Work on things that you find interesting, fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.712
Q: What are some areas you see where people could build important new technology?
For five years people asked me where I saw opportunities and I’d say “tunneling.” But nobody did anything. It was initially a joke, but we created the Boring Company and did a test tunnel in LA. People still didn’t believe us. Then we did our first operational tunnel in Vegas.713
There are still tremendous opportunities in tunneling. The world needs tunnels. All major cities have traffic, and tunnels can massively improve people’s quality of life by making it easy to travel from one place to another. They can be further expanded to long-distance travel. If you draw a vacuum on the tunnel, you can go extremely fast. Faster than a plane or high-speed rail. I’d still recommend someone—please—start a tunneling company.714
Another company to start would be anything to do with genetics. If you can solve genetic diseases, you can prevent dementia or Alzheimer’s with genetic reprogramming. That would be wonderful.715
Synthetic RNA is revolutionary in medicine. Most people are not aware just how much of a revolution this is.
This is like medicine going from analog to digital.716
RNA (ribonucleic acid) or MRNA (messenger RNA) are basically synthetic viruses. I think people don’t appreciate what’s going on—this is the digitization of medicine. You can create an RNA or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence like a computer program and encapsulate it in a lipid shell, so it looks like a tasty treat for your cells. This is the future of medicine.717
You can do almost anything. You could probably figure out how to turn someone into a literal butterfly. Your cells are tiny biological computers. They execute just like old-school computers, where you feed it a tape or punch card. Your cells do whatever their punch card says. That was a big eye-opener, understanding the potential of RNA.718
You could start a company for high-speed travel. Reading about the California high-speed rail was depressing. California taxpayers are paying to build the most expensive high-speed rail per mile in the world—and the slowest. Those are not the superlatives you want.719
It’s California! We make super high-tech stuff! Why are we spending—the estimates are around $100 billion—for something that will take two hours to go from LA to San Francisco? You can get on a plane and do that in forty-five minutes.720
There has to be a better way to do this. What would you ideally want in a transportation system? You want something faster than existing modes of transportation. Let’s say twice as fast, costs half as much per ticket, can’t crash, is immune to weather, and is not energy intensive. You can self-power the whole thing with solar panels or something. That would be pretty good. The devil is in the details of making the thing work, but something like this could work and be practical.721
There’s the possibility of this fifth mode of transport; I call it the Hyperloop.722
For long-distance travel, you can do tunnels or tubes. If you remove the air or most of the air, you can get rid of the air friction and go supersonic. You can do so with no dependence on weather and no need to get to high altitude or create any sonic boom issues. That’s what I envision for the Hyperloop. It’s basically a pressurized electric car in a vacuum tube. This will be our next evolution in transport.723
We want the future to be better than the past. If we had something like the Hyperloop, you’d look forward to the day that was working. Even if it was only in one place—from LA to San Francisco, or New York to DC—it would be a tourist attraction and show it is possible.724
Even if some of the initial assumptions didn’t work out or the economics didn’t work out quite as expected, it would still be cool. If you come up with a new technology, it should feel like that. If you told a stranger, would they look forward to the day this new thing became available?725
Q: What is the most important piece of advice you have for anyone who wants to start a company on behalf of humanity?
The final thing I would encourage you to do is to take risks. Especially before you have kids and other obligations. As you get older, your obligations start to increase. Once you have a family, taking risks affects not just yourself, but your family as well. It gets harder to do things that might not work out. It is easiest to start before you have those obligations. Take risks now, and do something bold. You won’t regret it.726
Go do it. Just go out there and do it. People are far too afraid to try. Fear is the biggest reason for failure. Don’t be afraid to fail. Just go.727
If you don’t push for radical breakthroughs, you’re not going to get radical outcomes.728