Elon Musk on Abundance, AGI, and The Media in 2024 | EP #79 (X Spaces)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (5)
Transcript
0:00Peter DiamandisFollowing is a year's conversation I had with Elon Musk, arguably the greatest entrepreneur of our time, perhaps the greatest entrepreneur ever. During this conversation, which is called the Coming Age of Abundance, we talk about how technologies including AI and humanoid robotics are creating a world of abundance, uplifting humanity across food, water, energy, healthcare, education.
0:22Peter DiamandisWe'll be talking about longevity, we'll be talking about AI. We'll be talking about the decreasing global population and what are the reasons that you should have for being optimistic about the future.
0:34Peter DiamandisJoin me. Happy New Year, Yan.
0:36Elon MuskHappy New Year 2024. I love to think.
0:40Peter DiamandisYeah, it feels like the future.
0:43Elon MuskIt is the future.
0:45Peter DiamandisIt is the future. It's going to be awesome. You know, I'm hoping we get a little bit of conversation on some hope and good news for folks on this on the spaces.
0:58Peter DiamandisI think Deal could use it.
0:59Elon MuskYou are the most optimistic person that I know of by far and I guess it is refreshing to hear such optimism.
1:14Peter DiamandisI think people need a positive mindset. I think it's self fulfilling prophecy to a large degree. If you're pessimistic. And we can talk about how the news media just decimates our minds constantly.
1:28Elon MuskYeah. The news is so negative. I mean it makes me sad to read the news, frankly.
1:32Peter DiamandisWell, let me ask you a question. I don't watch, I don't watch network news and I don't read any newspapers. They couldn't pay me enough money to do that.
1:43Elon MuskI'll accidentally read the news and I'll just be sad,
1:49Peter Diamandisinsane.
1:50Elon MuskWell, I mean as you, as you know, the, the news, the daily news really, really attempts to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today?
2:03Elon MuskIt is.
2:04Peter DiamandisAnd let me, let me show it to you every five minutes in your living room over and over and over again.
2:09Elon MuskYeah. And it's a big world. There's 8 billion people on Earth. So you know, somewhere something horrible is happening every single day. But there's also great things happening every single day.
2:19Peter DiamandisYou know what I call cnn, the Crisis News Network or the Constantly Negative News Network.
2:26Elon MuskAnd the problem is they've got to scare you otherwise, you know, if they say, hey, it's been a pretty good day overall, you know, violence is an all time low.
2:41Peter DiamandisWe've got more access to food, energy, water, health care, education on the planet than ever before. I mean, people would just start watching horror movies I think instead.
2:50Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
2:52Peter DiamandisThe challenge is, it's, it's our neural nets, the wiring of our brains, you know, evolved in a world of constant danger and so we're sort of just wired for fear and scarcity constantly.
3:06Elon MuskYeah, well, yeah, I think you made this point. Maybe others have. It sort of makes sense as a. As an evolutionary asymmetry that we would respond more to danger than to reward in that, like, the consequences of danger could be fatal.
3:29Elon MuskLike, it could be like, well, if you go over there, there's a lion that's going to eat you or some neighboring tribe that's going to kill you, and it's game over.
3:36Elon MuskYeah.
3:37Peter DiamandisYour genes are out of the gene pool.
3:39Elon MuskYeah, you're. You're out. Whereas, say, like, news that there's a. There's a nice bush with berries over there is. It's nice to have. It's. It's optional, but it's the.
3:53Elon MuskIn one case you die, in other cases you're hungry, but death is worse than hunger. So. So that's why it's. Basically anyone who did not respond more to negative news than positive news didn't make it.
4:08Peter DiamandisThey were selected. They were selected against for sure that.
4:12Elon MuskYes. I mean, anyone who was complacent about where the lion was eaten by the lion.
4:18Peter DiamandisAnd, and, you know, the reality is, you know, the news media has one job. To deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And when we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news, that's all we get 24.
4:31Peter Diamandis7. So, I mean, listen. Yeah, I.
4:33Elon MuskIt's inevitable.
4:34Peter DiamandisYeah, it is. I mean, I do get my news invariably on my feed on X, but I also get all the great things happening in the world because I can selectively choose to watch that.
4:48Peter DiamandisBut when you're watching TV or in the newspaper, some editor someplace or some producer is deciding what gets fed into your mind. And it can really screw with your mindset.
5:03Elon MuskYes, exactly.
5:04Peter DiamandisSo, I mean, this, this space is called it the coming age of Abundance. And you know, you were really. When my first book came out, Abundance of the Future Is Better Than youn Think, you were super supportive and I.
5:15Peter DiamandisAnd I appreciate that was 12 years ago and I think the story.
5:18Elon MuskWhoa. 12 years ago.
5:19Peter DiamandisAmazing. Yeah. And it's gotten so much better. So I.
5:24Elon MuskIt's gotten so. It has in so many ways.
5:26Peter DiamandisNot. Not every way.
5:28Elon MuskLike, I mean, I mean, obviously we go back a ways. The, The. I remember when we were at a Dana's party in Brazil. Yeah.
5:41Peter DiamandisHow long ago he was. It was his 40th. Or was it his 30th? I don't know.
5:46Elon MuskNo, it was his thirst. Wow. This was. It was just when SpaceX was. Yeah, just when I was pulling space.
5:53Peter DiamandisYeah, it was, it was 2003 thereabouts. It was just before the X prize was won.
5:58Elon MuskRight.
5:59Peter DiamandisI was trying to convince you not
6:00Elon Muskto build rockets 21 years ago. Could like, like you could have a kid that, that has, could legally drink
6:08Peter Diamandisor legally have kids. Yeah, yeah.
6:13Elon MuskSo 21 years ago. Yeah, so. And you know, think big things are mostly better.
6:22Peter DiamandisYou know, I want to give everybody listening a dose of hope and optimism on the abundance side because the world has gotten better in so many ways. All you hear about is the negative constantly.
6:34Peter DiamandisAnd I think that's going back to our sort of core dystopian mindsets from, you know, evolving 100,000 years ago. But if we just look at some of the, look at some of the areas.
6:45Peter DiamandisRight, so like global extreme poverty. Right. I mean, what's a more important metric? You know, here are the numbers. 90% of the world was in global extreme poverty in the 1800s.
6:59Peter DiamandisIn 1981 it was 42%. Today it's under 10% of the world.
7:04Elon MuskRight, yeah. Hunger is actually rare and it used to be common.
7:09Peter DiamandisExactly. And another one is obviously one area that you're leading the charge on is energy. You know, we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights and we ravaged mountainsides and we drilled kilometers into the ground.
7:23Peter DiamandisAnd what's the figure? It's like 8,000 times more energy hits the surface of the sun, surface of the Earth from the sun than we consume as a species. But what's the rate at which batteries and solar is increasing?
7:35Peter DiamandisIt must be massive.
