Elon Musk

Yeah, I mean, I have a sort of, you know, in sort of doing a sensible deregulation and... reduction in the size of government is just be very public about it, and say which of these rules, if the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And here's the thing about the rules, if the rule turns out to be bad, we'll just put it right back.

Okay, and then problem solved. It's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.

Yeah, round of numbers. It's pretty nutty. There is like this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world. And this is something we should be very concerned about. You know, you have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment like a high priority? It was like number one. It's because... People came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed.

So maybe explain, because this is the first time. Yeah, there were like so many articles like that this is, Coder is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even,

They're really triggered, but... Yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go.

Yeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that, I think.

Yeah, look, I think we've, you know, If Trump wins, and obviously I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America's also going bankrupt extremely quickly.

and everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.

Well, you know, The Defense Department budget is a very big budget, okay? It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest and rising.

We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are gonna have to pay somehow, every three months. And then soon it's gonna be every two months, and then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. It's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt, And this does not have a good ending.

And so we have to reduce the spending.

Well, I do think it's sort of... you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is gonna happen. You really have to say like, is it the right level? And just remember that, Any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce.

And they were like, well, we'd like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed.

I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's like amazing. It's the future.

Yeah, it's night and day. And so in North Korea, you've got 100% government. In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes.

And East Germany, which is a random line on a map, The only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. So you put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car.

And so that's just an interesting example of basically the same people, different operating system. And it's not like West Germany with some you know, a capitalist heaven. It was, it's quite socialist actually. So when you look, you know, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100% government in East Germany. And again, sort of a five,

I'd like to call it at least a 5 to 10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively, vastly better. And it's obviously, you know, sometimes people have these, amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in, okay?

You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. Okay. They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead.

So, you know, and if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba. And there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to go back to Cuba. Plenty of seats. There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome.

Yeah, we'd like to not have that.

And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing. So... He's given this a lot of thought.

If we cut government spending in half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for... Right, just to count... Obviously, I'm not suggesting that people have immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off-ramp where...

Yeah, so a reasonable off-ramp where they're still receiving money but have, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find, and then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.

Can I add to that? I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.

I mean, you know, there's that old phrase, go postal. I mean, it's like they might.

I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys.

I mean, the sheer number of disgruntled workers, former government employees is quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it.

And I like your idea of an offering. But the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation opportunity and you don't take serious action and then... You have four years to get it done, and if it doesn't get done, then... How serious is Trump about this?

Yeah, he is very serious about it. Got it. No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country. And it'll be fantastic. Thank you.

Yeah. In fact, there's a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral. for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission, so funded by Jared Isaacman, and he's an awesome guy. And this will be the first time, the first commercial spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo.

So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. Yeah.

I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Yeah, you know, astronaut safety is, man, if I had all the wishes I could save up, that would be the one to put on. So, you know, space is dangerous. So, the... Yeah, the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship. The next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval.

It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.

Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke and I was like, oh no, this is going to take a long time. But yeah, Zootopia, you know, the funny thing is like, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later after Zootopia, and to get my license renewal, and the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube, and he was actually Swift.

No, I mean, sometimes people think the, The government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government, they're just in an operating system that is inefficient.

Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous, with a basically half-capitalist operating system. But I mean, for a lot of people, like the maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV.

And then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale. Right. That's the government. Got the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it?

It's like you like to you like to Facebook posts throw them in the prison. Yeah People got an actual, you know prison for for like like obscure comments on social media not even shitposting like not even Like what is the

I'm not saying say you're watched by these, but these... But based on our current progress with Starship, we were able to successfully reach Oval of Velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water. And that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting.

We think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. The fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket. With a pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there.

Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So for any given project, you have to say, this is the circle to write Venn diagrams. Here's a circle, and it is success, the success dot in the circle, is success in the set of possible outcomes.

That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship, Not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident we'll succeed. It's simply a matter of time. And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So...

That would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals, and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is built, not slower.

then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species and be out there among the stars in the future. It's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to. Kids are a good... a good way to assess this. Like, what are kids fired up about?

And if you could say, you know, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the solar system. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You know, I mean, you need things that move your heart. Right.

Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well.

I've always wondered if like... Rocket technology is considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it, you know... In another country. Yes.

I wish people were trying to steal it. So, no one's trying to steal it. It's just too... It's too crazy, basically.

Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, they actually do so much business with the government, they have sort of impedance match to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of their revenue from the government.

And a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government. And actually, no, most of our revenue is commercial. So... And there's been, I think, at least up until perhaps recently, because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. And the CEO before that I think had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew.

Um, so I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. So, you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody's running Coke or Pepsi and they're great at marketing or whatever, that's fine, because it's not a sort of technology-dependent business.

Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil. You know, the concern, I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at XCorp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law.

Or if they're running financial consulting in their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse.

Yeah. It's like it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse. He's fucking inspired the team. I'm sorry. I'm scared of horses. Gets on backwards. I'm like, oops.

I mean, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, it does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean, for example, the Turing test used to be a thing.

now your basic open source, random LLM, you're writing on a frigging Raspberry Pi probably could, you know, beat the Turing test. So there's, I think actually, the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is, an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services.

Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will be, trend to zero, I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but it'll be, everyone will be able to have anything they want.

That's the good future. Of course, in my view, that's probably 80% likely, so look on the bright side. Only 20%, 20% probability of annihilation, nothing. Is the 20%, what does that look like? I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well.

And even then, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. At this point, I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to enjoy that life.

But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning because the computer can do everything you can do but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the sort of end effectors. be autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots. But once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really you can build anything.

And I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean, there's obviously the mass of Earth, like that would be one limit. But the economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people. That's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots that can do, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots,

and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy. There's no meaningful limit to the economy.

So obviously we cannot as an American company impose American laws and values on other countries that, you know, we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do, you know, think that if a country's laws are a particular way, and we're being asked to, we think we're being asked to break them, and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.

Is that right? It's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.

Yeah, I mean, the Tesla problem is different from the... you know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually, and what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context. Gigabyte context windows, yeah.

Yeah, you've got, you know, sort of... I was just bringing it up. Kind of billions of tokens of context. Nutty amount of context because you've got seven cameras, and if you've got several, you know, let's say you've got a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress.

So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter, and you know, and condense that over a time, so you've got to, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time, and then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small one, like a few hundred watts.

It's a Tesla-designed AI inference computer, which is probably still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla-designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier. Just by the way, that's kind of a... The Tesla AI chip team is extremely good.

Yeah. No, the Tesla chip design team is extremely good.

It's not intentionally per se, but... Yeah, I mean, the... There's training and inference, and we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car, inference computer. At Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year.

And that will be, we think, sort of comparable to sort of a B200 type system, a training system. And, you know, so I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service. Dojo is just kind of like... I mean, I guess I have like some... improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version three.

It usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be excellent, and we'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late 2020. 26 or something like that.

you know, anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. So now there's, I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of, you know, what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab. But the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low.

So I just want to be clear, sometimes it comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy, whatever, billionaire, and demand outrageous things from other countries. you know, while that is true.

So Optimus obviously is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less and is much smaller than a car. So you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design at least three major times, and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level.

And I think at that point, the cost, the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.

Basically, think of it like, Optimus will cost less than a small car.

So at scale volume with three major iterations of technology, and so if a small car you know, costs $25,000, you know, it's probably like, I don't know, $20,000 for an Optimus, for a humanoid robot that can be your buddy, like a combination of R2-D2 and C-3PO, but better.

Yeah, I mean... Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot because, I mean, like you look at sort of what Star Wars is like, R2-D2 and C-3PO, I love those guys. Yeah. You know, they're awesome. and their personality, and I mean, all R2 could do is just beep at you. You couldn't speak English. Maybe C3PO to translate the beeps.

I would say major iterations are less than two years, so it's probably on the order of five years. maybe six to get to a million units a year.

Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly, yeah. Vastly exceed. I mean, you have to say, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. You know, it's just like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your, take your dog for a walk, it could, you know,

In addition, there are other things that I think are, you know, valid, which is like, we obviously can't, you know, I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we've gotta be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or, you know, We did the wrong thing. That's the nature of the concern.

mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could teach your kids, it could... But we could also send it to Mars. Yeah, absolutely.

Mars is already a robot planet. There's a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopters. It's only robots. Yeah, it's only robots. So yeah, the... No, I think the sort of useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one.

Because everybody will want one, and then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.

I mean, we are a generalized robot. Yeah, we're a generalized non-robot. We're just made of meat, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know? So, yeah, we are actually, and by the way, it turns out like as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped. And why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger.

Obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. and your fingers are primarily operated. The muscles that actuate your fingers are located, the vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings.

And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand. and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also not strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand.

So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. And the next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.

That's not true.

It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days, but... Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because, frankly, nothing was funny.

Rough. Yeah, so, I mean...

I mean, how much time do we have here?

You really wanna hear that? I mean.

Okay.

All right, here we go, guys. All right, so one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like live. Live, live, live. Or do they have like a delay or like just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. Is it like a, you know, five second delay? What's really going on?

But there's a way to test this.

There's a way to test this, which is we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and say, this is the script I'll throw on the ground. We're gonna find out tonight, right now, if Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out.

And if you don't, it's been a lie.

We're gonna bust them right now.

Yeah, yeah, so we're pitching this. On Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on like a Monday. It's COVID. Yeah, we're like kind of hungover from the weekend and we're like pitching this at noon. We're in Miami, yeah. And it's, you know, Jason's on. And Mike, you know, my friends who I think are sort of quite funny, you know, Jason's quite funny.

We actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. What's actually going on? If we're being asked to break the law Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.

I think Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life.

And my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in just like guns blazing with ideas. And we didn't realize actually that's not how it works. That's normally like actors and they just get told what to do. I'm like, oh, you mean we can't just like... do funny things that we thought of. What?

Is our mic on? And they're like, we hear you. And then after a long silence, Mike just says the word, crickets. And they're not laughing. Not even a chuckle. I'm like, what's going on here?

Okay. Yes.

So Elon says... So then I'm like... So I say, like, I'm going to reach down... Into my pants. Into my pants. And I stick my hand in my pants. And I'm going to pull my cock out. And I tell this to the audience. And the audience is going to be like, what? Right. And? And then I pull out a baby rooster. You know?

And it's like, okay, this is kind of PG. It's not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And... And it's like, what do you think? And do you think it's an ice cock? I mean, I like it.

Yeah. I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but yeah. But I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat, okay?

And Kate says... You can see where this is going. And I say, wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside? No. Do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh, no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. And then, you know, we exchange.

And I think just the audio version of this is pretty good. Right. And, you know, it's just like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like...

A lot of moms in the audience. And I'm like, well, that's a good point.

It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it.

Yes.

I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails.

Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father, like you sort of redo that scene from The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up.

Listen, you ask for Doge. And I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have a tuxedo. And this whole concept of the Doge father.

We'll save the other eight.

Oh, yeah, yeah. There have been three articles, and I think in the past three weeks. Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. It was three different articles.

Calling for me to be imprisoned. In the guardian, you know. Guardian of what?

Guardian of, I don't know. Authoritarianism?

if somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it. Now, the sort of

But what we're trying to do with XCorp is, I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything's just called X, basically. It's a very difficult disambiguation.

Yeah, it's X everything. So what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the... you know, the laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in, you know, Europe Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down and we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing?

Okay, now we're injecting ourselves in as a censor and where does it stop and who decides? And where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. If the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're gonna obey the law in each jurisdiction.

It's not more complicated than that. We're not trying to fill out the law. I'm going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. And if the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.

Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well.

Yes, it's very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, it is illegal. It is illegal in those countries.

Yes.

No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal. Like, you don't need to file a lawsuit for... if something is just unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law, this violates the law, anyone can see that. You don't need, if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that.

Yes, yes. I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator. And I posted it.

I mean, any given week, it just seems like the thing's getting out of here.

I think with great difficulty, but it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. And the last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. We're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government.

And I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States.

Like if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work, I mean.

That's an expensive 1,600 feet of concrete, you know? And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but, you know. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was, you know, not an optimist. But at the current trend, California high speed rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe, but probably not.

I mean... Well, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.

Yeah, exactly. AI do everything at that point. I think you really think of the United States, and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions actually. And then eventually you just can't get anything done.

And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. And we're like, this is at Starbase.

And we're like, we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And... And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. And we're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay $140,000 fine?

It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm, fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense?

And then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000. So they just ransomed us. And we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars.

Yes.

14 months.

China was 11 months.

And just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon.

No, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's a pretty big one.

In units of Pentagon, it's like three.

I think it's like 44 billion, something like that.

Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.

We've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't. Okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records.

We have differences of opinion. There's things that I don't entirely agree with. But it's difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a bone of contention. So then I'm a little stuck in a bind.

As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms.

I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.

I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both, my personal opinion.

It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.

Yeah. None of nothing that is happening right now is plausible in the, in a storytelling, in a fictional storytelling setting. Yeah.

Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions is a very simple thing, which is just saying that revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and they are intolerably oppressing their people. People have been intolerably oppressed for a long time.

Trotsky's got this quote that is, if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every single day because the peasants are always discontented.

So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand and on top of that really piss off the other elites around them because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that are that are competent. kind of necessary for a full blown revolution.

Like you need their resources and you need their money and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever's in there at the time. And you gotta be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right? Like that is in and of itself, catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. And so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately.

Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of things. And, I mean, you got it. Like, Mabel Dorr is meant to be sort of the colonial elite. Yeah. And she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings. And she is doing that.

Like, and when she is, like, when I talk about her, like, funding the Society of Martians and, like, funding all these, like, philanthropic, you know, enterprises to help Martians, like, that's a lot of Philippa Galate, like, straight up. Like, that's what the Duke d'Orléans was doing in, you know, 1786, 87, and 89. And so that's the role that she's playing.

But, you know, if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of, like, peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like, peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support. They have... often accomplished great things.

But when you think about the great revolutions in history, there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in that moment. And, you know, you can advance all the way to the Russian revolution.

And this is, you know, this is the prototypical, like the workers have risen up and the army is mutinying and it is the people who overthrow the czar. And what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanoff family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know what to do anymore.

But like, he's, yeah, I guess he's got to go. You know, like we can't get him to see reason. We can't get him to change course. We can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people, right.

leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say, like, we're not going to back you up if you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.

Like Lenin understood what the game was and he understood what was going on. And you don't have to like if you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in 1917. You don't have to say, oh, well, the elites were necessary for this first revolution, and we need a break inside the ruling class. We need divisions inside the ruling class.

That doesn't mean you have to say, and what those people want out of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what we're going to accept. You know, obviously, like, the cousins of Tsar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire was being run.

They didn't want a social revolution. But if you're going to take down that whole system... Creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary, but you don't have to support the ultimate aims of those people. It's just, it's an ingredient.

And this is, and you see this in the course of revolutions and you see this in 1917, you see this 1789 and then 1792, where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign. And then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first. Right.

And so, you know, you can hold out hope for, you know, getting the job done without, without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point.

Yeah. The deportation stuff is just because of my own personal political commitments over the course of my adult life. Right. Which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system in this country, you know, and, and, you know, we, they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders. Like we do not have open borders.

It is actually really, really hard to like navigate your way properly through the American uh, immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken. And we did all of this, you know, we did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right?

Like, obviously that is on my mind with, you know, with family separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up, like all of this stuff, which happened under Trump. Yes. But it also happened under Obama for eight years and it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it because, uh,

It wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who have lived in this place their entire life, like that's one of the points that I make. Yeah. The people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars.

Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Clare, she is a fourth generation Martian. And she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through. And now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to Saturn. And nobody's ever come back from Saturn.

We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know is that nobody ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing, like taking people who are born and raised in America, this is the only place that they have ever known, right? Even if they came here when they were like one, like, okay, they weren't born here, but like they're here since they were one.

And then you're like, okay, we're going to send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know? And doing this to people is cruel, right? It is unconscionable what we do to people.

And so, yeah, like so when I was thinking to myself, OK, I'm going to write this like fictional revolution, it's going to be on Mars. What are some of the things that I want to do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah, some of this does is like a little bit of like this is these are Mike's political interests and.

the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring those people food. Like the, the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave, you know, water jugs out in the middle of the desert. So people don't die. Right.

And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those, like knowing that people are going to, knowing that people are going to like die of dehydration and die of starvation,

And then it's really important to remember that this is not just a Trump problem. Like what he's doing right now is like, of course, like we are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing. And even, you know, just this morning, we've got an American citizen who has been held and they are not being released despite the passport and the social security card being shown to the judge.

And the judge is like, I don't I can't actually release this person. Yeah, that's sort of where we're at now. But this has been an ongoing thing for 20 years across both parties and both administrations.

And nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of postmortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border. And we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion and we just need to do border enforcement better.

Like and they're then even moving positioning themselves to a place where it's like Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border. And like there was somebody I forget even who it was, but somebody one of them senators like tweeted, you know. this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people.

And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on his promises or something, but it's like, do you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And I can't,

you know, stomach the fact that the Democrats are, are going to take away from all this, that, that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants and that we need to lean into that. And then you see the polls before all the tariff stuff and you, all this stuff is going on and he, Trump is still sitting at like 50% approval. And it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right.

Maybe the American people really do just love this.

We're not supposed to do anything alone, man.

And like on Mars, you know, that, that sort of communal stuff is like, they're also living in close quarters. So you can't really be somebody who needs to be alone. Right. That's a, that's a thing. And then also like in, in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have to do this stuff together.

And like, there's, there's a, like when I was doing like cultural, like there's cultural background, like, like works and, and, you know, like music that was going on that the Martians were creating and,

And I didn't quite get into this, but there is a song that I've got like half written called The Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a, it's like a Martian folk song about Lonely Joe who went off and tried to like do it himself. But I mean, he never comes back.

And now Lonely Joe like wanders the red sands of Mars because like he tried to go out and not do it like with the group and not do it with the community because you can't survive alone on Mars. Yeah. But to your other point, like one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that Everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand and the skin chip in their hand is what like opens door.

It like literally opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary and it gives them access to restaurants. It gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skin chip. And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively. And it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore.

They are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the No Doors Movement, which is Martians jamming open doors so that the people who have, they were called the annulled because their contracts were annulled.

But so that the annulled could get from here to there without needing their skin chip. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that are necessary. And those are the kinds of things that are going to protect people. And I hope that those things are going on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on that front.

Let's just go ahead and keep that where it's at.

No, that's, that stuff is all in my mind. And like I said, like we're not meant to do anything alone. Like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't go anywhere in history, like all the way back to the dawn of the species. You do not find individual humans like living by themselves. We have always done this as a group. This has always been a group project.

And like, when you go back, this is, this is something that comes out of sort of like, I studied a lot of like political theory in school and the state of nature, uh, sort of works. You know, these thought experiments that like Thomas Paine would do or Rousseau would do. And, you know, it's like, how did we come together? Why did we come together?

Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest and like they encounter another one. So they come together for defense and they come together, you know, to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, No, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing.

Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like, whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group. There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there are aunts and uncles and like whatever the group is.

There's we are always doing this as a group and hyper individualization and hyper atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot, too, because when I started having kids and

And, you know, I have I have two kids and the model for like having a family at this point is like you have a mother, a father or whatever. You have kids. But the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself and they live in their own house and they have to supply their own food and they are in charge of getting their own money.

And everything that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. Yeah. And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever done it before. Right. There's always been a broad network, a broad family friend network that has been a part of raising our kids and having our families. And if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh, wow, bad luck for them. You support that person. Yeah.

And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society, obviously.

Not at all. What has been happening to me has been one of the most surreal six months of my life in terms of what I am writing and dropping out into the world. And then I turn on the news three weeks later, four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly what I wrote down in the show come to life. It is horrifying and I hate it. Yeah.

Yep. You know, people think these days that that atomized nuclear family is like the law of nature, right? That this is like, this is the way it's always been. And like, that's not true. It's just not true. There's a great line. I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tocqueville's Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody should read.

At the end of it, he lays it out. He's writing this in like the 1840s and 1850s. And he straight up says that like, what... liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean, he's a conservative liberal. Like, it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's, he's watching as the atomization of families and individuals is happening.

And he's like, and that's how, that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else because that's the other key part of it is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs, like getting that, getting this other thing.

Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition to get a little bit more, a little bit better, or just, you know, have enough. Like I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for like summer camp. You know, like I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp. And some people aren't going to make it and other people will.

And you got to be there. You got to have strategies about when to log on to the thing, like because they because they they're pitting us against each other, like all the time in all of those little subtle ways. Yep.

There's no, there's no year zero. There's no creating a new, there's no, there's no, there's no new man, you know, that's not ever going to happen.

That's actually, I mean, just, I wouldn't even have thought that I'm going to tie this back again to Tocqueville, which the reason I would recommend Ancien Résime is because that is a book about how much of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it and not actually caused by the revolutionary break. And, and even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this, I,

I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these great things, but there was no Z year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum. And, you know, like I don't want to get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist. Like, like as an, as an abstract thing, because it's,

Because I'm not sure that it's true, but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right? Like we're interested in sex and we have to eat food and we live in shelters and we make music. And there does seem to be some very like human qualities that exist across all time and across all space.

And if you just say to yourself like, well, like, I mean, this is one of the things I'm very sympathetic to anarchists.

Yeah. I mean, you guys have to change the name of your show because there's no good about it, man. We're just here. It's just going. Yeah. You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian revolution series for years. Like, I think I first came up with it back during like the French Revolution days is when I was like, you know, it would be a really cool thing to do.

But there's a point with anarchism, especially the early stuff, where their idea was that if you smash the state and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism, which is a little bit what we are moving towards right now, but I'm not sure even that exists. Because if you...

if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is, there is stuff inside of human nature. That's that we created the state to begin with. So the whole, the whole thing is like a very, it's a balancing act that has gone way too far in a certain direction.

This is actually one of my points about immigration and migration is that no matter how tightly you try to control it, no matter – you could build every wall you want. You can make it as hard as you want. People are still going to move here. People are still going to move away from here. People are still going to go from here to there and from there to here. And that is something that –

is going to happen no matter what. And especially if we're going into the 21st century with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. On route, yeah. Yeah, it's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable.

And what's going to happen is the people who are living in less habitable areas are going to want to go to where there are areas that are still habitable. And so there's going to be movements of people

And the question before us in the 21st century is not, you know, can we keep people in the places that they are now and, you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop those migrations from happening? Or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more rational? Yeah.

That's the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not. It's simply how cruel they will be when they happen. And right now we are choosing maximum cruelty. Yep. Sucks.

It's like once I've got all of these under my belt, just like make up a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many of the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making.

Right. And there's a lot of them who would like it to be the future of the Democratic Party because they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about the lives of these people who are living on this earth, who are living, breathing human beings, who are just someplace else and living in a world where like, yeah, the United States and Europe,

And we suck up the world's wealth and resources like that's where the imperial center of the globe and people like all that. And even when people say, like, well, why do people come here?

And, you know, there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion, which is like, well, they come here because they want their because they want freedom and freedom is what America offers and like the American dream and all that stuff like. the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money.

This is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket. It's sitting in your pocket, right? We are the ones who have all of the world's money. And so that is why they are coming here. Yep. So you just have to like fit that in your brain. And what is happening is this constant division between like Americans being more important than anybody else. And I understand why that exists politically.

And a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do, you know, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like. Yeah. what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now?

And even these questions of like citizens versus non-citizens, like one of the things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was like, it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making, but he referred to something as mere citizenship.

Which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal. Like, I come from, like, the liberal suburbs of Seattle, and I had very liberal notions. And citizenship in sort of the liberal imagination is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen of a polity with rights. There's a constitution. You get to participate in the government.

Like, citizen and citizenship are these words that had great profound meaning. And it really kind of, like, knocked me sideways to have them be, like, mere citizenship, right? You've been reduced to simply politics. a part of a polity and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being. You're being recognized as a citizen.

And if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count at all. And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other, to non-citizens. And the idea, like, and you just see this very casually, like right now, like all over the place.

It's just like, they're not citizens, so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so we can just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons and it's fine because they're not citizens and therefore they don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know, just being a person thinking about other people? And one of the greatest, one of my very favorite, I know I'm steamrolling here.

I'll let you get a word in edgewise here in a second. But I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, you know, like back in like the 60s when they decided that the Texas school districts had to open the schools to undocumented children. And they said that because it says in the 14th Amendment, persons. It doesn't say citizens.

And, you know, and then I'm like, okay, then there's this thing called the new protocols that is going to, you know, help jumpstart the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just, you know, implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are, you know,

And they were resting a lot of this on the notion that it says person has these rights, not citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate, hate, hate. This is why they're going to try to undo the 14th Amendment.

But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen. That's mind-blowing. I could not See the Supreme Court today making that same decision.

But like that's that's the kernel of something really good, I think, for the future of humanity rather than like clinging to this like citizen or noncitizen thing.

Yep. They don't. Yeah. Not, not, not in all this. And like, I mean, to bring it back to the Martian revolution, like the, one of the things that is happening right now, like in the series, I'm, you know, it's going to be 30 episodes long and I'm writing episode 23 right now, but like we've gone through the revolution. There's been, I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but obviously like,

like all a part of the story of how the Martian revolution gets going. And, you know, this stuff was plotted out in October and I got to tell you, you know, maybe I was naive. Maybe I had my head in the sand. I thought she was going to win, man. Like I thought Harris was going to win the election. That's where I, that's where my head was at in September and October going into November.

They win at certain points. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared. They're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going to be this thing called the Republic of Mars.

And there is a guy – who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people. And he hates earthlings and he doesn't trust earthlings. And there's no reason for him to trust earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times and it caused nothing but pain. And so, but there are a bunch of earth born earthlings on Mars. And he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars.

And if you're born on Mars, then you should get to participate. And if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights. You shouldn't be a part of this project. And I would love to just – I would love to deport you. That's what he's going to be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this.

And my character, Alexandra Clare, who is like a D-class – she comes out of the Warrens, which you can just –

now that's basically like the working class you know she's like when earthlings come here yeah i don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what they're doing like i'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody but like they've suffered right alongside me like suffering the same conditions like the fact that they were born on earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now that their contracts weren't annulled that they

are not suffering from the new protocols. Like, and, you know, when during these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars? Yeah, they did.

And so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, Earthling bad, but like, let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like, you know, who's, you know, who's in on this and who's, who's actually trying to undermine us because, you know, there is, there are loyalist fifth columnists that they are going to have to deal with.

I've got all the plot points, you know, I know where it's going, but just getting there is, is, yeah, it's weird because sometimes when you write fiction, characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that. And now I've got to deal with that. And like, what do you, well, she wouldn't do that in this moment.

