Latest / Elon Musk Podcast / Elon Musk Talks about aliens, SpaceX and more - Classic Episode

Transcript

Elon Musk Talks about aliens, SpaceX and more - Classic Episode · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  But most of all, welcome Elon Musk.
• 0:05
  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, I thought perhaps we had maybe a 20 or 25% chance of
• 0:58
  achieving both milestones where the booster and the ship both
• 1:02
  did a soft propulsive landing in the ocean.
• 1:07
  And so it really was, we achieved all the objectives,
• 1:10
  which I 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 haven't seen any signs of
• 2:16
  aliens. And I promise you, the minute I
• 2:21
  see any evidence of aliens, I'll immediately post it on the X
• 2:23
  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 Preak uniform in 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 from the filter that
• 3:50
  that's 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's, 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's, that's 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 system in space, anything that's sort of
• 5:28
  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
• 7:33
  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.
• 7:46
  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 on us
• 8:08
  in the 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 tells
• 8:36
  them SpaceX. So yeah.
• 8:41
  So that the and then the other companies were smaller and I,
• 8:48
  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 also have,
• 9:25
  if it's six companies, give or take, we also have a 7th or what
• 9:30
  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
• 9:42
  there's so many obstacles in the way.
• 9:45
  And it, I mean, it's difficult enough to get to Mars.
• 9:49
  It's, it's rocket science, literally.
• 9:51
  But you also have to navigate regulation and precautionary
• 9:57
  mindset. So, and I've understood that
• 9:59
  your style of management is to question every requirement to
• 10:04
  create clarity by never accepting, accepting that it
• 10:07
  just came from some department, some place.
• 10:10
  Every requirement should come with the name of the person who
• 10:13
  made it, because this makes it possible to question whether it
• 10:16
  makes sense on the conviction that only nature makes the real
• 10:20
  laws. Everything else is a
• 10:21
  recommendation. And that sounds great, but I
• 10:23
  think many politicians and bureaucrats would beg to differ,
• 10:26
  right? Yeah.
• 10:28
  Well, with respect to laws and regulation, we do have a
• 10:31
  fundamental issue, which is a natural outcome of an extended
• 10:35
  period of prosperity where there's there really hasn't been
• 10:39
  sort of a global war or, you know, there's when the things
• 10:45
  have been prosperous for a long time, you just get, you get an
• 10:48
  accumulation of laws and regulations naturally.
• 10:51
  And these laws and regulations are immortal, whereas humans are
• 10:55
  obviously mortal. So the, the longer you, you have
• 10:59
  this generation of this, this creation of rules and
• 11:03
  regulations, but you, but you sort of get to this point where,
• 11:09
  you know, each law and regulation is not perhaps
• 11:12
  crippling in and of itself, But they're, they're all like little
• 11:15
  strings that, that, like a million little strings that,
• 11:18
  that that tie Gulliver down. So like each little string and
• 11:22
  then eventually the giant can't move.
• 11:26
  So we've in, in, you know, in, in the West, I think we've
• 11:32
  created a, a regulatory gridlock where just almost everything is
• 11:38
  illegal. This is why they can't build a
• 11:40
  high speed rail in California. They spent $7 billion and
• 11:43
  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
• 11:51
  absurd for parity because large projects are essentially illegal
• 11:57
  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
• 12:11
  in in order for society to function and not to, you know,
• 12:16
  get hotening of the arteries just to to the point where you
• 12:19
  can't do anything. And this relates to our risk
• 12:25
  aversion. I think in the classical liberal
• 12:27
  tradition, one important starting point is that we just
• 12:31
  don't know everything. We nobody does.
• 12:35
  So the world is a game of learning and of discovery and
• 12:39
  therefore it takes trial and error and experiments to get to
• 12:41
  the right place. And I've realized that when I'm
• 12:44
  looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk
• 12:47
  averse type. On the contrary, you shouldn't
• 12:52
  avoid problems, but test things fast to find out what the
• 12:55
  problem is fast and then fix it fast.
• 12:58
  So a rocket blowing up might not be a mistake.
• 13:01
  It might be an important step of levelling up to the next stage
• 13:05
  of knowledge and of discovery. But that's the total opposite of
• 13:10
  much of the risk averse culture in many businesses and certainly
• 13:14
  in in governments So and many are so conservative that they
• 13:20
  wouldn't allow anyone to do anything for the first time.
• 13:23
  So the question is, how do you deal with that kind of risk
• 13:27
  averse culture? What changes in culture and in
• 13:31
  regulation would you make to make the world safe for
• 13:35
  experiments? Well, I said at a government
• 13:45
  level, I think that there should be a regulation removal
• 13:49
  department and, and probably some when we pass new laws, they
• 13:55
  should have some kind of sunset perhaps that they they need to
• 13:59
  be reaffirmed before they are or they just they expire.