7:38Elon MuskYes. I mean, I mean Tesla, we've made a couple of presentations, one sort of simplistic and then one in extreme detail on how to make Earth completely self sustaining from an energy standpoint and demonstrating that there is no that if you break down all of the raw materials for a lithium ion battery and for solar, you can easily make Earth.
8:07Elon MuskI mean there's no shortage of materials. It's easy, it's a lot of work obviously, but, but, but there's not like some critical material that we don't have enough of in order to make Earth fully self sustaining.
8:19Elon MuskEven if the only way that you powered all of industry on Earth and all power, including heating and transport electrically, you could do that with solar and lithium ion batteries and, and not, not come anywhere close to depleting the resources of Earth.
8:37Peter DiamandisYeah, my favorite, my favorite example there was back in the 1800s, the most precious metal on the planet was aluminum. It was more precious than gold and platinum. And even though the Earth's crust is 8% bauxite, basically aluminum, it was just so energetically difficult.
8:59Peter DiamandisIt wasn't that it was scarce, it just wasn't in usable form yet. And that's what technology does. It takes something which is scarce and not usable and makes it usable.
9:10Peter DiamandisRight, so.
9:11Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. Aluminum oxide is extremely common and. But, but it is, it is a low energy state. In fact, thermite. Thermite. Thermite is just iron oxide, rust and pure aluminum.
9:27Elon MuskAnd the, the energy difference between iron oxide and aluminum oxide is so great that it generates an incredible enough heat to melt through steel. So that's what thermite is.
9:39Elon MuskSo, yeah, you do need a lot of energy to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum. But, yeah, In World War II, there was a massive scarcity of aluminum for aircraft.
9:52Elon MuskSure. And that just. In fact, in Britain, the Mosquito sort of fighter bomber was made of mostly of wood, but it was, it was done with. It was basically an early form of composites, but using stiff wood on the outside and light wood and like balsa as a sandwich structure.
10:19Elon MuskIt's pretty clever. And the whole thing was intended to address the shortage of.
10:23Peter DiamandisAnd that. And then we get technology, we get better, better mechanisms of extracting the aluminum from the, from the aluminum oxide from the bauxite. And this happens over and over again.
10:34Peter DiamandisIn fact, that's just what we do. I mean, I think the number was last year in 2023 or maybe in 22, we had more new electricity production from solar than from any other form.
10:47Peter DiamandisAnd you've done an extraordinary job on battery production.
10:53Elon MuskYeah. And the battery production is growing, actually, almost at several times the rate of vehicle production. So, you know, in some cases, almost 10x the rate of vehicle production.
11:11Elon MuskSo, yes, there's a massive demand for batteries. And, you know, as the world uses more electricity, there's actually a lot more capability that the grid has if you can buffer the energy than without it.
11:27Elon MuskBecause the vast majority of electrical grid, sure, it's wasted. Assume no, they assume no buffering. So they have to size the power plants for, for peak output. Peak power output, which is typically a hot summer day, and, and then for at night, you can have anywhere from half, optimistically half power output to sometimes one tenth of the power output.
11:55Elon MuskSo basically, the grid, almost everywhere the grid is sized for excess electrical power output, and if you just buffer it with batteries, you can increase the output of the grid by two or three times.
12:12Peter DiamandisI mean, to make the point here on the abundance theme, there Is no limitation. Energy.
12:18Elon MuskRight.
12:19Peter DiamandisWe are increasing the amount of energy per capita and there's a direct correlation between the GDP of a nation and its energy production. Right. And the direct correlation between health and education and energy.
12:34Peter DiamandisEverything scales as you increase the energy per capita of a nation.
12:39Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
12:42Peter DiamandisAnother category, communications. Another area that you're revolutionizing. I think the number right now, I just was checking it earlier, it's like 6.9 billion smartphone users in 2023. Like 86, 86%.
12:57Peter DiamandisAnd that's what I got when I, when I googled it.
13:00Elon MuskI don't know what. 6.9. You know what?
13:03Peter DiamandisYeah,
13:06Elon Musk6900 million.
13:07Peter Diamandis6900 million. This guy there that my, my 12 year olds would.
13:16Peter DiamandisIt's like 85, 85% of the planet's got a smartphone. And
13:22Elon Muskwell, I mean if you add up the total number of smartphones ever made, it exceeds.
13:28Peter DiamandisYeah, I think it. So it's amazing. So we've gone from like zero telephony to the majority, vast majority of the planet in under a century. You know, global Internet as well.
13:41Peter DiamandisThe same thing. And did your, your next iteration of Starlink spacecraft have gone up the direct to cell phone?
13:55Elon MuskOkay, yes, that just went up. So you know, we still have to prove that it works and all, but we're confident that even if the, if these early satellites don't work, we're confident from a physics standpoint that it can work.
14:11Elon MuskIt is a challenge because we have to emulate a self tower on the ground in order for the phones to accept the signal. So we have to do Doppler compensation, for example, and do some sort of.
14:32Elon MuskBecause you've got a speed of light limitations, pal.
14:35Peter DiamandisIf it were easy, it would have been done already.
14:38Elon MuskYeah, yeah, there's some speed of light limitations. So you know, this, this like light is, is so fast and yet so slow. So you know, I, I think, yeah, a good way to think about light, at least in the space context or for the lowest orb context is, is it travels about 300km every millisecond in, in air or in, in space.
15:05Elon MuskAnd then, and then around just over 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber.
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16:42Peter DiamandisYou know, another abundance area is health. I hear some kids in the background there. So interestingly enough, you know, child mortality, I mean, probably, I mean, this is one that hits me the most in terms of increasing abundance.
16:56Peter DiamandisChild mortality under the age of five was 42% a couple hundred years ago. It was a coin flip of whether your kids survived. And it's decreased now to under 5% and it's gone down by 50% in the last 30 years.
17:16Peter DiamandisSo just childhood mortality and women dying in childbirth. All of these things people don't think about when they're listening to all the news on and all the issues. And then life expectancy, my favorite subject has gone up from, you know, 30 years old to, to 75 plus.
17:34Peter DiamandisI still disagree with you on longevity,
17:37Elon Muskthough, that, that we should solve it or not. Like we should. You think we should?
17:42Peter DiamandisWell, I, I listen, I'm not necessarily saying live forever, but I'd like to make it to 120. 150.
17:51Elon MuskYeah. I sort of wonder if we should not solve it too soon.
18:01Peter DiamandisPresidential elections, life expectancy first.
18:05Elon MuskAnd do you really want them to get that life expectancy first?
18:10Peter DiamandisWell, you know, you know, I think we, I think being able to have the vitality, the cognition, the physical prowess, you know, that you have when you're in your 40s or 50s through the age of 100, that's my goal.
18:30Peter DiamandisI mean, you don't want to, you don't want to, you know, you want to make it to at least 100, don't you?
