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Elon Musk Talks about aliens, SpaceX and more · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  But most of all, welcome Elon Musk.
• 0:04
  Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the
• 0:15
  time to speak to us today. I know you've got many things on
• 0:18
  your plate. And Speaking of that,
• 0:22
  congratulations on the Starship rocket last week and the first
• 0:28
  soft landing in the ocean for the world's most powerful rocket
• 0:32
  vehicle. It's a remarkable achievement.
• 0:36
  You are taking the fiction out of science fiction.
• 0:39
  Can you share with us what your thoughts, what thoughts were
• 0:42
  running through your head when you saw that happening and
• 0:45
  what's next? Well, I would say I was
• 0:52
  incredibly excited that we achieved those milestones.
• 0:55
  I thought perhaps we had maybe a 20 or 25% chance of achieving
• 0:58
  both milestones where the booster and the ship both did a
• 1:03
  soft propulsive landing in the ocean.
• 1:07
  And so it really was we achieved all the objectives, which I
• 1:10
  thought was unlikely. And that's thanks to an
• 1:13
  incredible team at Space XI. Think we've we've got the most
• 1:16
  talented team of rocket engineers that has ever been
• 1:19
  assembled. And that's, that's how we're
• 1:22
  able to accomplish these things. So, so it's an honour to work
• 1:27
  with great people to accomplish great things.
• 1:31
  So what's next in in the final frontier?
• 1:34
  What do you see ahead for space? Well, the, the founding purpose
• 1:42
  of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to extend
• 1:46
  consciousness beyond Earth. So, and, and, and this is sort
• 1:52
  of a little cerebral, but perhaps appropriate for the Cato
• 1:56
  event. I think they're quite cerebral,
• 2:00
  but if you think about the sort of Fermi filters of, you know,
• 2:06
  Enrico Fermi was always wondered, where are the aliens?
• 2:09
  Why do we not see signs of them? And I frequently get asked, are
• 2:14
  there aliens on Earth? And I, I, I haven't seen any
• 2:16
  signs of aliens. And, and I promise you, the, the
• 2:20
  minute I see any evidence of aliens, I'll immediately post it
• 2:23
  on the X platform. Most popular post of all time.
• 2:28
  So but that. But that we haven't actually
• 2:31
  seen any evidence, so I'm not aware of any.
• 2:33
  It's just that consciousness is extremely rare.
• 2:37
  You know, if we believe the archaeological record and the
• 2:40
  standard model of physics, Earth is about four and a half billion
• 2:44
  years old. Civilization as measured by the
• 2:48
  1st writing is only about 5000 years old.
• 2:53
  So archaic creak uniform and roughly 5500 roughly 5500 years
• 2:57
  ago was the first writing. I think that's a good date for
• 2:59
  the start of civilisation, which which means that civilisation
• 3:05
  has only been around for one millionth of Earth's existence
• 3:09
  almost nothing. I think this potentially argues
• 3:15
  for civilisation being fleeting and fragile.
• 3:22
  And so the thing that we can do to increase the probable
• 3:26
  lifespan of civilization is to be a multi planet species, to
• 3:30
  extend consciousness to other planets, ultimately to other
• 3:34
  star systems. And and this would massively
• 3:39
  improve the probable lifespan of, of, of humanity and
• 3:42
  consciousness as we know it. So that's it's, it's really
• 3:46
  trying to get past the single planet Bermi filter that that's
• 3:51
  the goal of SpaceX. That's why we're building such a
• 3:53
  big rocket. It's far in excess of anything
• 3:55
  that's needed to put satellites into a little bit.
• 4:02
  And it, it's really it's a planet colonizer.
• 4:05
  It's intended to build as quickly as possible a
• 4:09
  self-sustaining city on Mars. And I, I think the, you know,
• 4:15
  there's, it's somewhat of a race between making a self-sustaining
• 4:21
  city on Mars and global thermonuclear war or some
• 4:24
  calamity, whichever. If we have some civilization
• 4:28
  ending calamity before that happens, then, you know, that's,
• 4:32
  that's all they wrote. You know, that's, that's some,
• 4:35
  perhaps some future aliens will discover our civilization and
• 4:38
  say, well, they, they almost got there, you know, so, so that,
• 4:45
  that's, that's the goal. I think that's kind of an
• 4:47
  important thing to convey to people in the, in the audience
• 4:51
  who, who think about the future and, you know, you care about
• 4:56
  the, you know, the, the not just the preservation, but the
• 5:01
  extension of civilization, the extent, the, the, the growth of,
• 5:04
  of the scope and scale of, of consciousness.
