OpenAI GPT-4: The Most Advanced AI Yet - Live with Tesla & Elon Musk

my name's safian frivol and today we have a very special guest but before I introduce our special guest I'm going to go through and introduce our crew so our regular third row Tesla podcast crew so today we have Omar Kazi tussle truth boom and we have Kristen hi K10 thank you and we got Vincent you from Tasmanian hi all right great and then we got Galileo Russell from hyper change what up third row and now we got Viv fro who's uh Falcon heavy hey okay all right Omar do you want to introduce Our Guest please welcome the inventor of the car fart Elon Musk thank you thank you please put that on my gravestone I love it so yeah it's kind of crazy that we're actually all here and thank you so much for doing this you're welcome we're all Tessa customers fans and it's really good that it's finally happening and I remember that I was looking at your Wikipedia tweet um there's like this bizarre fictionalized version of reality and I reply to him why don't you come on a podcast and like tell you're a victimized version of reality sure until my fictionalized and um you're reply okay sure and I was kind of like taken by surprise by that and um you know the way you engage and listen to your customers online it's like I've never seen anything like that from you know the CEO of a public company or any executive so can you tell us a little bit where that came from why you communicate directly instead of like having this PR strategy that most companies have sure um well I mean it started out I actually had one of the very very first Twitter accounts like when it was like less than ten thousand uh people and and then everyone was tweeting at me like what kind of latte they had at Starbucks and I'm like this seems like the silliest thing ever so I deleted my Twitter account and then uh someone else took it over and started tweeting in my name yeah [Music] um and then a couple of uh friends of mine um said they both said hey you should really use Twitter to get your message out and also some somebody's tweeting in your name and they're saying crazy things so I'll say crazy things in my name did you have to pay them no no they they they um I'm not sure who it was but it was for some reason I got my account back great and um and then I was just I don't know at some degree it's like just sort of I just started tweeting for fun really and when my early tweets were quite crazy uh as I was trying to explain like it has the Arc of insanity is is short and that is not very steep because it started off insane and so if it's still insane it's you know hasn't changed that much um so um yeah and I don't know it seems it seemed kind of fun to you know like I said before it's like you know some people use their hair to express myself I use Twitter [Laughter] why do you like Twitter so much I mean you could use Instagram as opposed to other platforms yeah exactly um well like I don't trust Facebook obviously you know and and then Instagram is is fine but it's I I think not exactly my style um it's hard to convey a sort of intellectual arguments on Instagram and it's hot on Twitter too but it's uh but you can't uh you know it's so Instagram is also owned by Facebooks and I was like yeah yeah um deleted yeah yeah just leave it it's like I don't really need to just if I need to say something it only really need to say I don't know one platform pretty much and um and I don't spend too much time on social media so it was just like hell if people want to know what I'm saying then they can just sort of go to Twitter you know keep doing that as long as Twitter is good I suppose more good than bad um yeah crypto scammers are really cool I understand that they've been taking advantage of Vincent recently I know really yeah there's like 10 Vinson's out there oh all right but they totally they could copy everything and just like change one yeah they use my avatars and then the picture and then they just post like right below yeah your tweak yeah yeah I was like wow yeah and they blocked me too we fight them all all the time we're always like reporting them like every day we report like 10 people yeah yeah I have so many like yeah exactly conversations with Twitter like come on can you just like I think it would take like three or four customer service people to just look look at this it's crypto scan block it it should be easy it should be easy it should be but then like my wife vegan Shelley I think you'd like to retreat the other day um she got banned for like replying to one of your tweets and quoting like the video inside of it and then she got suspended for like a day or something I was like what the heck is going on yeah yeah so it's just weird how the algorithm works yeah so yeah there's a lot of manipulation but you're going back to the Wikipedia page you know it's kind of interesting just what a decade you've had it I remember I was reading somebody's article I think they interviewed you in 2009 or something like that and they said you know if you had met Elon Musk in 2009 right after the recession they're like struggling with the Roadster you know you never would have thought that you are where you are today you're you know launching astronauts into space yeah this year you know servicing the International Space Station I mean Tesla with the model 3 the model y you know electrification really yeah without Tesla it would not be where it is today you see where the other Legacy automakers are they're not doing great so you know looking at kind of like this like you've become this legendary figure and looking at kind of like how people kind of see you kind of the Ashley Vance biography or Wikipedia page what is it that really kind of sticks out to you or you know makes you laugh like that's just completely off base yeah um well I think I mentioned that the that I kept getting referred to as an investor in like a bunch of things it's like but I actually don't invest really except in companies that I help create so I only have the only publicly traded chair that I have at all is Tesla I have no diversity on publicly traded shares so um and um you know that's right we're quite unusual so uh you know once everyone you diversify some degree um and then the only stock that I have of significance outside of translated SpaceX which is privately it was a private private Corporation um and um and then in order to um get liquidity which is mostly to reinvest in SpaceX and Tesla and occasionally in like uh provide funding for much smaller projects like neurolink and boring company uh then I'll I'll actually take out loans against the Tesla and SpaceX stock so the so what so what I actually have is is what are the my Tesla and SpaceX stock is and then there's about a billion dollars of debt against that so um which you know it's it's that this is sometimes it's taking to imply that I'm claiming that I have no money which I'm not claiming [Music] but it's it's something to make it clear that you'll see some like number or some big number in like fours or something people will think I have the the Tesla SpaceX stock and I have the cash and I'm being somehow I'm just sitting on the couch doing nothing like hoarding resources like known it's you know the only alternative would be to say okay let's give the stock to the government or something and then the government would be running things and that the government it just is not good at running things that's the main thing um I think it's like like a fundamental sort of a question of like consumption versus Capital allocation um that was probably gonna get me into trouble but uh you know the the Paradigm of say communism versus capitalism I think is fundamentally um sort of orthogonal to the reality of of of actual economics in in a lot in some ways so uh what you actually care about is like the responsiveness of the feedback loops to the maximizing happiness of the population and if if more resources are controlled by entities that have poor response in their feedback loops so if it's like a monopoly Corporation or a small oligopoly or in the limit I would take the monopolistic Corporation in the limit is the government so you know it's just it's it's this is not to say people look at the governor bad if those same people are taken and put in a better sort of operating system situation will be much better um so it's really just what is the responsiveness of the organization to maximizing the happiness of the people um and um and and so you want to have a competitive situation where it's truly competitive uh where companies aren't gaming the system and and then where the rules are set correctly um and and then you need to be on the alert for regulatory capture where the the referees are in fact captured by the players um which is you know and the player should not control the referees yeah essentially which can happen um you know like that happen for example with uh I think there's a mission vehicle mandate in in California uh where um California was like really strict on EVs and then they the car companies managed to sort of frankly in my view trick the uh Regulators into into saying okay you don't you don't need to be so hardcore