Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding | All-In Summit 2025
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (13)
Transcript
0:00HostI believe Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity. Elon Musk and his ex AI startup have built the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence training supercomputer in the world.
0:15HostAs far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that. You know, this is an arms race of epic proportions. He's a big thinker.
0:23HostYou guys went on Fox the other day with the Doge team. You saw Elon's face nodding while they were speaking with a grin. Ear to ear. He was pro years from X.
0:32HostAI has acquired X in an all stock transaction. Tesla's first robotaxis are officially on the road.
0:39Elon MuskThe company's board proposed a new compensation package for the CEO that could pay him just about $1 trillion in stock. He gets nothing if he doesn't hit the numbers.
0:49HostSpaceX will buy wireless spectrum licenses from Echo Star for its Starlink satellite network for about $17 billion.
1:07HostThere's a. Phoebe, how do you have time this. I. I never understand you.
1:20Elon MuskYeah, well, I do work a lot.
1:22HostLadies and gentlemen, please welcome Elon Musk. All right, all right. Where are you? Also you're in Palo Alto and not Washington.
1:38Elon MuskI'm at Tesla Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto.
1:42HostYeah. So no more Washington dc. You're back at work, you're focused.
1:47Elon MuskYeah, yeah, I haven't been to D.C. since May.
1:50HostOkay,
1:53Elon Muskthat was a hell of a side quest.
1:56HostAny lessons from your time in Washington D.C.
2:03Elon Muskthe government is basically unfixable.
2:13Elon MuskI applaud David's noble efforts in this. It's good to have talented people in the administration. But at the end of the day, if you look at our national debt, which is insanely high, the interest payments exceed the Defense Department, I guess, sorry, War Department budget, and they keep rising.
2:40Elon MuskSo if AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we're toast.
2:47HostWhich is a great segue. Optimus is, I think, going to be the greatest product in the history of humanity. What's the progress like and how much of your. How many of your cycles are going specifically to Optimus?
3:07HostWhat's the timeline? I think you're on version three, maybe four. Tell us everything.
3:14Elon MuskWell, yeah, everything will take a long time.
3:19HostWe've got time.
3:25Elon MuskWe're finalizing the design of Optimus version 3. And that really is going to be a very remarkable robot. It will have the, essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so meaning a very complex hand.
3:47Elon MuskAn AI mind is that can navigate and comprehend reality and it will be made in very high Volume. Those are the three things that are missing. Like if you see any other robotics company, they're missing those three things.
4:04Elon MuskThose are the three really hard things. And I, I, I spend actually at this point.
4:19Elon MuskIt, it might be more of my mental cycles than anything, anything else, any other single thing on Optimus. That's, that, that's solving for real world AI. All of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the, the supply chain and production challenges of it, because we have, there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots.
4:42Elon MuskSo it has to be, we have to recreate it from scratch and which requires doing a lot of vertical integration. None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain.
4:58Elon MuskSo. But I think it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.
5:06HostAnd the cost of it, at scale, 20, 30, $40,000 a robot, what do you think the first wave of them will cost and when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch?
5:24Elon MuskI think that the module cost of production, once you hit a million units per year is probably around the $20,000 range. It, it, it sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the, in the robot.
5:46Elon MuskAnd you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators. There are 26 actuators per arm, like 26 electric like motors, gearboxes and power electronics.
6:03Elon MuskSo, so, but, but the, the, the, the, the AI chip will be pretty expensive like that, that might be like 5, 5 or $6,000 of the, of the bill of materials, maybe more.
6:15Elon MuskAnd, but, but, so I, but I think at volume, at a million units a year, the, the production cost is probably on the order of $20,000, maybe 25,000 like that.
6:28Elon MuskAnd price will be as a function of demand.
6:32HostElon, can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get right and why, you know, the actuator design is so unique and you know, why it's so difficult, why nobody makes it and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the robot properly?
6:51Elon MuskWell, it turns out human hands are incredibly, that they've evolved to this, to be this incredibly sophisticated machine like the, Your hand is actually a remarkable thing. It's look, look closely at your hands and think of all the things you can do with your hands, which is a lot.
7:12HostI can think of many things. Yeah, I was just thinking about something.
7:16Elon MuskYou know, your hands are very versatile instrument.
7:20HostYeah, you can give a high five.
7:23Elon MuskVery versatile. You know, you can Swing a baseball bat, you can thread needles. You put thread in a needle, you can play the piano with violin,
7:38Hostyou
7:38Elon Muskknow, you could disassemble or assemble a car. The hands are incredibly versatile instruments and most of the muscles of the hand are actually in the forearm. So your hand is kind of like a puppet.
7:56Elon MuskIt's mostly a puppet. The muscles are coming from the forearm and they're pulling the tendons, which are also human tendon designs or human tendon evolution is incredibly good. So you've got this wave of tendons.
8:13Elon MuskYou've got, I think the human hand is something like, depending on how you count it, 27 or 28 degrees of freedom per, you know, in the hand. It's. It's amazing.
8:27Elon MuskSo in order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hand, the hands problem.
8:37HostYeah, we had, we had Ari.
8:40Elon MuskHands, knees, hands.
8:42HostAnd so is it like when you were first building Tesla, where the supply chain doesn't exist and now you have to go out and find folks to work with and, you know, build all this vertical integration, get support?
8:52HostIs it, is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found and you're going to have to build all of this stuff up?
8:58Elon MuskYes. We could not actually buy the actuators for any amount of money. They simply didn't exist. Even though they're are 10, 20,000 electric motors out there of various sizes and shapes, we've had to design every electric motor, gearbox and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics first principles.
9:20HostThe good news is you've got a lot of experience with factories over the last couple of decades. So how challenging is this versus cybertruck, Model Y, Model X gigafactory, you know.
9:34HostYeah, the Faberge egg, known as the Model X. Yeah.
9:37Elon MuskRight. It's hotter than any of those things.
9:44HostOkay. Yeah, much hotter. Significantly, yeah. Starship.
9:49Elon MuskYes.
9:49HostWell, harder than Starship.
9:51Elon MuskNo, not Starship's hotter. Okay, sorry.
9:56HostSo somewhere between a Model X and a starship. Yeah. Is it, is the. What's harder, the hardware or the software?
10:06Elon MuskRight now we're struggling with the, the final design of the hardware. Like I said, it's really primarily the hand, not to just, just dismiss the rest of the robot.
10:17Elon MuskRest of it's also important. But the hands. Are the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.
10:26HostAnd then let's assume you get past the hardware challenges. How much do you sort of get for free based on all the progress that's happening with LLMs? Will you know, will consumers just be able to interact with this, talk to the robot, ask them to do things it'll understand and sort of.
10:42Elon MuskOh, yeah, yeah, no problem.
10:44HostYou're spending a lot of time with Annie. I noticed online not that long.
10:50Elon MuskMaybe I went a little over the top for Moaning Rock. Imagine.
10:53HostBut, well, but in all seriousness, those characters and these robots that seems to be, you know, like maybe they, you
11:03Elon Muskcould get the embodiments of any iceberg.
11:05HostYeah. Why? Why the human form factor, Elon. You could make something that's maybe better than a human or maybe simpler than a human to do specific tasks and maybe better than a human to do more things than a human can do.
11:17HostHow do you decide to make it just like a human?
11:21Elon MuskWell, if you wanted to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a humanoid robot. So if you wanted to do a subset, that's much easier.
11:34Elon MuskBut it turns out humans evolved to the shape and capabilities that we have for good reasons. There actually is that there is like this value to having five, you know, four fingers and a thumb.
11:55Elon MuskAnd even the pinky actually is quite useful. Toes are much more a question mark, but the fingers.
12:06HostWell, also, humans have designed the world as well. So we designed it for us. So exactly we can make a humanoid robot. It'll be immediately backwards compatible with what we've built the world.
12:16Elon MuskPrecisely, Elon.
12:17HostThere's another, there's another part of the robot. So there's the LLMs, there's the actuation, the hands, but also there's the, the silicon that runs it. And there was, you know, dojo, I think you, you posted on X AI5 and AI6 and it just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction in which the silicon layer was also going.
12:43HostCan you tell us about that and what that is? And what, what, what, what are we, what are we building here? What is being built? Is it a complement to everything that exists in the world?
