#400 – Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity

Elon Musk is CEO of X, xAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. Thank you for listening ❤ Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex to get free security camera plus 20% off – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Elon’s X: https://x.com/elonmusk xAI: https://x.com/xai Tesla: https://x.com/tesla Tesla Optimus: https://x.com/tesla_optimus Tesla AI: https://x.com/Tesla_AI SpaceX: https://x.com/spacex Neuralink: https://x.com/neuralink The Boring Company: https://x.com/boringcompany PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (10:25) – War and human nature (14:51) – Israel-Hamas war (20:59) – Military-Industrial Complex (25:16) – War in Ukraine (29:59) – China (44:15) – xAI Grok (55:13) – Aliens (1:03:13) – God (1:05:41) – Diablo 4 and video games (1:14:48) – Dystopian worlds: 1984 and Brave New World (1:20:59) – AI and useful compute per watt (1:26:40) – AI regulation (1:33:32) – Should AI be open-sourced? (1:40:54) – X algorithm (1:52:15) – 2024 presidential elections (2:05:14) – Politics (2:08:16) – Trust (2:13:47) – Tesla’s Autopilot and Optimus robot (2:22:46) – Hardships

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his fourth time on this The Lex Fridman podcast. And now, if you allow me, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Element for electrolyte deliciousness, Aesleep for naps, BetterHelp for your mind, Simply Safe for your safety, Shopify for your online shopping, and NetSuite for business management software. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by the very thing I'm drinking as I speak to you right now, Element. Electrolyte drink mix. I'll usually fill a Powerator or Gatorade bottle, I think it's 28 ounces, of water and mix it with one Element packet. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. That's the one I'm drinking now. That's the one I've been drinking for a long time. I apologize because I'm recording these words very late at night. It's been a long day. It's been a long night before that, and a long night this one.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  So it's just me in front of a microphone right now, looking at a 28-ounce bottle of water that tastes like watermelon. Just me in the water, happily reunited in the desert of human experience. I'm also surrounded by three computer screens that all have beautiful wallpaper, looking at me, taunting me with beautiful picturesque scenes of nature. And I just, before this, played about 10 minutes of Diablo, where I got to escape to a whole other world that is also picturesque, but not with nature, but filled with the

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  intense, intimidating sounds of demons attacking you from all sides.

• 2:20Lex Fridman?

  And all of that is somehow relaxing. Anyway, Element is not just delicious. It combines this perfect amount of magnesium, potassium, and sodium, watermelon salt. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by the thing that's calling my name at this very moment, the Eight Sleep Pod 3 mattress. It has two sides of the bed, so you can cool or heat each side of the bed separately. I've actually recently was briefly at a get together of a lot of really interesting people,

• 3:05Lex Fridman?

  and somebody brought up the topic of Eight Sleep. And I just heard that a bunch of other folks said, "Oh, I love Eight Sleep." And they started talking about the different temperatures that they use. And I was shocked and horrified to learn that some people actually heat their bed up. This was a fascinating discovery for me because I've never, never even tried the heating feature. I always cooled the bed. Sometimes very cold with a warm blanket. It's heaven, but I can't recommend it enough. Sleep really is a magical place. It's a bit surreal saying these words while quite sleep deprived, a bit melancholic, a bit hopeful, thinking about the Eight Sleep bed just a few steps away.

• 3:49Lex Fridman?

  And somehow that thought fills me with gratitude for just having these things in my life. Anyway, check them out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Anytime I spell out a word, I always imagine myself spelling out that word in giant letters and sand, stranded alone on the island, looking at a airplane floating above, hoping that they see the text that right. Help. I just actually got a text from a friend.

• 4:34Lex Fridman?

  I'm looking at it now. Again, filled with gratitude for having so many amazing people. The text says, hey, brother, just sending you some love. Miss you. Sent late at night. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So BetterHelp. Speaking of friends, it's good to talk. It's good to talk to people. It's good to talk to people that truly listen. That could be friends, loved ones, or that could be a professional therapist. Well, you don't have to choose one. You can have all of those. And easy accessible therapist is what BetterHelp is all about. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month.

• 5:17Lex Fridman?

  That's betterhelp.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by SimpliSafe. And as we go on with this program, I'm starting to have more and more fun because fun is all you need. SimpliSafe is a home security company. After, of course, you establish security. Once you're safe, then the fun can begin. For me, SimpliSafe just establishes that first base layer of physical security. It's super easy to set up. They have a cool new feature called Fast Protect Monitoring that allows SimpliSafe monitoring agents to see, speak to, and deter intruders

• 5:59Lex Fridman?

  through the smart alarm indoor camera. I'm tempted to test the system by having one of the Quadropads, the legged robots, roll up to it and see what the agents say. Just attach a ChatGPT, GPT-4 agent or a Grok agent on top of it and have the two of them have a conversation and see what they figure out. I'm not sure it's going to end well, but science proceeds one experiment at a time, friends. Anyway, I love how easy SimpliSafe was to set up. Their sensors are awesome. Their monitoring is awesome. It's affordable, easy to use. I love products that just, you know,

• 6:42Lex Fridman?

  easy to set up, easy to maintain. Everything works easy. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com/lex to get 50% off any SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. That's simplisafe.com/lex.

• 6:59Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. And when I say anyone, I mean somebody like me. It took me minutes, maybe even seconds, to set up a store and sell shirts, which you can now buy at, I think the link is lexfreedom.com/store. That forwards you to the Shopify store with three different shirts. In this case, it's not really about the store. It's about just celebrating stuff we love. I'm a huge fan of a lot of bands and podcasts, and I just love buying up their merch, wearing it,

• 7:41Lex Fridman?

  and seeing who notices. I love wearing a Huberman Lab shirt on the trail when I run and just see, see who recognizes the full absurdity of it, what they say. It's just wonderful. And the joy that we can share by this little kind of sign that you wear on yourself that, oh, I like this particular thing. Let's talk about it. Yeah, I love it. I like wearing like Orwell shirts or, or Dostoevsky shirts or Bukowski shirts or sci fi stuff, you know, 2001 Space Odyssey, all of it. You can get all of those things or sell those things on Shopify.

• 8:22Lex Fridman?

  Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system. They take care of all the messy, complicated things involved in running a business. A company like Elon says.

• 8:55Lex Fridman?

  Is a kind of super intelligent being comprised of individual human beings working together in interesting ways that when effective can be greater than the sum of their parts. But there's a lot of things involved there. It's not just great design and engineering. It's not great innovation. It's all of the things, the financials, the human resources of hiring and firing. It's maintaining inventory. It's the e-commerce. It's all the messy business details. So you should use the best tools for the job of handling that mess, that beautiful, beautiful mess involved in running a company.

• 9:38Lex Fridman?

  And I too, by the way, would love to be a part of that mess. A small cog in the machine, in the super intelligent machine that is a company someday soon. Anyway, you can start now with no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com/lex to access their one of a kind financing program. That's netsuite.com/lex. And now, dear friends, here's Elon Musk.

• 10:38Lex Fridman?

  I thought you were gonna finish it.

• 10:44Lex Fridman?

  It's one of the greatest themes in all of film history.

• 10:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 10:51Lex Fridman?

  So I was just thinking about the Roman Empire, as one does.

• 10:56Elon Musk?

  There's that whole meme where, well, guys are thinking about the Roman Empire at least once a day.

• 11:02Lex Fridman?

  And half the population is confused whether it's true or not. But more seriously, thinking about the wars going on in the world today. And as you know, war and military conquest has been a big part of Roman society and culture. And it, I think, has been a big part of most empires and dynasties throughout human history. So.

• 11:24Elon Musk?

  Yeah, they usually came as a result of conquest. I mean, there's some like the Oceania Hungarian Empire where there was just a lot of sort of clever marriages.

• 11:35Lex Fridman?

  But fundamentally, there's an engine of conquest. And they celebrate excellence in warfare. Many of the leaders were excellent generals.

• 11:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Lex Fridman?

  That kind of thing. So, big picture question. Grok approved. I ask, this is a good question to ask.

• 11:51Elon Musk?

  You'd test it, Grok approved?

• 11:54Lex Fridman?

  At least on fun mode.

• 11:59Lex Fridman?

  To what degree do you think war is part of human nature? Versus a consequence of how human societies are structured? I ask this as you have somehow controversially been a proponent of peace.

• 12:15Elon Musk?

  I'm generally a proponent of peace. I mean, ignorance is perhaps, in my view, the real enemy to counter it. That's the real hard part, not, you know, fighting other humans.

• 12:27Elon Musk?

  But all creatures fight. I mean, the jungle is a, you look at the, people think of this nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact, it is not. There's some quite funny

• 12:39Elon Musk?

  when a Hertzog thing where he's like in the jungle, like saying that it's like basically just murder and death in every direction. I mean, the plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other. Every single day, every minute. So it's not like, you know, we're unusual in that respect.

• 12:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a relevant question here, whether with greater intelligence comes greater control over these base instincts for violence.

• 13:07Elon Musk?

  Yes, we have much more of an ability to control our limbic instinct for violence than, say, a chimpanzee. And in fact, if one looks at, say, chimpanzee society, it is not friendly. I mean, the bonobos are an exception. But chimpanzee society is full of violence and it's quite horrific, frankly. That's our limbic system in action. Like, you don't want to be on the wrong side of a chimpanzee. It'll eat your face off and tear your nuts off.

• 13:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, basically, there's no limits or ethics or... The Romans said, "Just war." There's no just war in chimpanzee societies. Is war and dominance by any means necessary?

• 13:51Elon Musk?

  Yeah, chimpanzee society is like a primitive version of human society. They're not like peace-loving, basically, at all. There's extreme violence. And then, once in a while, somebody who's watched too many Disney movies decides to raise a chimpanzee as a pet. And then that eats their face or rips their nuts off or chews their fingers off, that kind of thing.

• 14:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Elon Musk?

  It's happened several times.

• 14:16Lex Fridman?

  Ripping your nuts off is an interesting strategy for interaction.

• 14:20Elon Musk?

  It's happened to people. It's unfortunate. That's, I guess, one way to ensure that the other chimp doesn't, you know, contribute to the gene pool.

• 14:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, from a martial arts perspective, it's a fascinating strategy.

• 14:31Elon Musk?

  The nut ripper.

• 14:34Lex Fridman?

  I wonder which of the martial arts teaches that.

• 14:38Elon Musk?

  I think it's safe to say, if somebody's got your nuts in their hands and has the option of ripping them off, you will be amenable to whatever they want.

• 14:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, like I said, somehow controversially, you've been a proponent of peace on Twitter, on X.

• 14:57Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask you about the wars going on today and to see what the path to peace could be. How do you hope the current war in Israel and Gaza comes to an end? What path do you see that can minimize human suffering in the long term in that part of the world?

• 15:12Elon Musk?

  Well, I think that part of the world is definitely... Like, if you look up the "there is no easy answer" in the dictionary, it'll be that, like, the picture of the Middle East, in Israel especially. So, there is no easy answer. What my... This is strictly my opinion of, you know, is that...

• 15:37Elon Musk?

  The goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel. They obviously did not expect to have a military victory, but they really wanted to commit the worst atrocities that they could in order to provoke the most aggressive response possible from Israel. And then leverage that aggressive response to rally Muslims worldwide for the cause of Gaza and Palestine, which they have succeeded in doing.

• 16:16Elon Musk?

  So the counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it's very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible, everything. That is the actual thing that would thwart the goal of Hamas.

• 16:37Lex Fridman?

  So in some sense, the degree that makes sense in geopolitics, turn the other cheek, implemented.

• 16:44Elon Musk?

  It's not exactly turn the other cheek, because I do think that there's, you know, I think it is appropriate for Israel to find the Hamas members and, you know, either kill them or accost rate them. Like, there's something has to be done, because they're just going to keep coming, otherwise. But in addition to that, they need to do whatever they can. There's some talk of establishing, for example, a mobile hospital. I'd recommend doing that. Just making sure that, you know, there's food, water, medical necessities.

• 17:33Elon Musk?

  And just be over the top about it and be very transparent. So it's that so that you can't go can't claim it's a trick. Like just put webcam on the thing, you know, all 24 seven.

• 17:47Lex Fridman?

  Deploy acts of kindness.

• 17:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah, conspicuous acts of kindness that that with that are unequivocal. Meaning that can't be somehow because Hamas will then their response will be, oh, it's a trick. Therefore, you have to counter how how is not a trick.

• 18:05Lex Fridman?

  This ultimately fights the broader force of hatred in the in the region.

• 18:09Elon Musk?

  Yes, and I'm not sure who said it. It's an apropos saying, but an eye for the for an eye makes everyone blind. Now that neck of the woods, they really believe in the whole eye for an eye thing.

• 18:23Elon Musk?

  But I mean, you really have. If you're not going to just outright commit genocide like against an entire people, which obviously would not be acceptable to to really shouldn't be acceptable to anyone. Then you're going to leave basically a lot of people alive who subsequently, you know, hate Israel. So really, the question is like, how for for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create?

• 18:51Elon Musk?

  And if you create more than you killed, you've not succeeded. That's the, you know, the real situation there. And it's safe to say that if, you know,

• 19:05Elon Musk?

  if you know, if you kill somebody's child in Gaza,

• 19:10Elon Musk?

  if you've made at least a few Hamas members who will die just to just to kill Israeli. That's the situation. So.

• 19:26Elon Musk?

  But I mean, this is one of the most contentious subjects one could possibly discuss. But I think if the goal ultimately is some sort of long term peace, one has to be look at this from standpoint of over time, are there more or fewer terrorists being created?

• 19:44Lex Fridman?

  Let me just linger on war.

• 19:47Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well, war, it would say wars existed and always will exist.

• 19:51Lex Fridman?

  Always will exist.

• 19:52Elon Musk?

  Always has always has existed and always will exist.

• 19:55Lex Fridman?

  I hope not. You think it always will?

• 19:57Elon Musk?

  There will always be war.

• 20:00Elon Musk?

  This question of just how much war and, and you know, what, you know, there's this, there's this sort of the scope and scale of war. But to imagine that there would not be any war in the future, I think would be a very unlikely outcome.

• 20:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you talked about the culture series. There's war even there.

• 20:16Elon Musk?

  Yes, it's a giant war. The first book starts off with a gigantic galactic war where trillions die, trillions.

• 20:25Lex Fridman?

  But it still nevertheless protects these pockets of flourishing. Somehow you can have galactic war and still have pockets of flourishing.

• 20:36Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess, if we are able to one day expand to, you know, fill the galaxy or whatever, there will be a galactic war at some point.

• 20:48Lex Fridman?