18:37Elon MuskWell, I guess it does depend on whether I'm, you know, have dementia. I don't think I'd want to be a burden on society or have dementia and not know what's going on.
18:48Elon MuskI prefer to be dead.
18:51Peter DiamandisWell, yeah, I think that's, that's for sure. But let's assume that you had, you know, all the cognitive power you have today and your physical strength. Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to, you know, have an extended lifespan or health span?
19:09Peter DiamandisYeah, sure,
19:12Elon MuskI guess. I think we are end up there's such a strong forcing function for life extension or healthspan extension that I think we will see advancements in that area whether I want them to be there or not.
19:29Elon MuskAnd actually my opinion on the subject is that it's, I think it's actually not that hard to solve because if you just consider arguments of symmetry that are quite helpful, the cells in our body all age at basic almost exactly the same speed.
19:53Elon MuskI've not seen anyone who has an old left arm and a young right arm. I've never seen that, not even once. Yes. So how, how are the cells communicating and how, what is keeping them?
20:07Elon MuskWhat is synchronizing their behavior? Something. There's a very clear mechanism for synchronizing aging among the 30 to 40 trillion cells in your body, like depending on your body mass, you're typically going to have 30 to 40 trillion cells.
20:22Peter DiamandisThat's correct, yeah.
20:23Elon MuskI mean, you know, in sync.
20:27Peter DiamandisI mean, the other, the other, the other reference proof point is, you know, Bowhead whales, one of the largest mammals, can make it to 200 years repeatedly. Greenland sharks can make it to 500 years and have babies at 200 years old.
20:39Peter DiamandisI remember when I was in medical school hearing that, I said, you know, why can they, why can't we? I said, it's either an engineering problem or software problem, a hardware problem or software problem.
20:50Peter DiamandisAnd I think this is one of the biggest areas AI is going to give us, is a real understanding. And then to your other point about your left arm and right arm, you know, when you have a baby, woman's 30, 35, you're 40, 45, your baby starts out at zero.
21:10Elon MuskYeah. I do find it remarkable that we decompress from a single cell to an adult human and then, and then we, you know, to procreate Compress back down to a single cell.
21:26Peter DiamandisThat is fascinating.
21:28Elon MuskYou know, I mean, you sort of look, look at yourself as a sort of, you know, blastocyst and say like, I haven't changed a bit.
21:38Peter DiamandisHere we go again. Let's recycle. It's like, it's like the big bang. It's like, right, the big crunch. You know, one of the things people argue about on extended health span and increasing the population getting to 100, 120, 150.
21:54Peter DiamandisAnd there's a concept called longevity escape velocity. Right. That there's going to be a point at which for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year.
22:02Peter DiamandisAnd that's an interesting idea to think about. In which case, you know, accidents become really a thing to be concerned about. The concern about overpopulation. And you've hit this multiple times.
22:16Elon MuskRight.
22:17Peter DiamandisAnd I saw you tweeting about it or sorry, you're xing about it today. Sorry, but it's, you know, overpopulation is one of the biggest myths and biggest false.
22:33Elon MuskOverpopulation is HUD or bs. Yeah, you know, and you know, it's such nonsense. Earth is underpopulated, not overpopulated with.
22:47Peter DiamandisLook out the window when you're flying across the country. It's empty.
22:50Elon MuskAbsolutely. Exactly. It's like if you say, like if your goal was to like flying from Elliot in New York to drop a bowling ball on a human, you would fail.
23:02Elon MuskSo,
23:05Peter Diamandisyou know, I think one of, one of my goals, I think the greatest gift we can give people in this abundance world is increased health span. I mean, when you think about what people want, they want happiness and they want health.
23:18Peter DiamandisRight. No one wants to die in a painful cancer or dementia.
23:26Elon MuskSo yeah.
23:27Peter DiamandisAnd you know, I have extended to you many times, my friend. Come down to Fountain Health. Let me put you through our, our program. The world needs you around for another 30, 30 years.
23:39Elon MuskOkay, well, what do you have any. What should I do? Let's say. Well, I mean, so there are two. What actions can be taken?
23:46Peter DiamandisThere are two quite.
23:46Elon MuskThis could be helpful for listeners. There are two on this discussion.
23:50Peter DiamandisYeah. So there are two. There are three things you need to know. Number one, is there anything going on inside your body that you don't know about? So the body is amazingly good at hiding disease.
24:03Peter DiamandisSo we found in our seemingly healthy adults, 2% have a cancer they don't know about. Two and a half percent. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm. 14.4% either have metabolic Disease, coronary disease, neurogenerative disease.
24:21Peter DiamandisAnd so your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Right. So you don't actually feel any cancer until stage three or stage four. 70% of all heart attacks have no precedence.
24:35Peter DiamandisYour body is compensating constantly. And you know, for most of us, we know more about what's going inside our cars or our airplanes than we do our bodies. Yeah, I had a question for you.
24:46Peter DiamandisHow many, how many sensors are going up on starship when you're launching? How many sensors are going, are onboard that vehicle? Rough order of magnitude, getting back data?
24:59Elon MuskWell, I guess when you count everything up, there's several thousand sensors. And if I were, I mean they're all 33 engines, so they count for the bulk of.
25:08Peter DiamandisSure. But you also have stress sensors and looking what's going on and the structures and avionics and communications across all the subsystems. And if I ask you how 39
25:19Elon Muskengines including the alpha stage. So there's several thousand sensors. Way more sensors than up on.
25:27Peter DiamandisYeah, I was gonna say if you, if I ask you, how many sensors do you have in your body? And so we don't look, which is insane because we do have the technology now to look to determine is there anything going on I need to know about and when's a good time to find out about like now or what's likely to break, what's likely to undergo failure cycles and then what's the most extraordinary therapeutics available to extend the human lifespan.
25:50Peter DiamandisSo I mean, for me that's a big one. Let me ask you another abundance theme, which is education. Do you think any of our schools today, middle schools or high schools, are preparing any of our kids for the future?
26:14Elon MuskWell, none that I know of. Well, they might. I mean there might, there probably are a few schools that are doing it, but probably 99% of schools are not.
26:24Elon MuskYeah, schools are very slow, slow to change. And I think that.
26:36Elon MuskDoes seem to move away from teaching the fundamentals, you know, of writing well and math and history. You know, I'm concerned about the whole woke agenda and ideology permeating through education.
26:51Elon MuskAgreed. And actually being destructive to education.
26:57Peter DiamandisAgreed. I mean, you know, how do you think, do you have any thoughts? I mean, so at the end of the day, I think our best, our best healthcare and our best teachers are going to be AI's right, that understand everything and they demonetize and they democratize every aspect.
27:19Peter DiamandisThe AI knows your, your kid's favorite color, sports star, movie star, what they know, the languages they know, what they did today. I mean, it's a way of giving every child on the planet the best educated.