12:53HostIs it a potential long term competitor? What is it? Yeah.
13:00Elon MuskSo at Tesla, we basically had two different chip programs, one Dojo and one Dojo on the training side. And then what we call, you know, AI4, it's just our inference chip that the AI force was currently shipping in all vehicles.
13:21Elon MuskAnd we're finalized finalizing the design of AI5, which will be an immense jump from AI4. By some metrics, the improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4.
13:35HostWow.
13:36Elon MuskSo 40%. 40 times. And, and this is because we work so closely at a very fine grained level on the AI software and the AI hardware. So we know exactly where the limiting factors are.
13:54Elon MuskAnd so effectively the AI hardware and software teams are co designing the chip.
13:59HostSo a 40x improvement in the silicon. I think then as it, as everybody here in the audience experiences it, is that just an almost like an order of magnitude increase in the quality of FSD and the safety that you experience as a Tesla driver and then the quality of the robot, like where does it all manifest when you, when you, you know, bring it up and actually get it into production?
14:23Elon MuskYeah, to be precise, the 40x is on. If you said like, compared to the worst limitation on AI4 which is running the Softmax operation.
14:33HostYeah.
14:34Elon MuskWe currently have to run Softmax in around 40 steps in emulation mode, whereas that'll just be done in a few steps natively in AI5. AI5 trip will also be easily handled mixed precision models.
14:51Elon MuskSo you don't have. It'll dynamically handle mixed. There's a bunch of sort of technical stuff that AI5 will do a lot better in terms of nominal sort of raw compute.
15:03Elon MuskIt's 8 times more compute, about 9 times more memory, roughly 5 times more memory bandwidth. So but because we're addressing some core limitations in AI4, you multiply that by that, that 8x compute improvement by another 5x improvement because of, of optimization at a, at a very fine grain silicon level of things that are currently suboptimal in AI4.
15:31Elon MuskThat's where you get the 40x improvement you had.
15:34HostI'll keep going.
15:36Elon MuskSo now that said, I am confident that the current chips, AI4 chips that are in the cars will achieve self driving safety that is at least 2 to 3 times that of human and maybe even 10x.
15:54Elon MuskAnd the software that will be released for that is coming out over the next few months. So version 14 will be the biggest upgrade in Tesla software since version 12.
16:08Elon MuskWe are increasing the parameter count by an order of magnitude. The. There's this, there's a lot of reinforcement learning that's been used as we. There's like you can think of AI sort of as a way of compressing reality.
16:30Elon MuskAnd some of those compression steps we were too lossy and we addressed the lossiness in the compression steps. So these are all software updates that'll go out. So just over there updates.
16:44Elon MuskYour car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.
16:50HostIt feels that way already to be honest. I saw in the trades that you spent about $17 billion on some spectrum, so some couch change to enable Your satellites and the Starlink network to connect directly with phones.
17:11HostWhat will that look like in a year or two? Are we going to drop our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account? We're kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks.
17:25HostHow many of you want a Starlink phone? Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible? I know you can't see it, but it's everyone? Yeah.
17:35Elon MuskAll right, cool. So this is a kind of a long term thing. It will allow SpaceX to deliver high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones. But there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phone.
17:59Elon MuskSo since these frequencies are not supported in current phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies and that probably is a two year time frame. So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years.
18:21Elon MuskAnd then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel, we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones.
18:33Elon MuskAnd then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity. But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.
18:45HostWow. And it's gonna be crazy. Do these frequencies, would they work indoors, inside buildings? You know, like, like the phone currently does.
18:54Elon MuskOkay.
18:56HostAnd so will you be able to
18:57Elon Muskhave basically like, if you, if you, if you're in a building with a, with a, like a thick metal roof, then.
19:02HostNo, but, no, the, the same types of, of.
19:05Elon MuskYeah, yeah, normal, normal homes? Yes, yes.
19:08HostElon, is your vision for this, that instead of, you know, having an AT&T account or, and then roaming when you're in the UK or you're in India, it's just we could have one direct deal with Starlink.
19:18HostIt works all over the world eventually. Not today, but at some point. Is that the end goal? That basically we don't need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier.