about the EVs and instead you should say say fuel cells of the future but fuel cells are of course many years away so forever this is uh then so that they let up the the rules and then you know GM recalled the ev1 and crushed them in exactly yeah a junkyard which is against the Wishes the owner they all lined up to buy them and they wouldn't let them buy it I mean Chris Payne did this great documentary on it and it's like the you know the owners of the the ev1 which weather wasn't actually that great of a car but they still wanted the electric car so bad that they held a candle and vigil at the junkyard where they were caused were crushed oh wow like it like it was like a like a prisoner being executed or something like that that was literally I know and like when is the last time you even heard of that for a product right you know GM is stopped the product I mean what I mean listen man they're not doing that for any other GM product yeah [Applause] it's hard to get through these guys you know so Henry I think that's a very important thing um so generally we could see like these oligopolies forming uh or do I please the um and then you get effective price fixing and then they cut back an r d budget like a kind of a silly one frankly it's like like candy like there's a there's a candy oligopoly and it's like when's the we don't see much innovation in candy so you're still working on the candy company crypto candy is that boring candy boring candy it's gonna be boring I haven't seen a candy yet that's good enough to send out but um and it's yeah but I think it it's there's like three companies or something that control all the candy in the world pretty much it's crazy uh and dog food yeah there's somebody constructed like this it's this crazy conglomerate and and it's like and it's like dog food and baby food and candy and it's like all you know all their brands a rendering yeah hundreds of Brands yeah you think you're buying from different companies but it all funnels up to like three companies or something like that don't send the rendering food to the candy company yeah yeah big candy [Music] you want to have like a good competitive forcing function so that you have to make the product better uh or or you'll lose like if you don't make the product better and and improve the product for the end consumer then then that company should have relatively less Prosperity compared to Coffee it makes better products um now the car industry you know is actually pretty competitive so that's good um the good thing about a competitive industry is then if you make a a product that's better it's going to do better in the marketplace definitely so as this is Gene Wilder's old house yeah yeah that's amazing it's lovely thanks for having us here as well I think it's really special yeah it's a good it's a cool spot let's go to solar glass roof yeah portion two right we didn't notice it but yeah we checked it out the second time yeah I'm waiting for my uh three so I'm waiting for version three well whatever is they're gonna put on I don't care let's just give me motion three yeah yeah looking forward to it yeah we saw him at the store in Torrance actually they've got it in the stores now looks really good well the the the it's actually designed such that you don't notice it so he's like this look it's a little hat this is like it's an old house and I'm probably 50 years old or something like that and it's quite quirky so if you put something on that was like it didn't blend in that it would it would not look right it would be pretty straightened and um this had a black comp shingle roof so I was like okay let's see if we can actually have it weave in and still feel natural look good and yeah um and I think it's it's sort of achieved that goal um but yeah this is a lovely quirky little house I'll show you around afterwards it's got all sorts of weird things it's exactly what sorry is it Frank Lloyd right no I I don't think so I think it was just built in increments over time by probably several people um but that they would have just knocked it down and built a giant house here so it's like so glad they didn't yeah it's super cool really amazing ginwell is one of my favorite uh actors actually so it's great with awesome movies so so when you come up with a product like the solar glass roof I think a lot of people misunderstand that like your goal is to bring these crazy Technologies to Market and really create a change in the world yeah and so I think it's fascinating that you do it through companies and it seems like the fastest way to create that feedback loop and to really like get go from inventing something to millions of people using it right away yes so like it seems like buying a Tesla is almost like the best thing you could do to help the climate crisis because you're like turbo charging r d and products and Innovation I feel like not enough people really understand that um yeah that that is I think there's lots of good things people can do for the climate but just generally anything that is um moving towards sustainable energy um whether it's sustainable energy create um um generation through solar or with an electric vehicle um actually just just things like better insulation in a house just is really um effective for energy consumption um but but if I find allergies [Applause] that's more of an emotion oh I actually got him a little um Halloween a little knitted Marvin the Martian you know the helmet with yeah and look it's super cute you got enough buddy so did you always know like you know business was the way you wanted to kind of attract attack these problems versus say you know maybe a non-profit or you know working as a college professor or something I don't know uh well when I was in in high school I thought I'd most likely be doing physics at a particle accelerator so that's what I was um if physics and computers I mean I got distinctions in two areas in physics and computer science and those were both yeah so my two best subjects and uh and then I thought okay well that I want to figure out what's the nature of the universe and um so you know go try to working with people banging particles together see what happens um and um and then it sort of things went along in the superconducting super collider got canceled in the US and that actually was like whoa you know what if I was working at a collider it's been all these years and then the government just cancels it wow and then that would because like I'm not gonna do that so um so it's like somewhere well we wrote back a little um like I try to figure out what when I was killing I had like this existential crisis and I was about 12 years old or something and and I was like well what does the world mean wait what's it all about reliving some meaningless existence and and then um I met I made the mistake of reading Nietzsche entrepreneur and they're like okay don't do that he's a little older I think no no actually lately these days I sort of rearrated like you know it's actually it's not that bad he's got issues he's got issues no question about it but you know it's anyway um so uh but there are the hitchhik's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams which is like quite really quite a good book on philosophy I think and I was like okay we don't really know what the answer is obviously uh so but the universe the universe is the answer and really what are the questions we should be asking to better understand the nature of the universe and so then to the degree that we expand the scope and scale of Consciousness um then we'll better be able to answer the ask the questions um and understand the why we're here or what it's all about and so we should take the set of actions that are most likely to result in this understanding what questions to ask about the nature of the universe um so that therefore we must propagate uh human civilization on Earth as far into the future as possible and become a multi-planet species to again extend the scope and scale of consciousness and increase the probable lifespan of if Consciousness which is going to be I think probably a lot of machine Consciousness as well in the future um and that's the best we can do it basically you know and if we yeah that's the best we can do so um you know and think about the various problems that we're facing or what would most likely change the future um the when they were in college there were five things that I thought would be um I mean I thought these were actually these I would not regard this as a profound Insight but rather an obvious one uh that the internet would fundamentally change Humanity because it's it's like uh if your enemy would become more of a super organism Because the Internet is like the like nervous system um now suddenly any part of the human human organisms anywhere where you have access to all the information amazing instantly neural link hey what I can imagine if you didn't have a nervous system you wouldn't know what's going on your fingers wouldn't know what's going on or your toes would know what's going on it had to do it by diffusion yeah and the way information used to work was really by diffusion one human would have to call another