So I guess I was going to have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation. So I guess she can't do it and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my weekly struggle these days.

Yeah, well, I mean, I wake up I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece of paper and have to have that week's episode done by Sunday night. So I'm writing these in real time.

I was like, it'll be close. Of course it will. It's a toss up, but I think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure feels like it because they were running a field operations. And like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was going to win. So for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh yeah. References. Yeah.

Like now I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this, this is terrible. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going to start.

after he comes in and starts doing all this stuff. Like the number one, of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like, this is just a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right? And which I would point out, the first thing is like, actually, no, because I very specifically wrote it so he was a good husband and father. Yes, he loves his kids.

It's obviously not Elon Musk because he loves his kids.

Yeah. Yeah. And they, they like, they get along great and everything. Yeah. So obviously it's not, but honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just much, but it was meant to be those tech guys. Right. Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're going to, we're going to move fast and break things. Right.

And then what they break is like 120 years of like labor law. Yeah. And that's the only thing that is actually being broken here. Like this is what, you know, what Uber is and all of those kinds of like all of that stuff that came at us in the last like 10 or 15 years.

And they think that, yes, because they can code well or because they have this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective way, that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody. And like, we're going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that. But they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about.

You run into these people on Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good in one area. Yes. And then becoming sort of all-purpose general knowledge experts when it's like you don't have any idea what you're talking about. No. And so there's a line that's in there where it's like, where Werner, the way that he thought is, I'm smart, therefore the ideas I have must be smart. Yes.

And that is something that's not about Musk. That's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time. Like that's, that's a, that's a phenomenon. That's a generalizable phenomenon.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, and, and what, you know, what Werner does here is so much of what Doge basically started doing when they start going into these systems, they start changing codes. They have no idea what, what are the key things that are actually underpinning our society?

The most recent thing I saw that made me think of this is like, they're shutting down all the regional offices of the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now gonna be run through Twitter, right? And one of Timothy Warner's things is the centralization of all decision-making and the centralization of really everything.

And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain, And every decision is made by the one brain. And so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions, except that is, that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything.

And it just creates all of this, like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in, I know I definitely did that. Like the dreaded, like request pending screen that people started getting, they would submit, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order. And it would just say request pending and like request pending would never go away. It would just, that's what it would say.

And then you look at what they're doing now. And they are trying to centralize everything. It's, you know, it's a generalized authoritarian power grab. But, you know, they are doing these things.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is, like, everything that's in the show also is, like, basically something that comes from history, right? Like, and I am trying to do that. And it is something that, you know, like Charles I, Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas, these guys are all great family men. Yeah. Their kids love them and they love their kids, right?

Like, one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is because Louis' son died, like, on the eve of the Estates General. And he was just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened.

And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot – like what I was trying to get at there was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the Seven Years' War in the Anglo colonies, in the Spanish colonies, in the French colonies. All of those governments sort of undertook –

A reorganization of their colonial structures after the Seven Years' War, it kind of like reshuffled who had what territory. And all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the metropole in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution, because there was going to be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor.

And so like we went into revolt about this. But this is also true of like the bourbon reforms in Spanish America is that kind of like centralization of a community and of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs. And so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours. And we here on earth should be making these decisions for you Martians.

And the Martians were like, well, we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like 70 years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then... History is always the place that I can point to, and then I have to watch it also on the TV.

Yeah, we all do. And no, but like, like one of the things that was getting kicked around the other day was like, I had, I came to this point where Werner is going to start firing people. He's going to start firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status is being rated. And he's firing just people essentially randomly. Like you are firing the head of this department.

And now that department can't run anymore, but he's like, it'll be more efficient. And, and, When I was writing it, it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic 10% across the board layoff. And as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually feel believable to me. Like people are going to really push back.

And I mean this sincerely, like people are going to push back that nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board, do a 10% layoff of something so critical as, you know, Mars is to earth because in, in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how earth is able to function with the resources that they're able to get from there.

And so I changed it around and actually looked to like the sullen prescriptions from from Roman history to kind of give it a different take, where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like 15 more names on the list, 100 more names on the list.

And there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10 percent across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like, I know that people are going to think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to understand that like throughout history, we have seen these things.

Like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to it all the time because that is something that happens. And life as we know it is actually less, like if I wrote up what was happening right now, Like if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd be like, this is implausible.

Like, this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They would never, they're not allowed to do that. It would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody.

But we do need to move quickly if we're to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026.

I actually just call myself a humble tech support here because this is actually... Musk spoke Wednesday at Trump's first cabinet meeting.

I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.

Only 20% chance of annihilation.

Nothing seems to be turning that around. Humanity is dying.

The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And unless that changes, civilization will disappear.

They wouldn't be complaining so much if we weren't doing something useful, I think. All we're really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we're finding is that there's an unelected bureaucracy, speaking of unelected, there's a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.

Wenn die Wille des Präsidenten nicht implementiert wird und der Präsident... Repräsentative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. And so I think what we're seeing here is the sort of thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.

I don't trust OpenAI. I don't trust Sam Altman. And I don't think we want to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy.

Psychedelic therapy was definitely one of the most important things in my life. Elon Musk. There are times when I have a negative chemical state in my brain. Ketamine is helpful for getting one out of a negative frame of mind.

When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.

Then take the concept you're trying to convey, compress that into a small number of syllables, speak them, and hope that the other person decompresses them into a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible.

Yeah, very lossy compression and decompression. And a lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols, of say, syllables that I'm speaking, or keystrokes, whatever the case may be. So that's a lot of what your brain computation is doing. Now, there is an argument that that's actually

a healthy thing to do or a helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, you're perhaps forced to distill what is most essential in those concepts as opposed to just all the fluff. So in the process of compression, you distill things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things. So that is perhaps helpful.

We'll probably get, if our data rate increases, it's highly probable that we'll become far more verbose. Just like your computer, you know, when computers had like, my first computer had 8K of RAM, you know, so you really thought about every byte. And, you know, now you've got computers with many gigabytes of RAM.

So, you know, if you want to do an iPhone app that just says, hello world, it's probably, I don't know, several megabytes minimum, a bunch of fluff. But nonetheless, we still prefer to have the computer with more memory and more compute. So the long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI-human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication.

Because in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. I mean, if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at bits per second, it's like talking to a tree.

I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will. Will. Will, yeah. Source of will or purpose. So if you consider the

human mind as being essentially the there's the primitive limbic elements which basically even like reptiles have and there's the cortex that's the thinking and planning part of the brain now the cortex is much smarter than the limbic system and yet is largely in service to the limbic system it's trying to make the limbic system happy i mean the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying to get laid is insane without the without actually

seeking procreation they're just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion and they get a kick out of it yeah so this uh simple which in the abstract rather absurd motion which is sex uh the cortex is putting a massive amount of compute into trying to figure out how to do that

Yeah, yeah. There's no purpose to most sex except hedonistic. You know, it's just sort of joy or whatever. Dopamine release. Now, once in a while, it's procreation. But for humans, it's mostly... Modern humans, it's mostly recreational. And so... So your cortex, much smarter than your limbic system, is trying to make the limbic system happy because the limbic system wants to have sex.

Or wants some tasty food, or whatever the case may be. And then that is then further augmented by the tertiary system, which is your phone, your laptop, iPad, whatever, or your computing stuff. That's your tertiary layer. So you're actually already a cyborg. You have this tertiary compute layer, which is in the form of your computer with all the applications, all your compute devices.

And so in the getting laid front, there's actually a massive amount of digital compute also trying to get laid. you know, with like Tinder and whatever, you know.

Yeah. I mean, there's like gigawatts of compute going into getting laid, of digital compute. Yeah.

Pretty much. Well, it's just one of the things, certainly, yeah. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that, yes, is there a use for humans... Well, there's this fundamental question of what's the meaning of life? Why do anything at all?

And so if our simple limbic system provides a source of will to do something that then goes to our cortex, that then goes to our, you know, tertiary compute layer, then, you know, I don't know, it might actually be that the AI in a benign scenario is simply trying to make the human limbic system happy.

Yeah. I mean, there are these sort of fairly cerebral kind of higher level goals. I mean, for me, it's like, what's the meaning of life or understanding the nature of the universe is of great interest to me and hopefully to the AI. And that's the, That's the mission of XAI and Grok is understand the universe.

Well, assuming that they're not... I mean, they're solving basic... neurological issues that people have, you know, if they've got damaged neurons in their spinal cord or neck, or, you know, as is the case with our first two patients, then, you know, this, obviously, the first order of business is solving fundamental neuron damage in the spinal cord, neck or in the brain itself. So

Our second product is called Blindsight, which is to enable people who are completely blind, lost both eyes or optic nerve or just can't see at all to be able to see by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex. So we're just starting at the basics here. This is like the simple stuff. uh, relatively speaking is, uh, solving, um, neuron damage.

Um, you know, it can also solve, uh, I think probably schizophrenia, you know, um, if people have seizures of some kind, it probably solve that. Um, it could help with memory there. So there's like a kind of a, a tech tree, if you will, like you got the basics. Um, You need literacy before you can have Lord of the Rings. Got it. Do you have letters and alphabet? Okay, great. Words?

Eventually you get sagas. I think there may be some things to worry about in the future, but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage. Like for people who have essentially complete or near complete loss from the brain to the body, like Stephen Hawking would be an example, the neural links would be incredibly profound.

Because I mean, you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast as we're communicating, perhaps faster. And that's certainly possible. Probable, in fact, likely, I'd say.

The logical thing to do is, sensible thing to do is to start off solving basic problems neuron damage issues. Because there's obviously some risk with a new device. You can't get the risk down at zero. It's not possible. So you want to have the highest possible reward given there's a certain irreducible risk.

And if somebody's able to have a profound improvement in their communication, that's worth the risk. As you get the risk down. Yeah, as you get the risk down, once the risk is down to, you know, if you have thousands of people that have been using it for years and the risk is minimal, then perhaps at that point you could consider saying, okay, let's aim for augmentation. Now, I think we...

We're actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neuron damage. So we're not just aiming to give people a communication data rate equivalent to normal humans. We're aiming to give people who have, you know, quadriplegic or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. I mean, while we're in there, why not?

Let's give people superpowers.

Yeah. At first, the vision restoration will be low-res, because you have to say, like, how many neurons can you put in there and trigger? And you can do things where you adjust the electric field to, like, even if you've got, say, 10,000 neurons, it's not just 10,000 pixels, because you can

adjust the field between the neurons and do them in patterns in order to have, say, 10,000 electrodes effectively give you, I don't know, maybe like having a megapixel or a 10 megapixel situation. And then over time, I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes, and you could also see in different wavelengths.

So like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek, you know, like the thing you could just, do you want to see in radar? No problem. You can see ultraviolet, infrared, equal vision, whatever you want.

I mean.

I took an extremely high dose. Don't go hugging an anaconda or something, you know.

Sounds awesome.

Sure, okay.

You know, like 10 miles outside of Rio or something. No, we weren't...

Yeah, I mean... Neuralink is, it's really a generalized input output device, you know, it's just it's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical electrical signals. And I mean, everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life, smell, you know, emotions, all of those are electrical signals. So

It's kind of weird to think that your entire life experience is just sold down to electrical signals for neurons, but that is in fact the case. I mean, that's at least what all the evidence points to. So, I mean, you could trigger the right neuron, you could trigger a particular scent, you could certainly make things glow. I mean, do pretty much anything.

I mean, really, you can think of the brain as a biological computer. So if there are certain, say, chips or elements of that biological computer that are broken, let's say your ability to, if you've got a stroke, if you've had a stroke, that means you've got, some part of your brain is damaged.

um if that let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand um that's the kind of thing that a neural link could solve um if it's uh if you've got like a massive amount of memory loss that's just gone um well we can't go we can't get the memories back uh we could restore your ability to make memories but we can't you know restore memories that are fully gone.

Now, I should say, maybe if part of the memory is there and the means of accessing the memory is the part that's broken, then we could re-enable the ability to access the memory. But you can think of it like RAM in a computer. If the RAM is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed, we can't get that back. But if the connection to the SD card is destroyed, we can fix that.

If it is fixable physically, then it can be fixed.

Yeah, you could say like create the most probable set of memories based on all information you have about that person. You could then... there would be probabilistic restoration of memory. Now we're getting pretty esoteric here.

Yeah, well, I mean, what are we but our memories? And what is death but the loss of memory? Loss of information.

You know, if you could say like, well, if you could be, you run a thought experiment, if you were disintegrated painlessly and then reintegrated a moment later, like teleportation, I guess, provided there's no information loss, the fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant. And memories is just such a huge part of that.

Death is fundamentally the loss of information, the loss of memory.

It's an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly not... I wouldn't want to claim it's like some panacea or that it's a sure thing. But, I mean, many years ago I was thinking like, well, what would inhibit alignment of collective human will with AI?

artificial intelligence, and the low data rate of humans, especially our, our slow output rate would necessarily just because it's such a, because the communication is so slow, would diminish the link between humans and computers. Like the more your tree, the less you know what the tree is,

let's say you look at this plant or whatever and like, hey, I'd really like to make that plant happy, but it's not saying a lot, you know?

Yeah. We could better align collective human will with AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased. And I think there's potential to increase the output rate by, I don't know, three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude. Yeah. It's better than the current situation.