19:28HostAnd that would be you.
19:30Elon MuskThat would be one of the options. To be clear, we're not going to put the other carriers out of business. They're still going to be around because they own a lot of spectrum.
19:38Elon MuskSo there's. But yes, you should be able to have a Starlink. Like you have an AT&T or T mobile, Verizon or whatever. You could have an account with Starlink that works with your Starlink antenna at home for your WI fi as well as on your phone.
20:00Elon MuskAnd yeah, it would be a comprehensive solution for high bandwidth at home and for high bandwidth direct to sell.
20:08HostCould you buy some carriers to have more spectrum? Maybe buy Verizon?
20:14Elon MuskNot out of the question. I suppose that may happen.
20:19HostLet's talk about Starship. You just had a really, what appeared to be a phenomenal launch. How close is it to, you know, being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting?
20:36Elon MuskI think we will recover the ship next year. We've got one more launch of the Starlink version two stack, but there's only one, one booster and ship left. That's in the version two design.
20:57Elon MuskAnd then thereafter it's, it's version three, which is a gigantic upgrade because that's got Raptor 3 and pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version three. So version three, you know, might have some initial teething pains because it's such a radical redesign, but it's, it's capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable.
21:23Elon MuskAnd I think it's, I think, I think unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit.
21:42HostWhat does the best rocket in the world do now in terms of tonnage to space?
21:50Elon MuskWell, in terms of sort of commercial rockets, this Falcon Heavy, which we'll do
21:58Hostin
22:01Elon Muskwith, with side booster reuse, we'll do about 40 tons.
22:07HostSo this is five times bigger. Yeah,
22:11Elon Muskwell, two and a half times bigger. But, but Starship will be full reuse, full reusability.
22:16HostGot it. Okay.
22:17Elon MuskSo everything comes back.
22:18HostElon. After, after the explosion that happened with the failed launch, there was a lot of.
22:27Elon MuskSorry, which, which failed.
22:30HostOh, the more recent one. The more recent would. The Starship. The big boom. Yeah, and the big boom on the base. And there was a lot of proclamations that there's going to be environmental and FAA and all these other sorts of.
22:42HostThe recovery back to the launch pad again was incredibly fast. How did you get back so fast? Not just technically and work wise, but just like regulatory clearance wise, because they said there were going to be all these questions and reviews and so on.
22:58HostHow did you guys manage that?
23:01Elon MuskWell, there were a lot of questions and reviews. We got through them all. And credit to the SpaceX team. They worked incredibly hard and they got the next chip and booster tested and on the pad and flown.
23:14Elon MuskAnd huge credit to the SpaceX team. Very proud of them for doing, doing such a job. A great job recovering, I mean, creating a fully Reusable orbital rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever.
23:31Elon MuskIt's certainly, you know, a candidate for most difficult engineering project ever. You know, it's on the podium at least. So it's a, that that's been the goal of SpaceX from the beginning, from 2002.
23:48Elon MuskAnd here we are 23 years later. So it's, it's a long journey and with, with a super talent like by far the, I think the most talented group of rocket engineers that's ever been assembled.
24:03Elon MuskAnd we're finally, next year, I think we'll be able to achieve full reusability.
24:10HostElon, what are the big technical blockers that you're focused on there between now and that full reusability? Are there some showstoppers where you're just kind of literally just obsessing over trying to figure out still, or is it more about getting through laundry list of your learnings and just integrating it into the next launch?
24:33HostWell,
24:38Elon MuskFor full reusability of the ship, there's still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield. So no one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield like the shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight.
24:53Elon MuskRight. So no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield.
24:58HostAnd is that a material science problem or is that an engineering problem or both?
25:03Elon MuskYeah, I mean it's a material science engineering problem. So it's, but we really are
25:11Hostlooking
25:11Elon Muskat the fundamental physics here again, physics first principles and trying to figure out how do we make something that is, you know, it can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn't transmit the heat to the, the primary.
25:31Elon MuskYeah, primary structure and,
25:37Hostbut then whose integrity is it?
25:38Elon MuskAll the tiles stay on and they don't crack.
25:41HostYeah.
