:19Lex Fridman?

  it's almost like Rick and Morty absurd until you start to really think about it. And you really should think about it in this way. Because everything else is kind of, if you think, you might fall victim to the momentum of the way things were done in the past, unless you think in this way.

• 33:37Elon Musk?

  Well, just as a function of inertia, people want to use the same tools and methods that they are familiar with. They're just, that's what they'll do by default. And then that will lead to an outcome of things that can be made with those tools and methods, but is unlikely to be the platonic ideal of the perfect product. So then, so that's why it's good to think of things in both directions. So like, what can we build with the tools that we have? But then, but also, what is the, what is the perfect, the theoretical? Perfect product look like and that that theoretical perfect part is going to be a moving target because as you learn more, the definition of for that perfect product will will change because you don't actually know what the perfect part is, but you can successfully approximate

• 34:22Elon Musk?

  a more perfect product. So think about it like that and then saying, okay, now what tools, methods, materials, whatever do we need to create in order to get the atoms in that shape?

• 34:37Elon Musk?

  But people rarely think about it that way, but it's a powerful tool.

• 34:44Lex Fridman?

  I should mention that the brilliant Siobhan Zilis is hanging hanging out with us in case you hear a voice of wisdom from from from outside, from up above. Okay, so let me ask you about Mars. You mentioned it would be great for science to put a base on the moon to do some research. But the truly big leap, again, in this category of seemingly impossible, is to put a human being on Mars. When do you think SpaceX will land a human being on Mars?

• 35:40Elon Musk?

  Best case is about five years, worst case 10 years.

• 35:48Lex Fridman?

  What are the determining factors, would you say, from an engineering perspective? Or is that that not the bottlenecks?

• 35:55Elon Musk?

  I know it's fundamentally, you know, engineering the vehicle.

• 36:03Elon Musk?

  I mean, Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, or a mangrove or something like that. It's a lot. It's really next level. So, and the fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. Like, there is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and then above that, we cannot afford to do it. So, right now, you couldn't fly

• 36:46Elon Musk?

  to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars. So, we need to get that above, you know, to get that, like, something that is actually possible at all. But then, but that's, we don't, we don't just want to have, you know, with Mars, flags and footprints, and then not come back for a half-century like we did with the moon. In order to pass a very important, great filter, I think we need to be a multi-planet species. This may sound somewhat esoteric to a lot of people, but

• 37:25Elon Musk?

  eventually, given enough time, that's something, Earth is likely to experience some calamity that could be something that humans do to themselves, or an external event like happened to the dinosaurs. And, but, you know, eventually, and if none of that happens, and somehow magically we keep going, then the sun will, the sun is gradually expanding and will engulf the Earth, and probably Earth gets too hot for life in about 500 million years. It's a

• 38:06Elon Musk?

  long time, but that's only 10% longer than Earth has been around. And so, if you think about, like, the, because the current situation is really remarkable, and kind of hard to believe, but...

• 38:19Elon Musk?

  Earth's been around four and a half billion years. And this is the first time in four and a half billion years that it's been possible to extend life beyond Earth.

• 38:27Elon Musk?

  And that window of eternity may be open for a long time, and I hope it is, but it also may be open for a short time. And we should, I think it was wise for us to

• 38:39Elon Musk?

  act quickly while the window is open, just in case it closes.

• 38:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the existence of nuclear weapons, pandemics, all kinds of threats.

• 38:50Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Lex Fridman?

  Should, should kind of give us some motivation.

• 38:56Elon Musk?

  I mean, civilization could get,

• 39:00Elon Musk?

  could die with a bang or a whimper. You know, if it's a, if it dies of demographic collapse, then it's more of a whimper, obviously. But if it's World War III, it's more of a bang. But, but these are all risks. I mean, it's important to think of these things and just, you know, think of things as like probabilities, not certainties. There's a probability that something bad will happen on Earth. I like, I think most likely the future will be good. But there's like, let's say for argument's sake, a 1% chance per century of, of a civilization ending event. Like that was Stephen Hawking's estimate.

• 39:39Elon Musk?

  I think he might be right about that. So then,

• 39:46Elon Musk?

  you know, we should basically think of this like being a multi-planet species is like taking out insurance for life itself, like life insurance for life.

• 39:57Lex Fridman?

  Wow, it's turned into an infomercial real quick.

• 40:00Elon Musk?

  Life insurance for life, yes. And, you know, we can bring the creatures from, you know, plants and animals from Earth to Mars and breathe life into the planet.

• 40:12Elon Musk?

  And have a second planet with, with life. That would be great. They can't bring themselves there, you know? So if we don't bring them to Mars, then they will just for sure all die when the sun expands anyway. And then that'll be it.

• 40:27Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the most difficult aspect of building a civilization on Mars? Terraforming Mars, like from an engineering perspective, from a financial perspective, human perspective to get?

• 40:41Lex Fridman?

  To get a large number of folks there who will never return back to Earth.

• 40:46Elon Musk?

  Uh, no, they could certainly return. Some will return back to Earth.

• 40:49Lex Fridman?

  They will choose to stay there for the rest of their lives.

• 40:52Elon Musk?

  Yeah, many will. Um, but, uh, you know, we, we need the spaceships back, like the ones that go to Mars. Bring them back. So you can hop on if you want, you know, it's like, but we can't just not have the spaceships come back. Those things are expensive. We need them back. I'd like to come back and do another trip.

• 41:10Lex Fridman?

  I mean, do you think about the terraforming aspect, like actually build, are you so focused right now on the spaceships part? That's so critical to Mars.

• 41:18Elon Musk?

  We absolutely, if you can't get there, nothing else matters. So, and like I said, you, we can't get there with, at some extraordinarily high cost. I mean, the current cost of, um, let's say one ton to the surface of Mars is on the order of a billion dollars.

• 41:34Elon Musk?

  So, because you don't just need the rocket and the launch and everything, you need like heat shield, you need, you know, guidance system, you need deep space communications, uh, you need some kind of landing system. So like rough approximation would be a billion dollars per ton to the surface of Mars right now. This is obviously, um, way too expensive to create a self-sustaining civilization.

• 42:02Elon Musk?

  So we need to improve that by at least a factor of a thousand.

• 42:08Lex Fridman?

  A million per ton?

• 42:09Elon Musk?

  Yes, ideally less than, much less than a million ton. But if it's not, like, it's got to be, you have to say like, well, how much can society afford to spend or want to just want to spend on a self-sustaining city on Mars? The self-sustaining part is important. Like, it's just the key threshold, um, the great filter will have been passed when the city on Mars can survive even if the spaceships from Earth stop coming for any reason. Doesn't matter what the reason is, but if they stop coming for any reason, will it die out or will it not? And if there's even one critical ingredient missing, then it still doesn't count. It's like, you know, if you're on a long sea voyage and you've got everything except vitamin C.

• 42:55Elon Musk?

  It's only a matter of time, you know, you're gonna die. So, so we're gonna get Mars, a Mars city to the point where it's self sustaining. I'm not sure this will really happen in my lifetime, but I, I hope to see it at least have a lot of momentum. And, and then you could say, okay, what is the minimum tonnage necessary to have a self sustaining city? And there's a lot of uncertainty about this. You could say like, I don't know, it's probably at least a million tons. Cause you have to set up a lot of infrastructure on, on Mars. Like I said, you can't be missing any, anything that in order to be self sustaining, you can't be missed. Like you need, you know, semiconductor fabs, you need iron ore refineries, like you need lots of things, you know?

• 43:40Elon Musk?

  So, and Mars is not super hospitable. It's, it's the least inhospitable planet, but it's definitely a fixer upper of a planet.

• 43:49Lex Fridman?

  Outside of Earth.

• 43:50Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 43:51Lex Fridman?

  Earth is pretty good.

• 43:52Elon Musk?

  It's like easy.

• 43:53Lex Fridman?

  And also I should, we should clarify in the solar system.

• 43:56Elon Musk?

  Yes, in the solar system.

• 43:58Lex Fridman?

  There might be nice like vacation spots.

• 44:01Elon Musk?

  There might be some great planets out there, but it's hopeless.

• 44:04Lex Fridman?

  To get there?

• 44:05Elon Musk?

  Yeah, way, way, way, way, way too hard, to say the least.

• 44:08Lex Fridman?

  Let me push back on that. Not really a pushback, but a quick curve ball of a question. So you did mention physics as the, the first starting point. So general relativity allows for wormholes. They technically can exist. Do you think those can ever be leveraged by humans to travel faster than the speed of light?

• 44:30Elon Musk?

  Well.

• 44:32Lex Fridman?

  Are you saying?

• 44:33Elon Musk?

  The wormhole thing is, is debatable. The, that we currently do not know of any means of going faster than the speed of light. There, there is like, like there, there are some ideas about having space, like so, so.

• 44:56Elon Musk?

  You're gonna like move at the speed of light through through space, but if you can make space itself move, that that that's like that that's what we're warming space. Space is is capable of moving faster than the speed of light.

• 45:10Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 45:11Elon Musk?

  Uh, like the universe in the big bang, the universe expanded it much, much more than the speed of light by a lot.

• 45:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Elon Musk?

  Um, so, um, but the i- i- if this is possible, the the amount of energy required to warp space is so gigantic, it's boggles the mind.

• 45:33Lex Fridman?

  So all the work you've done with propulsion, how much innovation is possible with rocket propulsion? Is this, um, I mean, you've seen it all and you're constantly invading in every aspect. How much is possible? Like, how much can you get 10x somehow? Is there something in there in physics that you can get significant improvement in terms of efficiency of engines and all those kinds of things?

• 45:54Elon Musk?

  Well, as I was saying, like the, really, the holy grail is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital system. So, uh, right now, uh, the Falcon 9 is the only reusable rocket out there. Uh, but it, but the the booster comes back and lands, and you've seen the videos, uh, and we get the nose cone or fairing back, but we do not get the upper stage back. So, uh, that means that we have a minimum cost of of of building an upper stage. You can think of like a two-stage rocket of of sort of like two airplanes, like a big airplane and a small airplane. Um, and we get big airplane back, but not the small airplane. And so it still costs a lot, you know?

• 46:39Elon Musk?

  So that upper stage is, you know, at least $10 million. And then the degree of the the booster is not as reuse, is not as rapidly and completely reusable as we'd like in order of the fairings. So, you know, our our kind of minimum marginal cost, not counting overhead for per flight is on the order of 15 to 20 million dollars, maybe. Um, so. That's extremely good for it's by far better than any rocket ever in history. But with full and rapid reusability, we can reduce the cost per tonne to orbit by a factor of 100.

• 47:24Elon Musk?

  But just think of it like imagining if you had an aircraft or something or a car. And if you had to buy a new car every time you went for a drive, it would be very expensive. It would be silly, frankly. But but you in fact, you just refuel the car or recharge the car. And that's makes your trip like, I don't know, 1000 times cheaper. So it's the same for rockets. If you it's very difficult to make this complex machine that can go to orbit. And so if you cannot reuse it and have to have to throw even any part of any significant part of it away, that massively increases the cost.

• 48:08Elon Musk?

  So, you know, Starship in theory could do a cost per launch of like a million, maybe $2 million or something like that. And and put over 100 tonnes in orbit, which is crazy.

• 48:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Elon Musk?

  So.

• 48:26Lex Fridman?

  That's incredible. So you're saying like it's by far the biggest bang for the buck is to make it fully reusable versus like some kind of brilliant breakthrough in theoretical physics?

• 48:36Elon Musk?

  No, no, there's no there's no brilliant break. No, there's no it just you're going to make the rocket reusable. This is an extremely difficult engineering problem.

• 48:44Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 48:45Elon Musk?

  But no new physics is required.

• 48:47Lex Fridman?

  Just brilliant engineering. Let me ask a slightly philosophical fun question. Got to ask. I know you're focused on getting to Mars, but once we're there on Mars, what do you what form of government, economic system?

• 49:02Lex Fridman?

  Political system do you think would work best for an early civilization of humans? Is, I mean, the interesting reason to talk about this stuff, it also helps people dream about the future. I know you're really focused about the short term engineering dream, but it's like, I don't know, there's something about imagining an actual civilization on Mars that gives people, really gives people hope.

• 49:26Elon Musk?

  Well, it would be a new frontier and an opportunity to rethink the whole nature of government, just as was done in the creation of the United States. So, I mean, I would suggest having direct democracy, like people vote directly on things as opposed to representative democracy. So representative democracy, I think, is too subject to special interests and, you know, coercion of the politicians and that kind of thing.