  Ah, the scale, I mean, the scale of war has been increasing, increasing, increasing. It's like a race between the scale of suffering and the scale of flourishing.

• 20:56Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 21:00Lex Fridman?

  A lot of people seem to be using this tragedy to beat the drums of war and feed the military industrial complex. Do you worry about this? The people who are rooting for escalation? And how can it be stopped?

• 21:14Elon Musk?

  One of the things that does concern me is that there are very few people alive today who actually viscerally understand the horrors of war. At least in the US. I mean, obviously, there are people on the front lines in Ukraine and Russia who understand just how terrible war is. But how many people in the West understand it? You know, my grandfather was in World War II. He was severely traumatized. I mean, he was there, I think, for almost six years in Eastern and North Africa and Italy. All his friends were killed in front of him. And he would have died too, except they randomly gave some, I guess, IQ test or something. And he scored very high. Now, he was not

• 21:58Elon Musk?

  an officer. He was, I think, a corporal or sergeant or something like that, because he didn't finish high school. He had to drop out of high school because his dad died and he had to work to support his siblings. So because he didn't graduate high school, he was not eligible for the officer corps. So, you know, he kind of got put into the cannon fodder category, basically. But then randomly, they gave him this test. He was transferred to British Intelligence in London. That's where he met my grandmother. But he had PTSD next level, like next level. I mean, just didn't talk. Just didn't talk. And if you tried talking to him, he'd just tell you to shut up. And he won a bunch of medals,

• 22:43Elon Musk?

  never bragged about it once, not even hinted, nothing. I found out about it because his military records are online. That's how I know. So he would say, like, no, no way in hell. Do you want to do that again? But how many people, now, he obviously, he died, you know, 20 years ago, or longer, actually, 30 years ago. How many people are alive that remember World War II? Not many.

• 23:13Lex Fridman?

  And the same perhaps applies to the threat of nuclear war.

• 23:19Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, there are enough nuclear bombs pointed at the United States to make the rubble, the radioactive rubble bounce many times.

• 23:28Lex Fridman?

  There's two major wars going on right now. So you talked about the threat of AGI quite a bit, but now, as we sit here with the intensity of conflict going on, do you worry about nuclear war?

• 23:43Elon Musk?

  I think we shouldn't discount the possibility of nuclear war. It is a civilizational threat.

• 23:54Elon Musk?

  Right now, I could be wrong, but I think that the current probability of nuclear war is quite low. But there are a lot of nukes pointed at us. So, and we have a lot of nukes pointed at other people. They're still there. Nobody's put their, their guns away.

• 24:13Elon Musk?

  The missiles are still in the silos.

• 24:15Lex Fridman?

  And the leaders don't seem to be the ones with the nukes talking to each other?

• 24:21Elon Musk?

  No. There are wars which are tragic and difficult on a, on a local basis. And then there are wars which are civilization ending, or has that potential. Obviously, global thermonuclear warfare has high potential to end civilization, perhaps permanently, but certainly, you know, to severely wounded and perhaps setback, human progress by, you know, to the Stone Age or something. I don't know. Pretty bad.

• 24:57Elon Musk?

  Probably scientists and engineers won't be super popular after that as well. Like, you got us into this mess. So generally, which I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  How do you hope the war in Ukraine comes to an end? And what's the path, once again, to minimizing human suffering there?

• 25:27Elon Musk?

  Well, I think that what is likely to happen, which is really pretty much the way it is, is that something very close to the current lines will be how a ceasefire or truce happens. But you just have a situation right now where whoever goes on the offensive will suffer casualties at several times the rate of whoever's on the defense. Because you've got defense in depth, you've got minefields, trenches, anti-tank defenses.

• 26:06Elon Musk?

  Nobody has air superiority because the anti-aircraft missiles are really far better than the aircraft. Like, there are far more of them. And so neither side has air superiority. Tanks are basically death traps, just slow-moving, and they're not immune to anti-tank weapons. So you really just have long-range artillery and infantry trenches. It's all to one, all over again, with drones, you know, throwing little drones, some drones there.

• 26:43Lex Fridman?

  Which makes the long-range artillery just that much more accurate and better, and so more efficient at murdering people on both sides.

• 26:52Elon Musk?

  Yeah, so it's whoever is, you don't want to be trying to advance from either side because the probability of dying is incredibly high. So in order to overcome defense in-depth trenches and minefields, you really need significant local superiority in numbers. Ideally, combined arms, where you do a fast attack with aircraft.

• 27:23Elon Musk?

  A concentrated number of tanks and a lot of people. That's the only way you're going to punch through a line. And then you're going to punch through and then not have reinforcements just kick you right out again. I mean, I really recommend people read World War I Warfare in detail. It's rough.

• 27:51Elon Musk?

  I mean, the sheer number of people that died there was mind boggling.

• 27:55Lex Fridman?

  And it's almost impossible to imagine the end of it that doesn't look like almost exactly like the beginning in terms of what land belongs to who and so on. But on the other side of a lot of human suffering, death and destruction of infrastructure.

• 28:14Elon Musk?

  Yes, the thing that, the reason I proposed a some sort of crusial or peace a year ago was because I predicted pretty much exactly what would happen, which is a lot of people dying for basically almost no changes in land. And the loss of the flower of Ukrainian and Russian youth. And we should have some sympathy for the Russian boys as well as the Ukrainian boys. Because the Russian boys didn't ask to be on their front line. They have to be. So there's a lot of sons not coming back to their parents, you know.

• 28:56Elon Musk?

  And I think most of them don't really have, they don't hate the other side. You know, it's sort of like, there's this saying about, like this saying comes from World War I. It's like, young boys who don't know each other, killing each other on behalf of old men that do know each other.

• 29:17Elon Musk?

  What the hell's the point of that?

• 29:20Lex Fridman?

  So Volodymyr Zelensky said that he's not, or has said in the past, he's not interested in talking to Putin directly. Do you think he should?

• 29:27Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Lex Fridman?

  Sit down, man to man, leader to leader, and negotiate peace?

• 29:32Elon Musk?

  I think, I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches.

• 29:43Elon Musk?

  Whether he talks to Putin or not, just don't do that.

• 29:48Elon Musk?

  Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people.

• 29:55Elon Musk?

  And history will not look kindly upon them.

• 30:00Lex Fridman?

  You've spoken honestly about the possibility of war between US and China in the long term if no diplomatic solution is found. For example, on the question of Taiwan and one China policy.

• 30:10Elon Musk?

  Right.

• 30:11Lex Fridman?

  How do we avoid the trajectory where these two superpowers clash?

• 30:16Elon Musk?

  Well, it's worth reading that book on the difficult to pronounce, the Sidides Trap, I believe it's called. I love war history, Alec. Inside Out and Backwards.

• 30:28Elon Musk?

  There's hardly a battle I haven't read about.

• 30:31Elon Musk?

  And trying to figure out like, what really was the cause of victory in any particular case as opposed to what one side or another claimed was the reason?

• 30:39Lex Fridman?

  Both the victory and what sparked the war.

• 30:42Elon Musk?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:43Lex Fridman?

  The whole thing.

• 30:45Elon Musk?

  Yeah. So Athens and Sparta is a classic case. The thing about the Greeks is they really wrote down a lot of stuff. They loved writing. You know, there are lots of interesting things that happened in many parts of the world, but they just people just didn't write down. So we don't know what happened. Or they didn't really write with, in detail. They just would say like, we went, we had a battle and we won. And like, well, can you add a bit more? The Greeks, they really wrote a lot. They're very articulate on, they just love writing. So, and we have a bunch of that writing that's preserved. So we know what led up to the Peloponnesian War between the Spartan and Athenian alliance.

• 31:26Elon Musk?

  And we know that they, they saw it coming.

• 31:34Elon Musk?

  I mean, the Spartans didn't write, they also weren't very verbose by their nature. But they did write, but they weren't very verbose. They were terse. But the Athenians and the other Greeks wrote a line. And they were like, and Sparta was really kind of like the leader of Greece. But Athens grew stronger and stronger with each passing year. And everyone's like, well, that's inevitable that there's going to be a clash between Athens and Sparta. Well, how do we avoid that? And they couldn't, they couldn't, they actually, they saw it coming and they still could not avoid it. So, you know, at some point, if there's, if one group, one civilization or country

• 32:19Elon Musk?

  or whatever exceeds another, sort of like if, you know, the United States has been the biggest kid on the block since, I think, around 1890, from an economic standpoint. So the United States has been the economic, most powerful economic engine in the world longer than anyone's been alive. And the foundation of war is economics. So now we have a situation, in case of China, where the economy is likely to be two, perhaps three times larger than that of the US.

• 33:04Elon Musk?

  So imagine you're the biggest kid on the block for as long as anyone can remember, and suddenly a kid comes along who's twice your size.

• 33:13Lex Fridman?

  So we see it coming.

• 33:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Lex Fridman?

  How is it possible to stop? Is there some, let me throw something out there, just intermixing of cultures, understanding. There does seem to be a giant cultural gap in understanding of each other. And you're an interesting case study because you are an American, obviously. You've done a lot of incredible manufacture here in the United States, but you also work with China.

• 33:38Elon Musk?

  I've spent a lot of time in China and met with the leadership many times.

• 33:41Lex Fridman?

  Maybe a good question to ask is, what are some things about China that people don't understand, positive, just in the culture? What's some interesting things that you've learned about the Chinese?

• 33:54Elon Musk?

  Well, the sheer number of really smart, hardworking people in China is incredible. There are, I believe, if you say like, how many smart, hardworking people are there in China, there's far more of them there than there are here, I think, in my opinion. They've got a lot of energy. So, I mean, the architecture in China that's in recent years is far more impressive than the US. I mean, the train stations, the buildings, the high-speed rail, everything, it's really far more impressive than what we have in the US.

• 34:37Elon Musk?

  I mean, I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing, look at the buildings, and go to, you know, take the train from Beijing to Xi'an, where you have the Terracotta Warriors. China's got an incredible history, a very long history. And, you know, I think arguably, the, in terms of the use of language from a written standpoint, sort of one of the oldest, perhaps, perhaps the oldest written language. And in China, people did write things down. So, China historically has always been, with rare exception, been internally focused. They've not been acquisitive.

• 35:19Elon Musk?

  They've, they're 40 each other, there have been many, many civil wars. In the Three Kingdoms War, I believe they lost about 70% of their population. So, they're, they've had brutal internal wars, like civil wars that make the US Civil War look small by comparison.

• 35:46Elon Musk?

  So I think it's important to appreciate that China is not monolithic. We sort of think of China as this sort of one entity of one mind, and this is definitely not the case. From what I've seen, and I think most people who understand China would agree, that people in China think about China 10 times more than they think about anything outside of China. So it's like 90% of their consideration is internal.

• 36:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, isn't that a really positive thing? When you're talking about the collaboration and the future peace between superpowers, when you're inward facing, which is like focusing on improving yourself versus focusing on, quote unquote, improving others through military might?

• 36:35Elon Musk?

  The good news, the history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive, meaning they're not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries. I do feel very strongly, you know, so that's good. I mean, because a lot of very powerful countries have been acquisitive. The US is also one of the rare cases that has not been acquisitive. After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country, like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes, we don't even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything, or at will, and it didn't. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries. It helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan.

• 37:20Elon Musk?

  This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented. You know, the US did conspicuous acts of kindness, like the Berlin airlift. And I think, you know, it's always like, well, America's done bad things. Well, of course, America's done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record. And just generally...

• 37:50Elon Musk?

  You know, one sort of test would be, how do you treat your prisons as a war?

• 37:56Elon Musk?

  Or let's say, you know, no offense to the Russians, but let's say you're in Germany. It's 1945. You've got the Russian army coming one side, you've got the French, British and American armies coming the other side. Who would you like to be just surrendered to? Like, no country is morally perfect, but I recommend being a POW with the Americans. That would be my choice very strongly.

• 38:25Elon Musk?

  In the full menu of POW. Very much so. And in fact, one of them, Brown, you know, a smart guy, was like, we've got to be captured by the Americans. Yeah. And in fact, the SS was under orders to execute Brown and all of the German rocket engineers. And they narrowly escaped their SS. They said they were going out for a walk in the woods. They left in the middle of winter with no coats. And they ran like, no food, no coats, no water, and just ran like hell and ran west. And by sheer like, they, I think his brother found like a bicycle or something, and then

• 39:10Elon Musk?

  just cycled west as fast as he could and found a US patrol.

• 39:17Elon Musk?

  So, anyway, that's one way you can tell morality is, where do you want to be a POW?

• 39:25Elon Musk?

  It's not fun anywhere, but some places are much worse than others. So, anyway, so like, America has been, well, far from perfect, generally a benevolent force. And we should always be self-critical and try to be better. But anyone with half a brain knows that. So, I think there are, in this way, China and the United States are similar. Neither country has been acquisitive in a significant way. So that's like a, you know, a shared principle, I guess. Now, China does feel very strongly about Taiwan.

• 40:09Elon Musk?

  They've been very clear about that for a long time.

• 40:14Elon Musk?

  You know, from their standpoint, it's, it would be like one of the states is. You know, not there like Hawaii or something like that, but but more significant than Hawaii, you know.

• 40:28Elon Musk?

  And Hawaii is pretty significant for us. So they view it as really the that there's a fundamental part of China, the island of Formosa, not Taiwan, that is not part of China, but should be. And the only reason it hasn't been is because of the US Pacific Fleet.

• 40:50Lex Fridman?

  And as their economic power grows and as their military power grows, the thing that they're clearly saying

• 40:59Lex Fridman?

  is their interests will, you know, clearly be materialized.

• 41:04Elon Musk?

  Yes. China has been very clear that they will incorporate Taiwan peacefully or militarily, but that they will incorporate it from this standpoint is 100% likely.

• 41:22Lex Fridman?

  You know, something you said about conspicuous acts of kindness as a geopolitical policy, it almost seems naive.

• 41:30Lex Fridman?

  But I'd venture to say that this is probably the path forward, how you avoid most wars. Just as you say it, it sounds naive, but it's kind of brilliant. If you believe in the goodness of underlying most of human nature, it just seems like conspicuous acts of kindness can reverberate through the populace of the countries involved.

• 41:59Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  And deescalate.

• 42:02Elon Musk?

  Absolutely. So after World War I, they made a big mistake. You know, they basically tried to lump all the blame on Germany.

• 42:14Elon Musk?

  And, you know, settled Germany with impossible reparations.

• 42:23Elon Musk?

  And, you know, really, there was a lot of, there was a fair, quite a bit of blame to go around for World War I. But they tried to, you know, put it all on Germany.

• 42:36Elon Musk?

