The Atlantic Meets the Pacific: Exploring the Mind of an Entrepreneur - Elon Musk & James Fallows

this ucsd-tv program is a presentation of university of california television for educational and non-commercial use only [Music] I'm Mary wall shock I'm associate vice-chancellor at UCSD and it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to this opening evening of the Atlantic meets the Pacific this is really an exciting new program for this region and I'd like to believe for the nation and it is being Co presented this year by UC San Diego and the Atlantic magazine for many years a number of us and many of you are in this room will remember how we brainstormed how we might create a forum that would draw a leadership from across the United States to the sandy San Diego region not only to enrich our conversations and that's going to happen for the next two two days but also to make the wonders of this place more visible to media and corporate and foundation leadership around the country and we'd like to believe that that's another benefit of this event we found a perfect partner in the Atlantic I met Elizabeth kefir who is the vice president for events and she and I really hit it off in a bar in Washington DC and I was told by a mutual friend Vivian Warren who many of you will remember from La Jolla for many many years that Elizabeth was the energy behind the very successful Aspen ideas festival in Washington ideas festival that it was the partnership between the Atlantic and those two organizations that made things work and as you can see tonight that partnership has worked we really want to thank our underwriters I don't know many of you are our guests this evening and friends of friends and we really are able to do this because of the two major program underwrite we have Chevron and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management this program good and we have representatives from both companies here throughout the event and I hope you'll get to know them and tell them how wonderful it was so we have a terrific roster of journalists and national technology leaders there'll be lots of good conversation and we owe a special note of thanks to Pete Ellsworth who is the CEO of the locally based Benbow foundation they're underwriting all of the media coverage so that's that's it keep eating your salads but I just in sum I am a university person but there's nothing more wonderful for a community than good conversation and big ideas that we can take home and utilize in our everyday lives as well as in our business and our professional careers we really believe that the kind of innovation profile that this region has and all of California has merits a more lively conversation with the national media and with national leaders and that's what the Atlantic meets the Pacific is about so I hope you're gonna have a very enriching experience and I welcome you but I also had the pleasure of introducing a new Californian I'm already trying to convert his daughter who's at the University of Florida to come to UCSD Joe Holsinger is the managing director of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and he's gonna add his words of welcome thank you [Applause] thank you Mary actually on behalf of Maryland's wealth management I am delighted to be here in California in spite of this just weather I love the weather and I love the people that I've met here so far and this event that we have here truly I think is going to represent a unique experience over the next two to three days for all of us we're particularly proud to be associated with the Atlantic one of the most highly respected forward-thinking publications in the country and it's our privilege to be the exclusive financial services underwriter for this inaugural event as Mary had mentioned the next few days we are expected to hear in depth discussions and debates from noted experts where we'll examine innovations and growth opportunities along three industries technology energy and healthcare we'll also have a glimpse into the not-too-distant future where we'll discover developments that will change the way we and our children live and work in the years to come we're pleased the Merrill Lynch can serve as an ambassador and a facilitator for such an event innovative forms and as we expand on our commitment to providing thought leadership for our clients and for the world we've launched a website which is focused exclusively on innovation ml comm / innovation so in addition to the content from this event throughout the year will feature new insights perspectives and research will highlight opportunities of innovation that create opportunity within the economy as well as for investors and so I invite you to visit ml comm slash innovation frequently in the months and years to come so on behalf of our firm and of all my colleague that are here I want to thank you for being a part of this exclusive event wish you a wonderful evening and I hope you have a great time this week I am Jay laughs I'm the vice president of the Atlantic and on behalf of my colleagues and our partners at the University of California San Diego welcome to the inaugural the Atlantic meets the Pacific program we're delighted to have you with us here we are privileged tonight to have with us Elon Musk whose bio I think many of you know but we'll elaborate that on that in a moment and to lead the conversation we're equally delighted to have a man whose career his own career really has been as as successful and varied as mr. musk sinned in many many ways my colleague Jim fallows many of you in this room probably know and from that applause I'll take it that you do know that the