• 50:02Elon Musk?

  So I'd recommend that there's just direct democracy. People vote on laws, the population votes on laws themselves, and then the laws must be short enough that people can understand them.

• 50:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and then like keeping a well-informed populace, like really being transparent about all the information about what they're voting for.

• 50:24Elon Musk?

  Absolute transparency.

• 50:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and not make it as annoying as those cookies we have to accept.

• 50:30Elon Musk?

  Accept cookies. I always like, you know, there's like always like a slight amount of trepidation when you click accept cookies. Like, it feels though there's like perhaps like a very tiny chance that'll open a portal to hell or something like that.

• 50:43Lex Fridman?

  That's exactly how I feel.

• 50:45Elon Musk?

  Why, why do they, why do they keep wanting me to accept that? What do they want with this cookie? Like somebody got upset with accepting cookies or something somewhere. I mean, who cares? Like, it's so annoying to keep accepting all these cookies.

• 50:58Lex Fridman?

  To me, this is just a great.

• 51:01Elon Musk?

  Yes, you can have my damn cookie. I don't care, whatever.

• 51:03Lex Fridman?

  Heard it from me on first, he accepts all your damn cookies.

• 51:07Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Elon Musk?

  And still asking me. It's annoying.

• 51:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's one example of implementation of a good idea done.

• 51:20Lex Fridman?

  Really horribly.

• 51:21Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's somebody who was like, there's some good intentions of like, privacy or whatever, but now everyone just has to click, accept cookies and it's not, you know, you have billions of people who have to keep clicking accept cookie. It's super annoying. Then just accept the damn cookie. It's fine. There is like, I think a fundamental problem that we're, because we've not really had a major, like a world war or something like that in a while, and obviously we'd like to not have world wars. There's not been a cleansing function for rules and regulations.

• 51:54Elon Musk?

  So wars did have, you know, some sort of lining in that there would be a reset on rules and regulations after a war. So world wars one and two, there were huge resets on rules and regulations.

• 52:07Elon Musk?

  Now, as if society, society does not have a war and there's no cleansing function or garbage collection for rules and regulations, then rules and regulations will accumulate every year because they're immortal. There's no actual, humans die, but the laws don't. So we need a garbage collection function for rules and regulations. They should not just be immortal because some of the rules and regulations that are put in place will be counterproductive, done with good intentions, but counterproductive, sometimes not done with good intentions. So if you just, if rules and regulations just accumulate every year and you get more and more of them, then eventually you won't be able to do anything. You're just like Gulliver with, you know, tied down by thousands of little strings.

• 52:50Elon Musk?

  And we see that in, you know, US and like basically all economies that have been around for a while and regulators and legislators create new rules and regulations every year, but they don't put effort into removing them. And I think that's very important that we put effort into removing rules and regulations.

• 53:15Elon Musk?

  But it gets tough because you get special interests that then are dependent on like they they have a you know a vested interest in that whatever rule of regulation and that they then they fight to not get it removed.

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so it I mean, I guess the problem with the Constitution is it's it's kind of like C versus Java because it doesn't have any garbage collection built in. I think there should be I when you first said that the metaphor of garbage collection.

• 53:42Elon Musk?

  Yeah, from a coding standpoint.

• 53:43Lex Fridman?

  From a coding standpoint, yeah, yeah, I it would be interesting. It's the laws themselves kind of had a built in thing where they kind of die after a while unless somebody explicitly publicly defends them.

• 53:54Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Lex Fridman?

  So that that's sort of it's not like somebody has to kill them. They kind of die themselves. They disappear.

• 54:00Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Lex Fridman?

  Not to defend Java or anything, but you know, C++ you know, you could also have great garbage collection in Python and so on.

• 54:11Elon Musk?

  Yeah. So yeah, something's good. Something needs to happen or just the civilizations arteries just harden over time and and you can just get less and less done because there's just a rule against everything. So so I think like I don't know for Mars or I say or even for you obviously for Earth as well, like I think there should be an active process for removing rules and regulations and questioning their existence. Just like if we've got a function for creating rules and regulations because rules and regulations can also think of as like they're like software or lines of code for operating civilization. That's the rules and regulations. So it's like we shouldn't have rules and regulations, but

• 54:54Elon Musk?

  you have your code accumulation, but no code removal. And so it just gets to become basically archaic blutware after a while. And it's just it makes it hard for things to progress. So I don't know, maybe Mars, you'd have like an, you know, any given law must have a sunset, you know, and and and require active voting to keep restoring to keep it up there, you know. And I actually also say like, and these are just, I don't know, recommendations or thoughts. Ultimately, it will be up to the people on Mars to decide, but.

• 55:33Elon Musk?

  I think it should be easier to remove a law than to add one because of the just to overcome the inertia of laws. So maybe it's like, for argument's sake, you need like, say, 60% vote to have a law take effect, but only a 40% vote to remove it.

• 55:54Lex Fridman?

  So let me be the guy, you posted a meme on Twitter recently where there's like a row of urinals, a guy just walks all the way across and he tells you about crypto.

• 56:07Elon Musk?

  I mean, that's happened to me so many times. I think maybe even literally.

• 56:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Do you think technologically speaking, there's any room for ideas of smart contracts or so on? Because you mentioned laws. That's an interesting use of things like smart contracts to implement the laws by which governments function. Like something built on Ethereum or maybe a dog coin that enables smart contracts somehow?

• 56:36Elon Musk?

  I don't quite understand this whole smart contract thing. You know, I mean,

• 56:43Elon Musk?

  I'm too dumb to understand smart contracts.

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  That's a good line.

• 56:49Elon Musk?

  I mean, my general approach to any kind of like deal or whatever is just make sure there's clarity of understanding. That's the most important thing. And just keep any kind of deal very, very short and simple, plain language, and just make sure everyone understands this is the deal. Is everyone, is it clear? And what are the consequences if various things don't happen? But usually deals are, you know, business deals or whatever are way too long and complex and overly lawyered and pointlessly.

• 57:24Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned that Doge is the people's coin. And you said that you were literally going SpaceX may consider literally putting a Doge coin on the moon. Is this something you're still considering? Mars, perhaps? Do you think there's some chance, we've talked about political systems on Mars, that Doge coin is the official currency of Mars at some point in the future?

• 57:53Elon Musk?

  Well, I think Mars itself will need to have a different currency because you can't synchronize due to the speed of light, or not easily. So it must be completely standalone from Earth. Well, yeah, because Mars' closest approach is four light minutes away roughly, and then at furthest approach, it's roughly 20 light minutes away, maybe a little more. So you can't really have something synchronizing, you know, if you've got a 20-minute speed of light issue, if it's got a one-minute blockchain, it's not going to synchronize properly. So Mars, I don't know if Mars would have a cryptocurrency as a thing, but probably,

• 58:37Elon Musk?

  seems likely, but it would be some kind of localized thing on Mars. And you let the people decide? Yeah, absolutely. The future of Mars should be up to the Martians. Yeah, so I think the cryptocurrency thing is an interesting approach to reducing the error in the database that is called money. You know, I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis because of PayPal.

• 59:19Elon Musk?

  You know, we really got in deep there. And right now, the money system, actually for practical purposes, is really a bunch of heterogeneous mainframes running old COBOL. Okay, you mean literally? Literally. That's literally what's happening. In batch mode.

• 59:44Elon Musk?

  Okay.

• 59:44Lex Fridman?

  In patch mode.

• 59:45Elon Musk?

  Yeah, pretty the poor bastards who have to maintain that code. Okay, that's a pain, that's pain.

• 59:53Lex Fridman?

  Not even for trans Cobalt, yep.

• 59:55Elon Musk?

  It's Cobalt. It's like, and they still, banks are still buying mainframes in 2021 and running ancient Cobalt code. And, you know, the Federal Reserve is like probably even older than what the banks have, and they have an old Cobalt mainframe. And so, now, and so the government effectively has editing privileges on the money database. And they use those editing privileges to make more money whenever they want. And this increases the error in the database that is money. So I think money should really be viewed through the lens of information theory. And, and so it's, you're kind of like, like an internet connection.

• 1:00:40Elon Musk?

  Like, what's the bandwidth, you know, total bit rate? What is the latency, jitter, packet drop, you know, errors in network communication? So think money like that, basically. I think that's probably where we think of it. And, and then say, what, what system, from an information theory standpoint, allows an economy to function the best? And, you know, crypto is an attempt to reduce the, the error in,

• 1:01:18Elon Musk?

  in money that is contributed by governments diluting the money supply as basically a pernicious, pernicious form of taxation.

• 1:01:30Lex Fridman?

  So both policy in terms of with inflation and actual like technological Cobalt, like cryptocurrency takes us into the 21st century in terms of the actual systems that allow you to do the transactions, to store wealth, all those kinds of things.

• 1:01:48Elon Musk?

  Like I said, just think of money as information. People often will think of money as having power in and of itself. It does not. Money is information and it does not have power in and of itself. Like, again, applying the physics tools of thinking about things in the limit is helpful. If you are stranded on a tropical island and you have a trillion dollars, useless. Because there's no, there's no resource allocation. Money is a database for resource allocation, but there's no resource to allocate except yourself. So money is useless.

• 1:02:32Elon Musk?

  If you're stranded on a desert island with no food, you, all the Bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving. Yeah. So, so like, just think of money as, as a database for resource allocation across time and space. And, and then what, what, what system, it is, what, what, in what form should that, that database or data system, what, what would be most effective? Now, there's, there is a fundamental issue with, say, Bitcoin in its current form

• 1:03:17Elon Musk?

  in that it's, the transaction volume is very limited. And the latency, it's, the latency for a properly confirmed transaction is too, is too long, much longer than you'd like. So it's not, it's actually not great from a transaction volume standpoint or a latency standpoint.

• 1:03:40Elon Musk?

  So it is perhaps useful as to solve an aspect of the money database problem, which is this sort of store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations, I suppose. But it is not useful as a currency, as a day-to-day currency.

• 1:04:02Lex Fridman?

  But people have proposed different technological solutions.

• 1:04:04Elon Musk?

  Like Lightning.

• 1:04:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Lightning Network and the layer two technologies on top of that. I mean, it's all, it seems to be all kind of a trade-off. But the point is, it's kind of brilliant to say that just think about information. Think about what kind of database, what kind of infrastructure enables the exchange of information.

• 1:04:20Elon Musk?

  Say like you're operating an economy and you need to have some thing that allows for the efficient, to have efficient value ratios between products and services. So you've got this massive number of products and services and you need to, you can't just barter, it's like that would be extremely unwieldy. So you need something that gives you the ratio of exchange between goods and services. And then something that allows you to shift obligations across time, like debt, debt and equity shift obligations across time. Then what does, what does the best job of that?

• 1:05:04Elon Musk?

  Part of the reason why I think there's some merit to Dogecoin, even though it was obviously created as a joke, is that it actually does have a much higher transaction volume capability than Bitcoin. And the, you know, the cost of doing a transaction, the Dogecoin fee is very low. Like right now, if you want to do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high. So you could not use it effectively for most things and nor could it even scale to a high volume.

• 1:05:43Elon Musk?

  And when Bitcoin was, you know, started, I guess, around 2008 or something like that, the internet connections were much worse than they are today. Like Order of Bank two, I mean, there's the way, way worse, you know, in 2008. So, so like having a, you know, a small block size or whatever is, you know, and a long synchronization time is, made sense in 2008. But, you know, 2021, or fast forward 10 years, it's like, it's, it's like, comically low, you know, it's, uh, so, um, and I think there's some value to having a linear increase

• 1:06:26Elon Musk?

  in the amount of currency that is generated. So, because some amount of the currency, you'd like, like, if, if, if a currency is too deflationary, or like, or should say, if, if, if a currency is expected to increase in value over time, there's reluctance to spend it. Because you're like, oh, if I, I'll just hold it and not spend it because it's scarcity is increasing with time. So, if I spend it now, then I will regret spending it. So I will just, you know, huddle it. But if there's some dilution of the currency occurring over time, that's, that's more of an incentive

• 1:07:04Elon Musk?

  to use it as a currency. So, um, those coins somewhat randomly has, uh, a, um, just a fixed number of, of sort of coins or hash strings that, uh, are generated every year. So there's, there's some inflation, but it's not a percentage base. It's, it's, it's, so that the, it's a fixed number. So, the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time. Um, so it just, I'm not saying that it's like the ideal system for a currency, but I think it actually is, uh, just fundamentally better than anything else I've seen, just by accident. Um, so.