human or or actually write them yes like if it was in a letter you would have tried you'd have to have that letter to another human that would be carried through a bunch of things playing another person would give it to you inefficient extremely slow diffusion um and if you wanted access to books if you were not did not have a library you're not you don't have it that's it right so um now you have access to all the books instantly and you if you can be in a remote like you know Mountain Top jungle location or something and have access to all of humanities information if you've got a link to the internet this was a fundamental profound change so that's one thing um I was on the internet early because of you know in the physics community that was pretty normal although it was interface was you know almost entirely text and hard to use um but um another one would be obviously making life multi-planatory making Consciousness multi-planetary um the uh changing uh human genetics um which obviously I'm not doing by the way uh it is a thorny subject but it is being done with crispr and others you know it would it will it will become normal to to I think to change the human genome it will become normal like what's the opportunity like why is that something that's inevitable or well you know I think for for sure as far as say um getting rid of diseases or propensity to various diseases then that that's going to be like the first thing that you'd want to edit out you know so it's like if you've got like you're you know the situation where you're definitely going to die of some kind of cancer at age 55 and prefer to have that edited out yeah definitely um so I think it's just edit that out it you know there's the the Gattaca sort of extreme thing where it's not really edited out but it's like it's edited in for various enhancements and that kind of thing which probably will come too but I'm not saying you know arguing forward against it I'm just saying this they're more likely to come than not uh at down the road yeah so then and then AI um really major one so these are all big motivational factors like to keep our Consciousness going oh and it's sustainable yes yes sustainable energy so sustainable energy actually was something that I thought it was important before the revital environmental implications became um as obvious as they they are so because if if you mine and burn hydrocarbons then you're gonna run out of them um because it's not like it's not like mining sort of say Metals for example if you team you know we recycle steel um an aluminum and because that's just it's it's not a change of energy State whereas if you if you take fossil fuels you're taking some some from a high energy State converting it to a lower energy State like CO2 which is extremely stable you know so whereas we will never run out of metals not a problem um we will run out of of mine hydrocarbons um and then necessarily if we've got billions ultimately trillions of tons of hydrocarbons that were buried deep underground in solid liquid or gas foam whatever but they're deep underground you say you sort of move them from deep underground to the oceans and atmosphere you will have a change in the chemistry of the of the surface obviously um and then there's just a certain probability associated with well how bad will that be um and the range of possibilities goes from wildly bad to extremely bad but then why would you run that experiment that seems like the craziest especially since we have to go to sustainable energy anyway why would you run that experiment because the maddest thing I've ever heard I'm not saying it shouldn't be some use of hydrocarbons on Earth but there just should be the the correct price place on co2 production and and the obvious thing to do is have a common tax it's a no-brainer every I don't know if 90 plus percent of economists would say this I think of physicists and it's just the you know the market system works well if you've got the right price on things it's very very simple um and if you've got a price of zero effectively or very low then it's um well the whole way accordingly so so just that's that's the thing that needs to get done I think it will get done um and and then the the if over time as you raise the the price on on carbon you can actually I think encourage a sequestration Technologies over time um and and there'll be a lot of innovation in that regard and another way to do it sure so you had these realizations about you know areas of big value and you went and started zip2 you sold it got you know 20 million cash you were the largest shareholder of PayPal at the time eBay acquired it I think you know you got 160 million or something like that uh you know you have enough money basically for an entire lifetime why go and put your money into SpaceX which is a huge you know risky operation or Tesla why not just kind of you know relax sure what so yeah basically um you know I I graduated from from Penn with basically physics and economics um and uh then that we're after the road trip to uh to Stanford uh with with Robin Wren who is in my physics class um and now it works at Tesla actually um it's cool yeah he grew up in Shanghai yeah so yeah yeah this was a very smart guy he ended up continuing at Stanford and I ended up going on deferment a couple days into the semester but I was going to be studying um Material Science and the physics of high and age Dynasty capacitors for use in electric vehicles so so the intent was I was going to go okay I'm gonna work on energy storage solutions for electric vehicles and I'd worked at a company at Cold Pinnacle research for a couple Summers that did high energy density capacitors I was going to try to do a factory like a solid-state version of of what they were doing with um it's going to get very complicated from a technical standpoint but they're using a ruthenium tantalum oxide erythem is extremely rare and expensive you cannot scale that so like can you find a substitute for ruthenia but you're able to get to uh energy density is comparable to lettuce of battery with incredibly high power density so what do you want I cannot go down a deep Rabbit Hole there but what's the purpose of a super capacitor in an EV from capacitor you know I think with the Advent of uh high energy lithium ion batteries a capacitor is not not the right path what was your thinking back then though that made you think it could be useful for EVS I want to use um Advanced chip breaking equipment uh to make capacitors that were precise at a molecular level um so at the you know just a level of precision that that was sort of unheard of in in capacitors like capacitors energy is a function of its area or in a separation distance so if you have if you have very tiny separation distance um and you can and you can inhibit Quantum tunneling like I said how do you things get pretty esoteric so you're going to inherit quantity it's only get a very it's a short Gap um um and and then you in theory get to very high energy densities you um by making capacitors in the way that you would make a uh an x86 processor um and since those there were tens of millions of dollars going into chip making r d that that I thought there might be a way to make an advanced capacitor using chip making equipment instead of conventional means throws it off the table alter capacitor it's unnecessary okay interesting it's unnecessary it's it's it I think I think it's I think it's probably supposed to be possible but it's it's unnecessary at this point I mean I know a lot of people were talking about Maxwell and they had been working on some stuff with capacitors the funny thing is when I was doing the um my internships at uh this uh Advanced capacitor company called Pinnacle research which was in Los Gatos we talked a lot about Maxwell and Maxwell was also trying to make high indigenous to capacitors no Tesla acquired Maxwell simple it's amazing that's awesome yeah wow we're looking forward to that investor day yeah it's kind of a big deal yeah yeah that's great great to know Maxwell has a bunch of technologies that are that that where if they're applied in the right way I think can be have a very big impact like the dry electrode stuff that would be one of them that's a big deal yeah for sure okay much much bigger deal than it may seem um yeah and there's a few other things with with the uh the space that it takes off with the ovens that you know for the current technology you can save all that that real estate space now that's one aspect and the cost reduction the weight savings I mean there's so many pluses right yes and there's many things there but I'll have to wait until you know whatever battery day sure I should hope in a few months but I think we've got some pretty exciting things to share um so Galley is very excited yeah it seems like the pace of the innovation of the the battery thing is just taken off like since you guys have more capital and being able to like have the gigafactory be vertically integrated just seems like no other car companies making that many batteries so they're not even thinking about what comes next but that they're not even you know man not even come close at all I