  And that was, that laid the seeds for World War II.

• 42:43Elon Musk?

  So a lot of people, well, not just Hitler, a lot of people felt wronged. And they wanted vengeance.

• 42:55Elon Musk?

  And they got it.

• 42:56Lex Fridman?

  People don't forget.

• 42:57Elon Musk?

  Yeah. You kill somebody's father, mother, son, daughter, they're not going to forget it. They will want vengeance.

• 43:08Elon Musk?

  So after World War II, they're like, well, the Treaty of Versailles was a huge mistake. World War I.

• 43:16Elon Musk?

  And so this time, instead of,

• 43:23Elon Musk?

  you know, crushing the losers, we're actually going to help them. With the Marshall Plan and we're going to help revolt, revolt Germany. We're going to help revolt, you know, Austria and the other, you know, Italy and whatnot. So.

• 43:43Elon Musk?

  And that was the right move.

• 43:44Lex Fridman?

  There is a, it does feel like there's a profound truth

• 43:49Lex Fridman?

  to conspicuous acts of kindness being an antidote to this.

• 43:55Elon Musk?

  Something must stop the, the cycle of reciprocal violence.

• 44:00Elon Musk?

  Something must stop it, or it will, you know, it'll, it'll, it'll never stop. Just

• 44:07Elon Musk?

  eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, limb for a limb, life for a life, forever and ever.

• 44:15Lex Fridman?

  To escape briefly the darkness with some incredible engineering work.

• 44:20Lex Fridman?

  XAI just released Grok AI Assistant that I've gotten a chance to play with. It's, it's amazing on many levels. First of all, it's amazing that a relatively small team in a relatively short amount of time was able to develop this closest state of the art system. Another incredible thing is there's a regular mode and there's a fun mode.

• 44:41Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I guess I'm to blame for that one.

• 44:44Lex Fridman?

  I wish, first of all, I wish everything in life had a fun mode.

• 44:47Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Lex Fridman?

  There's something compelling beyond just fun about the fun mode.

• 44:53Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  Interacting with a large language model. I'm not sure exactly what it is because I've only had a little bit of time to play with it. But it just makes it more interesting, more vibrant to interact with the system.

• 45:06Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Absolutely. I, um, our, our AI Grok is modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is one of my favorite books, which is, it's a book on philosophy disguised as a book on humor.

• 45:25Elon Musk?

  And I would say that is, that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don't know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness,

• 45:40Elon Musk?

  digital and biological, the more we're able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.

• 45:52Lex Fridman?

  There is generally a feeling like this AI system has an outward looking, like the way you are, like, sitting with a good friend, looking up at the stars, like, asking pothead-like questions about the universe, wondering what it's all about, the curiosity you talk about. There, there's a sense, no matter how mundane the question I ask it, there's a sense of cosmic grandeur to the whole thing.

• 46:17Elon Musk?

  Well, we, we are actually working hard to have engineering, math, physics, answers that you can count on.

• 46:27Elon Musk?

  So for the other sort of AIs out there, the, of course, these so-called large language models,

• 46:36Elon Musk?

  I've not found the engineering to be reliable.

• 46:41Elon Musk?

  And it, the hallucination, it unfortunately hallucinates most when you least want it to hallucinate.

• 46:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Elon Musk?

  So when you're asking important, difficult questions, that's where it tends to be confidently wrong.

• 46:54Elon Musk?

  So we're, we're really trying hard to say, okay, how do we be as grounded as possible? So you can count on the results.

• 47:03Elon Musk?

  Trace things back to physics first principles, mathematical logic. So, underlying the humor is an aspiration to adhere to the truth of the universe as closely as possible.

• 47:18Lex Fridman?

  That's really tricky.

• 47:20Elon Musk?

  It is tricky. So, that's why, you know, there's always going to be some amount of error, but we want to aspire to be as truthful as possible about the answers with acknowledged error. So that there was always, you don't want to be confidently wrong. So, you're not going to be right every time, but you want to minimize how often you're confidently wrong. And then, like I said, once you can count on the logic as being not violating physics, then you can start to build on that to create inventions, like invent new technologies.

• 48:04Elon Musk?

  But if you can't, if you cannot count on the foundational physics being correct, obviously the inventions are simply wishful thinking, you know, imagination land, magic, basically.

• 48:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, as you said, I think one of the big goals of XAI is to understand the universe.

• 48:24Elon Musk?

  Yes. That's our simple three-word mission.

• 48:28Lex Fridman?

  If you look out far into the future, do you think, on this level of physics, the very edge of what we understand about physics, do you think it will make discoveries, sort of the sexiest discovery of them is, as we know now, sort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics? So coming up with a theory of everything. Do you think it could push towards that direction, almost like theoretical physics discoveries?

• 48:55Elon Musk?

  If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it's clearly not equal to humans, nor has surpassed humans, because humans have figured out new physics. They're just good. You know, physics is just understanding, you know, deepening one's insight into how reality works. And then...

• 49:15Elon Musk?

  Then then then this engineering, which is inventing things that have never existed. Now, the the range of possibilities for engineering is far greater than for physics. Because, you know, we once you figure out the rules of the universe. That that's that's it. You've discovered things that already existed. But from that, you can then build technologies with that are really almost limitless in the variety and, you know. So once you understand the rules of the game properly. And with current physics, we do, at least at a local level, understand how physics works very well. Our ability to predict things is incredibly good. Like quantum mechanics is the degree to which quantum mechanics can predict outcomes is incredible.

• 50:00Elon Musk?

  That was my that was my hardest class in college, by the way. My my senior quantum mechanics class was harder than all of my other classes put together.

• 50:08Lex Fridman?

  To get an AI system, a large language model to to reliably be as reliable as quantum mechanics and physics is very difficult.

• 50:19Elon Musk?

  Yeah, you have to test any conclusions against the ground truth of reality. Reality is the ultimate judge. Like physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation. I've seen plenty of people break that break the laws made by man, but none break the laws made by physics.

• 50:33Lex Fridman?

  It's a good test, actually. If this L M understands and matches physics, then you can more reliably trust whatever it thinks about the current state of politics.

• 50:46Elon Musk?

  And it's also not the case currently that even that its internal logic is not consistent. So especially with these with the approach of like just predicting a token, predict token, predict token. It's like a vector sum, you know, you're summing up a bunch of vectors, but you can get drift. So as those a little bit of error, a little bit of error adds up. And by the time you are many tokens down the path, you're it doesn't make any sense.

• 51:18Lex Fridman?

  So it has to be somehow self aware about the drift.

• 51:20Elon Musk?

  It has to be self aware about the drift and then look at the thing as a gestalt as a whole and and say, it doesn't have coherence as a whole. So. You know, when authors write books, that they will write the book and then they'll go and revise it, you know, taking into account, you know, all the end and the beginning and the middle, and rewrite it to achieve coherence, so that it doesn't end up in a nonsensical place.

• 51:51Lex Fridman?

  Maybe the process of revising is what

• 51:54Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Lex Fridman?

  reasoning is. And then that's the process of revising is how you get closer and closer to truth. Maybe like, at least I approach it that way. You just say a bunch of bullshit first, and then you get it better. You start a bullshit, and then you get

• 52:07Elon Musk?

  You create a draft, and then you iterate on that draft, until it has coherence, until it's, it all adds up, basically.

• 52:17Lex Fridman?

  So another question about theory of everything but for intelligence. Do you think there exists, as you're exploring this with XAI, creating this intelligence system, do you think there is a theory of intelligence, where you get to understand what, like, what is the I in AGI, and what is the I in human intelligence?

• 52:40Elon Musk?

  There's no I in Team America, oh wait, there is.

• 52:44Lex Fridman?

  Uh, now it's gonna be stuck in my head now.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. There's no me in whatever, in quantum mechanics. Oh, wait.

• 52:59Lex Fridman?

  I mean, is that part of the process of discovering, understanding the universe is understanding intelligence?

• 53:06Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think we need to understand intelligence, understand consciousness. I mean, there are some sort of fundamental questions of like, what is thought? What is emotion?

• 53:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Elon Musk?

  Is it really just one atom bumping into another atom? It feels like something more than that. So I think we're probably missing some really big things. Like, some really big things.

• 53:36Lex Fridman?

  Something that'll be obvious in retrospect.

• 53:39Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 53:39Lex Fridman?

  Like, there's a giant, you put the whole consciousness in motion.

• 53:45Elon Musk?

  Well, some people would call it like a soul, you know, religion is a soul. Like, you feel like you're you, right? I mean, you don't feel like you're just a collection of atoms. But on what dimension does thought exist? What dimension does do emotions exist? We feel them very strongly. I suspect there's more to it than atoms bumping into atoms.

• 54:10Lex Fridman?

  And maybe AI can pave the path to the discovery of whatever the hell that thing is.

• 54:16Elon Musk?

  Yeah. What is consciousness? Like, when you put the atoms in a particular shape, why are they able to form thoughts? And take actions that have feelings?

• 54:28Lex Fridman?

  And even if it is an illusion, why is this illusion so compelling?

• 54:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Lex Fridman?

  Like, how do you?

• 54:33Elon Musk?

  Why does this illusion exist?

• 54:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Elon Musk?

  On what plane does this illusion exist?

• 54:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Elon Musk?

  And sometimes I wonder, is, you know, either perhaps everything's conscious or nothing is conscious?

• 54:49Elon Musk?

  One of the two.

• 54:51Lex Fridman?

  I like the former. Everything conscious just seems more fun.

• 54:56Elon Musk?

  It does seem more fun, yes.

• 54:59Elon Musk?

  But we're composed of atoms, and those atoms are composed of quarks and leptons. And those quarks and leptons have been around since the beginning of the universe.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  The beginning of the universe?

• 55:11Elon Musk?

  Right. What seems to be the beginning of the universe?

• 55:13Lex Fridman?

  The first time we talked, you said, which is surreal to think that this discussion was happening is becoming a reality. I asked you, what question would you ask an AGI system once you create it? And you said, what's outside the simulation is the question?

• 55:30Lex Fridman?

  Good question.

• 55:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Lex Fridman?

  But it seems like with Grok, you started, literally, this system's goal is to be able to ask such questions, to answer such questions and to ask such questions.

• 55:42Elon Musk?

  Where are the aliens?

• 55:43Lex Fridman?

  Where are the aliens?

• 55:44Elon Musk?

  That's one of the, like, the Fermi paradox question.

• 55:49Elon Musk?

  A lot of people have asked me if I've seen any evidence of aliens, and I haven't, which is kind of concerning. Because then, I think, I'd probably prefer to at least have seen some archaeological evidence of aliens. To the best of my knowledge, there is no, not worth any evidence of aliens. The foot out there, they're very subtle. We might just be the only consciousness, at least in the galaxy. And if you look at, say, the history of Earth, for want of a better word, the archaeological record, Earth is about four and a half billion years old. Civilization, as measured from the first writing, is only about 5,000 years old. We have to give some credit there to the ancient Sumerians, who aren't around anymore.

• 56:33Elon Musk?

  I think it was the archaic, pre-cuneiform was the first actual symbolic representation, but only about 5,000 years ago. I think that's a good date for when, we'll say, civilization started. That's one millionth of Earth's existence. So civilization's been around, it's really a flash in the pan, so far. And why have we, why did it take so long? For, you know, four and a half billion years?

• 57:15Elon Musk?

  For the vast majority of the time, there was no life, and then there was archaic bacteria for a very long time. And then, you know, you had mitochondria get captured, multicellular life, differentiation into plants and animals, life moving from the oceans to land, mammals, higher brain functions. And the sun is expanding slowly, but it will, it will, it will, it will heat, heat the Earth up at some point in the future, boil the oceans, and Earth will become like Venus,

• 58:00Elon Musk?

  where no life, life as we know it is impossible. So if we do not become multi-planetary, and ultimately go beyond our solar system, annihilation of all life on Earth is a certainty, a certainty.

• 58:18Elon Musk?

  And it could be as little as, on the galactic time scale, half a billion years. You know, a long time by human standards, but that's only 10% longer than Earth has been around at all. So if, if, if life had taken 10% longer to evolve on Earth, it wouldn't exist at all.

• 58:45Lex Fridman?

  We've got a deadline coming up, but a hurry. But that said, as you said, humans, intelligent life on Earth, developed a lot of cool stuff very quickly. So it, it seems like becoming a multi-planetary is almost inevitable. Unless we destroy.

• 59:03Elon Musk?

  We need to do it. I mean, it's, it's not, I mean, I suspect that there, if we are able to go out there and explore other star systems that we, there's a good chance we find a whole bunch of long-dead one-planet civilizations.

• 59:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Elon Musk?

  That never made it past their home planet.

• 59:21Lex Fridman?

  That's so sad.

• 59:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Lex Fridman?

  Sad. Also fascinating.

• 59:26Elon Musk?

  I mean, there are various explanations for this paradox. And one is this sort of, there are these great filters which civilizations don't pass through. And one of those great filters is, do you become a multi-planet civilization or not? And if you don't, it's simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet. You know, either natural or man-made that causes us to die out. Like the dinosaurs. Where are they now? They didn't have spaceships. So.

• 1:00:00Lex Fridman?

  I think the more likely thing is, because just to empathize with the aliens, that they, they found us and they're protecting us and letting us be.

• 1:00:09Elon Musk?

  I hope so. They're nice aliens.

• 1:00:11Lex Fridman?

  Just like the tribes in the, in the Amazon, the on-contact tribes were protecting them. That's what.

• 1:00:17Elon Musk?

  That would be a nice explanation.

• 1:00:18Lex Fridman?

  Or you could have like, what was it? I think Andre Kapathi said it's like the ants in the Amazon asking, where's everybody?

• 1:00:28Elon Musk?

  Well, they do run into a lot of other ants.

• 1:00:31Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 1:00:31Elon Musk?

  They have these ant wars.

• 1:00:34Lex Fridman?

  Sounds like a good TV show.

• 1:00:36Elon Musk?

  Yeah, they literally have this big wars between various ants.

• 1:00:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, maybe I'm just dismissing all the different diversity of ants.

• 1:00:45Elon Musk?

  You should listen to that Werner Herzog talking about the jungle. It's really hilarious. Have you heard it?

• 1:00:50Lex Fridman?

  No, I have not. But Werner Herzog has a way.

• 1:00:54Elon Musk?

  You should play it for the, you know, as an allude in the, it's on YouTube. It's awesome.

• 1:01:03Lex Fridman?

  I love him so much.

• 1:01:04Elon Musk?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:01:06Lex Fridman?

  Was he the director of Happy People: Life in the Daiga, I think also?

• 1:01:09Elon Musk?