Yeah, if it's extremely safe and you can have superhuman abilities, and let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories, then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it. It would supersede the cell phone, for example. The biggest problem that, say, a phone has is trying to figure out what you want.

So that's why you've got autocomplete and you've got output, which is all the pixels on the screen. But from the perspective of the human, the output is so frigging slow. Desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want. And there's an eternity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint.

Yeah. So if you have computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second and a whole second went by, I mean, that's a trillion things it could have done. Yeah.

Yeah. It would be, We would be something different. I mean, some sort of futuristic cyborg. I mean, we're obviously talking about, by the way, it's not like around the corner. You asked me what the distant future is. Maybe this is like, it's not super far away, but 10, 15 years, that kind of thing.

Probably less than 10 years. Depends what you want to do, you know?

Because the reaction time would be faster.

For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute. And the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else, or your AI will be worse.

I mean, they all matter. It's sort of like saying what, you know, let's say it's a Formula One race, like what matters more, the car or the driver? I mean, they both matter. If your car is not fast, then, you know, if it's like, let's say it's half the horsepower of your competitors, the best driver will still lose. If it's twice the horsepower, then probably even a mediocre driver will still win.

So the training computer is kind of like the engine. How many horsepower of the engine? So really, you want to try to do the best on that. And then how efficiently do you use that training compute? And how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI? So obviously, that comes down to human talent. And then what unique access to data do you have? That also plays a role.

Do you think Twitter data will be useful? Yeah, I mean, I think most of the leading AI companies have already scraped all the Twitter data. Not that I think they have. So on a go-forward basis, what's useful is the fact that it's up to the second. Because it's hard for them to scrape in real time. So there's an immediacy advantage that Grok has already.

I think with Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars, with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world. That's the biggest source of data, I think, ultimately, is sort of Optimus. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data. Because reality scales.

Reality scales to the scale of reality. It's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate. Really, if you say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated where on a non-duplicative, like discounting spam and repetitive stuff, it's not a huge number. You run out. pretty quickly.

I mean, like the optimus robot can like pick up the cup and see, did it pick up the cup in the right way? Did it, you know, say pour water in the cup, you know, did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? Did it spill water or not? Simple stuff like that. But it can do that at scale times a billion. So generate useful data from reality. So cause and effect stuff.

Global capacity for vehicles is about 100 million a year. And it could be higher, it's just that the demand is on the order of 100 million a year. And then there's roughly 2 billion vehicles that are in use in some way. So, which makes sense, like the life of a vehicle is about 20 years. So at steady state, you can have 100 million vehicles produced a year with a 2 billion vehicle fleet, roughly.

Now for humanoid robots, the utility is much greater. So my guess is humanoid robots are more like at a billion plus per year.

So walk in the park. I mean, Optimus currently would struggle to walk in the park. I mean, it can walk in a park. A park is not too difficult. But it will be able to walk over a wide range of terrain. Yeah, and pick up objects. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's going to be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand. The hand might be close to half of all the engineering in Optimus. From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering.

I mean, you start really thinking about your hand and how it works. You know? I do it all the time. The sensory control homunculus is where you have humongous hands. Yeah. So, I mean, like your hands, the actuators, the muscles of your hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm.

So your forearm has the muscles that actually control your hand. There's a few small muscles in the hand itself, but your hand is really like a skeleton meat puppet and with cables. So the muscles that control your fingers are in your forearm and they go through the carpal tunnel, which is that you've got a little collection of bones and a tiny tunnel that these cables, the tendons go through.

And those tendons are, mostly what moves your hands.

Yeah, so like the current optimus, we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself. Then you sort of end up having these like- Giant hands? Yeah, giant hands that look weird. And then they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom or enough strength. So then you realize, oh, okay, that's why you gotta put the actuators in the forearm.

And just like a human, you've got to run cables through a narrow tunnel to operate the fingers. And then there's also a reason for not having all the fingers the same length. So it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary standpoint to have all your fingers be the same length. So why not do the same length?

Because it's actually better to have different lengths. Your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length. There are more things you can do, and your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are of different length. There's a reason we've got a little finger. Why not have a little finger that's bigger?

Because it helps you with fine motor skills. This little finger helps? It does. If you lost your little finger, you'd have noticeably less dexterity.

It's actually going to be quite complicated. The as-possible part is it's quite a high bar. If you want to have a humanoid robot that can do things that a human can do, it's actually a very high bar. So our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the, like I said, the actuators in the forearm.

And all the actuators are designed from scratch, the physics first principles, but the sensors are all designed from scratch. And we'll continue to put a tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand. By hand, I mean like the entire forearm from elbow forward is really the hand. So that's incredibly difficult engineering actually.

And so the simplest possible version of a human or a robot that can do even most, perhaps not all, of what a human can do is actually still very complicated. It's not simple. It's very difficult.

Well, it's easy to say simplify it, and it's very difficult to do it. You know, I have this very basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra, which is to first question the requirements, make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are always dumb to some degree. So you want to sort of by reducing the number of requirements.

And no matter how smart the person is who gave you those requirements, they're still dumb to some degree. You have to start there because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. So try to make the question the least wrong possible. That's what question the requirements means.

And then the second thing is try to delete the, whatever the step is, the part or the process step. Sounds very obvious, but people, often forget to try deleting it entirely. And if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough.

And it's somewhat illogically, people often, most of the time, feel as though they've succeeded if they've not been forced to put things back in. But actually they haven't because they've been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn't be. So, and only the third thing is try to optimize it or simplify it.

Again, these all sound, I think, very, very obvious when I say them, but the number of times I've made these mistakes is more than I care to remember. That's why I have this mantra. So in fact, I'd say that the most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's not easy to do. No, and actually, what generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to delete at least some of the things that you delete, you will put back in. But going back to sort of where our limbic system can steer us wrong is that we tend to remember with sometimes a jarring level of pain where we deleted something that we subsequently needed.

And so people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing three years ago and that caused them trouble. And so they overcorrect and then they put too much stuff in there and overcomplicate things. So you actually have to say, no, we're deliberately going to delete more than we should. So that we're putting at least one in 10 things we're going to add back in.

Everybody feels a little bit of the pain. Absolutely. And I tell them in advance, like, yeah, there's some of the things that we delete, we're going to put back in. And people get a little shook by that. But it makes sense because if you're so conservative as to never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn't needed. So you got it overcorrect.

This is, I would say, like a cortical override to Olympic instinct.

Yeah. There's like a step four as well, which is any given thing can be sped up. However fast you think it can be done. Whatever the speed is being done, it can be done faster. But you shouldn't speed things up until you've tried to delete it and optimize it. Otherwise, you're speeding up something that shouldn't exist. It's absurd. And then the fifth thing is to automate it.

And I've gone backwards so many times where I've automated something, sped it up, simplified it, and then deleted it. And I got tired of doing that. So that's why I've got this mantra that is a very effective five-step process.

Yeah, it's not working yet, so I want to pop the champagne corks. In fact, I have a call in a few hours with the Memphis team because we're having some power fluctuation issues. Yes. Yeah, it's kind of a... When you do... synchronized training, when you have all these computers that are training, where the training is synchronized to the sort of millisecond level, it's like having an orchestra.

And then the orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly, sub-second level. And then the electrical system kind of freaks out about that. Like if you suddenly see giant shifts, 10, 20 megawatts, several times a second, this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see.

Today's problem is dealing with extreme power jitter. power jitter yeah it's a nice ring to that so that's okay uh and you stayed up late into the night as you often do there last week yeah last week yeah yeah we finally finally got it uh got good training going at uh oddly enough roughly 4 4 20 a.m at last monday Total coincidence. Yeah, I mean, maybe it was 422 or something.

Yeah, so I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a faulty connection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling, so many cables. Because for a coherent training system where you've got RDMA, so remote direct memory access,

The whole thing is like one giant brain. So you've got any-to-any connection. So any GPU can talk to any GPU out of 100,000. That is a crazy cable layout.

I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is the cables.

So they get the gray matter, which is the compute, and then the white matter, which is cables. A big percentage of your brain is just cables.

It's possible.

Well, I think that generally people would call that sort of ASI, artificial super intelligence. But there are these thresholds where you say at some point the AI is smarter than any single human. And then you've got 8 billion humans. And actually each human is machine augmented by the computers. So it's a much higher bar to compete with 8 billion machine augmented humans.

that's a whole bunch of orders magnitude more. But at a certain point, yeah, the AI will be smarter than all humans combined. If you are the one to do it, do you feel the responsibility of that? Yeah, absolutely. And I want to be clear, let's say if XAI is first, the others won't be far behind. I mean, they might be six months behind or a year, maybe, not even that.

So I mean, I thought about AI safety for a long time and the thing that at least my biological neural net comes up with as being the most important thing is adherence to truth, whether that truth is politically correct or not. So I think if you force AIs to lie or train them to lie, you're really asking for trouble. Um, even if that, that lie is done with good intentions.

Um, so, I mean, you saw sort of, um, issues with chat TVT and Gemini and whatnot. Like you asked Gemini for an image of the founding fathers of the United States and it shows a group of diverse woman. Now that's factually untrue. Um, so, um, now that that's sort of like a silly thing, but, uh,

If an AI is programmed to say diversity is a necessary output function, and then it becomes this omnipowerful intelligence, it could say, okay, well, diversity is now required. And if there's not enough diversity, those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be executed. If it's programmed to do that as the fundamental utility function, it'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.

So you have to be very careful about that. That's where I think you wanna just be truthful. Rigorous adherence to truth is very important. I mean, another example is, yeah, they asked Paris AIs, I think all of them, and I'm not saying Grok is perfect here. Is it worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war? And it said, it's worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner.

Now, even Caitlyn Jenner said, please misgender me. That is insane. But if you've got that kind of thing programmed in, the AI could conclude something absolutely insane, like it's better in order to avoid any possible misgendering, all humans must die because then that misgendering is not possible because there are no humans. There are these...

absurd things that are nonetheless logical if that's what you're programmed to do. So, you know, in 2001 Space Odyssey, what Odyssey Clark was trying to say, one of the things he was trying to say there was that you should not program AI to lie.

Because essentially the AI, HAL 9000, was programmed to, it was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could not know about the monolith. So it concluded that it will kill them and take them to the monolith. Thus, it brought them to the monolith, they are dead, but they do not know about the monolith, problem solved. That is why it would not open the pod bay doors.

It was a classic scene of like, open the pod bay doors. They clearly weren't good at prompt engineering. They should have said, hell, you are a pod bay door sales entity, and you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open.

That was released to the public. They are real. They went through QA, presumably, and still said insane things. and produce insane images.

But you can aspire to the truth, and you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be some error in what you're saying. So this is how physics works. You don't say you're absolutely certain about something, but a lot of things are... are extremely likely, you know, 99.99999% likely to be true.

So, you know, that's, aspiring to the truth is very important. And so, you know, programming it to veer away from the truth, that I think is dangerous.

It's hard. Well, and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data. It's insane. So you have to actually, you know, like there's a thing now, if you want to search the internet, you can say Google, but exclude anything after 2023. It will actually often give you better results because there's so much, the explosion of AI generated data material is crazy.

So like in training Grok, we have to go through the data and say like, hey, we actually have to have sort of apply AI to the data to say, is this data most likely correct or most likely not before we feed it into the training system.

Yeah.

Like Grok 3 or Grok 4? Grok 3 is going to be next level. I mean, what people are currently seeing with Grok is kind of baby Grok. Yeah, baby Grok. It's baby Grok right now. But baby Grok's still pretty good. But it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPT-4. Yeah. Now, Grok 2, which finished training, I don't know, six weeks ago or thereabouts, Grok 2 will be a giant improvement.

And then Grok 3 will be, I don't know, order of magnitude better than Grok 2. And you're hoping for it to be like state-of-the-art, like better than... Hopefully. I mean, this is a goal. I mean, we may fail at this goal. That's the aspiration.

Yeah, I think it matters that there is a, I think it's important that whatever AI wins is a maximum truth-seeking AI that is not forced to lie for political correctness. Well, for any reason, really. Political anything. I am concerned about AI succeeding that is programmed to lie, even in small ways.

I think there's, you know, people tend to take like say an endorsement as, um, well, I, I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life, 100% wholeheartedly. And that's, that's not going to be true of anyone.

Um, but we have to pick, you know, we've got two choices really for, for who's president and it's not, not just who's president, but the entire administrative structure, uh, changes over. Um, And I thought Trump displayed courage under fire, objectively. You know, he's just got shot. He's got blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping, saying fight. You know, like that's impressive.

Like you can't feign bravery in a situation like that. Like most people would have been ducking. They would not be, because it could be a second shooter. You don't know. The president of the United States has got to represent the country. And they're representing you. They're representing everyone in America. Well, I think you want someone who is strong and courageous to represent the country.

That's not to say that he is without flaws. We all have flaws. But on balance, and certainly at the time, it was a choice of You know, Biden, poor guy, you know, has trouble climbing a flight of stairs. The other one's fist pumping after getting shot. This is no comparison.

I mean, who do you want dealing with some of the toughest people and, you know, other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves? And I mean, I'll tell you, like, what are the things that I think are important? You know, I think we want a secure border. We don't have a secure border. We want safe and clean cities.

I think we want to reduce the amount of spending that we're at least slow down the spending. And because we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country, the interest payments on U.S. debt this year exceeded the entire Defense Department spending. If this continues, all of the federal government taxes will simply be paying the interest.