27:30Peter DiamandisI mean you, you funded back years ago, if you remember, the global Learning X prize that we did.
27:35Elon MuskWe did that.
27:36Peter DiamandisWe, we demoed in Tanzania with AIs on tablets. It was the earliest days of AI Imad with stock who, you know, was one of the winners of that competition who went on out to create stability.
27:50Peter DiamandisI mean, the challenge is I don't think the educational systems are going to give up that control anytime soon.
28:02Elon MuskSure. Well, I mean, if I look at how my kids are educated, they seem to be mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit and X as well, I suppose, but they're constantly on the Internet that, that seems to be.
28:17Elon MuskAnd I guess a lot of kids these days tick tock.
28:21Peter DiamandisUnfortunately.
28:22Elon MuskSo, yeah, so I think, yeah, the education situation is problematic. Not sure what to do about it.
28:38Peter DiamandisI think ultimately, you know, Khan Academy is one step in the right direction, but I think part of it is getting our educational institutions to first realize they're not preparing kids for the world that's coming.
28:54Peter DiamandisI mean, this hits another point. We are such linear thinkers, right? We're projecting what we have and putting it out four or five years. I don't think people, Let me ask you, do you think people are ready for what the world's going to be like in 2030?
29:14Elon MuskNo, I don't know what the world's going to be like in 2030. So probably I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily 30. We definitely live in the most interesting of times.
29:29Elon MuskYou know, like this allegedly, this Chinese saying that may you live in interesting times is not a good thing. But I mean, I think personally I would like to live in the most interesting of times.
29:41Elon MuskAnd this is the most interesting of times.
29:44Peter DiamandisI also think it's the best time to be alive ever. The only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. I mean, you know, by what measure? Yeah, we have environmental issues, but I think we have the best chance of solving those environmental issues with the technology we have now versus technology we had 10 years ago.
30:06Elon MuskYeah, well, I generally think it's as a general sort of rule of living, it is better to err on the side of being optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
30:18Elon MuskIf you're going to make, if you're going to err one side or the other better, it's just a higher quality of life to err on the side of being optimistic and risk being wrong than pessimistic, you know, and you know and, right.
30:33Elon MuskI mean, it's. It's better to be. You'll just have a. Just enjoy life.
30:37Peter DiamandisYeah.
30:38Elon MuskOptimism is, Is gonna make you happy.
30:42Peter DiamandisThere was a study of 14, 000 people. It was 14, 000 women and 1500 guys. And it showed that those who had an optimistic mindset lived 14 to 15% longer than those with a pessimistic mindset.
30:58Peter DiamandisI mean, mindset's a powerful thing and I think undervalued by almost everybody. One of my favorite examples of this was, do you know what the environmental disaster of the 1880s and 1890s was?
31:11Peter DiamandisI'm sure, you know,
31:17Elon MuskIs this back to whales? No, no, no, no.
31:18Peter DiamandisIt's another form of life. It's the horse manure disaster.
31:23Elon MuskOh, the horseshit problem.
31:26Peter DiamandisYes.
31:26Elon MuskYeah. What is this horseshit? Well, yeah, no, no, you're right. I mean, New York was basically a horse manure and urine and carcass.
31:44Peter DiamandisIt was terrible. People brought their motive power.
31:48Elon MuskBasically, New York felt like. If you think New York subways are stinky right now, I mean, try.
31:59Peter DiamandisEverywhere. Yeah, people everywhere. People move from. People moved into downtown New York, Detroit, Chicago. They brought their motive power with them. And, and the articles in the 1880s and 90s and into the 1900s, as you, as you read this, the projection was disaster.
32:17Peter DiamandisIt was going to be a disaster because horse manure was like, grow. They had like special parking lots for horseshit at the corner of every street.
32:28Elon MuskWell, it seems like there's also a challenge because I think if a horse lives, you know, for on the order of 15 years, that means 1/15 of all horses are kicking the bucket every year.
32:44Elon MuskSo you just got. So if you've got like 300,000 horses, that means you've got 20,000 horses dropping dead every year. And then you need a horse to move the horse
32:57Peter Diamandisor just. Or just cover it with horse mirror, let it decompose.
33:03Elon MuskYeah. I mean, it's going to be like decomposing horse carcasses throughout major cities.
33:08Peter DiamandisBut. But then.
33:09Elon MuskAnd then. And then like, it's like, well, who's horse dead? Who's dead horse is this. People are probably quick to claim a live horse, but they're not rushing to claim a death.
33:20Peter DiamandisBut then innovation came along and here comes the car and solves the problem. And I think that's the problem that we keep on forgetting. We forget that we are incredibly innovative at solving problems.
33:35Peter DiamandisThat's what humans are amazing at.
33:39Elon MuskYeah, yeah, True, true. Actually, on the whale front, I don't know if you know, Back to the whales. It's a whale of a tail. Whale tails. Okay, So a lot of people think that the low point on whale population was in the 1800s because, you know, whales were being hunted for whale oil and whale oil.
34:09Elon MuskYeah. But actually the low point by far was in fact in the mid 20th century because of a bureaucratic error in the Soviet Union.
34:26Peter DiamandisOkay, this I have to hear.
34:32Elon MuskSo they would always have these five year plans and quotas for whale tonnage. Now they didn't actually have even a, whether the whale tonnage was usable tonnage in any way.
34:45Elon MuskThey just had a quota for whale tonnage and what they would do in the Soviet unit. So just keep increasing the quota of everything every year, every five years.
34:57Elon MuskSo the whale tonnage just got higher and higher and higher. If you're a captain and you, and you, and you had a high whale tonnage, you'd get a medal and a raise.
35:09Elon MuskAnd if your whale tonnage was low, you'd be sent to the gulag.
35:11Peter DiamandisYou get what you incentivize, baby.
35:14Elon MuskYes, incentives matter. And, and so it got to it to, it just got to absurd levels. And you had Soviet whaling ships like going into, you know, US and Australian waters to desperately trying to find whales.
35:30Elon MuskAnd they would, they'd catch the whale, weigh the whale and then dump the carcass over.
35:35Peter DiamandisOh my God.
35:38Elon MuskI mean, there's a whole Internet rabbit hole that you can go down on this, which is basically a lesson in the follies of central planning.
35:48Peter DiamandisAnd this is the problem of keeping laws on the books way after they're useful to society.
35:56Elon MuskWell, we do actually have a fundamental issue with the accumulation of laws and regulations because they are immortal and humans are mortal. As we were just discussing, you know, life extension.
36:11Elon MuskSo, so naturally every year you're going to have this accumulation of laws and regulations until eventually everything is legal.
36:20Peter DiamandisYou mean everything is illegal?
36:23Elon MuskEverything is illegal, yes. Nothing is allowed because you're overlapping laws and regulations and some of which are in fact contradict each other. Whether you go left or right, both left and right are.
