[0:00:06] Good morning, Stanford. I'll tell you, seeing so many students up this early in the morning is really a great experience for the president of the university. And I'm so delighted you're able to join us here, and I can tell you're going to be in for a fascinating discussion this morning. If you think about our university and what makes it unique, it is that bold entrepreneurial spirit, that pioneering spirit that Jane and Leland
[0:00:31] And those innovations come in all walks.
[0:01:00] From the medical care we do and new ways of dealing with health problems, to energy efficiency, to robotics, to art, to everything we do. But every innovation begins with an idea, and every idea began with somebody who imagined it. And that's what today is about. The Stanford Technology Venture Program's Future Fest is an opportunity to examine and celebrate the impact of breakthroughs and pioneering technologies on our world.
[0:01:28] And I'm delighted you could all join us this morning. This is organized by STVP in collaboration with Stanford Arts. The Future Fest will be the place where discussions about futuristic technologies occur. And today we'll hear from two far-thinking individuals, Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson. Steve is a Stanford alum and a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He was recently hailed in the New York Times.
[0:01:55] As a space investor and rocket maker, his firm is invested both in SpaceX and a satellite company, Planet Labs. Steve is a Stanford alumnus three times over, and he also has the important characteristic that he was once my advisee. Despite that disadvantage, he completed his
[0:02:19] Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in two and a half years was the Henry Ford Scholar, went on to earn his MS, and despite my attempts to convince him to pursue a PhD, went off and got his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an R.J. Miller Scholar. He's recognized widely for being forward-thinking. The San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner named him as one of the 10 people expected to have the greatest impact
[0:02:46] on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st century. Now, Elon Musk, I think, is a name known to everybody who thinks about the future. He is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, engineer and investor. He was born in South Africa, attended Queen's University in Canada before moving to the US, where he earned his undergraduate degrees in economics and physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He arrived at Stanford to pursue his PhD in physics, but left
[0:03:16] After two days, I said, what was wrong along? Was it the food, the water, the weather? No, he left to launch his first startup, Zip2, a successful internet-based city guide. And then he went on to launch PayPal. He founded his third company, SpaceX, in 2002. And six years later, NASA awarded him a contract for cargo transport to the International Space Station. He was an early investor in Tesla Moda and now leads the company.
[0:03:47] as its CEO and product architect. But Alon dreamed big. As he told CNN a few years ago, we should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur. If our forefathers had taken that approach, the United States wouldn't exist. Amen to that. I think when you see the kind of work that Alon's doing, and I still remember my first trip down to Los Angeles to visit SpaceX and to see the
[0:04:17] First Tesla prototype before it came out. I realized he was going to change the world. This will be a wonderful exchange. After Steve and Alon's discussion, Matt Harvey, Executive Director of STVP, will close the program. But now, please join me in giving a warm Stanford welcome to Alon Musk and Steve Jurvetson. Thank you, President Hennessy. And this is a daunting venue. I feel like we should sing or something. Dance, perhaps? Wow.
[0:05:03] Okay, so, FutureFest. Today is all about the future, and I can't imagine a better person to speak with about that than Elon Musk. He is forging the future, as you all know, across multiple industries, repeatedly, in the most spectacular way, in a way that others have failed before him, and perhaps unprecedented in history. So, I'm a big fanboy. FutureFest, originally I think bounced around, and why this month, because this is a special month for FutureFest, is that...
[0:05:31] For those of you old enough, and it looks like maybe five or six of you in the audience to have been around when Back to the Future, the movie, came out, they had this vision of the future in the second edition of that series where they fast-forwarded in a time warp to the future. And it was October 2015. And they had flying cars and hoverboards and biometrics and video calls and what looked like Google Glass a lot of the times and a lot of other stuff that was completely cockamamie.
[0:05:59] Some of those dreams were true, some were not. And as a framework for Future Fest, we can think to the past and our dreams that did or didn't come true. I think that's where we'll start and then move to the future. We're sitting here today. What do we think the future may bode? So turn to Elon maybe as a starting point. As you think back to your high school days 30 years ago when we were both there and dreaming of that future, what about today?
[0:06:25] Is or isn't in accordance with what you thought back then? I mean, where have your dreams of the future, the bold visions, met or not met reality today? Well, I think the most remarkable thing that we do have today is the Internet and access to all the world's information from anywhere. So that's... Having a supercomputer in your pocket is, I think, something people wouldn't have predicted, you know, back to the future. So that's the biggest thing.
[0:06:55] And probably what they would be most surprised at is that we haven't progressed more in space. So people would have expected, I think, to have a space hotel. In fact, Otzi Clark... 2001 should have happened. Yeah, exactly. Though 2010 was really crazy. Space advancement. So it would be going to Jupiter and that kind of thing. So that's probably the most surprising thing. Particularly if you go back even further. If you say...
[0:07:25] In 69, when people first landed on the moon, if you'd asked the public what would the situation be in 2015, I think they would imagine that we would have a base on the moon, a base on Mars, and be all over the solar system by now. That's probably the biggest thing. What happened? Is there any pattern you can sense for where our dreams and science fiction realities drift from?