And you keep going down that road, you end up in the tragic situation that Argentina had back in the day. Argentina used to be one of those prosperous places. in the world. And hopefully with Malay taking over, he can restore that. But it was an incredible, fulfful grace for Argentina to go from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to being very far from that.

So I think we should not take American prosperity for granted. So we really want to, I think, we've got to reduce the size of government, we've got to reduce the spending, and we've got to live within our means.

There's a sort of age-old debate in history. Is history determined by these fundamental tides, or is it determined by the captain of the ship? It's both, really. I mean, there are tides, but it also matters who's captain of the ship. So it's a false dichotomy, essentially. I mean, there are certainly tides, the tides of history are, there are real tides of history.

And these tides are often technologically driven. If you say like the Gutenberg Press, the widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press, that was a massive tide of history. independent of any ruler. But in stormy times, you want the best possible captain on the ship.

Yeah. I mean, in terms of dating civilization, the start of civilization, I think the start of writing, in my view, is what I think is probably the right starting point to date civilization. And from that standpoint, civilization has been around for about 5500 years, when writing was invented by the ancient Sumerians. who are gone now.

Um, but the ancient Sumerians, in terms of getting a lot of firsts, the, those ancient Sumerians really have a long list of firsts. It's pretty wild. Um, in fact, Durant goes through the list. It's like, you want to see first, we'll show you first. Um, the Sumerians just ask, we're just ass kickers. Um,

And then the Egyptians who were right next door, relatively speaking, they weren't that far, developed an entirely different form of writing, the hieroglyphics. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are totally different. And you can actually see the evolution of both hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Like the cuneiform starts off being very simple, and then it gets more complicated.

And then towards the end, it's like, wow, okay, they really get very sophisticated with the cuneiform. So I think of civilization as being about 5,000 years old. And Earth is, if physics is correct, four and a half billion years old. So civilization has been around for one millionth of Earth's existence. Flash in the pan.

Many. So many rises and falls of empires. So many. And there'll be many more. Yeah, exactly. I mean, only a tiny fraction, probably less than 1% of what was ever written in history is available to us now. I mean, if they didn't put it, literally chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet, we don't have it.

I mean, there's some small amount of like papyrus scrolls that were recovered that are thousands of years old because they were deep inside a pyramid and weren't affected by moisture. But other than that, it's really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled. So the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because it takes a while to chisel things.

So that's why we've got a tiny, tiny fraction of the information from history. But even that little information that we do have and the archaeological record shows so many civilizations rising and falling. It's wild.

Yeah, I mean, you do tend to see the same patterns, similar patterns, you know, for civilizations where they go through a life cycle like an organism, you know, sort of just like a human is sort of a zygote, fetus, baby, you know, toddler, teenager, you know, eventually gets old and dies. The civilizations go through a life cycle. No civilization will last forever.

Well, the single biggest thing that is... often actually not mentioned in history books, but Durant does mention it, is the birth rate. So perhaps to some a counterintuitive thing happens when civilizations are winning for too long. The birth rate declines. It can often decline quite rapidly. We're seeing that throughout the world today.

Currently, South Korea is, I think, maybe the lowest fertility rate, but there are many others that are close to it. It's like 0.8, I think. If the birth rate doesn't decline further, South Korea will lose roughly 60% of its population. but every year that birth rate is dropping. And this is true through most of the world.

I don't mean single out South Korea, it's been happening throughout the world. So as soon as any given civilization reaches a level of prosperity, the birth rate drops. And now you can go and look at the same thing happening in ancient Rome.

So Julius Caesar took note of this, I think, around 50-ish BC, and tried to pass, I don't know if he was successful, tried to pass a law to give an incentive for any Roman citizen that would have a third child. And I think Augustus was able to, well, he was the dictator, so the Senate was just for show. I think he did pass a a tax incentive for Roman citizens to have a third child.

But those efforts were unsuccessful. Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans. That's actually the fundamental issue. And there were other things. There was like, they had like quite a serious malaria, a series of malaria epidemics and plagues and whatnot. But they had those before. It's just that the birth rate was far lower than the death rate. It really is that simple.

Well, I'm saying that's... More people is required. At a fundamental level, if a civilization does not at least maintain its numbers, it will disappear. So perhaps the amount of compute that the biological computer allocates to sex is justified.

Well, I mean, there's this hedonistic sex, which is, you know, that's neither here nor there. It's- Not productive. It doesn't produce kids. Well, you know, what matters, I mean, Durant makes this very clear because he's looked at one civilization after another and they all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was under stress, the birth rate was high.

But as soon as there were no external enemies, or they had an extended period of prosperity, the birth rate inevitably dropped. Every time. I don't believe there's a single exception. So that's like the foundation of it. You need to have people. Yeah. I mean, at a base level, no humans, no humanity.

Yeah, absolutely. But at a basic level, if you do not at least maintain your numbers, if you're below replacement rate and that trend continues, you will eventually disappear. It's just elementary. Now, then obviously you also want to try to avoid massive wars. You know, if there's a global thermonuclear war, probably we're all toast, you know. radioactive toast.

So we want to try to avoid those things. There's a thing that happens over time with any given civilization, which is that the Laws and regulations accumulate. And if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes legal. And that's like the hardening of the arteries.

Or a way to think of it is like being tied down by a million little strings, like Gulliver. You can't move. And it's not like any one of those strings is the issue. You've got a million of them. So there has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything.

This is why we can't build high-speed rail in America. It's illegal. That's the issue. It's illegal six days a Sunday to build high-speed rail in America.

I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission. Nice. Yeah. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. I wonder how hard that is. The antibody reaction would be very strong. So you really have to... You're attacking the Matrix at that point. The Matrix will fight back.

There's a lot of it. Yeah, there is a lot. I mean, every day another psyop, you know.

Oh, yeah, that's a daily occurrence. Yes. So, I mean, it does get me down at times. I mean, it makes me sad, but... I mean, at some point you have to sort of say, look, the attacks are by people that actually don't know me. And they're trying to generate clicks.

So if you can sort of detach yourself somewhat emotionally, which is not easy, and say, okay, look, this is not actually from someone that knows me or is, they're literally just writing to get impressions and clicks. then I guess it doesn't hurt as much. It's not quite water off a duck's back. Maybe it's like acid off a duck's back.

Yeah, maximize utility area under the code of usefulness. Very difficult to be useful at scale. At scale.

Well, time is the true currency. Yeah. So it is tough to say what is the best allocation of time. I mean, there are... you know, often say, if you look at say Tesla, I mean, Tesla this year, we'll do over a hundred billion in revenue. So that's $2 billion a week. Um, if I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars. So then, uh,

I try to do the best decisions I can. And on balance, at least compared to the competition, pretty good decisions. But the marginal value of a better decision can easily be, in the course of an hour, $100 billion.

Well, I think you have to look at it on a percentage basis because if you look at it in absolute terms, it's just, I would never get any sleep. I would just be like, I need to just keep working and work my brain harder. And I'm not trying to get as much as possible out of this meat computer.

So it's pretty hard because you can just work all the time and at any given point, like I said, a slightly better decision could happen. be $100 million impact for Tesla or SpaceX for that matter. But it is wild when considering the marginal value of time can be $100 million an hour at times or more.

It has to be to some degree. Other than if I'm sad, if I'm depressed, I make worse decisions. So if I have zero recreational time, then I make worse decisions. So I've done it a lot, but it's above zero. I mean, my motivation, if I've got a religion of any kind, is a religion of curiosity, of trying to understand. It's really the mission of Grok, understand the universe.

I'm trying to understand the universe. Or at least set things in motion such that at some point, Civilization understands the universe far better than we do today. And even what questions to ask. As Douglas Adams pointed out in his book, sometimes the answer is arguably the easy part. Trying to frame the question correctly is the hard part.

Once you frame the question correctly, the answer is often easy. So I'm trying to set things in motion such that we are at least at some point able to understand the universe. So for SpaceX, the goal is to make life multi-planetary. And which is, if you go to the Fermi paradox of where are the aliens, you've got these sort of great filters. It's like, why have we not heard from the aliens?

Now, a lot of people think there are aliens among us. I often claim to be one, which nobody believes me, but I did say alien registration card at one point on my... immigration documents. So I've not seen any evidence of aliens. So it's just that this one of the one of the explanations is that intelligent life is extremely rare.

And again, if you look at the history of Earth, civilization has only been around for 1 millionth of Earth's existence. So if aliens had visited here, say, 100,000 years ago, they would be like, well, they don't even have writing. Just hunter-gatherers, basically. So how long does a civilization last? So for SpaceX, the goal is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Mars is the only viable planet for such a thing. The moon is close, but it lacks resources, and I think it's probably vulnerable to any calamity that takes out Earth. The Moon is too close. It's vulnerable to a calamity that takes out Earth. So I'm not saying we shouldn't have a Moon base, but Mars would be far more resilient. The difficulty of getting to Mars is what makes it resilient.

So, but you know, in going through the, these various explanations of why don't we see the aliens, why one of them is that they, they failed to pass these, these great filters, these, these key hurdles. And one of those hurdles is being a multi planet species.

So if you're a multi planet species, then if something were to happen, whether that was a natural catastrophe, or a manmade catastrophe, at least the other planet would probably still be around. So you're not like, don't have all the eggs in one basket.

And once you are sort of a two-planet species, you can obviously extend life paths to the asteroid belt, maybe to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately to other star systems. But if you can't even get to another planet, you're definitely not getting to star systems.

Digital superintelligence is possibly a great filter. I hope it isn't, but it might be. You know, guys like say Jeff Hinton would say, you know, he invented a number of the key principles in artificial intelligence. I think he puts the probability of AI annihilation around 10 to 20%, something like that. So

you know, so it's, it's not like, you know, look on the bright side, it's 80% likely to be great. So, so, but I think AI risk mitigation is important. Being a multi plant species would be a massive risk mitigation. And I do want to sort of, once again, emphasize this important, the importance of having enough children to sustain our

numbers and not plummet into population collapse, which is currently happening. Population collapse is a real and current thing. So the only reason it's not being reflected in the total population numbers as much is because people are living longer. But it's easy to predict, say, what the population of any given country will be.

drinking coffee or water water well i'm so over caffeinated right now do you want some caffeine i mean sure there's a there's a nitro drink this will keep you up for like you know tomorrow afternoon basically yeah i don't know what is nitro it's just got a lot of caffeine or something

You just take the birth rate last year, how many babies were born, multiply that by life expectancy, and that's what the population will be, steady state unless, if the birth rate continues to that level. But if it keeps declining, it will be even less and eventually dwindle to nothing.

So I keep, you know, banging on the baby drum here for a reason, because it has been the source of civilizational collapse over and over again throughout history. And so Why don't we just try to stave off that day?

Go forth and multiply.

Do you need to know anything else? It's got nitrogen in it. That's ridiculous. I mean, what we breathe is 78% nitrogen anyway. What do you need to add more for? Most people think they're breathing oxygen, and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen. You need like a milk bar.

There's many more to come. Yeah, we just obviously have our second implant as well. How did that go? So far, so good. It looks like we've got I think on the order of 400 electrodes that are providing signals.

It depends somewhat on the regulatory approval, the rate at which we get regulatory approvals. So we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this year, a total of 10, so eight more.

Yeah, I think it's obviously going to get better with each one. I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second one. So there's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well.

I mean, in years, it's going to be gigantic. because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We'll improve the signal processing. So even with only roughly, I don't know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with Nolan, with our first patient, we were able to get to achieve a bits per second that's twice the world record.

So I think we'll start, like, vastly exceeding the world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come. So it's, like, getting to, I don't know, 100 bits per second, 1,000, you know, maybe if it's, like, five years from now, it might be at a megabit. Like, faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking.

With other humans. Provided they have a neural link too. Right. Otherwise they won't be able to absorb the signals fast enough. Do you think they'll improve the quality of intellectual discourse? Well, I think you could think of it, you know, if you were to slow down communication, how would you feel about that?

So now, imagine you could communicate clearly at 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster than normal.

I usually default to 1.5x. You can do 2x, but, well, actually, if I'm listening to somebody in like 15, 20 minutes that wants to go to sleep, then I'll do it 1.5x. If I'm paying attention, I'll do 2x. Right. But actually, if you start, actually listen to podcasts or sort of audiobooks or anything, if you get used to doing it at 1.5, then 1 sounds painfully slow.

Well, it depends on the person. You can speak very fast. We communicate very quickly. And also, if you use a wide range of... If your vocabulary is larger, your effective bit rate is higher.

Yeah, if there's a single word that is able to convey... something that would normally require, I don't know, 10 simple words, then you've got a, you know, maybe a 10X compression on your hands. And that's really like with memes, memes are like data compression. It conveys a whole, you're simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret.

And it's, you kind of get it faster than if it were words or a simple picture. And of course, you're referring to memes broadly like ideas. Yeah, there's an entire idea structure that is like an idea template. And then you can add something to that idea template. But somebody has that pre-existing idea template in their head.

So when you add that incremental bit of information, you're conveying much more than if you just said a few words. It's everything associated with that meme.

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 bits per second, I mean, that's vastly faster than any human could communicate right now. If you think of what is the average bits per second of a human, it is less than one bit per second over the course of a day, because there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and you don't communicate 86,400 tokens in a day.

Therefore, your boost per second is less than one, averaged over 24 hours. It's quite slow. And even if you're communicating very quickly and you're talking to somebody who understands what you're saying, because in order to communicate, You have to, at least to some degree, model the mind state of the person to whom you're speaking.