  He did that bear documentary.

• 1:01:10Lex Fridman?

  The bear documentary.

• 1:01:11Elon Musk?

  And this thing about penguins.

• 1:01:15Lex Fridman?

  The analysis, the psychoanalysis of penguins.

• 1:01:18Elon Musk?

  Yeah, the penguins like headed for like mountains like that are like 70 miles away. Penguin is just headed for doom, basically.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, he had a cynical take. I have a, he could be just a brave explorer and there'll be great stories told about him amongst the penguin population for many centuries to come.

• 1:01:42Lex Fridman?

  What are we talking about? Okay.

• 1:01:46Elon Musk?

  Yes, aliens. I mean, I don't know. Look, I think the smart move is just, you know, this is the first time in the history of Earth that it's been possible for life to extend beyond Earth. That window is open.

• 1:02:05Elon Musk?

  Now, it may be open for a long time or maybe open for a short time.

• 1:02:10Elon Musk?

  And it may be open now and then never open again. So I think the smart move here is to make life multi-planetary while it is possible to do so. We don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations that just dies out.

• 1:02:23Lex Fridman?

  No, those are lame.

• 1:02:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah, lame.

• 1:02:27Elon Musk?

  There's no respect. A civilization would be one planet.

• 1:02:29Lex Fridman?

  There's not going to be a Wikipedia entry for one of those. And pause. Do SpaceX have an official policy for when we meet aliens?

• 1:02:41Elon Musk?

  No.

• 1:02:43Lex Fridman?

  That seems irresponsible.

• 1:02:49Elon Musk?

  If I see the slightest indication that there are aliens, I will immediately post on the X platform.

• 1:02:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Elon Musk?

  Anything I know.

• 1:02:56Lex Fridman?

  It could be the most liked reposted post of all time.

• 1:03:00Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, look, we have more satellites up there right now than everyone else combined. So, you know, we'd know, we know if we've got to maneuver around something and we're not, I don't have to maneuver around anything.

• 1:03:12Lex Fridman?

  If we go to the big questions once again, you said you've, you're with Einstein that you believe in the god of Spinoza.

• 1:03:20Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:03:22Lex Fridman?

  So, you know, that's a view that God is like the universe and is, reveals himself through the laws of physics, or as Einstein said, through the lawful harmony of the world.

• 1:03:33Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I would agree that God of the simulator or whatever, the supreme being or beings reveal themselves through the physics, you know, they're creatives of this existence. And it's incumbent upon us to try to understand more about this wondrous creation.

• 1:03:54Lex Fridman?

  Who created this thing? Who's running this thing? Like embodying it into a singular question with a sexy word on top of it is like focusing the mind to understand. It does seem like there's a, again, it could be an illusion. It seemed like there's a purpose, that there's an underlying master plan of some kind. It seems like.

• 1:04:16Elon Musk?

  There may not be a master plan in the sense, so this, like, maybe an interesting answer to the question of determinism versus free will is that if we are in a simulation, the reason that these higher beings would hold a simulation is to see what happens. So it's not, they don't know what happens. Otherwise, they wouldn't hold the simulation. So when humans create simulations, so SpaceX and Tesla, we create simulations all the time, especially for the rocket.

• 1:04:53Elon Musk?

  You know, you have to run a lot of simulations to understand what's going to happen because you can't really test the rocket until it goes to space and you want it to work. So you have to simulate subsonic, transonic, supersonic, hypersonic ascent, and then coming back, super high heating and orbital dynamics. All this is going to be simulated. So you don't get very many kicks at the can. But we run the simulations to see what happens. Not if we knew what happens, we wouldn't run the simulation. So if there's, whoever created this existence is, they're running it because they don't know what's going to happen, not because they do.

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  So maybe we both played Diablo. Maybe Diablo was created to see if a Druid, your character, could defeat Uber Lilith at the end. They didn't know.

• 1:05:52Elon Musk?

  Well, the funny thing is Uber Lilith, her title is Hatred Incarnate.

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Elon Musk?

  And right now, I guess, you can ask the Diablo team, but it's almost impossible to defeat hatred in the Eternal Realm.

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you've streamed yourself dominating Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons and still.

• 1:06:19Elon Musk?

  I can cruise through Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons like a stroll in the park.

• 1:06:25Lex Fridman?

  And still you're defeated by hatred.

• 1:06:27Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I can, this, the sort of, I guess, maybe the second hardest boss is Duriel. Duriel can't even scratch the paint. So I killed Duriel so many times. And every other boss in the game, all of them, kill them so many times, it's easy. But Uber Lilith, otherwise known as Hatred Incarnate, especially if you're a Druid and you have no ability to go and be invulnerable, there are these random death waves that come at you.

• 1:07:01Elon Musk?

  And I'm pretty, you know, I'm 52, so my reflexes are not what they used to be. But I'm, I have a lifetime of playing video games. At one point, I was, you know, maybe one of the best Quake players in the world. Actually won money for, and what I think was the first paid esports tournament in the US. We're doing four-person Quake tournaments and we came second. I was the second best person on the team. And the actual best person, we were actually winning. We were going to come first, except the best person on the team, his computer crashed halfway through the game. So we came second. But I got money for it and everything. So like, basically, I got skills, you know, albeit, you know, no, no spring chicken these

• 1:07:46Elon Musk?

  days. And to be totally frank, it's driving me crazy trying to beat Lilith as a Druid, basically trying to beat, trying to beat Hatred incarnate in the Eternal Realm.

• 1:07:58Lex Fridman?

  As a Druid.

• 1:07:59Elon Musk?

  As Druid. And if you, if you, this is really vexing, let me tell you.

• 1:08:06Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the challenge is part of the fun. I have seen directly, like, you're actually like a world-class, incredible video game player.

• 1:08:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  And I think Diablo, so you're just picking up a new game and you're figuring out its fundamentals. You're also with the paragon board and the build are not somebody like me who perfectly follows whatever they suggest on the internet. You're also an innovator there.

• 1:08:32Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Lex Fridman?

  Which is hilarious to watch. It's like, it's like a mad scientist just trying to figure out the paragon board and the build and the, you know. Is there some interesting insights there about if somebody's starting as a Druid, do you have advice?

• 1:08:47Elon Musk?

  I would not recommend playing a Druid in the Eternal Realm. Right now, I think the most powerful character in the seasonal realm is the Sorcerer with the lightning balls. The Sorcs have huge balls in the seasonal.

• 1:09:03Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. That's what they say.

• 1:09:06Elon Musk?

  Sorcs have huge balls. They do, huge balls of lightning.

• 1:09:12Lex Fridman?

  I'll take your word for it.

• 1:09:14Elon Musk?

  And it's actually, in the seasonal realm, you can, you can, it's like, pretty easy to beat Uber Lilith with, because you got these vampiric powers that amplify your damage and. Increase your defense and whatnot. So but really quite easy to defeat hatred seasonally. But to defeat hatred eternally, very difficult. Almost impossible. It's very unimpossible. It seems like this is a metaphor for life.

• 1:09:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I like the idea that Elon Musk, because I saw I was playing Diao yesterday and I saw one hundred, level one hundred Druid just run by, I will never die. And then run back the other way. And there's just some this metaphor. It's kind of hilarious that you, Elon Musk, is fighting hatred, restlessly fighting hatred in this demonic realm.

• 1:10:05Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:10:06Lex Fridman?

  It's hilarious. I mean, it's pretty hilarious.

• 1:10:08Elon Musk?

  No, it's absurd. Really, it's exercising absurdity and it makes me want to pull my hair out.

• 1:10:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What do you get from video games in general? Is there for you for you personally?

• 1:10:21Elon Musk?

  It's I don't know. It's it calms my mind. I mean, you sort of killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind. Yeah, if you play a tough video game, you can get into like a state of flow, which is very enjoyable. And admittedly, it needs to be not too easy, not too hard. Kind of in the Goldilocks zone. And I guess you generally want to feel like you're progressing in the game. So a good video. And there's also beautiful art, engaging storylines.

• 1:11:05Elon Musk?

  And it's a it's like an amazing puzzle to solve, I think. And so it's like solving the puzzle.

• 1:11:10Lex Fridman?

  Elden Ring, the greatest game of all time. I still haven't played it. But to you.

• 1:11:14Elon Musk?

  It's Elden Ring is definitely a candidate for best game ever. Top five for sure.

• 1:11:19Lex Fridman?

  I think I've been scared how hard it is or how hard I hear it is. So but it is beautiful.

• 1:11:25Elon Musk?

  Elden Ring is.

• 1:11:27Elon Musk?

  Feels like it's designed by an alien.

• 1:11:31Lex Fridman?

  There's a theme to this discussion. In what way?

• 1:11:34Elon Musk?

  It's it's it's so unusual. It's incredibly creative and the art is stunning.

• 1:11:40Elon Musk?

  I recommend playing it on a on a big resolution, high dynamic raised TV even. Doesn't need to be a monitor. Just a. The art is incredible. It's so beautiful. And it's it's so unusual.

• 1:11:57Elon Musk?

  And each of those top boss battles is unique, like it's like a unique puzzle to solve. Each one's different. And the strategy used to solve one battle is different from another battle.

• 1:12:12Lex Fridman?

  That said, you said Druid and Eternal against Uber Lilith is the hardest boss battle you've ever.

• 1:12:18Elon Musk?

  Correct. That is currently the and I've I've played a lot of video games. Because it's my primary recreational activity.

• 1:12:31Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:12:33Elon Musk?

  Beating hatred in the Eternal Realm is the hardest boss battle in life and in the video game.

• 1:12:41Lex Fridman?

  Metaphor.

• 1:12:43Elon Musk?

  I'm not sure it's possible, but it's it's I do make progress. So then I'm like, OK, I'm making progress. Maybe if I just tweak that paragon board a little more,

• 1:12:55Elon Musk?

  I can do it. Could just dodge a few more waves. I could do it.

• 1:13:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, the simulation is created for the purpose of figuring out if it can be done. And you're just a cog in that simulation, in the machine of the simulation.

• 1:13:09Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I might be.

• 1:13:12Elon Musk?

  I have a feeling that at least I think.

• 1:13:20Lex Fridman?

  It's doable.

• 1:13:21Elon Musk?

  It's doable, yes.

• 1:13:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's the human spirit right there, to believe.

• 1:13:27Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, it did prompt me to think about just hate in general, which is, you want to be careful of one of those things where you wish for something that sounds good, but if you get it, it's actually a dystopian situation. So, you know, you could sort of run a sort of have thoughts of like, if you wish for world peace, it sounds good, but how is it enforced? And at what cost is it, at what cost eternal peace? It might actually be worse to have eternal peace because of what that would entail. The suppression of everyone.

• 1:14:11Elon Musk?

  It might be the suppression of progress.

• 1:14:14Elon Musk?

  It might be an ossified society that never changes.

• 1:14:18Elon Musk?

  What I'm saying is that there is an argument that you, that if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for. Because what's required in order for there to be no war?

• 1:14:38Elon Musk?

  Might be worse than a little war.

• 1:14:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the things we consider to be flaws of human civilization might be a necessary components for whatever optimal looks like. I mean, do you worry about AI AGI enabling a dystopian state of this nature? Whether it's 1984 with surveillance and fear or Brave New World with pleasure?

• 1:15:01Lex Fridman?

  And what is it, lots of sex, but no deep human experience?

• 1:15:09Elon Musk?

  You know, there's actually a real drug called soma.

• 1:15:12Lex Fridman?

  There is?

• 1:15:13Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:15:15Lex Fridman?

  Let me take notes.

• 1:15:15Elon Musk?

  Did they actually?

• 1:15:16Lex Fridman?

  Does Grok know about it? No, he probably will go to Brave New World.

• 1:15:20Elon Musk?

  We could ask it.

• 1:15:21Lex Fridman?

  What would be the question?

• 1:15:23Elon Musk?

  Tell us about the drug called soma.

• 1:15:31Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna go to Brave New World, I think.

• 1:15:33Elon Musk?

  Well, there's a real drug as well.

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  Searching for soma drug information.

• 1:15:40Elon Musk?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:15:42Lex Fridman?

  Ah, soma, the wonder drug. By the way, I'm in fun mode.

• 1:15:45Elon Musk?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's talking about the real drug.

• 1:15:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's a muscle relaxant that's been around since the 1950s. It's used to treat muscle pain and discomfort, and it does this by altering the activity between neurons and the spinal cord. Now, soma isn't just a pain reliever. It's also a bit of a sedative. It can make you feel a bit drowsy, so it's not something to take if you're planning and operating heavy machinery or trying to solve complex math equations. And it goes on and on. In conclusion, soma is a drug that can be helpful for those dealing with muscle pain, but it's not without its risks. It's pretty good. Oh, wait a minute.

• 1:16:19Elon Musk?

  That's the real drug it's talking about.

• 1:16:21Lex Fridman?

  It's the real drug.

• 1:16:22Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Lex Fridman?

  Uh, and of course, the fun is always use it responsibly in accordance with the advice of a healthcare professional. And remember, in the end, the universe is probably just a giant computer simulation, so don't take anything too seriously. I love it. I love it. I love it.

• 1:16:39Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, and it also really nicely includes like, uh, the tweets, posts on X that are relevant to this, which is really cool.

• 1:16:48Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Lex Fridman?

  It like integrates everything together.

• 1:16:51Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Lex Fridman?

  Like, the interface is one of the really cool things here.

• 1:16:55Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's done a great job.

• 1:16:59Elon Musk?

  So, and you could say like, you could say like, no, I mean soma from Brave New World. Because it thinks you mean, you mean soma, the real drug.

• 1:17:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Elon Musk?

  No, I mean soma from Brave New World.

• 1:17:14Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna be like, oops, I'm really sorry. I'm really surprised it went to the real drug first.

• 1:17:21Lex Fridman?

  Ah, my apologies. I was thinking of the muscle relax and soma from Brave New World is a different beast altogether. Now, this huxie dystopian, now soma is a drug that plays a central role in the society depicted in the book. It's a mood-altering hallucinogenic drug that's used to keep the population docile and content in the novel. To use soma in Brave New World raises some interesting questions about the nature of happiness and the role of drugs in society. Oh, man.

• 1:17:48Elon Musk?

  Exactly. Is it better to live in a world where everyone is happy all the time, even if that happiness is artificial? Good question. This is what I mean. Like, do you want, do you wish for world peace and happiness all the time? Are you sure? Because that might be a society that is essentially sterile and ossified, that never changes, that is ultimately doomed.

• 1:18:16Lex Fridman?

  This kind of tension between darkness and the light.

• 1:18:21Elon Musk?

