 This is Think Tech Hawai'i. Community matters here. Good afternoon, Howard Wigg. Think Tech Hawai'i. And you might be waiting for me to say cold green, but I am not in my cold green capacity today. I am in my musketeer capacity, as in Elon Musk. This is a special guest appearance, no extra charge for you. My guest is a fellow musketeer and entrepreneur, Alan Marchand. Welcome to the show, Alan. Hello, thank you for having me. I hope that, yeah, we have a whole lot of fun with this. The title of the program is Knocking Moore's Law Off It's Moorings. What in the world is that? Moore's Law, as you probably know, was founded by Gordon Moore, who was a professor, I believe, at University of Pennsylvania, and he was way, way early in the computer game when they were just developing transistors. And he watched the evolution of the transistors, and he said, you know what? Every two years, the size of these devices is going to shrink by half, and its capacity is going to double. And that was back approximately 1972, I think it was. And they recently, a couple of years ago, had a celebration for Dr. Moore, who since went on to have found a little company called Intel, and they celebrated him. He's now in his mid-80s, and they said, Dr. Moore, your prediction was pretty well on target, and this might be a huge exaggeration, but somebody speculated that back in 72, the Volkswagen Bug was all the rage, and if the Volkswagen Bug had gone through the same metamorphosis as have the computers and other electronic devices, it could, I think it's go 200,000 miles an hour, get two million miles to the gallon, and cost seven cents. I think that's hyperbole, but that's the nature of Moore's law. But the computer industry has been the godchild of Moore's law until Elon Musk comes along, and he's saying basically everything is progressing too slowly, and Ellen and I are going to be discussing his myriad projects, and everything points to the fact that he's trying to leap from beyond Moore's law almost. So why don't we start with you, Ellen? What do you have for us first? Which of his projects would you like to talk about? Well, I'm an Elon Musk fan. Really, that's what I like, and so what I want to talk about is some of the different companies Elon Musk is currently working on. I have missed some, but I don't think I've missed too many. I have a little list, so I think if you missed something, I can type in, and yeah. So if we can move on to the second slide, the Elon Musk has, of course, the CEO of Tesla, and he just did a major presentation among many, but recently about the Tesla Roadster, and this is coming out in 2020. And the amazing thing here is that it's got a 200 kilowatts battery, 600 mile range is all electric, and it does 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds. And what can a typical racing car do in 0 to 60? Probably like a 1.2.1, 2.4, and so the 1.9 would be a world record for that, and it has to be proven. But the interesting thing is that anybody that has the money to spend on an exotic car doesn't have to buy a V12 engine that sucks gas and needs to be tuned all the time, they can now buy an electric car. So just in that one thing alone, it's pretty neat, and for him, he's stated that it was, he wanted to show the world that this was possible in an exotic car. And then he sets the price point at $200,000 or $250,000, which by supercar standards is bottom run. Again, I would never buy one, but it's an interesting example of his in-your-face attitude towards current thinking. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of people who could afford a quarter million for a car, tens of thousands of them. Right. So if we go to the next slide, the more interesting thing to me is the recently introduced or unveiled Tesla Semi. And what's interesting about that is the Tesla Semi is... We need the next slide. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The Tesla Semi is what they call a class 8 truck, which is the biggest Semi as you would see on the road today, designed to carry 80,000 pounds in the trailer, like most trucks can. No one thought this was really possible. He repurposed four separate Model 3 engines at each of the back wheels. And if you look at this slide, it talks about the drag coefficient of the Tesla Semi at 0.36, and he compares it to the best car that's out there right now at 0.38. Now, if you think about a Semi running down the road, that's phenomenal. If we go to the next slide, they actually consulted with a lot of Semi companies or companies that use Semi's and asked them what would they like to see in the design of a Semi. So Tesla, instead of just creating the regular interior of a truck, put the driver front and center inside the cab of the truck. They also took the windshield, because it turns out the windshield is a big problem for trucks that they get broken, the trucks down can't move. They made the windshield bulletproof. So the windshield should never break. With the electric motor and the batteries, the trucks right now are slated to have a 3- and 500-mile range, depending on configuration, with a guaranteed 30-minute charge time at what they call a super or mega charger, which nobody's seen the specs on, but the early indications are that would be something over a megawatt of energy transfer at a point. So if we could go to the next slide, for the Tesla Semi, this brings up, it's a little bit, not the best resolution, but basically 0 to 60 in 20 seconds. That's a fully loaded 80,000 pound rig. 65 miles an hour at a 5% grade with a full load. And then because of its four