36:41Elon MuskMy God, you know, like SpaceX. I mean, shame on the, you know, the DOJ in this respect. In this particular case, where the DOJ, as you may know, is suing SpaceX for hiring only permanent residents and citizens of the U.S.
36:59Elon Muskthe reason that we did this was because we were told very clearly that if we did not hire permanent residents of the United States, that that would constitute a violation of international trade, traffic and arms regulations.
37:14Elon MuskItar and the entire executive team of SpaceX and the board would go to prison.
37:19Peter DiamandisSounds like a good motivation.
37:22Elon MuskYes. And so we, we were literally told by the government in very clear terms. And you're well aware of it.
37:28Peter DiamandisI am well aware of, yes.
37:30Elon MuskIt's a nightmare and we would like.
37:34Peter DiamandisWhich by the way puts us in a non competitive world against other nations.
37:41Elon MuskYes, it's, it's pretty bad. So, but then, then the DOJ, you know, is suing SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers. An important point here. Not asylum. Those have been granted asylum.
38:03Elon MuskThose who are seeking aside.
38:04Peter DiamandisThere's a lot of those. There's a lot of people seeking asylum.
38:08Elon MuskYes. So we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. So if we hire someone who's not a permanent residence, we're breaking the law. And if we don't hire someone who's not a permanent resident, we're breaking the law.
38:23Elon MuskSo this is an example of the madness that we're facing.
38:28Peter DiamandisBuddy, I want to compliment you on something which, and I've known you for long enough to have seen you gone through this, where you have bet everything over and over again, you've bet your entire fortune, gone into debt to do the things that you believe in.
38:45Peter DiamandisAnd I have a question to ask you, which I've been dying to ask and I'm going to start making this known. There are so many billionaires on the planet who have tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars who are effectively sitting on it and not changing the world, not putting it in, other than for increasing its return, which is not a bad thing.
39:12Peter DiamandisI think the more wealth and free energy there is out there to do things. But can you speak to that? I don't know if you're willing to, but there are a few people like Mark Benioff and Eric Schmidt and yourself, top of the list, who invest on making the world a better place, solving global grand challenges.
39:36Peter DiamandisThoughts on that?
39:38Elon MuskI'm going to open some line to the. Sorry, I just have some, some kids and stuff around. No problem. Sort of family noises in the background. So let's see.
39:53Elon MuskYeah,
40:00Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean, I do think that smart people with resources should care about the good of civilization, the future of civilization, even if there is not, even if they're not particularly altruistic because you can't really, you cannot exist absent civilization.
40:26Elon MuskIf civilization collapses, it's all over. You know, there's like, people have got like these sort of bunkers, other countries or Hawaii or whatever. And I'm like, listen, do you really think that you're gonna make it in in an apocalyptic situation, they'll come and find you in that bunker and they'll probably pry you out and get your stuff and it's gonna suck anyway.
40:57Elon MuskSo really smart people with resources, any smart person with resources, they just have some long term perspective.
41:05Peter DiamandisI mean listen, it's, it's you and it's you and Jeff Bezos right now who've got the biggest long term perspective. And I see, I, you know, I'm just curious about how do you incentivize other people to really help the world accelerate, you know, and make the world a more productive place?
41:32Peter DiamandisRight. The best way to become a billionaire, to help a billion people, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities.
41:43Peter DiamandisDo you believe that?
41:44Elon MuskWell, I guess maybe we should talk to people more. I guess just talking to them and you know, I think it was perhaps just raising the conscious awareness, the fact that there is no living without civilization.
42:06Elon MuskOne doesn't actually have to make an altruistic argument. You can actually make a, even if it's a purely self seeking argument, say life would be miserable without civilization. And if you want to know what life is like without civilization, just go try living in the forest naked for a day and you will be naked and afraid and quickly realize civilization is awesome.
42:35Elon MuskJust eat bugs and get eaten by bugs.
42:40Peter DiamandisWe're so interdependent upon each other to enable the state of technology and capability we have today. You know, I'm curious, is there anything that you think that isn't becoming more abundant out there or anything that we have an abundance constraint on?
43:01Peter DiamandisI'll just mention. Well, answer that first. And I want to come and talk about the carbon removal xprize that you funded. One second.
43:11Peter DiamandisYou know, we're, we're creating abundance of food, energy, water, healthcare, education. Are we constrained in any way?
43:21Elon MuskNo, not really. I mean, no, I think I agree with you that the future most likely has abundance. We shouldn't be complacent about the future. Complacency and entitlement are not a recipe for success.
43:39Elon MuskBut the most likely outcome is one of abundance of goods and services. That is certainly where we're headed.
43:50Peter DiamandisYeah, when I saw you last, that
43:51Elon Muskis mighty likely where we're headed.
43:53Peter DiamandisVery likely. Yeah, when I saw you last, you said definitely abundance. After AGI and I saw when you were talking about Optimus, which is awesome by the way. Let's just start with that.
44:06Peter DiamandisCongratulations.
44:08Elon MuskWell, thanks. I need to make sure the optimist is it doesn't Cause it doesn't add to civilizational risk because you don't want like a billion of these things or with centralized control.
44:26Peter DiamandisUnless what could go wrong?
44:28Elon MuskHas anyone made a movie about that?
44:33Peter DiamandisUnless they obey you.
44:37Elon MuskWell, I don't think they should obey any, any one person.
44:41Peter DiamandisYeah,
44:43Elon Musklike I think you have to have local control, but it has to be decentralized because any central control is going to be problematic because you just can't be like, it could be a rogue AI takes, I mean let's literally a movie, a rogue, you know, Terminator takes over some, gains control of the mothership of that controls all the, you know, the optimist robots or something like that.
45:15Elon MuskThat is basically. It needs to be, it needs to be impossible for that to occur.
45:22Peter DiamandisLet me ask you, I always love combining your companies because it's like, you know, it's like Reese's Peanut Butter cup, you know, Starlink and Starship together. How about Optimus Neuralink?
45:39Peter DiamandisWhen can I plug into an Optimus with my Neuralink connection?
45:49Elon MuskWell, hopefully the first neuralinks will. The first neuralink in a human will hopefully be soon, within the next, maybe this month or next. Now this is really just at first just trying to give your quadriplegic, quadriplegics and tetraplegics the ability to control their phone and computer.
46:15Elon MuskIt's basically like the first, the first product is telepathy essentially, or telekinesis. And then the second product, so tentatively called Blindsight, where we can restore sight even if somebody has lost both eyes and their optic nerves.
46:39Elon MuskAmazing.
46:40Peter DiamandisGo straight to the visual cortex.
46:42Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. Now these things already work in monkeys and I'd just like to reemphasize. No monkey has ever died because of a neural link. And we treat our monkeys extremely well.
