What Lex Fridman Learned From Meeting Elon Musk | Joe Rogan

Also on the podcast, just like you got a chance to talk to Elon Musk, meet him, talk to him in person and realize that there's, you know, there's people in this world that can make the impossible happen. You interviewed him as well. Yeah, twice. Yeah. Tell me what was that experience like for you? So you know, it was, it's quite incredible in the sense that he is a legit engineer and designer, which is like a pleasure for me. I've talked to a few CEOs, talked to Eric Schmidt, just CEOs, and they're a little bit more business oriented. Elon is really, really focused on the fundamental, like the first principles to like the physics level of the problems that are being solved, whether that's SpaceX with the fundamentals of rocket reusable rockets and, and, you know, going into deep space and colonizing Mars, whether that's a neural link, sort of the getting to the core of the fundamentals of what it's like to have a computer communicate with the human brain. And with Tesla on the battery side, sort of saying, he, he threw away a lot of the conventional thinking about what's required to build, first of all, an appealing car, electric car, but also one that's has a long range. That's something I don't know as much about. But on the AI side, just, I mean, he boldly said from scratch, we can build a system ourselves in a matter of months, now a couple of years, that's able to drive autonomously. Most people would laugh at that idea. Most roboticists that know from the DARPA challenges, most of them know how hard this problem is. He said, no, no, no, we're going to, we're not only going to throw away LiDAR, which is this laser based sensor, we're going to say cameras only. And we're going to use deep learning, machine learning, which is learning based systems. So it's a system that learns from scratch and we're going to teach it to drive from eight cameras and so on. So just talking to somebody like that was not the fact that he thinks like that. I think it's just fun to talk to people like that. I don't need them often. Let's say, no, no, no, stop this bullshit of thinking that this task is impossible. Let's say, why is it impossible? Is it really impossible? Well, you find out when you start to think about most problems from first principles is that it's not actually impossible. And then you have to think, okay, so how do we make it happen? How do we create an infrastructure that allows you to learn from huge amounts of data? So one of the most revolutionary things that Tesla is doing, and hopefully other car companies will be doing, is the over the air software updates, just like the update that you got. The fact that just like on your phone, you can get updates over time means you can have a learning system, a machine learning based system that can learn and then deploy the thing and learned over time and do that weekly. That sounds like maybe trivial, but nobody else is doing it and it's completely revolutionary. So cars, once you buy them, they don't learn most cars. Tesla learns. That's a huge thing. Forget about Tesla, Autopilot, all this stuff. Just the fact that you could update the software. I think there's a revolutionary idea. And then they're also doing everything else from scratch. This is the first principles type of thinking. The hardware. So the hardware in your car, I don't know when you got the Tesla, but it should be hardware version two. But that hardware performs what's called inference. So it's already trained, it's already learned its thing, and it's just taking in the raw sensory input and making decisions. Okay. They built that hardware themselves from scratch. Again, ballsy move. Now they're building what they're calling, again, he's such a troll, but they're calling Dojo is the name of the specialized hardware for training the neural networks, for training the models. What training is, is the learning side of it. So they're building their own like supercomputer. Google has a TPU to improve the training. TPU, what does that stand for? It's a processing unit. It's the same thing as the more general, Nvidia has graphics processing unit GPUs that all the nerds, all the people like me have been using for machine learning to train neural networks. It's what most also gamers use to play video games, right? But they have this nice quality that you can train huge neural networks on them. TPU is a specialized hardware for training neural networks. TPUs allow you to play video games and train neural networks. TPUs clean some stuff up to make it more efficient, energy efficient, more efficient for the kinds of computation neural networks need. Google has them, a bunch of other companies have them. Most car companies would be like, okay, let me partner with somebody else with Google to use their TPUs or use Nvidia's GPUs. Tesla's building it from scratch. So that kind of from scratch thinking is incredible. And the other two things I really like, listen, that I like about Musk is the hard work. We live in a culture like so many people, like I often don't sleep. I do crazy shit in terms of just focus, stay up nights sometimes. And often people recommend to me that, you know, balance is really important and taking a break is important, you know, that you rejuvenate yourself, you return to with fresh ideas, all those things are true. Sleep is important. You had people on the podcast tell you how important sleep is. But what most people don't advise me is hard work is more important, passion is more important than all of those things. Like that should come first and then sleep empowers it, rest empowers it, rejuvenation empowers it, especially in the engineering disciplines. Hard work is everything. He's sort of unapologetically about that. It's not like a come come to us, come work with us. It'll be a friendly environment with free snacks. It's like you're going to work the hardest you've ever worked on, whether you agree with him or not, on the most important problems of your life. OK, I like that kind of thinking because it emphasizes the hard work. The other part, in terms of meeting him in person, I don't know if you got to interact with that off because when he was on mic with you, he was very kind of... It was hard to bring it out of him. In person before that, he was very jovial and friendly and huggy. He's great. And then once he got on the microphone, I was like, oh, this is heavy lifting. I'm going to bring this out of him. So then we started drinking. And then, oh, yeah, it helps a lot. And then once the drinking, then I got to see who he is. Yeah, I should have done that. But I'm just kidding. He likes drinking. Yeah. No, the thing that's really interesting is he's gone... If you look at his biography, the kind of stress he's been under, in terms of he's been at the brink of losing his companies several times. And he lost a child. And that's the other thing that inspired me, is that he can be a good dad while running so many companies. Because I often wonder about the kind of hours I pull on what I'm doing. Can I have a family? Can I really give them... Because I'd love to be a father. And can I have a family? Can I be a good person? It's very, very, very, very difficult if you're working 18 hours a day to give your kids the time that they need. But it's possible. Not 18 hours. I believe there's in life, months, maybe years, that you have to do the 18 hours a day. But not always. There's time for everything. Right. Do the sprint. Sprint. Yeah. And then establish everything and then sit back. But the problem with a lot of guys like him is, first of all, it's very difficult to find a replacement for the way he thinks. So if he's the CEO of these companies and he's the one who's the mastermind behind all these things, and then he wants to step back, finding a commensurate replacement is insanely difficult because most people who would be a potential replacement are already off doing their own shit. Yeah. And there's not many people like him. That's the interesting... That's actually the disappointing thing to me is that his kind of thinking is a rarity. I'm not sure why that is exactly... I joke around about it, but I think there's a spectrum of evolution. And his mind is clearly way more advanced than my mind. There's something going on in his mind in terms of his attraction to engineering issues, solutions to global problems, solutions to traffic problems, pollution problems, all the things that he's... The internet, he's trying to give the world internet. He's got all these things going simultaneously. And one of the things that I got out of when I was talking to him was that he almost has a hard time containing these ideas that are just pouring out of his head like a raging river. He's trying to catch handfuls of water and this raging river of ideas that's going through his head. When he described his childhood that he thought that everybody was like that. And then as he got older, he thought he was insane. Yeah. I can relate to that. I'm trying to learn how to talk, but I have trouble talking because there's like a million ideas running in my head. Like anything you say, I'll immediately start... There's these weird tangents that go off and I want to start thinking about them. Is that true with a lot of people in your line of work? I think so. I think that's kind of puzzle solving. That's where the comfort is. I'm just surprised that a CEO is able to continue being that kind of puzzle solver. Do you see that tweet that he made about his plans? Like he put a tweet up in, I think it was 2006. And then he's essentially done all those things. He's done all those things. Now the thing is, most people... So a lot of people love Elon Musk, but there's quite a large community of people that don't love him so much. Well, that's always the case. I don't know. With anybody, great. I don't know if that's always the case. When is it not the case? Who accomplishes as many things as that guy does where everybody loves him? It's a difficult... I mean, I'm not a historian, but I could say Steve Jobs. Terrible example. So many people hated that guy. So many people hated that guy. I have personal friends that are involved in technology that wouldn't use Apple products because he's such a twat. They didn't want to have anything to do with him. They knew people that were engineers under him. They said it was horrible and mean and it just required so much when screaming at people and insult them. And he had these ideas in his head that he needed to get done. And if you couldn't work the hours that you needed to do what he wanted to accomplish, he would treat you like shit. Yeah. You're right. I just wish the world was better. I think... With all people like that, like with Steve Jobs and with Elon Musk, when he dies, people will always... You'll remember the greatness, right? Yeah. So that's how it seems to work. It's just sad that you can't celebrate that currently. But I do think there's one particular aspect of his personality that I also share that pisses people off really bad, which is, like you said, he had a plan, but he's late on that plan. Yeah. He keeps promising things. And he keeps being like a year or two or three late. Right. And that really... I don't know if it actually angers people or if people that already don't like you use that as a thing to say why they don't like you, but it's certainly a thing that people say a lot. Yeah. But I think that's an essential element of doing extremely difficult things is over promising and trying to over deliver. That's the whole point. Right. It's to say to make all the engineers around you believe that it's doable in a year. That's essential to do it in two years. So that kind of... And truly believing it is... It seems to be essential. Well, didn't he have people pay full price for that Roadster? Like you got on a list. Ahead of time, yeah. Yes. So you paid a quarter of a million dollars for a car that's essentially vaporware. Yeah. But the thing... So I don't know. There's a whole bunch of financial people that get mad at that kind of idea. They get furious. Like there's investors. It's like... I think it's the most shorted stock in history. So... But it keeps kicking ass. It confuses the fuck out of people. To me, the stock market is the most boring thing ever in people. It's gambling. Yes. And so you trying to say you're an expert in investing in the stock market, I blocked... I removed those people from my life because they don't say any interesting ideas. I said it. But when you're doing legitimate investment, yes, that's a really important service to society. But if you're commenting on the fundamentals of engineering problems that real engineers are trying to solve, that's not interesting to me. So that kind of stuff upsets, I think, financial folks. But the beautiful thing is when you have people buy vaporware and you bring that vaporware to reality, that's the amazing thing. Yeah. He will definitely bring that roadster to reality. If he doesn't die, that roadster will happen. If he dies, bail out now. Same with that insane Cybertruck. Yeah, Cybertruck is fucking awesome. He's so ridiculous. If he lives long enough, you better believe there's humans being put on Mars. Whether it's him or he gets everybody else. See, that one I'm skeptical of. That's the type of people that are going to want to go.