independent motors at the back wheels, the braking, the tip-over, and the safety factor plus auto-driving are tremendous. So right now there's over 4,000 deaths a year based on semi-accidents. This should help with that. You see these pictures sometimes of a great big semi-overturned on a bridge or whatever and spilling. This semi essentially doesn't have the front-wheel drive as being driven, so you don't necessarily need it in my opinion because you have each of the four wheels in the back individually torque steering. That is thoroughly, thoroughly incredible. Pretty exciting. And that's the first truck that they came out of the gate with, which is, if you look at some of the other electric trucks, there's a lot of efforts going on. But Mercedes, for example, has a single axle. I think it's a Class 6 or Class 7, but main basically for like a harbor area. Very short runs. But only 100-mile range. So for Tesla to come out with a semi, the first truck they ever produced at either 3 or 500-mile range is dependence in my opinion. And are these things actually out on the road now? 2020 is a delivery date, maybe 2019. Pre-orders right now are going more than they expected. UPS bought 125. Walmart bought 50. Oh my goodness. Let's see. There's another Canadian grocery team that are concerned that bought 20 or 25. So the pre-orders are coming in for the trucks. So people are believing it's going to be big. Yeah, which shows how much credibility Musk has. Right, and it's really unproven technology. It could fall on its face, but it's exciting that he's trying to make this happen. And again, each semi that's taken off the road on an annual basis is a huge positive factor from a lack of diesel fumes and consumption going out annually on 100,000 miles per year truck. And every year that goes by, more and more of our electricity is clean electricity produced either by wind or solar. Right, that's a long-term goal. There's still a lot of coal production in the mainland United States, unfortunately. Over 200 coal plants have closed already. Right, we're getting there. Which brings us to our next slide of Tesla Energy. And Tesla Energy is exciting because this is a picture of a recently installed 100 megawatt in conjunction with a wind farm in Australia. You may have read something about this, but Elon Musk took a challenge from one of the Australian folks that had a desire for this to happen and he said, I can put it in place in 100 days. So they put it in place in 100 days and already it's been smoothing out the electrical grid and in storing power from the wind farm. And it's reaction time if it needs to provide power to the energy has been proven already at 6 tenths of a 6 milliseconds. So it comes online in 6 milliseconds faster than they can turn a coal-fired or gas-fired peaker plant up. So pretty exciting. Yeah, a little background there. Here in Hawaii we're looking at more and more solar, more and more wind. In fact, we have so much PV photovoltaics on our roofs right now that in the middle of a sunny day we are producing more electricity than the utility can accommodate. It can throttle back its power plants only so much. If it throttles back anymore they'll stall. So they go as low as they can go and still the electrical production goes lower than that so it's wasted. So the solution is the solution to have storage batteries just like that to suck up all that middle of the day energy and then we have a peak in the evening and you use that to throw it up energy to what's called shave the peak. And Kauai is doing that even as we speak and incidentally Kauai has I believe it's 20 megawatts of the Tesla batteries over there and they have only 65,000 people and so they're getting close to being a clean energy island thanks partially to Tesla for exactly what you're describing here. Yeah, and that example just happened in Australia where they actually absorbed energy and they were paid money because it's more as important to absorb energy sometimes as it is to give energy to the network. Now if we go to the next slide... You know what? We're going... Not enough time. We need to take a break right now. Howard Wigg, Think Tech Hawaii with Ellen Marchand back in a moment. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Freedom, is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Dive Heart we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Dive Heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Dive Heart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Dive Heart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search DiveHeart.org and share our mission with others and in the process help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in there. Greetings again, Howard Wigg. Musketeer number two. I'm here with Ellen Marchand and we are talking about the most fascinating man in the world, Elon Musk. I was going to say Elon Tesla. Elon Musk. And why don't we jump back into those storage, that storage slide? Because this is so, so crucial. Yeah, if we could go to the next slide after that, that's the commercial battery pack. Each one of those three that you see on the left represents 100 kilowatts of storage. So made for commercial applications. Now this is the Powerwall 2 made for, say, more of a residential solution and it's right around 15 kilowatts. Price point would be about $6,200 inverter and battery. And they include the inverter inverter built into that package. So it's a very slimline package. And could you go off grid theoretically? Yes, you can sequence up to 10 of those. So depending on your house needs, you can actually do a scalable off grid solution. Now let's go to the next slide. Tesla also has some roof shingles, which they're producing. These are probably only going to be seen on high end homes. But you could go to their website right now, Tesla.com, click in the energy section, actually look at what a contracted rate would be for your roof. And then your roof would be this aesthetically pleasing solar panel. But with no solar panels on top. And you would get tax credits for this also. You would. Now if you go to the next slide, this is a more conventional solar panel that they are worked with in conjunction with Panasonic. And so that's more what you would normally see on top of a roof. And they put a nice border around the sides to kind of make it look more aesthetically pleasing. And I know the shingles are shatter-proof. I don't know if this is shatter-proof also. Yeah, the shingles are and that I don't know. That's a good question about that. Now if we go to the next slide, we'll go from the Tesla Energy Tesla.com to Elon's Neuralace company. Now this I'm not familiar with. Now this is interesting because Neuralace was conceptualized or brought out in a science fiction. Basically it's an injectable, some sort of synthetic material that goes into the human brain that interacts with your neurons and allows you to connect with the Internet. Now the reason why Elon Musk has developed a company for this in particular is to compete with machines in the future. So if you go to the next slide, he actually has a company called OpenAI. Now the reason why he has formed OpenAI, Open Artificial Intelligence, is he and Sam Altman see a danger in uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. Uncontrolled being for military, for economic gain, for advantage. And so overwhelming power of some sort. Exactly, and there's a concept called friendly AI. But friendly AI would be human controlled with reason. But there's a lot of uncontrolled development of going on of AI in competition. Like the Chinese, the US, the Russians, et cetera, for advantage, right? And so he wants to have open AI out there for development of friendly AI. There's a lot of people that don't talk about this and don't think about this. And if you go to the next slide, one of the AI books that Elon recommends that I'm currently reading I really enjoy is artificial intelligence in the human era, our final invention by James Barat. It summarizes entirely the AI development, the AI actors, the different types of AI, and then what the potential future could look like. So I encourage anybody to read it because right now anybody I talk to about AI, there doesn't seem to be an understanding of what's happening or an understanding of what the implications are. But essentially, if you have a super intelligent, artificial intelligent being, they would be a thousand or more times smarter than you and I. And so we would become the dog and they would become the master potentially if it's an uncontrolled AI solution. So going on to the next slide, one of the other companies that Elon theorized is the boring company. And it's not boring at all. Well, that's right, but interestingly enough, he was in LA traffic and he's decided that he was going to develop a boring company. He theorized that he could make 14-foot diameter tunnels, a new type of tunnel machine, improvement on the current tunneling technology by a factor of 10 or more. And the reason why he theorized this is that he said you could make a series of 3D tunnels at multiple levels in any city and then you could put them, you could put cars or transportation type devices like for multiple people on an electric skate car and then skate them around in these tunnels that is, say, about 124 miles an hour, all electric, no pollution. And then they come up and down via an elevator system wherever they need to land. Now, people thought this was really a funny, stupid idea. But then he went and bought a used tunneling machine. Then he went to the SpaceX parking lot and started digging a hole. Then he inserted the tunnel machine and started digging. Now he's been approved by the city of Hawthorne for a two-mile tunnel. And now, which he's currently building and he has pictures if you research, then now he's going to the next level, which is he's petitioning the city of Los Angeles for like a 14-mile tunnel, up the 405. So, if you go to the next slide... You know, we could spend a whole program on any one of these. I know, it's fantastic. We go to the Hyperloop. This is a theorized vacuum tube pod. That's a test pod right now, so the vacuum tube would be bigger, but right now they're going through a series of competitions to prove out the technology with a series of university teams. And he opened up the competition to anybody internationally. And they all have been competing multiple times, including there's a test track down at SpaceX. So the concept here is you could have up to 700 miles per hour of travel from point to point. And Elon said the distance that's likely, the best distance would be about a thousand miles. And so you can move commercial or regular people. He's looking at boring also from D.C. to New York City. Yeah, they have some boring efforts in right now, so it's really exciting. Going on to the next slide, we have Space Exploration Corporation, commonly known as SpaceX. These are two of the current rockets. The one on the left is the Falcon 9. It has nine engines. It's set the lowest price of any rocket in the world right now. Even cheaper than the Chinese. They have single-handedly brought back a massive amount of space launch capability to the U.S. that wasn't there before. And in this year, I think they're forecasting about 25 to 28 launches. And I think, partially since it's made out of recycled material, isn't he delivering goods up to the satellites for one-fourth the estimated NASA cost? Yeah, I think that probably UAL, our United Launch Alliance, which launches at Atlas V, was right around the 160 range, maybe more. Now, a lot of those are burden costs, depending on what NASA says the contractor has to provide. But still, the United Launch Alliance can't get it down that low. So they're saving NASA a lot of money. They're also saving the military a lot of money. And therefore, saving us text for it was a lot of money. Right. The rocket on the right-hand side is the Falcon Heavy. That's going to be coming in January of 2018. It should be launching from Cape Carnival. It has gone vertical on the launch pad currently, and it has 27 engines. So if you go to the next slide, this is an example of the Falcon 9 landing. Now, this is the first stage that goes up. The second stage with the payload, say a satellite, goes up from there. Every other space company has thrown away that first stage and let it burn up in the atmosphere. Elon Musk said in order to have a reusable craft, in order to save money, we have to make it reusable. So this is an actual landing shot of a Falcon 9 first stage landing, which is just amazing. No governments done that. Not the Chinese, not the Russians, not the U.S. Now, SpaceX works hand-in-hand with NASA. So again and again, Elon continues to credit NASA because it was the Space Information Sharing Acts that NASA had actually during Bush Jr's administration, believe it or not, that they said, we have all this technology on the shelf. We aren't getting it out there. We aren't commercializing it. So if we have a technology sharing agreement with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, with whoever wants to do it, ATK, then we're going to get that technology out. These companies are going to iterate and change and improve that technology. And then we'll have an agreement that they can't sell the technology that they create to, say, a foreign power that's an adversary of the United States. Talk about saving the taxpayers' money. I mean, we spent all of that development, those millions of dollars, and now we're putting it to use. Right. And this is basically like, it could go on and on. So let's go to the next slide. That is, I think, the Falcon 9. That's the Falcon Heavy. That's currently on the launch pad right now. And that's slated for a test firing maybe this Friday. And if it goes off, it'll be the largest and the most powerful rocket in the world when it goes up. So let's go to the next slide. This is really exciting. This is what they call the SpaceX BFR. And it stands for... Oh, we just ran out of slides. Okay. Yeah. That's okay. The next slide would have been the SpaceX BFR rocket. And that's the next iteration of all these rockets. And it stands for Big Frigging Rocket, literally. That's putting it politely. Now that is a 12-meter across 42-engine Mars rocket. 12 meters is 38 feet approximately. Right. With 42 engines. With a payload capacity of a spaceship on top. Now the spaceship on top is a second stage. But what he's going to do is he's going to sunset the Falcon Heavy and the Falcon 9 at some point in the future and have all customers going on the BFR. And the reason for the BFR is that it's completely 100% reusable. The first stage is going to come back and land vertically. The second stage is going to come back and land vertically. Now the second stage is a phenomenal spaceship. It's made to carry up to 200 people to Mars. To Mars. And land on its own power. This is unbelievable. I know. But if you go to the SpaceX.com, which I encourage anybody to do that's excited about this, you're going to see it. And it's just stupendous. I can't say more. If you saw the other slide, Elon's SpaceX company has as a goal to put a million people on Mars. And you say, well why would they do that? Why would anybody want to go to Mars? Elon Musk, again pushing the technology in all these different areas, his theory behind the Mars effort. He said it himself. But humanity has to create the forcing function to make the change. And those aren't his exact words, but that's what he said. Which is, if we get to the first planet, then we can think about the second planet. Until we get to the first planet, we're stuck back on Earth. We could have an extinction event. We could have a war. We could have a plague. Whatever it is. The fact that he wants a forcing function, so he's pushing every effort he can to get us to have this base on Mars. And the other thing they're talking about now because of more immediate political reasons is they might do something on the Moon. With this BFR spaceship, they could actually take that second stage spacecraft, go to the Moon, after refueling an orbit with a full load of fuel from another BFR second stage spacecraft that's just a fuel carrier, they could take that second stage and go directly to the Moon, land vertically, carry enough cargo and supplies for a mission to occur on the first landing. The Moon would just be a cakewalk. I mean, compared to... I think so. And on that very, very cheery note, I mean, we're just getting warmed up, but the time has come to say, this is Howard Wigg, one of the two musketeers, the other musketeer being Alan Marchand, musketeer and entrepreneur. So thank you very much. I hope you had as much fun as we did. Thank you for your time.