Elon Musk: Hero of Mars.

with the white paper for uh the
hyperloop so this is elon musk's big idea for a train which is now being promoted on at least three continents they have hyperloop france hyperloop somewhere like dubai i forget the hyperloop brazil hyperloop united states of america so the number the and of course the least impressive all hyperloop las vegas which is already opening and running you know so look i don't think it takes a genius to look at that white paper and say okay first of all if you have a tube with a partial vacuum it was completely surreal the minute i looked at that i thought how can you say it's an absolute vacuum why would anyone in their right mind promise that this would be like a laboratory conditions vacuum but okay it's under a partial vacuum let's just pretend he wasn't promising the impossible well you need the same seals whether it's full or partial well okay but the the amount of energy and time you're gonna need to pump out the air and achieve an absolute vacuum i mean this is huge okay but okay so you got it you got a tube that's under a vacuum the first disadvantage is you can only possibly have one train and two stops because if a door opens anywhere along the line you can't have multiple trains stopping at multiple stops so you're done with something like a subway system that just connects two points this is a huge obvious shortcoming never addressed by anyone you know never recognized me almost but then you've already mentioned this but there were you mentioned the turbine so you have a turbine which is fundamentally you could say churning air it's chewing up and spitting out air you want as much air pressure as possible for it to remind in a sense turbine and zero pressure and then also not maglev this is often not magnetic levitation that it would float on the same principle as a hockey puck on an air hockey table that there would be jets spitting air out into an absolute vacuum so only science i've studied is political science i'm looking at the first time i i had never heard thunderfoot or anyone else criticize elon musk i looked at the white paper out of pure ignorance and curiosity nobody had coached me nobody had wetted my skepticism and i can see this is fundamentally incompetent and impossible i i don't know you tell me what does impossible mean anymore is this i mean do people who study journalism lack some kind of basis in the sciences that i've got what's the explanation for this things right now is that the science editors of all the like space.com and teslarati and all these guys they got to step up their damn game man because they are just reciting garbage time and time again it's all clickbait nonsense and they don't seem to have the scientific literacy that it takes of a and like like you said you don't have a background in science but you looked at that and you knew that it was not right right maybe you didn't understand all the different ways it wasn't right but right off the bat like you said you look at it you go uh you know that's that doesn't sound like it's going to work like how are you going to take a 30 meter wide or 30 meter long cylinder running down a vacuum tube and bank that son of a [ __ ] around a corner i mean it's going to be a really really wide corner but you're going to have to have the thing while traveling faster than a jet while traveling like so what's the angle is the curve going to be yeah that's ridiculous yeah exactly but like it's going to be like a nascar track right it's going to have to be because i mean otherwise your momentum's just going to be all wrong you're going to be throwing people into the wall but for for all of it i mean none of it made any sense and i think one of the biggest things about musk is that okay there's two examples now you he introduces a hyperloop he introduces the white paper and then he says to the world we're going to hold a competition and you're going to this is the unwritten part you're going to work this out for me and i'm just going to keep the tech but i'll give you the prize right that's basically the whole hyperloop competition he's doing the exact same thing right now with the carbon capture because he doesn't know how to do institute resources and fuel development on mars so he's offered this hundred million dollar prize you know which made all the media and oh wow isn't he wonderful and he's doing this for the planet no son of a [ __ ] is trying to get out the cheap way for somebody else to figure out how to make fuel on mars for him because he doesn't know how to do it and starship depends on it hey folks this is fred i was uh hearing a report on the hyperloop i mean what happens when all of a sudden an earthquake hits there's no way out there's no need of hollering and screaming yelling you're in a more or less a coffin already so your fate is sealed so far none of the tubes that they've created have dealt with the expansion issue in any way whatsoever or just simply an earthquake hell a car crash into one of the pillars any slight dent in that wafer-thin tube and you would be looking at a cascade failure this is so so unsafe i mean we as a people have done so many unsafe things and we continue to do it we continue to put people's lives at stake for the sake of the dollar bill i mean the first thing we should assume is that we are very dumb you know things have obviously gotten way more smarter than the past way smarter the most important thing like i said the most important mistake i see smart people making is assuming that they're smart they're not yeah well i think the other question here is the belief in genius now i've known some people who were considered geniuses who were especially brilliant in kind of one field or another oh okay let's name some names phyllis granoff is supposed to be a genius in sanskrit you know i remember somebody said to me of her proudly she's the only scholar who can sit down and read sanskrit as casually as if she were reading the newspaper in english she was considered a great genius let me tell you something you can you can be talented in just one field in just one area like playing the guitar or playing the drums and you can be a complete idiot in every other field phyllis granoff you're an idiot i'm in a position to know but you know to get into the world of business of investment of the stock market and making money there there are a lot of ways to make money and you know very few of them really involve even the kind of narrow focused intelligence that learning sanskrit involves i'm not overrating learning sanskrit by the way you know learning sanskrit is more difficult than learning how to play chess let's put it that way but you know what is it about money [Laughter] you know i i think you should get into this a little bit you for me you opened my eyes to the extent to which his involvement with uh online payment platforms now called paypal wasn't even called paypal then you know this really was a kind of sham not to say the business was a sham but the presentation of it to the press gym but you know so what if he got rich off of paypal like if if even we take that as as true you know i think it's really worrying for our culture that we're ready to raise someone up and treat them as a genius because they happen to invest in a company like paypal at the right time and make a lot of money out of it what a lot of people don't realize is that you know when all somebody has to do for you to consider them to be a genius is for them to have 20 iq points on you right but amora's got 20 iq points on an idiot right it it really breaks down to that that most of the people and people aren't even necessarily voluntarily idiots they're just not schooled properly they don't have the scientific literacy they've got their their own bias confirmations coming in from other idiots that they're that are close to them right so if if musk can talk at a level that's above your head it you know it's no different than an ordinary person and a magician right they're showing you something you can't understand so you think that they got it all under control and really i think that's all that musk does if you listen to the way that he talks he talks about um one of his favorite things is instead of saying many times over he'll say orders of magnitude stuff like that and people go oh wow like that that's how a genius would clock no it's just a catch phrase that he's latched on to that he knows will make you think that way that's all it is he's creating he has he's a force in society that's like like a a a cross pollination of thomas edison and tony stark from the avengers okay you cross-pollinate those two folks you get elon musk when i think we can go to mars i mean i think possibly as soon as five years from now um really yeah so when you were talking to elon musk did you get the sense that you were talking to like a genius what did it feel like like i'm a chimp like you i'm like like you're that person yeah i'm not that's exactly what i was gonna say yeah i am that toxically stupid person talking to this guy really wants to create gigantic power stations in australia to fix their grid and wants to shoot rockets into space and anything he does is completely fascinating to people well he's a legitimate super genius legitimate like when he's not full [ __ ] he's that that is his his thought process is extraordinary but one of the things that was really clear from talking to him was that it's uncomfortable that his whole life it's been this tornado of ideas i watched his head yeah and he he's like you wouldn't want to be me [Music] i'm like what do you mean man you know he's like it's a it never shuts off right you know and like oh [Music] no no i think the playing paper [Music] is there another way we can engineer you know it's it's better if i can swing like this oh good so get it get it near my neck that's even better wait don't go in that way don't go in that way go away from me crazy many people in the audience who are listening to joe rogan i think they can't imagine the difficulties involved with orbital space travel uh sorry maybe i should even say orbital space travel orbit let alone movements between earth and the moon the moon and mars you know talk about orders of magnitude mars being several orders of magnitude more difficult than the near earth orbit and more expensive and so on but everybody listening to the joe rogan podcast has been on a train you know like most of these people have real life experience with subways and trains and getting around las vegas nevada you know what i mean like that's the part i don't get is you're so willing to believe this guy is this brilliant new solution for things that you are familiar with and where you you know you may know as much or more than uh than elon musk one of the things that musk kind of benefits from from this north american audience is that they aren't familiar with high-speed rail europe has it asia has it right uh the the emirates have it but there's no high-speed rail lines in north america they can't even figure that out but musk is saying that you know they're going to go la to new york eventually in in a vacuum tube that's moving at 800 miles an hour it's like okay first off we already know that the air skates are out and maglev is out so far as musk is concerned because he announced shortly after he made all those other announcements that he would probably have to advocate wheels for for keeping them off of the ground right so as soon as you the press still reports the still press still reports maglev and still reports air lev but yeah so i'm just saying the opposite we're saying is still circulating in the press go on exactly but sometimes i almost wonder if musk didn't uh announce hyperloop to keep the engineers from like virgin busy while he was busy at spacex getting past them and getting the contracts for you know lunar landers and that kind of stuff right because musk isn't doing hyperloop anymore right he's doing a boring company but boring company isn't hyperloop right hyperloop if something's ever going to be hyperloop according to the white paper it's going to be in a vacuum tube and it's going to be on ear skates period if it's a maglev whether it's a maglev on rails or maglev on rails in a vacuum it's still maglev it's not a hyperloop yeah right so basically as far as i can tell hyperloop's dead yeah right they're not doing the the competitions anymore but like you said this still being reported in the press and the media that you know elon musk invented the hyperloop and anytime that there's a hyperloop project if it's in dubai or wherever the next contract is you know going to disappear from um they automatically associate musk with that yeah and what the hell has he done like he hasn't done anything with it he doesn't have a hyperloop division oh no and they just opened a new test facility in toulouse france so governments and private investors keep lining up to put money into a hyperloop and you know they're they're going to have their tests in 2025 they're gonna be able to do a one mile test i'm sorry i figured it was one mile or one kilometer in 2025 i mean you know if you are interested in public transportation there are people who build a whole train in five years guys that was announced in 2020 and everyone's reporting this as genius and a scientific breakthrough and everything like yeah so no he's still he's still really the capital right this is the hyperloop one capsule you saw that right but this is the one in france as there is one in the american desert somewhere in in nevada or whatever yeah yeah i think it's the one in france i might be wrong um but it was reportedly made out of vibranium yeah anybody listening google this hyperloop capsule vibranium you'll see this come up it's like an empty coke can that nobody was allowed to take cameras in because of course they don't have a means of propulsion they don't have seats they don't have a layout it's kind of like a starship that way you know where you can see the outside but nothing on the inside right there there is nothing on the inside so yeah no people should do that you know just to kind of get caught up with how out of whack the media is from reality to what they're reporting because there's a huge disconnect there you played fallout 3 always like i really played that game a lot let me explore every corner of that game [Music] i'm looking for a new video game can you give me a recommendation overwatch i play overwatch yeah um overwatch is amazing oh which is amazing yeah [Music] and i was worried about him because he's one of our great geniuses and we have to protect our genius you know we have to protect thomas edison and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb and the the wheel and all of these things and he's one of our very smart people and we want to we want to cherish those people i think he's like remapping civilization and trying to make a better yacht i played obviously skyrim um i did not complete skyrim that was intense it was like it's a big game [Music] i played plot four that was great [Music] you have to give him credit i spoke to him very recently and he's also doing the rockets he likes rockets and uh he does good at rockets too by the way i never saw where the engines come down with no wings no anything and they're landing i said i've never seen that before you know just like shaquille o'neal is eight feet tall and some people are four feet tall you know some people just have a brain i mean there's no there's no level playing field when it comes to anything whether it's athletic performance or mental performance well there's hearthstone i haven't tried that one yet yeah i know people love it [Music] do you play anything besides of which i mean um we try the new dsx i have tried the new dsx it's okay but like the best game i played recently and it's not a super new game is the last of us oh is it from a couple of years ago sure i loved it okay last of us yeah you like that too is it really good yeah i've heard good things about uncharted it was just really the last of us the prior deus ex and the original the original deus ex was the storytelling was amazing uh shocking how well you know how it's come so fast i mean you go back a year and they were talking about the end of the company and now all of a sudden they're talking about these great things he's going to be building a very big plant in the united states he has to because we help him so he has to help us i don't know if anybody's played did you play the original deus ex that was killer he's not just milking this for positive and sympathetic support in the press he's all he's also milking it for millions of dollars in government support government contracts and private sector support private sector investment so that's so morally it's really different yeah i got a great question for for you and your listeners and it's something that we posted on uh twitter there the other day so you've got tesla who was given a billion dollar tax break in nevada for their factory there uh buffalo new york gave another billion dollars well they didn't give them a billion dollars they built a billion dollar factory for tesla giga2 um and that was in return for hiring commitments which musk has never honored and is looking for another deferral so he doesn't have to pay 41 million dollars a year in fines because he's not giving the area the jobs that he wanted so you've got this this company that is reliant on handouts that takes buyers incentives offer you know for every vehicle because the government's paying people to buy evs which is basically the poor taxpayer uh paying the difference for the rich taxpayer to get into a model 3 or ass or x or whatever you've got government handing musk money every which way so far as tesla is concerned but tesla is then allowed to turn around and sell green credits to legacy auto right how the hell does that work yeah this is emissions trading yeah so i just say even back in 1997 when i was a university student in political science i have always regarded emissions training as a scam i'm a pro-environmentalist person i'm a vegan i'm not a climate climate change denier or something but you know no no that that whole business of robbing peter to pay paul or wherever you want to put it um this world of emissions trading is bizarre and yes one of the people who's profited most from it is uh is elon musk the idea of that profit tesla's profit that he reported in q1 didn't come from their selling of vehicles it came from the selling of those credits and their profit made on bitcoin right like there's they're losing money selling cars because they can still turn around and sell these credits and imaginary fiduciary tokens you know for for profit which is i mean i don't know what your feelings about i'll just i'm just going to summarize the audience briefly so this is a bit like the catholic church selling condolences or the catholic church selling moral absolution to people you have one company in one place that is polluting and they say okay we will pollute less and then we will sell the token we will sell the credit we'll sell this imaginary you know permission slip to another company who will then pollute more or they'll continue polluting at the same levels so there definitely were examples in africa i never found an example like this from thailand or laos or cambodia but they may well exist there uh they just haven't been fully documented but there were there were examples in africa where you'd have a factory it could be it could be a noodle factory like it doesn't have to be really that big and heavy a business or industry and sometimes they would just shut down they'd say okay we're going to shut down for six months so we're not using you know we're not burning so much coal or producing so much smoke anymore and so now we have so many tokens to sell to other companies and profit from so it can really be as simple as that but yeah it's it's um it's bad in theory and worse in practice and it really emerged from the strange optimism of a bygone era of uh bill clinton uh political science i'd say yeah sorry go on so far as the tokens go that would be great if the company was actually a private company uh that was that wasn't relying on the taxpayers to you know to subsidize everything that they're doing and it's the same thing at uh at spacex right um you everybody thinks that spacex is a private space company and completely ignores its taxpayers dollars yeah it's about 10 billion dollars that he's gotten from nasa so we're in that neighborhood right um and yet crew dragon was four years late and um i mean what they're doing right now down at boca chica is an absolute disaster ecologically and they're operating outside of what texas even allows them uh with their conversion of state law they actually changed texas state law to allow musk to launch 12 dragons a year from monday to friday seven to seven nothing on weekends but dragons right right uh falcons falcons nines uh maybe falcon heavies this predates starship right so nothing in texas state law allows musk to launch starships for boca chica never mind uh destructively testing them right right so i mean he takes he takes and takes and takes and takes and nobody realizes um how much he's taking or where he's taking it from well i'd mention this because this might be something you you look into or hear about sooner or later but to my knowledge the only government that stood up to musk is china you know everyone else just wants to embrace him and encourage him whether it's the american government of the french government nobody has any hard words for him but well germany okay germany is has got some problems with them there right so that's so so some some department of the german government is saying the numbers don't add up or something yeah okay go on i want to hear about this gigafactory berlin um that area first off they had to to level a growth forest right it had some protective species in it and they had to wait for them to come out of hibernation before they could relocate them that kind of thing but there is a water allowance that the factory was given and apparently that water allowance once the factory is up and running is going to be blown right through like the what was supposed to be the max that the factory is is probably going to be the minimum that the factory is going to use so that's going to result in a water shortage there and then there's different environmental things that have come to light recently where uh inspectors have come across pipes that were underneath the factory for dispensing waste that were not on anybody's diagram nobody knew anything about them um and then what are some of the other things um the union busting activities that musk is famous for apparently he's under investigation right now for paying his workforce less than the mandatory minimum wage uh there's all sorts of different things in germany yeah and uh so there's about half a dozen different investigations going on for gigafactory berlin right now but again here's something else that people don't realize gigafactory berlin is being built on on land that they made tesla buy where i mean the one in china china just owns that that whole factory is owned by china but is being built on all conditional permits right so if at the end of the day the final inspectors come in to give final approval and they don't like what they see tesla has to bulldoze the factory and reconstitute the land to the way it was before and right now they're buggering everything up and the germans take those things very seriously i mean it is not it is not a case where they're going to be able to appeal to german parliament to make an exception their case i would expect a red light agree well you know china um is not a democracy but on a scale of one to ten they're not quite a zero for democracy there may be a one out of ten for there's a little bit of democracy you know and there's a lot of suspicion and hostility toward tesla and china in the millionaire class now this may shock you but the chinese government is actually somewhat influenced by the opinions of multi-millionaires in their country there is you know the sake there's no democracy but you know these are some of the same people that eat lunch together and you know what exactly china's problem with uh musk and tesla is it's somewhat secret but it does seem to be that one of their big concerns is actually the quality of the cars is actually the reliability and so on so that's i mean it's kind of taboo everywhere except consumer reports but i remember thinking oh isn't that interesting and maybe china will be the one country that's really asking tough questions that nobody wants to ask about uh voting elon musk and tesla well if you talk to tesla shareholders again they're under the impression that musk owns that factory and that's why you know they're showing a loss because they're doing all this expansionist activity and i mean that's just nonsense the um the factory itself was built by china the the gear on the inside all the factory equipment um is you know you know well china holds the loans against it right uh musk had to take out loans with the chinese government to outfit those factories right so china's got an image problem with tesla right now as a matter of fact tesla's at this point aren't allowed in some parking garages they aren't allowed on some city highways that are toll highways um and this all comes down from well some of it comes down from that auto show outburst that uh where that lady got up on stage and started screaming about the problems that she was having with her car but i mean it goes a lot deeper than just that one i'll give you one you might not know one you might not know there was a multi-millionaire in china and i think he was the first man in china to receive a tesla but if not he was one of the very first and he very publicly smashed his tesla to bits with a crowbar now to the limit of his strength and that was on video and that was in the news there and yeah it was a interesting moment now political relations between the united states and china were much more positive than they are now since then donald trump came and went and now uh joe biden joe biden is more anti-china than than trump was to everyone's surprise and and really supply chain and economic relation the united states and china may now really break down elon musk man losing his investment in china for reasons unrelated his incompetence but i would say sorry because you know i've lived in china in the past i i read and write chinese and so on but actually that moment of this guy smashing his tesla with the crowbar in china and saying it was it wasn't even that he was complaining so much that it was a worthless piece of junk he was complaining that elon musk was arrogant and that the tesla corp was which i think is a reasonable complaint um but arrogance carries a lot of weight there i would say that was maybe the iconic moment that formed china's idea of tesla um i i mentioned this because that was that went viral in china but i think people outside of china didn't see that disgruntled owner smashes his tesla to pieces with uh crowbar i'm amazed that nobody at our channel has seen that like yeah that would definitely have been brought up at the uh at the kitchen table conversation i'm here to share another question is what happened to that car after he smashed it up though did he then turn around and sell it secondhand that's also i mean after you've gotten the viral video what do you do with the smashed up tesla sitting in your drive are you that rich that you just literally throw it in the garbage i don't know you might have cleaned it up and sold the second hand after i just just putting myself in his position it seems like the people crying debunked are assuming that all of the scientists and engineers at spacex and all these universities haven't taken a grade 11 physics course okay um and i'm not an expert in uh battery pack technology but it seems that a lot of people are speculating that the uh specs for the semi truck even i believe the ceo of daimler said it breaks the laws of physics so i'm wondering is this just a leader not much about physics i know him [Laughter] yeah pretty happy you're engaged in a physics discussion with him i actually studied for this in college so look i want to ask you a bit of a broader question i think you to some extent have kind of one foot or one toe into the the space industry i mean you know we're not going to disclose anything about you but you often kind of speak in the first person plural about people who are involved in the real nuts and bolts of putting things into orbit and coast coping with the enormous cost thereof is that is that fair yeah um you know i think we're living in a very interesting era in terms of the justifications for these these enormous budgets i have to tell you i am not uncomfortable with private companies in general receiving millions of dollars from the government i have my own kind of pragmatic nihilist nuanced view of how how politics works but most things that the public perceives as public sector as being part of the government's domain actually are contracted out to private companies to create and of course this includes component by component the pieces that make up the international space station everything else as coronavirus comes to an end though all of the western democracies are now kind of teetering on the bridge of of bankruptcy of deficit spending at enormous levels and they're it's starting to be an odious question of really how much of taxpayers money is it appropriate to put into the pockets of people like elon musk and to put into the pockets of uh what are some other aerospace corporations here put into the pockets of uh uh like boeing and ula and uh blue origin right uh you know the um you know the so-called you know path breakers people pushing back the horizon of new technology so on and so forth um and they're incredibly lazy stupid fatuous investors get rich off it people like elon musk who are less less famous elon musk i think you know we're probably coming up to an era when there's going to be more skepticism and more hostility towards space travel space programs or or what have you and people are going to have to question uh just a personal anecdote i remember sitting at a at a table with a relative uh who was questioning me about how much money the building the wall cost donald trump's you know wall with mexico and i had the figures fresh in my mind right there and i said okay so what percentage of nasa's annual budget is that you know and when you start looking at the space program compared to anything else you say the government doesn't have money for whether it's building a wall or providing schools or providing pipes that don't have lead in them for drinking water or what have you we have a bit of an embarrassment of riches and we have a question of of poverty and scarcity where do you where do you see that going and i asked this partly because i really think elon musk himself could be a bit of a turning point in this uh here's what the way that we kind of approach this is that anything that is going to be developed or shine light on that embarrasses space exploration is going to have a negative effect overall okay so not only with what's happening at boca chica um is that a bunch of money going to one company where there could be 10 other doles out to smaller companies that might have better ideas they might have better technology that just need that lab to to make that happen i think that that centralization of the way the disbursements go acts negatively however beyond that if starship on one of these upcoming launches gets out of control let's say when they they launched the booster on july 1st as the intended date uh it winds up going into la padre and you know wipes out a small neighborhood that kind of thing as soon as starship kills somebody people are going to get shut right off of that entire uh that entire aspect of space exploration and the way that it's being done it's reckless what they're doing down at book chica right now is reckless they got lucky yesterday they had four other accidents those accidents littered three nature preserves with uh you know razor sharp stainless steel shrapnel you're talking a state park to the west to the south you've got another protected wetland to the east of boca chica you've got a turtle beach that's used by like six different species of endangered turtles they get blown up every time a starship is a fireball right and and people say okay but like around um around cape canaveral there's a nature preserved there too why aren't you bitching about that because these nature preserves were there first he built in the middle of a nature preserve where you know at kennedy they built the the launch platforms and they built a nature preserve around it so you know apples and oranges yeah but there's also the old saying about you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs i mean the american public's attitude towards loss of human lives and loss of billions of dollars i think those are two two very different things we were watching the promo clip i say we in reality i was yelling at my girlfriend about how ridiculous this was for the latest project from the multi-millionaire owner of virgin this is virgin galactic so i'm sorry i forget the guy's name now richard branson or something like that there you go so you know and one of the things that was yelling at my girlfriends was participatory yelling it's not actually an argument or a fight you know you know it's inevitable that one of these is going to blow up and all the passengers are going to die like you know you can really chart out how much time it is so you know you're talking about sinking millions of dollars into adventure tourism and you know admittedly every year people die doing parachuting they die doing mountain climbing there is risk built into tourism of of different kinds but in this case people are investing in this as a business as a for-profit proposition and you tell me what the profitability outlook is or what the value of that stock on the stock market is the first time just one of those uh space exploration vehicles shall we say it's near earth orbit you know but the the first time one of them burns up in orbit and everyone on board dies if we're talking about money i'm being honest with you the american public they have a tremendous tolerance for casualties you can have dead bodies coming back from afghanistan every week and people seem to be cool um but you know if you're actually talking about this on a on a profit making or even break even basis that's very hard for me to see people tolerating um once just one of those flights goes goes badly well you take a look at what happened with the shuttles yeah right there's one of them on the way up one of them on the way down you know but out of 135 missions 133 were were successful so it had a 98.5 success rate something in that neighborhood right but each time something happened it shut the program down for years right right we're talking 30 months 32 months somewhere in that neighborhood right now you've got there's certain things that are hinging on spacex right now right they had the lunar contract that's been shelved because blue origin has put a um put in a complaint instead of dianetics with a government over uh contracts spacex's favor for being in a third rate position but you take a look at um you know the the crew dragon right that program depends on spacex and nasa support to get you know north americans up to the international space station that's going to become more important once the russians and chinese have their own thing because the russians are abandoning the iss right so how often are soyuz going to be going to the iss after the russians are out of the iss that doesn't make a whole lot of sense so our ability to get astronauts to orbit into the iss right now is going to be completely dependent on crew dragon or if starliner can ever get up and running right but if there's a major catastrophe that spacex is involved with then the company will get shut down right because it's going to be a top to bottom forensic exercise into where that the part that failed came from or what part was it because if they're if they're modeling um if they're modeling starship after uh falcon which a lot of people say you know like they're using the same thrusters and that kind of thing different materials different engines different fuel but certain uh certain aspects that are familiar right but they're gonna have to take the the company apart like they did for nasa and when both of those shuttles failed and at that point do we lose our ability to get our own people to orbit and also do we lose our faith in the illusion that this is a for-profit company trading the stock market i'm sorry i know i know it may be less serious but politically that's also interesting like we're all pretending this is a business and to a large extent it's a government department you know well did you see the uh the episode that we put together about solar city yes yeah i've seen it okay okay so uh one of the things that we go into one of the tangents that we go into is how uh spacex got the disbursement to create crew dragon and the first thing they did with that money is they bought 255 million dollars worth of solar city bonds to keep solar city afloat right right so there is a even though that money was dedicated to the space program uh it was it was a show game right because it was between spacex and tesla and solar city and back and forth and back and forth and the only way the money ever moved was in a way that benefited musk right yeah his short-term self-interest was was guiding these things yeah exactly and now in july july 12 2021 he goes to court over that whole thing um for uh for the sale whether or not it was a conflict of interest if anybody wants to look at it it's in the delaware court of johnson and action number one two seven one one dcs and it goes ahead july 12th it was supposed to go ahead last month but um the legal team had to swap if you look at the success of spacex just in bidding for government contracts here basically meaning nasa do you have an explanation for that because you know again to eliminate my parents business when my parents worked in museums you could have a museum with a hundred million dollar budget like the amount of money would be huge but the amount of money my parents would get would be ten thousand bucks or something you know they'd get some little fragment of it but they would be competing if you're bidding for a role in planning or design they'd be competing with the walt disney company there'd be all these corporations saying oh we want to design this museum we want to do this we want you know and it includes decisions like what color you're going to paint the walls and stuff it's really not that glamorous neither is space travel by the way i realized but you know yeah yeah yeah i i don't want to do it myself but like you know when you look at their success in bidding do you feel it's just the lack of alternatives do you think that spacex has been largely unchallenged or do you think the government agencies that are that are evaluating the bids and tender and so on did you think that they are themselves influenced by the media hype that they're believing in elon musk the same way the journalists do yeah i think there's a lot of a lot of reality there that um you know people look at them and they you know they see the reports that he's the founder of tesla and tesla success and he's the founder of paypal of course not none of this is true but people think that he is and they think that he has this track record of establishing and building and selling and you know having successful companies but it's always somebody else he's always riding somebody else's shoulders i mean even at spacex he's not the uh he's not the brains of the operation he never has been the rockets that he designed all blew up but you take a look at equine shotwell and her history and the fact that her husband works for one of the other space manufacturers i think it's jpl i'm not 100 sure without looking at it but i mean he has rocket scientists you don't know who they are because he never mentions them and he takes all the credit for what they're doing but when they move down the road he's got to fill that gap and if he's ever unable to fill that gap then the whole you know the whole shell game can fall apart right um but so far as their success in getting the contracts i think a lot of it comes down to spaghetti theory i think when nasa has the the budget to actually you know throw as much money out there to see what sticks as possible that that's what they tend to do and of course they were able to do that in the last administration because trump wanted the the space force right and now you've got a change in in the guard and they've got they've got other concerns and they're they're cutting back because they want more about environmental and climate change monitoring and that kind of thing so at that point when the when the budget got reduced somehow musk knew to the dollar just ahead of the 11th hour what to bid for the hls system how we got that information is probably going to come up in that government inquiry that blue origin has just initiated that's what is hls i assume this is an orbital service okay so human land getting humans under the moon yes okay good yeah so um they have this they've got the three systems lined up so you've got dianetics you've got blue origin and both of those two have mock-ups of the interiors of their vehicles i mean blue origin six months ago delivered what their lunar lander was going to look like to nasa so that the astronauts who might be going on it could walk through it and sit in it and say okay this is great but this display panel should be moved down here so that i can reach it or this is better viewing or whatever so both the other two have that spacex doesn't spacex is the one who gets the contract when the budget gets reduced to the point where they can only send one so there's there has to be some sort of inside operation there because i mean like i said he knew to the dollar what to bid for that right the absolute last dollar i think the the figure ends in a seven how do you how do you put in a multi-billion dollar contract that ends in a seven unless you know exactly that's supposed to be a seven it's very strange these government bidding processes and every so often there's a scandal about military equipment you know billions of dollars being wasted on some missile design or another and this kind of thing you get five guys in suits and suspenders looking at these tender contracts and making these decisions but the truth is you know i think if we had a referendum on it i think if we had more democracy i think everyone would vote for elon musk to lead the project to land us on the moon i i'm just saying this is really i'm pro-democracy but it's very challenging for me to look at because i think this is you know kind of the most sad and sick and wrong side of democracy this is one of the greatest weaknesses in democracy as a political system and as a kind of cultural habit of mine oh great oh yeah the guy i've seen on tv the guy i've seen on the news he's gonna the guy who made millions of dollars out of paypal he must know a thing or two about lunar landings and that really is what it comes down to a lot of the time right it's just public exposure everybody sees him or they one of the worst things that has happened to the scientific community in the last 20 years is cgi because people think if you can make a cgi about it and cgi makes sense that everything else is going to be great wonderful and you know it's just a matter of time before this you know artificial vision is an actual vision and it's just people need to be able to understand one of the first things that they need to kind of wrap their brains around is just kind of you know spatial awareness right is the vessel that you're looking at physically capable of holding what people are saying is going to go inside of it and in the case of starship as we've shown in several of our different episodes it's simply not capable of holding what musk says it's going to you know the the refueling process that he's outlined where he's just going to slosh fuel between one vessel and another and load up the starship and the way they go under they're going to send the japanese billionaire off to off to the moon on the on the deer moon exercise well he's got 19 months to pull that together not just the ship not just the launching um not just the booster but also the refueling and the re-entry back to earth because a lunar system of starship even the way it's designed if it's designed perfectly the way the musk says it was isn't capable of re-landing back on earth so how are the 12 people coming down nobody thinks about this it's almost like there's nobody at spacex that's working logistics well i i'd put you this way too though in terms of education everyone seems to be willing to accept that elon musk has a ba in physics and that covers it he's mentioned that oh i studied physics at university you've heard him say this now let me just say uh you personally could probably design an exam to ascertain whether or not someone has the minimum requisite knowledge of physics and to some extent engineering to make a decision on this kind of contract if you right no no but but this is this kind of challenge i think i think all democracies have to start to face up to in the united states of america if i want to give advice on buying and selling stocks in the stock market i have to write an exam series 65 series 66 exam by by finra so there is there is an exam and if you've written that exam you get to say yeah i'm qualified to give advice on what you should buy in the stock market and there's another one called the cfa and i say yeah i'm now a qualified analyst i can give you my analysis what's going on in the stock market there is almost no other field in the united states of america that has this yeah you can go to the other end of that though and say you know even beauticians need a license a dog groomer needs a license right but people call him an engineer right and and he's not he's got no engineering qualifications he's got no no higher authority saying that he's an engineer i challenge you in the audience google this do dog groomers need a license where you live i think this changes some jurisdiction but you know everything would change if the people who have to make decisions about sewage treatment and drinkable water so you know there is this big scandal in the state of michigan uh flint michigan about this if the people who made decisions or who voted or who even talked about this on behalf of the government if you had to pass an exam saying yes i am fundamentally competent in understanding how a hospital works which is not the same as being a surgeon like i understand hospital management so and now that i've studied for that and written in my exam here's what i have to say about what's wrong with the hospital system i fundamentally understand physics and engineering as it supplies space travel the problem for my perspective isn't just that elon musk lacks that confidence i think the people who sat in that room and made the decision that he should win the contract i think probably they also lack this maybe some of them but maybe all of them you know you could be looking at people who have a distinguished military career in aerospace and who end up being in nasa or being the representative of uh you know congress to nasa the people who are actually making that decision or various political appointments who may be highly competent at something but they lack they lack the ability to see these problems that are so obvious to you and i um in looking at elon musk grandiose plans for the future did you actually see the news release that was released about um about musk getting that award because it's written in the first person that we found that very very interesting is that everything is i and me and uh so this was this is it an official press release from spacex yeah it's like well no it's from nasa oh from oh really oh okay in the first person okay wow and the person who released it um this lady whose name i can't remember right now um everything's written in the first person about how i determined and this is my recommendation and it's almost like there wasn't a committee right and that this deputy head of human launch services or something like that again i i don't have the that detail in front of me of course i'm going to look it up as soon as we're off here it's almost like she had to get that out of the way before the new administrator taking over from jim bradenstein took over yeah but it's almost like they they were they're you know anxious to get that done before this new person could come in and of course now that blue origin and dianetics has put in their uh their challenges uh it all gets um it's very box anyway it's very often the case i mean you know basically one man designed the healthcare system that we have in canada back in 2008 china with over a billion people completely redesigned their healthcare system good luck finding anything written in english about what happened and whether it was good or bad i mean political decisions with a really sweeping profound long-term consequences maybe on paper they're made by a committee of five people but there was really one person who dominated that community like when you look into these things and you know how many people decided uh the strategy for the americans conquering vietnam or whether or not america should go to war in vietnam uh big decisions that have really long-term consequences one i've been drawing attention to actually was the the 1971 war uh where richard nixon decided to have an alliance with china which continued till 2001 huge long-term consequences five guys in a room and maybe just one of them you know made this decision and on what basis and i've got to say it's something that we so-called democracies in the west we have a lot more in common with communist china than we want to admit to ourselves because so many of these supposedly democratic things especially in your field i'm sorry but any any city in america any city in canada was there anything democratic about the design of your subway system of your train system anything like this suddenly democracy just stops even though that's where things should be the most democratic of all because it's going to affect you know everyone's daily life for the next 50 years who builds the train and how yep and not just the the construction but construction noise construction costs the you know the addition to your tax bill the way it's going to come through your neighborhood the way you're going to access that system is there going to be a stop anywhere near you i mean what what tends to happen is we we elect these people uh to sit in dark rooms and come up with decisions on our behalf we think that because we elected them that they're acting on our behalf or we elected the person who appointed them we didn't even like them we elected someone else who selected them right yeah i think what uh a lot of it comes down to uh in canada and in the us like basically any major democracy anymore is that everything goes along party lines and really i think the only way that you're going to get back to a true democracy is by abolishing parties so that your representatives when they're sitting in ottawa or sitting in washington they're actually acting on your best behalf and making alliances to you know in the best interest of their area and that way they're free to vote yes on this and know on that and actually benefit the people who elected them to the office not only in such a way that they get elected but they can be recalled if they're no longer acting in our best interest and we don't need um one person at the top of it to to kybash or veto anything that they don't agree with what we need is a figurehead that can attend all the soirees the u.n and the you know the dinner parties and whatnot but there's no reason why the people that are in uh in representative rooms whether it's the house of congress or house of commons um you know why they can't elect a representative to act in that regard and again if that person is not doing the job that they're supposed to be doing then they get recalled and they have another election like i honestly think that the polarization uh that's happening in in politics especially left and right right now needs to needs to go away so that people can kind of heal a little bit and come back to the middle because the way that it's going right now is just getting worse and worse and worse and that's eventually there's going to be some sort of implosion there and it's not just in politics it's uh in regards to religions in regards to lifestyle choices in regards to the space industry uh you know where you've got your pro and your anti-musk uh we didn't start off anti-musk but uh the the way that the the channel has evolved over time um the the rabid nature of the people that we call the muskrats and maybe that's the misnomer but it certainly describes them well um you've got this defensive and irrational defense of something that's completely irrational and really the only way that you can try to break through that veneer is to to get is equally um uh like enraged sometimes in in how you're uh presenting your material because it's the only way to get through to some of them well uh theater has always been part of politics going back to athens in rome i'm not going to talk your ear off on the reform of democracy because i'm writing a book about that right now i can plug my book here but yeah i'm in the final stages of publishing my first book for grown-ups that i've ever written i've written some children's story books actually but uh it's called no more manifestos and yeah i am really of the opinion the book contains a very thorough going critique of the american constitution and its consequences and the american constitution has indeed influenced the constitutions of all the democracies of western europe and a lot of it a lot of comparative analysis of places like like china that i've talked about but i mean i think though it is for me in this instance what we're talking about today it's not as easy as saying more democracy would be better because i think you and i both know that the vast majority of of the crowd the vast majority of the voting public they would support them they they probably elect elon musk president united states which is terrifying we'll have a lot of fights between them then that's crazy that's 20 23 is not that far away that'll be there before you know it how many times have you had explosions when you're on a rocket i don't know like uh quite a few six maybe five or six what are those like what is it like when you watch it explode this is a test program we expect it to explode um it's weird if it doesn't explode frankly really yeah um if current trends continue uh if we you know if you plot the points on the curve of progress then then we should be doing regular uh orbital flights with a high probability of uh safe landing in two years and i just say what what qualifications you have so just to allude to my own personal history briefly for many years i've been back and forth to china i've been learning chinese i've also lived in cambodia thailand laos other countries in asia right and i've been learning things and i've been doing humanitarian work i've been doing all kinds of things that lose money and don't earn money but that do actually make me a brighter person or a more useful person whatever you want to say i could have spent those same years doing importing and exporting i'm thinking about it right now because i'm going to run out of money sooner or later i could have spent 10 years going to china and buying the cheapest crap made out of plastic for five dollars bringing it to the united states of america and selling it on amazon for a hun for a hundred dollars a piece instead and that is one of the surest bets in economics i can guarantee you i would have gotten rich doing that if you are a white person who speaks chinese and you can just travel back and forth between china and the united states and put junk made cheaply in china on amazon you will make money and tons of people are doing it and it just really sickens me to think that people would have more respect for my opinion and i have more just because of the number of dollars in my bank account like oh you've demonstrated that you can make a lot of money now we care about what you're gonna say and to me elon musk is like it's this phenomenon in its purest form this is all he wants to do is get money and have people talk about him behind his back because of who he's sleeping with and the car he's driving i mean you know this is a caricature of kind of the worst aspects morally of the 21st century american character and the majority of people love it and the majority of people support it and the majority of people vote with it so for me even though i'm pro-democracy this is yeah in this context i'm a real cynic i'm real skeptical with the marks itself go on yeah he can sleep a little bit easier because musk can never be president of the united states he wasn't born in the u.s so that is off of the table thank god well yes hmm what if musk becomes president of south africa would that be more boy could he turn that around yeah canada is still an option for him though he could first thing we should assume is that we are very dumb you know things have obviously gotten way more smarter than the past way smarter the most important thing like i said the most important mistake i see smart people making is assuming that they're smart they're not yeah don't buy into the hyperloop it is a disaster waiting to happen you may as well strap a bomb to get dressed and pull the pin if you got money to spend spending on something that's actually gonna help somebody to get better in life not to get dead what happens next so let me just ask you i i used to ask a political activist this whole time an interview political actors and say where do you think you're going to be five years from now what are you planning to accomplish in the next five years in the case of elon musk where is this going in the next five years i don't want to narrow your answer here i can think of some worst case scenarios the the timeline that he's set out for himself that if he doesn't make it then you know it's just more broken promises kicked down the road um he needs to get the deer moon ship circling the moon by the end of 2023 so i mean that's he's lined that up for himself um he was supposed to have cargo ships waiting for waiting for explorers on on mars by 2018 he missed 2018 he missed 2020. he's going to miss 22 if he doesn't get refueling in orbit lined up and that's going to be a whole rigamarole as well if he doesn't get that lined up he's going to miss 2024 then it's 24 26 29 31 those are the next windows and every time he misses a window his city of a million by 2050 gets again further and further kicked down the road but if you take a look at some of the episodes that we've done such as you know the the one that deals with okay his idea for getting people to mars is in convoys of a thousand ships to get those thousand ships up into orbit you need to launch between seven and twelve thousand uh tankers uh and supply ships to to facilitate them while they're in orbit and they're all going to go off at the same time like battlestar galactica and you could google that musk battle star galactic it'll tell you this this whole thing about how he's planning on doing it but we worked out the numbers on that and it's like you know you're into the 50 trillion dollars as a grocery bill by the time you get all these ships up into orbit and i mean again it's almost like nobody at spacex is doing logistics nobody understands the weight of water nobody understands the cost of launching groceries nobody seems to understand how much groceries people are going through uh what space is going to take up where right now the way things sit we do not have life support systems capable of pulling off a martian mission because the ones that they have on the iss are the best that there are and they need constant upgrade repair and resupply so if you take all this into consideration um i seriously and our group doesn't think that the starship gets much beyond leo they might maybe pull off deer moon uh how they're getting people back down to the ground is still a bit of a mystery um but at the end of the day people are starting to think that starship will never become more than an leo delivery system and at that point it's redundant because how many uh how many falcon heavies are they selling on an annual basis right you don't have a large a large large lift market to facilitate um you know the need for such a ship and their delivery system i mean the the more that it gets refined the more starships starts to look like shuttle and it the starship needs to look like shuttle if it's going to be that's what's physically possible exactly like if you take a look at the way the uh the payload be of um i know i've i've known this stuff since childhood i mean go straight but i mean i like a lot of people i learned a lot about how space travel works when i was chopping it even i can see what's wrong on the base of what i read when i was 11 years old i can see what's wrong with it but yeah okay exactly so uh you have musk's starship which basically if it's going to act as a payload delivery system is going to open up like the uh like the villains the spaceship was in um in moonraker right where it opens up like jaws and then clamps down instead of it it would actually be releasing it but you take a look at the hinge points that such a system would require and those are impossible everything would come down to one in the smallest hinge you know that you could because of the way that the the skin would come up right so it's much better if you open it up the way that shuttle did where you've got flat surfaces and straight surfaces where you can attach multiple hinges or one very long you know piano type hinge that has fewer points of failure and it closes in on itself if we were going to make a list of reasons why his starship program is impossible it's actually going to pretty pretty long list and broadly speaking he just went back to like the the 1950s he undid all the progress the space program had made you know people switched from using liquid fuel to using solid fuel for a reason we stopped having rockets land on their bum for a reason like a straight up into like a cigar or taking off and landing you know we switched to you know having the space shuttle with this you know array of heat resistant tiles and landing flat more like an airplane for a reason i mean we had booster rockets separate for a reason you just go through step by step all the distinctive aspects of why the space shuttle program worked the way it did and why russian rockets evolved in the way they did over the same period of time and why chinese rockets evolved the way they did and elon musk is starting again in the 1950s and repeating errors that you know there was no reason to be point where the the people were turning from orbit have to splash down in the ocean with parachutes well and look the only thing i'd say is again not to insult the intelligence people in your field but you know five years is a long time and in the last five years like between 2015 and 2020 sorry i realized we're actually doing this interview in 2021 but but nevertheless between 2015 and 2020 i think elon musk could have learned all this stuff he could have learned the stuff i learned when i was an 11 year old boy i think he could have gained an appreciation for the history of the space program and why the space shuttle ended up the way it did i do not mean that he would have had a phd level knowledge of these things but he could in broad brushstrokes understand that and he didn't he played video games you know like even if you look at how how ignorant he's remained since he began spacex you know to me that's more astonishing like if i start a pizza restaurant and the day i started i don't really know anything about the pizza business but five years into it i've learned all these lessons that's he is a dude who started spacex in the last five years he's remained so ignorant that when i look forward to the next five years it's like wow i guess there's going to be more lsd and more getting famous rock stars pregnant and more you know more playing video games and drug use and scandals and getting hauled into court for uh accusing someone of being a pedophile on twitter you know i you know i don't have any specific predictions away but to me you know video games are part of the beating heart of his ignorance they're part of the way that he produces and reproduces his own ignorance over time it's almost with some of the projects that he comes up with like hyperloop like starship like cybertruck it's almost like the the actual geniuses and the board of that particular company are like okay you need to get this guy out of our hair so we can get our work done let him do something stupid okay um that that little napkin drawing that he did with the truck make him work on that and just get him off the factory floor so that we don't have to trip over him anymore and worry about getting fired because we've upset his feelings yeah right and that's how you wind up that's how you wind up with a cyber truck that's how you wind up with a starship that's how you wind up with you know air skates in a vacuum for gracie well and meanwhile i think the only company we can see this with is um his car company tesla but it seems like all the brilliant hard-working honest people they quit or get fired one after another and the people who remain and the people he recruits and the people he grooms for leadership are these kind of unthinking yes men these people who flatter him and who fit into his ideology so i mean culturally that's very different from one milia to the next but i think we saw that with tesla and i i have to assume with hyperloop that's the case because there's this just mind-blowing incompetence at every level of the hyperloop progress part of me of at every level of the hyperloop project there's this mind-blowing incompetence so i think there must be something similar where um you know the ignorance and arrogance of elon musk at the top of spacex somehow shapes forms and reforms the other people in the organization and i again you keep alluding to there being other geniuses in the room but i'm guessing the geniuses quit or get fired the same way that you document the same way that you documented yourself at tesla yeah and you're seeing that at neurolink now as well right like of the original founders less than half of them are there i i don't even want to talk about knowledge that's so depressing oh my god and you know hey i asked you about the next five years it can get worse elon musk wants to make a nuclear reactor that will hover in midair and act like a man-made sun i can see ways that would go wrong in the next fight he could really see that's going that's for sure this could end up being at you know cartoonish levels of of super villainy and we'll look great talking to you this is the first time we talked i made some youtube videos shutting him out and so on and you know i'm a fan of his channel those of you don't already know this is a common sense skeptic there's a link in the description the youtube channel issues clarify it is not just one person he's alluded to it several times there were a group of people who are remaining anonymous and i think it's fair to say you know your channel is not just debunking elon musk i i assume you've alluded to there was a point in the past where you're worried about solar roadways some other things and you could move on to other other issues the idea is that we're supposed to be covering as many different aspects of technology and space travel as possible but it's just musk is a cornucopia he is on all the different uh all the different aspects every every uh arm and leg of technology here right now and that's how he keeps himself in the news but the problem is you know as we we point out over and over again many of them are houses of cards or there's so much information there that people haven't been exposed to that we try to distill down into bite-sized pieces so that you don't need anything more than common sense and skepticism to actually be able to know there is something wrong there well and you know symbols are dangerous things elon musk has become a symbol of progress he is influencing the way people think about science and technology and the future of our society i don't think of this as stand-up comedy i don't think of this as just having a laugh at elon musk for his own sake i actually think ultimately this is a very important political and ultimately ethical and moral [Music] challenge [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes