TAKES RISKS NOW - Elon Musk [THE BEST]

what is it that you have that so many people who are unbelievably brilliant at engineering or are incredibly good managers or bold businesspeople what have you what is it that you have do you think that enables you to make this stuff happen well I I I first bought it I saw you don't think I can do anything or or I do most things that people think are impossible because I think a lot of people of what people think where it is impossible is actually impossible so but if occasionally it's not and yeah every minute right you know I guess it's I don't think I've said less those performing is helpful to have kind of a physics framework full for looking at things you know fish principles analysis look for negative feedback and and like really believe in what you're doing but but not just from a blind faith standpoint like to have really thought about it and say okay this this is true I'm convinced it's true and I've tried him every angle to figure out if it's untrue and it's sort of negative feedback to figure out maybe if I may be wrong but then after all that it okay it still seems like this this is the right way to go that that I think gives one fundamental conviction and an ability to convey that conviction to others and to convince them to join and that's what a company is it's a group of people who come together to create a product of some kind and so if you can convey that in and answer the concerns that people have convinced them this is something that needs to be done it's important and here is a path to do it even if that path has a lot of danger associated with in risk and and maybe it won't succeed but people can understand okay this is why it's important and even if the odds are that it won't succeed it's worth trying to do it and I think you can create a great company and just being really rigorous in making that assessment because people are they tend to tend to natural human tendency is wishful thinking so a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say well what's the difference between really believing in new ideals and sticking sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit and it's it's that is it that is a really difficult thing to to tell you can you tell the difference between those two things I know so you need to be sort of very rigorous in your self self analysis I think certainly extremely tenacious and and then just work like how I mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 100 hour weeks every week and their matter like that but all those things improve the odds of success okay I mean if other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks then even if you're doing the same thing you know that in in one year you will achieve what they achieve you you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve and then I think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy so the normal way that we conduct our lives is we we we reason by analogy it's we're doing this because it's like something else that was done or it's like what other people are doing me to type ideas yeah it's like yeah a slight iteration yeah on a theme and and and and it's because it's it's it's kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles but but first principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and and say okay what do we sure is true or sure as possible is true and then reason up from there that takes a lot more mental energy you an example that like what's one thing that you've done that on that you feels worked for you sure so somebody could say in fact people do that battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they'll always be because that's the way they've been in the past you're like well no that's that's pretty dumb you know because if if you applied that reasoning to anything new that then you wouldn't be able to ever get to that new thing right so you know it's like you can't say oh you know horses nobody wants a car because horses are great and we're used to them and they can eat grass there's lots of grass all over the place and you know there's not like there's no gasoline that people can buy so people are never going to never get ever gonna get parts right people did say that and in for batteries they would say oh it's gonna cost you know the historically its cost six $600 $600 per kilowatt hour and so it's not gonna be much better than that in the future and you say no okay well what what are the batteries made of so the first principles would be to say okay what are the material constituents to the batteries what is the spot market value of the material constituents so you can say okay it's got cobalt nickel aluminum carbon and some polymers for separation and a steel can't so break that down on a material basis and say okay what if we bought that in london metal exchange what would each of those things cost like oh jeez it's like $80 per kilowatt hour so clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much much cheaper than anyone realizes do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea where do you get the internal strength to do that well first of all I'd say I actually think I feel feel fear quite strongly so it's not as though I just have the absence of fear I've I feel it quite strongly but there were times when something is important enough you believe it enough that you do you do it in spite of fear so speaking of important things like people shouldn't think III I should if you should think well I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it it's normal to be to feel fear like you'd have to definitely something mentally wrong you shouldn't feel fear so you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know I actually wear something that can be helpful as fatalism some degree if you just think if just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear so we're starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose lose everything but that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward so that we still do some good yeah same with Tesla I thought your odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low I would definitely advise people there's not any company to expect a long period of quite high difficulty yeah but let me song is people stay super focused on creating an absolute best product or service that really delights their end customer like if they stay focused on that then it should basically if you get a such that your customers want you to succeed then then you probably will all right you have to focus on the customer delivering for them yeah make sure if customers W you will your odds of success are dramatically higher first of all I'd say starting a business is not for everyone yeah yeah so generally starting a business I'd say number one is have a high pain threshold but that's the friend of mine who's got a good saying which is that Sounion company is like eating glass is staring into the abyss okay that's that's generally what happens because when you first start a company there's lots of optimism and things with things are great and then so happiness at first is high then you encounter all sorts of issues and Happiness will steadily decline and then you'll go through a whole world of hurt and those have to be focused on the short-term and money coming in when creating company because otherwise the company will fall die so that I think that a lot of times people think like creating company is gonna be fun I would say it's not it's really not that fun I mean their periods of fun and their their periods of where it's just awful and particularly if you a CEO of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company there's no point in spending your time on things that are going right so you only spend on things on your time on things that are going wrong and and there are things that are going wrong that other people can't can't take care of so you're like the worst you have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company the most pernicious and painful problem so I wouldn't say it's it's I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold and there's a friend of mine who says like starting companies like staring at the abyss and eating glass and there's some truth to that we're staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail like 90% ugly 99% of Starks fail so I so you that that's the staring into the abyss part you can't so constantly saying okay if I don't get this right the company will die it should be quite stressful quite stressful and and then the eating glass part is you've got you've got to do you've got to do the problems you're gonna start you're gonna work in the problem that the company needs you to work on that promise you want to work on and so that the that's you're not working on problems that you really wish you weren't working on and so that's the eating glass part then that goes on for a long time so how do you keep your focus on the big picture when you're constantly faced with we could be out of business in a month well it's just a very small percentage of mental energies on the on the big picture like you know you know you know where you generally heading for and and the actual path is gonna be some sort of zigzagging thing in that direction and try not to deviate too far from the path that that you want to be on but you're gonna have to do that some degree but I don't want to I don't want to diminish the I mean I think the product the profit motive is it is a is a good one if the rules of an industry are properly set up so there's something fundamentally wrong with profit in fact profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing then you're spending to create it that's a good thing and if you're not if that's not the case then you'll be out of business and rightfully so sure you're not adding enough value [Music] we have the same fun from innovation as from business running a business well I don't know that you'd be just an innovator engineer instead of a business owner or runner I mean I'd love to just do innovation work and just do engineering but you raise a good point because you know a lot of life in general in any job there's like you have to do your chores you know there's no nobody can do that for you well it's yet I think to be successful at almost anything you can't if you have to do the tough stuff and as well as the enjoyable stuff you have to do the boring stuff as well as the non boring stuff and if you don't do your chores then bad things will happen but if they don't do the things that they don't like to do then the company will be in trouble yeah like you have to basically be like it's more fun to cook the meal than to clean the dishes okay but you need to clean the dishes yes your boss exactly but Tesla your goal has been to make a better car and you've done that with an electric vehicle that people covet that has quite a cult following that's upgradable but you also want to achieve and your turn of phrase is very nice or try to achieve this Platonic ideal of a car right to reach your affection so what does the perfect car look like well I'm gonna do I do use that phrase with our assuring sign team that aspirationally we're in pursuit of like ideal of the perfect car and here's what that looks like actually but it's I want to try to make every element of the car as as flawless as possible and they'll always be you know some degree of imperfection but try to minimize that and create a car that is just a line fill in every way and I think if you do that then the rest kind of takes care of itself [Music] whatever you're doing is a great product or service it has to be really great and I go back to what I said earlier where if you're a new company I mean this it's like some new industry or new market that if it's an untapped market or then then you have more ability to give is this the standard is lower for your product service but if you're entering anything where there's an existing market place against Lodge entrenched competitors then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs it can't be a little bit better because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and they say why would you buy it as a consumer you're always gonna bribe the trusted brand unless there's a big difference so a lot of times you know entrepreneur will come up with something which is only slightly better and it's it's not you can't just be slightly better it's got to be a lot better number three I'd says it constantly seek criticism a a wealth a well-thought-out critique of whatever you're doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from everyone you can but particularly your friends usually your friends know what's wrong but they don't want to tell you because they don't want to hurt you yeah so they're you know that's I would encourage my friends so I'm not gonna tell him what I think is wrong with this product yeah it doesn't mean your friends are right but very often they are right and you at least want to listen very carefully to what they say and everyone you're looking for basically you should take the approach that that you're wrong you know that book that that you the entrepreneur are wrong your goal is to be less wrong we've also said in terms of where you want to go that that developing a high-performance sports car is not what this is about absolutely is it's not something else and you want to develop a sedan yeah the whole purpose behind has the reason I put so much of my time and money is helping create the the business is is we want to serve as a catalyst for accelerating the electric car revolution the the price of gas at the pump does not reflect the true cost of gasoline because you have a consumption of a public good it's one of the most it's really a common problem in e-commerce you have the same thing and fishing where because there's no cost to fishing stocks people just over fish and then you have disaster that that ensues and and here we're not paying for the cost of the co2 concentration in the oceans and atmospheres we're not paying for all these the ancillary offense the wars and all the other things at epic at the gas pump so you effectively have a subsidy taking place at the gas pump because of that so the only way to bridge that is with innovation is to try to try to make electric cars better sooner than they would otherwise be successful entrepreneurs probably coming all the size of shapes and flavors how much does any one one particular thing for me you know some of the things I've described already I think are very important I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product it is very important so you know being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing and this context really really liking what you do whatever area that you get into given that you know even if you if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short you know I'd say if and and also if you if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working I mean it'll just it's it's something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work I think and if you asked me yes I was gonna have to PayPal and I thought well you know I was wondering like I'd like to get involved in space but I just didn't think there's a thank you as an individual and but I was curious as to when we when we NASA would be sending a team to Mars because that was always gonna be the thing to do after the moon I figured that there'd be some plan and I just go websites and I could read the you know the schedule then Mars oh yeah it's like okay 2017 good okay but actually there wasn't anything on on the website and or at least I thought like am i can and I'll find it like what's gonna on here and it's a secret I don't know I so but it turned out that that NASA had done a study on what it would cost to send did to do a manned Mars mission and I this was under Bush the first and I suppose he asked for a 90-day study short laughed at taking office and NASA came back with a 500 billion dollar price tag and he said okay maybe not billion of me that's been five hundred billion dollars was serious money you're for the government so I so then that got totally shelf and it was like you were not allowed to talk about any kind of crude mission to Mars at NASA anyway so I thought well if I can do something that would galvanize public interest that and and then that public interest would translate to additional appropriations for NASA increased their budget then then maybe they could do it so the foot so actually what I sort of thinking I would do is send out a small greenhouse the surface of Mars versed's and dehydrated gel and then upon landing hydrate the jelly roll ants and the public has to respond to presidents and superlatives so this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled the first life on Mars I try to try to figure out how to do this with the proceeds that I had from from PayPal and I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft down and the communications and the little greenhouse and everything but the one thing I couldn't compress was the cost launch because there only a few options and the u.s. options were way too expensive and I ended up going to Russia three times to try to buy the biggest ICBM and the Russian nuclear fleet that's where I'd start yeah yeah go back yeah I mean okay but they it was so there were some strange trips that's for sure but you know it's like virtually like you can buy any it's a very capitalist society some ways so I actually didn't go she had a deal to buy two of the ICBMs - the nukes and but I can't think inclusion after that third trip that it wouldn't really matter like I actually came to occlusion that my initial premise was was was wrong because I actually think there's there's torrents about a will in American population particularly to to explore the United States you know maybe more than any other country is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration and it's really fundamental to psyche so if people think there's a way I think it would actually get a lot of support you know but but then it can't be just banging your head against the wall I gotta believe that this can be done without breaking the federal budget so that's when I said okay well is there some way to affect the cost of space transport and and is very and so I got together with a group of people over a series of Saturdays just to just try it out said is there something super expand 'mentally super expensive about rockets or can the cost be substantially improved and act had we had a bunch of those kind of brainstorming sessions and I couldn't see I couldn't see any fundamental obstacle to improving the cost of rockets so and that's when I started SpaceX it's like I'll just build myself yeah and then but I said at that point I would say the probability of success was definitely less than 50% I thought it would most likely not succeed but was worth a try my time is mostly split what's between SpaceX and Tesla and of course I I try to spend it's a part of every week at open AI so I spend most I spend basically half a day at opening I in most weeks and then and then I have some opening I stuff that happens during the week but other than that it's really interesting so Tesla like what is your time look like there yeah so that's a good question I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business see things but actually almost almost all my time like 80% of it is spent on engineering design engineering and design so it's developing the next generation product at that's 80% of it you probably know I remember this a very long time ago many many years you took me on a tour of SpaceX and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it I don't think many people get that about you yeah I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something it's just fine like business is fine but that guy it really it's you know it was like it SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell was chief operating officer she kind of manages legal finance sales and kind of general business activity and then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving that the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the most colonial architecture and that Tesla it's working on the model 3 and yes I'm in the design studio took very up half a day a week dealing with the aesthetics and and look and feel things and then most of our week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as the engineering of I've heard your response to the question but these guys need to hear it why is Mars important why does Mars matter sure well I think the it's really a fundamental citizen we need to make as a civilization you know what kind of future do we want do we want a future where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event however far in the future that might occur or do we want to become a multi-planet species and and then ultimately be out there among the stars being among many planets many star systems and I think the latter is a far more exciting and inspiring future than the former and and Mars is the next natural step in fact it's the only planet we really have a shot at at establishing a self-sustaining city on and and I think once we do establish such a city there will be a strong forcing function for the improvement of spaceflight technology that will then enable us to establish colonies elsewhere in the solar system and ultimately extend beyond the beyond our solar system and and so there's the defensive reason of protecting the future of humanity ensuring that the light of consciousness is not extinguished should some calamity before Earth but also and that that's the defensive reason but personally I find the more the word what it gets me more excited is is the fact that this would be an incredible adventure mmm maybe like the greatest adventure ever mm-hmm and it will be exciting and inspiring and they need to be things that excite and inspire people yeah you have to be you know reasons why you get up in the morning it can't just be solving problems it's got to be yeah something something great is gonna happen in the future yeah we talked about this at length yesterday it's it's not an exit strategy or a back-up plan for humankind Earth fails right it's also to inspire people on earth right and to transcend and just to go beyond our mental limits of what we think we can achieve right I mean I think it helps sort of how incredible the Apollo program was and just I mean if if you ask anyone and to name names of humanity's greatest achievements in the 20th century the Apollo program landing on the moon would wouldn't it in many of my most places we never warned do we be considering one trips one way only trips to Mars what's the best approach to colonize the planet is it but what is your review it's not socially acceptable you think people will sign up to do it I think it's plenty of people are signed up for a warrior to Mars but maybe if I could just have a show of hands who wouldn't see there such an option I see some not Mariel perhaps enough for a couple of missions you know and I think it's sort of like is it a one-way mission and then you die or is it a one-way mission and you get resupplied that's a big difference we're for the second option yeah exactly but I think it's so it is a big moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back like these spaceships are expensive okay if they're hard to bulls and just leave them there so whether or not people want to come back or not is kind of like they can jump on if they want but they need the spaceship back thank you I mean kind of weird like it was like huge collection of spaceships on Mars over time really if it's like we were just in the back and of course we're just in the back

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Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018