LIVE: Ben Shapiro interviews Elon Musk at European Jewish Association conference
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:06Former President of GreeceDear sir and dear friend. Dear President Rivlin. Despite some unforeseen circumstances, it is with great honor and emotion that I will remotely participate from Athens in the emblematic Leaders Forum in Auschwitz on the uncompromising fight against anti Semitism and harassment.
0:34Former President of GreecePlease rest assured that my dedication to our common goal remains unshakable. Commemorate and honor the tragic victims of the horrific Holocaust, the greatest crime against humanity. And to always fulfill our common duty.
0:56Former President of GreeceNever again we Greeks would be honored. If in the near future the Leaders Forum for the commemoration of the Holocaust were to be hosted in Athens or better in Thessaloniki, a city in which, as you well know, Mr.
1:18Former President of GreecePresident, because we work actively together, the Greek new Holocaust Museum will be erected. I very much look forward to joining you in person in the next Leaders Forum meeting.
1:36Event HostThank you. This was the president of. Former president of Greece and you also member of the Forum of Leaders. Together with other leaders who are joining us today.
1:59Event HostLadies and gentlemen, please let's welcome on stage, Mr. Elon Musk and Mr. Ben Shapiro.
2:29Event HostBefore we start, I just would like to express gratitude and appreciation to Mr. Musk for taking the time to join us today. In our times we seek to see more friends and we are appreciating very much the time you took to be with us today.
2:48Event HostAnd as a token of appreciation for taking the time to be with us today. If I may present something to you, please.
3:01Event HostThis was made out of a racket. A racket. They fall on a kindergarten in Be' Eri in Israel. And it was a miracle that kids were not killed during this when the rocket fell.
3:16Event HostIt's an artist, Israeli artist by the name Yoron Bob, who take this artist and use it in order to show a message how even rockets could become a single for never again.
3:27Event HostThank you very much.
3:29Ben ShapiroIt's quite heavy.
3:34Event HostIf I may just. It's written here, presented to Mr. Elon Musk in January 2024 in recognition and appreciation of your. Of your. For you. Of your fight against antisemitism.
3:45Event HostAnd to mark your visit to Auschwitz from the European Jewish associ.
4:02Ben ShapiroWell, it was an honor to walk with you today at Auschwitz. It's actually my first time there as well, so.
4:10Event HostSorry. Maybe you just have a very short video to present first and then we start. I apologize. I apologize. You know, Mr. Mask, when we were walking around Auschwitz together early on today, I couldn't help ask myself if the horror of the death camp could have been possible if social media was around in these days after the Holocaust.
4:32Event HostOne of the most heard sentences was we did not know. Today everything is in public. Everybody is a journalist or eyewitness. Please watch how it could have been used.
4:52Event HostYou have it in front of you.
6:53Event HostIt could have saved millions of lives. I remember you saying, AI is a potentially the most pressing risk to humans. I must tell you that there is a clear and present danger of a different AI.
7:08Event HostThis is anti Semitic incitement. This is why I really wanted you to be here with us, Elon. Because this AI ended up fueling the ovens at Auschwitz and powering the trains and took the cattle trucks of Jews to be molded.
7:26Event HostBen, thank you very much for coming too. Your work needs little introduction. A passionate conservative, an important media provider, a devoted father and husband, an advocate of family values, a staunch defender of Israel, and above all, a proud Jew.
7:45Event HostMillions follow you, watch you, listen to you and learn from you. Kolakava to you. And with that said, I now hand over to you, Ben, for your discussion. Thank you very much.
8:01Ben ShapiroI apologize for the premature beginning there. But, Elon, obviously we walked Auschwitz. I said I hadn't been there before either. First of all, just wanted to get your thoughts on what it was like to walk Auschwitz and Birkenau today.
8:18Elon MuskWell, it was incredibly moving and deeply sad and tragic that humans could do this to other humans.
8:34Elon MuskIt's good to have the memorial, as the plaque says, so that it never happens again.
8:45Elon MuskNo, I mean, I'm a student of history, so I'd seen the pictures, I'd seen the videos, but it's not quite. It hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person.
8:59Elon MuskI'm still absorbing, frankly, the magnitude of the tragedy that I witnessed or the place where the tragedy occurred. I think it'll take a few days to sink in, frankly.
9:16Elon MuskAnd as was mentioned, if there had been social media, I think it would have been impossible to hide if there's been freedom of speech as well, you know, so, you know, one of the first things the Nazis did when they came in is they shut down all the press and any means of conveying information.
9:39Ben ShapiroSo
9:41Elon Muskit's worth noting in the United States, the First Amendment in the United States was freedom of speech. Because the people that came to the United States from other countries did not have freedom of speech, that if they had said something, they could be imprisoned or killed.
10:00Elon MuskAnd that's why the first correction to the Constitution was the ability to say what you want to say and not be thrown in prison or killed.