• 1:07:47Lex Fridman?

  I like how you said, um, around 2008. So you're not, uh, you know, some people suggested you might be Satoshi Nakamoto. You previously said you're not. Let me ask, you're not for sure. Would you tell us if you were?

• 1:08:01Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:08:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Uh, do you think it's a feature or a bug that he's anonymous, or she or they?

• 1:08:10Lex Fridman?

  It's an interesting kind of quirk of human history that there is a particular technology that is a completely anonymous inventor.

• 1:08:20Lex Fridman?

  Or creator.

• 1:08:34Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, you can, you can look at the evolution of ideas.

• 1:08:41Elon Musk?

  Before the launch of Bitcoin. And. See who wrote.

• 1:08:48Elon Musk?

  You know, about those ideas.

• 1:08:52Elon Musk?

  And then I like, I don't know exactly, obviously, I don't know who created Bitcoin for practical purposes, but the evolution of ideas is pretty clear before that. And like, it seems as though like Nick Zabo is probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas. So he claims not to be Nakamoto, but I'm not sure that's, that's neither here nor there. But he, he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else.

• 1:09:22Lex Fridman?

  So it's not perhaps like singular figures aren't even as important as the, the figures involved in the evolution of ideas that led to things. So.

• 1:09:30Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, you know, most perhaps it's sad to think about history, but maybe most names will be forgotten anyway.

• 1:09:38Elon Musk?

  What is a name anyway? It's a name, a name attached to an idea. What does it even mean really?

• 1:09:45Lex Fridman?

  I think Shakespeare had a thing about roses and stuff, whatever he said.

• 1:09:48Elon Musk?

  Rose by any other name would smell sweet.

• 1:09:53Lex Fridman?

  I got Elon to quote Shakespeare. I feel, I feel like I accomplished something today.

• 1:09:58Elon Musk?

  Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

• 1:10:02Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna clip that out.

• 1:10:05Elon Musk?

  Not more temper and animal fair.

• 1:10:10Lex Fridman?

  Autopilot.

• 1:10:17Lex Fridman?

  Tesla autopilot has been through an incredible journey over the past six years, or perhaps even longer in the minds of, in your mind and the minds of many involved.

• 1:10:28Elon Musk?

  I think that's where we first like connected really was the autopilot stuff, autonomy and.

• 1:10:33Lex Fridman?

  The whole journey was incredible to me to watch. I was.

• 1:10:39Lex Fridman?

  Because I knew, well, part of it is I was at MIT and I knew the difficulty of computer vision.

• 1:10:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Lex Fridman?

  And I knew the whole, I had a lot of colleagues and friends about the DARPA challenge. I knew how difficult it is. And so there was a natural skepticism. When I first drove a Tesla with the initial system based on Mobileye.

• 1:10:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Lex Fridman?

  I thought, there's no way. So first, when I got in, I thought, there's no way this car could maintain,

• 1:11:04Lex Fridman?

  like stay in lane and create a comfortable experience. So my intuition initially was that the lane keeping problem is way too difficult to solve.

• 1:11:13Elon Musk?

  Oh, they're keeping, yeah, that's relatively easy.

• 1:11:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, like, but not this, but solve in the way that we just, we talked about previous is prototype versus a thing that actually creates a pleasant experience over hundreds of thousands of miles and millions. Yeah, so.

• 1:11:29Elon Musk?

  We had to wrap a lot of code around the Mobileye thing. It doesn't, it didn't just work by itself.

• 1:11:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes. I mean, there's part, that's part of the story of how you approach things. Sometimes, sometimes you do things from scratch. Sometimes at first, you kind of see what's out there and then you decide to do from scratch. That was one of the boldest decisions I've seen is both on the hardware and the software to decide to eventually go from scratch. I thought, again, I was skeptical whether that's going to be able to work out because it's such, such a difficult problem. And so it was an incredible journey. What I see now with everything, the hardware, the compute, the sensors, the, the things I maybe care and love about most is the, the stuff that Andre Karpathy is leading with the data set selection, the whole data engine process, the neural network architectures,

• 1:12:16Lex Fridman?

  the, the way that's in the real world, that network is tested, validated, all the different test sets. You know, versus the ImageNet model of computer vision, like what's in academia is like real world artificial intelligence. So.

• 1:12:32Elon Musk?

  And Andre is awesome and obviously plays an important role, but we have a lot of really talented people driving things. So. And Ashok is actually the, the head of autopilot engineering.

• 1:12:46Elon Musk?

  Andre is the director of AI.

• 1:12:47Lex Fridman?

  AI stuff, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's, I'm aware that there's an incredible team of just a lot going on.

• 1:12:53Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I just, you know, people, people will give, will give me too much credit and they'll give Andre too much credit, so.

• 1:13:00Lex Fridman?

  And people should realize how much is going on under the.

• 1:13:03Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's just a lot of really talented people.

• 1:13:07Elon Musk?

  The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. It's like some of the smartest people in the world. So yeah, we're getting it done.

• 1:13:16Lex Fridman?

  What are some insights you've gained over those five, six years of autopilot about the problem of autonomous driving? So you leaped in having some sort of first principles kinds of intuitions, but nobody knows how difficult the problem like.

• 1:13:36Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I thought the self-driving problem would be hard, but it was harder than I thought. It's not like I thought it would be easy. I thought it would be very hard, but it was actually way harder than than even that. So what it comes down to at the end of the day is to solve self-driving, you have to solve. You basically need to recreate what humans do to drive, which is humans drive with optical sensors, eyes and biological neural nets. And so in order to that, that's how the entire road system is designed to work with with basically passive optical and neural nets biologically. And now that we need to, so for actually for full self-driving to work,

• 1:14:21Elon Musk?

  we have to recreate that in digital form. So we have to, that that means cameras with advanced neural nets in silicon form. And then you, it will obviously solve for full self-driving. That's the only way. I don't think there's any other way.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  But the question is, what aspects of human nature do you have to encode into the machine? Right? So you have to solve the perception problem like detect. And then you first, well, realize what is the perception problem for driving? Like all the kinds of things you have to be able to see. Like, what do we even look at when we drive? There's a, I just recently heard Andre talked about at MIT about car doors. I think it was the world's greatest talk of all time about car doors.

• 1:15:08Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Lex Fridman?

  The, you know, the fine details of car doors. Like, what is even an open car door, man? So like the the ontology of that, that's a perception problem. We humans solve that perception problem and Tesla has to solve that problem. And then there's the control and the planning coupled with the perception. You have to figure out like. What's involved in driving, like especially in all the different edge cases? And then, I mean, maybe you can comment on this. How much game theoretic kind of stuff needs to be involved? You know, at a four-way stop sign. You know, as humans, when we drive, our actions affect the world. Like, it changes how others behave. Most of the time was driving.

• 1:15:53Lex Fridman?

  If you, you're usually just responding to the scene as opposed to like really asserting yourself in the scene. Do you think?

• 1:16:04Elon Musk?

  I think these, I think, I think these could, these sort of control logic conundrums are not, are not the hard part.

• 1:16:12Elon Musk?

  The, you know, let's see.

• 1:16:16Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the hard part in this whole beautiful, complex problem?

• 1:16:22Elon Musk?

  So it's a lot of frigging software, man. A lot of smart lines of code.

• 1:16:28Elon Musk?

  For sure, in order to have, create an accurate vector space. So like, you're, you're coming from image space, which is like this, this flow of photons. You're going to camera, cameras and, and then, so you have this massive bit stream in image space. And then you have to effectively compress the, a massive bit stream

• 1:17:05Elon Musk?

  corresponding to photons that knocked off an electron in a camera sensor and turn that bit stream into, into vector space.

• 1:17:19Elon Musk?

  By vector space, I mean like.

• 1:17:23Elon Musk?

  You know, you've got cars and humans and lane lines and curves and traffic lights and that kind of thing. Once you have an accurate vector space, the control problem is similar to that of a video game, like a Grand Theft Auto of Cyberpunk. If you have accurate vector space. It's the control problem is, I wouldn't say it's trivial. It's not trivial, but it's it's not like some insurmountable thing. It's just, but having accurate vector space is very difficult.

• 1:18:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think we humans don't give enough respect to how incredible the human perception system is to mapping the raw photons to the vector space representation in our heads.

• 1:18:16Elon Musk?

  Your brain is doing an incredible amount of processing and giving you an image that is a very cleaned up image. Like when we look around here, we see like you see color in the corners of your eyes. But actually, your eyes have very few cones, like cone receptors in the peripheral vision. Your eyes are painting color in the peripheral vision. You don't realize it, but their eyes are actually painting color. And your eyes also have like this blood vessels and all sorts of gnarly things. And there's a blind spot, but do you see your blind spot? No, your brain is painting in the missing, the blind spot. You're going to do these like, see these things online where you look here and look at this point and then look at this point.

• 1:18:58Elon Musk?

  And it's, if it's in your blind spot, it, your brain will just fill in the missing bits.

• 1:19:05Lex Fridman?

  The peripheral vision is so cool. It makes you realize all the illusions for vision science. It's so, it makes you realize just how incredible the brain is.

• 1:19:12Elon Musk?

  The brain is doing crazy amount of post-processing on the vision signals from your eyes. It's insane.

• 1:19:19Elon Musk?

  So and then even once you get all those vision signals, your your brain is constantly trying to forget as much as possible. So human memory is perhaps the weakest thing about the brain is memory. So because memory is so expensive to a brain and so limited, your brain is trying to forget as much as possible and distill the things that you see into the smallest smallest amounts of information possible. So your brain is trying to not just get to a vector space, but get to a vector space that is the smallest possible vector space of only relevant objects. And I think like you can sort of look inside your brain, or at least I can,

• 1:20:02Elon Musk?

  like when you drive down the road and try to think about what your brain is actually doing consciously. And it's conscious, it's it's it's like you'll see a car that's because you're you're you don't have cameras. You I don't have eyes in the back of your head or the side, you know. So you say like, but you're you're basically your your head is like a, you know, you basically have like two cameras on a slow gimbal. And and what's your and eyes, that's not that great. Okay, human eyes are, you know, like, and people are constantly distracted and thinking about things and texting and doing all sorts of things they shouldn't do in a car, changing the radio station.

• 1:20:42Elon Musk?

  So having arguments, you know, is like, so so then like, so like, like, like, when's the last time you looked right and left and, you know, or and rearward, or even diagonally, you know, forward to actually refresh your vector space. So you're glancing around and what your mind is doing is is trying to still the relevant vectors, basically objects with a position and motion.

• 1:21:14Elon Musk?

  And and then and then editing that down to the least amount that's necessary for you to drive.

• 1:21:21Lex Fridman?

  It does seem to be able to edit it down or compress it even further into things like concepts. So it's not, it's like it goes beyond, the human mind seems to go sometimes beyond vector space to to sort of space of concepts to where you'll see a thing, it's no longer represented spatially somehow. It's almost like a concept that you should be aware of. Like if this is a school zone, you'll remember that as a concept, which is a weird thing to represent. But perhaps for driving, you don't need to fully represent those things. Or maybe you get those kind of

• 1:21:55Elon Musk?

  Well, you

• 1:21:56Lex Fridman?

  Indirectly.

• 1:21:57Elon Musk?

  You need to like establish vector space and then actually have predictions for that those vector spaces. So like, you know, like if, you know, like you drive past, say, say a bus and and you see that this this people, before you drove past the bus, you saw people crossing. It's like, or some, just imagine there's like a large truck or something blocking sight. But you, before you came up to the truck, you saw that there were some kids about to cross the road in front of the truck. Now you can no longer see the kids, but you you need to be able, but you would now know, okay,

• 1:22:37Elon Musk?

  those kids are probably gonna pass by the truck and cross the road, even though you cannot see them. So you have to have memory, you have to need to remember that there were kids there and you need to have some forward prediction of what their position will be.

• 1:22:55Lex Fridman?

  It's a really hard problem.

• 1:22:56Elon Musk?

  At the time of relevance.

• 1:22:57Lex Fridman?

  So with with occlusions and computer vision, when you can't see an object anymore, even when just walks behind a tree and reappears, that's a really, really I mean, at least in academic literature, it's tracking through occlusions, it's very difficult.

• 1:23:12Elon Musk?

  Yeah, we're doing it.

• 1:23:13Lex Fridman?

  I understand this.

• 1:23:14Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Lex Fridman?

  So some of it.

• 1:23:15Elon Musk?

  It's like object permanence, like same thing happens with the humans with neural nets, like when like a toddler grows up, like there's a, there's a point in time where

• 1:23:25Elon Musk?

  they develop, they have a sense of object permanence. So before a certain age, if you have a ball or a toy or whatever, and you put it behind your back and you pop it out, if they don't, before they have object permanence, it's like a new thing every time. It's like, whoa, this toy went, poof, disappeared, and now it's back again, and they can't believe it, and that they can play peekaboo all day long, because the peekaboo is fresh every time.

• 1:23:47Elon Musk?

  But then we figure out object permanence, then they realize, oh, no, the object is not gone, it's just behind your back.

• 1:23:54Lex Fridman?

  Sometimes I wish we never did figure out object permanence.

• 1:23:57Elon Musk?

  Yeah, so that's a.

• 1:24:00Lex Fridman?

  That's an important problem to solve.

• 1:24:03Elon Musk?

  Yes, so, like, an important evolution of the neural nets in the car is

• 1:24:11Elon Musk?

  memory across, memory across both time and space. So, now, you can't remember, like you have to say, like, how long do you want to remember things for? And it, there's, there's a cost to remembering things for a long time. So you could, you know, like, run out of memory to, if you've tried to remember too much for too long. And then you also have things that are stale if they're, if you remember them for too long. And then you also need things that are remember, uh, remembered over time. So even if you, like, say, have, like, for argument's sake, five seconds of memory on a time basis, but like, let's say you, you're parked at a light. And you, and you saw, use a pedestrian example, that people were waiting to cross the, cross the road.

• 1:24:56Elon Musk?

  And you can't, you can't quite see them because of an occlusion.

• 1:25:00Elon Musk?

  And, but they might wait for a minute before the light changes for them to cross the road. You still need to, to remember that that, that's where they were, and that they're probably going to cross the road type of thing. So even if that exceeds your, your, your time-based memory, it should not exceed your space memory.

• 1:25:19Lex Fridman?

  And I just think the data engine side of that, so getting the data to learn all of the concepts that you're saying now is an incredible process. It's this iterative process of just, it's this HydraNet of many.

• 1:25:31Elon Musk?

  HydraNet.

• 1:25:34Elon Musk?

  We're changing the name to something else.

• 1:25:36Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I'm sure it'll be equally as Rick and Morty like.

• 1:25:41Elon Musk?

  There's a lot of, yeah, we've rearchitected the neural net, neural nets in the cars so many times, it's crazy.

• 1:25:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so every time there's a new major version, you'll rename it to something more ridiculous or memorable and beautiful? Sorry, not ridiculous, of course.

• 1:25:59Elon Musk?

  If you see the full, the full like array of neural nets that are operating in the cars, it kind of boggles the mind. There's so, there's so many layers, it's crazy. So, yeah. But, and we started off with simple neural nets that were basically image recognition on a single frame from a single camera and then trying to knit those together with, you know, with the C, I should say, we're really primarily running C here because C++ is too

• 1:26:40Elon Musk?

  much overhead. And we have our own C compiler. So to get maximum performance, we actually wrote our own C compiler and are continuing to optimize our C compiler for maximum efficiency. In fact, we've just recently done a new rev on a, on a C compiler that'll compile directly to our autopilot hardware.

• 1:26:58Lex Fridman?

  So you want to compile the whole thing down and with your own compiler?

• 1:27:01Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Lex Fridman?

  Like so efficiency here, because there's all kinds of compute, there's CPU, GPU, there's like ASIC types of things, and you have to somehow figure out the scheduling across all of those things. And so you're compiling the code down.

• 1:27:13Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Lex Fridman?

  That does all, okay. So that's why there's a lot of people involved.

• 1:27:18Elon Musk?

  There's, there's a lot of hardcore software engineering at a very sort of bare metal level because you, we're trying to do a lot of compute that's constrained to the, you know, our full self-driving computer. So, and we want to try to have the highest frames per second possible within a sort of very finite amount of compute and power. So.

• 1:27:49Elon Musk?

  We really put a lot of effort into the efficiency of our compute. And so there's actually a lot of work done by some very talented software engineers at Tesla that at a very foundational level to improve the efficiency of compute and how we use the trip accelerators, which are basically, you know, doing matrix math, dot products, like a Brazilian dot products. And it's like, what are neural nets? It's like, compute wise, like 99% dot products. So, you know.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  And you want to achieve as many high frame rates like video game. You want

• 1:28:32Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  full resolution, high frame rate?

• 1:28:36Elon Musk?

  High frame rate, low latency, low jitter. So I think one of the things we're moving towards now is no post-processing of the image through the image signal processor. So like, what happens for cameras is that almost all cameras is they, there's a lot of post-processing done in order to make pictures look pretty. And so we don't care about pictures looking

• 1:29:13Elon Musk?

  pretty. We just want the data. So we're moving just raw photon counts. So the system will, like, the image that the computer sees is actually much more than what you'd see if you represented it on a camera. It's got much more data. And even in very low light conditions, you can see that there's a small photon count difference between, you know, this spot here and that spot there, which means that, so it can see in the dark incredibly well, because it can detect these tiny differences in photon counts. Like, much better than you possibly

• 1:29:50Elon Musk?

  imagine. So, and then we also save 13 milliseconds on latency. So.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  From removing the post-processing in the image?

• 1:30:02Elon Musk?

  Yes. It's like, because we've got, you know, eight cameras and then there's

• 1:30:10Elon Musk?

  Roughly, I don't know, one and a half milliseconds or so, maybe 1.6 milliseconds of latency for each camera. And so like going to just basically bypassing the image processor gets us back 13 milliseconds of latency, which is important. And we track latency all the way from, you know, photon hits the camera to, you know, all the steps that it's got to go through to get, you know, go through the various neural nets and the C code. And there's a little bit of C++ there as well. Well, I can maybe

• 1:30:50Elon Musk?

  a lot, but it, the core stuff is, the heavy duty computers all in C. And, uh, and so, so we track that latency all the way to an output command to the drive unit to accelerate the brakes, just to slow down, steering, you know, turn left or right. So, cause you got to output a command that's got to go to a controller and like some of these controllers have an update frequency that's maybe 10 hertz or something like that, which is slow. That's like, now you lose a hundred milliseconds potentially. So, so then we want to update the, the drivers on the, like I say, steering and braking control to have more like a hundred hertz instead of 10 hertz. And you've got a 10

• 1:31:35Elon Musk?

  milliseconds latency instead of a hundred milliseconds worst case latency. And, and actually jitter is more of a challenge than, than latency. Cause latency is like you can, you can, you can anticipate and predict, but if you're, but if you've got a stack up of things going from the camera to the, to the computer through then a series of other computers and finally to an actuator on the, the car. If you have a stack up of, of tolerances, of timing tolerances, then you can have quite a variable latency, which is called jitter. And, and that makes it hard to, to anticipate exactly what, how you should turn the car or accelerate because, you know, if you've got maybe 150, 200 milliseconds of jitter, then you could be off by, you know, up to 0.2 seconds. And this can make, this could make a big difference.

• 1:32:18Lex Fridman?

  So you have to interpolate somehow to, to, to deal with the effects of jitter. So you, that you can make like robust control decisions.

• 1:32:29Lex Fridman?

  So the jitter is in the sensor information? Or is it the jitter can occur at any stage in the pipeline?

• 1:32:36Elon Musk?

  You can, if you have just, if you have fixed latency, you can anticipate. And like say, okay, we know that our information is, for argument's sake, 150 milliseconds stale. Like so for 150, for argument's sake, 150 milliseconds from photon second camera to

• 1:32:58Elon Musk?

  where you can measure a change in the acceleration of the vehicle.

• 1:33:05Elon Musk?

  So then, then you can say, okay, well, we're gonna, we know it's 150 milliseconds, so we're gonna take that into account and compensate for that latency. However, if you've got then 150 milliseconds of latency plus 100 milliseconds of jitter, that's which could be anywhere from zero, zero to 100 milliseconds on top. So then your latency could be from 150 to 200 milliseconds. Now you've got 100 milliseconds that you don't know what to do with. And that's basically random. So getting rid of jitter is extremely important.

• 1:33:35Lex Fridman?

  And that affects your control decisions and all those kinds of things. Okay.

• 1:33:40Elon Musk?

  Yeah, the car is just gonna fundamentally maneuver better with lower jitter.

• 1:33:44Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:33:45Elon Musk?

  The cars will maneuver with superhuman ability and reaction time much faster than a human. I mean, I think over time, the autopilot full self-driving will be capable of maneuvers that, you know,

• 1:34:03Elon Musk?

  you know, are far more than what like James Bond could do in like the best movie type of thing.

• 1:34:07Lex Fridman?

  That's exactly what I was imagining in my mind as you said it.

• 1:34:11Elon Musk?

  It's like impossible maneuvers that a human couldn't do, you know, so.

• 1:34:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask sort of, looking back the six years, looking out into the future, based on your current understanding, how hard do you think this, this full self-driving problem, when do you think Tesla will solve level four FSD?

• 1:34:32Elon Musk?

  I mean, it's looking quite likely that it will be next year.

• 1:34:36Lex Fridman?

  And what does the solution look like? Is it the current pool of FSD beta candidates? They start getting greater and greater as they have been degrees of autonomy. And then there's a certain level beyond which they can they can do their own, they can read a book.

• 1:34:54Elon Musk?

  Yeah, so I mean, you can see that anybody who's been following the full self-driving beta closely will see that the the rate of disengagements has been dropping rapidly. So like a disengagement be where where the driver intervenes to prevent the car from doing something

• 1:35:13Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:35:14Elon Musk?

  dangerous potentially. So

• 1:35:21Elon Musk?

  so the interventions, you know, per million miles has been dropping dramatically. At some point, the and that trend looks like it happens next year is that the probability of an accident on FSD is less than that of the average human and then and then significantly less than that of the average human. So it certainly appears like we will get there next year.

• 1:35:53Elon Musk?

  Then, of course, that then there's going to be a case of, OK, well, we now have to prove this to regulators and prove it to, you know, and we want a standard that is not just equivalent to a human, but much better than the average human. I think it's got to be at least two or three times higher safety than a human. So two or three times lower probability of injury than a human. Before before we would actually say like, OK, it's OK to go. It's not going to be equivalent. It's going to be much better.

• 1:36:19Lex Fridman?

  So if you look 10 point FSD 10.6 just came out recently, 10.7 is on the way. Maybe 11 is on the way. So where in the future?

• 1:36:29Elon Musk?

  Yeah, we were hoping to get 11 out this year, but it's

• 1:36:35Elon Musk?

  11 actually has a whole bunch of fundamental rewrites on the neural neural net architecture.

• 1:36:42Elon Musk?

  And some fundamental improvements in creating vector space. So

• 1:36:51Lex Fridman?

  There is a some fundamental like leap that really deserves the 11. I mean, that's a pretty cool number.

• 1:36:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Elon Musk?

  Eleven would be a single stack for all, you know, one stack to rule them all.

• 1:37:05Elon Musk?

  And but there are just some really fundamental neural net architecture changes that are that will allow for much more capability, but you know, at first they're going to have issues. So like we have this working on like sort of alpha software and it's good, but it's it's basically taking a whole bunch of C plus plus code and deleting a massive amount of C plus plus code and replacing it with a neural net. And you know, Andre makes this point a lot, which is like neural nets are kind of eating software. You know, over time, there's like less and less conventional software, more and more neural net, which

• 1:37:49Elon Musk?

  is still software, but it's, you know, still comes out the lines of software. But it's more neural net stuff and less, you know, heuristic, basically. If you're more matrix based stuff and less heuristic based stuff. And, you know, like, like, one of the big changes will be like, right now, the neural nets will deliver a giant bag of points to

• 1:38:33Elon Musk?

  the C plus plus or C and C plus plus code.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Elon Musk?

  We call it the giant bag of points.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Elon Musk?

  And it's like, so you got a pixel and something associated with that pixel, like this pixel is probably car, that pixel is probably lane line. Then you've got to assemble this giant bag of points in the C code and turn it into vectors.

• 1:38:58Elon Musk?

  And it does a pretty good job of it, but it's, it's a, it's, we want to just, we need another layer of neural nets on top of that to take the giant bag of points and distill that down to vector space in the neural net part of the software as opposed to the heuristics part of the software. This is a big improvement.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Neural nets all the way down is what you want?

• 1:39:24Elon Musk?

  It's not even neural, old neural net, but it's, it's, it's, this will be just a, this is a game changer to not have the bag of points, the giant bag of points that has to be assembled with many lines of C plus plus and have the, and have a neural net just assemble those into vectors. So, so that the neural net is outputting much, much less data. It's, it's outputting, this, this is a lane line. This is a curb. This is drivable space. This is a car. This is, you know, pedestrian or cyclist or something like that.

• 1:40:00Elon Musk?

  It's outputting, it's really outputting proper vectors to the, the C plus plus control, control code as opposed to the sort of constructing the, the vectors in, in C. We've done, I think, quite a good job of, but it's, it's a, we're kind of hitting a local maximum on the, how well the C can do this. So this is, this is really, this is really a big deal. And just all of the networks in the car need, need to move to surround video. There's still some legacy networks that are not surround video. And all of the training needs to move

• 1:40:45Elon Musk?

  to surround video and the efficiency of the training, it needs to get better and it is. And then we need to move everything to raw photon counts as opposed to processed images.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:41:00Elon Musk?

  Which is, which is quite a big reset on the training because the system's trained on post-processed image, images. So we need to redo all the training to train against the, the raw photon counts instead of the post-processed image.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  So ultimately it's kind of reducing the complexity of the whole thing. So reducing, reducing.

• 1:41:21Elon Musk?

  Lines of code will actually go, go lower.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fascinating.

• 1:41:25Lex Fridman?

  So you're doing fusion of all the sensors and reducing the complexity of having to deal with these.

• 1:41:29Elon Musk?

  Fusions of cameras is. It's not like cameras, really.

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  Right, yes.

• 1:41:35Lex Fridman?

  Same with humans. Well, I guess we got ears too. Okay.

• 1:41:38Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well, we'll actually need to incorporate sound as well because you know, you need to like listen for ambulance sirens or you know, fire trucks, you know,

• 1:41:49Elon Musk?

  if somebody like, you know, yelling at you or something, I don't know, just that there's, there's a little bit of audio that needs to be incorporated as well.

• 1:41:56Lex Fridman?

  Do you need a quick bathroom break?

• 1:41:57Elon Musk?

  Yeah, let's, sure, let's take a break.

• 1:41:58Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:42:00Elon Musk?

  Honestly, frankly, like the ideas are the easy thing and the implementation is the hard thing. Like the idea of going to the moon is, is the easy part, but going to the moon is the hard part.

• 1:42:10Lex Fridman?

  It's the hard part.

• 1:42:11Elon Musk?

  And there's a lot of like hardcore engineering that's got to get done at the hardware and software level. Like I said, optimizing the C compiler and the, just, you know,

• 1:42:24Elon Musk?

  cutting out latency everywhere, like this is, if we don't do this, the system will not work properly. So the work of the engineers doing this, they are like the unsung heroes to some, you know, but they are critical to the success of the situation.

• 1:42:40Lex Fridman?

  I think you made it clear. I mean, at least to me, it's super exciting. Everything that's going on outside of what Andre is doing.

• 1:42:46Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Lex Fridman?

  Just the whole infrastructure of the software. I mean, everything is going on with data engine, whatever, whatever it's called. The whole process is, is just work of art to me.

• 1:42:56Elon Musk?

  The sheer scale of it is, is boggles the mind. Like the training, the amount of work done with the, like we've written all this custom software for training and labeling. And to do auto labeling, auto labeling is essential.

• 1:43:09Elon Musk?

  Because especially when you've got like surround video, it's very difficult to like label surround video from scratch is extremely difficult.

• 1:43:19Elon Musk?

  Like take a human's such a long time to even label one video clip, like several hours. Or the order label it, basically we just apply like heavy duty,

• 1:43:31Elon Musk?

  like a lot of compute to the, to the video clips to pre assign and guess what all the things are that are going on in this round video.

• 1:43:40Lex Fridman?

  And then there's like correcting it.

• 1:43:41Elon Musk?

  Yeah. And then all the human has to do is like tweet, like say, you know, change, adjust what is incorrect. This, this is like increased, increases productivity by effect a hundred or more.

• 1:43:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you've presented Tesla bot as primarily useful in the factory. First of all, I think humanoid robots are incredible. From a fan of robotics, I think the elegance of movement that human, that humanoid robots, that bipedal robots show are just so cool. So it's really interesting that you're working on this and also talking about applying the same kind of all the ideas of some of which you've talked about with data engine, all the things that we're talking about with Tesla autopilot, just transferring that over to the, just yet another robotics problem. I have to ask, since I care about human robot interactions, so the human side of that, so you've talked about mostly in the factory.

• 1:44:33Lex Fridman?

  Do you see it also, do you see part of this problem that Tesla bot has to solve is interacting with humans and potentially having a place like in the home? So interacting, not just, not replacing labor, but also like, I don't know, being a friend or an assistant.

• 1:44:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah. I think the, the possibilities are endless.

• 1:44:58Elon Musk?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's obviously like a, it's not quite in Tesla's primary mission direction of accelerating sustainable energy, but it is a, an extremely useful thing that we can do for the world, which is to make a useful humanoid robot. That is capable of interacting with the world and helping in, in many different ways. So, so in factories and I really just, just, I mean, I think if you say like extrapolate to, you know, many years in the future, it's like, I, I think work will become optional.

• 1:45:36Elon Musk?

  So like, there's a lot of jobs that if you if you if you weren't paid to do it, they they wouldn't do it like it's not it's not fun, you know, necessarily like if you're washing dishes all day, it's like, eh, you know, even if you really like washing dishes, you really want to do it for eight hours a day, every day, probably not. So and then there's like dangerous work. And basically, if it's dangerous, boring, has like potential for repetitive stress injury, that kind of thing, then that's really where humanoid robots would add the most value initially. So that's what we're aiming for is is to

• 1:46:17Elon Musk?

  for for the humanoid robots to do jobs that people don't voluntarily want to do. And then then we'll have to pair that obviously with some kind of universal basic basic income in the future. So I think.

• 1:46:32Lex Fridman?

  Do you see a world when there's like hundreds of millions of Tesla bots doing different performing different tasks throughout the world?

• 1:46:43Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I haven't really thought about it that far into the future, but I guess that there may be something like that. So.

• 1:46:51Lex Fridman?

  That's a wild question. So the the number of Tesla cars has been accelerating. It's been close to 2 million produced. Many of them have autopilot.

• 1:47:01Elon Musk?

  I think we're over 2 million now. Yeah.

• 1:47:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there will ever be a time where there will be more Tesla bots than Tesla cars?

• 1:47:12Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I, you know, actually, it's funny you ask this question because normally I do try to think pretty far into the future, but I haven't really thought that far into the future with the Tesla bot or it's codenamed Optimus. I call I call it Optimus Subprime.

• 1:47:30Elon Musk?

  Because it's not it's not like a giant, you know, transformer robot. So I but it's meant to be a general purpose help for bot.

• 1:47:46Elon Musk?

  And basically, like the things that we're basically like Tesla, I think, is the has the most advanced real world AI for interacting with the real world, which you developed as a function of to make self-driving work. And so along with custom hardware and like a lot of, you know, hardcore low-level software to have it run efficiently and be power efficient, because, you know, it's one thing to do neural nets if you've got a gigantic server room with 10,000 computers. But now, let's say you just you have to now distill that down into one computer that's running at low power in a humanoid robot or a car. That's actually very difficult and a lot of hardcore software work is required for that.

• 1:48:30Elon Musk?

  So since we're kind of like solving the navigate the real world with neural nets problem for cars, which are kind of like robots with four wheels, then it's like kind of a natural extension of that is to put it in a robot with arms and legs and actuators. So like the two like hard things are like you basically need to make the have the robot be intelligent enough to interact in a sensible way with the environment. So you see real world AI and you need to be very good at manufacturing, which is a

• 1:49:15Elon Musk?

  very hard problem. Tesla is very good at manufacturing and also has the real world AI. So making the humanoid robot work is basically means developing custom motors and sensors that are different from what a car would use. But we've also we have, I think we have the best expertise in developing advanced electric motors and power electronics. So it just has to be for humanoid robot application on a car.

• 1:49:53Lex Fridman?

  Still, you do talk about love sometimes. So let me ask, this isn't like for like sex robots or something like that.

• 1:50:00Elon Musk?

  I love it's the answer.

• 1:50:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:50:04Lex Fridman?

  There is something compelling to us, not compelling, but we connect with humanoid robots or even legged robots like with a dog in shapes of dogs. It just, it seems like, you know, there's a huge amount of loneliness in this world. All of us seek companionship with other humans, friendship and all those kinds of things. We have a lot here in Austin, a lot of people have dogs.

• 1:50:27Elon Musk?

  Sure.

• 1:50:27Lex Fridman?

  There seems to be a huge opportunity to also have robots that decrease the, uh, the, the amount of loneliness in the world or help us humans connect with each, with each other. So in a way that dogs can. Do you think about that with Tesla Bot at all? Or is it really focused on the problem of, of performing specific tasks, not connecting with humans?

• 1:50:54Elon Musk?

  I mean, to be, to be honest, I have not actually thought about it from the companionship standpoint, but I think it actually would end up being, it, it could be actually a very good companion. And it, it could, you develop like a personality over time that is, that is like unique, like, uh, you know, it's not like they're just all the robots are the same. And that personality could evolve to be, you know, uh,

• 1:51:24Elon Musk?

  match, match the, the, the owner or the, you know, yes, the owner.

• 1:51:31Lex Fridman?

  Well.

• 1:51:31Elon Musk?

  Whatever you want to call it.

• 1:51:33Lex Fridman?

  The other, the other half, right? Uh, in the same way that friends do. See, I think that's a huge opportunity. I think.

• 1:51:41Elon Musk?

  Yeah, no, that's interesting. Like, um,

• 1:51:45Elon Musk?

  the, cause you know, like there's a Japanese phrase or like the wabi sabi, you know, the subtle imperfections are what makes something special.

• 1:51:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Elon Musk?

  And the subtle imperfections of the personality of the robot mapped to the subtle imperfections of the robot's human.

• 1:52:05Elon Musk?

  Friend, I don't know, owner sounds like maybe the wrong word, but

• 1:52:10Elon Musk?

  could actually make an incredible buddy, basically.

• 1:52:13Lex Fridman?

  In that way, the imperfections.

• 1:52:14Elon Musk?

  Like R2D2 or like a C3PO sort of thing, you know?

• 1:52:17Lex Fridman?

  So from a machine learning perspective,

• 1:52:21Lex Fridman?

  I think the flaws being a feature is really nice. You could be quite terrible at being a robot for quite a while in the general home environment or all the in the general world. And that's kind of adorable and that's like, those are your flaws and you fall in love with those flaws. So it's a very different than autonomous driving where it's a very high stakes environment. You cannot mess up. And so, yeah, it's more fun to be a robot in the home.

• 1:52:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah, in fact, if you think of like C3PO and R2D2, like they actually had a lot of like flaws and imperfections and silly things and they would argue with each other. And.

• 1:53:00Lex Fridman?

  Were they actually good at doing anything? I'm not exactly sure.

• 1:53:05Elon Musk?

  They definitely added a lot to the story.

• 1:53:09Elon Musk?

  But there's there's sort of quirky elements and, you know, that they would like make mistakes and do things like it was like, it made them

• 1:53:20Elon Musk?

  relatable. I don't know.

• 1:53:22Elon Musk?

  Enduring. So, so, yeah, I think that that could be something that probably would happen.

• 1:53:30Elon Musk?

  But our initial focus is just to make it useful. So, so

• 1:53:37Elon Musk?

  I'm confident we'll get it done. I'm not sure what the exact timeframe is, but like we'll probably have, I don't know, a decent prototype towards the end of next year or something like that.

• 1:53:46Lex Fridman?

  And it's cool that it's connected to Tesla, the car. So.

• 1:53:51Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's using a lot of, you know, it would use the autopilot inference computer and a lot of the training that we've done for the for cars in terms of recognizing real world things could be applied directly to the to the robot. So it but but there's there's a lot of custom actuators and sensors that need to be developed.

• 1:54:13Lex Fridman?

  And an extra module on top of the vector space for love.

• 1:54:18Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Lex Fridman?

  That's me saying.

• 1:54:22Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:54:22Elon Musk?

  We could add that to the car too.

• 1:54:24Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 1:54:27Lex Fridman?

  That could be useful in all environments. Like you said, a lot of people argue in the car, so maybe we can help them out. You're a student of history, fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast.

• 1:54:37Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:54:38Lex Fridman?

  Greatest podcast ever?

• 1:54:39Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I think it is, actually.

• 1:54:43Lex Fridman?

  It almost doesn't really count as a podcast.

• 1:54:45Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's more like an audiobook.

• 1:54:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you were on the podcast with Dan, I just had a chat with him about it. He said you guys want military and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:54:54Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's literally, it was basically,

• 1:55:01Elon Musk?

  it should be titled Engineer Wars. Essentially, like, when there's a rapid change in the rate of technology, then engineering plays a pivotal role in victory in battle.

• 1:55:15Lex Fridman?

  How far back in history did you go? Did you go World War II?

• 1:55:18Elon Musk?

  It was mostly, well, it was supposed to be a deep dive on fighters and bomber technology in World War II, but that ended up being more wide ranging than that. Because I just went down the total rat hole of like studying all of the fighters and bombers of World War II. And like the constant rock, paper, scissors game that like, you know, one country make this plane, then it make a plane to beat that, and that's the plan to make a plane to beat that. And then, and really what matters is like the pace of innovation. And also access to high quality fuel and raw materials. So like Germany had like some amazing designs, but they couldn't make them because they couldn't get their raw materials.

• 1:56:02Elon Musk?

  And they had a real problem with the oil and fuel, basically. The fuel quality was extremely variable.

• 1:56:11Lex Fridman?

  So the design wasn't the bottleneck?

• 1:56:13Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like the US had kick ass fuel that was like very consistent. Like the problem is if you make a very high performance aircraft engine, in order to make it high performance, you have to,

• 1:56:27Elon Musk?

  the fuel, the aviation gas, has to be a consistent mixture. And it has to have a high octane.

• 1:56:38Elon Musk?

  Like high octane is the most important thing, but also can't have like impurities and stuff. Because you'll foul up the engine. And Germany just never had good access oil. Like they tried to get it by invading the Caucasus, but that didn't work too well.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  That never works well.

• 1:56:55Lex Fridman?

  See you, Joe.

• 1:56:57Elon Musk?

  Nice to meet you. So Germany was always struggling with basically shitty oil. And then they could not, they couldn't count on a high quality fuel for their aircraft. So then they had to add all, have all these additives and stuff. So whereas the US had awesome fuel and they provided that to Britain as well. So that allowed the British and the Americans to design aircraft engines that were super high performance, better than anything else in the world.

• 1:57:29Elon Musk?

  Germany could design the engines, they just didn't have the fuel. And then also the, like I said, the, the quality of the aluminum alloys that they were getting was also not that great. And so, you know.

• 1:57:39Lex Fridman?

  Is this like, you talked about all this with Dan?

• 1:57:42Elon Musk?

  Yep.

• 1:57:43Lex Fridman?

  Awesome.

• 1:57:45Lex Fridman?

  Broadly looking at history, when you look at Genghis Khan, when you look at Stalin, Hitler, the darkest moments of human history, what do you take away from those moments? Does it help you gain insight about human nature, about human behavior today? Whether it's the wars or the individuals or just the behavior of people, any aspects of history?

• 1:58:12Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I find history fascinating.

• 1:58:21Elon Musk?

  There's a lot of incredible things that have been done, good and bad, that they help you understand the nature of civilization and individuals and.

• 1:58:37Lex Fridman?

  Does it make you sad that humans do these kinds of things to each other? You look at the 20th century, World War II, the cruelty, the abuse of power, talk about communism, Marxism and Stalin.

• 1:58:52Elon Musk?

  I mean, some of these things do, I mean, if you, like, there's a lot of human history, most of it is actually people just getting on with their lives, you know? And it's not like human history is just nonstop war and disasters. Those are actually just, those are intermittent and rare. If they weren't, then, you know, humans would soon cease to exist.

• 1:59:18Elon Musk?

  But it's just that wars tend to be written about a lot. And whereas like something being like, well, a normal year where nothing major happened was just get written about much. But that's, you know, most people just like farming and kind of like living their life, you know, being a villager somewhere.

• 1:59:40Elon Musk?

  And every now and again, there's a war. And I think so.

• 1:59:47Elon Musk?

  And yeah, I would have to say like, there aren't very many books that I, where I just had to stop reading because it was just too, too dark. But the book about Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, I had to stop reading. It was just too, too dark, rough.

• 2:00:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. The 30s, there's a lot, a lot of lessons there to me, in particular, that it feels like humans, like all of us have that, it's the old Solzhenitsyn line, that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, that all of us are capable of evil, all of us are capable of good. It's almost like this kind of responsibility that all of us have to, to, to tend towards the good. And so like, to me, looking at history is almost like an example of, look, you have some charismatic leader that convinces you of things is too easy, based on that story,

• 2:00:50Lex Fridman?

  to do evil onto each other, onto your family, onto others. And so it's like our responsibility to do good.

• 2:00:58Lex Fridman?

  It's not like now is somehow different from history. That can happen again, all of it can happen again. And yes, most of the time, you're right. I mean, the optimistic view here is mostly people are just living life. And as you've often memed about, the quality of life was way worse back in the day and it keeps improving over time through innovation, through technology. But still, it's somehow notable that these blimps of atrocities happen.

• 2:01:25Elon Musk?

  Sure. Yeah, I mean, life was really tough. Most of history. I mean, probably for most of human history.

• 2:01:37Elon Musk?

  A good year would be one where not that many people in your village died of the plague, starvation, freezing to death, or being killed by a neighboring village. It's like, well, it wasn't that bad. You know, it was only like, you know, we lost 5% this year. That was a good year. You know, that would be par for the course. Like, just not starving to death would have been like the primary goal of most people in throughout history is making sure we'll have enough food to last through the winter and not freeze or whatever. So.

• 2:02:11Elon Musk?

  Now, food is plentiful. I have an obesity problem.

• 2:02:16Elon Musk?

  So.

• 2:02:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, the lesson there is to be grateful for the way things are now for for some of us.

• 2:02:24Lex Fridman?

  We've spoken about this offline. I'd love to get your thought about it here.

• 2:02:31Lex Fridman?

  If I sat down for a long form in-person conversation with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, would you potentially want to call in for a few minutes to join in on a conversation with him moderated and translated by me?

• 2:02:46Elon Musk?

  Sure. Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to do that.

• 2:02:51Lex Fridman?

  You've shown interest in the Russian language. Is this grounded in your interest in history of linguistics, culture, general curiosity?

• 2:02:59Elon Musk?

  I think it sounds cool.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  Sounds cool, not looks cool. So.

• 2:03:03Elon Musk?

  Well, it's, you know, it's, it's a, it takes a moment to read Cyrillic.

• 2:03:11Elon Musk?

  Once you know what the Cyrillic characters stand for, actually, then reading Russian becomes a lot easier because there are a lot of words that are actually the same, like bank is bank.

• 2:03:25Elon Musk?

  And.

• 2:03:26Lex Fridman?

  So find the words that are exactly the same and now you start to understand Cyrillic. Yeah.

• 2:03:30Elon Musk?

  If you can, if you can sound it out, then it's much, there's at least some commonality of words.

• 2:03:37Lex Fridman?

  What about the culture? You love great engineering, physics. There's a tradition of the sciences there.

• 2:03:45Elon Musk?

  Sure.

• 2:03:46Lex Fridman?

  You look at the 20th century from rocketry. So you know, some of the greatest rockets of the space exploration has been done in the Soviet, in the former Soviet Union.

• 2:03:55Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:55Lex Fridman?

  So do you draw inspiration from that history? Just how this culture that in many ways, I mean, one of the sad things is because of the language, a lot of it is lost to history because it's not translated, all those kinds of, because it is in some ways an isolated culture. It flourishes within its, within its borders.

• 2:04:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:16Lex Fridman?

  So do you draw inspiration from those folks from, from the history of science and engineering there?

• 2:04:22Elon Musk?

  I mean, the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine as well, and have a really strong history in spaceflight, like some of the most advanced and impressive things in history were done,

• 2:04:39Elon Musk?

  you know, by the Soviet Union. So

• 2:04:46Elon Musk?

  one can, cannot help but admire the impressive rocket technology that was developed.

• 2:04:53Elon Musk?

  You know, after the sort of fall of Soviet Union, the, there's, there's much less that, that happened.

• 2:05:02Elon Musk?

  But

• 2:05:04Elon Musk?

  it's still things are happening, but it's not, not quite at the frenetic pace that was happening

• 2:05:12Elon Musk?

  before the Soviet Union kind of dissolved into separate republics.

• 2:05:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, I, you know, there's Roskosmos, the Russian agency. I, I look forward to a time when those countries with China are working together. The United States are all working together, maybe a little bit of friendly competition, but.

• 2:05:33Elon Musk?

  I think friendly competition is good. You know, governments are slow and the only thing slower than one government is a collection of governments.

• 2:05:42Elon Musk?

  So yeah, the Olympics would be boring if everyone just crossed the finishing line at the same time.

• 2:05:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Elon Musk?

  Nobody would watch.

• 2:05:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Elon Musk?

  And people wouldn't try hard to run fast and stuff. So I think friendly competition is a good thing.

• 2:05:56Lex Fridman?

  This is also a good place to give a shout out to a video titled "The Entire Soviet Rocket Engine Family Tree" by Tim Dodd, AKA Everyday Astronaut. It's like an hour and a half. It gives a full history of Soviet rockets. And people should definitely go check on, support Tim in general. That guy is super excited about the future, super excited about spaceflight. Every time I see anything by him, I just have a stupid smile on my face because he's so excited about stuff. I love people like that.

• 2:06:23Elon Musk?

  Tim Dodd is really great. If you're interested in anything to do with space, he's, in terms of explaining rocket technology to your average person, he's awesome. The best, I'd say. And I should say, like, the part of the reason, like, I switched us from, like, Raptor at one point was going to be a hydrogen engine. But hydrogen has a lot of challenges. It's very low density. It's a deep cryogen, so it's only liquid at a very, you know, very close to absolute zero. Requires a lot of insulation. It's, so it's a lot of challenges there.

• 2:07:02Elon Musk?

  And I was actually reading a bit about Russian rocket engine development, and at least the impression I had was that Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine primarily were actually in the process of switching to Methalox. And there were some interesting test stand data for ISP, like, they were able to get like, up to like, a 380 second ISP with a Methalox engine. And I was like, whoa, okay, that's, that's actually really impressive. So, so I think we could, if you could actually get a much lower cost, like, in optimizing

• 2:07:46Elon Musk?

  cost per tonne to orbit, cost per tonne to Mars, it's, I think, methane oxygen is the way to go. And I was partly inspired by the Russian work on the test stands with Methalox engines.

• 2:08:04Lex Fridman?

  And now for something completely different. Do you mind doing a bit of a meme review in the spirit of the great, the powerful PewDiePie? Let's say one to 11, just go over a few documents, print it out.

• 2:08:17Elon Musk?

  We can try.

• 2:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Let's try this. I present to you document numero uno.

• 2:08:27Elon Musk?

  Okay.

• 2:08:30Lex Fridman?

  Vladine Payler discovers marshmallows.

• 2:08:35Elon Musk?

  That's not bad.

• 2:08:38Lex Fridman?

  So you get it because he likes hailing things?

• 2:08:43Elon Musk?

  Yes, I get it. I don't know, three, whatever.

• 2:08:46Lex Fridman?

  That's not very good. This is grounded in some engineering, some history.

• 2:08:59Elon Musk?

  Yeah, give us an eight out of 10.

• 2:09:02Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about nuclear power?

• 2:09:04Elon Musk?

  I'm in favor of nuclear power. I think it's a in a place that is not subject to extreme natural disasters, I think it's a nuclear power is a great way to generate electricity. I don't think we should be shutting down nuclear power stations.

• 2:09:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but what about Chernobyl?

• 2:09:25Elon Musk?

  Exactly. So I think people, there's like a lot of fear of radiation and stuff. And it's, I guess, the problem is like, a lot of people just don't understand, they didn't study engineering or physics. So they're, it's just the word radiation just sounds scary, you know, so they don't, they can't calibrate what radiation means. But radiation is much less dangerous than you'd think. So like, for example, Fukushima, you know, when the Fukushima problem happened.

• 2:10:10Elon Musk?

  Due to the tsunami, the, I got people in California asking me if they should worry about radiation from Fukushima. I'm like, definitely not, not even slightly, not at all. That is crazy. And just to show, like, look, this is how, like, the danger is so much overplayed compared to what it really is, that I actually flew to Fukushima. And actually, I donated a solar power system for water treatment plant. And I made a

• 2:10:49Elon Musk?

  point of eating locally grown vegetables on TV in Fukushima. Like, I'm still alive. Okay.

• 2:11:02Lex Fridman?

  So it's not even that the risk of these events is low, but the impact of them is...

• 2:11:07Elon Musk?

  The impact is greatly exaggerated.

• 2:11:09Lex Fridman?

  It's just... Human nature.

• 2:11:11Elon Musk?

  It's people, people don't know what radiation is. Like, I've had people ask me, like, what about radiation from cell phones causing brain cancer? I'm like, when you say radiation, do you mean photons or particles? They're like, I don't know, what do you mean photons, particles? Do you mean, let's say photons, what frequency or wavelength? And they're like, I have no idea. Like, do you know that everything's radiating all the time? Like, what do you mean? Like, yeah, everything's radiating all the time. Photons are being emitted by all objects all the time, basically. So, and if you want to know what it means to stand in front of nuclear fire, go outside. The sun is a gigantic, you know,

• 2:11:56Elon Musk?

  thermonuclear reactor. You're staring right at it. Are you still alive? Yes. Okay, amazing.

• 2:12:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I guess radiation is one of the words that could be used as a tool to fear monger by certain people. That's it.

• 2:12:11Elon Musk?

  I think people just don't understand, so.

• 2:12:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's the way to fight that that fear, I suppose, is to understand, is to learn.

• 2:12:18Elon Musk?

  Yeah, just say like, okay, how many people have actually died from nuclear accidents? It's like practically nothing. And say, how many people have died from, you know, coal plants? And it's a very big number. So like, obviously, we should not be starting up coal plants and shutting down nuclear plants. It just doesn't make any sense at all. Coal plants like, I don't know, 100 to 1,000 times worse for for health than nuclear power plants.

• 2:12:46Lex Fridman?

  Ah, you want to go to the next one? This is really bad.

• 2:12:51Lex Fridman?

  So that 90, 180, and 360 degrees, everybody loves the math. Nobody gives a shit about 270.

• 2:12:59Elon Musk?

  It's not super funny. I don't know, like, two or three.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:04Elon Musk?

  This is not, you know, LOL situation.

• 2:13:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Elon Musk?

  That's pretty good.

• 2:13:15Lex Fridman?

  The United States oscillating between establishing and destroying dictatorships. It's like a metric. Is that a metric?

• 2:13:21Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Lex Fridman?

  What is that?

• 2:13:21Elon Musk?

  Metronome. Yeah, it's a, I don't know, seven out of 10. It's kind of true.

• 2:13:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, this is a, this is kind of personal for me. Next one.

• 2:13:30Elon Musk?

  Oh, man, this is like a.

• 2:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, no, this is.

• 2:13:33Elon Musk?

  Or it's like referring to like or something.

• 2:13:35Lex Fridman?

  As like as like a husband.

• 2:13:38Elon Musk?

  Husband. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:39Lex Fridman?

  Hello, yes, this is dog. Your wife was launched into space. And then the last one is him with his eyes closed and a bottle of vodka.

• 2:13:47Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like it didn't come back.

• 2:13:49Lex Fridman?

  No. They don't tell you the full story of, you know, what what the love, the impact they had on the loved ones.

• 2:13:56Elon Musk?

  True.

• 2:13:56Lex Fridman?

  That one gets an 11 for me.

• 2:13:58Elon Musk?

  Sure.

• 2:13:58Lex Fridman?

  The Soviet shutout. Oh, yeah, this keeps going on the Russian theme.

• 2:14:04Lex Fridman?

  First man in space, nobody cares. First man on the moon.

• 2:14:08Elon Musk?

  Well, I think people do care.

• 2:14:09Lex Fridman?

  No, I know, but.

• 2:14:12Elon Musk?

  Your gargoyles names will be forever in history, I think.

• 2:14:17Lex Fridman?

  There is something special about placing, like stepping foot onto another totally foreign land. It's not the journey like people that explored the oceans. It's not as important to explore the oceans as to land on a whole new continent.

• 2:14:33Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Lex Fridman?

  This is about you. Oh, yeah, I'd love to get your comment on this. Elon Musk, after sending $6.6 billion to the UN to end world hunger, you have three hours.

• 2:14:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously $6 billion is not going to end world hunger, so.

• 2:14:55Elon Musk?

  So, I mean, the reality is at this point, the world is producing far more food than it can really consume. Like, we don't have a caloric constraint to this point. So where there is hunger, it is almost always due to, it's like civil war or strife or some like.

• 2:15:16Elon Musk?

  It's not a thing that is extremely rare for it to be just a matter of like, like, lack of money. It's like, you know, it's like some, the civil war in some country and like one part of the country is literally trying to starve the other part of the country.

• 2:15:34Lex Fridman?

  So it's much more complex than something that money could solve. It's geopolitics, it's, it's a lot of things. It's human nature, it's governments, it's money, monetary systems, all that kind of stuff.

• 2:15:46Elon Musk?

  Yeah, food is extremely cheap these days. It's like, I mean, the US at this point, you know, among low income families, obesity is actually another problem. It's not, like, obesity is, it's not hunger, it's like too much, you know, too many calories. So it's not that nobody's hungry anywhere, it's just, it's just, this is a, not, not a simple matter of adding money and solving it.

• 2:16:17Lex Fridman?

  What do you think that one gets?

• 2:16:19Elon Musk?

  I don't know. Two.

• 2:16:25Lex Fridman?

  He's going after empires. World, where did you get those artifacts? The British Museum. A shout out to Monty Python. We found them.

• 2:16:34Elon Musk?

  Yeah, the British Museum is, it's pretty great. I mean, admittedly, Britain did take these historical artifacts from all around the world and put them in London. But, you know, it's not like people can't go see them. So it is a convenient place to see these ancient artifacts is, is London for, you know, for a large segment of the world. So I think, you know, on balance, the British Museum is a net good. Although I'm sure that a lot of countries are arguing about that.

• 2:17:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:04Elon Musk?

  It's like you want to make these historical artifacts accessible to as many people as possible. And the British Museum, I think does a good job of that.

• 2:17:12Lex Fridman?

  Even if there's a darker aspect to like the history of empire in general, whatever the empire is, however things were done, it is the history that happened. You can't sort of erase that history, unfortunately. You could just become better in the future. That's the point.

• 2:17:29Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, well, how are we going to pass moral judgment on these, these things? Like, it's like, if, you know, if one is going to judge, say, the British Empire, you're going to judge, you know, what everyone was doing at the time and how were the British relative to everyone? And I think they were, British would actually get like a relatively good grade, relatively good grade, not in absolute terms, but compared to what everyone else was doing, they were not the worst. Like I said, you got to look at these things in the context of the history at the time and say, what were the alternatives? And what are you comparing it against?

• 2:18:09Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:18:10Elon Musk?

  And I do not think it would be the case that Britain would get a, a bad grade in, when looking at history at the time. You know, if you judge history from, you know, from what is morally acceptable today, you're basically going to give everyone a failing grade.

• 2:18:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:30Elon Musk?

  I'm not clear. So I don't think anyone would get a passing grade in their morality of, like, you go back 300 years ago, like, who is getting a passing grade? Basically, no one.

• 2:18:42Lex Fridman?

  And we might not get a passing grade from generations that come after us. What does that one get?

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  Sure, six, seven.

• 2:18:53Lex Fridman?

  For the Monty Python, maybe.

• 2:18:55Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a Monty Python, they're great. The Life of Brian and the Quest of the Holy Grail are incredible.

• 2:19:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:01Speaker 03

  Damn, those serious eyebrows.

• 2:19:03Lex Fridman?

  Brad, you know. Like, you know, how important do you think is facial hair to great leadership?

• 2:19:09Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:19:10Lex Fridman?

  You got a new haircut, is that, is that, is it, does, how does that affect your leadership?

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  I don't know, hopefully not. It doesn't.

• 2:19:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the second is no one.

• 2:19:22Speaker 03

  There is no one competing with Brad.

• 2:19:24Lex Fridman?

  No one too.

• 2:19:25Speaker 03

  Those are like epic eyebrows. So. Sure.

• 2:19:30Lex Fridman?

  That's ridiculous.

• 2:19:31Speaker 03

  Give it a six or seven, I don't know.

• 2:19:33Lex Fridman?

  I like this, like Shakespearean analysis of memes.

• 2:19:37Speaker 03

  Brad, he had a flair for drama as well. Like, you know, showmanship.

• 2:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. It must come from the eyebrows. All right, invention, great engineering, look what I invented. That's the best thing since ripped up bread.

• 2:19:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:53Lex Fridman?

  Cause they invented.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  They're just.

• 2:19:56Lex Fridman?

  Sliced bread, am I just explaining memes at this point?

• 2:20:01Lex Fridman?

  This is what my life has become.

• 2:20:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm a meme, what it, like a, you know, like a scribe that like runs around with the kings and just like writes down memes.

• 2:20:15Speaker 03

  I mean, when was the cheeseburger invented? That's like an epic invention.

• 2:20:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  Like, like, wow.

• 2:20:22Lex Fridman?

  That was versus just like a burger?

• 2:20:24Speaker 03

  Or a burger, I guess a burger in general is like, you know.

• 2:20:28Lex Fridman?

  Then there's like, what is a burger? What's a sandwich? And then you start getting, it's a pizza sandwich and what is the original? It's, it's, it gets into an ontology argument.

• 2:20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but everybody knows, like, if you order like a burger or cheeseburger or whatever, and you're like, you got like, you know, tomato and some lettuce and onions and whatever, and, you know, mayo and ketchup and mustard, it's like epic.

• 2:20:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I'm sure they've had bread and meat separately for a long time, and it was kind of a burger on the same plate. But somebody who actually combined them into the same thing. And they could bite it and hold it, make, makes it convenient. It's a materials problem, like your hands don't get dirty and whatever. Yeah, it's brilliant.

• 2:21:09Elon Musk?

  Well.

• 2:21:10Lex Fridman?

  That is not what I would have guessed.

• 2:21:12Elon Musk?

  But everyone knows, like, if you order a cheeseburger, you know what you're getting, you know? It's not like some obtuse, like, I wonder what I'll get, you know?

• 2:21:21Elon Musk?

  You know, fries are, I mean, great, I mean, they're the devil, but fries are awesome. And, yeah, pizza is incredible.

• 2:21:32Lex Fridman?

  Food innovation doesn't get enough love.

• 2:21:34Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Lex Fridman?

  I guess is what we're getting at.

• 2:21:37Elon Musk?

  Great.

• 2:21:39Lex Fridman?

  What about the Matthew McConaughey Austinite here? President Kennedy, do you know how to put men on the moon yet? NASA, no. President Kennedy, be a lot cooler if you did.

• 2:21:51Elon Musk?

  Pretty much, sure. Six, six or seven, I suppose.

• 2:21:57Lex Fridman?

  And this is the last one.

• 2:22:00Elon Musk?

  That's funny.

• 2:22:02Lex Fridman?

  Someone drew a bunch of dicks all over the walls, Sistine Chapel, boys' bathroom.

• 2:22:07Elon Musk?

  Sure, I'll give it nine. It's really true.

• 2:22:10Lex Fridman?

  All right, this is our highest ranking meme for today.

• 2:22:13Elon Musk?

  I mean, it's true, like, how do they get away with that?

• 2:22:16Lex Fridman?

  Lots of nakedness.

• 2:22:17Elon Musk?

  Dick pics are, I mean, just something throughout history. As long as people can draw things, there's been a dick pic.

• 2:22:25Lex Fridman?

  It's a staple of human history.

• 2:22:26Elon Musk?

  It's a staple. Consistent throughout human history.

• 2:22:29Lex Fridman?

  You tweeted that you aspire to comedy, you're friends with Joe Rogan. Might you do a short stand-up comedy set at some point in the future? Maybe open for Joe, something like that. Is that, is that?

• 2:22:41Elon Musk?

  Really, stand-up? Actual, just full-on stand-up?

• 2:22:44Lex Fridman?

  Full-on stand-up? Is that in there or is that?

• 2:22:46Elon Musk?

  I've never thought about that.

• 2:22:48Lex Fridman?

  It's extremely difficult, if, at least that's what, like, Joe says and the comedians say.

• 2:22:56Elon Musk?