• 14:07
  Now the thing that tends to happen is that once regulations
• 14:10
  are passed, an ecosystem of consultants forms around those
• 14:15
  regulations that wants to keep them going.
• 14:18
  Environmental regulations are particularly bad in this regard.
• 14:23
  So, you know, and I, I, I'm very much pro environment, but, but
• 14:28
  the, the, the environmental regulations are, are in my view,
• 14:33
  largely terrible. And they're, they're very much
• 14:38
  sort of permission based as opposed to you have to get
• 14:42
  permission in advance, as opposed to say paying a penalty
• 14:45
  if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more
• 14:47
  effective to say, like, look, we're going to do this project.
• 14:49
  If something goes wrong, then we'll be forced to pay a
• 14:52
  penalty. But we do not need to go through
• 14:55
  a three or four year environment of our environmental approval
• 14:57
  process. So just changing things from,
• 15:02
  you know, you have to get a permission in advance to you
• 15:05
  have to pay a penalty if you do something bad, I think would be
• 15:08
  profoundly effective for the advancement of of large
• 15:12
  projects. But just in general, I think
• 15:16
  governments around the world should be actively deleting
• 15:19
  regulations, questioning where the departments exist.
• 15:22
  Obviously, President Blais, I think it seems to be doing a
• 15:26
  fantastic job on this front. Just deleting things, deleting,
• 15:28
  deleting entire departments. Fantastic.
• 15:33
  Yes. You know, I mean here, let's
• 15:37
  think about like if you delete departments and regulations, you
• 15:40
  can always put them back. It goes out that those were very
• 15:45
  important. You can always put them back.
• 15:48
  And, and, and really, this is like taking the brakes off of an
• 15:52
  economy and, and of a civilization.
• 15:54
  It's it's it's we need to snap those strings that are holding
• 15:57
  Gulliver down and preventing us from making progress as a
• 16:00
  civilization. Yeah.
• 16:02
  We've been discussing Argentina here over the past few days in
• 16:06
  the new classical liberal reform agenda.
• 16:09
  And the next speaker here on stage is President Miley.
• 16:12
  And of course, he's up against decades of, of, of not just
• 16:21
  obstacles in general, but stagnation.
• 16:23
  But he's coming there with his chainsaw.
• 16:26
  It was a very famous clip of him on social media was when he's
• 16:31
  looking at bureaucracy and spending in government
• 16:33
  departments and just removing them one by one, a fuera.
• 16:37
  A fuera, which I guess means sort of get just get rid of it.
• 16:41
  Sure. Doesn't that remind you of
• 16:44
  something your own idea about the value of subtraction when it
• 16:48
  comes to innovation and business?
• 16:50
  Delete any part of the process you can.
• 16:53
  And apparently if you don't end up putting 10% back in, you did
• 16:57
  not delete enough. So sorry.
• 17:01
  Yeah, there's I sort of, I was, I like to use sort of the tools
• 17:06
  of physics like a 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, a lot of this involves like sort of technology
• 17:54
  companies, but you want to delete first, then, then once
• 18:00
  you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
• 18:02
  the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if,
• 18:07
  if you're not forced to put back in at least 10% of what you
• 18:09
  delete, you're obviously being far too conservative in the
• 18:13
  deletion. So, but people often afraid to
• 18:17
  delete things And, and I'm like, well, it's just, you just just
• 18:21
  go ahead and do it. And, and, and if you're not
• 18:23
  putting a little bit back in, you're, you're just not deleting
• 18:26
  enough, obviously. So I really would, I think this
• 18:31
  is a very big deal if, if it is over over over deletion of
• 18:38
  rules, regulations and you'll end up putting a few back and
• 18:41
  that's fine. Yeah, I told you it's not risk
• 18:44
  averse, right? You follow it's.
• 18:47
  Pretty sensible. It's just sensible really.
• 18:50
  I I think it stands the test of logical examination.
• 18:54
  And to me, that seems to be what President Millet is trying to do
• 18:59
  in Argentina as well, to delete what's not absolutely essential,
• 19:03
  to leave space for creativity and and entrepreneurship.
• 19:07
  You've met him repeatedly. You've seen what's going on in
• 19:10
  Argentina. Do you have any thoughts about
• 19:13
  that, his ambitions, how important it is for Argentina
• 19:16
  and possibly for the rest of the world, with the case right here,
• 19:19
  right now? Well, I think it is very
• 19:22
  important that Argentina succeed and that we give President Malay
• 19:25
  awful support. And I think this and my
• 19:38
  prediction is that unless President Malay is stopped in
• 19:41
  some way from taking the actions that he wants to take, that that
• 19:46
  Argentina will have a massive growth in the economy and there
• 19:51
  will be far more prosperity and and optimism about the future
• 19:57
  than there ever there has been perhaps in 100 years.
• 20:09
  And in in just 10 minutes, Malay will we'll talk about those
• 20:12
  things from this stage. Would you be able to give him
• 20:18
  some advice if he wants to turn Argentina into an innovation and
• 20:22
  entrepreneurship nation again? What?
• 20:24
  How should he go about it? Well, from everything I've read,
• 20:30
  he's he's making all the right moves.
• 20:32
  I would just encourage the people of Argentina to give him
• 20:35
  their full support, run this experiment because clearly the
• 20:39
  thing the policies of the past have have not succeeded.
• 20:42
  We know that for a fact. So let us, let us, I think, go
• 20:46
  boldly into the future. You know, I hope people have
• 20:49
  originally given them their full support.
• 20:53
  And I think it'll be a very exciting adventure.
• 20:55
  And I think it's going to work out really well.
• 21:05
  Could I just then broaden that question about innovation and
• 21:11
  the future of economies? Because right now it seems like
• 21:15
  active industrial policy is all the rage, not just in the old
• 21:20
  left, but sometimes in the populist right as well.
• 21:22
  The idea that governments should get heavily involved and pick
• 21:26
  certain winners in business and in technology.
• 21:29
  They all often talk about trying to come up with government moon
• 21:33
  shots to create the the future, which I find a little bit ironic
• 21:37
  because the landing a man on the moon was great, but it didn't
• 21:40
  give us any kind of industry. We didn't see Internet from the
• 21:44
  space, no moon base, no asteroid mining, no solar power in space.
• 21:48
  Because it was political and not commercial.
• 21:51
  So and because it was political it was OK to spend tons of
• 21:57
  money, but it also made it unsustainable in the future.
• 22:01
  It only became a commercially viable final frontier when
• 22:05
  SpaceX got into the race. So it it it.
• 22:09
  Could you tell us about how you see governments role in
• 22:12
  innovation generally? I mean you were the guy who had
• 22:15
  to sue NASA to get them to open up space to to private providers
• 22:21
  as well. What is the government's role in
• 22:23
  building the future of technology?
• 22:26
  I, I think the government's role is, is, is really the, it, it's
• 22:31
  to ensure that the playing field is a good playing field.
• 22:35
  That the rules that, that there are good rules.
• 22:37
  The, the government is essentially the, you know, the
• 22:41
  Football League and it like the, the, the, the referee, the, you
• 22:44
  know, making sure that, that there's fair play that like I
• 22:49
  said, that the rules are sensible and allowing the
• 22:52
  players on the field to play the game.
• 22:55
  And what happens over time, though, is government keeps
• 22:58
  growing and, and, and a certain point, you have more referees
• 23:00
  than players on the field and, and then the game is not good.
• 23:06
  Yeah, you do need referees. I'm not saying you don't need
• 23:10
  referees, but you don't want the referees to outnumber the that
• 23:14
  would be silly, but that's often what happens.
• 23:17
  So it's just make sure that the that that, that the player that,
• 23:22
  that fair games are being played, that the that are
• 23:25
  sensible rules and I think and don't get in the way of the
• 23:28
  players and the results will be excellent.
• 23:33
  When we met in Austin recently, you talked about socialism as a
• 23:37
  concept and the problem that when the government gets too
• 23:41
  heavily involved, you lose the feedback mechanisms that really
• 23:45
  force them to continue to learn, improve, and do things better
• 23:49
  all over again. Would you be willing to share
• 23:52
  those thoughts with the audience?
• 23:55
  Yeah. You know, like another way you
• 23:59
  think the government is like a corporation in the limit.
• 24:00
  It is the most, it is the biggest corporation and it is a
• 24:05
  monopoly and, and one that can really kind of only go bankrupt
• 24:10
  if the country goes bankrupt. So it doesn't have the the sort
• 24:13
  of, you know, commercial corporations, if the cup, if
• 24:16
  they make bad products fail to compete, then they will go
• 24:18
  bankrupt and and they should if they make bad products.
• 24:22
  So a government is essentially a 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's you can think of like, like, I think one way
• 24:35
  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, you wouldn't want the DMV to make cars, you know, and, and
• 25:10
  if, if you don't get good service from the government,
• 25:12
  what do you 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 end 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
• 25:46
  left so, but I'd like to pick your brains on a couple of
• 25:49
  topics, one of them being free speech.
• 25:52
  You bought Twitter partly to, as you've said, described it, to
• 25:57
  save an open platform, to save free speech, and that's very
• 26:03
  laudable. But of course there are also
• 26:04
  trade-offs. The old saying goes, if you keep
• 26:07
  your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of
• 26:10
  rubbish into it. So obviously when we have free
• 26:13
  speech, we'll get some ugly stuff as well, even toxic.
• 26:17
  Can you talk about why to you it's so important to save
• 26:21
  freedom of speech for to you and for society and the progress of
• 26:25
  society? Yeah, well, for a platform like
• 26:30
  the X platform only known as Twitter, there will be things
• 26:35
  that are said that are that are incorrect, but it provides an
• 26:39
  immediate feedback loop for correcting that things that are
• 26:42
  wrong. So somebody says something, well
• 26:44
  then another person can reply and and rebut what that person
• 26:47
  saying. And there can be just an ongoing
• 26:50
  sort of dialogue or argument to and and someone can read the
• 26:53
  whole thread and see, okay, this person said something, but
• 26:56
  somebody counteracted that. There was further rebuttals.
• 26:59
  There was more context added and and that will give them the best
• 27:03
  understanding of the situation as compared to say a legacy news
• 27:07
  media article where it's you just have the opinion of the
• 27:10
  reporter, no rebuttal, no comments, no no, no counter
• 27:14
  argument. And very often what's, what
• 27:16
  printed in the press is completely false and people
• 27:20
  don't know. But on a, on a real time
• 27:22
  interactive platform like X, like they can see the, like I
• 27:25
  said, they can see the not just what somebody said, but what are
• 27:28
  the rebuttals? What are the counter arguments?
• 27:30
  And we've got things like community notes, which I think
• 27:32
  is very helpful, where if something, if somebody says
• 27:35
  something false or, or sort of get inaccurate or misleading,
• 27:39
  then the, the, the, the sort of the core secret to community
• 27:43
  notes is that for a note to be attached to a post, people who
• 27:49
  normally disagree about a subject must agree on that, on
• 27:53
  that community note for it to be shown.
• 27:56
  So the probability of it being accurate is is very high because
• 28:00
  people who historically disagree are are only going to agree on
• 28:04
  something that is quite accurate.
• 28:06
  So it's all down to feedback loops basically.
• 28:10
  I think you, yes. You've been remarkably generous
• 28:12
  with your time, so I'll just give you a last question
• 28:16
  possibility for some last thoughts.
• 28:18
  It seems to me that your take on the world is that progress
• 28:22
  doesn't happen by itself. It's not automatic.
• 28:24
  After the moon landing, we went back from the final frontier for
• 28:28
  half a century and Argentina has been stagnating for almost a a
• 28:32
  century by now. It takes human agency.
• 28:35
  Someone's got to do it. And in the light of that, are
• 28:39
  you optimistic about human progress?
• 28:41
  And if So, what are you optimistic about and what do you
• 28:45
  think that people are listening today and and think tanks like
• 28:48
  the Cato Institute can do to speed progress up?
• 28:57
  Well, it, it does seem as though like civilization is reaching
• 29:02
  new heights in technology and, and, and I think we've got quite
• 29:08
  a bit of momentum. I, I do worry about certain
• 29:10
  existential risks, like the low birth rate, which is
• 29:15
  accelerating in, in most countries, you know, and really
• 29:19
  this is one of those things that I think is underrated as an
• 29:22
  issue is that if there are no, no, no humans, there's no
• 29:25
  humanity. Would 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 with that piece of listen, unless we're going to
• 29:53
  leave it all to the robots. So this I think is is massively,
• 29:58
  massively underweighted and I don't have a great solution to
• 30:01
  it, but it must be solved somehow or human 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.
• 30:16
  I, I agree, I think we should, we should have an optimistic
• 30:19
  view of the 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, in the sort of extreme form of
• 30:33
  the environmentalist movement, it's, it's people start to view
• 30:36
  humans as a plague on the surface of the Earth, as a
• 30:38
  fundamentally bad 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, you can think of
• 30:55
  things as as a, a fight between expansionist and extinctionist
• 30:59
  philosophies and the, that that's what really matters.
• 31:04
  Like everything else is like if, if, if humans, if humans go
• 31:09
  extinct or, or civilization collapses, whatever policies we
• 31:13
  may have are irrelevant. So first, first and foremost, we
• 31:17
  must have an expansionist philosophy for, for civilization
• 31:21
  and for consciousness. We must seek to, you know, go
• 31:26
  beyond what we've done in the past to increase the, I think
• 31:32
  increase the number of humans. And this is, this is incredibly
• 31:38
  fundamental. So one way or another, this,
• 31:43
  this must happen. Yeah.
• 31:47
  So the final message is go forth and procreate yes.
• 31:52
  Go forth and multiply. You know, free civilization,
• 31:54
  Yeah. Yes.
• 31:58
  Well, you know, time flies and opportunity cost is a concept
• 32:01
  that's very viable when you're talking to Elon Musk.
• 32:04
  So thank you so much for your time here today, and I'm sure
• 32:09
  you've got other important things to attend to now.
• 32:11
  Good luck. All right.
• 32:13
  Thanks for holding.