10:13Ben ShapiroElon is obviously the CEO of X, which is the largest news service on the Internet. A place where a huge number of people, including me, get the news. You've been committed since you took over to a much broader perception of free speech on the outlet, and that's led to a lot of criticisms about suggestions of rising anti Semitism on the outlet as well.
10:37Ben ShapiroI can say for my own part that the broadening of speech on Twitter, I think, has been. Has been an excellent thing. One of the things that I was able to do, for example, in the aftermath of October 7th was actually put out full footage and pictures of what exactly was happening.
10:54Elon MuskYou could see what. What's really happening. And the true horror is something people need to be able to see if they want to see it.
11:03Ben ShapiroAnd the community notes feature has allowed for people to. Even when things that are false are put up that used to maybe pass in real time, now you can correct all that.
11:10Ben ShapiroHow do you balance the necessity for free speech with all these critiques about what is hate speech, what is anti Semitism, and how do you balance that?
11:20Elon MuskWell, the general bias of the platform is in favor of free speech. And I think at the end of the day, free speech wins in that if somebody says something that's false, especially on our platform, you can then reply to it with the correction.
11:39Elon MuskAnd then. I'm a huge fan of community notes. We've put maximum resources and attention behind community notes, so if somebody tries to push a falsehood like Holocaust denial or something like that, they can immediately be corrected.
11:54Elon MuskAnd you can't get rid of the tag, it's like, stuck on you. So I think it's. And the overarching goal for the X platform is to be the best source of truth in the world.
12:11Elon MuskSo now, you know, it's difficult to get to perfect truth, and sometimes people have different interpretations of truth, but one can always aspire to be as accurate as possible and to minimize the error between what is being said and reality.
12:32Elon MuskSo relentless pursuit of the truth
12:39Ben Shapirois
12:39Elon Muskthe goal with X and allowing people to say what they want to say, even if it's controversial, provided that it does not break the law. I think that's the right thing to do.
12:51Ben ShapiroAnd setting the new standard for the town square, as I say, has allowed for more speech and more availability of information than ever before, certainly on the platform. You recently didn't just go Here, obviously, after October 7th, you went to Israel and you saw the wages of horrific anti Semitism in the various kibbutzim and moshavim.
13:13Elon MuskI saw all the videos. I saw a lot of video. Yeah.
13:18Ben ShapiroYeah.
13:18Elon MuskIt was shocking to See, I think maybe the most shocking thing was to see the delight in killing innocent people, like the delight in killing kids and defenseless woman and men.
13:35Elon MuskAnd there was no remorse. Quite the opposite. I mean, that requires a level of indoctrination that is extremely intense. So I think that to solve that you have to address the source of the indoctrination nation because no one should ever be glad about killing some, some child.
14:03Ben ShapiroI know a number of, enormous number of Jews, myself included, are very moved that you continue to wear the necklace in remembrance of the hostages. So I want to thank you for that, obviously, because raising the profile of the fact there's still dozens of men, women and children.
14:19Elon MuskI checked before I came, so many. I hope they're alive. I hope they come back.
14:26Ben ShapiroSo let's talk about the uptick in anti Semitism more broadly. One of the things that's been hard to watch as a Jew, but also just as an American and a Westerner, has been the radical upsurge in anti Semitic activity.
14:38Ben ShapiroJust generally anti Semitic sentiment appallingly after October 7th. It's been astonishing, actually.
14:43Elon MuskYes. I must admit to being so somewhat frankly naive about this. In the circles that I move, I see almost no anti Semitism. And you know, there's this old joke.
14:57Elon MuskI've got like this one Jewish friend. No, I have like two thirds of my friends are Jewish. Okay. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non Jewish friends.
15:05Elon MuskI'm like Jewish by association. I'm aspirationally Jewish. So I don't, you know, I was like, what are people talking about with this anti Semitism? Because I never hear it in at dinner conversations.
15:19Elon MuskIt's like an absurdity, you know, at least in my friend circles. But when, you know, looking at the pro Hamas rallies in vast numbers that took place in almost every major city in the west blew my mind.
15:40Elon MuskAnd on including on the elite college campuses that are supposed to be, you know, if you're an elite college campus, you're supposed to be enlightened, you're not supposed to be fostering hate.
15:57Elon MuskAnd yet you had these pro mass demonstrations at Harvard, you know, Yale, including I went to U. And I was like, this is unbelievable.
16:11Ben ShapiroI mean, there's a poll recently from Harvard, Harris, showing that some 67% people aged 18 to 24 said that the Jews were an oppressor class, which, you know, in America, Jews represent approximately 7 million Jews in the United States out of 330 million Americans.
16:28Ben ShapiroTiny percentage of the population. But that ideology that, that the Jews are an oppressor class matches up very nicely and very closely with what is a conspiracy theory. At root, anti Semitism is a conspiracy theory, and it's a conspiracy theory about power.