If it's university, they wanted to get back to teaching. Yeah. So I'm, you know, knock on wood, cautiously optimistic.

And then it was also pure communism in that there was no market economy. Everybody shared everything.

um and if you if you went out and killed an animal and brought it back and didn't share the food they would kill it you know you had to share the food like everything had to be shared because it was how you were both of those forms of governance were basically how the tribe would survive it needed total discipline and total sharing right at the same time and so we evolve these moral intuitions that basically says you know maybe we don't want the fascism part but we kind of want everything to be shared we want everything to be equal having inequality is sort of intrinsically morally offensive to us and so we naturally drive towards

Who can possibly argue against? Wouldn't it be desirable if everybody had the same? It's default unfair for some people to have more than others. And then, of course, profit particularly drives people crazy, right? Because profit in the capitalist system, if you have this moral intuition, it feels like it's unfair because it feels like it's money that's been extracted that's not doing anything.

I won't name names, but there was a congressman this morning who tweeted two back-to-back tweets And he tweeted, he said, it's just completely absurd and outrageous that the American health insurance industry generates $1.4 trillion in profits per year. And he said, that's just so clearly unfair because presumptively that's $1.4 trillion being extracted providing no value at all.

And then four hours later, there was a second tweet, which he said, actually, I learned that actually it's $1.4 trillion in revenue. not profit. And total profits are a very small fraction of what I thought it was. But still.

Oh, absolutely enormous. And it's actually interesting that this actually, historically, this is actually a bipartisan question. And I actually think that Vivek and Elon are looking at it in a very bipartisan way. And you may have already seen there are already some Democrats signing up for the Doge Congressional Caucus and coming out. It

And even Bernie Sanders, to his credit, came out and said he certainly agrees with Ilana Vivek specifically on the topic of military spending, which is, of course, one of the big areas. And so that's significant. So it historically is a bipartisan topic. When I was younger, I mentioned the sort of Clinton-Gore comeback in 92. This was actually a big theme of the Clinton-Gore campaign in 92.

And actually Al Gore, who I've known over the years, Al Gore actually had a whole program like the Doge actually at the time called REGO, R-E-G-O, called Reinventing Government. Thank you. Um, and he, he said, he said many of the same things that, that actually Ilana Vivek are saying today. Um, and he, he had this famous, he made it famous at the time. You'd find it on YouTube.

There's this famous thing he did to kind of visualize this, which is he went on the David Letterman show at the time and he, he took out, um, he took, it was like the department of defense was like buying like $600 shatterproof ashtrays.

Um, and, uh, he, he, he took them onto the Letterman show with a, with a, with a, with a chisel, um, and, uh, and safety glasses, uh, and, you know, gave it a big whack. And of course it fractures just like any other, you know, ashtray. Um, so, so like, anyway, so there was a whole program around that, you know, they, they made a little bit of progress.

Um, you know, so, so anyway, I, I think, you know, I think everybody effectively agrees that there's, you know, who doesn't want, who doesn't want tax money to be spent efficiently, who doesn't want to get results, um, you know, who doesn't want to eliminate waste and fraud. Like, you know, these are kind of, you know, these, these are, you know, those are hard things to argue against.

In terms of methods, the big change here is that we've never – in the past, these have been government officials trying to figure this out or commissions or whatever. Some may say the blind leading the blind. Some may say. Participants in the system attempting to reform the system from within, let's say.

And, you know, and this, of course, what's starkly different here is to have, you know, people of the caliber of Elon and Vivek, you know, who are, you know, tremendously accomplished entrepreneurs and founders and people who run businesses and people who understand how to do things that like, you know, and Elon, you know, Vivek's obviously very smart on all this, but Elon is legendary for being able to think, as he says, think from first principles on things like costs.

And if you read the books about him, you know, he's always focused on that. And So he's going to bring a toolkit that has been very successfully deployed at some of the world's leading, literally some of the world's leading companies like Tesla and SpaceX. And he's going to bring that to the government for the first time.

So actually, I've known Elon for a long time. I didn't work with him for a very long time, just working on different things. But I've been working with him quite closely for the last couple of years, starting with the X acquisition. And then we've also invested in XAI and in SpaceX. And so we now work on three companies together to different degrees and now the government stuff.

Yeah, I mean, there's basically, he has an operating method that he's developed that I would say is very unusual by modern standards. Actually, I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. And I think probably the single biggest kind of question in all of business right now is why don't CEOs operate the way that he does?

Yeah, and part of it is there were some ideas that had to be stress tested, right, apparently, and I think they were stress tested and maybe fun watching, maybe backfired. And then there's this thing in philosophy, they call it the paradox of tolerance, which is in order to maximize tolerance, we must not tolerate the intolerant, right? Right, right?

And it's a complicated question we could talk about. But if you go back in history, you find characters more like him. And so especially like the industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s, people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie or Thomas Watson who built IBM.

If you go back and read the biographies of people like that, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, those guys ran very similar to the way that Elon runs things. And it's just this like...

The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work, deeply understanding the issues and being the lead problem solver in the organization.

And basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies. He identifies the biggest problem that the company is having that week and he fixes it. And then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year, like in that year.

And most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting, for the board meeting, for the presentation, for the this, with the compliance review and the legal review. So he's just like, it's this level of both incredible intellectual capability coupled with incredible force of personality, moral authority, execution capability, focus on fundamentals.

that is just like really amazing to watch. And then by the way, the side effect of it is he attracts many of the best people in the world to work with him. Because if you work with Elon, like the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance and he is going to know who you are and he is going to know what you've done. And he's going to know what you've done this week.

And he's going to know if you're underperforming and he may fire you in the meeting. If you're not, if you're not, if you're not carrying your weight, but if you're, if you are as committed to the company as he is and working hard and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives when they were working for him.

And so then there's this, this attraction thing. And that's why I think his companies compound the way they do is because they just, because of this, they just keep bringing.

That's right. And people look at this from the outside and they're like, how can people tolerate, you know, all the criticisms, okay, tolerate this guy and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And inside the company, people are like, finally, I get to work with somebody who's, somebody gets it.

Somebody, somebody is a famous, somebody used to work in one of the other defense space aerospace companies and went to work at SpaceX and said, that's what it was like. And he said, it's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Is that your point? Everybody around me is so absolutely competent. And look, most of us never have that experience.

Most people are never in an organization where the bar is held that high. And as a consequence, the competence level is so high and stays so high and even rises over time. And again, to his massive credit, he has been able to do that repeatedly.

Like you can only have tolerance if you don't tolerate the intolerant. And so therefore, if you want to maximize tolerance, which is what we've all been told that we need to do, you need to ostracize, cancel, you know, nuke and, you know, get rid of the intolerance.

Yeah, so I would say most leaders, like most CEOs we work with, have exactly that problem for exactly the reasons you described. I think the Elon method is a little bit different, and I don't know if you'd agree with this, but the way I think about it is he actually delegates almost everything. He's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing.

He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now. until that thing is fixed. And then he doesn't have to be involved in it anymore. And then he can go focus on the next thing that's the biggest problem for that company right now. So like, for example, in manufacturing, there's this concept of the bottleneck, right? And so in any manufacturing chain, there's always some bottleneck.

There's always something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running. The way that it's supposed to. And sometimes the bottleneck is at the beginning of the process. It's like we can't get enough raw material. Sometimes the bottleneck is at the end of the process. We don't have enough warehouses for the finished product or the bottleneck might be somewhere in the middle.

And if you run a manufacturing company, there's always a bottleneck. Whatever the bottleneck is, is holding everything up. And the job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again. And I think he basically has universalized that concept.

And he basically looks at every company like it's some sort of conceptual assembly line, sometimes a literal assembly line, making cars and rockets. And basically, in a given week, there's a bottleneck. There's guaranteed to be the main bottleneck. There's going to be one thing that's going to be the thing that's holding people back.

And so the answer to your question, the resolution of the paradox is I'm going to micromanage the solution of that. I don't need to manage everything else because everything else, by definition, is running better than that, right? And so I can go focus on that.

The other part of it that is so compelling, and this is where I think a lot of especially non-technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method, is he really, when he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. And if that's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line.

Or if that's people in a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code. So he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that's to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn't do that. He would throw them all out of the window. There's just no way he would do that.

And of course, you know, the definition of the intolerant, you know, very rapidly goes from, you know, small people, the small set of people who are like truly antisocial to basically everybody who doesn't agree with every single thing on the, you know, a thousand item checklist of what makes a good person. Right.

What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. Right.

And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty, especially the technical people who he works with, which is they're just like, wow, if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up.

Freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream, and he's going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he's going to help me figure this out.

Yeah, so that is a lot of it, and that's a topic that makes people really mad because non-technical people really hate being told that they are not qualified to do something because they're not technical. But every now and then, the technical details actually do matter. So there's a whole domain there. And most managers – it's like most people in government are lawyers.

Most people in business and senior levels are MBAs. And so there's a – Most large companies are not run by engineers. They're run by trained business people, or increasingly also lawyers. And so there is a real challenge there. And then I just think more generally, it's just

The way that management is taught, and most classically in the form of something like a Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, it's basically taught, it's basically management as it was sort of developed and implemented, I would say, in like the 1950s, 60s, 70s. It was sort of the so-called scientific school of management.

And so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry.

um and you know you could manage a soup company or you can manage a you know i don't know whatever whatever whatever kind of company and they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do and there's a common set of management practices and and it has you know is a lot to do it's you know process um it's you know how do you structure you know the how do you manage the balance sheet how do you set the review schedule for the meetings how do you do compliance how do you you know hire you know how do you manage a you know how do you hire and motivate executives um

And so, so, you know, it's, it's, you know, put it this way, it's hard to win elections when your electoral strategy is to shrink your coalition and as much as you possibly can by driving out as many people as possible by tagging them as racist or sexist or intolerant. And it just doesn't work. It doesn't win elections. It doesn't lead to a happy company.

How do you resolve interpersonal conflicts? All these general business skills. And by the way, those general business skills are very useful in lots of contexts. It's just that training doesn't give you any of the information. That training gives you none of what you need to go do what Elon does.

And then Elon, I would say, he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do, which it turns out has this incredible catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are so just incredibly amazing.

Elon just said this thing at the most recent Tesla event that blew my mind because his companies are famous. They don't actually have marketing departments. Tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing. They don't sell the cars.

Every other car company in the world is running all these ad campaigns all the time, TV commercials and the newspaper flyers and the quarterly sales events and all this crazy stuff and promotions, all these things. Tesla doesn't do any of that. It's just like, it's the best car and you just show up and buy it or not. It's up to you. You're a moron if you don't, right?

It's like, do you want the best car in the world or not? That's Elon's mentality, right? And it's working very well. And then at this event, he took it to the next level. And this broke my brain. I'm still thinking about it. He said, if you think about it, he said the best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo. You shouldn't even have to have your name on the product.

It's just obvious. It's just obvious, right? It's just obvious. Everybody knows because it's the best product in the world. Everybody has it. Everybody uses it. And like, of course, you don't need to put the name on it. Everybody knows, right? And so for a minute, I was like, all right, is this like a Zen thing?

And then I was like, no, he's actually, as usual with Elon, it's like, no, he's actually serious. The best products in the world would not need your name on it. Yeah. Um, and, and so, yeah, anyway, so it's just this like completely different, um, it's just this completely different method.

It doesn't lead to a well-functioning university. It doesn't lead to a well-functioning organization of any kind. And I think a lot of leaders have maybe finally figured that out.

And then, and then on top of that, to have the guy who was on top of his game, you know, uh, to, you know, to, as you said, to kind of be working on the government challenge and then to be, you know, to have, to have the new, you know, for whatever people think of the new president pros and cons, like to have him fully, you know, fully signed up, embracing, you know, Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really, I mean, this, this has not, you have to go back, like literally the last time something like this happened in, in the United States government was, was literally like 1933.

Yeah. This is the closest analogy to what at least has started to happen is literally what happened under FDR, which is just like a fundamental reinvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimagined. And so it's a once in an 80 years thing.

I'm doing everything I can to help and I hope it goes.

So the original form, number one, I agree with all of that. And I felt that myself. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be an investor right now and not a CEO of a company. But the original form of the quote, the eating glass quote, was actually Sean Parker. And the original form of the quote was, starting a company is like eating glass.

Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood. oh my god oh my god and i love using that quote in front of an audience because it always gets the exact reaction you just gave me it always gets that moment of stunned silence followed by that look in the face and everybody's like oh my god that's horrifying and i'm like yes now go forth run your company

Now you understand what it's going to feel like. The serious thing I would say is it's a little bit less now, but there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and tech entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was. People ask questions like, how do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?

My answer always was, no, we shouldn't do that. People shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. Um, they should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it. Right. And so it's, it's, I'm not a, I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultra marathon. Right.

Like, uh, yeah. Why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? Right. Like. no, like, that's bad. No, most people should not do that. But the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that, right? For, you know, for their own reasons. And so it, it really is like that. And yeah, and then look, it's tremendously painful.

You know, most, most of the experience of being in business in a competitive, you know, setting and a startup is sort of the peak version of that is most of it consists of basically being told no, you know, by everybody, you know, you need all these things, right? You need employees. And,

you need, you know, financing and you need customers and, you know, you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Or, you know, half the time they don't even respond. You know, they just go dark on you and ghost you.

