Latest / The Ben Ferguson Podcast / Podcast Exclusive PART 2: One-on-One w Elon Musk from the White House

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Podcast Exclusive PART 2: One-on-One w Elon Musk from the White House · The Ben Ferguson Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome.
• 0:00
  Speaker 2: It is the Ben Ferguson Podcast. Really nice to have
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: you with us. And if you missed part one of
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: my interview with Elon Musk with Senator Cruz, you may
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: have seen. It's gone viral, Elon Musk tweeting out multiple
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: clips for the interview and the media world covering it
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: wall to wall, being used everywhere, even in the mainstream media. Well,
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: now today's show is even more meaningful in part two
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: because we get into the conversation about the astronauts that
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: were supposed to be in outer space for eight days.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Instead they were there for nine months, and the Biden
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: administration in essence made them into political prisoners in outer space.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Now Elon Musk and Donald Trump have gotten them home.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: So what was the backstory behind Wyatt took so long?
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: We have that for you in part two of our
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: interview with Elon Musk, And if you miss part one,
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: go back and listen to Monday's podcasts. So here it
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: is Part two two with the Mosque.
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: Let me start with a question. You know a lot
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: about what year does man first set foot on Mars.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: I think the soonest would be twenty nine, twenty nine, yes,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And I don't think it's more than two to four
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: years beyond that.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: And that's not an unman, that's that's a human being
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: putting his foot on the surface.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Yes, best case would be twenty nine.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: And what do you put the odds of finding either
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: alien life or evidence of alien life.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: I don't think we're going to find aliens, okay.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: But do we find ruins, do we find remnants?
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: We may we may find the ruins of a long
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: dead alien civilization, that's possible. And we may find subterranean
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: microbial life, that's possible. All Right.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: If man lands on Mars and twenty nine, how soon
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: after that do you land.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: On Mars remains? And I'm not sure. The important thing
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: is that we uh build a self sustaining city on
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Mars as quickly as possible. The key threshold is when
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: that city can continue to grow, continue to prosper even
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: when the supply ships from Earth stop coming. At that point,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: even if something would happen on Earth, it might might
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: It might not be World War three, but it might
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: be that a bad virus. Yeah, it might not be anything.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: For those things. It's like like say, civilization, you could
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: die with a bang or whimper. It may be that
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: civilization dies with a whimper rather than a bang or
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: and simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: But so you absoenly need Mars to become self sustaining
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: and be able to grow by itself before the resupply
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: ships from Earth stopped coming. That that is the critical
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: a civilizational threshold beyond which the probable last span of
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: civilization is much greater.
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: And how close are we technologically to be able to
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: do that, to have a self sustaining settlement on the
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: surface of Mars.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: I think it can be done in twenty years, but.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: It would take twenty years, so we're not in twenty nine.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: We're not there. What are we missing? What are the
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: big technologies?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: We don't have a few people running around the surface
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: in a hostile environment is not going to make it
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: self sustaining. So you're going to need on the order
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: of a million people, maybe a million tons of cargo.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: So but you think we could have a million people
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: on Mars in twenty years, yes, And what's the technology
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: we're missing right now?
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: When you think about a million people.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: On Mars, do we have the ability to get water,
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: to get food.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: To keep them safe. I mean, what do we need
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: to make that happen? Well, you need to recreate the
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: entire base of industry of Earth. So you know, we're
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: here at the top of a massive permit of industry.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: That's thoughts with mining a vast array of materials, those
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: materials going through hundreds of steps of refinements. We grow food, obviously,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: we grow trees, we make things out of the trees.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: There's you know, you've got to You've got to build
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: all that on Mars. And Mars is a hostile environment.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: It's you know, it sometimes gets above zero on a
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: warm summer day near the equator on Mars. Meanly it's
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: quite cold. How do you prep for that? Well, in
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: the beginning on Mars, you have to have a a
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: life support habitation module, right like you need you can't
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: just live outdoors. You can't breathe the air like a
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: dome you think is likely, Yeah, glass domes type of thing.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Have you identified a location on Mars that is likely
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: to be ideal for a habitat what.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Might be Arcadia planet here is one of the one
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: of the good options. That's one of my daughters is
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: named Arcadia after that. And what makes that attractive. My
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: eldest son's middle name is Ari's Mars.