gym is is one of really the most decorated and respected journalists in America today he's the national correspondent for the Atlantic he has been with us we're grateful to say for for 25 years with the Atlantic reporting on really a variety of subject matter from from world affairs to macro economics politics and and technology and really from all over the world in the East and West at various points along the way for the Atlantic he's been deployed in washington d c-- berkeley austin texas tokyo kuala lumpur shanghai and most recently and famously maybe beijing where up until last year jim or a year and a half ago for four years was reporting back from beijing and really I think his elevated himself into the position of a must-read to really understand China's place in the world today before the Atlantic I'd just to give you a little bit of Jim's background he spent two years as the chief white house correspondents what's CUNY White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter for two years after that as the editor in chief of US News and World Report he squeezed the six-month stint in there on technology as a program designer for Microsoft if you will in between that right exactly so obviously a vast and varied career before joining us he is the current chairman and has been since 1999 of the board for the American New America Foundation Jim has been nominated for five National Magazine Awards which is the Oscars of our industry his won one of those he's won an American Book Award for nonfiction and the list goes on and on and in his copious spare time he's also an instrument-rated pilot so I have a feeling he shares with our conversation partner today a love of things that fly and move fast and and maybe you'll explore that so without any further ado I'll turn it over to Jim thank you Jim the theme we're going to explore the next two plus days involves confluence of various kinds of science of pure science and technology and commerce and innovation and public policy and the human condition and culture and and all the rest and we have a gentleman to lead this off who epitomizes in the spectacular and so far brief career he's had a variety of different interests that he's been able to meld and maybe what maybe we'll hear there's a unified field theory behind it at least well we'll have different ones I'm going to take a minute to read a few of Elon Musk's achievements just as background for the kind of variety and breadth that he brings this conversation he's now the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and also the CEO CTO of Space Exploration Technologies SpaceX which had of course it's it's wonderful launch a little more when was that two years ago when was a year in the Falcon nine with Falcon nine is one think nine we did two launches last year yeah and it was it was in recognition of the Falcon nine that I served as mr. musk Mini biographer a year ago we had our annual brave thinkers issue for the Atlantic so I got to do a brief Q&A with you about all the various things you're also the the non-executive chairman and principal shareholder of Solar City which is now the leading provider of solar power systems in the US and of course among other things your spare time you were the co-founder of PayPal there are I will just give one or two other accolades and then get onto the the convert conversation that in 2009 the National Space Society awarded our guest mr. musk their von Braun trophy given for leadership of the most significant achievement in space and in 2010 he was the youngest recipient of the Otto executive of the Year innovator award for his work at Tesla Motors and so and and we'll have we'll have one more and then we'll get to two actual questions which is there are other publications in the universe apart from the Atlantic Monthly one of them is is time it's a younger publication that we are they're about 80 years old we're 154 and Counting but the the time 100 for 2010 you were a member of that so with that background we have a few minutes to explore a whole variety of topics about the business history so the various enterprises you've been involved in about the frontiers of energy and transportation and the sky and the land about the process of innovation the US environment for for making these discoveries but let me just start most of us are wondering how you could possibly have been involved in so many different fields and be pushing the frontiers of all of them how did you end up being in PayPal and space exploration and solar power and all the right how did you get here sure well some of that was cereal so I did a Internet company that most people haven't heard of coax of - which helped bring the newspapers online use newspapers weren't always online but but my company helped bring that help help with the New York Times and Hearst and that road and a few other things and and then with the capital from that I started a PayPal which was originally called XCOM and and then from the capital of that it allowed me to start SpaceX Tesla and SolarCity so and I didn't I didn't actually I can expect to be running SpaceX and Tesla but I kind of had the Detroit choice to either let Tesla die or or run it personally and so I I don't want to let it die so I stepped in and run personally but I have to say it's quite difficult running two companies at the same time I don't want to make it sound like this is easy really difficult and was it planned all along that you would get into all this whole range of fields it was that opportunistic is it true no it was actually well planned is maybe aspirational so when I when I was in college there were three areas that I thought