PowerfulJRE/YouTubeTaking time out from his busy schedule of having a go at the guys who saved 12 Thai boys and their football coach earlier this summer, Elon Musk sat down with Joe Rogan, got high, and talked about stuff.
During the wide-ranging interview, Joe and Elon talked about electric planes, supersonic flight, fossil fuels and solar energy. Elon also had some sort of flame thrower, which was interesting.
The guys also shared some whisky, played around with a samurai sword, chatted about Elon’s love life, and smoked a joint.
Interestingly, after Joe compares Tesla to the samurai sword, Elon said his Model X car could dance to ballet – this was before they’d had a smoke. Asked why he would program that into a car, Elon simply replies: ‘It seemed like fun’.
Elon also talks at length about his ideas for electric planes, which would be able to take off vertically and travel at supersonic speeds, saying:
I’ve thought about this quite a lot, quite a lot. The trick is that you have to transition to level flight. The thing you’d use for vertical takeoff and landing is not suitable for high speed flight.
Going further, he added:
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 your gravitational potential energy on the way down. So you really don’t need any kind of reserve fuel.
However, he did say his electric planes are not a priority right now, he’s more concerned with electric cars and solar energy, adding:
The electric airplane isn’t necessary right now. Electric cars are important, solar energy is important, stationary storage of energy is important.
These things are much more important than creating electric supersonic VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing).
Elon also got quite emotional while talking about fossil fuels and the future of the planet, speaking about the need for sustainable energy:
We’re really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans. We’re taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this, putting this in the atmosphere, this is crazy.
We should not do this. It’s very dangerous. We should accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
I mean the bizarre thing is that obviously we’re going to run out of oil in the long term. There’s only so much oil we can mine and burn.
You can watch the whole thing here:
It’s fair to say the guys got pretty deep, covering a lot of ground between the host and Musk.
Although they didn’t mention the recent controversy Musk has been involved with of late, there was a lot of interesting topics discussed.
The best way to sum it up? Bizarre.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.