• 5:13
  Speaker 4: You've been thinking about this for a long time. If
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: you're name and your kids around it.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: My eldest kid is middle name is essentially Mars.
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: When did you get the dream?
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: I mean it's twenty twenty one soon, this is a
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: decade old. Yeah, dream?
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: So like when you were ten, did you look up
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: and say I'm going to Mars?
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: No? No. I read a lot of science fiction books
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: and program computers. But the first, finally off, the first
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: video game that I sold was a space video game
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: called Blastar. Maybe I spilled this way, how do you.
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: How do you become Elon Musk? Look, you're obviously smart
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: as hell, but but there are lots there are a
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: lot of smart people that don't do squat and you've
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: managed everything you've touched has been an extraordinary success. Uh yeah, yeah, Look,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: I mean that's just objectively right. So what has led
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: to that? Because there are other smart people that that's
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: not true, and they gaze at their navel and they
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: don't do anything. So what what do you do differently
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: that makes you so effective?
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Well? I suppose to have a philosophy of curiosity. I
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: want to find out the nature of the universe, understand
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: the universe, and in order to do that, we have
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: to travel to other planets, see other staw systems, maybe
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: other galaxies, find perhaps other alien civilizations or at least
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: the remnants of alien civilizations, gain a better understanding of words,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: it's universe going ready to come from and what questions
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: do we not yet know to ask about? The answer
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: that is the universe.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: So let's go back twenty five years, late nineties. You're
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: at PayPal. How do you turned PayPal into the success
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: it was, which which then helped launch you to the
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: next one and the next.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So I studied physics and economics and college she's
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: a good foundation for understanding how the economy works and
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: how reality works. And then I was going to do
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: a PhD at Stanford in advanced ultra capacitors actually as
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: a potential means of energy storage for electric transport. Put
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: that on hold to start an internet company. Essentially came
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: to the conclusion that the Internet was one of those
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: rare things and I could either watch it happen while
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: a grad student or participate. And I figured I've always
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: go to back to grad school. Grad school is going
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: to be kind of the same. But I couldn't rather
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: thought of just watching the Internet happen, so I wanted
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: to be a part of building it. So I created
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: a net into the company. We did the first maps, directions,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: yealow pages, white pages on the Internet. I actually wrote
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the first version of software just by myself in ninety five,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and we ended up selling that to Compact Texas company.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: I guess YEP for about three hundred million dollars in
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: cash about four years after I graduated. Wow, So I
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: should say just to preface that I graduated with about
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars a student debt. So it was
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: it yeah, you and me both, Yeah, yeah, right, I know.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: And when I first arrived in North America, I arrived
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: with twenty five hundred dollars, a bag of books and
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: a bag of clothes.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: All right, So you sell the company for three hundred million,
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: How much does that change your life?
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Well? I got twenty one million dollars black jack, and
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: but I wanted to do more on the Internet, so
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: started a company called x dot com, which merged with
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: a company called Confinity, which is Peter Teel and Max
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: leftun YEP and the combined company was actually at first
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: still called x dot com, but we later later changed
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: the name of the company to PayPal. Because of all
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: the name changes, it's kind of confusing. But the company
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: that people know is know as PayPal today was actually
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: I filed those incorporation documents for that company. Interesting.