16:42Ben ShapiroAnd if you read Nazi literature, the Nazis literally promoted the idea that Jews were, of course, this small caste of people who were running all of the major industries, who were standing behind all world power.
16:54Ben ShapiroAs Hitler's suggestion is that it was world Jewry that stood behind Germany's loss in war, world World War I, and then the Allies unwillingness to make a deal with Germany prior to World War II.
17:02Ben ShapiroAnd you know, that theory of power and group identity is really ugly and we see echoes of it today. I mean, the diversity, equity, inclusion ideology that basically suggests that all of society is a vast pyramid of group identity and that at the very top are the people who are successful and that those people are exploiting everybody else.
17:21Ben ShapiroAnd we can tell who's successful by their group identity, not by their level of success, by their group identity. That matches up incredibly. It syncs up almost a Venn diagonal circle of anti Semitism.
17:29Elon MuskAbsolutely. The diversity and actually inclusion. We should always be, always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book. That's never a good sign.
17:43Elon MuskAnd because it sounds like, sure, diversity, equity, inclusion, these all sound like nice words, but what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation.
17:55Elon MuskAnd it's against merit. And thus, I think is fundamentally anti Semitic. So, yeah, you know,
18:13Elon MuskI think the whole all of the sort of, the, all of the riots that were in the major cities and college campuses, I think was a shocking wake up call to I think, any sort of civilization or civil minded person, really quite a shock.
18:38Ben ShapiroThe crossover between some of these rallies on college campuses in favor of Hamas, I mean, they unite the. The weirdest coalitions maybe in human history. You'll see LGBTQ flags in favor of Hamas, where of course, if an LGBTQ person were to be actually in the Gaza Strip, they would no longer be in the Gaza Strip, they would be dead.
18:56Elon MuskYes, exactly.
18:58Ben ShapiroThat coalition is.
18:59Elon MuskThat's like seriously out of touch.
19:00Ben ShapiroYeah, but it isn't. But it only isn't out of touch in the sense that there is a coalitional idea here that basically power structures must be torn down at all costs.
19:14Ben ShapiroAnd if that means allying with people who hate me, then I'll ally with people who hate me. And the fact that that's grown in fervor since October 7th really is, you know, as I said to me on a Personal level, quite shocking.
19:27Ben ShapiroWhat do you make of the future of a West if the west continues to embrace that idea?
19:32Elon MuskWell, I think we really need to stop this principle that the weaker, normally weaker party is always right. This is simply not true. If you are, in quotes, oppressed or the weaker party, it doesn't mean you're right.
19:47Elon MuskBecause if some of those, you know, weaker groups want to annihilate you, that does not make them good. We just, we have to get rid of the rule that if you're weaker, you're automatically good.
20:03Elon MuskThat's obviously makes no sense. You know, it often makes sense where it's like, okay, you don't want to beat up on someone smaller and weaker than you, but if that smaller group wants to kill you, they're bad.
20:22Elon MuskOkay. I mean, I'm a big believer in moral absolutism, not moral relativism. There is, there's good and bad in the absolute. And you judge any group or individual against absolute moral standards, not whether they're the so called oppressed or oppressor, just on absolute moral terms.
20:45Elon MuskAre they doing good things? Do they want to murder innocent people? That's bad. Doesn't matter who they are.
20:53Ben ShapiroYou would think. But the pseudo sophisticates on college campus seem to think differently. So, so I wanted to get your take on why you think this is so prevalent on college campus.
21:00Ben ShapiroWhat do you think the future of the universities in the United States looks like? Given the fact that entire universities appear to have been corrupted by moral relativism and this sort of perverse ideology.
21:13Ben ShapiroDo you think that a wave of change is coming to the universities? Do you think that there is going to be direct hiring out of high school? What is the solution for universities in the United States as well as abroad?
21:26Elon MuskI think we need to return to where things were or mostly were, which is a focus on merit. And it doesn't matter whether you're a man, woman, you know, what race you are, what beliefs you have.
21:46Elon MuskWhat matters is how good are you at your job or what are your skills, you know, you know, you could be a three legged green Martian,
21:57Former President of Greeceyou
21:58Elon Muskknow, wears a kimono and drinks yak's milk, who cares? It doesn't matter. You know, what matters is like how good is your work? That's it. That, that, that's, that's the, that's the least sort of racist, sexist you can be, is just care about the work that somebody does and not anything else.
22:22Elon MuskThat's what the focus needs to be to return to.
22:28Ben ShapiroYeah, it seems as though you mentioned earlier these sort of problems of attacks on the meritocracy. And one of the claims is that there's no real meritocracy, there's a pseudo meritocracy that basically all the institutions are run for the benefit of those who run the institutions.
