♪ emily: he is the owner of the world's first model s. a fast talker with an unconventional investing approach. he once shadowed steve jobs. he has one of the biggest private space collections in the world. he spends his days pondering the future of artificial intelligence and the self-driving car. emily: thank you so much for being here. in 1996 you made an early

investment in hotmail and you bet on e-mail before e-mail was anything. steve: it is usually combination of an entrepreneur the gets me really excited and an idea that was unlike anything i had seen before. it wasn't tied to a corporate system or university system. it was e-mail that could follow you wherever you go. emily: microsoft went on to buy hotmail. tell me about where you come from and what kind of kid where you. steve: i was born in arizona. i was inspired by my dad growing up. he had one of the first

computers. the ability to program the machine. unlike other experiments that would take time to learn. emily: you graduated from stanford first in your class. an mba from stanford. steve: i love to learn. i rolled right from my undergraduate degree into a masters. i eventually had to go get a job. the hoodies and the dropping out wasn't as popular back then. emily: he worked for steve jobs and apple. they tried to recruit you at pixar. steve: it was a short. of time it was pretty intense. he has this incredible laserlike focus on whoever he is speaking with. the walks that we would go on. i want to study the way he did business. not that i could be like him but just to try to understand him. i just asked him.

he came to my house to speak when i was at stanford business school. he stayed for like three hours. what i remember was that he was just obsessed with apple when he was at next. he was just distraught. he felt this visceral pain when apple was getting beat around in the public eye and in the press. he would always come to the same inevitable conclusion that apple should bring him in with the next technology. i would look at him like he was nuts. i said what ceo would ever bring you back and keep his job? and of course that is exactly what happened. the ceo who brought him and was gone within months.

everyone knows that he has this fascination with design. what fascinates me was at no point do i recall him ever stating a strategy. he and elon musk have this visceral education with imperfection. emily: tell me about your relationship with elon. he went into debt for tesla. the headlines say that you saved him. we first met in 96. he was pitching zip to we did not invest in zip to the relationship then was more that i could just enjoy my life. as you mentioned in december

2008 he saved tesla he wanted to personal debt, he had the collateral of all his companies to backstop the loan to invest in tesla when no one else would. the other investors around the table said if everyone else is in miami. we invested in a way to get them in. emily: i feel like you have a mind meld with him. deceive or say things that are absolutely crazy? -- does he ever say things that are absolutely crazy? you launch rockets in your yard. tell me about that. steve: we send these things they go twice the speed of sound. gps systems. to convert the lobbies in the hallways from into a space museum. a piece from every lunar module that has been to the moon. i have not been in space but i have been weightless. if it was up to me i would like to go into space in five or six years.

what i have kids and responsibilities. i might wage 10 years. the perception of fear is that this sounds like a dangerous thing. things blow up and it is a visual failure. the goal of spacex is to make it as routine as possible. to make the rocket reusable c don't throw it away after each flight. you can fly much more often. emily: spacex rocket exploded during the launch. have a fix to the problem? steve: they believe they have. it is a single little bolts frankly inside a larger tank. they can just put that aside and put a much better replacement design in. they will get to mars.

the colony might take 20 years to get started. if you just want to send something to mars they can do that with any year two. i like them both and the first s 78 ever made. it works great. the model s has not been serviced or a much. i have yet to replace the brakes. there is no muffler, there is no smog check. the usual stuff that i get maintenance on. only the tires have needed to be

replaced. i get very excited about the future of automatic driving. just like we knew the electric car would be the wave of the future. same with autonomous driving. it is going to be awesome when we look back and we say why did we let our teenage kids drive. 10 years from now i'm certain we will look back to the present and say wow. imagine uber or lyft but without a driver. vehicles that could not kill someone even if they tried to jump in front of the vehicle. in reality it is not scary at all. you might not buy a self driving car. you might take a ride in one in

las vegas. if you believe is elon does that all vehicles will be electric and all vehicles will be autonomous, that all car companies have to do it or they will go out of business. if you don't do it you will be in business. so they should. you wish them well. a whole fleet of different kinds of vehicles. bus like things. no one company can do it all. by the year 2020 i believe there will be an apple car. sometimes apple succeeds and sometimes they don't. that watches not really grabbing me. not enough battery life. i have a bunch of watches. i cannot fathom the charging

issue. emily: do you think tesla should focus more on lower-priced cars? steve: that is a great question. that is their long-term vision. you either have many billions of dollars to put into equipment or you do iterations. if you take the current model s is a very expensive vehicle and you factor in the total cost of ownership, the fuel costs, the maintenance costs. the total cost is not that much greater than a ford taurus. you can do that same analysis and my come out to be like a honda civic. it starts to selling more mainstream vehicle. emily: how concerned are you about google's ambitions? emily: i know you are super