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and as you know, Peter Tiel and I
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: were buddies back in the mid nineties before he went
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: and did any of this, but you know, I became
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: friends with him when he was a corporate lawyer in
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: New York and just sort of a young libertarian with
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: a lot of dreams.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: So it's been a heck of a journey. Yeah. Yeah. Now, sly,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Peter was involved in a coup. You know, we had
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: a little sort of knifing in the Senate situation where
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: you know that they did cooney at PayPal. I kind
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: of a make peace after that. Yeah yeah, yeah. I
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: mean I was doing a lot of sort of risky
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: moves that I think ultimately would have been successful. But
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: I then went on a two week trip which was
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: a dual money raising trip and honeymoon, and said not
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: done my honeymoon earlier in the year, So it was
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: raising money while doing doing Holly honeymoon, But I was
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: kind of awake. Did that go over by the way
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: it worked? It worked there, you go, kind of worked.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: I raised money, yeah, and we had honeymoon. There are
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: young so yeah, but you don't want to be away
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: from the battle when things are scary. So I was
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: not there to assuage the concerns of the troops. And anyway,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: we're passed things up. And I have been friends nonetheless,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: and you know these days all like stay at his
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: house and stuff. So I was super friends and he
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: he's also invested in most of my companies.
• 11:03
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  Speaker 3: All right, So two thousand and two you start SpaceX,
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: Like how do you start a rocket company? Like what's
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: the first day where you're like I want to make
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: rockets and I want to go to Mars?
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Like what do you do on day one? So I
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: think you have to start with a some sort of
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: philosophical premise in order to have in order for the
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: in order to be in order to be highly motivated,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: you have to have some philosophical foundation. In my case,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: it was that that we want to expand the scope
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the universe, and in order to expand scate, expand consciousness,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: we need to go beyond one planet. If for one
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: planet there's too much risk. You know, hopefully Earth civilization
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: prospers very far into the future, but it may not.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: There's always some risk that we are we self annihilate
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: through nuclear war, or that there's a big meter that
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: takes us out like the dinosaurs. Yep, there's always some
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: risk if all your eggs are in one basket. So
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: it's going to be better if we're a multiplanet species.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And then once we're multiplanet species, that the next step
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: would be to be a multi stellar and have a
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: civilization among on many different star systems. So in two
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: thousand and one, I didn't think that I could. I
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: didn't think I could sell rock companies, so I thought
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: I'd take some of the money from PayPal. In that case,
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I think it was about one hundred and eighty million
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: dollars after tax, something like that, and I thought, you know,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know one hundred eighty million dollars, so I'll
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: spend a bunch of it on a philanthropic Mars mission
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: to get the public excited about going back to Mars.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: We're going to Mars, I should say. Yeah, Mars was
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: always going to be the destination after the Moon. Right.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: In fact, if you told people in nineteen sixty nine
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: that it would be twenty twenty five and we've not
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: even gone back to the Moon, let alone, it's hard
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: to believe, let alone Mars. They'd be like what happened
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: in the civilization collapse top like, they would be incomprehensible
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: that we've not been to Mars. By now, if you
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: told people this after landing on the Moon in sixty nine.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: Why did you think in fifty years America never went
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: back to the Moon.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Well, we destroyed the Saturn five rocket that was that
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: could take people to the Moon, and had the Space Shuttle,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: which could only go to lowth orbit, and then there
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: really hasn't been anything to replace any No vehicle has
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: been made since then that can go to the Moon
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: or to Mars until the SpaceX Starship rocket. Yeah, so
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: you can't go to Mars if you don't have the ride.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: So I remember you and I first met in twenty
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: thirteen when when I was a brand new baby senator. Yeah,
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: and I was still down in the basement office. They
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: stick freshman senators in the basement office kind of like hazey, yeah, yeah, say,
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: sounds like there aree hundred sected offices. But for six
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: months you stay in the base. It's like worry, mean,
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: you know where you're supposed to You know, I got
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: to stay. Now, thirteen years into it, I think there's
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: a lot of wisdom to doing that. But you were