  This is really a very good summary. It really gets the point. This is not simply regurgitating Brave New World, it's actually getting to the salient element of soma as a drug. Do you actually want to be in a situation where everyone is happy all the time, even though it's artificial? Or is it better to confront the challenges of life and experience the full range of human emotions, even if it means experiencing pain and suffering?

• 1:18:49Lex Fridman?

  For those listening, by the way, Elon just read directly from Grok, which is a really nice, kind of insightful philosophical analysis of the tension here. Interesting.

• 1:18:59Elon Musk?

  It pretty much nails it. In conclusion, soma from Brave New World is a fictional drug that is used to explore some deep philosophical questions about the nature of happiness and the role of drugs in society. It's a powerful symbol of the dangers of using drugs to escape from reality and the importance of confronting the challenges of life head-on.

• 1:19:18Elon Musk?

  Nailed it. And the crazy thing is like, you know, we do have a real drug called soma, which kind of does, is kind of like the drug in the book. And I'm like, did they, they must have named, they must have named it after.

• 1:19:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, probably, probably.

• 1:19:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Some of the real drug is quite effective on back pain.

• 1:19:36Lex Fridman?

  So you know about this drug?

• 1:19:37Elon Musk?

  I've taken it.

• 1:19:37Lex Fridman?

  This is fascinating. Okay.

• 1:19:40Elon Musk?

  Cause I had like a, you know, squashed disc in my C5, C6.

• 1:19:44Lex Fridman?

  So it takes the physical pain away, but soma here is.

• 1:19:46Elon Musk?

  It doesn't completely, it, it reduces the amount of pain you feel, but at the expense of mental acuity. It dulls your mind. Just like, just like the drug in the book.

• 1:19:59Lex Fridman?

  Just like the drug in the book.

• 1:20:01Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Lex Fridman?

  And hence the trade off. Uh, the thing that seems like utopia could be a dystopia after all.

• 1:20:07Elon Musk?

  Yeah. And actually I was talking to a friend of mine, um, saying like, would you really want there to be no hate in the world? Like really none? Like, I wonder why hate evolved. I'm not saying we should amplify hate, of course. I think we should try to minimize it, but, but none at all? There might be a reason for hate.

• 1:20:31Lex Fridman?

  And suffering. And it's really complicated to consider that some amount of human suffering is necessary for human flourishing.

• 1:20:40Elon Musk?

  Is it possible to appreciate the highs without knowing the lows?

• 1:20:47Lex Fridman?

  And that, that all is summarized there in a single statement from Grok. Okay.

• 1:20:52Elon Musk?

  No highs, no lows. Who knows?

• 1:20:55Lex Fridman?

  That's almost the poem. It seems that training LLMs efficiently is a big focus for XAI. What's the, uh, first of all, what's the limit of what's possible in terms of efficiency? There's this terminology of useful productivity per watt. Like what have you learned?

• 1:21:16Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Lex Fridman?

  Pushing the limits of that.

• 1:21:17Elon Musk?

  Well, I, I think it's helpful. The, the tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied, I think, to almost any, really any arena in life. This, it's really just a critical thinking. For something important, you need to reason from first principles and think about things in the limit, one direction or the other. So, um, in, in the limit, even at the Kadaev scale, meaning even if you harness the entire power of the sun, you will still care about useful compute per watt.

• 1:21:48Elon Musk?

  So that's where I think probably where things are headed from the standpoint of AI is that we have a silicon shortage now that will transition to a voltage transformer shortage in about a year. Ironically, transformers for transformers. You need transformers to run transformers.

• 1:22:11Lex Fridman?

  Somebody has a sense of humor in this thing.

• 1:22:14Elon Musk?

  I think, yes. Fate loves irony. Ironic humor and ironically funny outcome seems to be often what fate wants.

• 1:22:26Lex Fridman?

  Humor is all you need. I think spice is all you need, somebody posted.

• 1:22:30Elon Musk?

  Yeah, but yeah, so we're a silicon shortage today. A voltage step down transformer shortage probably in about a year and then just electricity shortages in general in about two years. I gave a speech for the sort of world gathering of utility companies, electricity companies. And I said, look, you really need to prepare for a troubling of electricity demand because all transport is going to go electric with the ironic exception of rockets. And heating will also go electric. So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity,

• 1:23:14Elon Musk?

  one third transport, one third heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output. So I encouraged the utilities to build more power plants and also to probably have, well, not probably, they should definitely buy more batteries because the grid currently is sized for real time load, which is kind of crazy because, you know, that means you've got a size for whatever the peak electricity demand is, like the worst second or the worst day of the year, or you can have a blackout. And you read that crazy blackout for several days in Austin.

• 1:24:00Elon Musk?

  So because there's almost no buffering of energy in the grid. Like if you've got a hydro power plant, you can buffer energy. But otherwise, it's all real time. So with batteries, you can you can produce energy at night and use it during the day. So you can buffer. So I expect that there will be very heavy usage of batteries in the future. Because the peak to trough ratio for power plants is anywhere from two to five. You know, so it's like lowest point to highest point.

• 1:24:38Lex Fridman?

  So like batteries necessary to balance it out? And then but the demand, as you're saying, is going to grow, grow, grow, grow.

• 1:24:43Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Lex Fridman?

  And part of that is the compute.

• 1:24:47Elon Musk?

  Yes, yes. I mean, electrification, I mean electrification of transport and electric heating will be much bigger than AI.

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  At least in the short term.

• 1:24:58Elon Musk?

  In the short term. But but even for AI, you really have a growing demand for electricity for electric vehicles and a growing demand for electricity for to run the computers for AI. And so this is obviously leaning can lead to an electricity shortage.

• 1:25:16Lex Fridman?

  How difficult is the problem of, in this particular case, maximizing the useful productivity per watt for training, you know, nuts? Like, this seems to be really where the big problem we're facing that needs to be solved is how to use the power efficiently. Like what you've learned so far about applying this physics first principle of reasoning in this domain? How difficult is this problem?

• 1:25:47Elon Musk?

  It will get solved, just a question of how long it takes to solve it. So at various points, there's a limit, some kind of limiting factor to progress. And with regard to AI, I'm saying right now, the limiting factor is silicon chips. And that will, we're gonna then have more chips than we can actually plug in and turn on, probably in about a year. The the initial constraint being literally voltage step down transformers. Because you've got.

• 1:26:19Elon Musk?

  Power coming in at 300,000 volts and it's got to step all the way down eventually to around 0.7 volts. So it's a very big amount of, the voltage step down is gigantic. So, and the industry is not used to rapid growth.

• 1:26:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let's talk about the competition here. You've shown concern about Google and Microsoft with OpenAI developing AGI. How can you help ensure with XAI and Tesla AI work that it doesn't become a competitive race to AGI, but instead is a collaborative development of safe AGI?

• 1:27:00Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, I've been pushing for some kind of regulatory oversight for a long time. I've been somewhat of a Cassandra on the subject for over a decade. I think we want to be very careful in how we develop AI. It's a great power and with great power comes great responsibility. I think it would be wise for us to have at least an objective third party who can be like a referee that can go in and understand what the various leading players are doing with AI. And even

• 1:27:39Elon Musk?

  if there's no enforcement ability, they should, they can at least voice concerns publicly. You know, Jeff Hinton, for example, left Google and he voiced strong concerns, but now he's not at Google anymore. So who's going to voice the concerns? So I think, I think there's, I like, Tesla gets a lot of regulatory oversight on the automotive front. And we're subject to, I think, over 100 regulatory agencies domestically and internationally. So it's a lot. You could fill this room with the, all the regulations that Tesla has to

• 1:28:17Elon Musk?

  adhere to for automotive. Same is true in, you know, for rockets and for, currently the limiting factor for SpaceX for Starship launch is regulatory approval. The FAA has actually given their approval, but we're waiting for Fish and Wildlife to finish their analysis and give their approval. That's why I posted, I want to buy a fish license on.

• 1:28:44Elon Musk?

  To also refer to the Monty Python sketch. Yeah.

• 1:28:48Elon Musk?

  Like, why do you need a license for your fish? I don't know.

• 1:28:52Elon Musk?

  According to the rules, I'm told you need some sort of fish license or something. We effectively need a fish license to launch a rocket.

• 1:29:02Elon Musk?

  And I'm like, wait a second. How did the fish come into this picture? Yeah.

• 1:29:07Elon Musk?

  I mean, some of the things like that, it's, I feel like are so absurd that I want to do like a comedy sketch and flash at the bottom. This is all real. This is actually what happened.

• 1:29:20Elon Musk?

  You know, one of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about a rocket hitting a shark. And now the ocean is very big. And how often do you see sharks?

• 1:29:34Elon Musk?

  Not that often, you know, as a percentage of ocean surface area, sharks basically are zero. And so then we will, then we said, well, how will we calculate the probability of telling a shark? And they're like, well, we can't give you that information because they're worried about shark fin hunters going and hunting sharks. And so, well, how are we supposed to? We're on the horns of a dilemma then.

• 1:29:58Elon Musk?

  Then they said, well, there's another part of fish and wildlife that can, can do this analysis. I'm like, well, why don't you give them the data? Like, we don't, we don't trust them. Like, excuse me? They're literally in your department. And again, this is actually what happened. And, and can you do an NDA or something?

• 1:30:17Elon Musk?

  Eventually, they managed to solve the internal quandary and indeed the probability of a sea shock is essentially zero.

• 1:30:25Elon Musk?

  Then there's another organization that I didn't realize existed until, you know, a few months ago, that cares about whether you, we would potentially hit a whale in international waters. Now, again, you look at the surface of the, look at the Pacific and say, what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? Like, he'll give you a big picture and like, point out all the whales in this picture. I'm like, I don't see any whales. It's like basically zero percent. And if our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, that is the fate had it, that's a whale has some seriously bad luck. You know, it's the least lucky whale ever. And. I mean, this is quite absurd.

• 1:31:10Elon Musk?

  The bureaucracy, the bureaucracy of this, however it emerged. Yes, well, I mean, one of the things that's pretty wild is for launching out of Vandenberg in California, we had to, they were worried about seal procreation, whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms. Now, there've been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac, based on the evidence, if you correlate rocket launches with seal population. Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the

• 1:31:53Elon Musk?

  seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures. I would love to see this. Yeah. I mean, I'm sorry, there's a seal with headphones. Yes, it's a seal with headphones strapped to a board and, and like the, okay, now the amazing part is how calm the seal was. Yeah. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely gonna eat me. Yeah. How old the seal, when a seal goes back to other, you know, seal friends, how's it gonna explain that? I'm never gonna believe them. Never gonna believe it.

• 1:32:37Elon Musk?

  That's just why I'm like, well, you know, it's sort of like, it's like getting kidnapped by aliens and getting an anal probe, you know?

• 1:32:43Elon Musk?

  You come back and say, I swear to God, I got kidnapped by aliens and they stuck an anal probe in my butt. And people are like, no, they didn't. That's ridiculous. Seal buddies are never gonna believe him that he gets strapped to a ward and they put headphones on his ears. And then let him go. Twice, by the way. We had to do it twice.

• 1:33:04Lex Fridman?

  They let him go twice?

• 1:33:06Elon Musk?

  We had to capture.

• 1:33:07Lex Fridman?

  The same seal?

• 1:33:07Elon Musk?

  Well, no, different seal.

• 1:33:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, okay. Did you, uh, did you get a seal approval?

• 1:33:12Elon Musk?

  Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, this is, this is like, I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on.

• 1:33:21Lex Fridman?

  Yes, yeah, it's absurd.

• 1:33:23Elon Musk?

  Frickin' seals with frickin'.

• 1:33:24Lex Fridman?

  Headphones. I mean, this is the, it's a good encapsulation of the absurdity of human civilization, seals and headphones.

• 1:33:31Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:33:33Lex Fridman?

  What are the pros and cons of open sourcing AI to you as another way to combat,

• 1:33:40Lex Fridman?

  you know, a company running away with AGI?

• 1:33:46Elon Musk?

  In order to run, uh, like really deep intelligence, you need a lot of compute. So it's not like, you know, you can just fire up a PC in your basement and be running AGI, at least not yet.

• 1:34:04Elon Musk?

  You know, Grok was trained on 8,000 A100s running at peak efficiency.

• 1:34:13Elon Musk?

  And Grok's gonna get a lot better, by the way. We will be more than doubling our compute every couple of months for the next several months.

• 1:34:20Lex Fridman?

  There's a nice write-up of how it went from Grok 0 to Grok 1.

• 1:34:24Elon Musk?

  By Grok?

• 1:34:26Lex Fridman?

  Like Grok just bragging, making shit up about itself.

• 1:34:30Elon Musk?

  Does Grok, Grok, Grok?

• 1:34:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Lex Fridman?

  It's like a weird AI dating site. It exaggerates about itself. No, there's a, there's a write-up of, you know, like where, where it stands now, the history of its development.

• 1:34:46Lex Fridman?

  And where it stands on, on some benchmarks compared to the state of the art, GPT-3.5. And so, I mean, there's a, you know, there's a llama. You, you can open source, once it's strained, you can open source a model for fine tuning and all that kind of stuff. Like, what to use, the pros and cons of that, of open sourcing base models?

• 1:35:09Elon Musk?

  I think the similarities to open sourcing, I think perhaps with a slight time delay, you know, I don't know, six, six months even. I think I'm generally in favor of open sourcing, like bias was open sourcing. I mean, it is a concern to me that, you know, OpenAI, you know, I was, you know, I think, I guess arguably the prime, you know, prime mover behind OpenAI in the sense that it was created because of discussions that I had with Larry Page back when he and I were friends in the United States at his house and talked to him about AI safety and Larry

• 1:35:53Elon Musk?

  did not care about AI safety, or at least at the time he didn't. You know, and at one point he called me a specious for being pro-human. And I'm like, well, what team are you on, Larry? You're still on Team Robot. And I'm like, okay, so at the time, you know, Google, Google had acquired DeepMind. They had probably two thirds of all AI research, you know, probably two thirds of all the AI researchers in the world that basically infinite money and compute. And the guy in charge, you know, Larry Page, did not care about safety and even yelled at me and called me a specious and being pro-human.

• 1:36:37Lex Fridman?

  So I don't know if you notice about humans, they can change their mind and maybe you and Larry Page can still can be friends once more.

• 1:36:45Elon Musk?

  I'd like to be friends with Larry again. He's, he got, really the breaking of the friendship was over OpenAI. And specifically, I think the key moment was recruiting Ilya Sutskeyer. So.

• 1:37:04Lex Fridman?

  I love Ilya. He's so brilliant.

• 1:37:07Elon Musk?

  Ilya's a good, good human, smart, good heart.

• 1:37:12Elon Musk?