25:43Elon MuskAnd then as you ascend, if you hit some rain, the tiles don't dissolve in rain. There's, there's a lot of different issues and, and then you really need to know that these tiles are working.
25:56Elon MuskYou can't, you know, go through this laborious inspection. So it really needs to be where, you know, these, these tens of thousands of tiles all work and don't need to be repurposed or check one by one.
26:13Elon MuskThat was the case with the shuttle.
26:15HostCan we maybe switch now? I mean, who, who else were you talked about? Tesla. Then you go to SpaceX. Yeah. Now I'd like to ask you some questions about Grok and Xai.
26:28HostYou want to just give us an update? I think you, you kind of talked about where the next Gen model is and you said something incredible. I still don't think people really understand it, which is, you know, there's going to be a next training run where you expect, you know, not to start from the, you know, common web and common crawl where you expected an enormous amount of synthetic data.
26:49HostJust tell us about how the evolution of GROK is going and this innovation and why it's so important.
26:59Elon MuskYeah, so we're, we're running a lot of, using a lot of inference compute and, and reasoning to look at all of the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge and then thinking about each piece of information and then adding, adding what's missing and correcting, correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from this, from that training data.
27:27Elon MuskSo it's, it's like if you take the Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to, to books, PDFs, websites, every form of information.
27:42Elon MuskGROK is using heavy amounts of inference compute. Let's say to look at as an example a Wikipedia page and say what is true, partially true or false or missing in this page.
27:59Elon MuskNow rewrite the page to correct the, remove the falsehoods, correct the half truths and add the missing context.
28:13HostElon, by the way, could you just publish that? Could we create like a Grokopedia? I mean that would be. Yeah, especially for our bio pages which are a disaster.
28:21HostWikipedia is so biased and it's a constant war. You know, if something gets corrected five minutes later there'll be an army of people trying to, I mean it's become hyper partisan and there's hyper activists all over it.
28:34HostSo if you do fix for example Wikipedia as a source of truth, it'd be great to publish that just so the world has it.
28:44Elon MuskAll right, I'll talk, talk about that, Talk to the team about that. Like Grokpedia or whatever. This here's the Grokpedia version.
28:53HostBe interesting. Yeah.
28:54Elon MuskAnd then just have it out there
28:55Hostfor where in terms of people here like it in terms of training. Grok 5, you're, you're scaling up your super cluster in Colossus in Memphis. Yeah. Could you give us an update on that?
29:13HostAnd then also as part of that, where are we in the scaling laws? If you scale a bigger cluster, do you get a more powerful AI model? Is there a point of diminishing returns or like how much more compute?
29:26HostIf you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model? Do you get 100% better model? Like is it log linear? What, what? I guess how much More juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?
29:42Elon MuskI think, I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute. So then like, say, for argument's sake, like 10x more compute will double the intelligence.
29:55Elon MuskMaybe that's. That might be a rough rule of thumb, but, you know, that still means that, you know, you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ, so pretty, pretty big deal.
30:06Elon MuskSo I. And I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where, you know, most of the power of the sun is honest for compute, and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, you know, sort of.
30:22Elon MuskClaudia, shift to Kodashev 3 scale compute. So I guess once you think about artificial intelligence, not as sort of this, you know, a destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of.
30:46Elon MuskYou know, human intelligence has also scaled as you have. As the population has increased and we've been able to store more and more information, human intelligence has scaled. Now human.
30:58Elon MuskBecause of population declines and low growth rate, human intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline. And my guess is that I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year.
31:19HostWow.
31:22Elon MuskAnd then probably within five, like, say 20, 30, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.
31:30HostDo you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving? Do you think there's this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's underway that we don't really understand the structure of what's going on?
31:41HostBut.
31:46Elon MuskYeah, maybe we implicitly know that it's coming.
31:58Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I hope the birth rates turn around. I'm a big proponent of increased birth rate, obviously.
32:09HostWell, you're doing anything about it, or.
32:11Elon MuskNo, I'm trying to set a good example.
32:15HostYou know, we had a big conversation at this conference we didn't expect, which is suicidal empathy. The west, this declining birth rate. I noticed you've been pretty active about it.
32:29HostAnd open borders. And open borders like let the invaders in. Could all three of those be the same thing? It seems like there's a number of symptoms of the west being suicidal.
32:39HostThe most obvious one being the birth rate is not a replacement level. So obviously if that continues indefinitely, then the west will literally not reproduce enough to replace itself.
32:49HostBut there's other things too. There's the fact that the borders were totally opened to the point where Western culture, the social fabric started to come apart. And you see this especially in Europe, where The indigenous cultures of the UK or France or Germany are starting to potentially be taken over by cultures of people who are brought in and aren't assimilating.
33:11HostYou have crime where we have this case on social media right now, this young woman, Irina, who's just killed in a senseless way on a subway, which is horrific enough in and of itself.
33:24HostBut then in addition to that, the elite media just, for whatever reason, just refused to cover it, like it didn't exist. So you have this issue of crime that's not being addressed or even acknowledged, and no acknowledgement of this.
33:37HostLike, it's almost like we're trying to deny the reality of the spiral and this. Yeah. So you have the. You have all these data points that seem to suggest that the west is suicidal or doesn't.
33:53HostYou know, doesn't seem to want to defend itself or propagate itself. Look, I think everyone in this room thinks that life is awesome. Right. I mean, pretty great and, I think worth living.
34:04HostYeah. And when. When Alex Karp was here earlier today defending. Defending the west, that got some of the loudest applause at the conference. So I guess we probably don't really understand what's going on.
34:14HostWe don't really. Yeah. What's your take, Elon? Because, you know, what's your take on the suicide of the West?
34:19Elon MuskYeah, I'm very worried about it. Yeah, I'm very worried about it. You know, I think there's. Let's just say that the actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide.
34:32Elon MuskAnd it says so, but it's. Look, at least in America, there's generally a sense of optimism. But when's the last time you talked to someone from Europe who lives in Europe who's optimistic?
34:49HostNot for a while. Decades.
34:52Elon MuskLike, even one. It's rare. So I think unless people have a sense of optimism and purpose about the future, they. Suicide might be just what happens. Like having a child is an act of optimism about the future.
35:12Elon MuskSo if you're not optimistic.
35:21Elon MuskSo I think we need to maybe give people a sense of optimism and excitement about the future and a belief that the future will be better than the past and they'll be more interested in having kids.
35:34HostDid religion play a role in the past, Elon, to kind of placate and make folks feel that way when they.
35:40Elon MuskYeah, I think so. The nature abhors vacuum. And if you take away religion, then I think you actually. You get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before.
35:57Elon MuskI mean, it's like destructive Basically you get, you get like the white work mind virus filling, filling the hole that religion used to have, taking the place of religion.
36:08Elon MuskYou get these dystopian de facto religions that, that are, that are very, very self destructive. So I think perhaps some sort of revival of religion or at least what we need is some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about.
36:34Elon MuskI mean for me it's a philosophy of curiosity. I'm curious about the nature of the universe and I want to go out there and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars, maybe meeting alien civilizations, maybe in some cases we see the ruins of a long dead alien civilization.
36:52Elon MuskBut they were, they were very strong for 10 million years. You know the kind of stuff that you see in Star Trek in the, in a non dystopian sci fi book or movie or show.
37:04Elon MuskAnd so I'm just, I have a philosophy of curiosity of like I just want to know what's going on. And in order to know what's going on, we must have and increase in the scope and scale of consciousness.
37:18Elon MuskWe must expand as a consciousness. We must grow humanity and we must extend humanity in order to comprehend, to understand the universe or even what questions we should ask about the answer that is the universe.
37:37Elon MuskDouglas Adams book the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is actually a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor. And what the point he was trying to make in that book was that the questions are the really the hard part.
37:53Elon MuskThe answer is the universe, like it answers everything you see around you. But, but, but what are the questions that we don't know to ask? Now some of the questions I guess I do know, I'd like to know, is the standard model of physics correct about the origins of the universe?
38:08Elon MuskAre we actually 13.8 billion years old? How does the universe end? Does it end in a heat death or in some other way? You know, are we in a black hole?
38:18Elon MuskWe might be.
38:22HostElon, can you talk about the whole
38:24Elon Musksort of simulation question? Are we a simulation? Maybe.
38:26HostWhere does the, where do you think we find the answer first? In AI or in the stars? Because you're pursuing both, obviously.
38:38Elon MuskYeah. I don't know if I hope more people can get behind a philosophy of curiosity because I think it's very exciting and inherently optimistic because there's this amazing sense of wonder about the nature of the universe.
39:06Elon MuskAnd when you just, when you uncover some secrets of the universe, that's amazing. And you're like a whole world of understanding has opened up. I mean we used to not even Know where all the continents were.
39:21Elon MuskYou know, it used to be like just the map would be there be dragons. What we know is that when they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back.
39:30HostI mean the moon base, that's all,
39:32Elon Muskthat's all they knew.
39:34HostI kind of feel like the moon base or just going to the moon for real this time would be a big step in the right direction. You still have the moon planned?
39:43HostWhat's the status of that? Is that still on the agenda? Yeah,
39:49Elon MuskI think we want to try to reach new heights as a civilization.
39:52HostYeah.
39:53Elon MuskSo I think it's, it's fine to go to the moon, but, but we should go to the moon in order to establish a lunar base. Like a, a lunar research base.
40:01Elon MuskYeah, I mean there are parts of the moon that are perhaps older than parts of, of Earth. And we, we, we might understand more about the nature of the universe if we had a science base on the moon.
40:13Elon MuskThat would be very cool. And then we, we obviously want to go beyond the moon to Mars. And will they self sustaining city on Mars? The I, I do think that, that, that there is a fork in the road of human destiny where if we can establish a self sustaining city on Mars with the, the key test being if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars continue to, to prosper or does it die out at the point at which Mars is able to prosper and grow on its own?
40:49Elon MuskThe probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on everything going right on Earth. You know, there's, there's always some possibility of self annihilation on Earth with the World War three or, or super virus or, or, or a meteor like extinct but you know, that destroyed the dinosaurs.
41:09Elon MuskWe know from the fossil record that there have been many mass mass extinction events. So the question that I sort of, I'm always wondering about is will civilization, will the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can make Mars self sustaining before the civil civilizational arc descends?
41:31Elon MuskBecause the window of opportunity to make life multi planetary exists now for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth.
41:40HostYeah, Elon, let's assume that we get there and you're there. You know, you'd be the elder statesman, you'd have the moral authority of Mars. How do you run Mars?
41:56Elon MuskBut this point that I think I want to just emphasize again that that's it's more important than the form of governance on Mars or who's there in the early days.
42:09Elon MuskWhat really matters is that Mars is self sustaining. That we are truly a multi planet species and such that we've achieved planetary redundancy. So that if, if something, and obviously we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great, but there's always some risk that of an annihilation event on Earth.
42:33Elon MuskLike I said, self annihilation or some natural disaster. And so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are multi planet species. With the key test being can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming?
42:54Elon MuskThe first missions to Mars are not that important. The what matters is can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars can prosper on its own. And that means it has to have all of the ingredients of civilization.
43:08Elon MuskIt's not just that you need to build for example a chip factory on Mars or ship FAB on Mars, but you, you need the ability, do you,
43:16Hostdo you have a sense of the timescale? Like let's assume starship is at a state starting in, you know, 2026, then there's going to be a bunch of testing.
43:24HostObviously there's going to be a bunch of early testing. We only have certain launch windows, so there's a bunch of time constraints. Is that, Is this a 50 year thing in your mind?
43:33HostIs it 150 year thing? Is it something that is for our generation or is it our children's generation? Where do you see that point? If it's optimally possible, you know, things go and break our way.
43:47Elon MuskI think it can be done in, in 30 years provided there's an exponential increase in the, in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer windows, which is every two years.
44:01Elon MuskSo every two years the, the planets align and you can, you can transfer to Mars. So I think in roughly 15, but maybe as few as 10, but 10 to 15 ish Mars transfer windows.
44:18Elon MuskIf you're seeing exponential increases in the tonnage to Mars with each Mars transfer window, then it should be possible to make Mars self sustaining in, in about quote, roughly 25 years.
44:32HostAmazing.
44:33Elon MuskThat's incredible.
44:35HostAll right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. We'll see you when we're back in town. Miss you. See you in person next time. Thank you, brother.