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: down in the basement office, and I remember you were
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: coming and sitting down with SpaceX and at the time
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: the Air Force was not letting you all bid to
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: launch satellites, and so you were coming and saying, look,
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: we got a company. I think we can do a
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: really good job of this. And yet we're locked out
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: of this. It's a little amazing to think the journey
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: SpaceX is gone from then to now.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, it's hard to believe that this still because originally,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: consistently with my belief that we need to become a
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: multiplant species, I thought the only way to do that
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: would be through NASA. So and I think I thought, well,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: if I just get the public excited about Mars, then
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: they'll do admission to Mars. And so initially my thought
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: was to have to send a small greenhouse with seeds
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: and dehydrated nutrient gel. Then land the greenhouse, hydrate the seeds,
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: and you see these the sort of money shot proof.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: The money shot would be green plants on a red background.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: I also recently learned that money shot has a different
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: meaning in some other arenas. But yeah, story, But what
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to say is the captivating shot would be
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the green plants on a red background. And then hopefully
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: that would if we did something like that, that would get
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the public excited about Mars, that would increase NASA's budget,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: and then we could send people to Mars. Your dream
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: was naicey to do this? Yes, not you. No, The
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: original original plan was literally to take a bunch of
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: the money from PayPal and I guess, by some people's definition,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: waste it with no probit on a nonprofit thing. To
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: I wanted to spend a whole bunch of my money
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: for free to get nasta's budget to be bigger so
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: we could.
• 18:22
  Speaker 5: Go to friggin Mars. Right, Wow, that's what I wanted.
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: So that was the holy Grail, That's what I wanted.
• 18:28
  Speaker 5: I was like, so when did you Mars? That's what
• 18:31
  Speaker 5: I wanted to know.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: When when did it strike you? Okay, you're going to
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: have to do this.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: If you want, I'll tell you. It gets crazier, all right,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: It gets crazier. So so that I couldn't afford any
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: of the US rockets because, as you know, the US
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: rockets are way too expensive, boying lucky rock Lucky rockets
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: are crazy money. I didn't have. I didn't even even
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: with one hundred eighty millions. The way I could have
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: afforded were they back then, well, the that with with
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the additional stage to get to Mars, it would have
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: been about like eighty million. So technically I could have
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: afforded one of them, but I wanted to do too
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: in case one of them didn't work. Yeah. So, and
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: then I didn't have enough money for that. Yeah, And
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: I was sort of prepared to, you know, I don't know,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: waste half the money. And I figured if I had
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: ninety million left, that'd be fine, you know, but ideally
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: all of it. So I went to Russia twice to
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: try to buy ICBMs. How'd that go? And who do
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: you call? The Russian rocket forces? Do they sell ICBMs?
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Does that work? Yeah?
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: You got to tell us a story that I want
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: to know who you can buy anything in Russia?
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like, please walk me down that.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: I want to know how you made that phone call
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: and when you get there, how did that work?
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: And what do you tell your friends? Yeah, listen, I'm
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: going to Russian device in my CBMs. I might not return,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: you know, in this situation. Literally, Yeah, so I guess
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: slightly less insane when you when you understand that the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Russians had to demolish a bunch of their ICBMs because
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: of you know, salt talks like the piece, because basically
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: the total number of ICBMs, Russia was actually obligated to
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: scrap a bunch of their ICBMs. So if you took
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: it the very biggest ICBMs, you could converte those into
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: a rocket, added additional stage and send something to Mars.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: So those are big enough with one more stage to
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: get to Mars.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: To send a small payload to Mars. Yeah, so the
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: s S eighteen.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: So you try to buy CBMs, do you succeed or no?
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: Or do you figure out you got to build your
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: own instead?
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: They kept raising the price on me, so because I figured, like, look,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: they're going to throw these things in scrappy on anyway,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: you should get a really good deal, right. So the
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: price out at four million. Then the next conversation there
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: were at eight million. Then the next conversation they were
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: like nineteen million, and I'm like, this is before we
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: signed a contract.
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: By the way, was there another was there another bid
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: or were you the only one trying to buy them?