[0:07:52] Is there some reason you think, because we have dreams today that we're going to have these Mars colonies in the near future. Unless something jumps to mind. I have a bunch of questions, by the way, from the audience as well here. I want to move to something a little more current as we move forward in time. 20 years ago, when we first met, you were starting your first internet company of two, the one before PayPal, Zip2. And I know that in your...
[0:08:21] In your youth, you envisioned a variety of industries that needed to change. When you were pursuing your first one, did you imagine you would get to the next one and the next one? No, I mean, when I was in college, I just thought, well, what are the things that are most likely to affect the future of humanity, just at a macro level? And it just seemed like it would be the internet and sustainable energy, making life multi-planetary, and then genetics and AI.
[0:08:50] And I thought the first three, if you worked on those, they were almost certainly going to be good. And then the last two, a little more dodgy. In terms of the net benefit? Yeah. It's with a double-edged sword, and you're not sure which edge is the worst. Interesting. So it seems like begging the question, are genetics and AI the ones that are ripe for students today to be thinking about as they look to the future? I mean, they are. My cousin...
[0:09:19] A younger cousin who's just finishing up a physics and computer science degree, actually at Berkeley. We know. And he says everyone there in the computer science department is working on AI. So I think we're going to see some crazy breakthroughs in the next few years on that front. I want to come back to that later as we look.
[0:09:49] More to your vision of the future. As you think back, though, to your younger self, many of the people in the audience are themselves college students in either undergrad or grad programs and are thinking about the world they're entering. I'm curious, this may be an odd question, but one that I find fascinating. As you think here today back to your younger self, is there any advice you wish you could have given your younger self with hindsight, given what you know now?
[0:10:16] Well, I give a lot of advice. Dating, a whole bunch of things like that. I got you. But just in terms of how to think about a life trajectory, perhaps, or how to pursue your passions? I'm reasonably happy with how things turned out. So it's like... Touche. Not terrible. Yeah, that's a good point.
[0:10:46] If there's anything... I'll let you... If something jumps to mind, let me know, but let me... I mean, apart from the obvious, like, just telling my younger self exactly how the future will unfold, which is... Right. But that, you know, wouldn't be... That's not exactly advice. It has to be encapsulated into non-time-warping wisdom. Yeah, exactly, like wisdom. I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, it's sort of... I mean, certainly... Yeah, I mean...
[0:11:23] Listen more to critical feedback. A lot of things I learned in college actually were pretty helpful. I think the physics approach to thinking is very good, like the first principles approach. And you applied that broadly? Yeah, applying the first principles approach to thinking is, I think, a good way to figure out counterintuitive situations.
[0:11:52] So I thought that was really a helpful thing to learn. That's good. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, feel free to jump in. I don't know how I'd answer that question. Yeah, what would you do? What would you tell your younger self? It'll be all right. You weren't as dorky as you think. Advice like that, nothing really too actionable. Don't worry about it? Well, just don't be so insecure about everything you're insecure about. Yeah, that would probably be advice to myself.
[0:12:24] Let's move on. I'm not used to thinking about me. So I may be roughly overgeneralizing here, but it seems to me that there's often a trigger problem that generates in your mind a great solution for when you come up with a new company. So for example, when trying to negotiate with the Russians for launch capacity, the aha that we should just build a better rocket to solve this problem.
[0:12:50] It comes forth. Or when you deal with the commute on the 405 or whatever in LA, it's like, oh my God, what is wrong with mass transit and perhaps Hyperloop and then with a variety of ideas. There seems to be some trigger, something that's broken in the world and you have the idea of how to fix it. And I guess what I'm curious about is not how you've picked the areas of interest and the solutions, but how have you decided what not to fix? In other words, there's many things that need fixing in the world and students here probably could think of
[0:13:19] A long list, many of which you could probably imagine solutions to using the physics first principle approach. But has there been any framework or idea you've used to filter out what you don't do, what you don't pursue? Yeah, I mean, well, what I did initially was, you know, you go back to like college times I was working on.
[0:13:45] Energy storage technologies for electric vehicles. And that's what I was going to pursue at Stanford, actually, was work on advanced capacitors and batteries to improve the energy density for electric vehicles. And then the internet was kind of happening. It was clear the internet was happening back in 94, 95. And I wasn't sure if what I worked on in the PhD would actually be useful.
[0:14:12] So I was really concerned that if I... Why? Timing or what was your intuition? Meaning I think it could be academically useful but not practically useful. I think it could result in a PhD and adding some leaf to the tree of knowledge but then discovering that, well, it's not really going to matter. Is it going to be a good enough thing to actually be used in an electric vehicle? I wasn't sure. So it was like...
[0:14:41] I was uncertain as to whether success was one of the possible outcomes. Like I thought maybe it was, but I wasn't sure. And then I thought, well, if I watch the internet get built while I'm doing this, that would be really frustrating. So there's a sense of that eminent timing, that that was the time for the internet and maybe the other stuff could wait or be on the back. Yeah, exactly. Was it always there as like one day I'll get back to that? Yeah, I thought probably I'd get back to it and did end up doing that.
[0:15:11] But yeah, I thought sort of the Internet was happening, like really taking off, although most people weren't aware of it in 95. And so I figured like electric vehicle technology, energy storage technology, there will be some sort of natural progression in that, and I could come back to it later. But the Internet, you know, that was the moment to really do something.