22:45Ben ShapiroAnd it feels like there is some truth to the idea that institutions have lost credibility with the people, particularly in the west and in the backlash to that. I think that there's now, you know, sort of an idea that if we do away with all institutions and all limits on moral behavior, then that somehow is better.
23:01Ben ShapiroBut there needs to be a recapturing of the institutions or at least a rebuilding in place of those institutions. New things. And that's something obviously that you're very focused on not only with X, but your other of kind companies is building new things, innovation, trying to create our way out of the problems that we've created for ourselves.
23:18Elon MuskYeah, I think generally people should always be wary that they may have either consciously or mostly subconsciously internalized the notion of a zero sum game or a fixed pie.
23:33Elon MuskAnd if you internalize that there's everything's zero sum meaning like in order for me to get ahead, someone else has to not get ahead, or for me to have stuff, someone else must not have stuff.
23:47Elon MuskIf you have that axiomatic flaw, then what needs to be done is to fix that axiomatic flow because it is false. It's not a zero sum game. We can absolutely grow and have grown and the evidence is overwhelming that we have grown the output of goods and services.
24:07Elon MuskWe have many things today that we did not have in the past. We are far more prosperous, all of humanity is far more prosperous today than it was at times in the past.
24:18Elon MuskI mean it wasn't that long ago where, you know, we'd count a good year as one where, well, the bubonic plague wasn't that bad, only killed 10%. You know, we not that many people starved through the winter.
24:35Elon MuskWe only lost, you know, 5% of our population due to raids from other tribes. You know, basically life used to be very rough in the old days and it's.
24:47Elon MuskIf they could see us now, they'd be like, what are you guys complaining about? This is amazing. You know, not having to worry about food for. I mean we were food constrained for probably the last hundred thousand years until recently.
25:07Elon MuskSo you know, really the present day future is amazing compared to the past. And anyone who doesn't think it's amazing is not a good student of history. So I think we live in the most interesting of times and probably the best of times.
25:26Ben ShapiroOne of the things that I would hope that. And I think you're part of this, is a coalition of meritocrats. Standing up for the meritocracy is going to be deeply necessary in a future where trust has been fragmented with so many institutions, we're going to have to stand up and loudly say that merit still exists and that merit is individually based, not based on innate characteristics of some sort.
25:46Ben ShapiroSo you mentioned earlier, you know that you're aspirationally Jewish, that you surround yourself with that you're surrounded by so many Jews. So are you part of the Jewish conspiracy?
25:55Ben ShapiroWhat exactly is the.
25:57Elon MuskMaybe
26:00Ben Shapirothat'll please the haters online.
26:02Elon MuskYeah, sure. No, I mean, I just.
26:09Elon MuskYeah, I grew up around a lot of Jewish people. I went to Hebrew preschool, Rachel Spiro in South Africa. My name is very Jewish.
26:19Ben ShapiroI will tell you that for the past 10 years, people have assumed in my community that you are Jewish until I informed them otherwise. Yeah, Elon is a pretty Jewish name.
26:27Elon MuskHe is super Jewish. And then I went to Israel when I was 13. You know, I mean, you know, visited Masada. I'm certainly checking the boxes on a lot of things.
26:43Elon MuskAnd like I said, most of my friends are Jewish. Just worked out that way. So sometimes, yeah, I guess maybe I forget, am I Jewish? I'm Jewish. Aspirationally Jewish.
27:01Ben ShapiroSo, you know, when you hear critiques about acts, right. About the amount of anti Semitism on X, what are the metrics that you're seeing from the inside about the amounts of anti Semitism or quote, unquote, hate speech?
27:13Ben ShapiroBecause it's always a vaguely defined term hate speech on your platform.
27:18Elon MuskYeah, I mean, the outside audits that we had done, at least the ones that we've had done, show that there was the least amount of anti Semitism on X.
27:31Elon MuskIf you look at. Look at all the other social. It's never going to be zero. If you've got 600 billion people on a platform, expecting it to be anything, to be zero is extremely unlikely because you have 600 million people on a platform.
27:43Elon MuskBut when they compare us to Instagram TikTok. TikTok's actually got a lot of antisense.
27:50Ben ShapiroTikTok is pretty terrifying. People have not checked out TikTok. I mean, the algorithm is absolutely pushing me toward prochomas material.
27:56Elon MuskYes, it is. So I believe It's. We have. TikTok has like five times the amount of anti Semitism per post than we do. So it's not like it's not going to be zero, but to the best of our knowledge it has the least amount of anti Semitism of any platform.
28:20Ben ShapiroLegacy media has spent an awful lot of ink on you. There's been a lot of attempts to paint you as anti Semitic or paint X as anti Semitic. Where do you think that's coming from?
28:31Ben ShapiroWhy does the legacy media seem to have you, particularly in the last year and a half, in the crosshairs so much?