46:58Peter DiamandisLast time I spoke to you about this, you were playing Pong against Pager.
47:02Elon MuskI think that's right. Actually, it turns out monkeys love playing video games. They're really just like us. I mean they love eating snacks and playing video games.
47:17Peter DiamandisI'll tell my 12 year old boys about that.
47:20Elon MuskYeah, I mean, you see the video of Pedro playing, you know, monkey mind Pong, you know, just telepathic. Playing Pong telepathically. He's not restrained in any way. He's just sitting on the sort of tree branch drinking smoothies and drinking smoothies.
47:39Elon MuskDrinking a smoothie and playing Pong. He's not held down, you know, in fact, he gets upset when we take his video game away.
47:47Peter DiamandisJust like humans, just like our kids. That's awesome. And I mean, giving sight to the blind, I mean, it's biblical stuff. And this is again, coming back to the original, you know, kicking off the new year with a positive mindset, with an abundance mindset, with an exponential mindset, with a moonshot mindset.
48:10Elon MuskRight.
48:10Peter DiamandisWhich I, and I think, I hope you agree, like, I think for entrepreneurs and people listening, like, the single most important thing we have is our mindset, how we see the world.
48:19Peter DiamandisI mean, would you agree with that?
48:23Elon MuskYeah. I mean, you can choose to be. I mean, happiness is, I think, is a decision.
48:34Elon MuskI mean, largely. I mean, there's obviously people that have chemical imbalances, but for most people, the difference between being happy and unhappy is deciding to be happy.
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49:40Peter DiamandisNow back to the episode. I want to take a second for everybody listening to point something out. You know, ilan, it was 2021. I was texting with you and I said you should fund another X prize.
49:55Peter DiamandisYou funded an X Prize years ago on teaching kids in the middle of Tanzania reading, writing and arithmetic without any adults, no schools around, just on a tablet. They were handed and the software had to teach them.
50:06Peter DiamandisAnd it was an amazing success. And then in 21, I asked you if you'd do an X prize on carbon removal and you said yes almost instantly. And we launched it three months later.
50:20Peter DiamandisIt was like the fastest yes to an X Prize launch ever. So thank you for that. I want to give you a quick update on it if I could.
50:27Elon MuskYou're welcome. Absolutely. Well, I hope the education X prize and the carbon removal X prize are resulting.
50:36Peter DiamandisI'm sure we had 6000 teams enter the carbon removal prize. We have 1300 active teams in the competition right now as we down select about 36%. 460 are focused on carbon capture.
50:56Peter Diamandis430 are land related capture, 240 are ocean related capture. And the. We've given away 20 million of your money already. 5 million to students and 15 million to a million to the top 15 teams.
51:12Peter DiamandisAnd the finals are coming up in two years in Earth Day of 2025. And interestingly enough, you know, the winning team needs to demonstrate megaton level capture that can scale to gigaton level capture.
51:28Peter DiamandisAnd so just the final competition is going to capture 4 megatons of carbon, which is twice what's being done on an annual basis today. So good progress so far.
51:41Elon MuskGreat, that's good to hear, pal.
51:46Peter DiamandisAs we begin to wrap up, what other thoughts for people on abundance? What other mindset thoughts do you have for folks here?
52:03Elon MuskWell, I do think that the birth rate is too low for humans as I'm always going on about that.
52:14Peter DiamandisJust longevity, baby. I'm solving it with longevity going to keep people alive longer.
52:20Elon MuskOkay, well, and robots and AI, sure. But I mean it just. The current situation is grim. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of countries are, you know, if you look at say Korea, Italy.
52:39Peter DiamandisYeah.
52:40Elon MuskThey're losing roughly half their population per generation. That means three generations, they're one tenth of their current size. And with the 1/10 that remains being very old.
52:55Peter DiamandisYeah. The numbers for folks, the replacement number is 2.1 children per family on average. And Europe is at 1.5. Asia dropped from 5.7 in the 1950s to 1.9 today, which is crazy.
53:14Peter DiamandisNorth America dropped from about 3 to 1.6. We're below the replacement level in the United States and it is an issue. I mean, we need smart people on the planet.
53:30Elon MuskYeah, well, I mean if we don't make new humans, we won't have humanity. And even with longevity, we'll live longer, but we're not live forever. So I think we just need.
53:44Elon MuskIt's, you know, I'm concerned that like a lot of people think that the planet is overpopulated and that's one of the things contributing to a low birth rate. In fact, some people I've encountered think they're basically being martyrs for not having kids.
53:59Elon MuskAnd that's just, it's just not true. I think we should take the position that we actually have a civic responsibility to have kids, to at least keep the human population constant.
54:16Elon MuskIdeally we should grow it, but we should at least not have population collapse, which is what we Currently have.
54:22Peter DiamandisI think people, people fear the future. And I mean the conversations I've heard is I don't want to bring children into this world. It's too dangerous. AI is going to destroy humanity.
54:35Peter DiamandisThe environment, you know, we're destroying the environment and so forth. So I think part of it is getting people to be optimistic about the future versus pessimistic, which is one of, as you said in the beginning of this space is one of my, one of my missions.
54:50Peter DiamandisIf people think the world is getting better and they have a hand in making it a better place, you most definitely do.
54:58Elon MuskYeah, I think people should be optimistic about the future. Earth can handle far more humans than currently exist. And the danger is not a population explosion, but population collapse.
55:15Elon MuskSo I would just encourage as many people as possible to have kids and ideally have a lot of kids because they've got to make up for those who, whatever reason, don't buy an extra
55:25Peter Diamandisbottle of wine tonight, folks.
55:28Elon MuskYeah, it's a big deal. So
55:35Peter Diamandislet's close out on the conversation of AI and AGI, which I know a lot of people are always interested in. And, and there's a real fear about AI. What would you say to dissuade people?
55:48Peter DiamandisI mean, it's you. I've heard you say 80% probability we make it through and we need to protect the downside. Can you speak to that? How can people walk away more optimistic than pessimistic on this front?
56:05Peter DiamandisAnd how do you, how do you think about, you know, is, is it containment? Is it shaping how we train our AI systems? How do you think we navigate super in digital superintelligence?
56:23Elon MuskWell, the rate at which AI is growing is. It really boggles the mind.
56:28Peter DiamandisYeah.
56:30Elon MuskSo it currently seems as though the amount of compute dedicated to artificial intelligence is increasing by a factor of 10 roughly every six months. It's faster than annual, that's for sure.
56:50Elon MuskSo I mean, I recently heard today about a gigawatt class
56:59Peter DiamandisAI
57:01Elon Muskcompute cluster. Wow, that's. I think it's being being built in Kuwait or something to that effect. And it's like 700,000 v1 hundreds, which is a couple generations above two generations that's currently in production.
57:22Elon MuskSo this is a, a staggering amount of compute and there are many such things. That's just the biggest one I've heard of so far. But there's a 500 megawatt installation happening and there's multiple 100 megawatt installations in the works.