[0:15:39] Although in 95 it wasn't obvious that you could actually make any money on the internet. This was like nobody, until Netscape went public, I think at the end of 95, nobody even thought there was like, you could make a valuable company on the internet. It wasn't as obvious as it seems now. Yeah, like now it seems really obvious, but back then it was not at all. So it was really from the perspective of, it wasn't like, oh, I want to make a bunch of money. It was actually from,
[0:16:07] It's like I want to just be a part of this thing that I thought was like a nervous system. It was like previously people had communicated effectively by osmosis. And you'd have to basically physically connect with somebody to really communicate. You're like a letter. Like you'd send letters on paper. And with the internet, anyone who had a connection...
[0:16:32] Anywhere in the world would have access to all the world's information, just like sort of a nervous system. So humanity was effectively becoming a super organism and qualitatively different than what it had been before. And so I wanted to be part of that. But initially the goal was just to make enough money to pay the rent. It wasn't to do anything beyond that. And then as many know, much of that capital then got plowed back into your next businesses. Right.
[0:17:01] Right, exactly. And then the Internet is also helpful because anything to do with software is a low capital endeavor. So I didn't have any money. I just had a bunch of student debt. But software you can just write by yourself. And you don't need a lot of atoms. You don't need a lot of tooling and equipment. So it's not capital intensive. So the ability to start a company...
[0:17:28] If it's software related and it's the first company, it's much, much easier. Right. It seems obvious now, but of course, the easier place to start and then as you gain more of a personal reputation and have more personal capital. I know SpaceX was entirely funded by Elon for its first period, partially from... And in an era when others probably wouldn't have funded it in those early days. Actually, the precursor to SpaceX was not...
[0:17:57] The idea wasn't really to create a company, it was to try to figure out why we hadn't sent people to Mars. So we went from SIP2 to PayPal, and then going from PayPal to the next thing, I was sort of thinking, well, is there some way to reignite the dream of Apollo? And I thought, well, it was maybe a question of...
[0:18:26] Like we'd lost the will to explore it. But I actually think that my original premise was wrong. We had not lost the will to explore, but people did not think there was a way. And if people don't think there's a way, then they won't bash their head against the wall continuously. They'll sort of give up. But in the beginning, I thought it was a question of will. So if we can send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars and you have seeds and...
[0:18:54] So the headlines were clear in your mind once you had success on what that would lead to to catalyze action.
[0:19:21] Get the public excited about that and get NASA's budget increased. So that was actually the original goal. And so I went to Russia to try to buy some ICBMs in 2001. It was an interesting experience. A lot of vodka. Yeah, a lot of vodka. Yeah, it's crazy. And I couldn't afford the regular rockets like the Boeing and Lockheed rockets are too expensive. Still are? Yeah, still very expensive.
[0:19:51] That's true. I had to, sorry. Wait, may I jump in here for a sec? Because the anecdote you brought up of wanting to change government policy and inspire the world to have a Mars program, if you will, whether it's popular uprising or space programs at the government level, I think it's a fascinating anecdote because in a sense what you were saying is I as an individual want to start an entity, business or otherwise, that will catalyze change even beyond the company level or the industry level.
[0:20:21] And I see a parallel in other initiatives you've taken on in that if you look at the goal of Tesla under your leadership, it is to assure the transition to all vehicles being electric, not just the cars that currently are produced by Tesla. And with Powerwall and SolarCity, arguably the description is one of ushering in a wholesale shift to renewable energy. Many of the solutions required wouldn't be provided by the companies you're starting.
[0:20:49] And so as I deal in entrepreneurship as a venture capitalist every day, we see this incredible scope of ambition here that is breathtaking. Like change the world, as Steve Jobs and others talk about, in a company, maybe shifting an industry. But we're talking about shifting the entire zeitgeist of the world, in a sense, and maybe eventually other worlds. So my question is, do you start always in your mind with that as a...
[0:21:16] Where's the starting point? I see this arc of a story, like the Mars example or renewable energy, and then do you pull back to where's the best product to get it unstuck? Why isn't this happening? If I solve that problem, then it unlocks value. How does that happen in your mind? Sure. I should say when we started SpaceX and Tesla,
[0:21:45] I mean, I really thought the probability of success was very low. I mean, it wasn't like, I think, oh, we'll definitely be successful. I thought we'd be like maybe 10% likely. Well, yeah. And we came very close to both companies not succeeding in 2008. We'd had three failures of the SpaceX rocket. So we were zero for three. We had the crazy financial recession, like the Great Recession.
[0:22:14] The Tesla financing round had fallen apart because it's pretty hard to raise money for the startup car company if GM and Chrysler are going bankrupt. It's poorly for the upside. Yeah, that was a tricky one. And unfortunately, at the end of 2008, the fourth launch, which was the last launch we had money for, worked for SpaceX. And then we closed the Tesla financing round, as you know, Christmas Eve 2008.
