Spotify
Elon Musk first appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on September 7th, 2018, which is Rogan’s most-viewed episode on YouTube with over 40.7 million views. Elon Musk made his third appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience on Thursday, and over the course of three hours and 24 minutes, they covered topics including The Dictator movie, the Tesla Roadster, and the Cybertruck.
To open the Spotify podcast, Elon Musk divulged his inspiration for the pointy top of the SpaceX Starship – The Dictator movie starring Sacha Baron Cohen. If you remember the 2012 movie, the iron-fisted despot of Wadiya had “Nuclear Nadal,” the head of the fictional country’s nuclear program and Procurer of Women, executed over a dispute over the pointiness of a missile. “Round is not scary, pointy is scary.”
Rogan asked Musk, “You literally told them to make the Starship more pointy because of the movie The Dictator?” Musk responded, “Yep, and they know it too, it’s not like they are unaware of it. Everyone thought it would be funny if they made the rocket more pointy, so we did.”
Speaking of SpaceX, Musk said he is “trying to make life multi-planetary.”
“We’re trying to extend life beyond Earth,” Elon said on the JRE. “In order to do that, you have to have high tonnage to Mars. That means you need a big rocket, and you need to fly a lot.”
Musk revealed his motivation for space exploration: “The universe is the answer. And we need to figure out what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe.”
Musk talked about the upcoming Tesla Roadster and explained that he wants the vehicle to hover over the ground.
“I want it to hover,” Musk says of the Tesla Roadster. “I’m trying to figure out how to make this thing hover, without, you know, killing people.”
“I thought, maybe we could make it hover, but not too high,” he continues. “So maybe it could hover, like, a meter above the ground, or something. So, if you plummet, you blow out the suspension, but you’re not going to die. Maybe, I don’t know, six feet. If we put a height limit on it, it will probably be fine.”
Musk hinted that SpaceX cold-gas thrusters could be installed behind the license plate to give the Roadster some insane acceleration.
“At a minimum, I’m confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down, James Bond-style, and there would be a rocket thruster behind it, and that gives you three tons of thrust.”
Musk said the engineering of the Roadster would be done this year, and the new electric vehicle could be available as soon as 2022.
Musk teased a Tesla van with solar panels on the roof.
“Now, a van, because you have a big, flat area, that’s actually where solar could start to make a little more sense. You know, because you have a lot of area,” Elon stated. “You could also have, maybe, a roof where it is solar, and then, when it is stationary, [the roof] goes out and provides shade, and maybe triples your area or something like that. Now, you triple the area, and you have a big, flat surface, you could maybe start charging enough where you start getting like 30 miles a day.”