57:41Elon MuskIt's not even clear to me what you do with that much compute. Because when you actually add up all human data ever created, you really just run out of things to train on quite quickly.
57:57Elon MuskLike, you know, if you've got maybe, I don't know, 20 or 30,000 H1 hundreds, you can train on synthetic data almost every. Yeah, basically you have to have synthetic data because for certainly well under A hundred thousand H1 hundreds you can train on all human data ever created, including video.
58:19Peter DiamandisAnd it's not. And it's not just the compute, which is the major scarce resource, but it's also the number of entrepreneurs focusing in this area, the amount of capital that's going into this area, the amount of data available.
58:33Peter DiamandisI mean, it's all increasing and it's all feeding on itself and it's so it's just, you know, hitting your point about the speed at which it's progressing is. I think the word awesome comes to mind or staggering.
58:48Elon MuskYeah, it's really staggering and for sure. So I'm just trying to give a sense of scale. I've never seen anything move this fast of any technology. This is the fastest moving thing.
59:02Elon MuskSo in terms of aiming for AI safety, my, my best guess of my sort of primitive biological neural net is that we should aim for maximum truth seeking and curiosity.
59:27Elon MuskThat's my gut feel for how to make AI as safe as possible. The danger with programming morality and explicit, with an explicit morality program is what is sometimes referred to as the Waluigi problem.
59:42Elon MuskIf you create Luigi, you automatically create Waluigi by inverting Luigi. Sure. So I think we have to be careful about programming in sort of an arbitrary morality. But, but if we focus on maximizing truth with acknowledged error, that's, that's probably.
1:00:07Elon MuskI think that's the way to maximize safety and also to have the AI be curious because I think that, you know, Earth is much more interesting to an advanced AI with humans on it than without humans.
1:00:26Elon MuskI have a, I agree with you.
1:00:28Peter DiamandisNow a interesting question of do you think vast intelligent, with vast intelligence comes significant empathy and respect for life?
1:00:43Elon MuskYeah, I think so.
1:00:44Peter DiamandisBecause that's the hope at the end of the rainbow here that I don't want to use the word AGI. I'll use the super. Digital superintelligence as a term with a digital superintelligence that is able to be more benevolent and support us.
1:01:02Peter DiamandisBecause sometimes I'm not sure us squishy meat sacks can make it through our own, our own horseshit problems that we put together. So maybe there's a value there. I think on the whole, AI is the Single most important technology we ever invented, and it is going to uplift all of humanity.
1:01:26Peter DiamandisI think it's what you said, you know, post AGI comes abundance. I think it's the interim issues in the next one to four years.
1:01:34Elon MuskRight. It's.
1:01:35Peter DiamandisIt's not artificial intelligence. It's human stupidity.
1:01:40Elon MuskYeah. Well, I mean, one way that AI could go wrong is if the extinctionist philosophy is programmed into the AI, whether implicitly or explicitly. I mean, probably not explicitly, but there's a strong danger of it, of an implicit extinctionist philosophy being programmed into AI, you know.
1:02:03Elon MuskAnd what would that look like?
1:02:05Peter DiamandisWhat would that look like?
1:02:07Elon MuskWell, like, there's this guy on the front page of New York Times about a year ago. He's head of the Extinctionist Society, and he was literally quoted as, there are 8 billion people on Earth.
1:02:18Elon MuskIt would be better if there were none.
1:02:20Peter DiamandisOh, my God.
1:02:22Elon MuskYeah. So. And if you take the extreme environmentalist argument, especially like the implicit extreme environmentalist argument, there's an implicit conclusion that. That humans are a plague on the surface of the Earth.
1:02:43Elon MuskSo I think we have to be quite careful about an implicit, like. Like if the extinctionist movement was somehow programmed into AI as. As the optimization, that would be obviously extremely dangerous.
1:02:58Elon MuskYeah.
1:02:59Peter DiamandisTo say the least.
1:03:02Elon MuskYeah, It's. And. But, you know, there are people, quite a few people actually, who view humanity as. As a blight on the surface of the Earth.
1:03:15Peter DiamandisAnd we're. We are coming down to. There is the, you know, accelerationist movement, the decelerationist movement, the boomers and the doomers. But I think people forget to realize, or don't realize and forget the fact that, you know, we romanticize the past, and the past life was short, brutish, and you were dead by 40.
1:03:38Peter DiamandisYou know, the life that we enjoy today is a result of the extraordinary technology that we brought to bear.
1:03:45Elon MuskYeah. So the, like, you know, Hobbes life is nasty, brutish and short. I. I actually had a little Yorkshire terrier once who was nasty, brutish and short and kept biting people.
1:04:01Elon MuskSo I called him Hob. Perfect. I would tell friends that came over, watch out for the dog. And they'd look at this miniature Yorkshire terrier and laugh. And then he would bite them on the ankle.
1:04:17Elon MuskAnd I said, watch out for the dog.
1:04:22Peter DiamandisYou know, that extinctionist meme is the same sort of, you know, you discount it until it starts being a mind virus, in part, as you've called it, and it starts disrupting us.
1:04:39Elon MuskYeah. If you convince people that, you know, we're running out of resources on Earth, that there are too many people in the world and the only way to survive is to have far fewer people, which a lot of people are believed to be the case.
1:05:01Elon MuskAnd like I said, if that, if that somehow gets programmed into AI and that AI becomes the most powerful AI, then we're in deep trouble.
1:05:11Peter DiamandisYeah, we need a counter force to the population bomb. I mean, what an extraordinary disservice to humanity.
1:05:19Elon MuskYeah, Ehrlich's book was terrible. Nightmare. Maybe the most anti human book ever written.
1:05:25Peter DiamandisYeah, for sure, for sure. But give people hope. On the flip side here, those who are saying again, going back to. I don't want to bring up my children because I hear this all the time and I'm sure you do too in an age where AI is going to destroy us.
1:05:42Elon MuskSo
1:05:45Peter Diamandisshort term problems, long term problems. Short term solutions. Long term solutions. You said make it curious, make it maximum truth seeking 100%. Is it okay to say that we're going to have issues in the short term and we're going to have to deal with them,
1:06:04Elon Muskor do you want to be. There will be some issues. I mean, essentially at this point, no way to stop AI. It's, it is accelerating whether people like it or not.
1:06:19Elon MuskI mean that's, that's, that's why together with a number of really smart people, we created xai. And you know, hopefully, you know, some really small humans will continue to join XAI and build what is intended to be a maximally truth seeking and maximally curious AI.
1:06:49Elon MuskAnyway, I think that's really important.
1:06:54Peter DiamandisSo Elon, listen, on behalf of those of us, and I think everybody here listening who, who are pro humanity and pro uplifting humanity and making us a multi planetary species and living a longer, healthier life.
