EP #1 How to Save the World w/ Elon Musk

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Visit Phoenix Edu Some people think nature.

Is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever. Yeah, going to Mars reads like that. ADP for Shackleton. Going to the Antarctic, you know, it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable, it's a long journey, you might not come back alive. But it's a glorious adventure and it'll be amazing, an amazing experience and your.

Name will go in history.

Yes, you might not. It's gonna be a coke pool and you probably won't have good food and all these things, you know.

And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the like. This is who I am.

This is what I'm going to do.

This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Everybody, I'd like to share with you a conversation I had with Elon Musk in spring of 21 when we were in Florida near Kennedy Space Center. It was the morning before SpaceX launch and we were launching a hundred million dollar gigaton carbon removal XPRIZE. If you don't know XPRIZE, it's an organization I started 28 years ago where we challenged the world to solve the biggest problems on the planet. There's no question that what's going on in the environment is one of our greatest challenges. I had a conversation with Elon a few months earlier about putting forward a hundred million dollar prize to address carbon removal on the atmosphere. And literally a week later he said, yes, let's do it. So if you don't know xprize, that's what we do. We put up grand challenges around the planet. You can check it out@xprize.org this is a challenge in which we've already gotten 1200 teams from around the world, almost every country coming into this. Student teams, professional teams. We've given away $5 million of the $100 million prize to student teams already. We've given away $15 million to the top 15 teams, $1 million each. And the remaining 80 million is on the table for the team that can actually demonstrate megaton carbon removal that can scale to gigaton carbon removal. Check out this conversation. I hope you like it. Please give it a thumbs up so others can hear about it and check out xprize.org as well. Thanks. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to a special live stream on Earth Day.

Here we are on Earth.

On Earth, in a beautiful nature preserve. Yeah, Couldn't do it better for 21 Earth Day. Here to talk about the launch of the largest prize ever, $100 million X Prize for carbon capture. And here with a very special guest, probably one of the greatest innovators and engineer of our time, the CEO of Tesla, of SpaceX, of a bunch of other companies, and someone I'm proud to call a friend. Elon.

Hey, Peter.

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Yeah, it's. It's the perfect setting for our conversation today.

Yeah. We've known each other for a long time now.

Yeah, 21 years. I think it was like 2000.

Yeah. Whoa. It is. I think it was 2000 in like Brazil.

Brazil.

It was actually a similarly nice sort of setting. Yeah.

It was a Dayo's birthday.

Florianopolis and.

Florianopolis.

Yeah. And you're trying to convince me not to start a rocket company.

I was trying to convince you to fund the original X Prize before I met Anusha.

Yes, but you also said you're like, really advised me not to start art company because I would lose all my money, which I thought you were probably right. So I thought, you know, 10% chance of success. But anyway, seems to have worked out.

I'm sure glad you didn't follow my advice.

Yeah.

Oh, my God. So we're going to talk a little bit about the rules. Try encourage teams around the world to register for this thing. Get as many innovators, students talking about it.

Our goal is like, basically to do something that have it be sort of interesting, fun and ultimately useful and to spur creative ideas for what is actually the smartest way to take the trillions of tons of carbon that we've removed from the ground and will remove from the ground, from deep, deep underground. And we've placed that carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, which obviously changes the chemical constituency of the surface of the Earth. And now I should sort of measure my statements in that I think we, the Earth, I don't think we're currently doomed. To be clear, this is a very important, very importantly, you know, there are people on all parts of the spectrum ranging from nothing to worry about, CO2 just makes things better, to we're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. I am somewhere in the middle. So my concern with the CO2 is not kind of where we are today or even the current rate of carbon generation, but really, if carbon generation keeps accelerating and we keep getting that increase in the keeling curve, you know, the CO2 possibility in the atmosphere. And if we keep going and if we're complacent, then I think we could, there's some risk of sort of nonlinear climate change. So, you know, thus far we've seen the CO2 parts per million be fairly linear on our timescale, although it looks very exponential on geologic timescale. But there are certain potential nonlinear events. Like if we raise the temperature to the point where we melt the Siberian traps or something like that, and methane escapes. Yeah, yeah. There's just a massive amount of sort of frozen dead plant and animal matter in Siberia. There's potentially trapped gases deep in the ocean through ocean warms that could be released. So these are just risks that are not wise to take. And since we know that long term we're going to have to have renewable energy anyway because we'll run out of oil and gas. It's not going to last forever. So we know where this ends up. This has to end up with renewable sustainable energy. It's tautological, really. Just the question of do we try to get there sooner or later and we should just try to get there sooner. It's obvious. How long do you want to run this experiment?

Yeah, it's also true that even if we stopped CO2 production, that's probably still not enough. That we do need mechanisms for extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans that don't exist right now.

You know, as I said, I am. People sometimes think I'm sort of like, I'm kind of in the middle of the spectrum. You know, I think if we stopped CO2 production today, which obviously we could not do without civilization coming to a grinding halt and mass starvation and all sorts of terrible things happening, so we could not stop CO2 generation today. But I think at the, you know, at the sort of 400, possibly even 500 ppm level, I think it's probably okay. But if, you know, as the world industrializes and we're sort of at 8 billion people, get to 9 billion people, have a lot more industrial output per person, you could see the, you know, at what might be okay at sort of 4 or 500 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere might become quite dire at 1000. And the trend is certainly in that direction if we don't do anything about it. So that's why I think it's just probably an unwise experiment to run. Even if you think that the. This is Why I think should be a compelling argument to even those who would assign a low probability to increase CO2 causing problems. Let's say you think it's 99.9% likely that adding all the CO2 to the ocean's atmosphere is going to be fine. So you're saying there's a 0.1% chance of disaster? Well, there's only one right now. We only got one planet, even a 0.1% chance of disaster. Why run that risk? That's crazy. So I think what's likely to play out is that we will continue to add a lot of, a lot more CO2 to the ocean's atmosphere. And also, you know, ocean acidification as you know, is also an issue. You don't want to sort of add carbonic acid to the oceans and change the PH level because it destroys reefs.

And all that, which it's actively doing right now as we're watching.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Now I remember when I first met you, Elon, you had, it was about 2000 and I remember you had two massively transformative missions. It was one making the. Making humanity multi interplanetary and the second was bringing us to a sustainable economy, a sustainable energy economy.

Right, exactly.

And I think you've done pretty damn good. Are you happy with the progress you've made?

Yeah, I think it's hard to complain. The outcome so far has been great, although obviously we've not yet sent anyone to Mars and, and hopefully will in the future. And in fact, just a few days ago or early last, late last week, I guess, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract.

Awesome. 2.8 $2.9 billion for the next lunar lander.

Yeah. So a SpaceX craft will be the next craft to put humans on the moon. I believe the first human will be a woman actually this time. So this is very great.

Yeah.

So, but of course we have to actually do it. And then we've got. Tomorrow we've got our third astronaut launch to your station.

Before we dive into the carbon removal rules and so forth, I mean, it's.

Obviously a bit of a dichotomy because our rockets do produce carbon. You know, like Carly. What a hypocrite.

True.

No, no, he's obviously just in for the money.

But let's talk about the crew tomb.

I feel like I should address this. There's being hypocrite by launching rockets that produce carbon. The problem is right now there's really no way to get around the physics of a rocket. So I think it's important for the Long term preservation and ultimately the expansion and extension of the scope and scale of consciousness and the long term probability of survival of humanity and life as we know it. We must become a multi planet species because there are all these risks that we can't control.

Existential risks, Asteroid strikes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's like super volcanoes.

You know, we could have World War III or something. You know, there's like, I'm optimistic about the future, but you can also say like, okay, well, so how long do you think civilization will last before there's a catastrophic event? If you say infinity, this is not correct.

Yes.

Okay. This is not. History does not suggest that. History just suggests we do dumb things to civilizations all the time. You know, and you know, the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, ancient Romans, where are they now? Let's do the video series. Where are they now? Civilizations? Babylonians, Sumerians. Yeah, you name it, you know, so there's been many civilizations that have risen and fallen. And anyway, we've got to preserve. We're going to become multi planetarian. And right now the only way to do that is with rockets that do burn fuel. But we do have a long term plan for sustainability of even rocket flights by generating propellant using sustainable energy, wind and solar, to generate, starting first with liquid oxygen. And for our starship vehicle, it's almost 80% liquid oxygen and 20% liquid methane. And the oxygen, it's obviously pretty easy to create that. You just use wind and solar electricity and you do air separator because you've got the oxygen already in the air, the plants are making the oxygen. So you can just use electricity, basically renewable electricity, to create 80% of the propellant on the rocket. And then for the remaining 20%, you can use the body, a process where you actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere and you combine that with water to create CH4 and more O2. And that's in fact what we would do on Mars to generate propellant. Sure. So there is a long term plan for sustainable generation of propellant for the rockets. I do want to emphasize that. And if there's some other way to do that now we certainly would. But I'm just trying to sort of address this apparent inconsistency. And you know, if generating carbon is bad, why are you doing that with rockets?

And listen, I think it's a moral imperative for the human race to be able to move off Earth while we have the opportunity. Everything we know is right here.

And just because it's not just one of the other criticisms, sometimes people think, oh Is this some escape hatch for rich people? No, no. You know, they think it's like. So going to Mars reads like that output for Shackleton. Going to the Antarctic, you know, it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable, it's a long journey. You might not come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be amazing, an amazing experience, and your name.

Will go in history.

Yes. You might die. It's going to be uncomfortable, and you probably won't have good food and all these things. So if an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive, but it's a glorious adventure sounds appealing.

Mars is the place. And you still have thousands of volunteers, if not millions of volunteers, who would want to go?

I mean, honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. It's tough sledding over there.

We're an exploring species.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We don't want to make anyone go, so it's volunteers only.

You have a Dragon capsule on the pad. Crew 2 is nominally. Are you still go for launch tomorrow?

Yeah.

Awesome. You want to just spend two minutes talking about the Crew 2 mission?

Yeah, we've got hopefully, a great mission planned for tomorrow. This will be our third flight of people to the space station. We had the test mission with two astronauts, then the first sort of operational mission with four. This is our second operational mission with four. It's an international crew. A great group. I was just looking online. They're sort of picking their. Hopefully not final meal, but they get to pick whatever their favorite food is from their country. So I'm actually heading over there tonight just to wish them well.

I was out at pad 39A to see the stack yesterday. A couple of things. One, pad 39A historic.

Yeah. This is where people went to the moon.

Yeah. Apollo 11. Apollo.

From that pad.

From that pad. The first space shuttle launch back in 81. STS1. And so it's a lot of, like, karmic responsibility to be operating from that.

Yeah, it's like Time Square, the Times Square of launch pads.

It's amazing. Yeah, amazing. And the first stage has a beautiful patina on does.

Yeah, it's a reused stage. So when the stages come back, they kind of get scorched. So the black. Sometimes people think, is that soot or something? No, that's. It got scorched from reentry.

Your team said they used to wipe it off to clean it, and then it's just like, why bother?

It's kind of hard to wipe off. It doesn't wipe off easily. It's kind of like baked on there and it's interesting. You kind of have to repaint it really.

We're having a discussion about is it safer to use a stage that's flown already versus a new stage.

Yeah. So I think what we'd say is like flight proven.

Flight proven, yes.

It's like a Lexus. If this was an airplane, do you want to be on the first flight of the airplane when it comes out of the factory or do you want to be on a later flight? I'd say let the test pilots do their thing before fly a plane. So flying a plane, you want to see that plane is flown a few times before you get in. I think, I think it should be on balance better. And then we'll also be start re flying the spacecraft.

The Dragon?

Yeah, the Dragon spacecraft.

Beautiful.

So we're trying to get. Reusability is obviously very important in many arenas. Reusability is important and reusability in rockets is important.

I remember being in Hawthorne, seeing your Falcon one there and it was just amazing.

It's come so there's some funny pictures of basically the sort of SpaceX as kind of like a kindergartner and me being like whatever, 20 years younger and. Yeah, we're just in this tiny little warehouse in El Segundo.

Yeah, I remember it well. Before we go to jump into the guidelines, one last question. Update on Starship, because that's what I mean. Starship's taking us to the moon, taking us to Mars, and it is audacious. Can you compare it to the Apollo, Compare it to the Apollo vehicle, the Saturn V for comparison for a second, for folks to know, know, get a sense of it.

Sure. Well, I think the thing that's least obvious from when it's on the ground, from the videos and pictures, is the size of it. So it's going to be the largest flying object ever. So it'll be twice the thrust and weight of the Saturn V. Amazing. So that's just for a size and taller, including the launch escape tower. So it's a very tall rocket, 120 meters tall.

And because it's so wide, the proportions obscure that fact. How big it is.

Yeah, you can see in some of the pictures that have been released when it's landing on the moon and the people look like ants. It's a big rocket. This rocket is capable of at least 100 tons and probably closer to 200 tons of useful payload to the surface of the moon. So we designed it to be far in excess of NASA's requirements. And so it's really intended to be something that, you know, that can enable a permanently occupied base on the moon. So, you know, we've got obviously permanently occupied base in Antarctica and it would be great to have one on the moon as well. And you can do, you know, I think a lot more research if you have the scientists actually there. And we could have some very powerful telescopes.

No, the moon. You know, there's some great sayings from Robert Heinlein that said if God had wanted humanity to have space flight, they would. She would have given us a moon.

Exactly.

It's a great staging place.

Exactly. It's sort of, it's just off the coast. Mars is much, much, much, much further. Actually more important than the size of starship is the fact that it is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable. So this is the fundamental holy grail breakthrough needed for access to space. To make humanity a true space faring civilization, we must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. Now we've made some progress in that direction with Falcon 9 where the booster is reusable and the Dragon spacecraft upper portion is reusable, but the second stage is not reusable. And I would say right now, I would not say the Falcon booster spacecraft and fairing they're not rapidly reusable. Like it takes a fair bit of effort. Less effort than the. Much less effort than the space shuttle took.

Yeah, but it was a turnaround every year or so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We had four and it took about a year to turn them around. We're getting it down to a few months basically, and soon, I think probably under a month to turn around a booster. But landing out to sea and then having to bring it back and then sort of taking a month or so to get it ready for launches. I wouldn't call it rapid by aircraft standards, Whereas Starship is intended to be both fully and rapidly reusable. So the booster comes right back to the launch pad, literally is caught by the launch tower. So it lands and is actually caught by launch tower arms. That's aspirationally. I mean that looks like science fiction excitement guaranteed. So the booster gets. It comes back about six or seven minutes later. So it's right there. And then caught by launch tower arms and placed right back onto the launch stand. Amazing. And then the ship is. I actually want the ship also to be caught by the launch tower. Now the ship will take. It takes at least 90 minutes to orbit the Earth and we may take more than one. It may Take three or four orbits to get the ground track realigned with the landing zone. Yeah, the landing zone depending on where you are. But the point is that the ship will come back and land right by the tower and be placed right back on.

And so like a 767, just refuel and go.

It's intended to be such that the booster can be used, I don't know, a dozen times a day. And the ship, the ship could be, you know, basically every couple hours. And that's mostly about reloading propellant and mounting the ship. And then the ship could probably be used, you know, probably every, in theory, every three hours if you can make the ground track match. But certainly every, say six to nine hours, call it twice a day for the ship. And we'll make more ships than there are boosters. And I think once we have the floating space platforms, we can position them such that the ship can come back in a single orbit.

Amazing.

So then it could be like, let's say if we get three ship launches per day, that's 1,000 flights a year each with 100 to 150 tons of.

Now we're talking a real space program. So Elon, this is the largest prize ever. Ever. Largest incentive prize ever. And I would argue for one of the most, largest civilization scale challenges we have.

Sure.

And we can get into the rules in a second so that folks who are looking at creating teams can understand why, why we created those rules. But why did you fund this? Let's start with the why there.

Yeah, I think I wanted to spur ideas and thinking about the long term need to capture carbon. And you know, I think this is one of those things that's going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is. And especially to figure out what the best economics are for CO2 removal and think through all the consequences. You don't want the cure to be worse than the disease. So sometimes people say, well just plant a bunch of trees. I'm like, that's not so easy.

A trillion trees.

Sure, exactly. And then you got like, okay, well you need fertilizer. Are you going to water them? Where's the water going to come from? What habitat are you potentially destroying? Where the trees used to be. It's not just a no brainer, just go plant.

But it's not to say that's not a good viable option.

We should plant some trees. I'm in favor of planting trees. It's just not a question of like, okay, there are vast sections of the Sahara desert or some Large barren areas, very dry areas in the US where you couldn't plant a lot of trees, but you're going to need a lot of water and you're going to have to cultivate them. It's not like they don't just throw some seeds on the ground or drop them from orbit. Yeah. And I mean, so just, I think it'd be good to sort of kind of frame the debate and understand, okay, what things are really going to move the needle? How much are they going to move the needle? If we're talking about getting tens or hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in what form will that carbon be? Will it be stable over time? And like I said, what is it going to cost humanity to do? However it's paid for, what is it going to cost? What's the thing that's going to be most affordable? I think there are a lot of open questions on this.

There are. Let me chunk the rules for those listening. And you and your team, an amazing team. And Marcus Extrevor and Zinnia Tata and their team work really well together. So the first thing is that for a team to win this and we'll talk about the prize amounts and so forth, they've got to actually build something that works and demonstrate something that can extract 1,000 tons per year, a kiloton of carbon per year, as a demo scale model.

Yeah. I think, by the way, we're very much open to adjusting the rules. To be clear to everyone, meaning if things aren't working or for whatever reason, we need to adjust rules, we'll adjust the rules. The fundamental goal is to have spent 100 million and actually ended up being probably like 120 million or whatever, with cost of managing the prize and everything. So it'll be, at the end of the day, probably something like $120 million spent and hopefully that's spent well and usefully and that what comes out of it is something that matters to the future. So that's the goal, to be clear. And so if people have ideas for adjusting the rules.

Yeah, we're going out as guidelines and we're going to have, I think till mid May for get public feedback, tell us if we miss something, we will turn them from guidelines to rules. Once we get really feedback and we've gone out to so many of the amazing climate scientists out there and it's. Yeah, unless the rules need to. Need to be valid for the 4 years of this prize duration.

Yeah. So we're super open to critical feedback. Don't hesitate to yell and Say, this is how it should be different in some way or whatever. The goal is just to, let's have it be a useful exercise and have people have a good time trying to figure out this problem. I think it's a fun problem to try to. To work on. And yeah, we just want it to be useful at the end of the day and have it not be sort of an academic exercise or something that never amounts to anything.

I think one of the things that you've said and I've said is everything works on PowerPoint.

Everything works on PowerPoint. That's exactly. You can have a PowerPoint presentation for a teleportation system to the Andromeda galaxy and even have a simulation of like, look, here we are. Boom. You're in the. According to the slide, you're now teleported to Andromeda. But it doesn't actually work.

So to win this prize, a team actually, during the four years, has to build something that can at minimum pull out 1000 tons of carbon per year so that they can show us that.

Do they have to pull out a thousand tons or just show that the rate it works?

No, they have to pull out like.

A literal thousand tons. We'll weigh it.

We're.

Putting on scale and we're going.

To like, you know, maybe we could calculate it to be a thousand tons, but the rate at which. Yes, they'll have to run it for a year to get a thousand, but.

If they run it for a month, that's okay.

Probably it's okay. All right.

I mean, in a month they have like a hundred tons and it needs to fit on our weighing machine or something. You know, I don't know. We're going to weigh it somehow.

We'll use one of the chips.

We can go down the ship yard on our hand.

And, you know, part of the actual physically doing it is that they can. They have enough data to calculate costs, which are going to be important. But we're not looking for theory, we're looking for practice. And you know how hard it is to make something real.

It's very hard to make something real. In my view. Prototypes are trivial and production is hard. Generally people think it's the prototype that is the hard thing. Prototypes are. Well, I mean, obviously you gotta have that 1% of inspiration, but as the saying goes, it's 1% and it's 99%. Perspiration ideas are plentiful. Actually, getting it done is very hard. You could say, for example, what about the idea of going to the moon is Easy. Going to the moon is hard. It's not the idea, man.

Yeah, there's plenty of ideas out there. It's execution.

This was my idea to go to the moon. I patented it. Okay, good.

See you there. The second thing is, and this is a term that you use first, is that the teams have to be able to calculate the fully considered costs of pulling out the CO2. And what does that mean to you?

Yeah, so I think fully considered cost actually just means that if there are, you want to look at both the benefits and the cost, actually. So if in sequestering carbon or moving it from the atmosphere or oceans has some, perhaps some environmental impact which might be small, but it's not negative, that certainly needs to be taken into account. And then by the same token, if what's done is, in extracting carbon is a useful product from which you can generate revenue, then that should count too. So I don't know, I'm just sort of saying for argument's sake, like, let's say you could create construction material like cement. Cement, yeah, exactly.

Which we just. I'll talk about that later.

Some kind of useful rocks that are useful or sand or, I don't know, something that's useful for construction. Then you could say, ok, well this is what we could sell it for. And, and just fully consider pros and cons and say, okay, this is what if we need to pay to have it done in the future, which we probably will have to do, then what's the lowest net cost?

And to be clear, the working teams, what they do has to be net negative. Right. It's not break even, it's not play out a thousand tons and then emit a thousand tons. And in fact, one of the things we talked about.

Absolutely.

One of the things we talked about, obviously. Yeah, one of the things we talked.

About is it can't be worse than the disease.

Yes. How long do you need to sequester the carbon forest? We had a big debate. You want to share what you came up with there, what the team came up with?

Well, it's the rate of carbon sequestering needs to far exceed the rate at which, say, it is potentially dissolving back into the atmosphere. So, you know, like if. Yeah.

And so one of the rules is that you have to be able to sequester for at least 100 years. Right. So we set a target, doesn't take forever, you know, a year is not long enough. So we said you have to demonstrate that your methodology is going to contain the CO2 in some fashion. For 100 years, at least.

Yeah. Maybe there's a small amount that is lost. Maybe it's not perfect. I think we probably don't want to set it to 100% before 100 years out, but if it's like 90% for 100 years, that's probably okay. It just needs to be something that, if we scaled it up, would it work?

And that's a third party, obviously. That's the third part, which is a common sense test.

Really.

Yes. And the hardest thing is that the winning team has to prove to our judges that their approach can actually scale to a gigaton level. Otherwise it's not going to be useful.

Exactly. It can't be niche, it can't be inherently niche.

And if anybody knows about scaling up, I think you do.

Yeah, scaling is hard. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what the answer is here, really, but I think if a lot of smart people work on this, there could be some really creative solutions.

Something generally useful for the world in that regard.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, just to be clear, like, we're looking for pragmatic solutions. It doesn't need to be perfect, you know, but it's got to be something that just fundamentally, if we scaled it up, would it work? And that's it.

So let's talk about the prizes that are up for grabs. First place is going to be 50 million, which is significant. Our hope is that it's going to attract enough cognitive surplus out there to focus in on this 30 million split between sort of a second, third and fourth place prize. And one of the things that you and your team put forward is maybe it might be split into different categories, different approaches.

Yeah. I mean, we want to reward people who have done great work. Yeah. Fundamentally, I'm open to increasing the price size too, over time. So if it turns out like, hey, somebody really, really kicked ass and somehow there's not a price for them, I'll add some more to the price.

That's extraordinary.

Yeah, absolutely. I want somebody to have spent mass of blood, sweat and tears, have done something useful and I get nothing for it. That would be pretty bad. But I think also, you know, somebody's going to probably get a company out of this, you know, because I think this will be a need long term and, you know, so and so this is kind of like, you can also think of it as like, you know, free venture money.

Yeah. You know, non dilutive venture capital.

Yeah. Free money for a company.

And hopefully we're also creating a massive marketplace and proving to people that there's a there, there here. So 50 million for the first 30 million split among second, third and fourth. In the next year, we're taking $15 million and distributing a million dollars to the top 15 teams that appear to be making the most progress, the most real.

Just giving some people some seed money, basically. Yeah.

And then you've set aside 5 million for student teams.

Yeah.

Which is really important. You want to talk about student teams? I know you're passionate about that.

Yeah, yeah. We've done a lot of student competitions. For example, hyperloop, just trying to spur ideas in advanced transportation. And it's really just basically an electric car in a vacuum tube, to be precise. And we've had several of them. And the last Hyperloop competition, they actually got like, I think, halfway to the speed of sound. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. And the thing was, you had to get to the fastest speed and then stop without crashing. So it's kind of exciting. Like, is this thing going to get. What speeds are going to get up to? Are they going to slam the brakes on in time or is it going to hit the crash barrier at the end? So it was pretty fun. And then we kind of got to. I put that on pause. And now we're doing tunneling competitions.

Nice. Change that. Yeah. That technology has not changed that much in a century.

Honestly, I think we're going to, you know, I mean, for, I don't know, five or seven years. For a long time I was like, people ask me, what opportunities do you see? I said tunneling, and they would think I was joking. But I think this is the way to solve traffic in congested cities. Almost every major city is congested. As autonomy gets better and better and you have robo taxis and everything, the robotaxis will be cheaper than a bus or subway, and people will want it and it'll take you point to point, even when it's raining and snow and it's, you know, so it's going to be better also, I think, for, you know, from a public health standpoint, like, if there's another pandemic and, you know, how do you get around? You know, it's like, you know, it's difficult to go in crowded spaces. So then anyway, so I think tunnels are going to be really important in the future for relieving congestion in cities. So, you know, I hope others start tunneling companies and just improve tunneling technology. You can have effect these walk tunnels just going all the way through 3D multiple levels. We're the first operational one in Vegas that's going to go into operation. I think in a few months.

We could sit here and talk about Macaque monkeys playing Pong as well on Neuralink. That was amazing. That was awesome. I'm not going to go there. I'm going to focus still on our.

He played Mind Pong against the monkey.

He did. Did he win?

No, but it hadn't practiced as much yet. So now it might be able to beat me. Monkeys have very good agility.

They've got to catch the branch they.

Can swing through the trees and we cannot. Not very well, you know? Yeah. So I think a monkey actually could play like a fast twitch video game really well.

That's great.

Maybe better than a human.

You can sponsor a team.

Yeah, exactly.

Esports is just Monkeys Macaques against the best teams.

Yeah. Monkeys actually love playing video games and.

So do my 9 year old.

And drinking smoothies. No, it's just like humans. I mean, basically humans love snacks and video games and so do monkeys.

That's awesome. I just wanted to hit on. There are four categories that teams can put their approaches forward. First is direct air capture. Pull it out of the air. Any comment on that?

Sure. Well, I'll give this. You can certainly pull that out. There's lots of ways to get carbon out of the air. It could adsorb it many different ways.

Yeah. Category two is oceans. Sort of algae, kelp, plankton, a lot of CO2 in the oceans. People don't realize that category three, land trees. I mean, Marc Benioff has been backing a trillion trees project. I mean, where are they going to be planted? We'll find out.

Okay.

By the way, when people say that Earth is being overpopulated, this is not true. It's like, look out the window. And I know you and I have had this conversation that you're more worried about underpopulation of planet Earth.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Earth is going to face a massive population collapse over the next 20, 30 years. Massive. And this is definitely, you know, well, civilization, you know, question of like a civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. This would definitely be dying with a whimper.

Yeah, we need.

The birth rate is very low.

Yeah, it's been dropping. Right. It used to be five, six children per family. Globally, it's like 2.4 below. In the US it's below. Below replacement levels.

I mean, in most of Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, you know, it's. It's well below replacement.

But I would still say when we spoke last about this, are you still a sort of abundance, optimist that the world is getting better on many levels.

Yeah, I think the world is generally getting better. I have some concerns about advanced AI. That's a risk. If I say like existential risks, I'd say super advanced AI is one. And probably the second biggest risk after that is population collapse.

Not asteroid impact.

No, the population collapse. The thing about demographics of birth rates, you know what's going to happen in 20 years because you know the birth rate last year. It takes like 20 years for a person to grow up.

Yeah.

So we know what the adult population is going to be 20 years from now because we know what kids were born last year. I think we have a serious issue with population collapse that's far bigger than people realize. And the social networks and everything. I mean, the social support networks were not really set up for a high ratio of retirees to workers.

So then, well, thank God we got robots coming in.

Yeah, the robots, exactly. We'll need those robots. But you don't want to have the youth effectively enslaved to take care of the elderly, which is what would kind of happen if you have an upside down demographic pyramid.

All right, we're going to go to some questions. We have some over here. The first one is from Chuck Brady in Austin. Chuck is one of our innovation board members, one of the earliest funders that did the background work in the climate. So I found this question super fascinating. So he says if the bogey is 10 gigatons per year and the global economic output is $87 trillion, at least it has been the last year, then at $200 per ton to sequester cost, sequestration is 2 trillion, or about 2% of the global GDP. So it seems like a reasonable drag in overall economy if we could stop reverse climate change. The shortcoming right now is we don't have a scalable way yet to Capture and sequester CO2. That's the background that seems like a reasonable estimate. So here's his first question. Should competing teams prioritize scalability over cost? And what lessons From Tesla and SpaceX have you learned to help teams thinking about the design of their solutions?

Well, I think it's not unless the cost is affordable, it's not scalable. I mean, I thought the prior math was pretty sensible there. We could afford something Perhaps which is 1 or 2% of GDP, but it would be extremely painful if it was 20% of GDP, we'd start having to cut into healthcare and all sorts of social care programs. And if it's 200% of GDP, it's not happening at all.

Chuck has a second question I also thought was really important. He says while we want to the lowest cost that will do a gigaton per year or more, inevitably there are going to be trade offs between cost and scalability.

No, actually I think something's not scalable unless the cost is low or at least if the cost at scale is low. I guess cost is scale. Where you could say I could plant a tree. Yeah, sure, okay, yeah, yeah. But we just need to solve the problem. And so both cost and scalability need to be addressed. It's like, is it going to be remove enough carbon to matter and can we afford it as a civilization? Those are the two things that matter. And then just obviously making sure that in sequestering the carbon we're not at the same time creating some new environmental issue.

I mean, that's an important point, right? That we're not creating a new environmental issue at the same time that we are.

Or maybe it is, but it can only be basically the cure has got to be much better than the disease, obviously. So you take some medication, maybe there's slight side effects, but you generally want the medication to be much better than the disease. So it's just got to make sense. Like we can see a path to this, to working at scale and solving a problem. It has to have some chance of that.

Paresh Ghulani from Los Angeles, one of our Vision Circle members says who do you think should be paying for the cost of carbon capture? Is it government oil industry attacks across everyone? Do you have a sense about that?

Well, generally market systems work very well when prices are accurate. And the problem we have right now is that we're not correctly pricing the cost per ton of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. And there are various attempts to try to get at this with subsidies and whatnot, but really the market system will work well if market systems work well, if there is not a pricing error and we have a pricing error in that we are not paying for this externality. It's in classic economics, it's just not priced externality. We're not paying for our garbage removal. So then garbage piles up. And so the logical thing to do, and I think the vast majority of economists would agree, is to put a tax on Cotman and then you can find ways with tax rebates and whatnot to make sure it's not a regressive tax, that it does not unfairly, you know, negatively, disproportionately negatively affect people on low incomes with tax rebates. And stuff. So I think that's the way, that's the thing that systemically I think is important to address it. If you correctly price something, the market system works. Prices are just information. We have the wrong information.

Julio from Dublin says, do you expect the technologies coming out of this competition to have any use on Mars, for example? And P.S. thank you for what you're doing for humanity.

Yeah, I think so. Interesting thing on Mars is that Mars is a primarily CO2 atmosphere, but also has some nitrogen and carbon and other trace elements. Nitrogen and argon, I should say, in addition to primarily CO2. So in order to produce propellant on Mars, we would take the CO2 from the atmosphere, combine that with water ice. Mars has a lot of ice under the dust.

It's amazing that we didn't that 20 years ago that wasn't known. I mean we're discovering it every place now.

Yeah, yeah. Mars is just basically covered in ice. It's just got dust too. So it's hard to see the ice under the dust. But I believe if, if you warmed Mars up, you'd have an ocean with an average depth, I think of almost a mile or something like that on the northern part of the planet. So something like 40% of the planet would have an ocean potentially up to a mile deep or something like that. Extraordinary. Like a big, it wouldn't be like just a little lake or something like that. So you take the water ice, H2O and you combine that with the CO2 in the atmosphere, use something like this vadier process where you run it over a ruthenium catalyst and you get basically methane. Yeah, you get methane, you get CH4 and O2 oxygen. And that's actually why we designed the starship to use methane oxygen is because we can actually create that and refuel sustainably. Yeah. In fact, literally by pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere, combining it with water, and then using that as propellant. And so actually by its very nature, Mars has to have a sustainable rocket propellant.

Let's go to India. Rohan Kumar from Mumbai says why don't you simply implement the available technologies on a larger scale.

Like which technologies?

Yeah, tree planting.

I, I think there should be more trees.

I think I would say that there currently does not exist technologies that can scale to the gigaton level at a reasonable cost. And that's the underlying purpose of this competition, is to either demonstrate existing technologies can, and teams can use whatever technologies they want or, or to really innovate and come up with new approaches.

The thing is that generally if Trees can grow somewhere. They usually do grow. Unless they're generally.

Yeah, there's no one there pulling them out other than humans. In the Amazon.

Yeah, I mean, the Amazon is quite a big, thick jungle. I've flown over the Amazon many times and that is one hell of a jungle. In fact, you would fly for long periods of time and see nothing. No lights, no fires, no nothing, just darkness. And then eventually fly over Brasilia, the capital, and out of nowhere there's a bunch of lights. But there's just. In order to have a big increase in tree biomass, we would have to irrigate and, and provide manure, basically fertilizer.

We'D have to cultivate, make it hospitable for the trees to grow.

Yes. And then you say, okay, well, what's the energy cost of the fertilizer and getting the fresh water there and just making it habitable for trees? You've got to factor in the energy cost of the fertilizer and the energy cost of the water and all that. So it's like, okay, what's the actual net carbon result? It's not as good as people might think. Again, I'm not saying I'm anti tree, I'm pro tree, but it would just be very difficult to blanket the Sahara with trees.

So this is an important one here as teams are coming together. So Grant in Washington D.C. says, what is Elon's and Peter's process of building a strong team? And ultimately, I think the quality of your team is everything.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. How you get things done, how do you.

I mean, when you start a new company like neuralink or Boring, how do you recruit that first core team?

Neuralink and Boring are very small companies. Like these are tiny compared to SpaceX and Tesla, which is.

Sure.

Well over 90% of what I do is just SpaceX and Tesla. So, you know, Neuralink and Warren Company are each just a few hundred people.

But how do you.

These teams are going to be 80,000 people.

That's incredible, dude.

Yeah. So it's Tesla. SpaceX is like over 8,000 people. So.

But how do you recruit your initial team to work on something? Do you put out word? Do you know somebody? Typically, do you build around somebody else? Do you pull from your existing companies?

Well, it varies. I mean, the first company, way back in the day, zip two, what I did was I just wrote software, so I didn't have any money. So I came out to. With Zip2, I came out to go do grad studies at Stanford. I had $100,000 in student debt and wanted to computer and I was going to actually work on advanced capacitors for used in electric vehicles.

I remember that you're saying that way.

Back in the day. And I'd spent a couple summers working on that in Silicon Valley before going to Stanford. And then that summer I was like, well, the Internet's going to be something that really changes. It's going to be one of the biggest impacts on humanity. It's like humanity communication will go from being like osmosis to humanity having a nervous system where you could access any part of humanity's knowledge from any connection anywhere. You could be in the middle of the Amazon jungle and have access to all of humanity's information more than if somebody was living in the Library of Congress. So I was like, well, I want to be part of creating that. And so I just started writing software. I've been writing software for a long time, but I actually wrote the first maps and directions on the Internet. First white pages, first yellow pages by myself. And then, you know, we hired a few interns. And then my brother joined another friend of mine, Greg Curry, he's passed away. And then we got some venture funding. I thought it was crazy that these guys were going to give us like they gave us like $3 million. And I was like, this is insane. It's just us and some interns and they're giving us $3 million. It was crazy. They must be mad.

So I think what I'm hearing you say is if you, you know, the first, most critical part of the team is you as the founder and the.

Passionate individuals try to do useful things. For SpaceX, it was just literally like, okay, we should become multi planet species. But these are like long answers. But I think in general, if you want to recruit people that are really talented and driven, you have to say, you have to state what's the, the mission, what's the problem we're trying to solve and just be clearly willing to pour a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it and have a convincing argument for why it matters. There's three major things in terms of motivation. It's like, first of all, somebody's got to look forward to coming to work in the morning. Are they enjoying the work itself? Intrinsically, that's very important. And the right work environment can really make a big difference there. I think the ideal is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive fair financial compensation. Like that the financial rewards are good and fair. And then third, for the really for the best people in the world, they want to know are they, is what they're doing going to matter? So if they spend 10 years doing this, will it make a difference to the world or will people notice? Will it matter?

Elise from San Diego says the X Prize just awarded 20 million in prize money related to carbon removal. Can you explain what the difference is between that and the Musk Foundation's XPRIZE? We had a $20 million energy COSEA prize for pulling CO2 out of the smokestack of a natural gas and coal plant and turning it into a product more profitable in the cost of extraction. And we just. The two teams that won that were creating concrete and they're up in scaling so it's a, you know, now it's instead of just out of the plants right now. And thank you to Wyoming for their support there, it's now can we pull it out on a global level?

Okay.

Nandan from India says, can a 17 year old register? Given that I have the resources and ideas, yeah, I think so, sure.

I think there's no age limit.

There's no age limit where in fact student teams are going to be important. Oli from London says technology is a piece of the climate change solution. But how do you change behavior and habits? What do you think about that?

I think changing people's behavior and habits is tough. Basically. If you're trying to convince people to make life more miserable for themselves, this is a hard argument to win. So with Tesla, when we created Tesla, we're like, okay, look, we got to make a car that's exciting and fun and looks good and then people don't have to. If you're trying to convince people that in order to save the environment, you have to wear a hair shirt and make life miserable and your food's going to be terrible, this is an uphill battle. Okay, so at Tesla we're like, we're just going to make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars, faster, lower cost for maintenance, they look beautiful, they're faster, then they have all sorts of cool advanced technology, they're more fun and you don't have to go to gas stations, which are nasty, but you got to solve a long distance problem with superchargers. So I think it is actually going to be way more palatable to people if, if whatever solution is removing carbon does not make their quality of life worse.

One last question here from Godfrey in New York. I know Godfrey, he has got ALS and he is loving his fully self driving Model S. Ok, well it's not fully self driving. Yeah, I know, but it's getting there. It's getting there, it's getting there. And so he's. I mean, for people who are disabled, it's extraordinary technology. It's coming. And he's a brilliant, brilliant human being. He says, hi, Elon, big fan of your work. Massively and eternally grateful to you for being a powerful source of inspiration to me. Can you please share who and what inspires you and drives you to be so insanely productive at a superhuman level?

Well, I don't know. I think I was always kind of like a crazy kid. I suppose I was just very curious about the world and how do we come to be here, what's the meaning of life and all that. And I always had a really intense desire to understand things and learn. Yeah, I mean, I had sort of an existential crisis, I guess, when I was 11 or 12 or something, just trying to figure out what it's all about, and ultimately came to the conclusion that we don't really know the answer. But. But if we increase the scope and scale of civilization, then we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here or even what are the right questions to ask. So therefore, we should strive to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.

Well, on behalf of the human race, on behalf of everybody watching, Elon, thank you for all that you do. I know you work 247 and driven by passion, so thanks. Yeah, just grateful for what you've done. And thank you for supporting and launching this X Prize. It's meaningful beyond belief. And hopefully now it's everybody else's turn to try and dig in and form teams.

I hope you all have a good time and some productive stuff comes out of it. That'd be great.

Yeah, that would be awesome, Elon.

All right.

Thanks, buddy. Pleasure. Thank you.