• 5:10
  So, yeah, so that that's, that's the, that's the goal.
• 5:13
  Make life multi planetary is the goal of SpaceX.
• 5:15
  And, you know, along the way we'll seek to generate revenue
• 5:20
  from any space based activities, such as providing, you know,
• 5:24
  building an Internet Internet system in space, anything that's
• 5:28
  sort of space related in order to fund the the extension of
• 5:33
  consciousness, consciousness beyond Earth.
• 5:36
  That makes a lot of sense to me. We shouldn't keep all our eggs
• 5:41
  in one basket. We should try to diversify risk.
• 5:44
  So thank you for doing mankind's work.
• 5:46
  But that's not the only thing you're doing.
• 5:49
  If anyone has missed it, you're also revolutionising electric
• 5:52
  cars and it's Neurolink, it's AI, The Boring Company.
• 5:56
  And if you missed that, he recently bought Twitter and
• 5:59
  renamed it X as well, where we're live streaming as right
• 6:02
  now. It's yeah.
• 6:06
  See, that's popular with the audience.
• 6:09
  To to me, it's exhausting just to read the list of these
• 6:12
  things. I think what's Alex Ferguson,
• 6:15
  the football coach, the soccer coach, who said that hard work
• 6:19
  is a talent, but it's also hard and it's actually quite
• 6:23
  exhausting. So the question is, what's
• 6:25
  what's the big plan? What's the overarching goal?
• 6:28
  Is it just that you can't help yourself from getting involved
• 6:31
  in every technological field, or is there an overarching goal?
• 6:38
  Yeah, the overarching goal is to take the set of actions that are
• 6:41
  most likely to improve the probability that the future is
• 6:44
  good. And that leads to the, the, the,
• 6:50
  the, the expansion of consciousness and our
• 6:53
  understanding of the, the universe.
• 6:58
  You know, this is somewhat prompted by a, you know, trying
• 7:04
  to figure out what's the meaning of life, you know, so, you know,
• 7:10
  I had this existential crisis when I was a kid trying to
• 7:13
  figure out like, what's the meaning of life?
• 7:14
  Is it just pointless? Like, and I read a lot of books
• 7:20
  on, on philosophy and religious books and whatnot.
• 7:22
  And, and ultimately the thing that I thought was most
• 7:26
  enlightening was Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the
• 7:29
  Galaxy, where, you know, Earth is basically this giant computer
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  to answer the question of what is the meaning of life and comes
• 7:36
  up with the answer 42. But, but it turns out that
• 7:38
  actually the answer is the easy part and the hard part is the
• 7:41
  question, but we don't actually know the right questions to ask.
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  So I thought, well, if we expand the scope of scale
• 7:48
  consciousness, then we're better able to understand what
• 7:51
  questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
• 7:55
  The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy great book and I advise
• 7:58
  everyone to read it and maybe you can become the next Elon
• 8:01
  Musk if you do. Thank you also Elon for putting
• 8:04
  the role of the moderator and the interviewer and, and in the
• 8:08
  spotlight coming up with the right questions.
• 8:11
  That's that's the most important thing.
• 8:13
  So let me ask you the next question then and try to probe a
• 8:16
  little bit deeper into what you're really doing because as I
• 8:20
  understand it, you you have six companies that you're running,
• 8:23
  but you also have a 7th or did you just come up with another
• 8:28
  one? Well, I really, the, the, the
• 8:34
  companies that take up the vast majority of my time are Tesla
• 8:36
  and SpaceX. So yeah.
• 8:41
  So that the, and then the other companies are much smaller and
• 8:46
  I, you know, I don't run sort of the X platform day-to-day.
