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The Thoughts of Elon Musk About The Successful Landing of Starships 4th Flight!!!. · Elon Musk Thinking

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Congratulations on the Starship Rocket last week and the first soft landing in the ocean
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for the world's most powerful rocket vehicle. It's a remarkable achievement. You are
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taking the fiction out of science fiction. Can you share with us what your
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thoughts, what thoughts were running through your head when you saw that happening,
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and what's next? But I would say it's incredibly excited that we achieved those
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milestones. I thought perhaps we had maybe a twenty or twenty five cent chance
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of achieving both milestones where the booster and the ship both did a soft propulsive
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landing in the ocean, and so it really was richieved all the objectives,
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which I thought was unlikely. And best things two incredible team at SpaceX.
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I think we've got the most talented team of rocketish years that has ever been
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assembled. And that's how we're able to accomplish these things. So it's an
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honor to work with the great people to accomplish great things. So what's next?
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In the final from tier, what do you see ahead for is to
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develop the technology is necessary to extend consciousness beyond Earth. So I mean this
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is sort of a little cerebral, but bab halfs appropriate for a catero event.
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Let's particularly quite cerebral. But if you think about the sort of Fermi
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filters of you know, Enrico Fermias always wondered where are the aliens? Why
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do we not see science of food? And I frequently get asked are there
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aliens on Earth? And I haven't seen any signs of aliens? And I
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promise you the minute I see any evidence of aliens, I'll immediately post it
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on the x platform the most popular posts of all time. So, but
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that we haven't actually seen any evidence, I'm not aware of any suggests that
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consciousness is extremely rare. Now, if we believe the archaeological record and the
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standard model of physics, Earth is about four and a half billion years old,
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Civilization as measured by the first writing is only about five thousand years old,
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so archaic precute forming roughly fifty five hundred Roughly fifty five hundred years ago
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was the first writing. I think that's a good date to pull the startup
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civilization, which which means that civilization has only been around for one million of
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Earth's existence, almost nothing. I think this potentially argues for civilization being bleeting
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and fragile, and so the thing that we can do to increase the probable
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lifespan of civilization is to be a multiplanet species, to extend consciousness to other
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planets, ultimately to other star systems, and this would massively improve the probable
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lifespan of humanity and consciousness as we know. So it's really trying to get
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past the single planet Bromin filter. That that's the goal of SpaceX. That's
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why we're building such a big rocket. It's far in excess of anything that's
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needed to fore satellites into a little bit, and it's really it's a planet
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colonizer. It's intended to weld as quickly as possible as self sustaining city on
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Mars. And I think, you know, there's somewhat of a race between
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making yourself sustaining city on Mars and global thermon nuclear war or some calamity whichever.
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If we have some civilization ending calamity before that happens, then you know,
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that's all they were. You know, that's some perhaps some future aliens
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will discover our civilization and say, well, they almost got there. So
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so that that's the goal. I think that's kind of an important thing to
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convey to people in the audience to think about the future, and you know
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you care about the not just the preservation but the extension of civilization, the
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extent that the growth of the scope and scale of consciousness. So yeah,
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so that's the that's the goal. Make like multiplanetari as the goal of space
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X, and you know, along the way, we'll seek to generate revenue
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from any space based activities, such as from building an Internet Internet system in
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space, anything that's sort of space related, in order to fund the the
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extension of consciousness beyond it. That makes a lot of sense to me.
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We shouldn't keep all our eggs in one basket. We should try to diversify
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risk. So thank you for doing mankind's work. But that's not the only
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thing you're doing, if anyone has missed it, you're also revolutionizing electric cars
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and its neural link. It's AI the boring company, And if you miss
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that, he recently bought Twitter and renamed it x as well, where we're
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live streaming as right now. Yeah, with the audience, to me,
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it's exhausting just to read the list of these things. I think, what's
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Alex Ferguson, the football coach, the soccer coach who said that hard work
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is a talent, but it's all so hard and it's actually quite exhausting.
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So the question is, what's the big plan, what's the overarching goal.
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Is it just that you can't help yourself from getting involved in every technological field,
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or is there an overarching goal? Yeah, the overarching goal is to
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take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the probablity the future
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is good and that lead to the expansion of consciousness and our understanding of the
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universe. You know, this is somewhat prompted by a trying to what's the
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meaning of life? You know, so, you know, I have this
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existential crisis when I was a kid, trying to like, what's the meaning
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of life? Isn't just pointless? Like? And I read a lot of
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books on philosophy and religious books and whatnot, And ultimately the thing that I
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thought was most enlightening was Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where you
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know, Earth is basically this giant computer to answer the question what is the
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meaning of life? And it comes up with they asked forty two. But
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it turns out that actually things ask the easy part, and the hard part
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is the question, Well, we don't actually know what the right questions ask
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So I thought, well, if we expand the scope of scale consciousness,
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then we're better able to understand what questions to ask about. The answer that
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is the universe. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a great book that I
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advise everyone to read it. Maybe you can become the next deal on Musk
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if you do. Thank you also, Elan for putting the role of the
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moderator and the interviewer and in the spotlight coming up with the right questions.
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That's the most important thing. So let me ask you the next question then,
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and try to probe a little bit deeper into what you're read you doing,
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because as I understand that you have six companies that you're running, but
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you also have a seventh or did you just come up with another one?
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Well, I really the companies that take up the vast majority of my time
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are Telleslan SpaceX. So yeah, and then the other companies are smaller and
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I, you know, I don't run sort of the iiform day to day,
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that's Lindi acher. You know, I do drive the product development and
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the sort of future improvement, that kind of thing. And you know,
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so that's really it's not like it's these companies are very different in scale,
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like Tesla's I don't know, about one hundred and forty thousand people and SpaceX
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is about fifteen thousand people, and all the other companies are less a few
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hundred people or less, so very different scales. But apart from that,
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you also have if it's six companies give or take, you also have a
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seventh or what it might be, and that's to navigate bureaucracy and regulations while
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you're doing this. And this has been a conference about out innovation and entrepreneurship
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and how do we do that that when there's so many obstacles in the way.
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And I mean, it's difficult enough to get to Mars, it's it's
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rocket science, literally, but you also have to navigate regulation and precautionary mindset.
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So and I've understood that your style of management is to question every requirement
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to create clarity by never accepting that it just came from some department someplace.
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Every requirement should come with the name of the person who made it, because
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this makes it possible to question whether it makes sense on the conviction that only
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nature makes the real laws. Everything else is a recommendation. And that sounds
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great, but I think many politicians and bureaucrats would beg to differ. Right,
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Yeah, well, with respect to your laws regulation, we do have
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a fundamental issue, which is a natural outcome of an extended period of prosperity,
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whether that really hasn't been sort of a global war or you know that
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there's well, when things have are prosperous for a long time, you just
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get you get a cumulation of laws and regulations naturally, and these those regulations
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are immortal, whereas humans are obviously mortal. So the longer you have this
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generation of the creation of rules and regulations, but you sort of get to
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this point where you know each law regulation is not perhaps crippling in and of
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itself, but they're all like little strings that like a million little strings that
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that tie gulliver down. So like each little string, and then eventually the
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giant can't move. So we in the West, I think we've created a
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regulatory gridlock where just almost everything is illegal. This is why they can't build
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a high speed rail in California. They spend seven billion dollars and there's a
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sixteen hundred foot section is all they have to show for it, and doesn't
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even have rails on it. It's really, you know, too absurd for
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parody. Because large projects are essentially illegal in California so and much of Europe
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and other countries. So there has to be some garbage collection process for removing
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rules and regulations in order to force society to function and not to get hardening
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of the arteries and just to the point where you can't do anything. And
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this relates to our risk a version. I think in the classical liberal tradition,
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only important starting point is that we just don't know everything. So the
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world is a game of learning and of discovery, and therefore it takes trial
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and error and experiments to get to the right place. And I've realized that
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when I'm looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk averse type.
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On the contrary, you shouldn't avoid problems, but test things fast to find
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out what the problem is fast, and then fix it fast. So a
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rocket blowing up might not be a mistake, it might be an important step
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of leveling up to the next stage of knowledge and of But that's the total
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opposite of much of the risk of us culture in many businesses and certainly in
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governments, so and many are so conservative that they wouldn't allow anyone to do
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anything for the first time. So the question is how do you deal with
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that kind of risk averse culture. What changes in culture and in regulation would
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you make to make the world safe for experiments? Well, I said,
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at a government level, I think that there should be a regulation removal department,
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and probably some when we pass new laws, they should have some kind
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of sunset, perhaps that they need to be reaffirmed before they are or they
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just they expire. The thing it tends to happen is that once regulations are
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passed, that there's an ecosystem of consultants forms around those regulations that wants to
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keep them going. Environmental regulations are particularly bad in this regard. So you
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know, I'm very much pro environments, but the environmental regulations are and might
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be largely terrible, and they're very much sort of you have to get permission
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in advance, as opposed to say, paying a penalty if you do something
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wrong, which I think would be much more effective to say, like,
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look, we're going to do this project. If something goes wrong, then
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we'll be forced fare penalty. But we do not need to go through a
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three or four year environment or environmental approval process. So just changing things from
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you know, you have to get a permission in advance to you have to
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pay a penalty if you do something bad, I think would be profoundly effective
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for the advancement of life projects. So just in general, I think covers
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around the world should be actively deleting regulations, questioning where the departments exist.
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Obviously, President balaze things. We're doing a fantastic job on this front,
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just deleting things, deleting it high departments. Fantastic. Yes, I mean
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here, here's the thing about, like if you lead departments and regulations,
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you can always put them back. There's out that those are very important.
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You can always put them back. And really this is like taking the breaks
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off of an economy and of a civilization. It's we need to snap those
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strings that are holding gull of it down and preventing us from making progress as
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a civilization. Yeah, we've been discussing Argentina here over the past few days
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in the new Classical Liberal reform agenda. And the next speaker here on stage
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is President Mile and of course he's up against decades of not just obstacles in
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general, but stagnation, but he's coming there with this chainsaw. Because a
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very famous clip of him on social media was when he's looking at bureaucracy and
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spending and government departments and just removing them one by one a fuera, which
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I guess means sort of veret, just get rid of it. Sure doesn't
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that remind you of something your own idea about the value of subtraction when it
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comes to innovation and business. Delete any part of the process you can,
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and apparently if you don't end up putting ten percent back in, you did
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not delete enough. So sorry, yeahs, I sort of. I I
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like to use sort of the tools of polics, like a first principles approach
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to things. And so the sort of a simple algorithm that I developed after
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making the same mistake over and over again was and I need to repeat it
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to myself so I may hopefully make these mistakes less often. Is that you
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start off first by making the requirements less dumb, so so you delete the
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requirements, as you know, delete and simplify the requirements, because if you
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don't delete the simplify the requirements, you are simply going to get in the
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best case outcome is the right answer to the wrong question. And then you
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also then a lot of this involves like sort of technology companies, but you
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want to delete first. Then once you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
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the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if you're not
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forced to put back in at least ten percent of what you delete, you're
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obviously being far too conservative in abletion. So the people often afraid to delete
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things. And I'm like, well, let's just just go ahead and do
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it. And and if you're not putting a little bit back in, you're
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just not deleting enough obviously, So I really would. I think this is
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a very big deal if it is over deletion for those regulations and you end
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up putting a few back and that's fine. Yeah, it totally is not
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risk averse, right, You've followed pretty sensible. It's just sensible. Really.
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I think it studs the test of logical examination, and to me that
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seems to be what President Malay is trying to do in Argentina as well,
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to delete what's not absolutely essential, to leave space for creativity and entrepreneurship.
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You've met him repeatedly, You've seen what's going on in Argentina. Do you
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have any thoughts about that his ambitions, how important it is for Argentina and
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possibly for the rest of the world with a case right here, right now.
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Well, I think it is very important that Argentina succeed and that we
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give President Malay a full support. And I think this and my prediction is
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that unless present Lay is stopped in some way from taking the action is that
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he wants to take, that Argentina will have a massive growth in the economy
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and there will be formal prosperity and optimism about the future than ever there has
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been, perhaps in one hundred years. In just ten minutes, Malay,
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we'll we'll talk about those things from this stage. Would you be able to
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give him some advice if he wants to turn Argentina into an innovation and entrepreneurship
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nation again, how should he go about it? Well, from everything I've
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read, he's making all the right moves. I would just encourage the people
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of Argentina to give him their full support run this experiment, because clearly the
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things the policies of the past have not succeeded. We know that for a
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fact, So littus, I think, gooldly into the future. You know,
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I hope people have argently given him their full support, and I think
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it will be a very exciting adventure, and I think it's going to work
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out really well. Could I just then broaden that question about innovation and future
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of economies, because right now it seems like active industrial policies all the rage,
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not just in the old left, but sometimes in the populist right as
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well. The idea that governments should get heavily involved and pick certain winners in
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business and in technology. They all walk off of and talk about trying to
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come up with government moonshots to create the future, which I find a little
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bit ironic because the landing a man on the moon was great, but it
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didn't give us any kind of industry. We didn't see Internet from the space,
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no moon based, no asteroid mining, no solar power in space because
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it was political and not commercial. So because it was political, it was
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okay to spend tons of money, but it also made it unsustainable in the
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future. It only became a commercially viable final frontier when SpaceX got into the
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race. So could you tell us about how you see government's role in innovation
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generally. I mean, you were the guy who had to soon NASA to
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get them to open up a space two to private providers as well. What
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is the government's rolling building the future of technology? I think the government's role
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is it really the it's to ensure that the playing field is a good playing
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field, that the rules that there are good rules. The government is essentially
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the you know, the football league and like that the referee, the you
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know, making sure that there's fair play, that like I said, that
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the rules are sensible and allowing the players on the field to play the game.
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And what happens over time, though, is the government keeps growing and
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at a certain point you have more referees than players on the field. The
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game is not good. Yeah, you do need referee, but I'm saying
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you don't need referees, but you don't want the referees to out number.
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That would be silly, but that's often what happens. So it's just make
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sure that that the player the fair games are being played, that the that
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are sensible rules and I think, and don't get in the way of the
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players, and the results will be excellent. When we met in Austin recently,
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you talked about socialism as a concept and the problem that when the government
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gets too heavily involved, you lose the feedback mechanisms that really force them to
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continue to learn, improve and do things better all over again. Would you
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be willing to share those thoughts with the audience. Yeah, Like another way,
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you think, the government is like a corporation in the limit. It
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is the most it is the biggest corporation, and it is a monopoly and
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one that can really can only go bankrupt if the country goes bankrupt. So
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it doesn't have the sort of you know, muscal corporations. If the if
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they make bad products, fail to compete, then they will go bankrupt,
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and they should if they make bad products. So the company is essentially corporation
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in the limit. And since it is monopoly and there's no there's just you
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can think of like like I think, one way I figured economy is just
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in terms of feedback weeks and the feedback live for government provided services to be
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excellent is weak because if like if you have if you have a government monopoly
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or anything, what are your you as a consumer have no alternatives? You
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have no means of you know, And I sort of say, like you
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said, think of the Department of Motor Vehicles like the DMB, you know,
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and it's very inefficient. You wouldn't want the DMB to make it.
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No, and if you don't get good service from the governt, what do
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you do? Who do you complain to? An idea? You just you
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know, competition breeds excellence because two organizations and more organizations are fighting to make
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the end consumer happy, and one will gain market share if they do a
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better job than the other. So that's why we really want government to do
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the least, because it's just got the broken feed back for you. Right.
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So, but i'd like to pick your brains on it, one of
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them being free speech. You bought Twitter partly too, as you've said,
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described it to save an open platform, to save free speech, and that's
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very laudable. But of course there are also trade offs. The old saying
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goes, if you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot
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of rubbish into it. So obviously when we have free speech, we'll get
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to some ugly stuff as well, even toxic. Can you talk about why
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to you it's so important to save freedom of speech to you and for society
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and the progress of society. Yeah, well, for platform like the next
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platform, Holy name on Twitter, there will be things that are said that
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are incorrect, but it provides an immediate feedback loop for correcting things that are
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wrong. So somebody says something, well, then another person can reply and
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robut what that person's saying. That can be just an ongoing sort of dialogue
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or argument to and someone can read the whole thread and see, Okay,
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this person said something, but somebody counteracted that, there was further rebuttals,
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there was more context added, and that will give them the best understanding of
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the situation, as compared to see a legacy news media article where it's you
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just have the opinion of the reporter, no rebuttal, no comments, no
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no counter argument, and very often what printed in the press is completely false
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and people don't know. But on a real time interactive platform like x they
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can see the like I said, they can see the not just what somebody
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said, but what other rebuttals, well, the counter arguments. And we've
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got things like community notes, which I think is very helpful where if something
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somebody says something falls so inaccurate and misleading. Then the core secret to community
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note is that for a note to be attached to a post, people who
21:21
normally disagree about a subject must agree on that community note for it to be
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shown. So the probability of it being accurate is very high because people who
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historically disagree are only going to agree on something that is quite accurate. So
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it's all down to feedback loops. Basically, thank you. Yes, you've
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been remarkably generous with your time, so I'll just give you a last question
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possibility for some last thoughts. It seems to me that your take on the
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world is that progress doesn't happen by itself. It's not automatic. After the
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moon landing, we went back from the final frontier for half a century,
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and Argentina has been stagnating for all a century. By now it takes human
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agency. Someone's got to do it. And in the light of that,
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are you optimistic about human progress? And if so, what are you about
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And what do you think that people are listening today and think tanks like the
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Cato Institute can do to speed progress up? Well, it just seem as
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though like civilization is reaching new heights and technology, I think we've got quite
22:22
a bit better momentum. I do worry about certain existentialrists, like the low
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birth rate, which is accelerating in most countries, you know, And really
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this is one of those things that I think is underrated as an issue,
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is that if they're no humans, there's no humanity. They you have to
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make them somehow, And I think we should be very concerned. But the
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accelerating of the birth rate, this is a super big deal, Like basically
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nothing else matters if there are no humans, like as a first, as
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an initial premise, you must have humans first with any civilisness, unless we're
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going to leave it all to the robots. So this I think is massively
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underweighted and I don't have a great solution to it, but it must be
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solved somehow or humanity will dwuddles nothing. Perhaps if we give people a hope
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and a belief in the future and that it will get better, that they
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want more people to see it. Yeah, I agree. I think we
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should have an optimistic view of the future. And like I do think that
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one sort of bad thing about the environmentalist movement is that in the sort of
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extreme form of the environmentalist movement, people start to view humans as a plague
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on the surface of the earth as a fundamentally bad thing, and with the
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implication that if aucubists disappeared somehow it would be better off. This is the
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extinctionist movement, and I think you can really, I think, at a
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fundamental level, you can think of things as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist
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philosophies, and that's what really matters. Like everything else is humanist going state
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or civilization collapses. Whatever policies we may have are irrelevance. So first and
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foremost we must have an expansionist pluss speak for civilization, for consciousness. We
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must seek to go beyond what we've done in the past to increase the I
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think, increase the number of humans. And it is incredibly fundamental. So
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one way or another, this must happen here. So the final messages go
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forth and procreate, yes, and before the multiply free civilization yeah. Yes,
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Well, you know, time flies and opportunity cost is a concept that's
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very viable when you're talking to Elon Musk. So thank you so much for
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your time here today, and I'm sure you've got other important things to attend
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to now. Good luck,