[0:22:44] Last hour of the last day that it was possible. Yeah. And thanks to you. For those that don't know, it's the most extraordinary act of entrepreneurial zeal and commitment I've ever seen where Elon personally saved Tesla in those hours. Like when no one else would write a check, he spoke for it all. And that flipped the mentality from fear to greed and everyone joined the bandwagon. And everything changed from, you know, divoting into the ground to success. But you were willing to go like net negative personally of his entire net worth.
[0:23:14] It's a remarkable story. Thanks for supporting, by the way. That was much appreciated. We were happy to fall right behind in line, but it was all him. So I guess on this idea of the big picture, I'm curious, in the way I heard you just now describe the greenhouse and the headlines is interesting. Do the marketing headlines flash through your mind as you introduce new products that are a step to a much grander vision?
[0:23:41] I'm curious because it seems like it has two purposes, like getting employees, customers, everyone really gung-ho about the vision, but it also makes it larger than life in so many ways. Well, if you're trying to convince the public to do something, you have to say, okay, how is this going to read? And what message are we going to try to convey? What will people respond to? What would I respond to if I was sort of an objective member of the public? And so that's really...
[0:24:09] If you're trying to change people's minds or get people fired up about something, then you've got to think, okay, what's that message? What's going to get them really excited? And that's really good advice, by the way, for all the engineering students. Yeah. I was one as well. I'm curious, as an adjunct sometimes to these grand visions like making humanity a multi-planetary species or shifting us to renewable energy or making all vehicles electric, that has a purpose-driven element to it.
[0:24:37] Higher calling than the quarterly bottom line. In fact, there was a Tesla quarterly report, I remember famously, where the opening, the literally opening line was, while profits are not a priority, comma, you know, nevertheless. In the short term. Nevertheless, exactly. And it occurred, I was struck by it at first, and it did occur to me that it's not like some sort of misdirected fiduciary question. To me, it seems like how could you lead an industry transition if your business model was worse than what's already there? Meaning, like, if you weren't more profitable in the long term,
[0:25:07] And a better business, why would anyone shift? So it almost seems like with the right purpose, profits follow. Yeah, well, if the output is more valuable than the input, which is really, that's profit. Like the output's more valuable than the input. That says you have a useful company. So in a high growth scenario, you have a lot more inputs for...
[0:25:35] For future outputs, so that you have negative cash flow and lack of profitability, which we currently have at Tesla. But in the long term, of course, that has to be fixed. There can't be negative cash flow in the long term. And that there needs to be a net positive output, which is sort of profits in the long term. But in the short term, when there's high growth, that doesn't...
[0:25:59] It isn't the more sensible thing. And then there's also related things like open sourcing patents and acts that, to me, relate to the purpose. Let's let the whole auto industry do this. And so I'm curious, what do you see from your vantage point as the benefits of a purpose-driven company? Meaning, when you have this thing that every employee and customer knows is the purpose of the company, how do you see that flowing through to benefits for the company? Well, I think having a purpose certainly
[0:26:29] It's going to attract the very best talent in the world because if there's something that's intrinsically enjoyable and the financial rewards are good, but then also it's something that's going to genuinely change the world, then I think that's a pretty powerful motivator. But I don't think everything needs to change the world. Honestly, there's lots of useful things that people do. I think really it should be a usefulness optimization.
[0:26:58] Just say, is what I'm doing as useful as it could be? You're talking about the goal of an organization? The goal in general, yeah. Even if something isn't changing the world, if it's making people's lives better, I think that's great. Even if something's making people's lives only slightly better, but it's a large number of people, then the area under the curve is quite good.
[0:27:26] So is that mathematical first principles a point? Utility and number? Exactly. I mean, one could say, is some app really making people's lives better? But if it's affecting a lot of people, even in a small way, then yeah, the area is good. So let's shift gears a little bit, since it is FutureFest. Looking to the future. We started 30 years in the past.
[0:27:52] But the future keeps accelerating. So let's maybe look 20 years in the future for an equivalent leap. Arguably, five years in the future might be equivalent to the past 30, but let's say 20. So the year 2035, what does the future look like, as far as you can tell? What would you... 20 years. Yeah, 2035. Yeah, 20 years. It's always really tricky to predict the future. I mean, some of it's pretty obvious, like computing power is going to be...
[0:28:22] Just crazy. And really, the big change is the cost of computing power. Not so much the sort of circuit density, sort of the Moore's Law thing. But if you look at, say, what is the actual dollars per instruction? And that cost is dropping exponentially. If you think about it, if you're making a computer, you're rearranging
[0:28:52] Silicon and copper on a little chip. And once the capital cost of the development and the chip plant is paid for, the marginal cost of a chip is very, very tiny. So I think we'll see massively parallel computers and computing power and storage being really as much as you want.
[0:29:21] And it's interesting, I too start with that. I don't know what else to predict, but as a foundational thing, this seems like the safest starting premise. But then, what does that ripple through to in fields like genetics and AI, which you mentioned, autonomous driving, space-related topics? I mean, just ubiquitous computing everywhere. I think AI is going to be incredibly sophisticated in 20 years.
[0:29:48] When does it first wake up? It seems to be accelerating. And the tricky thing about predicting things when there's an exponential is that an exponential looks linear close up. But it's actually not linear. And AI appears to be accelerating, from what I can see. And for that, do you look at autonomous driving and point AIs, like the Siri-like functionality, as your guidepost?