28:38Elon MuskWell, I mean, the reality is that X is competition for the legacy media. So you know, X is a, is where people go to get the most current news and learn about the world.
28:51Elon MuskSo the legacy media is our direct competitors. So they're really going to find every angle to try to cancel X. I mean, if you want to know why things are happening, look at the incentives, you know, so.
29:07Elon MuskAnd legacy media has had a tough time with respect to usage. The numbers I saw was that the sort of traditional print cable television viewership went down something like 20, 30% last year.
29:23Elon MuskOn the other hand, X went up roughly the same, roughly 20, 30%. So it's a direct competition for people's attention. So if there's some attack they can levy against me, they will.
29:37Ben ShapiroIt seems as though one of the other matters is not just direct competition between the media and X, but also that the legacy media for most of my life, up until the past, you know, 15 years, performed what they saw as a gatekeeping function.
29:50Ben ShapiroThey were the ones who got to define the narrative. They were the ones who got to determine what was appropriate news and what was inappropriate news. And then even after social media arose in the early days, there was this sort of, the sort of things that you articulate were actually articulated by virtually all the social media heads.
30:03Ben ShapiroMark Zuckerberg used to say the kinds of things that you say. Jack Dorsey used to say the kinds of things, things that you said. And then there seemed to be an institutional takeover by a lot of legacy media types in terms of the kinds of rules and restrictions that were placed on what you could and could not say on these platforms.
30:19Ben ShapiroWho would get banned, who would not get banned. Advertisers weaponized against particular outlets if those outlets didn't follow the diktats that were put forward by these types. And it seems like since you took over, one of the, the biggest objection of all is that they're not performing the gatekeeping function anymore.
30:37Ben ShapiroSomeone else is.
30:38Elon MuskWell, yes, I mean, I don't think there should be a gatekeeping function by a small number of individuals. I Mean really, if you say, like for newspapers in America there are about five editors that decide what gets put on the front page or what to focus on or what not to focus on.
30:57Elon MuskAnd most of the other papers just copy them essentially.
31:01Former President of GreeceSo.
31:02Elon MuskBut is that really what we want? Do we want just a handful of people deciding what they think is important or should it be that the people decide what's important?
31:13Elon MuskAnd I think it should be sort of an organic thing where the people decide what's important and what to focus on, not just a handful of editors. And yeah, they don't like the fact that this power has been taken away from them, but I think it should be.
31:32Ben ShapiroI want to go back to something that you said a little bit earlier, talking about the idea that on a moral level, you know, there's nothing that suggests that simple weakness is itself virtue, that a weak person can be virtuous, but doesn't necessarily mean that they are.
31:44Ben ShapiroA powerful person can be, you know, the victimizer, but doesn't necessarily mean that they are. That logic carried forward, particularly to what's going on in Israel right now has been, in my opinion, entirely pernicious and wrong.
31:56Ben ShapiroThere's this idea that because Israel is a powerful, militarily sophisticated country that is doing its best to limit civilian casualties in one of the most population dense areas of the world, in which we have terrorists who are honeycombed throughout every aspect of society, building literally hundreds of miles of tunnels, the entire London subway system worth of tunnels underneath the ground, that somehow, you know, Israel targeting those systems and killing a lot of people.
32:22Ben ShapiroBecause when you kill terrorists, unfortunately, and they're embedded among civilians, it's terrible and it's horrifying. But every one of those deaths is on the terrorist group that embeds itself with civilians.
32:29Ben ShapiroThere's been this logic has been mapped onto that conflict that smaller and weaker means morally virtuous because victimized.
32:39Elon MuskYeah, it really has come completely full circle from or 180 degrees from what has historically been the case. So through most of history the operating principle has been might makes right.
32:57Elon MuskSo yeah, for really up until modern times, might makes right was the if you were stronger, you, you were right. Now we've sort of flipped it to if you're weaker, you're right, but neither is true.
33:17Elon MuskThere is rightness independent of strength or weakness. Just because somebody's strong doesn't mean they're right and because somebody's weak doesn't mean they're right. You have to look at morals in the absolute.
33:30Ben ShapiroSo on a broader Level. Elon, you talk a lot about, you know, your hope for humanity. I'd say that you're somebody who really loves humanity, which is why you talk about expanding humanity's reach out to the stars.
33:42Ben ShapiroWhen you go to a place like Auschwitz or when you walk the villages like Kibbutz Berry after October 7th, does that change your opinion of humanity or does it reinforce what you think humanity can be on both the positive side and on the negative side?
33:59Elon MuskI think it is human, actually human nature to love humanity unless you are indoctrinated otherwise. So I think the actual default for most people is to love humanity and to love being around their fellow humans.