1:07:12Peter DiamandisAnd the one place I've disagreed with you on X is on having people live longer. People don't need to die for there to be new ideas. The CEO of Ford and GM didn't have to die for Tesla to come into existence.
1:07:29Peter DiamandisSo we're, you know, I want to just say thank you for all that you're doing and setting a model for other industrialists and entrepreneurs out there to take on and solve big, huge problems.
1:07:49Elon MuskWell, thank you. I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future, like err on the side of optimism. You will be happier for it and as you pointed out, probably live longer.
1:08:05Elon MuskSo I'm not totally against life extension. I think we, you know, we want to be, I don't think we want to necessarily have people live forever. That's, or live for a very long, like thousands of years that I think that would potentially lead to ossification of society.
1:08:22Elon MuskIt would, I think, lead to ossification society. But I mean, solving dementia and, you know, curing cancer, I think are good things, obviously. So I'm not sure we're actually that far apart on the life extension thing.
1:08:43Elon MuskI think we're probably mostly in agreement. Yeah, we just don't want to have like, you know, can you live for it? Like, do you want Kim Jong Un living for a thousand years?
1:08:53Peter DiamandisNo, but I'd like, I'd like Elon Musk and Peter D. Man just living for 150 years and a few other thousand amazing entrepreneurs out there.
1:09:03Elon MuskSure. So it's, it's, you know, there is a challenge that like a lot of people, they really never change their mind. They just die. And this, this is actually, I'm not sure who originally said this, but even in physics where, which is extremely rigorous, that, you know, physics in a lot of cases has advanced one death at a time.
1:09:32Peter DiamandisYeah, my friend Brian Keating, who's a astrophysicist, reminded me of that. And, and maybe it was true. But in this world of entrepreneurship, I think we do live a meritocracy to a large degree.
1:09:48Peter DiamandisAnd the best ideas can bubble up to the top faster than ever before, especially with, with AI now where you can build companies, you know, extraordinary companies with a couple of people and a lot of tech.
1:10:03Elon MuskSo, yeah,
1:10:07Peter DiamandisI have one last question and then I know it's dinner time there. The future of X Xai, what's your vision there, pal?
1:10:22Elon MuskWell, as I was saying, I think the path to AI safety is the bold AI that is maximally truth seeking with acknowledged error. That's maximally curious. And I think that is most likely to lead to a good outcome for humanity because we are much more interesting than not humanity.
1:10:51Elon MuskObviously, I'm a big fan of Mars, but Mars is much less interesting because there's no human civilization there. And you take humans, for example. We could hunt down all of the chimpanzees and kill them, but we don't.
1:11:11Elon MuskIn fact, we make efforts to preserve their habitats. So anyway, I think that that is the path to a great future and a maximally positive AI is to be rigorously truth seeking, always acknowledging some amount of error and maximally curious.
1:11:42Elon MuskAnd that's the goal of Xai's. And you know, the company motto is understand the universe. And that's a, that's a.
1:11:55Peter DiamandisIt's a good mission and one that's going to take a bit of time. I can't wait till the first AI is able to come up with new theories of physics and new innovations.
1:12:06Peter DiamandisThat's going to be. I mean, I don't think that's far away and I think that's going to be one of the most awesome times ever to be alive.
1:12:14Elon MuskTrue. Like, we, we definitely live in the most interesting times. And I actually, for a while I was kind of depressed about AI, but then I, I kind of got fatalistic about it and said, like, well, even if, even if AI was going to, you know, end all humanity, would I prefer to be around to see it or not?
1:12:41Elon MuskI guess I would prefer to be around to see it, just out of curiosity, but obviously, hopefully, AI is extremely beneficial to humanity. But the thing that sort of reconciled me to be less anxious about it was to say, well, I guess even if it was apocalyptic, I'd still be curious to see the.
1:13:01Elon MuskIt's like I'd be curious to see it.
1:13:04Peter DiamandisI remember I was at your birthday party at one of your homes here in LA before you sold them, and Larry Page was there and Sergey was there and we were having a conversation about living in a simulation.
1:13:18Peter DiamandisAnd the notion was, this is. We're in the 99th level of the gameplay and this has got to be a simulation because you couldn't. Why would be, why would it be alive right now in this single most interesting time?
1:13:31Peter DiamandisAnd then the only comment was, don't poke the simulation or end.
1:13:39Elon MuskYeah, well, if we are in a simulation, the way to keep the simulation going is to keep being interesting. So, like, humans run lots of computer simulations because we don't know what the outcome's going to be and we're curious to see.
1:14:01Elon MuskWe'll run lots of simulations, like in Tesla we'll run crash simulations and SpaceX will run, you know, rocket flight simulations. And we only stop doing the simulations when the, when the outcome is extremely predictable and boring.
1:14:17Elon MuskYes. So if we're in some alien.
1:14:22Peter DiamandisThat's a great argument. That is perfect.
1:14:25Elon MuskRight.
1:14:25Peter DiamandisWhen it's absolutely known, if we're not entertaining enough to the digital gods or the universe gods, they'll end the sim.
1:14:33Elon MuskYeah. We just need to make sure we keep the ratings up. But this is also why I think, like, one of the ways to predict the future is that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely as seen by a third party, as though we were in an alien soap opera.
1:14:57Elon MuskI love that. Yeah. So it's not necessarily good for those in the soap opera, like you could be watching a World War I movie and seeing, you know, people get blown
1:15:08Peter Diamandisup
1:15:10Elon Muskand you're just eating popcorn and drinking a soda. But we're in the movie. Yeah, well, let's not get, let's not
1:15:19Peter Diamandisget dystopian here because I think we can have a really positive outcome of a lot. Lot of other cool stuff. Yeah, for sure.
1:15:28Elon MuskI think most likely outcome is positive.
1:15:32Peter DiamandisAnd, and I think if you. And I think that's partly a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe so if you believe it's going to be a dystopian outcome, then you're going to be back on your heels protecting yourself, not investing in the future and it unravels and this.
1:15:49Peter DiamandisYeah, and. And so, you know, I think the, the message of this entire space is, is this is the most extraordinary time to be alive, the most exciting time to be alive.
1:15:59Peter DiamandisA time where, you know, a lot, a lot of individuals listening on the spaces as more power than kings or queens or heads of nations had just a few decades ago.
1:16:09Peter DiamandisAnd it doesn't take a government or a large corporation to solve a problem anymore. You know, an entrepreneur with, you know, a few H1 hundreds can do a good job.
1:16:22Elon MuskYeah, I think we should err on the side of optimism. We should err on the side of optimism and we should have kids like, you know, to err is human.
1:16:36Peter DiamandisH E I R and to reproduce is human. All right, buddy, listen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing.
1:16:47Elon MuskWelcome. All right, thanks, Peter. Take care, buddy. Bye.