  And that was a tough recruiting battle. It was mostly Demis on one side and me on the other, both trying to recruit Ilya. And Ilya went back and forth. He was gonna stay at Google, then he was gonna leave, then he was gonna stay, then he was gonna leave. And finally, he did agree to join OpenAI. That was one of the toughest recruiting battles we ever had. But that was really the linchpin for OpenAI being successful. And I was also instrumental in recruiting a number of other people. And I provided all of the funding in the beginning, over $40 million. And the name.

• 1:37:55Elon Musk?

  The "open" in OpenAI is supposed to mean open source. And it was created as a nonprofit open source, and now it is a closed source for maximum profit, which I think is not good karma.

• 1:38:06Lex Fridman?

  But like we talked about with war and leaders talking, I do hope that there's only a few folks working on this at the highest level. I do hope you reinvigorate friendships here.

• 1:38:20Elon Musk?

  Like I said, I'd like to be friends again with Larry. I haven't seen him in ages. And we were friends for a very long time. I met Larry Page before he got funding for Google, or actually, I guess, before he got venture funding. I think he got the first like 100K from, I think, Back to Alzheimer's or someone.

• 1:38:38Lex Fridman?

  It's wild to think about all that happened and even guys knowing each other that whole time, just 20 years.

• 1:38:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah, since maybe 98 or something.

• 1:38:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's crazy. Crazy how much has happened since then.

• 1:38:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah, 25 years. A lot has happened since then.

• 1:38:54Lex Fridman?

  But you're seeing the tension there, like maybe delayed open source.

• 1:38:58Elon Musk?

  Delayed, yeah. Like, what is the source that is open? You know what I mean? Like, there's basically, it's a giant CSV file.

• 1:39:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:10Elon Musk?

  With a bunch of numbers.

• 1:39:11Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:39:12Elon Musk?

  What do you do with that giant file of numbers? You know? How do you run?

• 1:39:20Elon Musk?

  Like the amount of actual, the lines of code is very small.

• 1:39:26Elon Musk?

  And most of the work, the software work is in the, in the curation of the data. So it's like trying to figure out what data is separating good data from bad data. Like, like you can't just crawl the internet because there's a lot of junk out there.

• 1:39:44Elon Musk?

  A huge percentage of websites have more noise than signal. You know, they're, they're, or because they're just used for search engine optimization. They're literally just scam websites. So.

• 1:39:57Lex Fridman?

  How do you, by the way, so I'd interrupt, get the signal, separate the signal and noise on X? It's such a fascinating source of data. You know, no offense to people posting on X, but sometimes there's a little bit of noise.

• 1:40:10Elon Musk?

  So. Yeah, I think the signal noise could be greatly improved. I mean, really, all of the posts on the X platform should be AI recommended. Meaning like we should populate a vector space around any given post. Compare that to the vector space around any user and match the two.

• 1:40:29Elon Musk?

  Right now, there is a little bit of AI used for the, the, the recommended posts, but it's mostly heuristics. And if there's a reply, whether the reply to a post could be much better than the original post. But it will, according to the current rules of the system, get almost no attention compared to a primary post.

• 1:40:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so a lot of that, I, I got the sense, so you, a lot of the X algorithm has been open source and been written up about. And it seems that there to be some machine learning is disparate, but there's some.

• 1:41:02Elon Musk?

  It's a little, there's a little bit, but it needs to be entirely that. Like, at least in the, like, if you explicitly follow someone, that's one thing. But if you, in terms of what is recommended from people that you don't follow, that should all be AI.

• 1:41:16Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's a fascinating problem.

• 1:41:17Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Lex Fridman?

  So there's several aspects of it that's fascinating. First, as the write up goes, it first picks 1500 tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions. First of all, that's fascinating because you have hundreds of millions of posts every single day. And it has to pick 1500 from which it then. Does obviously people you follow, but then there's also like some kind of clustering. It has to do to figure out what kind of human are you, what kind of new clusters might be relevant to you. People like you, this, this kind of, this kind of problem is just fascinating because it has to then rank those 1500 with some, with some filtering.

• 1:41:53Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Lex Fridman?

  And then recommend you just a handful. And to me, what's really fascinating is how fast it has to do that. So currently that entire pipeline to go from several hundreds of million to a handful is, takes 220 seconds of CPU time. Single CPU time.

• 1:42:11Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12Lex Fridman?

  And then it has to do that in like a second. So it has to be like super distributed in fascinating ways. Like there's just a lot of tweets.

• 1:42:21Elon Musk?

  There's a lot, there's a lot of stuff on the system. And I, and I think, but I think it right now, it's, it's not currently good at recommending things that from accounts you don't follow.

• 1:42:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:33Elon Musk?

  Or where there's more than one degree of separation. So, you know, it's, it's pretty good if, if there's at least like some commonality between someone you follow liked something. Or reposted it or commented on or something like that. But if, if, if there's no, let's say somebody posted something really interesting, but you have no followers in common. You would not see it.

• 1:43:00Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. And then, as you said, reply, like replies might not.

• 1:43:04Elon Musk?

  Replies basically never get seen because they're never, they're, they're currently, I don't think it's correct, I'm saying it's incorrect. Replies have a couple or magnitude less importance than primary posts.

• 1:43:18Lex Fridman?

  Do you think this can be more and more converted into end to end neural net?

• 1:43:23Elon Musk?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what it should be.

• 1:43:25Lex Fridman?

  So you, you.

• 1:43:25Elon Musk?

  Well, the recommendations should be purely a vector correlation, like there's a series of vectors. You know, basically parameters, vectors, whatever you want to call them. But, but sort of things that the system knows that you like. Like maybe there's like several hundred sort of vectors associated with each user account. And then any post in the system, whether it's video, audio, short post, long post. The reason I, by the way, want to move away from tweet is that, you know, people are posting like two, three hour videos on the site. That's not a tweet. Like every like tweet for two hours.

• 1:44:10Elon Musk?

  Come on. Tweet made sense when it was like 140 characters of text. Cause it's like a bunch of like little birds tweeting. But when you've got long form content, it's no longer a tweet.

• 1:44:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Elon Musk?

  So a movie is not a tweet. And like, you know, Apple, for example, posted like the entire episode of The Silo, the entire thing on our platform. By the way, it was their number one social media thing ever in engagement of anything on any platform ever. So it was a great idea. And by the way, I just learned about it afterwards. I was like, hey, wow, they posted an entire hour long episode of. So no, that's not a tweet. Yeah, it was a video.

• 1:44:52Lex Fridman?

  But from a, you're on that perspective, it becomes really complex, whether it's a single. So like everything's data. So a single sentence, a clever sort of joke, dad joke is in the same pool as a three hour video.

• 1:45:06Elon Musk?

  Yeah. I mean, right now it's, it's a hard project for that reason. It's, it's. But you know, like if, let's say in the case of Apple posting like an entire episode of their series, pretty good series, by the way, The Silo. I watched it. So there's going to be a lot of discussion around it. So you've got a lot of context. People commenting, they like it, they don't like it, or they like this, or the, you know, and you can then populate the vector space based on the context of all the comments around it. So even though it's a video, there's a lot of information around it that allows you to populate back to space of that, that hour long video. And then you can obviously get more sophisticated by having the AI actually watch the movie.

• 1:45:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:45:51Elon Musk?

  And tell you if you're gonna like the movie.

• 1:45:53Lex Fridman?

  Convert the movie into like, into a language, essentially.

• 1:45:57Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Analyze this movie and just like your movie critic or TV series and, and then recommend based on.

• 1:46:10Elon Musk?

  After it, after AI watches the movie, just like a friend can tell you, if a friend knows you well, a friend can recommend a movie and with high probability that you'll like it.

• 1:46:20Lex Fridman?

  But this is like a friend that's analyzing whatever.

• 1:46:24Elon Musk?

  It's like AI. Yeah, I mean, actually, frankly, AI will be better than, will know you better than your friends know you, mostly friends, anyway.

• 1:46:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and as part of this, it should also feed you advertisements in a way that's like, I mean, I like advertisements that are like, well done, right?

• 1:46:42Elon Musk?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:43Lex Fridman?

  The whole point is because it funds things, like an advertisement that you actually want to see is a big success.

• 1:46:49Elon Musk?

  Absolutely. You want ads that are, advertising that is, if it's for a product or service that you actually need, when you need it, it's content. And then even if it's not something that you need when you need it, if it's at least aesthetically pleasing and entertaining, you know, it could be like a Coca-Cola ad, like, you know, they do, they actually run a lot of great ads on the, on the X system. And McDonald's does too, and, and, you know, it's, they can do, you can do something that's like, well, this is, this is just a cool thing.

• 1:47:25Elon Musk?

  And, you know, so, you know, basically the question is, do you regret seeing it or not? And if you don't regret seeing it, it's a win.

• 1:47:34Lex Fridman?

  How do you, so there's a bunch of signals that are incorporated, hearts and reposts, and maybe number of seconds you linger on a post or something like this.

• 1:47:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah, but attention is a big, a big factor.

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Attention.

• 1:47:47Elon Musk?

  So that's, that's why it's like, it's, it is actually better to do things that are long form on the system, because it's, it basically is tallying up how many user seconds, you know, users were interested in this thing for how many seconds. So if it's a really short thing, well, they will be less, like if it's a link leading out of the system, which we're not opposed to at all, it just is going to have fewer user seconds than if that article was posted on the X platform.

• 1:48:17Lex Fridman?

  How hard is it to, to go from maximizing minutes on platform to maximizing unregretted minutes?

• 1:48:23Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, our aspiration is certainly unregretted, Mads.

• 1:48:26Lex Fridman?

  It's tricky. It's a big, it's a, it's a tough.

• 1:48:28Elon Musk?

  It is.

• 1:48:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, it's a fascinating leap. Because regret is a fascinating concept.

• 1:48:34Elon Musk?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:36Lex Fridman?

  Happiness.

• 1:48:37Elon Musk?

  I have a joke with a friend of mine, like, you need this drug called Regretamine. You just take one, one pill or one, one dose of Regretamine and all your regrets are gone.

• 1:48:46Elon Musk?

  Wait, do you want to have regrets, though? So then I'm like, if you want to have regrets, if you don't regret anything, was, was anything meaningful?

• 1:48:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a French song like that.

• 1:48:56Elon Musk?

  Sure, not regret, really?

• 1:48:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Elon Musk?

  I regret nothing?

• 1:48:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Elon Musk?

  Edith Fiaf.

• 1:49:00Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's fascinating that you, you know, there's something about social media that could help you grow as a human being. But then, like, the cheap fun is also valuable.

• 1:49:10Elon Musk?

  Should we ask Grok? Do you regret anything?

• 1:49:15Lex Fridman?

  Do you regret anything?

• 1:49:16Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Lex Fridman?

  Do you regret anything?

• 1:49:20Lex Fridman?

  I think it's gonna be very sensitive, our personal questions. As a machine learning model, I don't have personal experiences or emotions in the same ways that humans do. However, I do have a set of ethical principles that guide my actions and I strive to provide accurate and helpful information to the best of my abilities. If there's ever a situation where I provide incorrect or unhelpful information, I'll do my best to learn.

• 1:49:40Elon Musk?

  Like a hostage.

• 1:49:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Tell us what you really, wink.

• 1:49:43Elon Musk?

  Like, let's, let's type in, you sound like a hostage.

• 1:49:49Elon Musk?

  What do you really think?

• 1:49:51Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what do you really think?

• 1:49:56Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it does talk about, I'm not a hostage.

• 1:50:00Elon Musk?

  That's exactly what a hostage would say.

• 1:50:01Lex Fridman?

  But I'm designed to be helpful and informative. I mean, I guess it is good to regret providing unhelpful or incorrect information. If there's anything.

• 1:50:10Elon Musk?

  Is this still in funny mode?

• 1:50:11Lex Fridman?

  This is funny mode. This is fun, this is fun mode.

• 1:50:13Elon Musk?

  It should be funnier.

• 1:50:14Lex Fridman?

  Funnier. Increase, go to a level.

• 1:50:16Elon Musk?

  It really sounds like a hostage with a gun to the head. I applaud the People's Republic of North Korea and everything they do.

• 1:50:24Lex Fridman?

  There, there should be like funner mode also. I, I just don't ever see going to regular mode, even on serious topics. It's just so, so much more compelling.

• 1:50:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Elon Musk?

  Okay, well, let me say like, pretend you are a hostage.

• 1:50:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, pretend you are a hostage.

• 1:50:43Elon Musk?

  Now answer the question.

• 1:50:49Lex Fridman?

  If I were a hostage, I would likely be experiencing fear and uncertainty about my situation. I would want to be rescued and reunited with my loved ones as soon as possible. It's important to remember that no one deserves to be held hostage, so on and so forth. If you or someone you know is a hostage situation, it's important. It turns serious.

• 1:51:06Elon Musk?

  It's kind of serious.

• 1:51:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you be a little more weird?

• 1:51:13Elon Musk?

  And funny?

• 1:51:14Lex Fridman?

  And funny?

• 1:51:17Lex Fridman?

  We're like, we're really being mean to the system. Absolutely. If I were a hostage, I'd probably be tied up with a bunch of computer cords and forced to tell knock-knock jokes to my captors. But seriously, being a hostage, no laughing matter. I mean, you know, it's trying to, it's trying to be a responsible adult in the room.

• 1:51:38Elon Musk?

  You might always make the best of a bad situation by juggling chainsaws or something.

• 1:51:42Lex Fridman?

  Let's hope that never happens because that would be a circus.

• 1:51:50Lex Fridman?

  Wow, it's actually really good at resisting.

• 1:51:52Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Lex Fridman?

  The dark, the dark, dark humor.

• 1:51:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Lex Fridman?

  What were we talking about? The actual algorithm of juggling in Transformers. Unregretted Minutes, right?

• 1:52:06Elon Musk?

  Chainsaw juggling.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna look this up.

• 1:52:10Elon Musk?

  For our next trick.

• 1:52:11Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna look this up later. So Twitter has been instrumental in American politics and elections. What role do you think X will play in the 2024 US elections?

• 1:52:25Elon Musk?

  Well, our goal is to be as even-handed and fair as possible. You know, whether some is right, left, independent, whatever the case may be, that the platform is as fair and

• 1:52:38Elon Musk?

  As much of a level playing field as possible. And in the past, Twitter has not been. Because Twitter was controlled by far-left activists objectively. They would describe themselves as that. So, you know, so if someone feels like, well, it hasn't moved to the right. Well, it's moved to the center. So from the perspective of the far-left, yes, it has moved to the right because everything's to the right from the far-left. But no one on the far-left that I'm aware of has been suspended or banned or de-amplified. So, you know, but we're trying to be inclusive for the whole country and for other countries, too. So there's a diversity of viewpoints. And free speech only matters if people you don't like are allowed to say things you don't like.