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: I think I don't know if there were other bits,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: but they didn't mention any other bits. But I was like, man,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: if if the price is increasing this much before the
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: contract signed, I'm really going to get fleeced after the contracts.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: So so I got pretty frustrated there. Actually, in some
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: cases we got into like shouting matches in Moscow, some
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: guys shouting at me in Russia, and I'm shouting back
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: at him and really badly, you know, I'm like.
• 21:38
  Speaker 4: So you are all I mean, you're all.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: In Moscow. Yeah, so man, I should have recorded that. That
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: would have been one for them.
• 21:51
  Speaker 4: How many days were you there negotiating that first time?
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: I mean was this like ongoing? Yeah? Yeah, this this
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: took place. These conversations took place over probably six months
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: or so. Wow. So, and then the final trip trip
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: there was with the with was with Mike Revenue later
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: became as administrator. I actually realized in the course of
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: this that my original premise was wrong, that that America
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: actually has plenty of will to go to Mars, but
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: needs that. It just needs a way to Mars that
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: is affordable and that doesn't break the budget.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: You know, just as you know, we couldn't even get
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: to the space station.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: We needed the Russians to to get us to our
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: own space station. That was embarrassing. It really was pitiful.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure most Americans know just how much we
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: were being fleeced. Like I think they got up to
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: ninety million dollars a seat, yeah wow, Yeah, for a
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: seat that cost them like ten It was pretty obviously,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: but it was the only Yeah it was before space X.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Ninety million dollars a seat for a seat that cost
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: them ten million is high. Yeah, that's a lot of money. Yeah.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: So a few months ago you and I were down
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: in Bocachica with the President for a starship launch, and
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: it is incredible what you built in Boca Chica. You know,
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: five years ago it was an empty beach at the southern.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: Tip of tex this soundbar.
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's now a city and a factory where
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: you're building a rocket ship a month with incredible precision.
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: But one of the things you said to me when
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: we were down there that really stood out to me
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: is is you said, your philosophy on intellectual property talked
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: to lots of CEOs or we fight to guard our IP,
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: and you had a very different approach. What's what's your
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: view of IP?
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Patterns of the week, patterns of for those innovation slowly.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: I literally do not know anyone else in business who
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: would say something like that, like like it was a
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: startling and and and what Elon said down there is
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: he said, look this stuff, I assume everyone will steal everything,
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: but by the time they steal it will be five
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: generations beyond and it won't matter.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Yes, at Tesla, we actually opened social life patents, so
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: we said that our patents are anyone can use it
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: for free. Really, yeah. The only we only do patterns
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: at Tesla to to avoid patent trolls causing causing trouble.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: So we'll try to look ahead and say, Okay, patent
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: trolls are going to trial, pat file patterns to block
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: certain things, will file patents and then open source to
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: make it free. I mean, I want to say patents
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: for the week. Now, there are a few cases, in
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: say with pharmaceuticals, where it might cost you billion dollars
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: to do a phase three human file, but then subsequently
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: the drug is very cheap to manufacture. So cases there
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: are some, in my opinion, which is massively reduced what
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: can be patented and and and say, because the whole
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: point of patenting is to maximize innovation, not inhibit it.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: And in my opinion, maybe a controversial opinion, most patents
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: inhibit innovation, they do not help it. But there are
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: cases I want to do want to single out cases
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: like where such as a phase three clinical trial that
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: might cost a billion dollars, but the than the drugs
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: thereafter cost a few dollars to manufacture, and if you
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: can then immediately copy those drugs for a few dollars,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: no one will pay for the billion dollars. A free
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: writer problem. Free writer problem, yeah, exactly, So you have
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: to address the free writer problem. But other than that,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: there should be no patterns. Ideas are easy.