would would most affect the future of humanity in a positive way and a bit but I thought I was though I thought of these in the abstract not not from the same point I would actually be able to be involved in those three areas but those were the Internet sustainable energy both production and consumption tells us about production sorry solo studies about production tells us about consumption of energy in a sustainable way and then the third is making life multiplanetary and I really didn't think I'd be involved in the third one better but it did seem to me that's one of the really important things that should happen if we're to have an exciting and inspiring future and let me you said something which caught my attention that when you were in college developing these skills you want to do some things that were of benefit to humanity why why did you think that well because not everyone does ya know I guess it was sort of a existential crisis of like what does it all mean and what's the mini you know what's the meaning of life and there's 3 a.m. over a beer or probably goes back to high school I guess I don't to give a lavoris the long answer but I was Modar childhood it wasn't good probably partially brought on by by by reading some of the philosophies like don't ever read Schopenhauer Nietzsche if you're 14 yes it's not good no or Iran either yeah yeah so I was just trying to find figure out what you know what as well mean and actually when I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy I think it's a great work philosophy that sort of highlight at the point that very often the issue is understanding what questions to ask and if you can properly frame the question then the answer is the easy part so I thought things that expand the scope and scale of human consciousness and allow us to better ask questions and you know and and and achieve greater enlightenment those are good things and so that's sort of what what can we do that's gonna most likely lead to that outcome and so obviously we have to sis the Internet is an important element to that because the internet it's like it's like the world acquiring a nervous system all of a sudden you can be anywhere if you have an internet connection you have access to the cumulative knowledge of humanity it's pretty incredible I mean you have more access more information than the Library of Congress through your iPhone I want to be part of you know bosz put a small brick in the construction of that that edifice and it's and that's that's why the internet and then sustainable energy because well tautologically huh if it's not sustainable we're gonna hit a wall and even if one considers the environmental issues to be non-existent in fact you could say for the sake of argument that co2 is beneficial but let's assume it's beneficial I bother I think every bad assumption or respect to Chevron the and and then even if you assume that the United States has every drop of oil in the world well we still need to get off oil eventually because what will happen is that's guess they will drive the price up leading to economic collapse and so my interest in electric vehicles goes back to to college before global warming became a real issue and so and and but I think I think the environmental issues to add additional urgency to the matter it's simply unwise to run an experiment on how much co2 the a the oceans atmosphere can absorb yes yes let me ask one other question about again you and how you got to this point life one reason people read biographies of accomplished people is to get more clues more data points on how it happened what what the the the steps were a long long the road many people kind of college and can't find a job you've been invented several entire new new industries or or companies what do you think may you the way you are and what can be extrapolated Middaugh the people learn from your example to date you know I thought I thought I think I need to sort of put some thought into that and say what what lessons can be drawn because I'm so usually in the thick of things that that it's they don't I don't I'm really put a lot of time into abstracting what what lessons can be most helpful but in the way I tend to view problems this is from it from a physics standpoint and I think I think physics is a good analytical framework and one of the key things in physics is to reason from first principles this is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place which is by analogy reasoning from first principles just means that you figure out what are the fundamentals what are the fundamental truths or or things that are pretty people are pretty sure of fundamental truths and and can you build up to a conclusion from from that or you're on those principles and and then certainly if you come up with some idea and it appears to violate one of those fundamental truths then you're probably wrong or you should get a really big prize or something like that so this may seem like I don't know it may be it may seem sort of obvious when it's explained but it's actually not what people do you reasoning my analogies is helpful because it's a shortcut yeah and and it's and it's mostly correct but but it tends to be most incorrect when you're dealing with new things because it's hard to analogize to something really new let me now shift to the areas where your businesses are now operating you have a solar solar power company obviously you have the electric cars and you have space and so let's talk about each of each of those areas give us if you would what you think the potential of solar power is and your general you are making your point about the importance of addressing a sustainability energy what how you think people should think about energy now about solar and energy and more broadly sure well I I think I think solar solar power will be the single biggest source of electricity at least in the United States by the midpoint of the century and that that may seem like a bold statement given the tiny percentage that it generates right now which is on the order of sort of 1% or less less than 1% really but if you look at the growth rate of solar that that's where it's gonna it's gonna go this compound growth is incredibly powerful and but I think anything we can do to accelerate that that growth is a good thing because it means we will have power as long as the Sun shines and if the Sun doesn't shine we have larger issues so so I think that that's a good way to go and actually the earth is almost entirely solar powered today the the I mean the only reason we're not a frozen ice ball that around 4 Kelvin maybe 3 Kelvin is is because of the Sun and that so all the precipitation the weather system almost everything is so bad that the ecosystem is is solar-powered and you know so it's really just about taking a little bit of that solar power and turning that ain't electricity which people could use and is there a way to explain concisely in terms I might understand the concept that solar cities is applying that will make it successful in a way that previous solar projects have not been yeah so well firstly I should say that most people don't realize how much the cost of solar panels has dropped that they used to be about four dollars a watt five years ago they're now about a buck 20 so that that's a huge drop and and and there's obviously this this sort of threshold where when when solar power is cheaper than conventional electricity that that's a massive inflection point and and electricity costs vary across the country so you'll see it's it starts to be better in some places then if small and replaces then a medium then eventually most most places right which i think is what will occur and I don't think so how will be the everything but it'll just I think will probably be at least a plurality maybe a majority by the mid mid 14th century and most of what solar city specifically is focused on is actually balance of systems hopes to see that Seoul City does not make the panel solo study is it's kind of like say a polo Dell where they they design the system appropriate to a particular house or office and they'll do the installation wiring the inverter permitting and after-sales service which is about seventy percent of the cost and since I've come from DC only today where any discussion of solar involves Solyndra scannable government policy etc etc what what should the government be doing if anything about solar now yeah well I think the Solyndra thing is somewhat overblown it's also becoming political football but not not a very good one I think I think we're holding it should pick up and I'm sort of moderate sort of half half of all they're gonna have Democrat if you will but I'm somewhere in the middle I guess I'm sort of socially liberal and fiscally conservative I think a lot of the country is actually but you know so but but the thing is that if you look at Solyndra at specific case Solyndra private investors lost twice as much as the government and and the the investors the venture capitalists that were involved in Solyndra are some of the smallest venture capitalists out there they're not they're not fools so if some people to say the government was a fool if if you've got some of the best venture capitalists in there and investing in at all is just startups are it's a bit of a numbers game you know typically in in Silicon Valley venture capitalists if they invest in twenty companies one or two will be a big hit maybe three or four will be okay and there and the rest will not make it but that's the way it works it's it's sort of it's it's I don't think it makes sense to vote for the media to be so focused on Solyndra and there will be other failures to vote yes yeah and and and is there anything briefly that the government is doing right now that is either helping or hindering your work at Solar City well probably both I suppose but but I think probably on balance more helpful than been hurtful and certainly you know the case of SpaceX a lot of credit goes right NASA where I mean SpaceX word have been able to get started and and would have gotten to where it is today without the help of NASA right and so this is very much a sort of a partnership on that on that front and then what's with solar Solar City this whole city actually doesn't get it gets gets a little bit on the federal side and a little bit on the in certain states in terms of the subsidies for for solar but those subsidies are actually actually relatively small these days they're not not very big they they used to be big but then they've been declining every year and then the big challenge for Solar City is of course to provide unsubsidized power at better than good grid costs that's that's sort of the Holy Grail there and then of course sorry at Tesla has received a loan from the government as far away I get these Solyndra questions it but actually so City ever saw a Tesla is also raised about twice as much from the private sector is from the government and you know if Tesla's to compete effectively against GM Ford Chrysler and and others and those guys are getting massive amounts of money from the government and and at near zero cost of capital and and and we don't participate in that game it makes a very difficult job even hotter and so it just wouldn't it would be sort of really unwise if we didn't do that and let's talk now about the electric car business itself what should people expect in terms of the technological improvements that that are ahead of how much of a difference this will make in energy consumption an environmental impact in patterns of life how should we think about this well actually our own electric cars I actually think that that electric vehicles will be a majority of all new cars manufactured in about twenty years will be pure electric and twenty years after that I expect the vast majority of caused in the road to pure electric it takes sort of at least sort of 15 years to replace the existing fleet and so that's another prediction like hopefully I live to see the truth or you know falseness event but in terms of how I think it'll fix things I I think I think that the transportation experience will become better and and most people haven't driven an electric car or use one day to day but but it's actually really nice not having to go to a gas station it's how are you say sorry Chevron I I doubted me too they are diversifying - absolutely I know everyone's doing doing a lot of good things so I I don't mean to be negative on that one so I think with the Model S in particular that's coming out in July of next year the that that's where we hope to show that an electric car can actually be superior to a gasoline car in terms of of how much usable space you get in the car so the Model S is about the same external dimensions as say Mercedes e-class or BMW 5-series but it has twice the luggage capacity and it can actually seat up to up to five adults plus to two kids in a rear-facing seat kinda like the old station wagons and it'll have a range of over 300 miles you can charge charge charge in about 45 minutes you can swap the battery pack off - faster than you can pull a gas tank and it'll have the highest safety rating of any car in the world every five star in every category and in fact it'll be the only car that's five star in every credit category by 2012 standard so it'll be the safest car you could buy and his cost would be order of magnitude what well it's one to two million dollars so it's a great deal but for you no no it's it's it's it's it's actually priced at the at the same same prices as other premium sedans it's about fifty fifty thousand dollars starting price and then there's something about a hundred thousand dollars for the high performance version with all the options and and actually when you factor in the that gasoline is much more expensive than electricity per mile about ten times more expensive when you factor in those cost savings it's it's almost like a anywhere from a 10 to 20 thousand dollar discount off the price and so one other question on electric cars is the challenge between now and the future describing mainly an engineering challenge or is there a science challenge and still left it's mostly an engineering challenge there's some there there is a science challenge potentially in the high energy density capacitors and in fact what originally brought me out to California was that's going to do grass ties at Stanford to try to develop a high energy density capacitor that could serve as an electric and an energy storage mechanism electric vehicles I think all right now I wasn't sure that success was one of the possible outcomes but but now I'm I'm increasingly convinced that that it could work and and there's definitely some interesting science there could yeah yeah so I'm gonna ask you a question about space and then a question about American policy before I invite a few questions from from the crowd a question on space for Americans of my vintage which is tragically older than than your vintage space was very romantic in the time when I was a kid and we were having a you know the race to the moon and it's become routine and you don't find children see me excited in space why are you fascinated with space why should people care about it right well I think part of the problem the reason people aren't as excited about space is that we haven't been pushing the frontier as much and so you can only you can only watch the same movie so many times in it before it gets a little boring and you know in the 60s and early 70s we're really pushing the front human spaceflight and and also that those land landing on the moon is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of humanity of arguably of life itself and even though only a handful of people went to the moon vicariously we all went there well at least I wasn't alive at the time sir but retrospectively and you know and it was it was just one of those really inspiring things that I think made everyone glad to be you know human you know it's like the things that we were we don't they're bad things human ideas and they're they're good things and it's one of the good things and I do think it's important that that we have these inspiring things that you make you glad to get up in the morning and and that that and glad to be a member of human race and and we need we need to push that that bed front here so and I think the great goal we should be trying to pursue is trying to make life human make make life multiplanetary so to establish a self-sustaining and growing civilization on another planet Mars being the only realistic possibility and and I think that would just be one of the greatest things humanity could ever try to do it you know life just been on earth for four billion years and it's been confined to earth before for four billion years and and so it I think I think most people want a future where we're headed towards being a spacefaring civilization we're going out there exploring the Stars and and and and we want to be on a path to making true the things that we read in science fiction books and see in the movies and that that's a bet that's an exciting future but a future where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event is less inspiring you should be a journalist how all our stories turn out and how much of this if if the space part of your visions and collective visions goes as well as you expect how much do you expect actually to see yourself setting aside any life extension experiments you may come up with but right what do you think is feasible in the next half-century in the next century well I think I actually think it's I think well I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with SpaceX but but I I think we could potentially send someone to Mars as soon as 10 years and I'd be disappointed if it took us longer than 20 but then then going beyond that what what's important is not to sort of have a flags and footprints mission but to develop the technologies that that could allow people to move to Mars if they wanted to and I think that that threshold number for where people where you would become kind of a self-sustaining reaction is around half a million dollars so it's okay that's the really the key question can you get it down to where the cost of moving to Mars plus enough to get going it is equivalent to middle-class house in California can you can like sell your stuff and move that's how people came here just all right yeah sure my parents came here oh I think that's possible I wasn't sure it was possible I wouldn't affect I'm still not Harmsen sure as possible but I but I now think I think it is possible basically architecture and design in mind that I think could accomplish that yeah in that timeframe I have one more question to ask you and then I'll turn it over for questions from the crowd you've given us now almost half an hour of really inspiring and encouraging things to think about that most of our power will come and these from these solar installations the most of the cars will be running for attempt the mile cost per mile they'll be going to Mars in 10 or 20 years yeah you must have have noted that the prevailing mood in the US right now is not quite that negative lighten up a little I think honestly and so I mean one but but it's my it's my duty of course to press on the scab of optimism or pessimism which is that that that for example about the festering sore pessimism I can say that that many of the fundamentals that have made Americans successful in research over the years seem to be less invested in now than in the future we still have people coming from around the world like you to make this the arena for their their talents which is America's greatest asset in my view but universities are having troubles etc etc do you think on the objective merits how do you think about America's position right now as an arena for all the kind of innovation you're discussing sure well actually you know submission like my grandfather was American and I was named after my great grandfather was from Minnesota that's where my name comes was learned on a roll exotic so I'm really returning to my ancestral homeland I returned back to the US yeah I mean III think that I think there are actually lots of reasons to to be optimistic and and that life is actually pretty good you know but and if I'm if I may criticize the media a little bit here [Music] actually not so much the magazine medium a Q magazine media it's actually pretty pretty good better choice yeah the daily news media tends to focus on the worst thing occurring in the world at any given point it is like if you know you know the world this there's almost 7 billion people or something like that on earth you can imagine that the 7 billion thing is pretty awful okay it's really bad and and if you put if you look at your Google News page or whatever it is you'll see a spotlight on the worst thing on earth it's so it's it should be called what is the worst thing on earth today that's it is terrible no I think it's it's everything daily news meters probably blame but I mean ghosts there's something in the psyche of the human psyche which tends to place a weight on negative stuff more than positive I mean you want to react faster to the lion that's gonna eat you rather than dinners on the table yeah you know being dinner is what its gonna get a worse than having dinner so even though that the news that you're reading is you know probably doesn't affect you directly and it's somewhere else in the world it's it still it still has that sort of negative visceral reaction I know I'm not sure quite sure how that the problem gets solved but III do think the mood or to improve because it's it's not it's out of sync with what the reality life life is really pretty good you you've made a good case for that now we have time for a couple questions I'm going to turn to to Mary for the responsibility to choose questioners yeah yeah you got to choose yes among your friends and colleagues here Elan if I might ask you you know guys are talking pretty lightheartedly about things are actually pretty good but I think it's fair to say everyone in the room is aware that a lot of people many of those billions of people they don't have proper food they don't proper shelter they don't have proper clothing they don't get educated around the world and you know we're talking rather glibly about perhaps making interplanetary journeys to the moon or the Mars I'm just wondering well how about taking some of this you know effort and really trying to devote it to solving these very intractable problems here on earth before we worry about going to the moon or going to Mars well I don't think it's not either/or thing and I should maybe clarify that you know in terms of making life multiplanetary which you can sort of view as as kind of life insurance for life collectively I think you know we should spend a lot save a much less than we'd spend on health care but more than we spend on lipstick you know that's kind of like maybe a good way to bracket it and so maybe and I like lipstick but but but maybe a quarter of a percent of the GDP so it's not you know it's it's I think that's maybe a good number now I mean as far as the the rest of world's concerned I think I mean fact there was a good if I think five fire knew well actually I III read an article recently I remember who wrote it but it was called a history of violence and and that you know we're actually at this incredibly non-violent period in history so if one of the metrics what you'll use is like how much violence is that are in the world we're at this ridiculously low violence period the probability of someone in the world dying for dying from war or social environment is extremely low and the lowest it's ever been in history that's the reason to be positive and if you look at but in most countries in the world that that we used to consider to be I guess poor I mean like say in India or China they've made massive strides and that this so it's a good and a bad thing it's it's good obviously primarily good but it also means that there's a lot of more resources that that get used you know China is now putting more new cars in the road then then the u.s. is first of all it's good thing overall so I wouldn't think of the rest of what is not improving I think I think it actually it is improving one may be unhappy with the rate of improvement but it certainly is it is improving and yeah there's still issues in lots of parts of the world but that but they're going in the right direction they're not getting worse except in a few exceptional cases and and and and where those are exceptional cases they tend to be more driven by corrupt government or civil war that then technology problems so but you know it's sort of unfashionable these days so so we're going to take out some well I guess maybe it's nothing unfashionable to take out the dictators of other countries and so I'm not sure what I could do you know in that in that thing I just like I don't think these are technology problems you know and and to clarify one thing you said that I think should be clarified you're a person with great success in life and you're not saying oh life is good for me you're arguing that life is better for most people then what we usually appreciate a bit better for the vast majority of people in the world I mean it's difficult about a thousand on it you know everywhere all the time but but the vast majority people in the world life life is is good exactly our life is great for me Mary yes yes hi Yvonne so I had the opportunity to your factory which is brand-new and and amazing and I noticed that while your cars are battery driven and that's great it's also that the entire frame of the car is made of aluminium correct right and I was wondering how you made that choice and maybe we should should we build all cars with aluminum aluminum frame yeah I mean I think is the best choice of material because with with a Model S we wanted to achieve extremely high safety rating but not make the car super heavy because then if it's so so the problem with with if you use steel is that it ends up being you either you can either make it heavy and safe or light and unsafe and like either of those alternatives and and so hence the use of aluminum it is it is a little harder to work with aluminum is harder to join and and so forth but it since in the aerospace industry like you know people would would not make a plane out of Steel I mean that that would you know be of it but it's bit silly not a plane it would fly right and and steel would also not be the first choice for for a rocket although I should point out the early appleís tanks were steel balloons but but but for the most part you would normally corrupt out of out of out of steel so I do think moving to aluminum would be generally be a good idea I was actually presenting some work I did it's at a conference at Stanford and NASA actually sold I was doing they asked me to come over to the Ames center they brought me over there and they tasked me on a project to build a genome synthesizer for Mars which is kind of a crazy crazy story so I just moved here to La Jolla and actually started a company called Cambrian genomics okay well actually a couple days ago I met with craig Venter and the entire team there originally they were they contacted me in Korea and it's part of why I dropped out of school to come come here and start this company and work with Craig all right all right so Craig you know he started he made the first synthetic cell right from completely synthetic DNA right so the company I started is called Cambrian was started with George charge at Harvard both of us came up with these light-based devices to get DNA off the next-gen sequencer right so the synthesis that we do is massively parallel the sequencing we do is massively parallel and then we use laser as a serial capture process we can capture about a hundred base pairs every second to second did you steer this towards a question Carson yeah anyway so my thinking was basically that people weren't very interested in going to Mars for the simple reason that it's a bunch of red rocks it doesn't look very interesting and they've seen lots of pictures of it on the telly well it's definitely a fixer-upper of a planet right so if we could if we could go there potentially do something interesting and have people do you know make interesting things on for the planet and tariffs or maybe small parts of it Wiki we could do something maybe a little bit more interesting have you have any plans I know your original plans were to do the greenhouses but maybe we could do without the greenhouses right well I think I think long-term it's possible to terraform Mars and make it much like Earth but but that's sort of a long-term project that that may take a few centuries but in the meantime we need to to have established cities on Mars and I think that would require sort of domes and and and and that kind of thing but that's the only way to go I think and then and then over time you you know we can terraform it and and then I think they could they could be a role for specially designed microbes in that scenario it it's tough right now for Mars because it's it's quite cold and you know well it's sort of it's not super calming that there are times in Mars where it gets above freezing but but you know you don't have the same UV protection that you have on earth or the same cosmic grade protection so you kind of need to fix a few things about the planet I think before it's really gonna be feasible to have microbes that that could let you know live outdoors and laws so the kindly Mary has said that we could have a few more questions from Murphy yes so if you are willing sure yeah absolutely and Amory Lovins right up here in the front I'm just curious if either of them wants to enter into this conversation I want to pay tribute to something that hasslin a Tesla that I think has some important implications your chief engineer JB Straubel is an old dear friend of mine yeah and the original roadster had a problem that the gearbox blew up when it tried to meet the acceleration and speed specs simultaneously so JB had the neat idea of getting rid of the gearbox getting more power out of the motor and his colleagues said well then the motor will overheat we'll have to ban date on this baroque cooling system so he said no we'll figure out what's getting hot and we'll give it a bigger cross-section or a higher conductivity it will tweak the software and power electronics to match and correct me on this but I think the result was something like no gearbox ten miles longer range 14 pounds lighter weight less noise less maintenance much lower manufacturing cost everything got better so the moral of that story was that there's a lot more flexibility in the software and power electronics design space than in the Baroque Victorian mechanical arts and that the ability to exploit that flexibility probably goes more to the small agile company than the big rich company now you may like to know that when I told this story to the chief engineer of one of the big automakers who had been saying electric traction will never make it in the market internal combustion engines will rule for another half century within a few weeks he gave an interview in the trade press saying he changed his mind and now he thought the future of traction was electric ok great and I think this is a very interesting example of the kind of mind bending that that goes on in the kinds of small entrepreneurial outfits that that you have started and you know the the search for intelligent life on Earth continues but some really promising specimens are turning up just when and where we need them thank you so I think we have a microphone way in the back so you had a remarkable entrepreneurial journey and my question is just where do you draw the bounds on your entrepreneurial vision do you for instance see yourself as if you get someone to Mars are you going to be its first real estate developer for instance SpaceX is gonna be focused on trying to be on the problem of being able to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars at an affordable you know at Alette look at low cost very reliably kind of like the you know the Union Pacific sort of you know but but then I think that will enable a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs on Mars but we're so you know if we can enable also opportunities there and I count that very successful so we'll just do the things that other people don't don't want to do but but I think you know step one is getting there and if you can't get there then it doesn't matter and I mean if if people couldn't get across the Atlantic there would be no United States so before we thank Ella musk which we all will do enthusiastically we'll have a minute of stage we want to thank Meryl Lynch we want to thank Chevron also for its patience and big heartedness and in this session and in particular we want to thank we want to thank UCSD we want to thank the Atlantic's event staff so now please join me and thanking you're not [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 46,525

Rating: 4.9414635 out of 5

Keywords: Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Musk, Fallows

Id: aRqfYBqPEQs

Length: 52min 16sec (3136 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/peterabbit456]

I wish I'd started the video at 31 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRqfYBqPEQs#t=31m5s

Edit: "...Mars is the only possibility..." I disagree. We don't know enough about Ceres to rule it out, as a better colonization possibility than Mars. Titan is smoggy, but in many ways, like a dense atmosphere, it may be a more attractive place for settlement than Mars. Last, the Moon has severe problems in the form of lack of several light elements, but it is a short trip, and may be a better place to settle than the Mars advocates generally acknowledge.