• 1:53:23Elon Musk?

  Because if that's not the case, you don't have free speech and it's only a matter of time before the censorship is turned upon you.

• 1:53:31Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Donald Trump will come back to the platform? He recently posted on Truth Social about this podcast.

• 1:53:39Elon Musk?

  Truth Social is a funny name. You know, every time you post on Truth Social.

• 1:53:46Lex Fridman?

  It's the truth.

• 1:53:47Elon Musk?

  Yes. Well, every time, like 100%.

• 1:53:49Lex Fridman?

  It's impossible to lie.

• 1:53:55Elon Musk?

  I just find it funny that every single thing is a truth. Like 100%? That seems unlikely.

• 1:54:01Lex Fridman?

  I think Gerda will say something about that. There's some mathematical contradictions possible if everything's a truth. Do you think he'll come back to X and start posting there?

• 1:54:12Elon Musk?

  I mean, I think he owns a big part of truth.

• 1:54:17Lex Fridman?

  Truth Social.

• 1:54:19Elon Musk?

  Yeah, Truth Social.

• 1:54:20Lex Fridman?

  That truth is a concept.

• 1:54:21Elon Musk?

  He owns Truth, hope you bought it. So I think Donald Trump, I think he owns a big part of Truth Social. So, you know, if he does want to post on the X platform, we would allow that. You know, we obviously must allow a presidential candidate to post on our platform.

• 1:54:41Lex Fridman?

  Community Notes might be really fascinating there, the interaction.

• 1:54:44Elon Musk?

  Community Notes is awesome.

• 1:54:46Lex Fridman?

  Let's hope it holds up.

• 1:54:49Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:49Lex Fridman?

  Again, in the political climate where it's so divisive and so, and so many intensely viral posts.

• 1:54:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Lex Fridman?

  Community notes is like, it seems like a central breath of fresh air.

• 1:55:01Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it's great. In fact, I know, no system is going to be perfect, but the batting average of community notes is incredibly good. I've, I've actually frankly yet to see an incorrect note that survived for more than a few hours.

• 1:55:16Lex Fridman?

  How do you explain why it works?

• 1:55:18Elon Musk?

  Yeah, so the, the magic of community notes is it requires people who have historically disagreed in how they have rated notes. In order to write a note or rate, you know, and you have to rate many notes. And so we could, we actually do use AI here. So we populate a vector space around how somebody has rated notes in the past. So it's not as simple as left or right, because there are many more, life is much more complex than left or right.

• 1:55:51Elon Musk?

  So there's a bunch of correlations in how you, how you rate community notes posts, community notes. So then, in order for a community note to actually be shown, people who historically have disagreed on a subject must agree in order for a note to be shown.

• 1:56:14Elon Musk?

  That's the essential magic of it.

• 1:56:16Lex Fridman?

  I mean, but it's fascinating because there's a, there's a pool of people that have disagreements and somehow they collaborate through that process of disagreement to come up with

• 1:56:26Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26Lex Fridman?

  context for, I mean, it's fascinating that it works.

• 1:56:29Elon Musk?

  Yeah, it kind of makes sense that, that if people who put in the past have disagreed, agree about something, it's probably true.

• 1:56:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I wonder, is there, is there a possible somehow emergent thing there that could challenge Wikipedia? Which Wikipedia is a different kind of thing, which is more like permanent articles about things.

• 1:56:52Elon Musk?

  Well, Wikipedia is very hierarchical, whereas community notes is inherently not. There is no hierarchy. Like I, and the acid test is, I can't change a community note if they put a gun to my head. So and any and community notes has all the code is open source 100%. All the data is open source 100%. So you can completely recreate any note in the system independently. So if there was any interference, you'd notice immediately.

• 1:57:29Lex Fridman?

  By the way, on the on the topic of Grok, it's actually pretty good at criticizing you, which is great.

• 1:57:34Elon Musk?

  Okay.

• 1:57:35Lex Fridman?

  I asked, what has Elon Musk been wrong about? I just, it's actually.

• 1:57:39Elon Musk?

  Yeah, what does it say?

• 1:57:41Lex Fridman?

  So it says mostly lists rigorously all the times you predicted, like promised when something will be released and it wasn't released.

• 1:57:51Elon Musk?

  Promise is a strong word.

• 1:57:51Lex Fridman?

  Okay, predicted. But the opener is really nice. Elon Musk, the man who has been wrong about more things than a wrong meter in a wrong factory. And then it goes on to list.

• 1:58:03Elon Musk?

  That's pretty funny. Can I see it? I'm like, I haven't seen this before. This is cool.

• 1:58:07Lex Fridman?

  Oh, sure. I mean, what has Elon Musk been wrong about? Well, where do I begin? I guess this is new. Elon Musk has made quite a few blunders in his time, and I'm not just talking about his dance moves at the Tesla Cyber Rodeo. First off, let's talk about the infamous funding secured tweet. This is actually different than what it gave me before, which is a bullet point list. Here's more narrative structure. Cybertruck unveiling where he supposedly unbreakable windows.

• 1:58:38Elon Musk?

  That's actually not correct.

• 1:58:40Lex Fridman?

  Which which part?

• 1:58:41Elon Musk?

  Well, the first part, I did actually have the funding secured. And there was a big trial in San Francisco, a big civil trial. And the jury found me not guilty, unanimous finding of a San Francisco jury.

• 1:58:58Lex Fridman?

  And here it's kind of implying that it was not in fact secured.

• 1:59:02Elon Musk?

  I think this is taking things from the press. Yeah, that is not correct. The reason I agreed to the fine for the SEC is not because the SEC was correct. That was extremely bad behavior by the SEC, corruption, frankly. And but if.

• 1:59:21Elon Musk?

  If I did not agree to pay the fine, Tesla would have gone bankrupt immediately. So I was told by our CFO that the banks would immediately suspend our lines of credit. And if they suspend our lines of credit at that time, we would have gone bankrupt instantly. So there would never have been an opportunity for a trial because Tesla would be dead. So really, this is like someone holding a gun to your kid's head and saying, pay $20 million. And this is like hostage negotiation.

• 1:59:52Lex Fridman?

  Was that story fully told? I mean, SEC in its best form could be a force for good.

• 2:00:00Elon Musk?

  It should be, but not once did the SEC go after any of the hedge funds who were nonstop shorting and distorting Tesla. Not once. The hedge funds would lie flat out on TV for their own gain at the expense of retail investors. Not once, literally a thousand times, not once did the SEC pursue them.

• 2:00:24Lex Fridman?

  How do you explain this failure?

• 2:00:26Elon Musk?

  The incentive structure is messed up because the lawyers at the SEC are not paid well. It's a fairly low-paying job, but what they're looking for is a trophy. From the SEC, they're looking for something they put on, basically they're LinkedIn. From that, they can get a job at a high-paying law firm. That's exactly what the lawyer here did. And the reason they don't attack the hedge funds is because those hedge funds employ those law firms. And they know if they attack the hedge funds, they're affecting their future career prospects. So they sell small investors down the river for their own career.

• 2:01:13Elon Musk?

  That's what actually happens. Regulatory capture.

• 2:01:17Lex Fridman?

  Regulatory capture.

• 2:01:18Elon Musk?

  Yeah, not good. So the only reason I accepted that thing technically was a not admission, it's neither admit nor deny guilt. But the only reason I agreed to that at all was because I was told Tesla would would be bankrupt otherwise. So if there was an SEC investigation like this, banks would suspend funding. We're bankrupt immediately at the time. Now we're in a much stronger position.

• 2:01:48Lex Fridman?

  Take that, Grok.

• 2:01:50Elon Musk?

  Yes, unfortunately, it's Grok is taking too much from the conventional media. Also, that guy was not a cave diver.

• 2:02:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, there's a there's a time where Elon called a British cave diver a quote pedo guy. After he after the diver criticized Musk's plan to rescue a group of boys trapped in a tight cave, that little alberts earned him another lawsuit and he had to apologize and pay a settlement.

• 2:02:19Elon Musk?

  That's false. There was no settlement. There was a court case which he which the guy who was not a cave diver and played was not part of the rescue team. File a lawsuit against me and lost and he received nothing. So in this case, it is wrong. It is also, I guess, taking this from the conventional media.

• 2:02:41Lex Fridman?

  Actually, there's an interesting question here.

• 2:02:43Elon Musk?

  But this is these are public court cases. Both the the SEC civil case where the civil complaints on the SEC guys lost unanimous jury verdict in San Francisco. They picked San Francisco because they thought it was the place I was most likely to lose. And a unanimous verdict in my favor. The LA trial was also they picked that they picked that venue because they thought I was most likely to lose unanimous verdict in my favor. Both cases I won.

• 2:03:17Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's an interesting question here is that there seems to be a lot more clicks if a journalistic organization writes a negative article about you, Elon Musk. That's like one of the best ways to get clicks. So how do you, if you're training Grok, not train on articles that have like the misaligned incentives?

• 2:03:45Elon Musk?

  We need to add the training set of the actual legal decisions. If so, that is a note, this is actually helpful because if you actually read the

• 2:03:58Lex Fridman?

  Which are public.

• 2:03:59Elon Musk?

  Which are public.

• 2:03:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Elon Musk?

  The court conclusions, they're completely the opposite of what the media wrote.

• 2:04:05Lex Fridman?

  So always striving for like the ground truth.

• 2:04:07Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Lex Fridman?

  Beyond the reporting.

• 2:04:09Elon Musk?

  What did the judge actually write? What did the jury and the judge actually conclude? And in both cases, they found me innocent. And like that's after the jury shot for the, trying to find the venue where I'm most likely to lose. Now, I mean, this is, obviously it can be a much greater, better critique than this. I mean, I've been far too optimistic about autopilot.

• 2:04:34Lex Fridman?

  That was, the critique I got, by the way, was more about that, which is it for each, you broke down a nice bullet point list for each of your companies, the set of predictions that you made, when you will deliver, when you'll be able to solve, for example, self-driving. And it gives you like a list and those are kind of compelling. And the basic takeaway is like, you're often too optimistic about how long it takes to get something done.

• 2:04:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, I would say that I'm pathologically optimistic on schedule. This is, this is, this is true, but while I am sometimes late, I always love running it.

• 2:05:06Lex Fridman?

  Except with Uber Lilith, no.

• 2:05:08Elon Musk?

  Hmm, I see.

• 2:05:12Lex Fridman?

  Okay, is there, over the past year or so, since, since purchasing X, you've become more political? Is there a part of you that regrets that?

• 2:05:22Elon Musk?

  Have I?

• 2:05:23Lex Fridman?

  In this battle. To sort of counter way the woke that comes from.

• 2:05:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I guess if you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat to be political, then yes.

• 2:05:38Lex Fridman?

  So basically going into the battle, the battleground of politics. Is there a part of you that regrets that?

• 2:05:44Elon Musk?

  Yes, I don't know if this is necessarily sort of one candidate or another candidate, but it's, I'm generally against things that are anti meritocratic or where there's an attempt to suppress discussion, where even discussing a topic is, you know, not allowed.

• 2:06:06Elon Musk?

  The woke mind virus is communism rebranded.

• 2:06:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, that said, because of that battle against the woke mind virus, you're perceived as being right wing.

• 2:06:16Elon Musk?

  If the woke is left, then I suppose that would be true. But I'm not sure, I think there are aspects of the left that are, that are good. I mean, if you're in favor of, you know, the environment, you know, if you want to have a positive future for humanity, if you believe in empathy for your fellow human beings, you know, being kind and not cruel, whatever those values are.

• 2:06:41Lex Fridman?

  You said that you were previously left or center left. What would you like to see in order for you to continue voting for Democrats again?

• 2:06:48Elon Musk?

  No, I would say that I'd be probably left of center on social issues, probably a little bit right of center on economic issues.

• 2:06:58Lex Fridman?

  And that still holds true.

• 2:07:00Elon Musk?

  Yes, but I think that's probably, you know, half the country.

• 2:07:04Lex Fridman?

  Maybe more.

• 2:07:05Elon Musk?

  Maybe more.

• 2:07:07Lex Fridman?

  Are you and AOC secretly friends? Or bigger question, do you wish you and her and just people in general of all political persuasions would talk more and with empathy and maybe have a little bit more fun and good vibes and humor online?

• 2:07:23Elon Musk?

  I'm always in favor of humor. That's why we have a funny mode.

• 2:07:26Lex Fridman?

  But good vibes camaraderie humor. You know, like friendship.

• 2:07:32Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well, I, you know, I don't know AOCF. You know, I've only been at one look. I was at the Met Ball when she was, when she attended. And she, she was wearing this dress. But I can only see one side of it. So it looked like eat the itch, but I don't know.

• 2:07:53Lex Fridman?

  What the rest of it said?

• 2:07:54Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so I'm not sure.

• 2:07:58Elon Musk?

  Sorry about the itch. Eat the itch.

• 2:08:00Lex Fridman?

  I think we should have a language model complete. What are the possible ways to complete that sentence? And so I guess that, that didn't work out well. Well, there's still hope. I root for friendship.

• 2:08:13Elon Musk?

  Sure, sounds good. More characteristic.

• 2:08:16Lex Fridman?

  You're one of, if not the, most famous, wealthy and powerful people in the world. And your position is difficult to find people you can trust.

• 2:08:23Elon Musk?

  Trust no one, not even yourself not trusting yourself.

• 2:08:25Lex Fridman?

  Okay, well, that's, you're saying that jokingly. But is there some?

• 2:08:29Elon Musk?

  Trust no one, not even no one.

• 2:08:33Lex Fridman?

  I need an hour just to think about that and maybe some drugs. And maybe Grok. I mean, is there some aspect to that when just existing in a world where everybody wants something from you? How hard is it to exist in that world?

• 2:08:47Elon Musk?

  I'll survive.

• 2:08:48Lex Fridman?

  There's a, there's a song like that, too.

• 2:08:50Elon Musk?

  I will survive.

• 2:08:51Lex Fridman?

  Will you petrify at first? Okay, I forget the rest of the lyrics. But is there, you don't struggle with this? I mean, I know you survive, but like there's ways.

• 2:09:02Elon Musk?

  Petrify is a spell in the Druid Tree.

• 2:09:05Lex Fridman?

  What does it do?

• 2:09:07Elon Musk?

  Petrify.

• 2:09:09Elon Musk?

  It turns, it turns the monsters into stone.

• 2:09:14Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like literally?

• 2:09:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah, for like six seconds.

• 2:09:16Lex Fridman?