• 8:50
  That's Linda Yakarino. I do drive the product
• 8:53
  development and the sort of feature improvement, that kind
• 8:55
  of thing. And you know, it's so that's,
• 9:02
  that's really, it's, it's not like it's these companies are
• 9:06
  very different in scale. Like Tesla's, I don't know about
• 9:09
  140,000 people, and SpaceX is about 15,000 people and all the
• 9:16
  other companies are less, a few 100 people or less.
• 9:20
  Yeah. So very, very different scales.
• 9:23
  Yeah. But but apart from that, you
• 9:24
  also have, if it's six companies, give or take, we also
• 9:29
  have a 7th or what it might be. And that's to navigate
• 9:32
  bureaucracy and regulations while you're doing this.
• 9:35
  And this has been a conference about innovation and
• 9:39
  entrepreneurship and how do we do that that when there's so
• 9:44
  many obstacles in the way and it, I mean, it's difficult
• 9:47
  enough to get to Mars. It's, it's rocket science,
• 9:50
  literally. But you also have to navigate
• 9:54
  regulation and precautionary mindset.
• 9:58
  So, and I've understood that your style of management is to
• 10:02
  question every requirement to create clarity by never
• 10:06
  accepting, accepting that it just came from some department,
• 10:09
  some place. Every requirement should come
• 10:12
  with the name of the person who made it, because this makes it
• 10:15
  possible to question whether it makes sense on the conviction
• 10:18
  that only nature makes the real laws.
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  Everything else is a recommendation.
• 10:22
  And that sounds great, but I think many politicians and
• 10:24
  bureaucrats would beg to differ, right?
• 10:28
  Yeah. Well, with respect to laws and
• 10:30
  regulation, we do have a fundamental issue, which is a
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  natural outcome of an extended period of prosperity where
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  there's there really hasn't been sort of a global war or, you
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  know, there's when the things have been prosperous for a long
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  time, you just get, you get an accumulation of laws and
• 10:50
  regulations naturally. And these laws and regulations
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  are immortal, whereas humans are obviously mortal.
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  So the, the longer you, you have this generation of this, this,
• 11:01
  this creation of rules and regulations.
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  But you, but you sort of get to this point where, you know, each
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  law and regulation is not perhaps crippling in and of
• 11:13
  itself. But they're, they're all like
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  little strings that, that, like a million little strings that,
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  that that tie Gulliver down. So it like each little string
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  and then eventually the giant can't move.
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  So we've in, in, you know, in, in the West, I think we've
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  created a a regulatory gridlock where just almost everything is
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  illegal. This is why they can't build a
• 11:40
  high speed rail in California. They spent $7 billion and
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  there's a 1600 foot section is all they have to show for it and
• 11:46
  doesn't have rails on it. It's, it's really, you know, too
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  absurd for parody because large projects are essentially illegal
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  in California. So and, and, and much of Europe
• 12:02
  and, and, and other countries. So there there has to be some
• 12:06
  garbage collection process for removing rules and regulations
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  in in order for society to function and not to, you know,
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  get hotening of the arteries just to to the point where you
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  can't do anything. And this relates to our risk
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  aversion. I think in the classical liberal
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  tradition, one important starting point is that we just
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  don't know everything. We nobody does.
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  So the world is a game of learning and of discovery and
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  therefore it takes trial and error and experiments to get to
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  the right place. And I've realized that when I'm
• 12:44
  looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk
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  averse type. On the contrary, you shouldn't
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  avoid problems, but test things fast to find out what the
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  problem is fast and then fix it fast.
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  So a rocket blowing up might not be a mistake.
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  It might be an important step of levelling up to the next stage
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  of knowledge and of discovery. But that's the total opposite of
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  much of the risk averse culture in many businesses and certainly
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  in in governments So and many are so conservative that they
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  wouldn't allow anyone to do anything for the first time.
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  So the question is, how do you deal with that kind of risk
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  averse culture? What changes in culture and in
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  regulation would you make to make the world safe for
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  experiments? Well, like I said, at a
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  government level, I think that there should be a regulation
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  removal department and and probably some when we pass new
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  laws, they should have some kind of sunset perhaps that they they
• 13:59
  need to be reaffirmed before they are or they just they
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  expire. Now the thing that tends to
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  happen is that once regulations are passed, an ecosystem of
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  consultants forms around those regulations that wants to keep
• 14:17
  them going. Environmental regulations are
• 14:19
  particularly bad in this regard. So, you know, and I, I, I'm very
• 14:26
  much pro environment, but, but the, the, the environmental
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  regulations are, are in my view, largely terrible.
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  And they're, they're very much sort of permission based as
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  opposed to you have to get permission in advance, as
• 14:43
  opposed to say paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which
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  I think would be much more effective to say, like, look,
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  we're going to do this project. If something goes wrong, then
• 14:51
  we'll be forced to pay a penalty.
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  But we do not need to go through a three or four year environment
• 14:56
  of our environmental approval process.
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  So just changing things from, you know, you have to get a
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  permission in advance to you have to pay a penalty if you do
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  something bad, I think would be profoundly effective for the
• 15:10
  advancement of of large projects.
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  But just in general, I think governments around the world
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  should be actively deleting regulations, questioning whether
• 15:21
  departments exist. Obviously, President Blais, I
• 15:24
  think it seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front.
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  Just deleting things, deleting, deleting entire departments.
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  Fantastic. Yes.
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  You know, I mean here this thing about like, if you delete
• 15:39
  departments and regulations, you can always put them back.
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  It goes out that those were very important.
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  You can always put them back. And, and, and really this is
• 15:49
  like taking the brakes off of an economy and, and of a
• 15:53
  civilization. It's it's it's we need to snap
• 15:56
  those strings that are holding Gulliver down and preventing us
• 15:59
  from making progress as a civilization.
• 16:02
  Yeah. We've been discussing Argentina
• 16:04
  here over the past few days in the new classical liberal reform
• 16:08
  agenda. And the next speaker here on
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  stage is President Miley. And of course, he's up against
• 16:18
  decades of, of, of not just obstacles in general, but
• 16:22
  stagnation. But he's coming there with this
• 16:25
  chainsaw. It was a very famous clip of him
• 16:29
  on social media was when he's looking at bureaucracy and
• 16:32
  spending in government departments and just removing
• 16:34
  them one by one, a fuera. A fuera, which I guess means
• 16:39
  sort of get just get rid of it. Sure.
• 16:42
  Doesn't that remind you of something your own idea about
• 16:46
  the value of subtraction when it comes to innovation and
• 16:49
  business? Delete any part of the process
• 16:52
  you can, and apparently if you don't end up putting 10% back
• 16:56
  in, you did not delete enough. So sorry, yeah, there's I sort
• 17:02
  of, I was, I like to use sort of the tools of physics like a
• 17:07
  first principles approach to things.
• 17:09
  And so the, the sort of a simple algorithm that I developed after
• 17:16
  making the same mistake over and over again was and I need to
• 17:19
  repeat it to myself. So I make hopefully make these
• 17:22
  mistakes less, less often is that you start off first by
• 17:26
  making the requirements less dumb.
• 17:29
  So, so you, you delete the requirements as you know, delete
• 17:37
  and simplify the requirements because if you don't delete and
• 17:40
  simplify the requirements, you are simply going to get in the
• 17:44
  best case outcome is the right answer to the wrong question.
• 17:49
  And then you also then a lot of this involves like sort of
• 17:54
  technology companies, but you want to delete first, then, then
• 18:00
  once you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
• 18:02
  the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if
• 18:07
  you're not forced to put back in at least 10% of what you delete,
• 18:10
  you're obviously being far too conservative in the deletion.
• 18:16
  So, but people often afraid to delete things and, and I'm like,
• 18:19
  well, it's just, you just just go ahead and do it.
• 18:22
  And, and if you're not putting a little bit back in, you're,
• 18:25
  you're just not deleting enough, obviously.
• 18:29
  So I really would, I think this is a very big deal if, if it is
• 18:36
  over over over deletion of rules, regulations and you'll
• 18:40
  end up putting a few back and that's fine.
• 18:43
  Yeah, I told you it's not risk averse, right?
• 18:46
  You follow. It's pretty sensible.
• 18:48
  It's just sensible really. I I think it stands the test of
• 18:52
  logical examination. And to me, that seems to be what
• 18:57
  President Millet is trying to do in Argentina as well, to delete
• 19:01
  what's not absolutely essential, to leave space for creativity
• 19:05
  and and entrepreneurship. You've met him repeatedly.
• 19:08
  You've seen what's going on in Argentina.
• 19:12
  Do you have any thoughts about that, his ambitions, how
• 19:14
  important it is for Argentina and possibly for the rest of the
• 19:17
  world, with the case right here, right now?
• 19:21
  Well, I think it is very important that Argentina succeed
• 19:24
  and that we give President Malay awful support.
• 19:27
  And I think this and my prediction is that unless
• 19:40
  President Malay is stopped in some way from taking the actions
• 19:43
  that he wants to take, that that Argentina will have a massive
• 19:49
  growth in the economy and there will be far more prosperity and
• 19:55
  and optimism about the future than there ever there has been
• 19:59
  perhaps in 100 years. And in in just 10 minutes, Malay
• 20:10
  will we'll talk about those things from this stage.
• 20:16
  Would you be able to give him some advice if he wants to turn
• 20:20
  Argentina into an innovation and entrepreneurship nation again?
• 20:24
  What? How should he go about it?
• 20:28
  Well, from everything I've read, he's he's making all the right
• 20:31
  moves. I would just encourage the
• 20:34
  people of Argentina to give him their full support, run this
• 20:37
  experiment because clearly the thing the policies of the past
• 20:41
  have have not succeeded. We know that for a fact.
• 20:44
  So let us, let us, I think, go boldly into the future.
• 20:48
  You know, I hope people have originally given them their full
• 20:51
  support. And I think it'll be a very
• 20:54
  exciting adventure. And I think it's going to work
• 20:56
  out really well. Could I just then broaden that
• 21:07
  question about innovation and the future of economies?
• 21:13
  Because right now it seems like active industrial policy is all
• 21:17
  the rage, not just in the old left, but sometimes in the
• 21:21
  populist right as well. The idea that governments should
• 21:24
  get heavily involved and pick certain winners in business and
• 21:28
  in technology. They all often talk about trying
• 21:31
  to come up with government moon shots to create the the future,
• 21:35
  which I find a little bit ironic because the landing a man on the
• 21:38
  moon was great, but it didn't give us any kind of industry.
• 21:42
  We didn't see Internet from the space, no moon base, no asteroid
• 21:45
  mining, no solar power in space. Because it was political and not
• 21:50
  commercial. So and because it was political
• 21:54
  it was OK to spend tons of money, but it also made it
• 21:59
  unsustainable in the future. It only became a commercially
• 22:02
  viable final frontier when SpaceX got into the race.
• 22:07
  So it it it. Could you tell us about how you
• 22:11
  see government's role in innovation generally?
• 22:14
  I mean, you were the guy who had to sue NASA to get them to open
• 22:17
  up a space to to private providers as well.
• 22:21
  What is the government's role in building the future of
• 22:24
  technology? I, I think that the government's
• 22:27
  role is, is, is really the, it, it's to ensure that the playing
• 22:33
  field is a good playing field. That the rules that, that there
• 22:36
  are good rules. The, the government is
• 22:38
  essentially the, you know, the Football League and it like the,
• 22:42
  the, the, the referee, the, you know, making sure that, that
• 22:45
  there's fair play, that like I said, that the rules are
• 22:50
  sensible and allowing the players on the field to play the
• 22:54
  game. And what happens over time,
• 22:56
  though, is government keeps growing and, and at a certain
• 22:59
  point you have more referees than players on the field and
• 23:03
  then the game is not good. You do need referees.
• 23:09
  I'm not saying you don't need referees, but you don't want the
• 23:12
  referees to outnumber the that would be silly, but that's often
• 23:16
  what happens. So it's just make sure that the
• 23:20
  that that, that the player that, that fair games are being
• 23:23
  played, that the that are sensible rules and I think and
• 23:27
  don't get in the way of the players and the results will be
• 23:30
  excellent. When we met in Austin recently,
• 23:35
  you talked about socialism as a concept and the problem that
• 23:40
  when the government gets too heavily involved, you lose the
• 23:43
  feedback mechanisms that really force them to continue to learn,
• 23:47
  improve, and do things better all over again.
• 23:50
  Would you be willing to share those thoughts with the
• 23:53
  audience? Yeah.
• 23:58
  You know, like another way you think the government is like a
• 24:00
  corporation in the limit. It is the most, it is the
• 24:02
  biggest corporation and it is a monopoly and and one that can
• 24:08
  really kind of only go bankrupt if the country goes bankrupt.
• 24:11
  So it doesn't have the the sort of, you know, commercial
• 24:14
  corporations, if the cup, if they make bad products fail to
• 24:17
  compete, then they will go bankrupt and and they should if
• 24:20
  they make bad products. So, you know, government is
• 24:25
  essentially corporation in the limit.
• 24:28
  And, and since it is monopoly and and there's, there's no,
• 24:32
  there's just it, it you can think of like, like I think one
• 24:35
  way to think of the economy is just in terms of feedback loops.
• 24:38
  And the feedback loop for government provided services to
• 24:41
  be excellent is weak. Because if like if you have, if
• 24:44
  you have a government monopoly or anything, what do your, you
• 24:48
  as a consumer have no alternatives?
• 24:51
  You have no means of like, you know, I would sort of say, like
• 24:58
  you said, think of the Department of motor Vehicles,
• 25:00
  like the DMV, you know, and, and, and it's very inefficient.
• 25:03
  You wouldn't want the DMV to make cars, you know, and, and if
• 25:10
  if you don't get good service from the government, what do you
• 25:13
  do? Who do you complain to what?
• 25:15
  And you just, you know, competition breeds excellence
• 25:19
  because two organizations and more organizations are fighting
• 25:22
  to make the and consumer happy and one will gain market share
• 25:28
  if they do a better job than the other.
• 25:30
  So that's why we really want government to do the least
• 25:35
  because it because it's just got the broken feedback loop for
• 25:38
  improvement, right Afuera? So we only have 4 minutes left
• 25:47
  so, but I'd like to pick your brains on a couple of topics,
• 25:51
  one of them being free speech. You bought Twitter partly to, as
• 25:56
  you've said, described it, to save an open platform, to save
• 26:00
  free speech, and that's very laudable.
• 26:03
  But of course there are also trade-offs.
• 26:05
  The old saying goes, if you keep your mind sufficiently open,
• 26:08
  people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
• 26:11
  So obviously when we have free speech, we'll get some ugly
• 26:15
  stuff as well, even toxic. Can you talk about why to you
• 26:19
  it's so important to save freedom of speech for to you and
• 26:23
  for society and the progress of society?
• 26:27
  Yeah, well, for a platform like the X platform only known as
• 26:32
  Twitter, there will be things that are said that are that are
• 26:36
  incorrect, but it provides an immediate feedback loop for
• 26:41
  correcting that things that are wrong.
• 26:43
  So somebody says something, well then another person can reply
• 26:46
  and and rebut what that person saying.
• 26:48
  There can be just an ongoing sort of dialogue or argument to
• 26:52
  and and someone can read the whole thread and see, okay, this
• 26:55
  person said something, but somebody counteracted that.
• 26:58
  There was further rebuttals. There was more context added and
• 27:02
  and that will give them the best understanding of the situation
• 27:05
  as compared to say a legacy news media article where it's you
• 27:09
  just have the opinion of the reporter, no rebuttal, no
• 27:12
  comments, no no, no counter argument.
• 27:15
  And very often what's, what printed in the press is
• 27:17
  completely false and people don't know.
• 27:21
  But on a, on a real time interactive platform like X,
• 27:23
  like they can see the, like I said, they can see the not just
• 27:27
  what somebody said, but what are the rebuttals?
• 27:29
  What are the counter arguments? And we've got things like
• 27:30
  community notes, which I think is very helpful, where if
• 27:34
  something, if somebody says something false or, or sort of
• 27:38
  get inaccurate or misleading, then the, the, the, the sort of
• 27:42
  the core secret to community notes is that for a note to be
• 27:46
  attached to a post, people who normally disagree about a
• 27:51
  subject must agree on that, on that community note for it to be
• 27:54
  shown. So the probability of it being
• 27:57
  accurate is is very high because people who historically disagree
• 28:02
  are are only going to agree on something that is quite
• 28:05
  accurate. So it's all down to feedback
• 28:08
  loops basically. I think you, yes.
• 28:11
  You've been remarkably generous with your time, so I'll just
• 28:14
  give you a last question possibility for some last
• 28:17
  thoughts. It seems to me that your take on
• 28:21
  the world is that progress doesn't happen by itself.
• 28:23
  It's not automatic. After the moon landing, we went
• 28:26
  back from the final frontier for half a century, and Argentina
• 28:30
  has been stagnating for almost a a century by now.
• 28:34
  It takes human agency. Someone's got to do it.
• 28:37
  And in the light of that, are you optimistic about human
• 28:41
  progress? And if So, what are you
• 28:43
  optimistic about and what do you think that people are listening
• 28:47
  today and and think tanks like the Cato Institute can do to
• 28:50
  speed progress up well? It, it does seem as though like
• 29:01
  civilization is reaching new heights in technology and, and,
• 29:07
  and I think we've got quite a bit of momentum.
• 29:09
  I, I do worry about certain existential risks like the low
• 29:12
  birth rate, which is accelerating in, in most
• 29:17
  countries, you know, and really this is one of those things that
• 29:20
  I think is underrated as an issue is that if there are no,
• 29:24
  no, no humans, there's no humanity, They, you have to make
• 29:27
  them somehow. And I think we should be very
• 29:30
  concerned about the, the accelerating implosion of, of,
• 29:39
  of the birth rate. This is a super big deal.
• 29:43
  Like basically nothing else matters if there are no humans.
• 29:46
  Like as a first, as a initial premise, you must have humans
• 29:50
  forced without a piece of living unless we're going to leave it
• 29:53
  all to the robots. So this I think is is massively,
• 29:58
  massively underweighted. And I don't have a great
• 30:00
  solution to it, but it must be solved somehow or humanity will
• 30:04
  dwindle to nothing. Perhaps if we give people hope
• 30:09
  and a belief in the future and that it'll get better, that they
• 30:12
  want more people to see it. Yeah, I, I agree.
• 30:17
  I think we should we should have an optimistic view of the
• 30:19
  future. And but like, I do think that
• 30:24
  one sort of bad, like bad thing about the environmentalist
• 30:29
  movement is that the, in the, in the sort of extreme form of the
• 30:33
  environmentalist movement, it's people start to view humans as a
• 30:36
  plague on the surface of the Earth, as a fundamentally bad
• 30:39
  thing. And with the implication that if
• 30:42
  all humans disappeared somehow it would be, would be better
• 30:44
  off. This is the extinctionist
• 30:48
  movement. And I think you can, you can
• 30:50
  really, I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things
• 30:55
  as as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist
• 30:59
  philosophies. And the that's what really
• 31:04
  matters. Like everything else is like if
• 31:09
  humans, if humans go extinct or civilization collapses, whatever
• 31:13
  policies we may have are irrelevant.
• 31:16
  So first, first and foremost, we must have an expansionist
• 31:19
  philosophy for, for civilization and for consciousness.
• 31:23
  We must seek to, you know, go beyond what we've done in the
• 31:27
  past to increase the, I think increase the number of humans.
• 31:34
  And this is, this is incredibly fundamental.
• 31:40
  So one way or another, this this must happen.
• 31:46
  Yeah. So the.
• 31:47
  Final message is go forth and procreate yes.
• 31:52
  Go forth and multiply. In a free civilization, yeah.
• 31:56
  Yes. Well, you know, time flies and
• 32:00
  opportunity cost is a concept that's very viable when you're
• 32:03
  talking to Elon Musk. So thank you so much for your
• 32:06
  time here today, and I'm sure you've got other important
• 32:10
  things to attend to now. Good luck.
• 32:12
  All right. Thanks for holding.