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: You want ideas to flow maximum to people to get
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: there faster and do things bigger.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: The idea is the easy pot the herd. Execution is
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the hard part. As the old saying goes, it's one
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: percent inspiration, if not less than one percent, and nineteen
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: nine percent perspiration.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: But I'll say the perspiration part you're really damn good
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: at also because you're making. You know, the companies you're
• 25:38
  Speaker 3: building are actually building stuff. They're building cars, they're building spaceships,
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: they're building things that if they don't work, it's a
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: real problem. And the precision you manufacture things with, how
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: do you get that level of precision? How do you
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: get how do you build a culture? You're not you're
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: amazing at thinking outside the box. But what's interesting thing
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: is you're you may even be better at execution, which
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: is how do you execute so effectively?
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Well, I take a physics first principles approach to everything.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: It's not as though I wanted to in source manufacturing.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: It's just that I was unable to outsource it effectively. So, uh,
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: you know, the idea at the beginning of Tesla was
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: that we would outsource almost all the manufacturing, but then
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: it turned out there was no there were no good
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: companies to outsourced manufacturing too, which there wasn't a really really,
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: it wasn't peaceable. Outsourced manufacturing actually is the exception of
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: the rule. And and just over time we had to
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: in source almost everything for Tesla and same for SpaceX.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: I became very good at manufacturing because I had to
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: lose no choice. At this point, I might know more
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: about manufacturing than any any human ever has, because I've
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: done so many I've manufactured so many different things and
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: so many different arenas. I think probably more than anyone
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: ever has.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: Look, that's that sounds like an astonishing statement, but it's
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: not a crazy statement. And you're somehow running Tesla and
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: running SpaceX and running X and running the boring company
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: and running doralink and doing doge.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: How much do you sleep in a given night? About
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: six hours and average.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: So about six So that's it wouldn't have shocked me
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: if you said three or four.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: So the Crenet rush is how many hours do you
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: work a day? I work almost every working hour.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: And Ben, he's not kidding at that. Like when Elan
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: and I were first getting to know each other, I suggested,
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: I said, hey, let's grab dinner sometime and I don't
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: know if you remember what you said.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: You said, I don't eat dinner. I don't have social dinners,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: really right, I mean that, Yeah, I mean you obviously
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: eat food, but.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, idea in a restaurant for two hours, but the
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: idea of like, I don't, But it was it was
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: just kind of a matter of fact, what why would.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: I go to dinner like you jump you work? Uh yeah,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: I literally just thought I'll have lunch, and then it
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: brought during meetings and continue being.
• 28:09
  Speaker 4: How many nights have you slept at your offices? You
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: think your career percentage wise where you say, I just
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: got to take this nap basically because my body forces
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: me to, and I got to get back to work
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: fast and efficiently without going somewhere else.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess it started out even with the first company,
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: SO two, which is a terrible name, but the first
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: interior company, we were able to rent an office which
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: was like in a leaky attack, essentially full five hundred
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: dollars a month, and the cheapest apartment we could find
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: was eight hundred dollars a month, so like, and we
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: only had about five thousand dollars between our brother and I.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: So like we're not, We'll we'll just stay in the office. Yep.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: So we got some couches that converted into beds and
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: we'd can't sleep at night, and then we just have
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: like turn the beds back into catches before anyone came,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: and then we would shout the YMCA down the road.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: And so that went that that that that literally was
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: for several months. What we did, it was in great shape,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: you know, work out the y. I still remember that
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: that y m C a Atu page Miller al Camino
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: in Palo Alto. So that was a long time. Again,
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: so it's been I don't know, I've never thought to
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: count it, but several hundred days maybe, I don't know.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: So you're now the richest man on earth. Do you
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: still sleep at the office, Well, that's true, maybe Mars,
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: we'll find someone else.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: But I think if if someone is a sovereign head
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: of a country there to facto richer by a lot,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: do you still sleep at the office now? I have
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: sometimes left at the office.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, don't forget Share this podcast please on social media
• 29:58
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• 30:02
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• 30:05
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• 30:12
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• 30:13
  Speaker 1: I'll see you back here tomorrow