[0:30:18] Well, I had sort of a debate about someone like, is AI accelerating or not? And he was saying, well, what's the y-axis? You know, if it's accelerating, you've got t on the x-axis, but what's the y-axis? Well, I thought about that, and I think you could have a recursive y-axis, so that if at any point in time your predictions for AI are coming sooner or later, that actually would help to find whether it's...
[0:30:45] Accelerating or not. Whatever that axis was. If in any given year, if you find your predictions are going further out or coming closer in, that actually is one way to think of acceleration. Otherwise, what's the qualitative or quantitative measure of AI? If a given technology is always 20 years in the future? If it's always 20 years in the future,
[0:31:14] It's more logarithmic. Does AI seem like it's one of the most fastly accelerating things that you're aware of? Yes. I can certainly say that with autonomous driving, where three years ago, I thought it was 10 years away. Two years ago, I thought it was five years away. Now, I think it's three years away or less than three years away. Wow.
[0:31:40] And when you say away, like release to market, available for consumer adoption as opposed to prototyping? No, I mean like the technology works. There's a sort of second question as to when regulators would approve it. Yeah, yeah. Good luck with that. Technology works as a general solution. So like autonomous driving basically works anywhere. So it could be sooner for point things, like highway only? Highway only, we're already in public beta.
[0:32:10] So we'll be hopefully in the next several weeks releasing to all of the cars that have the autopilot hardware, which is all cars built in roughly the last 12 months. Wow. And so this seems like one of those things that once you've experienced it, the inevitability of it becomes more apparent. Kind of like the first time I sat in an electric vehicle, it's just so clear. And same with autonomous vehicles. Do you think that will help persuade public opinion?
[0:32:40] The regulatory question is an interesting one, because as technology continues to accelerate, human nature doesn't, and acceptance of change. I'm just not sure if there's... As we look out in the future, should we assume that no matter how fast something like Moore's Law accelerates, there's always the counterbalancing force of human nature and habit? Yeah, I think there's always going to be human nature, and it's difficult to predict what that will...
[0:33:12] How that will affect things. But I'm not sure if I fully answered your question. So in terms of what I think... Oh yeah, please. So for sure, ubiquitous computing, AI that's beyond anything like the public appreciates today. I think we'll have most of the new vehicles being produced being electric. And we'll probably have...
[0:33:40] The super majority of energy being produced being sustainable. So I think we're on... Solar primarily in your mind? Primarily solar, yeah. And so I think those are sort of some good things. I think we'll be hopefully on a good path for sustainable energy. Sooner is always better, but I think by 2035, I think we'll be substantially... Like most of transport, most of new energy being produced will be sustainable.
[0:34:10] Broadband everywhere? Broadband everywhere, yeah. Mars colony? And hopefully a small base on Mars, a small city on Mars in 20 years, yeah. City, did I hear? Well, okay, fine, town, village. Hamlet. I mean, that's exciting. I mean, that could get people fired up about the future. Yeah, I do. I agree, exactly.
[0:34:42] The idea of being a multi-planetary species and getting out there and exploring the stars is one of those really inspiring, exciting things. I mean, just as Apollo was incredibly inspiring to everyone around the world, and even those, I mean, only a very tiny number of people went there, but, I mean, vicariously, we all went there. And I think that's true if we have a Mars base as well. And it's very important that we have things that are exciting and inspiring in the future, because otherwise, why get up in the morning?
[0:35:11] It was just about one sort of sad problem after another. It's like life's not worth living. Are there any other things that excite you a lot about the future beyond the multi-planetary species, perhaps AI, although it may scare you, as well as excite you, the autonomous vehicles? Are there any other planks that you think, looking forward 20 years, would be like, this is what I really get excited about? Well, I mean, for sure.
[0:35:38] For sure, Mars and sustainable transport, those items are really, and sustainable energy, those are, I think, really cool things. In terms of getting excited about it, I think we'll probably start seeing more truly cyborg activity, like brain-computer interfaces. Alongside the AIs that are purely synthetic? Yeah, I think so.
[0:36:08] It's the only way we can relate, I think, and have a conversation. There are amazing things happening these days like this. They've been able to figure out how to do an artificial hippocampus in rats and monkeys. And now they're looking at doing that to solve severe epilepsy. About half of severe epilepsy cases originate in the hippocampus. And by having sort of an artificially augmented hippocampus, they can actually solve
[0:36:38] I believe the severe epilepsy cases. Wow, that's amazing. So it's like, wow. And you can read and write information back to the chip from your brain at the individual neuron level, like today.
[0:36:52] Pretty exciting. The whole field of biology and things inspired by biology and the information systems biology fascinate me personally as a computer science-oriented person. Before I go to the student questions, which I'm about to do, there was one last story I wanted to share that we experienced together and ask your thoughts about it. We were in Hawthorne, Texas when the Grasshopper vehicle happened.
[0:37:16] Yeah. Spectacular explosion right in front of us. Right. I brought the SpaceX board out to take a look at one of the critical takeoff and landing tests, and of course, that's the one that blows up.