34:16Elon MuskYou can take, for example, like what's one of the worst punishments in prison is solitary confinement. And all saltery confinement means is that you, you don't get to hang out with the other prisoners, which might not be the best group of people to hang out with, but even that is considered a terrible punishment to not be able to hang out with other prisoners.
34:38Elon MuskSo in truth, I think in our nature, we all love humanity unless we are indoctrinated otherwise. And so we have to stop that indoctrination.
34:49Ben ShapiroSo how do you think that people ought to pursue that? Because obviously we have seen indoctrination at a wide variety of levels, ranging from sort of soft indoctrination in various schools in the west, very, very hard indoctrination that you see in, for example, the Gaza Strip, where kids are literally, unfortunately, at very young ages, they have graduation ceremonies that we've seen tapes of where they're reenacting kidnapping of Israeli soldiers or killing of Israeli soldiers, for example.
35:12Elon MuskThat fundamentally has to be addressed or there will not be peace. The education of kids in Gaza, the indoctrination of hate into kids in Gaza has to stop. So, you know, when I was in Israel, I was like, that was my top recommendation, is that you've got to make sure, you know, I understand the need for this to invade Gaza.
35:40Elon MuskAnd unfortunately some innocent people will die. There's no way around it. But the most important thing is to ensure that afterwards that the indoctrination where kids are taught from as soon as they can understand language, that their goal is to kill Israelis.
36:00Elon MuskAnd if you're told that from when you're a toddler, well, you're going to believe it. And that needs to stop.
36:08Ben ShapiroOn a technological side, what do you think can be done there? Because actually this is one of the areas where, you know, the Gaza Strip isn't famous for its Internet access.
36:16Ben ShapiroYou know, there are a lot of places around the world where the government puts an extraordinarily heavy hand on the flow of information. You were mentioning that the Nazis first thing they did was take over the entire process mechanism inside Germany and then inside the occupied areas of Europe.
36:30Ben ShapiroBut that obviously happens all over the world right now. And one of the things you'd use startling for is to try and open up some of those avenues of information.
36:37Ben ShapiroBut what, what can you do? What should we be doing?
36:41Elon MuskIt's worth noting also that the Nazis engaged in extreme censorship within Germany for anything that was pro Semitic. I don't know how many people are aware of that, but they censored any pro Semitic.
36:58Elon MuskAnyone who tried to defend the Jews in Germany. Anything pro Semitic was censored.
37:04Ben ShapiroSo,
37:06Elon Muskyeah, I think freedom of speech and rigorous pursuit of the truth is the way is one way to get to defeat hatred.
37:19Ben ShapiroYou know, when I look at the United States, maybe B way. Well, when I look at the United States, one of the things that seems to be breaking down and when any.
37:26Ben ShapiroThe first element, historically, maybe the last element of a society in a state of mental decline is a vast outbreak of anti Semitism. This is what was happening in not only Nazi Germany, but historically, countries that are in a state of decline tend to have wild outbreaks of anti Semitism.
37:41Ben ShapiroAnd it seems to me that one of the key things that can reverse that process is the rebuilding of local institutions. And as local institutions break down, you see sort of this fragmentation of the population at large.
37:58Ben ShapiroHow do you merge the need for technological development with the building of those local institutions? Families, churches, schools, the kinds of things that societies are built upon.
38:09Elon MuskYeah, actually, I should say there were really three things that were my strong recommendation visiting Israel. One is obviously one has to get rid of Hamas fighters who where reform is impossible.
38:22Elon MuskTheir only goal is to kill Israelis. They ought to be either killed or imprisoned, because otherwise they will simply kill more Israelis. Then the second thing is you've got to change the indoctrination in the schools so that kids are not taught to hate from the Moment they are 2 years old.
38:44Elon MuskAnd then the third thing is, which is a very hard thing to do in this situation, is conspicuous acts of kindness to the people in Gaza. Conspicuous acts of kindness to the people in Gaza.
38:59Elon MuskIt's just that much harder to hate someone if you do nice things for them. Even if they try to bite your hand when you do it, keep doing it.
39:09Elon MuskAnd you look at the Marshall Plan after, you know, look at the difference between World War I and World War II, where after World War I, Germany got an unfair share of the blame.
39:21Elon MuskIt led to immense bitterness. It's what allowed Hitler to rise to power was the embittered German soldiers from World War I. But then you look in contrast to what happened after World War II, you had the Marshall Plan.
39:42Elon MuskSo the United States coming in and actually funding the rebuilding of Germany and the rebuilding of Japan. How often does that happen in history? But look at the results.
40:01Elon MuskNo war with Germany, peace with Japan and Germany for now. Soon it'll be almost a century.
40:12Ben ShapiroSo when you look at the state of the west right now, maybe it's all the doom scrolling, but when you look at the state of the west right now, you're very optimistic.
40:20Ben ShapiroIt sounds like I find it hard to be optimistic in this moment. It's been a very ugly couple of years from Ukraine to the current conflicts in Israel and Hamas to domestic politics in the United States.
40:33Ben ShapiroAnd we're all seeing seems like there's a lot of polarization, a lot of fragmentation. What do you think is the future of the West? Can we come together around any sense of shared common values?
40:44Ben ShapiroEspecially given the fact that everybody is kind of drinking from the fire hose of information. One of the downsides about the upside of information is the availability. The downside is, you know, choice paralysis and overload.
40:55Elon MuskI mean you can definitely get information overload, so much information coming at you these days because you can get all the world's information real time and it's impossible for one human to digest all that.
41:13Elon MuskYou know, I think there are some things that we can agree on or most people would agree on are cool and inspiring. Like humanity going to the moon. You know, if you ask probably kids almost anywhere in the world, what's the coolest thing humans have ever done, I think a lot of kids would say we went to the Moon, you know.
41:45Elon MuskAnd so I think we want to continue that spirit of exploration. Speaking of kind of growing the pie is that we want to have a dream that we can be a space faring civilization, a multi planet species, a multi stellar species, and go out there among the stars and discover the nature of the universe.
42:14Elon MuskThat we can collectively seek greater enlightenment to better understand this incredible universe we live in. I find that very compelling. I think most people would find that very compelling.
42:33Ben ShapiroI think embedded in that is also, as you say, that core value of meritocracy. Because it's one thing to say man can go to the moon, it's another thing to say I can be part of man going to moon.
42:42Ben ShapiroAnd a meritocracy suggests that you can be part of that. It's not just that human beings are capable of doing the thing, it's that you can be a part of that thing if you work hard enough, if you innovate enough, if you try hard enough.
42:53Ben ShapiroAnd so societies that seem to have given up on that also seem to have given up on going to the moon. Societies that are so reflective about their own supposed flaws.
43:01Ben ShapiroThe United States has this problem right now that they are unwilling to simply say, freedom is pretty phenomenal and meritocracy is the greatest thing that's ever been invented and we should hold onto that.
43:14Ben ShapiroAnd that's what's going to allow us to get to the moon. That stops us from going to the moon or to Mars or to anywhere else.
43:19Elon MuskYeah, I mean, there's many wonderful, interesting things that are happening besides space exploration. Obviously, as time goes by, we improve our ability to cure cancer, to cure many diseases.
43:33Elon MuskThere's increased access to information, and people talk a lot about inequality. But what about the equality of access to information? That's incredible. You know, right now, if you've got, you know, a very cheap electronic device at an Internet cafe, you can access all of the lectures of MIT for free.
43:57Elon MuskYou can access almost any book. You can learn anything. This is an equality of access to information that was unthinkable even 20, 30 years ago. You can teach yourself how to do anything for free.
44:15Elon MuskThat's amazing. Maybe there's, like, too much focus on the things that are unequal, but we forget about the things that are equal and that have improved inequality so much like access to information.
44:36Elon MuskThat's one of the things that we're trying to help out with. Starlink is provide Internet access to people who don't have Internet access or where it's too expensive for them to afford.
44:48Elon MuskBecause once you have Internet access, you can learn anything and you can sell your products and services. So I think that's. That's pretty amazing. I mean, you know, that's sort of like if we're going to count our flaws, we should also count our blessings.
45:12Ben ShapiroOne of the things that I think is amazing about what you've been doing, Elon, is that it's not just, you know, the business side of you that's important. Obviously, you become this unbelievably large figure looming in the public imagination.
45:26Ben ShapiroAnd that means that when you tweet, it has, you know, impact. That is. That is very large. How do you decide when to tweet? Sometimes it's memory Sometimes it's, sometimes it's joking, sometimes it's these long thought out posts.
45:38Ben ShapiroHow do you decide when to tweet? How do you inform yourself on the topics that you're tweeting about?
45:47Elon MuskWell, I do post a lot on the X platform, you know, sometimes 100 times a day. So once in a while I'll do something dumb for sure. But I really, you know, I try to say things that I think are interesting or funny.
46:12Elon MuskI mean, there must be some reason why 169 million people follow me, I guess, I don't know, I must be keeping them amused in some way. So amuse, entertain, you know, have opinions on something.
46:29Elon MuskSometimes they're wrong, sometimes they're right. And you know, things like Community Notes, it applies to me as well as it applies to anyone else. So if I say something that's incorrect or you know, not full context, then Community Notes will correct me very quickly.
46:48Elon MuskSo, but it's only me doing these posts ever. I don't have a team or anything. So in fact, I generally would recommend for leaders of the world to just literally post your own stuff.
47:06Elon MuskAnd once in a while you make a mistake, don't worry about it.
47:12Ben ShapiroSo can't win them all.
47:14Elon MuskNobody bets 1000.
47:17Ben ShapiroSo obviously where we visited today, the big takeaway always is never again. I think the question that a lot of Jews worldwide asked after October 7th and after that wild up surge of anti Semitism which we've seen, the Jewish Jew hatred that continues now is whether never again really for a lot of people meant never again between the years 1939 and 1945, or whether it actually means never again like right now, as in if there is a genocidal group that wishes to kill lots of Jews, is that something that you wish to stand up against right now?
47:47Ben ShapiroAnd when you look out at the world and the state of the world, you know, the video that EJ put up a moment ago suggesting that the Holocaust would have been somewhat mitigated or people may have had more information or been able to certainly been able to escape earlier.
48:04Ben ShapiroI mean, one of the things that's astonishing obviously about the history of the Holocaust is how many Jews, because they were only getting partial information. It was slow and it was gradual.
48:14Ben ShapiroAnd by the time they wanted to get out, it was just too late for them to get out. What are your hopes that never again is a real thing?
48:25Elon MuskI mean, I certainly hope there's not a Holocaust.
48:27Ben ShapiroHow realistically is it?
48:29Elon MuskI think it's unlikely, frankly. So at least if you say Like, I mean, I could be naive, but I think the probability of a holocaust in the west is extremely tiny.
48:41Elon MuskYou know, I think if you look at say the, you know, the Nazis, I think Hitler got like a third of the vote or something like, like that when he was first semi.
48:50Elon MuskHe was sort of semi elected and then basically a coup.
48:58Elon MuskBut think of all the people that fought to destroy Nazism. The millions and millions of people that fought and who died to destroy Nazism. That's the vast majority of the west opposed even in those days, opposed not to and fought and died.
49:17Elon MuskMy grandfather was in World War II for almost six years. All his friends got killed. He was the only one of his friends to survive. And he was severely traumatized.
49:29Elon MuskLike he really just couldn't even talk afterwards. Most of the time was in East Africa, North Africa, Italy. The only reason he's even alive, frankly is because towards the end of the war they gave like an aptitude test because he was just a corporal.
49:47Elon MuskHe didn't graduate high school, so he wasn't eligible for officer school. And they plucked him out probably right before he died and sent him to work for British Intelligence in London, which is where he met my grandmother, you know, so he was one of the people fighting to stop the Nazis and many along with millions of others, you know, so let's not forget that the vast majority of the west fought and died to stop Nazism.
50:16Ben ShapiroSo I had the chance to Briefly meet your 3 year old today. Oh yeah, he's a fun guy, adorable. I have a three year old of my own, so I can.
50:24Ben ShapiroThey're all very similar in. But you know, as you're, you have some kids who are much older. You have, you know, kids who are younger obviously when it comes to teaching them about things like the Holocaust and anti Semitism.
50:36Ben ShapiroHow do you address those topics?
50:40Elon MuskWell, my kids are pretty well read, so they read a lot of history. They're not ignorant on the subject. I mean maybe the three year old is.
50:51Ben ShapiroSure, I would hope, yes.
50:54Elon MuskCan't read, so my kids are very well read. So. But you know, I have had some sort of disturbing conversations with sort of some say nephews or some family members, not my kids, but kids of family
51:16Ben Shapiromembers, where
51:18Elon MuskI was actually shocked to see anti Semitism or at least. Yeah, one disturbing conversation was, you know, saying that the, you know, we deserve to have the trade towers destroyed because of our terrible foreign policy.
51:37Elon MuskAnd I was like, this is what they're teaching you in elite New York high schools. This is messed up.
51:45Ben ShapiroWell, Elon, I think I personally. Jews all over the world. A lot of people in this room want to thank you for not only visiting Auschwitz, but also for visiting Israel after October 7th and for the strong moral voice you've been on behalf of the fight against anti Semitism.
52:00Ben ShapiroIt's great to spend time with you. Thank you so much.
52:02Elon MuskThank you. Thank you for having me.
52:14Event HostThank you very much.
52:15Elon MuskThank you.
52:15Event HostThank you, Ben, for very very interesting interviews. Interview. Thank you for the questions and thank you for the answers. I would like now please to call the 10th President of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin and Dr.
52:28Event HostJoel Mergi, the president of the consistar of Paris for a brief picture, please. The 10th president,
52:45Event HostDoctor Bergi.
52:45Elon MuskYes, thank you.
52:53Event HostDoctor Joel, the president of the Crusade of France. We'll take please a picture before we move on with the program.
53:03Ben ShapiroThank you.
53:04Event HostPresident Rivlin. President, if you please could call you for the.
53:09Elon MuskOkay, okay.
53:10Event HostHouse. You hold it again. It's quite heavy. Okay. Yeah, please do. Okay,
53:47Elon MuskI know, I know,
53:53Elon MuskI know.
53:57Former President of GreeceThere's even.
54:10Event HostThank you very much.