Episode 53 - Scott Sees the Future with Elon Musk’s Help

Date: 2018-06-16 | Duration: 11:04

Topics

Elon Musk’s boring company Cities of the future

Transcript

[0:03] Yes, it’s me again, back for a second Periscope in the morning. And it’s because I’m so excited. I’ve got a new topic, something I just saw in the news, which I’m going to put together with you. Put all the parts together and we’re gonna get a peek at the future. I’m going to show you a future that nobody has shown you yet and it’s a good one. So this is all good news on this Periscope, nothing but good news. And what goes well with good news? Coffee. Coffee and good news. Let’s have some good news coffee. Here’s the setup: the biggest problem in the future, given that a lot of our other problems are solved, is how do you provide a decent life for all the

[1:04] people who won’t be able to make enough money to buy the expensive things we consider the necessities for life? Those things would include housing and food and healthcare, etc. So what do you do when there are a lot of old people, a lot of people who don’t have the skills for the modern age, a lot of people who just aren’t gonna be able to have a lot of money? And there’s nothing that a Bernie Sanders, a socialist approach, is gonna fix because even if you took all the money from the rich, you still might not have enough. So Elon Musk is somewhat stealthily combining assets to solve the biggest problem. Right now, I would have said the biggest problem was North Korea until recently, but it looks like we might have a solution there. Maybe the biggest problem is climate change, but as it turns out, Elon Musk might solve that

[2:06] too, just sort of on the side without even trying. Let me draw you the full picture. You know that Elon Musk owns something called The Boring Company, which is a fantastic name for a device which bores tunnels very efficiently. It’s a gigantic boring truck sort of a thing that literally just drives down the tunnel and automatically creates this great tunnel, but it creates all this dirt leftover because you don’t need the dirt in the tunnel. What do you do with the dirt? Well, do you just move it around? Turns out that today’s news is that Musk is starting a brick company, literally making bricks out of the stuff that they take out of the tunnels. Now why is that interesting? Well, if you saw it in isolation, you’d say to yourself, “Ah, well that’s clever. He’s got a thing that bores tunnels, so why not make some

[3:06] bricks out of it?” And if you stop there, you would not see the future. So critics say, “Well, that helps you a little to have cheap bricks, but the real cost is in the land and the labor.” Not for long, because the labor is going to be robots. We already have—when I say “we,” technologists already have—robots that can read plans and assemble pieces. Right? What would be the easiest thing for a robot ever to assemble? Bricks. Is it a coincidence that the future is going to be robots building houses at the same time that Elon Musk is saying, “Let’s make some cheap bricks”? So you’ve got your cheap labor, you’ve got your cheap bricks, but it gets better. If you were going to build a

[4:08] house, your big cost is going to be land, right? But you probably saw a story that Bill Gates is looking at building sort of an ideal futuristic town or city on a green field where there’s just nothing there. So there’s nothing there but cheap land. So if you take this technology and you go where the land is cheap, you’ve got cheap land, you’ve got cheap bricks, you’ve got cheap labor. Now the beauty of this technology being able to bore a tunnel easily is that tunnels are where you can put your water delivery utilities. You might have some transportation down there. Maybe the transportation is for people or bicycles, maybe it’s for just package delivery. But if you’ve got nice tunnels, you’ve got a seriously good situation. If there’s nothing in your way, you can put the

[5:09] tunnels wherever you want them. So you’ve got your transportation, utilities, and everything else, but you also might be able to put gardens there. Because if you put a light pipe—if you’ve ever heard of that word—there are technologies that essentially use mirrors and glass that can pipe the sun from above to below, and it’s more than a window. There’s some technology to really spread the light. So underground gardens with no pesticides needed because it’s indoors, essentially. Your weather is always perfect-ish because you’re not outdoors. What if you need some extra dirt? Well, you’ve got dirt, but it might be hydroponic then. Let’s say you’re off the grid because you’re in some godforsaken part of the world that didn’t have a town before, and there was a good reason because there were

[6:10] no facilities, no transportation or whatever. But those things were a lot less important if you’ve got a Tesla battery connected to your house and solar power. You’re practically off the grid. And we’re not too far away from 5G superfast speeds for cell phones and other devices. So if you’re looking at fixing up, let’s say, New York City, none of this is useful. You’re not going to use your boring machine, your robots, your bricks to build something in Manhattan. But most of the world is not Manhattan. It’s the Middle East. Now look how big this is. Suppose you could say to the Middle East, “Hey Palestinians, I know you don’t want to make a deal, but suppose we put you first in line for inexpensive housing?” That would be awesome. How would that be? Well, suddenly with this

[7:12] package of stuff which isn’t ready yet but it’s getting close, this package becomes something that can bring peace to places that don’t have it. It would transform lives, transform civilizations. It creates jobs because even though there are robots, there’s gonna be a lot of new activity and a lot of that will still require some people. So if you look at anything that Musk is doing in isolation, it just looks like, “Oh, that’s sort of interesting. He’s got a thing that bores the tunnel, that’s cool. I’m glad somebody did that. Hey, he’s got a thing that makes bricks. He is working on some robot stuff. He’s got some batteries.” It’s only interesting when you put it all together. So this is probably the future. You have the ability to build a place where there was none and make it right. Now what happens if you’re looking at some place like Detroit?

[8:14] Let’s take Detroit for an example. There’s a situation where you’ve got to do a lot of demolition. I’ll be talking more about that in the coming months, but there may be places that are not Manhattan where you could just take advantage of the fact that the land prices are already low and you could just build awesome things that we’ve never seen before. They would take the cost of living down to a trivial level where people can have insanely good lives. Now keep in mind that the stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s not that you’ve got walls and a roof; it’s how you organize it to satisfy everything from—I’ll say Feng Shui, even though what I’m talking about is just how you feel. I don’t believe in Feng Shui exactly, but I do believe that different spaces make you feel different ways and act in different ways. So you’ve got to get that right, which

[9:14] most of our cities do not, because most of our cities were built piecemeal by different people doing different things. If you started early and said, “All right, here are the rules of this town. We’re gonna make sure that we have all the things that people like here,” you could build the most awesome place ever. Bomb shelters? What if the robots start throwing the bricks? All right, so that’s the only thing I wanted to share with you on this Periscope, that Musk has some interesting plans. I don’t know if he’s thinking of them all in one as one solution to inexpensive housing, but he should. And it would be sort of amazing if he weren’t. So I’m assuming that he is. Vertical boring for

[10:20] water wells? Well, I think drilling vertically, we have technology for that, so you don’t really need a boring machine for that. All right, so that’s the news from technology. And yeah, someday you’ll fly all this to Mars and build this stuff on Mars. Yeah, you add desalinization to this mix and suddenly you’ve got additional places that you can build. That’s all for now and I will talk to you all later.