[0:37:27] And we're all in a tent with a glass of water. I'm like, whoa. I mean, you feel the repercussions. And then walking through the steaming. It's like a colada ride. It's a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. That's right. Yes, rapid, unscheduled disassembly. Anyone in rocketry, like a hobbyist or professionally, knows what that one is. Every component part is just strewn across. And as we walked, one of the...
[0:37:49] Other board members asked, maybe in a cheering up kind of method, with some quoting Bill Gates or somebody that said, you know, if you haven't failed, then you're not learning, or it's a paraphrase of the quote. And I remember your reply, and I have it written as a quote because I want to put it on a placard. Given the options, I prefer to learn from success, which I think is...
[0:38:09] A great comeback. And so I guess I was curious in general, what do you think of the Silicon Valley mantra, fail fast, fail often, or as Esther Dyson says, always make new mistakes, as if failure is the crucible of learning. I'm curious if you had any further thoughts on that and that maybe off-the-cuff comment you made out there. Well, I mean, there are many sort of, I mean, I think there's sort of, there's like some entropic basis for this. Like there are many more ways to fail than to succeed. So, I mean, you have to explore, I mean, particularly like for a rocket, there's like,
[0:38:38] A thousand ways a thing can fail and one way it can work. You could have a lot of rocket failures to explore all the ways in which it could fail. But I do think that one great thing about Silicon Valley is that failure is not a big stigma. If you try hard and it doesn't work out, that's okay. You can learn from that and do another company and it's not a big deal. And I think that's really one of the great things about Silicon Valley.
[0:39:07] Interesting. Do you also... I'm curious if either on the... Well, it seems to me that on the system design side, you can accommodate a likely failure of subcomponents. And so much of the elegance of, let's say, a Falcon 9 or a Falcon 9 Heavy is an ultimate incarnation of this vision of how the rocket should be built to say, hey, parts will fail, but here's how the system can succeed. And I'm curious if there's any other thoughts along that, how to accommodate anticipated failure and then also maybe...
[0:39:35] Like in managerially, is there ways that you motivate the team either in advance of failure to coach them on, hey, this is going to happen, or in the aftermath of failure to get them fired up to solve it and move forward when it might be dark times. For example, notions like failure to launch, exploding on the pad, there's all these, it's a very visual, it's public spectacle when you have a setback in the rocket industry. I'm curious how you manage around failure. I mean, I think it's like,
[0:40:05] Quite painful and difficult, honestly. And it feels terrible. But, yeah, I mean, the company's sort of looking to, you know, me to, you know, rally them, and so I do. But I honestly feel super bad. Like a punch in the gut? Yeah. Yeah. I remember, it's almost like the stages of grief I remember in Texas. It's kind of like...
[0:40:32] Sort of denial and then it sort of hits us at dinner. It's like, oh my God, what just happened? Yeah, I mean, it's just, I mean, it's particularly with rockets, it's just a really, like rockets, space is hard and rockets tend to fail, unfortunately. And even when you've got like a lot of really smart people working super hard to minimize the probability of failure, it's still there and it's, you know, it's quite significant.
[0:41:01] And people have asked me, well, why are rockets especially hard? And part of it is everything has to work the first time. You can't do a recall. You can't patch it. It's like nine minutes to orbit or it's over. And then you can never test the rocket completely in the environment that it's actually going to experience. You can't fully recreate.
[0:41:29] Something that's moving super fast in a vacuum on the surface of Earth. You can only really recreate that in space. Is that a limit of the simulation tools? Is that a limit of the simulation tools today? Yeah, absolutely. If there's any error between the simulation and reality, and there's always some amount of error, then that can result in a failure. It's a really tricky one. In a software analogy, it would be like,
[0:41:59] The software analogies to rocket design.
[0:42:28] The modular reuse. I mean, there's many of these. For those who aren't familiar, it's not like this is an aerospace engineer by traditional training coming, but is in fact radically changing the industry. I think applying a CS perspective to industry after industry, I'm like, how would a computer scientist or a physicist approach the problem, which oftentimes the solution is very unlike the industry incumbents. There's a certain elegance to it, at least from the outside, an astro-observer like myself.
[0:42:58] Let me switch, if I may, to some student questions, which will be completely in a different direction. First one comes from Nick Zhu in an architectural design co-turn, so this will be switching more to the other side of our brain for a moment. What do you look for in design, and related, if you'd like, what do you look for in art? Design might be more immediately relevant, but that's where he's coming from. Sure. I mean, I think there's, I mean,
[0:43:32] You want to make something beautiful. You want to trigger whatever fundamental aesthetic algorithms. In your brain, you have some intrinsic elements that represent beauty. And that trigger the emotion of appreciation of beauty in your mind. And I think that these are actually...
[0:44:05] Relatively consistent among people. I mean, not completely. Some people like, not everyone likes the same thing, but there's a lot of commonality. But I think it is important to combine aesthetic design with functionality. Like the thing that's, like if you say like what was really hard about say the Model S or the Model X was to combine aesthetics and
[0:44:37] So to balance the two. You can make a car look very good by giving it sort of certain proportions, like making it sort of low and slim. But if you do that, the utility is significantly affected. So the big challenge with, say, the Model S was trying to figure out how do we get five adults plus two kids because we want to have...
[0:45:05] It seems like the Dragon and every Tesla has room for seven. Five children I can see might be an important design parameter. I definitely don't think we should take the whole family on the spacecraft. But the big challenge with the S was having a car that had a high utility and looked good. And the same with the X. To make a sports car look good is relatively easy.
[0:45:35] But to make a sedan look good or an SUV look good is quite difficult. And I think another principle is you want to have it feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. And that's also a really hard thing to do. And then really pay attention to the little details, the nuances of design and shape and form and function.
[0:46:04] The way it looks in different lights. When something's off, the little thing, how do you experience that? It drives me bananas. The problem is you can train yourself to pay attention to the tiny details. I think almost anyone can. Although this is very much a double-edged sword because then you see all the little details. And then little things drive you crazy.
[0:46:33] But most people, they don't consciously see the small details, but they do subconsciously see them. Your mind takes in a result of the overall impression, and you know if something is appealing or not, even though you may not be able to point out exactly why. And it's a summation of these many small details. So most of us experience that as a...
[0:47:00] Oh, I think that's ugly, or I think that's beautiful, or like, wow, that's elegant, but can't break it down. You mentioned something in passing, like you can train yourself in this, though? Yeah, you can train yourself, I think. You can make yourself pay attention to why, essentially bring the subconscious awareness into conscious awareness. I wish I could do that. How do you do that? Just pay really close attention. Almost like a meditation on the object?
[0:47:28] I've been trying to find the details, like why do I not like this? Yeah, just look closely and carefully. And for any given object, it's geometry, it's... I heard someone whisper Steve Jobs, and that thought occurred to me as well. I worked briefly with him, and I could only experience it as a visceral agitation with imperfection.
[0:47:54] And that's just wrong. That has to be fixed. I have to turn it off, otherwise I can't go through life. The world around you or even in... Yeah, because there's always something wrong somewhere all the time. You really have to turn it off, otherwise you just get the mental list of things that are wrong. It just drives you crazy.
[0:48:23] I just wish there was a way you could just record it for everyone else to go fix. It's like this running tally, right? Oh, my God. So let me go to one other question. I found that one interesting. I had no idea where that was going to go, so I really appreciate that question, Nick. Thank you. Let's see. Which one of these do I want? There's some combination of questions. Let me mention both, and you can pick which one you like more because they both relate to colonizing Mars. One comes from Henning Rodol, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering, which just...
[0:48:50] It asks, Elon, given your plan to bring a million colonists to Mars, what are the pressing future technologies that need to be developed in order to support a robust and thriving surface colony? So it's technology for, I guess, survival. And then maybe related from the Stanford Space Initiative students, how do you envision humans governing a separate planet? I'm not sure if you had to think about that yet. I thought a little bit about those things. I mean, obviously, the first challenge is just getting there at all.
[0:49:17] So SpaceX is working super hard on figuring out just how to get large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. And I think we've got something that I think works at a sort of fundamental physics and economics level. So it's a question of figuring out the detailed design, which we're working on. We're only spending like half an hour a week on it because we're like pressing near-term priorities. But I'm kind of excited about how it's coming together.
[0:49:43] So just getting that transport thing solved, I think, will then open up a tremendous number of opportunities for people on Mars. You know, just like having the Union Pacific Railroad to California. And look at what resulted after that. The whole ecosystem of other companies figured it out. Yeah, it's like once you get there, then the opportunities for entrepreneurs are tremendous. That ranges everything from...
[0:50:12] Everything you can imagine. Like starting the first Italian restaurant or something on Mars. It's like, somebody's got to do it. That'll be kind of cool. Like an iron refinery. Local resource utilization. The entire base of industry. And then there'll probably be things that are just unique to Mars.
[0:50:40] We've got to get that, you know, effectively that Union Pacific Railroad there in order to get the entrepreneurs there and then create a fertile environment for them to create companies. So once you're there, it's going to be, I think, a lot of exciting things that can be done. And in the beginning, people would live in kind of glass domes, but over time...
[0:51:08] It would terraform Mars and make it like Earth. And so I think there's just going to be a lot of super exciting things that are hard to predict, just like when they were building here in the Pacific, nobody would have predicted Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Right. That would have been like... And urbanization in general. Yeah. Well, California would be the most populous state in the country. They'd be like, that sounds crazy.
[0:51:37] For them, gold is discovered, right? Yeah. I think it's really incumbent on SpaceX or maybe other organizations to figure out how to get there. Otherwise, nothing else matters. And then once you get there, there's a lot that can be done. From a governance standpoint, I mean, obviously, ultimately, the governance of Mars will be up to the Martians, but the... It's cool that we have a name for them now.
[0:52:06] You become a Martian when you go there. But I think if you said, like, how would you do democracy 2.0, you know, or like some new version, I think we'd probably have more of a direct democracy than a representative democracy. And, you know, when the United States was formed, it was impossible to have a direct democracy. Like even sending a letter took weeks.
[0:52:33] So there was no way that people could vote directly on issues. You had to have representatives. So I think probably there would be a more direct democracy. And is this thing about the latency of communication from Earth? Communication errors and communication latency, when you have letters that take weeks to get anywhere, would have made governance almost impossible.
[0:53:03] I think if it hadn't been a representative of democracy, you had a lot of people who couldn't even read or write. That's fascinating. I was just wondering, if you were to start over with a clean sheet of paper on governance, do you think a framework that could be envisioned that encompasses other sentient beings to come, meaning the AIs and others who might clamor for their rights? It's difficult to predict, but I can say probably we would aim for a more direct democracy.
[0:53:33] I was talking to Larry Page about this, and he had a good suggestion. We should limit the number of words in a law. We have these thousand page laws that get passed, and nobody's read them. Twitter equivalent of parsimony? Yeah, I don't know, a thousand word letter count or something like that. If you can't write the law in a thousand words, then probably it shouldn't be there. We shouldn't have...
[0:54:02] A single law passed that's like the size of Lord of the Rings. That's right. And literally not a single person in Congress has read the whole thing. It's like a tax code. It's unscrutable. Yes, exactly. So there's that. And I think laws also have an infinite lifespan unless they're given some sort of sunset period. So probably it would be good to default laws to have a sunset period. If it's not good enough to be renewed,
[0:54:31] Then it goes away. And maybe some hysteresis in making it easier to remove a law than to put one in place. You can just imagine, because over time, the body of law just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you avoid that? And you have inertia associated with laws. And so maybe it would take 60% to create a law, but only 40% to remove a law.
[0:55:01] Oh, interesting. Oh, fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Those are like the rules of a constitutional democracy have such a profound impact. And to have a new playground would be fantastic. There's something embedded in what you said a moment ago that I want to highlight on a transition to perhaps a closing question. I heard in passing, you know, I think about some of these things about a half hour a week, if I heard you right. And this is, I think, a profound thing to dwell on is that
[0:55:31] You know, he's changing the world in so many areas and many entrepreneurs I see get, and myself included, enamored with all of the possibilities of a future Mars base, of the terraforming, of every aspect of it that might need to come into being. And I find myself often distracted by those future questions that are a little less relevant today. What you just heard was we got to solve the railway first. Like, let me put 90%, 95% of my effort into that.
[0:55:56] And not get distracted by all the other interesting questions that need to come later. And I remember a few years ago, maybe three or four years ago, trying to get you to brainstorm with Craig Venter about doing a sample return from Mars and sending a genetic sequencer there to help understand life there that might exist, et cetera. And I remember profoundly the response was, that is a really interesting topic, but I got to get these rockets to work first before that's going to be relevant to me. And let me hunker down on what's important here. And that ability to prioritize it on the
[0:56:24] Stepping stones to a huge vision. It's this interesting dichotomy, not just pure visionary scattered across many things alone. It's a clear sense of where we're heading, chaining back to the present, and making sure we're taking the right steps in a fumbled future, if you will. I wish we could all do that in the way we try to implement change. So let me move, if I may, to one last question, which...
[0:56:48] It could be broad or not, which is there's a lot of people here from all kinds of parts of the world. And I think everyone who hears your story, an immigrant from South Africa through Canada to the US taking on four or five different industries with great aplomb and success is inspiring. But it's not just that you've had business success or technology success. It's that you really are changing the world for the better in these areas. And so I guess maybe for as a closing question, again, looking from the present to the future,
[0:57:17] What do you see as the sort of the biggest pressing problems that need to be addressed? This may in fact require you to pull that filter off for a moment on the things of the world that are broken. And if everyone here in the audience could be a change agent themselves in their area of passion, what would you hope to catalyze today? You can say, guys, go solve this big hairy problem and figure out why it's broken. You know, honestly, I don't think everyone needs to go, you know, try to solve like some big...
[0:57:46] Big world-changing problem. I really think we should just think, are we doing something that's useful to the world? If you're doing something useful, that's great. Imagine it's like Animal Farm. Some things are more useful. Sure. Sure. Maybe one of your personal picks. I just think a usefulness optimization, that's a really good thing.
[0:58:14] If you've done something that's useful to your fellow human beings, you've done a really good thing. And people should feel proud of doing that. It doesn't always have to be something that's going to change the world. I mean, sometimes the world should just keep going in a particular direction. Help the world. Yeah, it might be going in the right direction. And I mean, in a lot of ways, the world is, we are in great shape.
[0:58:42] And that if you look at, say, violent crimes per capita in the world, it's at an all-time low. We're actually quite prosperous compared to history. And I think there's a lot of things to feel good about in terms of how the world is today. Access to information is incredible.
[0:59:12] Anyone with like a $100 device has access to basically all the world's information, which is an incredible thing. And yeah, so I honestly, I just think like the best thing for people to try to do is say like, hey, what is something that I can do that would really be useful to the world? And just do that, you know, that's great. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us today on FutureFest and Fludging the Future.
[0:59:53] So just very quickly, on behalf of all the faculty and staff affiliated with STVP, we'd like to thank President Hennessy, the School of Engineering, and our home Department of Management Science and Engineering, Matthew Tooze, Stanford Arts, and the amazing staff here at Bing that was so helpful to us this morning.
[1:00:10] DFJ, obviously, for your incredible sponsorship of Future Fest and also for your continued long-term support of STVP and our hope to create entrepreneurship education opportunities for Stanford students. And of course, we offer our most sincere thanks. Please help me in thanking again Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson.