Joe Rogan - Elon Musk's Fix for L.A. Traffic

Yeah, I think people like overall are pretty nice on the highway even in LA, but sometimes they're not. Do you think the Neuralink will help that? Probably. Everybody will be locked in together, this hive mind. Tunnels will help it. We're going to have traffic. That'll help a lot. How many of those can you put in there? Nice thing about tunnels is you can go 3D. So you can go many levels. Right. Until you hit hell. Yeah. But you can have 100 levels of tunnel. They're bombs. Jesus Christ, I don't want to be on 99. I want to be on negative 99 floors. This is one of the fundamental things people don't appreciate about tunnels is that it's not like roads. The fundamental issue with roads is that you have a 2D transport system and a 3D living and workspace environment. So you've got all these tall buildings or concentrated work environments, and then you want to go into this 2D transport system, which is pretty low density because cars are spaced out pretty far. And so that obviously is not going to work. You're going to have traffic guaranteed. But if you can go 3D on your transport system, then you can solve all traffic. You can either go 3D up with a flying car or go 3D down with tunnels. You can have as many tunnel levels as you want. You can arbitrarily relieve any amount of traffic. You can go further down with tunnels than you can go up with buildings. You're 10,000 feet down if you want. I wouldn't recommend it. What was that movie with what's his face? Bradley Cooper. Christian Bale. Christian Bale. They fought dragons. Him and Matthew McConaughey. They went down deep into the earth. How deep can you go? Batman for dragons? No, it wasn't Batman. It was Christian Bale. Rain of fire. You ever saw that? No. I wouldn't recommend drilling super far down. It gets hot, right? Earth is a giant ball of lava with a thin crust on the top, which we think of as the surface. This thin crust. And it's mostly just a big ball of lava. That's Earth. But 10,000 feet is not a big deal. Have you given any consideration whatsoever to the flat Earth movement? Ha ha. I think that's a troll situation. Oh, it's not. No, it's not. You would like to think that because you're a super genius. But I, as a normal person, I know there's people way dumber than me. And they really, really believe. They watch YouTube videos, which go on uninterrupted and spew out a bunch of fucking fake facts very eloquently and articulately. And they really believe. These people really believe. I think it works for them. Sure. Fine. Weird though, right? In this age where there's ludicrous mode in your car, it goes 1.9 seconds, 0 to 60. 2.2. 2.2? Which one's 1.9? The Roadster? The next generation Roadster. Standard edition. Yeah, I'm on top of this shit. Standard edition. So it's about the performance package. What? Performance package? What the fuck do you need? We're going to put rocket thrusters on it. For real? Yes. What are they going to burn? Nothing. Ultra high pressure compressed air. Whoa. Just air? Cold gas thrusters. Do you have to have air tanks or are they sucking the air out of it? Yeah, just have an electric pump. Whoa. Pump it up to like 10,000 PSI. And how fast are we talking? 0 to 60. How fast do you want to go? I want to go instantaneously. We could make it fly. I want to go back in time. You can make it fly. You make it fly. Sure. Do you anticipate that as being when you were talking about the tunnels and then flying cars, do you really think that's going to be real? Too noisy and there's too much airflow. So the final issue with flying cars, I mean, if you get one of those like toy drones, think of how loud those are and how much air they blow. Now imagine if that's like a thousand times heavier. This is not going to be make your neighbors happy. Your neighbors are not going to be happy if you land a flying car in your backyard. It'll be very helicopter-like. Or on your roof, they're just really going to be like what the hell. That was annoying. You can't even look. If you want a flying car, just put some wheels on a helicopter. Is there a way around that? Like what if they figure out some sort of magnetic technology like all those Bob Lazar type characters were thinking that was a part of the UFO technology they were doing at Area 51. Remember, didn't they have some thoughts about magnetics? Nope. No? Bullshit? Yes. Really? Yeah, there's a fundamental momentum exchange with the air. So you must accelerate. You have a mass and you have gravitational acceleration. Your mass times gravity must equal the mass of airflow times acceleration of that airflow to have a neutral force. So it's impossible to get around. Mg equals ma and then you won't move. But if mg is greater than ma, you will go down. And if ma is greater than mg, you will go up. That's how it works. There's just no way around that. There is definitely no way around it. There's no way to create some sort of a magnetic something or another that allows you to... Technically, yes. You could have a strong enough magnet. But that magnet would be so strong that you would create a lot of trouble. Would you suck cars up into your car? Just pick up axles and shit? You'd have to repel off of either material on the ground or in a really nutty situation off of Earth's gravitational field and somehow make that incredibly light. But that magnet would cause so much destruction, you'd be better off with a helicopter. So if there was some sort of magnet road, like you have two magnets and they repel each other, if you had some sort of a magnet road that was below you and you could travel on that magnet road, that would work. Yes, you could have a magnet road. A magnet road. Is that too ridiculous? No, it would work. It would work. You could do that. It's pretty ridiculous too, right? I would not recommend it. There's a lot of things I don't recommend. I would super not recommend that. Not wise, I think. No? No? No. Definitely not. Definitely not. I would cause a lot of trouble. So you put some time and consideration into this other than, you know, instead of like my foolishly rendered thoughts. So you think that tunnels are the way to do it? Oh, it'll work for sure. That'll work. Yes. And these tunnels that you're building right now, these are basically just like test versions of this ultimate idea that you have? You know, it's just a hole in the ground. Right. We played videos of it where you're going to drop that hole in the ground. There's a sled on it and the sled goes very fast, like 100 miles an hour plus. Yeah, you can go real fast. You can go as fast as you want. And then if you want to go long distances, you can just draw the air out of the tunnel, make sure it's real straight. Draw the air out of the tunnel. Yeah, yeah, so vacuum tunnel. And then depending on how fast you want to go, you can use wheels or you could use air bearings depending upon the ambient pressure in the tunnel or you could maglev it if you want to go super fast. So magnet road? Yes. But underground magnet roads. Underground magnet roads. Otherwise you're going to really create a lot of trouble with because those metal things. So magnet roads, the way to go, just underground. If you want to go really fast underground, you would be maglev in a vacuum tunnel. Mag in a vacuum tunnel. Magnetic levitation in a vacuum tunnel. Rocket launchers. Fun? With rocket launchers. No, I would not recommend putting any exhaust gas in the tunnel. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Because then you're going to have to pump it out. Because then the air will be gone. Right, you'll have to pump it out and you probably have a limited amount of air in the first place. Like how much can you breathe? Do you have to pump oxygen into these cubicles? No, you have to have a pressurized pod. It'd be like a little tiny underground spaceship basically. Like an airplane. Because you have air in an airplane, it's not getting new air in. It is. It is? Yes. They have like a little hole? Yeah, they have a pump. Really? Yeah. So it gets it from the outside? Yes. Wow, I didn't know that. Airplanes have it easier because essentially you can... They're pretty leaky. Jesus. Yeah, but as long as the air pump is... Working at a decent speed, they have backup pumps. Oh. So they have like three pumps or four pumps or something. And then that... Then there's like... It exhausts through the outflow valve and through whatever seals are not sealing quite right. Usually the door doesn't seal quite right on a plane. So there's a bit of leakage around the door. And the pumps exceed the outflow rate. And then that sets the pressure in the cabin. Now have you ever looked at planes and gone... I could fix this. I just don't know at the time. How about a design for a plane? You do? Yes. A better design? I mean, probably. I think it is. Who have you talked to about this? I've talked to friends. Friends? Friends and... I'm your friend. Girlfriends and... You can tell me. What do you got? What do you got? What's going on? Well, I mean, the exciting thing to do would be some sort of electric vertical takeoff and landing supersonic jet of some kind. Vertical takeoff and landing, meaning no need for a runway. Just shoot up straight in the air and then... How would you do that? I mean, they do that on some military aircraft, correct? Yes. The trick is that you have to transition to level flight. And then the thing that you would use for vertical takeoff and landing is not suitable for high speed flight. So you have two different systems? I've thought about this quite a lot. I've thought about this quite a lot. The interesting thing about an electric plane is that you want to go as high as possible. But you need a certain energy density in the battery pack because you have to overcome gravitational potential energy. Once you've overcome gravitational potential energy and you're at a high altitude, the energy you use in cruise is very low. And then you can recapture a large part of the gravitational potential energy on the way down. So you really don't need any kind of reserve fuel, if you will, because you have the energy of height, gravitational potential energy. This is a lot of energy. So once you can get high, the way to think about a plane is it's a force balance. So a plane that is not accelerating is a neutral force balance. The force of gravity, you have the lift force of the wings. Then you've got the force of the thrusting device, the propeller or turbine or whatever it is. Then you've got the resistance force of the air. Now the higher you go, the lower the air resistance is. Air density drops exponentially. But drag increases with the square. An exponential beats a square. The higher you go, the faster you will go for the same amount of energy. And at a certain altitude, you can go supersonic with less energy per mile, quite a lot less energy per mile than an aircraft at 35,000 feet because it's just a force balance. It makes sense though.