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emily: i know you are super fascinated with machine learning. steve: over the next five years it will be the specialty eyes. things that will be creepy or magical depending on your point of view. their ability to do something like drive a car or manager our schedules and figure out what i want to do today. it will compete with medical imaging. all these areas where recognizing a pattern of human behavior or pattern in the world around us, it will see things that we didn't see.

it will point out. i can navigate more easily through this traffic. i can optimize my time in a way that i couldn't see before. that will acclimate us to what we call the guy slowly. emily: how concerned are you about google's ambitions? steve: it scares me a little bit. there's a bit of reckless abandonment there. with the occasional of course we will be cautious. but almost like this is the inevitable trajectory of technology that is our future. we will make good pets for these ais in the future. it is almost like pollyanna. ais i worry about are the ones that we may not even know they exist. they are living off information feeds and operating in a way that we cannot even fathom. we may never even detect their existence. emily: how is your interest in machine learning playing out in your investment philosophy?

steve: the way we engineer things is changing. more like iterating a solution very rapidly. imagine much like a newborn baby they can learn anything. you build a brain in a box. it is exposed to photos and starts to recognize caps on the internet. that same program could recognized anything on the internet. recognize speech. or to find tumors in mammograms. you have these generic learning machines but you are applying them to many different things. you don't actually know how it works. we don't actually know how the brain works but we know how it got there. they could take over the world, but why? to what end? that is what we make good pets.

we would know that we were pets. we would think that we'd figured out how to do a fusion reactor. imagine the gap between us and our pets. the cap thinks it is hunting that little toy mouse. it will be similar. we would not even know. the long arc of human intelligence is that we have less and less violence over time. why would a more intelligent being use childish levels of violence as opposed to a much more sophisticated manipulation of us. emily: it is now a $10 billion valuation. do you stand behind theranos? ♪

emily: what do you think about this bubble talk right now? steve: every time you ask a question like that somewhere a

fairy dies. [laughter] i don't know. it is interesting how the private funding world is reaching valuations we have not seen before. we believe in early-stage investing that is way before the unicorn phase. we are fine if people want to invest at those kinds of prices. there are new unicorns being born every week. it doesn't really mean anything. that ipo window may be shutting. emily: i have to ask you about theranos. would you invest again? steve: we don't yet have the answers to the questions that

are swirling around now. i remember meeting her when she was still a stanford student. elizabeth holmes. i remember my partner tim saying she is like steve jobs. she had that mesmerizing zeal to revolutionize. the entire field of medicine. these special kinds of needles and things. we wrote a $500,000 check before anyone else.

she has been somewhat independent. i do have the answer. emily: you want to invest in breakthrough technologies. how do you have the earliest stages separate something possible from something impossible? steve: there are people walking in every day where someone has an idea that is equally exciting and you keep hearing about the potential. you are scratching your head like do i believe, do i think this could happen? the best partnerships are where the venture investor believes almost as passionately as the entrepreneur himself. when we invested in tesla, i was absolutely committed that all vehicles will be electric. same for autonomous vehicles. i have been wrong and i will be wrong again. when it is right it is really remarkable. let's talk about the ones that are right. emily: the world of venture capital has changed a lot in the last few years. it is like the hot new firm.

a lot of people in recruiting and marketing. where do you see dfj in the market today? steve: in a healthy economy or what have many companies doing different things. i like a different approach which is looking at industry sectors that no one else is competing for the deal. the vast majority of investments that i have made there was no competing investor. no one else was seeking it. you have to get on the top of the list. in the sectors that all have 18 different firms, it is a dogfight. when we invested in space, no one else was saying they were investing in space. then they find us. we don't need the same infrastructure to track down and

find the opportunities competing with everyone else. i think a venture firm is ideally a small team of five to seven people. almost every endeavor where creativity or ambiguity is needed. emily: what is next for you? steve: you'll find me learning. by changing the immune system of the page to be like the human so that we can take their hearts and kidneys and lungs. the field of biology in the field of information will fuse. we will build things that feel like brains and less like computers. pushing engineering beyond its current limit. if you had asked the question will be one day have something that is smarter than humans, the answer has to be yes.

it can't be no. literally smarter. in every way. has a conversation and gives you better answers to your questions that i can. that will inevitably happen if you give it a billion years of evolution. to say that nothing will be better than a human is to say that the law market evolution has to stop here. and that is obviously not the case. that just thinks the question why can't we accelerate that process? what can we do today to rapidly evolve things to surpass us? 10 years from now for sure. emily: thank you so much for joining us. i will see you on the moon. ♪

♪ sam: every year around november or december, journalists will something that makes them feel a little nervous. >> you are putting me on the spot. to write will be asked a story on what will happen in the coming year. >> the worst thing is predicting the future. >> i don't think anyone has made an accurate prediction. >> there's a chance i will be wrong. sam: predicting the future is a tough job but someone has to do it. the stories, latest development