can 201 miles that's a joke yeah no it's really it's true uh the other car countries just really want to Outsource Battery Technology not even not even making the like this battery module and sell um but they're they're obviously Outsourcing the sales but even Outsourcing the modules in the packs yeah you know and it's like they're really not thinking about fundamental chemistry improvements and there's some pretty deep Wizardry at Tesla on this front and I should say a bit about like like electric vehicles and and so sustainable energy in general you know I said it was it was pretty I think obvious to not just me to me but a lot of people even go back 30 years or longer that we must have uh a sustainable energy solution in fact it's sort of logical if it's under if if it's a if it's not sustainable we must at some point find an alternative to it and so even if there were no environmental impact to uh the sort of a fossil fuel economy then it would run out of them and then we'd have economic collapse and well civilization would fall apart so so that that was actually my initial motivation for electric vehicles is like okay we've got to have a solution that does not require um mining hydrocarbons uh that that is sustainable to in the long term it was not actually initially from an environmental standpoint because I don't realize the gravity of environmental situation at that time and I thought actually for sure by now we'd have electric cars like for sure but are we back on the moon yeah totally why are we not back on there that's insane it is insane if you saw something in 69 that yeah that would not be back on the moon and in like 2020 that they'd be like oh you probably might have gotten punched honestly because I feel like you're just it's like so insultingly rude to the Future because they'd be like what is wrong with you yeah it's encouraging them yeah yeah yeah so it's like we should have a share of a base on the moon we should have sent people to Mars I know that's occurred you know it's Gotta does we've got to make that happen yeah so it's a bit on the sustainability for it was really like I said it not so much initially not so much from an environmental standpoint but from um a necessity of replacing a finite resource um in order to ensure that Civilization could continue to grow and then the urgency of it became much more obvious like well Maria's really going to do something because uh the environmental stuff is becoming quite serious um and the the the inertia of large existing companies is just hard to appreciate they just want to keep doing the same thing and maybe five percent different every year maybe five percent different um the company's head change so um so then the you know the time the Tesla you know it's a quest Creator we you know there was no no one was doing electric cars no they weren't really startups they weren't the big car companies weren't doing it uh GM and Toyota canceled their EV programs and now everybody's doing it right now like everybody and their mom mom my friends doing it yeah and we will all like to congratulate about the gigafactory three definitely yeah yeah it's epic and I would like to know like why China is the best country to build the first foreign gigafactory yeah China is the biggest um consumer cars in the world so uh it's basically so that that learn would be enough to do it um I think also there was a lot of uncertainty about the tariffs and and you know it's like potentially would be unable to sell effectively in China if we did not have Factory locally yes uh or at least unable to sell at prices that weren't extremely high but those are really the two two main reasons um I think that um what I think was also a third important reason that that there's just so much uh Talent um and drive in China that I think it's a good place to do a lot of things um and uh the evidence is there in the incredible progress in the factory um which was um built with a very very high quality in a very short period of time um and um the the cars coming out of the of Shanghai are already very high quality oh I can't tell and the Run rate is amazing and I love that they use the uh Chinese badge as well it's like a symbol of Pride and sure you know made made in China so that's cool it's super cool how did Tesla manage to get the first wholly owned foreign car company in China yeah I mean a factory uh well I've went to China many times and they kept saying that we have to do this you know majority local own renter and I said that well a rich part of someone who said well oh you know we're a little late to the dance here you know so who do we partner with you know um there's nobody nobody left and and uh and also we're just a little company so you know we're you know that like because they should get married and we're like we're a bit Young that's a good example We're Young you know and then so then um you know but I know and then also is pointing out like you know this certainly Chinese companies that are gonna you know they're establishing factories in or in the US and there's like a very future and that kind of thing and and that's 100 owned by them and so for I mean to be fair it should be a lot better American Car Company should we also own its Factory in China as well um and so we you know talked to him for over a number of years and they eventually said okay well other companies can do it as well um so it's not just limited to Tesla and how much of that production hell like learnings have really enabled because one of the I don't like to bring up capex but one of my favorite things is the stats and the shareholder letter if it's so much cheaper not only faster but it seems like you guys have learned so much from this the Fremont Factory and that really enabled like kind of a turbocharged uh build for Shanghai yeah the I think the big difference is is like we are way less dumb than we were um so the the portions of capital expenditures was very high um and it's less high now [Laughter] um and then with the the Shanghai Factory we designed out all of or as much of the the foolishness as we could think of um that exists at Fremont um and in Nevada um so we just made a lot of decisions that weren't smart and um and we designed those out so such the production line is much simpler um so it's much simpler and and better implemented um and then um we also found like that those in most cases the suppliers were more efficient in China as well than in the US so um but we've also managed to get a lot more output from existing equipment in in the US as well so the model 3 body line in in Fremont for example was only Implement to do 5 000 cars model threes a week and it's doing seven thousand wow nice so nice and with with with turning off a bunch of unnecessary things that were being done so um it it I mean there's just there's a lot of foolish things that we're doing so um and we changed some of the designs and um made it easier it would it's it's like hundreds of little things um to make it to make it easier to build and and so being able to get 40 more output of the same line obviously makes up makes a big difference um and while while reducing the cost the marginal cost of production and and I think improving the quality of the car um so it's all good good stuff it was a result of a ton of hard work um by a lot of people so yeah it was kind of necessary in that where there was we didn't really have a place to put a second multi body line so it's like you're either we either make with one go faster or we will not be able to achieve production but the model 3 body line in Shanghai is um much much simpler than the one in and I say that a good way um then because it has the same the same end result so if yeah um and and but but it's a much easier to understand this just getting rid of unnecessary movement there's a lot of unnecessary movement in the freelance body line but not in Shanghai um so you guys said in the production letter that you just started battery production Shanghai 2 and I heard that you guys were getting cells from cattle and LG chem are the cells basically kind of like a commodity part that you can assemble into your battery packs there or you know does it make a difference how do you see that long term I believe these cells are not yet from algae we do expect to use locally locally produced cells but I'm I don't always know exactly what's going on everywhere in the 50 000 person company so some of the things like the most most most of the things I say will be correct but of the movie occasionally something that's not um as so that's my knowledge we're not yet using um uh algae campsells we're using Panasonic cells made in Nevada but LG chem can make pretty much the same cells as Panasonic yes but pretty much it's not the same as same so there's still a few uh bugs to work out with the LG chem cells um before we can use them in our module and battery pack production system um the catl cells oh it's the ca Health situation will be more of an integrated module than it will be a cell um and that's so it's that it's it's not just it's not super easy to replace these things um but yeah we'll be we do expect to use catl would you expect to use LG currently we're using Panasonic I'm going to say expect to use I mean like virtually a matter of months so by the middle of this year we probably be using both LG and CTL um in volume wow so we were talking about a lot of Tesla stuff but we kind of wanted to ask you about your personal history because we were saying you were saying how there's some misconceptions you would like to make straight you know Ashley Vance wrote a book about you I just read May's lovely book and it was really wonderful I loved it and learned a little bit more history about your family in U of M what are some of the misconceptions that you would like to correct you know most of this is just it ended up being kind of water under the bridge that people didn't notice that much um yeah I mean there's a sort of some stories in there where it sounds like I like fired people all of a sudden and arbitrarily which was not the case uh there um you know that it just actually asked somebody who uh who who didn't know what was going on and then that person was suddenly not there and they didn't know why yeah um but I I you know I definitely do not require talented people and yeah you know unless there's no option so yeah um and absolutely not not without warning or I keep hearing you say we like it sounds like you're always thinking of everybody I see you as a very selfless person I mean seriously I mean yeah it's like from the age 12 it sounds like you've been thinking about how to help Humanity um yeah I mean I I'm not trying to be sort of like some you know the sort of Savior or something like that you know but it's really just that uh if it just seems like the it's just I don't know it seems like the obvious thing to do I I can't like I don't know why you do anything else um we want to maximize happiness to the population and propagate into the future as far as possible and understand the nature of reality um and from that I think everything else follows um I saw you on Twitter um like talking about how like people are having this rumor that you've been wealthy your whole life and that would be like the only reason you became successful when you've debunked that and can you like share more about your upbringing and will let you to go into North America uh when you sure I was in in South Africa and uh it seems like wherever there was like a lot of the advanced technology in the world was being produced in America and there's a Silicon Valley especially so I wanted to be where where I could sort of be have in fact on technology so that's or be involved in the creation of new technology so that's what brought me to go to um at first Canada because I could get citizenship in Canada through my mom and then ultimately to the US um but yeah just uh left South Africa um 2017 and land in Montreal they had like about two thousand dollars Canadian uh yeah I started staying in a youth hustle for a few days and then there was a you could buy a ticket to go across the country for 100 bucks and stuff long way and so um I put that and uh just took a Greyhound across Canada and so all these like little towns well we're getting I didn't have much I had like a backpack like a suitcase books the the the bus company Greg had unloaded it uh in one of the cities and then the bus left without my my stuff oh that's nice so I literally had nothing all your books but your clothes too um actually weirdly I think I might have had the books thing but I closed that was priorities all you need yeah because I needed I was just sitting in the bus station Reading waiting for the bus to get ready yeah yeah um and I think out the books but not not but no clothing no no so anyway um but I managed to get to Swift car Saskatchewan um and then my my it's your cousin cousin's son yeah has a wheat farm there and I worked on the wheat farm for about six weeks wow um and toilet so I turned 18 in Saskatchewan um it's in this town called Swift Current so that was summertime right it was June yeah yeah June 28th so because I've been there in the winter and it's like minus 40. yeah yeah you don't want to be traveling yeah did you ice skate did you try ice skating no there was it was quite warm well I mean in the wintertime were you there in the winter I was just I was there for about six weeks oh you're lucky you survived that's good yeah it's cold there really literally working on the wheat farm um we did a bond raising and I cleared out the wheat bins you know the green bit of grain silos that kind of thing and um I just worked the vegetable patch basically it's doing various things would you mind just thinking of what you're what you're gonna do after that yeah it's perfect what are your next uh don't know what to do um so then when I ended up getting back on the bus and went to Vancouver and I had a half uncle there um who was a kind of in the lumber industry um he like made Lumber like Lumber equipment sounds like the Northwest yeah yeah basically so I ended up chainsawing logs and working on at the slumber Mill um and uh cleaning out the the the where they boil the pulp and he was like crazy crazy sort of boiler rooms wow and that might be the hardest job I've had actually because yet like crawl through this little tunnel um in a hazmat suit and then uh with with the uh shovel with it and then you shovel is sort of steaming sand and put and mulch out of the the boilers to clean them out wow and you have to like there was only one entrance or exit which was like a little little tunnel if you're claustrophobic you could be real real bad and then you could you'd shovel the the sand and the mulch through the tunnel uh and it actually blocked the tunnel and then somebody else would reach in and shovel it out from the other side so just a big enough long enough if you have a trouble with a long handle so one person on the inside can travel far enough that someone on the outside can shovel it out and then yet to rotate every 15 minutes to avoid getting hypothermia oh there's just two people kind of paired up so if like one person's it was collapses and you're gonna call somebody but it'd be really hard to drag somebody out I have to say that it does not seem safe because the tunnel gets blocked trying to get the attack and block that tunnel would be very difficult in a short period of time so um but it was the highest paying job at the employment office that's why I was like okay the other jobs were like I don't know eight dollars an hour and this one was 18 an hour you need to buy your clothes and they're all gone well they should give you a hazmat suits oh there you go yeah how long did you have to did you do that job for like four days then it was done yeah it was awesome you said it was like a short-term thing cleaning grain bins cleaning the yeah so what was next we were in boiler rooms and then yeah basically um yeah I mean literally was like Lumberjack it's chainsawing uh logs um and uh just during the library Lumber stuff basically um for a few months there and then applied for college and I'm going to Kingston um and uh was there for a couple years and then uh somebody that's just that I should reply to UPenn and uh I I didn't think I'd be able to go because I I pay for my own way through University just which is actually not that hard in Canada because the the tuition system yeah the tuition is highly sells that is in Canada so um so with you know with basically some if you sort of work during the summer and semester and take out some loons and some get some scholarships you can pretty much go to any college in Canada I think but I met someone who was at UPenn and they said you should at least apply and apply and they actually gave me like quite a big scholarship so uh that allowed me to go there and so I did the physics and economics um there and uh and and then that that's what led to the road trip to Stanford with uh Robin Wren um and uh and and then I was doing that that summer that I was like okay if I can either spend several years kind of doing a PhD and I know that I care about the PHD actually but I just needed a lab um but I could even spend a bunch of years working in a lab and maybe it would maybe the technology would pan out or maybe it wouldn't um but the internet would it was definitely about to go supernova in 95. so I was like okay look I I can always come back to working on electric cars basically um and which of course I did um but the internet is not going to wait so then I put saffron deferment and um too which was really just uh you know we're starting off with maps and directions yellow pages white pages that kind of thing um and uh it was you know that's my knowledge the first math and directions on the internet so and this was some like patents I have I don't know how many more but like they've obviously lapsed at this point but um for maps and directions and yellow pages and advertising and stuff and I wrote the whole the whole initial code base I wrote personally was because there wasn't anywhere else it's just me so um and I only had a few thousand dollars and my brother joined and he brought like five thousand dollars which was a lot yeah these were the first few months there was literally only one computer so the website when the website wasn't working it was because I was compiling code and um and even to get an internet connection was pretty hard but there was a internet service provider on the floor below I said we're more or less squatted in this office the landlord was was like out of the country or something and nobody was using it so so you lived in there yeah I think I read that in May's book you showered at the YMCA then right that's right yeah it's smart though I mean you were Thrifty you did what you had to do we just like had no no money so we're gonna do yeah what did people think about zip2 generally was it like seen as a crazy idea or like did people even understand the internet back then most people did not understand the internet most people didn't know even on Sandhill Road like we tried pitching people to invest in an area company most the VCS we pitched to had never used the internet you remember some of the VC firms you went to on Sandhill um I remember most sorry we wouldn't take a meeting and if they did take a meeting they were pretty bored and not uh so like who's made money in the internet no like no one okay um but but the sea change occurred when um The Escape went public yeah so um but the first thing I tried to do was not start a company I tried to get a job Netscape but they didn't reply to me oh no oh man so I just I tried and I tried hanging out in the lobby at an escape I don't know who to talk to so that's really too shattered towards anyone I don't know so it's like okay I can't get a job at the only internet company that you know that that does internet software so they're gonna try writing software um so that's um kind of what happened there yeah I remember like I said my brother came down and joined this is like well like late 95. um and then in January 95 I think it was the um there was there was a lot more interest and internet stuff following than Escape IPO um and that's the soft software was more impressive I guess so then we then what David now invested um so their VC film on Sand Hill Road um and they they invested I think it was like three million dollars for effectively sixty percent of the company wow um which we thought was crazy uh they're like with these people they're gonna give us some money for nothing they must be man yeah so they that this this seems like crazy that they were to give so much money for a company that consists of the time of about five people um like literally I think five people at the time so uh but anyway it worked out well for them in the end so we we then we hired a lot more people um we're both out the service and yeah and they're also ended up writing a bunch of software to bring newspapers online so Knight Rider New York Times company host uh Royal became investors and and customers and at one points up to um was responsible for a significant section of the New York Times company website yeah so I got to know the media industry pretty well and uh over what really happened with with effectively got too much there was there was too much control um by the existing media companies um so that too many board seats and to Too Much voting control and that they kept uh trying to push the company down directions that made no sense um okay so um the executive actually had uh really good software I'd say software that's comparable in some ways more advanced than say a Yahoo or excite at the time but it was just not being used properly and it was all being forced through uh through media companies um who they're not not use it you know so it's like yeah it's okay we've got the best technology but it's it's not being deployed properly so but unfortunately uh Compaq came along and they um compounded compact acquired digital equipment and digital equipment had owned Alta Vista which at the time was probably the best the search best search engine so they thought that their idea was they will combine Alta Vista with a bunch of other internet companies and try to compare create a competitor to Yahoo or excite that was the excite used to be a big thing amazingly um and Yahoo used to be a big thing yeah yeah a long time ago now it's like owned by Verizon or something yeah and there was AOL AOL yeah it was a crazy story they you know they failed to acquire Google twice you know Microsoft offered them like 40 billion or something and they turned it down and then Alibaba saved them out of nowhere yeah yeah the Alibaba steak was worth more than the whole company I went by like yeah a huge amount right it was basically a proxy for Alibaba shares training yeah exactly but at one point I mean at that time like if you go back to say 98.99 Yahoo seemed like an Unstoppable Juggernaut yeah like literally like yeah this company will you know as a behemoth nobody could possibly defeat them um but anyway um and where's combat today yeah uh but that that was their idea which is you know at least if executed well could have made sense um doing we're recording a podcast uh yeah how do you want me to join um yeah pull up for sure so what do you remember about zip2 um yeah we remember yeah so but then the internet came along with kind of this huge thing I mean it was always it was always there but it became a big deal and then Elon was working on uh working in Silicon Valley and as I remember it you know I never heard uh a meeting where uh some of the Yellow Pages companies were thinking of doing sort of online Yellow Pages and no where would I why would I have been here this is a long time ago anyway you called me up and you said we should do you think you can do I do a better job so we think we can do it maybe you made that up to try and get Kimball interested how would I be in a meeting with yellow pages I have no idea that's what I remember [Laughter] with you but but um so it was like I think uh April of 1995 we started working on it and the um uh uh I guess the idea was fairly simple to take mapping and apply it to the internet and there were there were a few other companies trying to do it but no one with uh the very cool technology of of uh sort of what was called vector-based mapping which is which is what we will use today where the map is actually alive you know not not just a picture that was very ahead of its time you know I think we were the first I I know there were other people putting maps on the internet but I think we were the first to put vector-based mapping which is what the kind of Technology you use today on on the internet and door-to-door directions so it was cool I I remember my brother and I press and go on on his server at our office and took about 60 seconds for the first daughter daughter the door-to-door directions to come up on my screen and even 60 seconds was amazing yeah you're like this is incredible go to your directions to anywhere this is just amazing and uh definitely seemed amazing at the time definitely seemed an amazing good time yeah it's like now it's like wherever normal but um this was like an impossible thing that's so cool it was so cool and uh using Java Elon had coded a uh interactive map which again all super normal stuff today but the ability to just draw a square and zoom in or zoom out that was just unheard of uh technology Central or Square yeah you remember that it was like a little little red square on the Java member browser it was that was unusual yes you just like yeah well you cheated if you're using Java applets yeah this is when Java sucked and it was barely yeah this was like probably the most it was 95. I think we even got some sort of recognition because it was the most advanced Java application on on Java at the time because it was so ridiculously hard it was it was a really crappy technology at the time but this this was done on it there's things if you if you downloaded the the job out that we could we could uh transmit the vector data not just a bitmap and this is what when everyone was on a modem right so somebody's on like you know 28 kilobits modem or for you know trying to download a map image if we take forever whereas if you had but downloading the vector data is that locally rendered using the Java applet was super was relatively speaking super fast that's what made it cool smart yeah I mean yeah even like vector maps are even Google Maps using like raster Maps a few years ago like it seems like very out of its time well we we were the first time I believe I believe the two of us were the first humans to see maps and digital directions on the internet which I think is pretty cool that's pretty cool yeah Garmin came out when did Garmin first launch um well they weren't internet based right so you could you could actually I don't think Garmin was even a player at this point it was uh navtech was the only place that we were that's where we got the data from yeah and they were building it for for her to neverlast which came out a few years later you know those things that no one uses in the the GPS systems um really really bad technology but the actual mapping data was amazing and so we took that and uh applied it to the internet that we were 22 and 23 at the time it had cost them 300 million dollars to build this data and they gave it to us for free with a simple contract saying if you ever make any money on this