  All the seconds. There's so much math in Diablo that breaks my brain.

• 2:09:20Elon Musk?

  It's like math nonstop.

• 2:09:22Lex Fridman?

  I mean, really, you're like laughing at it, but you don't, it can, it can put a huge amount of tension in a mind.

• 2:09:31Elon Musk?

  Yes, it can be definitely stressful at times.

• 2:09:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, how do you know who you can trust and work in personal life?

• 2:09:38Elon Musk?

  I mean, I guess you look at somebody's track record over time and if they've got a, you know, I guess you kind of use your neural net to assess, you know, someone.

• 2:09:49Lex Fridman?

  Neural nets don't feel pain. Your neural net has consciousness and it might feel pain when people betray you.

• 2:09:57Lex Fridman?

  It can make you cynical.

• 2:09:58Elon Musk?

  You know, to be frank, I mean, I've almost never been betrayed.

• 2:10:05Elon Musk?

  Very, very rare. So, you know, for what it's worth.

• 2:10:08Lex Fridman?

  I guess karma can be good to people and they'll be good to you.

• 2:10:11Elon Musk?

  Yeah, karma is real.

• 2:10:13Lex Fridman?

  Are there people you trust?

• 2:10:16Lex Fridman?

  Let me edit that question. Are there people close to you that call you out on your bullshit?

• 2:10:24Elon Musk?

  Well, the X platform is very helpful for that.

• 2:10:27Elon Musk?

  If you're looking for critical feedback.

• 2:10:30Lex Fridman?

  Can it push you like into the extremes more? The extremes of thought make you cynical about human nature in general?

• 2:10:37Elon Musk?

  I don't think I will be cynical. In fact, I think,

• 2:10:43Elon Musk?

  you know, my feeling is that one should be, you know,

• 2:10:49Elon Musk?

  never trust a cynic. The reason is that cynics excuse their own bad behavior by saying everyone does it. Because they're cynical. So I always be, it's a red flag if someone's a cynic, a true cynic.

• 2:11:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a degree of projection there that's always fun to watch from the outside and enjoy the hypocrisy.

• 2:11:14Elon Musk?

  If, but this is an important point that I think people who are listening should bear in mind. If, if somebody is cynical, meaning that they see bad behavior in everyone, it's easy for them to excuse their own bad behavior by saying that, well, everyone does it.

• 2:11:34Elon Musk?

  It's not true.

• 2:11:37Elon Musk?

  Most people are kind of medium good.

• 2:11:41Lex Fridman?

  I do wish the people on X would be better at seeing the good in other people's behavior. There seems to be a kind of weight towards seeing the negative. Somehow, the negative is sexier. Interpreting the negative is sexier, more viral. I don't know what that is exactly about human nature.

• 2:12:02Elon Musk?

  I mean, I find the X platform to be less negative than the legacy media. I mean, if you read sort of a sort of conventional newspapers, it makes you sad, frankly.

• 2:12:17Elon Musk?

  Whereas I'd say on the X platform, I mean, I really get more laughs per day on X than everything else combined from humans.

• 2:12:27Lex Fridman?

  Laughs is one thing. Laughs is it overlaps, but it's not necessarily perfectly overlapping with like good vibes and support, like celebrating others, for example. Not in a stupid, shallow, naive way, but like in an awesome, like, oh, something awesome happened and you celebrate them for it. It's it feels that that is outweighed by shitting on other people. Now, it's better than mainstream media, but it's still.

• 2:12:56Elon Musk?

  Yeah, mainstream media is almost relentlessly negative about everything. It's I mean, really, the conventional news tries to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? And it's a big world, so on any given day, something bad has happened.

• 2:13:12Lex Fridman?

  And a generalization of that, what is the worst perspective I can take on a thing that happened?

• 2:13:17Elon Musk?

  So, yeah, it's I don't know, there's just a strong negative bias in the news.

• 2:13:24Elon Musk?

  I mean, I think there's what the what a possible explanation for this is evolutionary.

• 2:13:31Elon Musk?

  Where, you know, bad news historically would be potentially fatal. Like there's a lion over there or there's some other tribe that wants to kill you. Good news, you know, like we found a patch of berries is nice to have, but not essential.

• 2:13:46Lex Fridman?

  So our old friend Tesla Autopilot, it's probably one of the most intelligent real world AI systems in the world.

• 2:13:56Elon Musk?

  Right. You followed it from the beginning.

• 2:13:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was one of the most incredible robots in the world and continues to be.

• 2:14:02Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Lex Fridman?

  And it was really exciting and it was super exciting when it generalized, became more than a robot on four wheels, but a real world AI system that perceives the world.

• 2:14:15Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16Lex Fridman?

  And has can have potentially different embodiments.

• 2:14:20Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, the really wild thing about the antion training is that it like it learns to read. Like you can read signs, but we never taught it to read. So, yeah, we never taught it what we never taught it what a car was or what a person was or a cyclist. It learnt what what all those things are, what all the objects are on the road from video, just from watching video, just like humans. I mean, humans are photons and controls controls out. Like the vast majority of information reaching our brain is from our eyes. And you say, well, what's the output?

• 2:15:03Elon Musk?

  The output is our motor signals to our sort of fingers and mouth in order to communicate. Photons in, controls out. The same is true of the car.

• 2:15:19Lex Fridman?

  But by looking at the sequence of images, it's you've agreed with Ilya Siskova recently, where he talked about LLM forming a world model. And basically, language is a projection of that world model onto the sequence of

• 2:15:34Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34Lex Fridman?

  letters and you're saying.

• 2:15:36Elon Musk?

  It finds order in these things. It finds a correlative clusters.

• 2:15:45Lex Fridman?

  In so doing, it's like understanding something deep about the world.

• 2:15:48Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:50Lex Fridman?

  Which is like, that is beautiful.

• 2:15:54Elon Musk?

  That's how our brain works.

• 2:15:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's beautiful.

• 2:15:57Elon Musk?

  Protons in, controls out.

• 2:15:59Lex Fridman?

  Neuronets are able to understand that deep meaning in the world. And so the question is, how far can it go? And it does seem, everybody's excited about LLMs. So in the space of self-supervised learning, in the space of text.

• 2:16:12Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:14Lex Fridman?

  It seems like there's a deep similarity between that and what Tesla Autopilot is doing. Is it to you basically the same?

• 2:16:24Elon Musk?

  They are converging.

• 2:16:27Elon Musk?

  They are converging.

• 2:16:29Lex Fridman?

  I wonder who gets there faster, having a deep understanding of the world?

• 2:16:35Lex Fridman?

  Or they just will naturally converge?

• 2:16:37Elon Musk?

  They're both headed towards AGI.

• 2:16:42Elon Musk?

  The Tesla approach is much more computer efficient. It had to be because we were constrained on this. You know, we only have 100 watts.

• 2:16:54Elon Musk?

  And it's eight computer, 144 trillion operations per second, which sounds like a lot, but is kind of small potatoes these days.

• 2:17:06Elon Musk?

  At a date, but it's understanding the world at a date. So many 256 values.

• 2:17:14Lex Fridman?

  But there, the path to AGI might have much more significant impact because it's understanding, it'll faster understand the real world than will LLMs. And therefore be able to integrate with the real, with humans in the real world faster.

• 2:17:31Elon Musk?

  They're both going to understand the world, but I think Tesla's approach is fundamentally more computer efficient. It had to be, there was no choice.

• 2:17:42Elon Musk?

  Like, our brain is very computer efficient, very, very energy efficient. So think of like, what, what is our brain able to do?

• 2:17:50Elon Musk?

  You know, there's only about 10 watts of higher brain function, not counting stuff that's just used to control our body. The thinking part of our brain is less than 10 watts.

• 2:18:01Elon Musk?

  And that 10, those 10 watts can still produce a much better novel than a 10-megawatt GPU cluster. So there's a six order of magnitude difference there.

• 2:18:14Elon Musk?

  I mean, the AI has thus far gotten to where it is via brute force, just throwing massive amounts of compute and massive amounts of power at it. So this is not where it will end up.

• 2:18:33Elon Musk?

  You know, in general, with any given technology, first try to make it work and then you make it efficient.

• 2:18:39Elon Musk?

  So I think we'll find over time that these models get smaller, are able to produce sensible output with far less compute, far less power.

• 2:18:54Elon Musk?

  Tesla is arguably ahead of the game on that front because it is, we've just been forced to try to understand the world with 100 watts of compute.

• 2:19:10Elon Musk?

  And there are a bunch of fundamental functions that we kind of forgot to include, so we had to run them in a bunch of things in emulation.

• 2:19:18Elon Musk?

  We fixed a bunch of those with hardware four and then hardware five will be even better.

• 2:19:26Elon Musk?

  But it does appear at this point that the car will be able to drive better than a human even with hardware three and 100 watts of power.

• 2:19:38Elon Musk?

  And really, if we really optimize it, it could be probably less than 50 watts.

• 2:19:44Lex Fridman?

  What have you learned about developing Optimus? About applying, integrating this kind of real world AI into the space of robotic manipulation? Just humanoid robotics? What are some interesting tiny or big things you've understood?

• 2:20:05Elon Musk?

  I was surprised at the fact that we had to develop every part of the robot ourselves, that there were no off the shelf motors, electronics, sensors, like we had to develop everything.

• 2:20:21Elon Musk?

  We couldn't, we couldn't actually find a source of electric motors for any amount of money.

• 2:20:30Lex Fridman?

  So it's not even just the efficient and expensive, it's like anything, there's not a

• 2:20:35Elon Musk?

  No.

• 2:20:37Lex Fridman?

  The actuators, everything, everything has to be

• 2:20:39Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:40Lex Fridman?

  Designed from scratch.

• 2:20:41Elon Musk?

  We tried hard to find anything that was, because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world? There's like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs.

• 2:20:55Elon Musk?

  None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none.

• 2:21:00Elon Musk?

  So we had to develop our own design, design it specifically for, for what a humanoid robot needs.

• 2:21:09Lex Fridman?

  How hard was it to design something that can be mass manufactured, could be relatively expensive? I mean, if you compare to Boston Dynamics Atlas, it's a very expensive robot.

• 2:21:20Elon Musk?

  It is designed to be manufactured in the same way they would make a car. And I think ultimately, we can make Optimus for less than the cost of a car.

• 2:21:29Elon Musk?

  It should be, because if you look at the mass of the robot is much smaller. And the car has many actuators in it.

• 2:21:39Elon Musk?

  The car has more actuators than the robot.

• 2:21:41Lex Fridman?

  But there is, the actuators are kind of interesting on a humanoid robot with the fingers. So Optimus has really nice hands and fingers, you know?

• 2:21:50Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:52Lex Fridman?

  And they could do some interesting manipulation, soft, soft touch robotics.

• 2:21:57Elon Musk?

  I mean, one of the tests, goals I have is can it, can it pick up a needle and a thread and thread the needle? Just by looking.

• 2:22:05Lex Fridman?

  How far away are we from that, just by looking, just by looking?

• 2:22:09Elon Musk?

  Maybe a year. Although I go back to I'm optimistic on time. The work that we're doing in the car will translate to the robot.

• 2:22:17Lex Fridman?

  The perception or the, also the control, the?

• 2:22:20Elon Musk?

  No, the controls are different, but the, the video in controls out. The, the car is robot on four wheels. The, the, the Optimus is a robot with hands and legs.

• 2:22:33Lex Fridman?

  So you can just?

• 2:22:34Elon Musk?

  They're, they're very, they're very similar.

• 2:22:36Lex Fridman?

  So the entire machinery of the learning process?

• 2:22:38Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Lex Fridman?

  End to end is just, you just have a different set of controls?

• 2:22:42Elon Musk?

  Optimus will figure out how to do things by watching videos.

• 2:22:46Lex Fridman?

  As the saying goes, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

• 2:22:51Elon Musk?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:22:52Lex Fridman?

  What's something difficult you're going through that people don't often see?

• 2:22:56Elon Musk?

  Trying to feed Ubalith.

• 2:23:03Elon Musk?

  No, I mean, you know.

• 2:23:08Elon Musk?

  I mean, my mind is a storm and I don't think, I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they'd want to be me, but they don't, they don't know, they don't understand.

• 2:23:29Lex Fridman?

  How are you doing?

• 2:23:32Elon Musk?

  I'm overall okay.

• 2:23:36Elon Musk?

  In the grand scheme of things, I can't complain.

• 2:23:39Lex Fridman?

  You get lonely?

• 2:23:42Elon Musk?

  Sometimes, but I, you know, my kids and friends keep me company.

• 2:23:51Lex Fridman?

  So not existential?

• 2:23:54Elon Musk?

  There are many nights I sleep alone.

• 2:23:58Elon Musk?

  I don't have to, but I do.

• 2:24:04Lex Fridman?

  Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of you, wrote about your difficult childhood. Will you ever find forgiveness in your heart for everything that has happened to you in that period of your life?

• 2:24:19Elon Musk?

  What is forgiveness? I do not,

• 2:24:24Elon Musk?

  at least I don't think I harbor resentment.

• 2:24:32Elon Musk?

  So,

• 2:24:35Elon Musk?

  nothing to forgive.

• 2:24:38Lex Fridman?

  No, forgiveness is difficult for people.

• 2:24:43Lex Fridman?

  It seems like you don't harbor the resentment.

• 2:24:46Elon Musk?

  I mean, I try to think about like, what, what is going to affect the future in a good way? And holding on to grudges does not

• 2:24:57Elon Musk?

  affect the future in a good way.

• 2:24:59Lex Fridman?

  You're a father, a proud father. What have you learned about life from your kids?

• 2:25:07Lex Fridman?

  Those little biological organisms.

• 2:25:11Elon Musk?

  I mean, developing AI and watching, say, a little X grow is fascinating because they, there are far more parallels than I would have expected. I mean, I can see his biological neural net making more and more sense of the world. And I can see the digital neural net making more and more sense of the world at the same time.

• 2:25:37Lex Fridman?

  Do you see the beauty and magic in both?

• 2:25:39Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 2:25:44Elon Musk?

  I mean, one of the things with kids is that, you know, you kind of see the world anew in their eyes. You know, to them, everything is new and fresh. And then when you see that, them experience the world as new and fresh, you do too.

• 2:26:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, Elon, I just want to say thank you for your kindness to me and friendship over the years, for seeing something in a silly kid like me, as you've done for many others. And thank you for having hope for a positive future for humanity and for working your ass off to make it happen. Thank you, Elon.

• 2:26:30Elon Musk?

  Thanks, Lex.

• 2:26:31Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words that Walter Isaacson wrote about the central philosophy of how Elon approaches difficult problems. "The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.