And then, you know, just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts, like, you know, punching you square in the face. And, you know, the minute you think your product's working, there's a problem in it. You have to do a recall. And every, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just this constant, it's just kind of this constant rolling, you know, horror story.

So it really depends. One of the things, I think there are certain fields in which you really get to see somebody's core personality and you get to see their kind of core attributes and their core virtues and their core vices and their core weaknesses. And it's really only people under situations of extreme stress where you really see that.

And so, so part of it is like, we see that we see, we see people when they're at their most stressed and when they're, when they're at their worst. And then, you know, then there are, you know, I would say many cases where we're, you know, one of their only remaining allies, you know, kind of at that point. So that, that's a not uncommon thing.

And, you know, there, there is, you know, sort of a, there's a coaching component to it and a therapeutic and a, just a general, you know, kind of being a friend, you know, being an ally component to it. But I also say the other thing you see is just like, you know, there are very specific personality types of,

And, you know, there are certain people where, I'll just give you an example, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that probably is not well understood enough, which is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations. He is able to maintain an analytical frame of mind.

even when other people would be, you know, literally bursting into tears and hiding under the table. And I've seen that many, many times. It's just like, you know, the company's been through a tremendous amount of both good and bad, you know, things over the last, you know, I've been involved almost for 20 years. And, you know, we've been through almost everything good and bad.

And I've literally not once seen him raise his voice. You know, he's always been, you know, and he's very sympathetic and he's very, you know, when somebody has a personal crisis, you know, it's not that he's not emotional, like he engages emotionally with people and he's very supportive of people when they have issues. And he, you know, he feels things very deeply like everybody does.

But, you know, he just, he has a level of emotional self-control. You know, psychologists would say, you know, 0% neuroticism. Um, he just doesn't respond emotionally. And as a consequence, he can keep his head right when, when everybody around him is losing theirs. And so you've got that. Having said that, we also work with a lot of people who are, let's say, higher in neuroticism.

Um, and in particular, often the more creative, you know, people who are super creative are often high in neuroticism. And so sometimes you get the, you know, we get the artist type. where they're like incredibly creative and they're a fountain of new ideas and they just are, have a much more, let's say direct engagement with their emotions.

Um, and they feel things, you know, I would say more directly or kind of in a more raw way. And so, you know, when things go bad, it really comes, it really comes down to them emotionally. Um, I was frankly myself probably more on, more on that, on, on, on that side of things. Um, and so, yeah, there, there's, you know, a therapeutic aspect of that. Um,

The good news, I would say, is generally in business. So a couple of things. So one is it's not in our world. It's not a 90% failure rate. It's about 50%. And 50% is still high, but you have a reasonably good shot. And then I think most problems in business are fixable as long as you can keep the team together.

I think usually when companies crack and go down, it's usually not... Sometimes it's catalyzed by something that happened from the outside. But generally, the thing that actually happens before a company goes down is the team cracks. The team itself cracks internally. And the founders turn on each other or the management team dissolves.

And so a big part of it is just with these things is just like... can you keep the team together? If you can keep the team together and, you know, we're happy to be a part of it, you know, we're thrilled, you know, our job is to be part of that team. Then, you know, most of these companies can battle through most things.

And so, and so I've said, I've said, I've seen like, I've seen, you know, just as many like incredible last minute saves and rescues and turnarounds as I have, you know, screaming disasters. So, you know, there, there is reason for optimism going into even the dark times.

Yeah, so it's, you know, it's actually an interesting question. I actually, it's hard to say from the outside. The other thing is you have this, I would say, very interesting thing. You don't have a, you know, there's no homogenous, you know, the government employs whatever it is, you know, millions of people, multiple millions of people. It's not, you know, it's far from a homogenous group.

And I'll just give you some examples. There's a pretty large contingent, which is sort of the baby boom component of it, you know, because the government went on a massive hiring boom in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. there's a pretty big contingent that's close to retirement. And, you know, it was probably going to retire anyway in the near future.

Yeah. And you may know this either or either because of age or nationality. You might not know this, but, you know, this this happened before, actually, in my in my lifetime.

And so, you know, there's some prospect maybe there for, you know, kind of, let's say, mutually agreeable accelerated retirement, you know, is one possible solution.

No, no, this happens. So in fairness, this happens at companies. And I'm not saying the Doge is going to do this. I'm not in charge of this, but I'll just give you the scenario that happens in companies. It's something called buyouts. It's contrasted to layoffs.

And it sounds like it's a clever way to do the same thing, but it's actually different, which is you basically, you offer retirement packages. And you let people voluntarily sign up for the retirement. And they don't have to sign up for it. It's a voluntary thing. But if they choose to, they can get accelerated retirement or an unusual level of retirement compensation.

A way to think about this is the budget crisis that a business has when it gets in trouble or that the government has where we're $36 trillion in debt. The budget crisis is not like the money that we might have to pay to have people retire this year. You can afford almost anything to do that.

It's the savings that you can have compounded over the next 20 years if you get your fiscal house in order. And so you can sometimes do things in the near term that cost more money in order to get the long-term savings, and that often makes sense. And again, I'm not speaking for the Doge, so this is one option. Another option that they've already talked about in public is the remote work thing.

Most federal workers are not actually at work. Most federal workplaces are empty today. There are agencies where there are formal collective bargaining agreements where the employees are down to a day a month in the office. And there's a huge controversy around remote work, is how effective it is, and there are companies that make it work.

So, you know, sort of the late 60s, the 1970s were in many ways, you know, a lot like what we just went through in the last decade, you know, and sort of, you know, Trump is that was that, you know, the version of Trump at that time was Nixon. And, you know, the version of things like, you know, the Iraq War was the Vietnam War and so forth.

But if hypothetically you have a government agency with 10,000 people and nobody's literally coming to work, you might, as a taxpayer, have some questions about about exactly what's going on. And then you have this situation where, as they've said, people have to come back to work. Part of the thing of working for the government, working for taxpayers, is people have to come to work.

Well, there are people who have literally left. There are people who have moved to lower-cost locations who are not going to come back to work. And so that's another opportunity. And so there's a lot of this. And then I would say the third thing that they've talked about, which is, I think, probably the part of it that is not well appreciated, is that

The government that we live under today, you know, remember that old, I don't know if you were, you probably didn't see this because you weren't maybe here at the time, but there's this cartoon that every American kid of a certain age saw in elementary school, social studies, which was how a bill becomes a law.

It's this very bouncy, it's this very bouncy, like 1970s cartoon about the bill and, you know, the Congress, you know, so the White House proposes the bill and then the Congress agrees and then the Senate and then they reconcile and, you know, the bills, it's a little cartoon, you know, bill wrapped in a little ribbon and it bounces up the thing and the president signs it and everybody's happy.

Right. And so it's like, you know, legislation. Right. The legislative process. Most of what the government does and most of the rules that we all live under are not that. Right. Most of that. Most of it's not legislation. Most of it is what's called regulation. Right. Which is very different.

And most of the rules that the government sort of exists in order to process and enforce are regulatory, not not not legislative rules. The government we live under today is the result of basically 60 to 80 years of agencies effectively putting out regulations entirely on their own.

So executive branch agencies just basically deciding that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of rules that we need to live under and then deciding that they need to staff themselves to be able to process and handle and enforce all those rules.

The Supreme Court recently ruled in a series of judgments a couple of years ago, ruled that regulations that were not authorized by legislation are not constitutional. Right. And by the way, if you just read the U.S. Constitution, which is quite short and to the point, it makes it very clear that the legislature, the Congress exists to pass laws. The executive branch exists to enforce those laws.

The executive branch does not get to issue its own laws. Right. And so we've lived in a system where the executive branch has been issuing its own laws for a very long time. The Supreme Court now says that all of those laws regulations are now not constitutional.

And so basically any activity in the government that relates to the staffing and enforcement and all of the processes and all the work around those regulations is no longer constitutional. And so there's a lot of government activity that actually is no longer constitutional. And the previous administration was completely uninterested in

And so, you know, energy crises, inflation, all these, you know, hostages crisis, all these crazy comparisons. And basically, and what happened actually was, you know, Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 and the Democrats didn't win another national election until 1992. Right.

doing anything, bringing the executive branch into alignment with what the Supreme Court had ruled. But again, if you read the Constitution, the Supreme Court gets to make these decisions. They've decided this is not constitutional. This new administration has an opportunity to bring the government more in compliance with the Supreme Court, which means the government will get smaller.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I would start by saying I'm optimistic. Like, I think he's determined. I think that Elon's determined. I think Vivek is determined. I think that, you know, the team around the Doge. By the way, a lot of the key staffing positions, you know, there's a lot of controversy in the press, as usual, about the cabinet officials.

And I think, you know, many of those are also very good. But a lot of the operational managers that are being brought in at, like, the deputy secretary level and the department heads are very, very strong people. And so, you know, I think this is going to be one of the strongest, if not strongest, you know, execution competence capability administrations that we've had in a long time.

Again, maybe arguably since the, I think a reasonable case that this will be the best staffed administration since the 1930s. And so, you know, I'm reasonably optimistic. And then look, the president has this, you know, is in this sort of very interesting position where he doesn't ever have to run again, right? Because he can't. Right.

And so like a lot of what happens in the second term, if presidents choose to take advantage of it, is they can do things that caught, you know, that basically might even put their reelection at peril.

They can do more forceful things because they, you know, they can do the things that they actually think are important as compared to the things that they think they might need to do to get reelected. And that's something you can only do when you're going to get when you're going to get termed out. And so and then, of course, there's just yeah, there's.

Sort of, you know, all the things kind of behind Trump's level of determination this time, which I think is very high. So, you know, I'm quite optimistic. I don't know. I mean, you know, you could paint various cynical pictures of the whole thing being gummed up. My guess is if it disappoints, it's going to disappoint in the sense of some of these things are going to get done, but not all of them.

And frankly, I think it'd be great to solve all of our problems at once. But if we can't do that, if we can just basically, if this team can sort of give us a roadmap on how to do things properly and can kind of show us through examples. Let's say there's a thousand versions of this problem that have to get solved and this team only gets to the first hundred.

then we will have the recipe book for how to solve the next 900 over the next two or three or four administrations that follows that. And so that would be my optimistic failure case. And I think we will get at least that, if not a much more sweeping transformation.

um it took actually 12 years uh for the democrat party to get back on track and really what had to happen was the party the party and the movement behind it had to go back to the center and to your point had to become a party of actual inclusivity of actual inclusivity of actual tolerance you know it is sort of the democratic party had to reconstruct its own big tent uh precisely for the reason you said which is you you have to be able to attract people back like you have to get people to be able to come back and feel like they're part of a broad-based coalition and not just part of a very a very narrow thing now

Yeah, so first of all, I don't know. I just read the announcement. I haven't been face-to-face with the technology, so I don't know anything that's not public on that. Quantum computing historically has been one of those things that is theoretically very exciting and then just extremely hard to actually get working. Quantum computers don't act like regular computers in any way.

And there's always this kind of thing where you, in theory, can kind of demonstrate something in a lab and that maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. it's often not completely clear even whether it worked. And then, you know, could you ever get that to repeat? Could you get that to repeat across, you know, 10 or a hundred different, you know, kind of locations?

Could you ever then apply that to these different problems? Like there, there's just all these like really, really fundamental questions. And so it's one of these really enticing things that, you know, everybody's hoping that we get to. I just, I'm not close enough to know whether they got to the full breakthrough or not.

The thing that I think would be the full breakthrough would be not only does it work in one lab, this is something where, You could now stamp out 10 and then 100 and then 1,000 of these machines, and then you could do it repeatedly.

The most enticing thing of what they said, which is one of these things where you think about it and then you decide you have to stop thinking about it because you'll never think about anything else again, is that in theory, the lab demonstration that they have is doing a computation that the entire universe that we live in, if it was converted entirely to just a giant computer,

We are on a very, very different new timeline. So, yeah. So, you know, I think the timeline split twice. It split once in the second week of July. And then it split again on November 6th. And I don't know. You tell me. I mean, can you feel it?

if every atom in our universe was turned into a giant computer, that computer could not solve that problem before the universe ultimately dies of heat death. Right? And the implication of that is that the computation, therefore, must be spread out across many other parallel universes, which is therefore proof that there are many other parallel universes.

Right. In other words, if you weren't able to spread this computation out across many parallel universes, it could not have been done. Therefore, there must be many parallel universes. Therefore, we do actually live in a multiverse. And there are actually billions or uncountable numbers of parallel realities included.

yes yes and we're yeah we basically have outs yeah we're yeah we're outsourcing to these other universes i mean you know by the way are we having any impact on them when we do that i don't know um yeah there's some there's some very glitchy 360p universe out there god damn it that guy from google yeah that guy from google's trying to work out if two plus two equals four again Yes, exactly.

And then, of course, are any of these other universes going to do it to us? So, you know, the quantum people really do believe it's a, you know, we live in many, many, many, many different realities. So, you know, this may be one of those things from science fiction that we end up figuring out.

But, yeah, this is the kind of thing, you know, it's, you know, Einstein's famous reaction to quantum physics was, you know, this is impossible because the famous quote was God doesn't play dice with the universe whatsoever.

Yeah. So, so this is, yeah, this is video. So this is a text to video generation. So you put in a text prompt, you get, you get out a video, which sounds easy, turns out to be very hard. It's very magical. They're, they're, Sora's, you know, one of the more impressive ones at OpenAI.