you've gotta you got to come share it with them yeah and that's that's how we got it wow that's amazing that is amazing yeah you can see it's amazing what happens if you ask yes nicely and there's also part of it was these guys had been working so hard on the tech and no one had ever seen what they were doing yeah because it was not on the internet and was not being used for for Hertz and so it was just they were excited that someone would use the data and it would pick people could see what they've been working on so how did you get guys get the engineering chops to pull this off because it sounds like you were so young you didn't really have any help and then you built this like Cutting Edge piece of technology from I don't know what time what age but you publish your first the like blast star game right yeah I think it was 12. did you write any other cool stuff back then yeah I wrote a bunch of games um yeah uh and then like occasionally software for people that asked for software you know you also work for a video game company yeah our funny it was called um rocket science yeah that's funny by the way we took a space extra yesterday it was insane thank you for that that was amazing yeah it was so good it's like Batman's lair in there that's right it's really cool it is amazing but it gives you perspective on what Tesla's doing because the technology is so Advanced and there's you know interchange of information there like the I know they use the inconel fuse right was from SpaceX when they couldn't get the the power output right it kept burning up the fuse in the performance models so yeah it's awesome yeah it's pretty cool to see the SpaceX Tech being applied to Tesla I think I think there's a jump there's one joint employee between SpaceX and Tesla and it's really it's the materials is it the materials engineer or what do you want uh there's just not that many humans on the planet that know how to do this stuff no well it sounded like back in the old days it was was it just Elon doing the coding or I mean I did a little for like HTML friends not recently uh I know there's there was we had no money so you can employ them yeah yeah so I just wrote I sure all the software and you worked through the night right you just never according to Facebook you just never slept I mean we lived in a little office I think this address was 470 Sherman Way in uh yeah in Palo Alto it was probably about the size of this room yeah yeah it was probably like 15 feet wide by 30 feet long with a little little closet in the back and we would um we couldn't afford a place to sleep or like a like a house or a home or apartment so we would sleep in it and it had a couch that was a futon which would pull out the futon take turns sleeping on the futon or the floor although he coded a lot at night so I usually got the futon at night um uh and we're here to code it at night because the server when the internet was live needed to be functional and we just had data for the Bay Area at the time so we were just kind of making sure that the people in the Bay Area could use it and then um uh and then we had a little little mini fridge with a cooking stove on it and we'd cook uh simple things you know like pasta sauce and pasta and things like that that would be as cheap as dirt people think it's expensive to eat real food it's actually really cheap yeah yeah it Cooks vegetables pasta and beans stuff beans super cheap so we're here and then and then we would go eat a Jack In The Box which I can still it's still kind of shiver a little I've eaten there for for probably 20 years uh or longer maybe 22 years and I can still probably recite the entire menu yeah recycle through the menu of Jack in the Box it was like it was a few blocks away from and it was up in 24 hours over 24 hours I'm trying to get you know dinner in Palo Alto after 10 is afraid of zero yeah yeah so did they know you very well at Jack In The Box well they didn't really yeah they did it no and I remember one time I got a milkshake and I was so tired it was like four four in the morning and just needed to get some sugar for the rest of night and it was something in it oh no I remember just flicking it out and just pretending it didn't exist I just kept drinking my milkshake oh that's it was it was like that or that kind of like not in the zone to go back into Jacksonville argue about a milkshake but I don't want to not drink the milkshake and part of the reason that food was like so cheap is that they had some people I think died of food poisoning right around that time when they got off into a food poisoning scare yeah so it was just very cheap to eat there and I figured like you know they're probably you know have taken some action because they're after the food poisoning yeah hopefully yeah that sounds very it's like but I still eat a little bit of it it tastes funny and you just don't stop eating if it tastes funny you run out of things to eat because it after like the 17th chicken fajita pita you're like chicken fajita pita can't do it the Teriyaki Bowl remember that's reactable was that one good it's actually it varied but it was it was edible it was so bad which one what the teriyaki bowl teriyaki bowl wasn't bad there was the sort of uh sourdough grilled grilled cheese thing that was wasn't bad yeah I don't see it in mind those were the good old days right I mean it was honestly good days I mean we just we were just hoping that people would let us stay in the country yeah [Music] we weren't really that worried about what we were eating we were we were just doing everything we could to uh to get to to get someone to support the company we didn't really unders I didn't understand the Venture Capital was that much so we were doing a seed round an angel round and doing our best to talk to everyone and anyone we could find uh we had a very good friend with us Greg Curry who now passed away who was older than us by about 10 years I think and yeah it was a wonderful Mentor helped us out and uh put a little money in as well and and then I did a lot of the work to just find just network with people I think our uh with our first salesman who was selling Yellow Pages ads for us I was a real estate agent who knew another person who knew this other person who helped us who helped us you know raise or put together we ended up not doing the round but put together a round of like 200 000 or something yeah and then um we did like part of it or something yeah but I think once we had the Java Java map which was really quite impressive I mean if you've never seen if you're never you've never seen Google Maps or Yahoo Maps before it really is a remarkable thing to see we we started to go to uh we got it we got some audiences with some Venture capitalists and it just went from we were starving we had no car well the car we had it broken the wheel fell off huh the wheel fell the wheel fell off yeah what kind of car was it I remember that it's an old BMW 3 Series yeah across the country yeah the one that my mom had some pictures of so I think this I think there's still a there's a there's a carve in the in the road at Page Mill and El Camino so yeah yeah it's like the point which the wheel falls off it's time to go to the junkyard okay this you and I were in Kinko's till two in the morning no that was that was way too much that was way later because we already had the deal but we were I we were not I don't know if you were but I was not legally in America so I was illegally there I was legally there but but I was mentioning student work oh yeah I just I had a student work yeah you were doing a p you were supposed to be doing a PhD in Stanford and yeah decided not to so Ms it was like I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever you know I don't know I I try to get a Visa but there's just there's just not no Visa you can get to do a startup yeah unfortunately nobody was paying you anything either and so so we ended up getting it we got a deal from uh from from more David out and uh this uh really high well-respected DC firm and we had to break the news to them that that that we take the bus we took the bus to get to to the offices we don't have a car and we don't have an apartment and we're illegal no no no no no you're illegal so I I was legal but my Visa was going to run out in two years okay yeah but I was definitely student visa we needed to get it sorted and so uh they were great I mean they're the the lead investor his wife was from Canada they knew the whole challenge of being an immigrant and we had Canadian passports and so uh they they funded the company and they gave us some money to each buy a car and they gave us a salary so we could rent an apartment and they had I got a Visa uh through through the company but but the day the morning we were supposed to present to the partners I went to Toronto because my mother was freaking out because she needed her computer fixed Anna but really seriously this is brutal so I I flew out there planning to fly back on Sunday and the meeting was on Monday and I get to the airport on Sunday and um the the water control are they they call me out they're like you're you're going down to work you're not going down for for travel I was like no no I'm going out of work I explained uh as you know I didn't I I said I'm not going to work because I think that's what I'm supposed to say but the lawyers told me not to say anything and so they they rejected me from the border oh oh and so I'm supposed to do the presentation with Elon the next morning and so a friend of mine came to pick me up at the airport and drove me across the border and we went to the the Buffalo border and just said we're gonna go see the David Letterman show no that's hilarious and they bought a controller guy was like yeah go ahead oh wow that's amazing I got on the late night flight from Buffalo to San Francisco and uh we made the meeting in the morning so very good yeah I mean technically we're not going out of work because that would have required meant you were being paid something yeah I wasn't actually paid anything yet yeah technically we weren't actually no you're right you're not actually breaking the law you're not breaking the law because we we we're not being paid anything exactly yeah I should have told them that it's border control but anyway it was very frustrating getting paid for something no I've not done that no yeah you're right exactly we were not not being paid exactly um but yeah so so then they approved the deal that Monday and which sort of buildings up to you know and uh it wasn't a business model for you know back in those days well it was it was kind of like a pre like Yelp is like the business model was similar to sort of yeah but it was at a time when most businesses didn't didn't know what the internet was so and most people didn't have an email address or yeah they went online explaining to them what a website was the internet was the kind of this cool thing people were using Netscape browser and uh I think by the end of it we caught for 18 000 businesses to be on on our service pay paying to be like with websites and everything yeah you know a lot of the things that you can do today like automatically build websites we we built a lot of those sort of tools to make it easier to build websites and we had to sell door-to-door uh it was that was the only way did you hire people or is it just you guys no no we had a team by the laptop because we could hire a hire a team but um I remember talking to the Yellow Pages guy once and it was amazing it was the head of the Toronto Star that they owned all the Yellow Pages Yellow Pages will never die Famous Last Words literally so we want to part with you and let's one of your partners to do to put the Yellow Pages online and he picked up the Yellow Pages this book this big fake book that full of ads this multi-billion dollar Revenue stream I mean these guys were so arrogant and so like we are Kings of the world and it will never end he picked he picked up this book and he said do you ever think you're gonna replace this this is really loud I I'm in my head and my head is like dude you're already dead that's hilarious reminds me of the anti-tesla people you know gas cars will never die that's right that's right yeah but I mean like we we saw the growth of the internet we saw the use of the Yellow Pages we saw even on our competitors and stuff and no one was using the paper Yellow Pages if you had the choice yes exactly no one yes that's rich and so so at that point very few people were on the internet so it was really a question of really is the internet going to succeed which we were huge Believers in and these guys were not you know they didn't even clue in yeah it was like one one porn country after after another who said like listen we'll just put your LPS online it's going to cost very little you know you'll still own all the content and everything um and they're like they'll just throw us throw us out of the office yeah you're like no and how dare you even suggest this it was extraordinary and we're like okay I guess we'll just build it and yeah we're yeah but it's been interesting to watch over the years where like in PayPal the company editors were not uh Banks you know even though that should have been the competitive no there were there were banks that tried to compete but it wasn't at eBay mostly that was sort of the band if you had something called bullet point um yeah that which but it wasn't exactly like PayPal yeah but generally eBay had an issue with trying to uh get payment for stuff like yeah like two people would have to mail checks to each other um yeah that's gonna work if you have mail a check and you receive the check and you how do you know the check's real then you've got to you know cash check and take you know two to five days for the for the money to transfer so it could take two weeks before somebody had confirmed payment and then I then they would ship you the item and so but the transaction velocity was very low as a result if you had instant payment you could improve transaction velocity dramatically like factor of you know maybe three to five yeah but I've just sort of seen that the the when you when an industry is disrupted that you worry about the major players I mean we remember when we started Tesla we were aspiring to be the GM of the 21st century four years later GM went bankrupt you're like okay we're good um and uh and and it's you know whoever is going to be the main competitors you know we don't know yet but um uh it may not be the the entrenched players who may maybe not yeah sort of other companies um and so so that happened at zip two where we we tried our best to partner with the industry because that seemed like the best way to make some money and actually have a revenue model and we ended up finding the newspapers to be a better partner because they didn't have the Yellow Pages business and uh they I think they think we're smarter their classifieds business was was getting eaten Away by Craigslist um you know before Craigslist classifies was the bread and butter of of the newspaper and of course anyone who just used Craigslist would never use the newspaper so it was it was those folks seem to have a better uh uh at least some of the players had a more more vision of the future and so our business became putting you know major newspapers New York Times to all all of the you know Philadelphia Inquirer of Chicago Tribune or whatever all the main players all the the LA Times everyone and then we started going internationally doing the same thing so if you went on to the New York Times website and you wanted to search for a restaurant of course have all these reviews or if you wanted to search for a home that you could you could we tied them MLS together with maps and directions so all of these services that we now use and take for granted that use maps directions we we did that all in the 90s to find a business model yeah what might you do PayPal um after zip too why didn't you go like straight into sustainable energy um right so um I'm gonna re recall things that are you know for quite a while so it would have been like 98 when compact offered to acquires of two um and uh which I think it was a good thing to put them to acquire because as I mentioned the the newspapers actually the media companies had too much control over Z2 so they were not we had great technology that was not being deployed effectively um and there would just generally be averse to anything that could remotely be competitive with their newspapers so so we're sort of Trapped in this situation um and uh the building compact came along and and bought the company in late 98 and the deal closed early 99. so so then as a result that um Kim and I had some capital i have 20 million dollars was coming out of it and um the the I think the thing that was frustrating to me was that we built uh incredible technology um and it had not been used it was just sort of like it was very disappointing you know put a lot of work into this technology and just wasn't being used so I was like okay I'm gonna want to do one more thing on the internet just to show that we can make technology that is uh when it's used properly can be extremely effective so thought about what what's digital essentially what's what's it what's what exists in the form of information and is also not high bandwidth um because it in 99 people still mostly had modems so you couldn't like video was not really feasible in 99. so with money is low bandwidth and digital effectively mostly digital so it's like what can we do to make money work better um and Like Money In My Views is essentially an information system for labor allocation um so it has no power in and of itself it's a it's like a database for um the

Channel: Tesla

Views: 8,981

Keywords: openai, openai chatgpt, openai chat, ai, chat gpt, chatgpt, openai chatbot, openai playground, open ai, openai whisper, how to use chatgpt, what is chatgpt, how to use chat gpt, open ai chat gpt, openai chatbot gpt, chatgpt explained, chatgpt tutorial, machine learning, chat gpt ai, openai tutorial, openai gpt3, gpt4, chat gpt4, gpt4 news, gpt4 vs chatgpt, open ai gpt4, elon musk, elon musk live, elon, musk, elon live, musk live, gpt-4, tesla, tesla ceo, tesla live

Id: al8Jc0hIAe4

Length: 83min 56sec (5036 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023