  Huh, I wonder if I could.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  There's only one way to find out.

• 2:23:00Elon Musk?

  You know, I have done stand-up for Friends, just impromptu.

• 2:23:07Elon Musk?

  You know, I'll get get on like a roof and they they do laugh, but they're friends too. So I don't know if if you got to call, you know, like a room of strangers, are they going to actually also find it funny? But I could try, see what happens.

• 2:23:22Lex Fridman?

  I think you'd learn something either way.

• 2:23:25Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25Lex Fridman?

  I kind of love both the when you bomb and when when you do great, just watching people, how they deal with it. It's so difficult. It's so you're so fragile up there. It's just you and you think you're going to be funny. And when it completely falls flat, it's just it's beautiful to see people deal with like that.

• 2:23:46Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I might have enough material to do stand up. And I I've never thought about it, but I might have enough material.

• 2:23:54Elon Musk?

  I don't know, like 15 minutes or something.

• 2:23:56Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Do it. Do a Netflix special.

• 2:24:00Elon Musk?

  Netflix special, sure.

• 2:24:03Lex Fridman?

  What's your favorite Rick and Morty concept? Just to spring that on you, is there? There's a lot of sort of scientific engineering ideas explored there. There's the there's the butter robot.

• 2:24:14Elon Musk?

  It's a great. It's a great show.

• 2:24:16Lex Fridman?

  You like it?

• 2:24:16Elon Musk?

  Yeah, Rick and Morty is awesome.

• 2:24:18Lex Fridman?

  Somebody that's exactly like you from an alternate dimension showed up there, Elon Tusk.

• 2:24:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:24:24Lex Fridman?

  That you voiced.

• 2:24:24Elon Musk?

  Yeah, Rick and Morty certainly explores a lot of interesting concepts. I sort of like what's the favorite one? I know the butter robot certainly is, you know, it's like it's certainly possible to have too much sentience in a device. Like you don't want to have your toast to be like a super genius toaster. It's gonna hate hate life because all it could do is make is toast. But if it's like, you don't want to have like super intelligent stuck in a very limited device.

• 2:24:52Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's too easy from a if we're talking about from the engineering perspective of superintelligence? Like with Marvin, the robot, like, is it? It seems like it might be very easy to engineer just a depressed robot. Like it's not obvious to engineer a robot that's going to find a fulfilling existence. Same as humans, I suppose. But I wonder if that's like the default. If you don't do a good job on building a robot, it's going to be sad a lot.

• 2:25:24Elon Musk?

  Well, we can reprogram robots easier than we can reprogram humans.

• 2:25:29Elon Musk?

  So I guess if you let it evolve without tinkering, then it might get sad. But you can change the optimization function and have it be a cheery robot.

• 2:25:44Lex Fridman?

  You, like I mentioned with SpaceX, you give a lot of people hope. And a lot of people look up to you, millions of people look up to you. If we think about young people in high school, maybe in college, what advice would you give to them about? If they want to try to do something big in this world, they want to really have a big positive impact. What advice would you give them about their career, maybe about life in general?

• 2:26:10Elon Musk?

  Try to be useful.

• 2:26:13Elon Musk?

  Do things that are useful to your fellow human beings, to the world. It's very hard to be useful.

• 2:26:22Elon Musk?

  Very hard.

• 2:26:25Elon Musk?

  You know, are you contributing more than you consume? You know, like, can you try to have a positive net contribution to society?

• 2:26:39Elon Musk?

  I think that's the thing to aim for, you know, not to try to be sort of a leader for for the sake of being a leader or whatever.

• 2:26:48Elon Musk?

  A lot of time, people who, a lot of time, the people you want as leaders are the people who don't want to be leaders. So

• 2:27:00Elon Musk?

  if you live a useful life, that is a good life, a life worth having lived.

• 2:27:09Elon Musk?

  You know, and like I said, I would encourage people to

• 2:27:15Elon Musk?

  use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They're the best tools.

• 2:27:21Lex Fridman?

  When you think about education and self-education, what do you recommend? So there's the university, there's self-study. There is a hands-on sort of finding a company or a place or a set of people that do the thing you're passionate about and joining them as early as possible.

• 2:27:40Lex Fridman?

  There's taking a road trip across Europe for a few years and writing some poetry. Which, which, which trajectory do you suggest?

• 2:27:49Lex Fridman?

  In terms of learning about how you can become useful, as you mentioned, how you can have the most positive impact.

• 2:28:04Elon Musk?

  Well, I encourage people to read a lot of books. Just read, like, basically try to ingest as much information as you can.

• 2:28:14Elon Musk?

  And try to also just develop a good general knowledge. So you at least have like a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape. Like try to learn a little bit about a lot of things. Because you might not know what you're really interested. How would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't like doing it? Peripheral exploration of broadly of of the knowledge landscape.

• 2:28:43Elon Musk?

  And you talk to people from different walks of life and different

• 2:28:48Elon Musk?

  industries and professions and skills and occupations, like just try.

• 2:28:54Elon Musk?

  Learn as much as possible.

• 2:28:58Elon Musk?

  And search for meaning.

• 2:29:02Lex Fridman?

  Isn't the whole thing a search for meaning?

• 2:29:06Elon Musk?

  Yeah, what's the meaning of life and all, you know? But just generally, like I said, I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas.

• 2:29:15Elon Musk?

  And then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and and what you're interested in. So people may be good at something, but or they may have skill at a particular thing, but they don't like doing it.

• 2:29:30Elon Musk?

  So you want to try to find this thing where you're that's a good, a good combination of of your of the things that you're inherently good at, but you also like doing.

• 2:29:43Elon Musk?

  And

• 2:29:44Lex Fridman?

  And reading is a super fast shortcut to to figure out which where are you you both good at it you like doing it and it will actually have positive impact.

• 2:29:54Elon Musk?

  Well, you got to learn about things somehow. So read reading a broad range. It's just really read it, you know, more important was that kid I I read through the encyclopedia. So that's pretty helpful.

• 2:30:11Elon Musk?

  And there are also things that even existed a lot, obviously.

• 2:30:15Lex Fridman?

  It's like as broad as it gets.

• 2:30:17Elon Musk?

  Encyclopedias were digestible, I think, you know, whatever, 40 years ago.

• 2:30:24Elon Musk?

  So

• 2:30:26Elon Musk?

  you know, maybe read through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I'd recommend that. You can always like skip subjects where you read a few paragraphs and you know you're not interested, just jump to the next one. So read the encyclopedia or skim through it.

• 2:30:46Elon Musk?

  And

• 2:30:48Elon Musk?

  but I, you know, put a lot of stock and certainly have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day's work to do useful things. And and just generally to have like not a zero sum mindset. Or like have have more of a grow the pie mindset like the

• 2:31:09Elon Musk?

  if you if you sort of say like when when we see people like have some including some very smart people kind of taking an attitude of like like like doing things that seem like morally questionable. It's often because they have at at a base sort of axiomatic level, a zero sum mindset.

• 2:31:29Elon Musk?

  And and they without realizing it, they don't realize they have a zero sum mindset, or at least that they don't realize it consciously. And so if you have a zero sum mindset, then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others. If it's like if if if the if the pie is fixed, then the only way to have more pie is to take someone else's pie. But but this is false, like obviously the pie has grown dramatically over time, the economic pie. So there in reality, you can have

• 2:32:01Elon Musk?

  overuse this analogy, you have a lot of, there's a lot of pie.

• 2:32:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:07Elon Musk?

  Fire is not fixed.

• 2:32:10Elon Musk?

  So you really want to make sure you don't you're not operating without realizing it from a zero sum mindset, where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others, then that's going to result in you trying to take things from others, which is not not good. It's much better to work on adding to the economic pie, you know, so creating, like I said, creating more than you consume, doing more than you, yeah. So that's a big deal. I think there's like, you know, a fair number of people in in finance that do have a bit of a zero sum mindset.

• 2:32:48Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's all walks of life. I've seen that. One of the one of the reasons Rogan inspires me is he celebrates others a lot. There's not not creating a constant competition, like there's a scarcity of resources. What happens when you celebrate others and you promote others, the ideas of others, it actually grows that pie. I mean, it every like the the resource, the resources become less scarce, and that that applies in a lot of kinds of domains. It applies in academia where a lot of people are very see some funding for academic research is zero sum. It is not. If you celebrate each other, if you make, if you get everybody to be excited about AI, about physics, above mathematics, I think it there'd be more and

• 2:33:32Lex Fridman?

  more funding, and I think everybody wins. Yeah, that applies, I think, broadly.

• 2:33:38Elon Musk?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:33:40Lex Fridman?

  So last last question about love and meaning. What is the role of love in the human condition broadly and more specific to you? How has love, romantic love or otherwise, made you a better person, a better human being?

• 2:33:58Lex Fridman?

  Better engineer?

• 2:34:00Elon Musk?

  Now you're asking really perplexing questions.

• 2:34:04Elon Musk?

  It's hard to give up.

• 2:34:08Elon Musk?

  I mean, there are many books, poems and songs written about what is love? And what is what exactly? You know?

• 2:34:19Elon Musk?

  You know, what is love? If you don't hurt me.

• 2:34:23Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the great ones. Yes.

• 2:34:25Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:25Lex Fridman?

  You've you've earlier quoted Shakespeare, but that that's really up there.

• 2:34:29Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:31Elon Musk?

  I mean, love is a many splintered thing.

• 2:34:35Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's a it's because we've talked about so many inspiring things that could be useful in the world, sort of like solve problems, alleviate suffering. But it seems like connection between humans is a source. You know, it's a it's a source of joy, is a source of meaning. And that that's what love is friendship, love.

• 2:34:55Lex Fridman?

  I just wonder if you think about that kind of thing, where you talk about preserving the light of human consciousness and us becoming a multi planetary, multi planetary species. I mean, to me at least.

• 2:35:11Lex Fridman?

  That that means like if we're just alone and conscious and intelligent, it doesn't mean nearly as much as if we're with others. Right? And there's some magic created when we're together. The the friendship of it, and I think the highest form of it is love, which I think broadly is is much bigger than just sort of romantic, but also, yes, romantic love and family and those kinds of things.

• 2:35:37Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, the reason, I guess, I care about us becoming a multi planet species and a space frank civilization is foundationally, I love humanity.

• 2:35:49Elon Musk?

  And and so I wish to see it prosper and do great things and be happy. And and if I did not love humanity, I would not care about these things.

• 2:36:02Lex Fridman?

  So when you look at the whole of it, the human history, all the people who's ever lived, all the people alive now, it's pretty, we're okay. On the whole, we're a pretty interesting bunch.

• 2:36:16Elon Musk?

  Yeah. All things considered, and I've read a lot of history, including the darkest, worst parts of it, and despite all that, I think on balance, I still love humanity.

• 2:36:30Lex Fridman?

  You joked about it with the 42, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Is there a non-numerical representation?

• 2:36:40Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well, really, I think what Doug Adams was saying in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that the universe is the answer. And what we really need to figure out are what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.

• 2:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:58Elon Musk?

  And that the question is really the hard part. And if you can properly frame the question, then the answer, relatively speaking, is easy. So therefore, if you want to understand what questions to ask about the universe, you want to understand the meaning of life, we need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we're better able to understand the nature of the universe and understand the meaning of life.

• 2:37:23Lex Fridman?

  And ultimately, the most important part will be to ask the right question.

• 2:37:29Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 2:37:30Lex Fridman?

  Thereby elevating the role of the interviewer.

• 2:37:34Elon Musk?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:37:35Lex Fridman?

  As the most important human in the room.

• 2:37:38Elon Musk?

  Interview, good questions are, you know, it's hard to come up with good questions. Absolutely. But yeah, like, it's like, that is the foundation of my philosophy, is that I am curious about the nature of the universe and, you know, and obviously, I will die, I don't know when I'll die, but I won't live forever. But I would like to know that we are on a path to understanding the nature of the universe and the meaning of life and what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And so if we expand the scope and scale of humanity and consciousness in general, which includes silicon consciousness, then...

• 2:38:22Elon Musk?

  That seems like a fundamentally good thing.

• 2:38:26Lex Fridman?

  Elon, like I said, I'm deeply grateful that you would spend your extremely valuable time with me today and also that you have given millions of people hope in this difficult time, this divisive time, in this cynical time. So I hope you do continue doing what you're doing. Thank you so much for talking today.

• 2:38:46Elon Musk?

  You're welcome. Thanks for your excellent questions.

• 2:38:50Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Elon Musk himself. When something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.