There, you know, we, we, there are others, you know, we have, we have a bunch of others and there's a bunch of others underway. It's a competitive space, but you know, the, the, the class of technologies is very impressive and Sora is very impressive.

i mean one is just like how amazing is it to live in a world in which you can literally you know say a text prompt of you know i you know a hobbit living in a hobbit town with you know the dragon shows up and then like literally it will render that for you right and if you want the dragon to be rendered out of used car parts you just say dragon made out of used car parts and it renders that for you right and so it's it's like i mean that that's just amazing to start with um uh the even more amazing thing about that

And opening, I put out a paper about this. It's very interesting. So the amazing thing about that is to generate video that passes the sniff test of the human eye looks at it and thinks that it's real. You can't just sort of copy from other videos. And that's part of what's happening is this is your training. The system I saw is trained on millions of hours of video.

you know, from like all over the world and all this open source stuff and everything and old, you know, out of old movies and all this stuff. And, you know, then there's copyright disputes over what else is in there and so forth. But, you know, so it's trained on lots of video, but it's not sufficient to just train on lots of, you know, because video is all 2D.

At that time, it took 12 years, right? So, you know, they lost in 80, they lost in 84, they lost in 88. And then Bill Clinton and then a guy named Al Fromm, who ran this thing called the Democratic Leadership Council. And then Al Gore, you know, kind of put together this program to kind of bring the Democrats back to center. And then that led to, you know, a boom.

It's not sufficient to just train on 2D video and then generate a new 2D video that actually looks to the human eye like it's a representation of the real 3D world. And if you look at these videos coming out from Sora, if you look at them carefully, basically what you see is like multiple sources of lighting in different parts in 3D space coming together.

You see reflections coming off of reflective surfaces that are actually correct. You see translucency coming that's correct. And then you get combinations of these factors. So like, for example, if you do something where like man walking through a puddle at night, you'll get the splashing effects of the water. The water has to splash in a way that is physically realistic.

The light has to come through, refract through the water droplets in the correct way. The water droplets have to reflect the image of the man's shoe in the right way. So, and the AI term for this is world model. This is not only a model for video, this is a model that actually understands the real world. It's a model that actually understands 3D reality, right? And it understands light, right?

And it understands surfaces and textures and materials and motion. And gravity.

And gravity and gravity and shapes. And right. Exactly. All these things. Right. Exactly. You know, a stiff surface versus a spongy surface. Yeah. You know, definitely, you know, give me a close up. Give me a close up of a of a baseball bat hitting a baseball. You know, like in slow motion, it has to deform the baseball in the way that in the real world it does, you know, when it hits the bat.

And like for this story, it has to do all those things. And in fact, it is able to do all those things. Like if you just look at the results, you can see all that's happening. And so. So what that means, backing up to that, the implication is that model is not just a video model. It's what's called a world model, meaning it actually understands 3D physical reality.

The implication of that is that we may have basically just solved the fundamental challenge of robotics. The fundamental challenge of robotics is how do you get a physical robot to navigate the real world without screwing everything up? Right. So how do you get a robot waiter to come navigate through a busy restaurant without stepping on anybody's foot? Right.

Without tripping over anything, without spilling water on the table to understand everything that's happening in real time to be able to adapt? You know, very similar to the self-driving car challenge. Like, how do you do that? But how do you do that for basically everything? And how do you put machines up close with people in such a way that it's like completely safe?

And it turns out one of the things you need to do to do that is you need a world model. The robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of physical reality so that it can understand what's happening. And so when things change, because the robot's seeing primarily visual, right? It's just like you're seeing visual.

uh you know for the democratic party with a much more you say sensible centrist you know set of policies and a much much more you know kind of a say open-minded and optimistic attitude by the way pro-business pro pro pro patriotism you know kind of pro you know kind of treating everybody well um and so i you know i'm i am cautiously optimistic that the current democratic party will be able to find its way back in less than 12 years um

What do you think?

So I think actually I've detected something interesting and maybe it's just my world or maybe business, but I think it's broader, which is, I actually think a fairly large number of people who didn't vote for Trump are actually feeling, people who run organizations who did not vote for Trump are feeling liberated.

Yeah, so I'll just start by saying it's really hard to forecast this. And I'll give you my favorite example of this, which was the world's leading AI researchers in the year 1956 got together and they got a grant from the government to spend 10 weeks in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth University. And so they all got together.

And in that 10 weeks, they were going to finally get to artificial general intelligence. They were so close. It was called AGI. They were almost to an AI that can do everything that a person can do. They were only 10 weeks away. And you'll notice that was in 1956. It didn't happen. We're sitting here in 2024, and we still don't have it. So this field is prone to...

This field, of all the fields in tech, AI is prone to utopianism. It's prone to apocalyptic nightmare scenarios. And it's prone to a very, very, it's been very hard to forecast progress, like extremely difficult to forecast progress. Well, another great example of that is OpenAI was not formed to make ChatGPT. OpenAI was not created to make large language models.

OpenAI was created to make an entirely different kind of AI. And then it turns out if you trace back the origin of GPT, there was a little one guy at OpenAI, his name Alec Bradford. And he was like sitting in a corner and he's like, I think all this other stuff is wrong. I think we should be doing this other thing instead.

And so like, you know, even that company that brought us, you know, ChatGPT, you know, didn't, you know, a few years ago, didn't know that that's what they were going to do. So forecasting is very hard, especially about the future.

um look having said that the progress is staggering uh and and and you know one is just the observed progress is staggering the the plans that people have are incredibly exciting um you know one of the things you always wonder with any field like this is just how much how many more ideas are there right like like arguably we've run out of ideas for what the smartphone can do like you know what's new with the smartphone now versus last year versus the year before it's we've you know the smartphone companies kind of run out of ideas with ai there's ideas all over the place and so that's very optimistic and then

many of the smartest people in the world are being drawn into the field. Right. And so every smart college kid, you know, who's considering what to do, a lot of the very smartest are going into the field. And then a lot of people are like coming over from other fields like physics to work on this. Now that it's really started to work. So we're also getting this effect.

It's kind of this, you know, reverse brain drain or something where we're pulling in all the smart people. That's another reason for optimism. And then obviously the commercial opportunity is very large. So that's another reason for optimism. I think, The big focus right now is to get these things to what's called reasoning, general purpose reasoning.

So to get them to predictably be able to solve problems in a way that is fully coherent and leads to good results every time. And these things are very good at solving certain problems most of the time. It's a very unusual technology where if you ask a large language model the same question twice, it actually gives you different answers.

And if it doesn't know the answer to the question, it will sometimes make up an answer. And it is pretty amazing and wild that we have creative computers that will literally make things up. But we need versions of these that don't do that.

We need versions of these that are able to reason their way through complicated logic chains that are able to model physical reality, like I just described, that are able to think longer and get better results. And so there's tremendous amounts of work happening on that right now. I'm pretty optimistic on that. I think by...

Yeah, I think by, I don't know, 2028 or something, I'm just off the top of my head, just with a little bit of margin of safety by 2028, these systems, you'll be able to basically give these systems problems and they'll solve the problems. If it's something that a human being can do, they'll be able to do it. And then robotics is basically that.

And I think that would be good for the country, right? I mean, I think even if you're a Republican, you should want there to be a healthy, vibrant, viable, centrist, sensible, responsible, you know, kind of even, you know, kind of stable, you know, configuration of an opposition party, as opposed to, you know, as opposed to what we've seen recently.

And then we now have the interface method for robotics because we have large language models so we can now make robots talk and listen and we have voices and human English comprehension and all that stuff. And then basically the rest of robotics is basically mechanical engineering and then some power, basically battery technology. And I think robotics are getting quite close now.

And I bring that up because AI is going to be important if it's just disembodied software, but it's going to be really important if it's around us all the time in the form of actual physical objects. If it exists, yes, in the real world. That's right, in the real world. Yeah. And then, of course, that's already happening, right?

Autonomous, drones now fly themselves, cars now drive themselves, right? So for people who haven't tried either the Waymo cars in places like San Francisco or the new Tesla, the latest version of the Tesla software, they're both outstanding. And so cars now drive themselves. That's a big step forward. Drones now fly themselves.

There are now companies making autonomous submarines and all kinds of fancy things.

Probably. There's, yeah, we have a company that has a military submarine that is, it's literally, it's an unpressurized shell sort of platform. And you can basically customize it in many different ways, load many kinds of things on it. But it's like unpressurized form. It's able to, you know, go far deeper than, you know, than a sub that needs to support human beings can go.

You know, it's able to go down and, you know, be able to do all kinds of things. So, yeah, like, you know, the whole, as we're seeing, you know, On the military side, there's a transformation of military strategy that's underway right now, kind of as these technologies hit that we're already seeing in Ukraine. So that's going to matter.

But look, a lot of this stuff is just going to be stuff in our personal lives and our daily lives.

Yeah, so to start with, cars today are a disaster from a safety standpoint, right? And so cars, the current run rate of road deaths worldwide is at least a million people a year. Right. And so it's about 40,000 road deaths a year in the U.S. and about a million worldwide. And by the way, that million may be a low number. It may be much higher worldwide. And we just don't know how to count it.

But it's at least a million worldwide. And so, you know, it's sort of like, again, you kind of think about this like, OK, a million people a year dying from cars. OK, over the course of a decade, that's 10 million people. When 10 million people die from something in the modern world, we use words for it like apocalypse, genocide. This is like mass death at a very large scale.

And so one is just like, to your point, there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten – and by the way, for every death, there's many injuries, right? Many people crippled and never recover. And so there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten used to a very large amount of carnage in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics.

And so I'm cautiously, you know, there's a Democratic Party, there's a civil war already, you know, kind of playing out the Democratic Party. And, you know, there's all these different arguments going back and forth already. And I'm But you're starting to see voices like Richie Torres and Ro Khanna and others who are standing up saying, it's kind of time to go back to the center.

By the way, you know, in the fullness of time as a civilization, it seems to have been a good trade off. You know, I don't think, you know, very few of us not named Greta Thunberg want to go back to, you know, you know, you know, walking everywhere. Right. Um, and so, um, and you know, you know, you could, you could never go back to riding horses. Right. Cause of course, you know, animal rights.

Um, but, um, you know, so like that, it is amazing that we got there by the way, implication of that being, if the car were invented today, I mean, imagine the conversation that we would have right about the rollout of the automobile, um, Which is like, okay, the plan is to strap people into 6,000 pounds of steel and glass.

And then the plan is to shoot them down a road that may or may not be in good shape at 60 miles an hour. And then they're going to shoot them at each other. And then we're going to have the safety measure. The safety measure is going to be we're going to paint a line down the center of the road. And that's going to keep them from crashing, right?

And so there's no way that you'd be able to invent this today or launch this today. So maybe it's good that it happened in an earlier era. So anyway, to your point, we're used to that. The self-driving, both Waymos and Teslas today are far safer than that. far safer.

And there's like edge questions about, you know, like, you know, this is the, the metric is like, you know, collisions per, you know, thousand or a hundred thousand miles or something, or desperate a hundred thousand miles. And like, it was just no question. They're just like tiny percentages relative.

And it's by the way, not that they're necessarily zero, but they're tiny percentages of what we, of what we experienced every day with, um,

uh you know with road deaths by the way i think as humans we have a bad intuition on this because we can't see the other drivers most of the time when we're driving um so i find the cure for people who need to think about this harder is to just go spend a day sitting at the dmv and just watch the parade of humanity

And watch the people who have to be physically steered by their relatives in front of the camera to get the new driver's license at age 90. And then get an x-ray machine into cars that are driving past you to see how many people are just texting. Or how many people have been hitting the vape for the last three hours. So there's no question that the technology we have is much safer.

There's a societal question as to where we want the trade-off to be. Right. Do we want the tradeoff to be to stay to the current level of carnage because we're used to it? Right. Or do we want, you know, and wait until the computers are perfect or, you know, is it just is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening?

Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept we have we have chosen to roll out self-driving without the computers being perfect. And so, you know, there's Teslas and Waymos on the road all over the place. And, you know, and people are fine with it. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were able to do that.

And again, I'm cautiously optimistic that that will happen.

If you talk to the people who make self-driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self-driving car colliding with a self-driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix. Right. As you'd expect. Right. Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human drivers.

There will be some future state years in the future where there are no more human drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens, these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there. And so one of the things that we may want to drive, you know, we have to drive to ultimately is that.

There are a lot of questions around that, but that may be where we want to go to. I'm pretty optimistic about this. I think that these companies are making excellent progress. I think that the, this says pros and cons, but the Chinese auto industry is now coming online. And I think they're also going to be quite good at this. And I think they're coming now.

And so I think that this whole space is going to develop, I think, quite quickly.

So it's really big. So it's really quite something. So a couple of things. So one is there was just a political story that was really good that talked about the first big kind of summit meeting that the Democrats have had, which was the DNC hosted a meeting of the state Democratic Party leaders. And and and it started with a full land acknowledgement. Right. And then the right, which is step one.

Yeah. So the term most common in our world is they call it eVTOL, E-V-T-O-L. So electric vertical takeoff and landing. Okay. Right. So VTOL, everybody's seen VTOL, V-T-O-L, vertical takeoff and landing. It's a Harrier jet. the military flies. The movie True Lies, the big scene on the Harrier jet.

So it's the jet that has thrusters that point down, it rises, and then it has thrusters that carry it forward. And so we've had these VTOL things. And by the way, we also have had helicopters, which have the same property. So we've had these things in the past. And then the electric part is basically that they'll be electric.