Kimbal Musk
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Kimbal Musk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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South Africa was... So I grew up in apartheid South Africa, but more specifically, the fall of apartheid. So it was the 80s. I was a teenager in the 80s. And our community would... Part of our social life, frankly, was the anti-apartheid protests and to go be with white people, black people, kind of mixing it all together.
The most formative experience is, frankly, how much I appreciate a place like America where we have value for human life. So there was a country where human life was not valued. It was a It's a weird thing to come from that to here where we take it so seriously if someone dies in a war or something like that. And we just didn't take it seriously in South Africa. People died.
where people were killed. I saw someone killed in front of me. I was getting off a train, and it's a very violent train, known for violence. We were stupid kids. We didn't really listen to our parents. We went on this train, and the doors opened, and I had people trying to get off the train.
And in front of me, two black people, one black guy just stabbed this knife in the side of this other black guy's head. You're like, what the fuck? And you just, I've got to get off the train. How old were you at this time? Probably 16 or 17. And I got to get off the train. And everyone is trying to get me to get off because they're all behind me.
So I step off and I step into the pool of blood, one foot, and then I just walk for about 100 paces while the stickiness of the blood just kind of, for my sneakers, just on one foot, just like leaves a footprint behind me. And you just walk on. You just walk on. Did the others walk on as well? Everyone walked on.
I've heard this before, which I think I agree with, is when someone is killed, someone is taken from our lives, the vacuum that it creates, the social vacuum, is extraordinarily painful. And it truly is true. I mean, if someone in my community passes away, it's very, very sad for me.
And when you go to a place where, you know, grow up in a place where that human life is not valued, there's something about the, there's a little bit less of the social vacuum created because everyone is kind of expecting everyone to potentially be taken out at any moment. Yeah. But then there's also a beauty to it because there's a much more of a celebratory element.
When my cousin Russ and I, again, we were stupid kids, we shouldn't be doing this, but we'd go into the townships where a lot of the violence would be happening. We really didn't see most of the violence there. It was in these more protests and so forth. But there's a joy that also comes from lower value of human life. There's a real joy. Everyone is like, well, I mean, it's beautiful.
We'd have dinner with black friends, friends with their family. We were still pretty young. And there was just a real joy to it. When you accept mortality, you can really enjoy life. You can really enjoy life. I mean, I think there's actually quite a nice insight. I've never really put it that way, but I think that's right, actually. I think you just chill out a bit.
It takes things a little less seriously.
I do love that we all live longer and so forth, but we should live longer with the goal of joy and the goal of happiness and peace, not some form of misery that you choose to attach yourself to. Maximize joy. Yeah.
I mean, it was horrible. I think, you know, coming back to the point of low value of human life, they tried to kill him. It wasn't... There was no holding back, so I just watched someone. It wasn't just one, but there was a main person, and then there was a few others that piled in. They just tried to kill him in front of me.
We were eating sandwiches on a staircase at the school, an outdoor staircase. They were not coming after me, and I just had to watch, and I couldn't help. It was one of the saddest, most difficult experiences. It just was, it's just awful.
Yeah, I think, so I've had a near-death experience where I almost died. I was in 2010, and I think that, and I broke my neck, and I can go into that story in a moment, but this was different. This was, this comes back to the low value of human life part where if someone had killed my brother, if that person had beat him to death, which he was trying to do, Life would have gone on.
That's like an insane thought in an American, maybe in some tough neighborhoods, but for the most part, it's another thing.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I always say to people who have an opinion about America that, you know, this is a really bad country or whatever, and I say, look, please go try another country before you say that.
Not to say that America can't get better, but please go try another country because not having that perspective or having a perspective that, I don't know, that could chip on their shoulder about the country that they're in Okay, go try another country. And then come back and tell me. Pick any country. It doesn't have to be some very violent country. Go pick any country.
And you just realize that actually the world doesn't think the same way that America thinks. And you're going to just learn a perspective that I think gives you a better way to critique where we live in America.
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