Latest / Elon Musk Podcast / Elon Musk Said AGI Would Arrive by 2025. Now He Says 2026.

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Elon Musk Said AGI Would Arrive by 2025. Now He Says 2026. · Elon Musk Podcast

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Thank you so much. Elon Musk posted on X that there
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will be no poverty in the future and no need to save money.
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He said there will be universal high income for everybody on the
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planet now. He was responding to Ray Dalio,
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who had just announced a $70 million pledge to help fund
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savings accounts for newborns under a new Trump administration
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program. Musk called it a nice gesture,
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but essentially unnecessary because AI and robotics will
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eliminate poverty entirely. In the same week, Musk told ex
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AI staff that artificial general intelligence could arrive as
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early as 2026. He said by 2026, which means
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that we have a week before AGI hits.
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Apparently said the same thing last year, except that time he
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said AGI would arrive by 2025. So what happens when the richest
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person on the planet keeps promising a post scarcity future
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that never quite arrives on schedule now?
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Musk has been making these predictions for years.
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The timelines always shift. The framing stays exactly the
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same, though, and today we're going to cover what he actually
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said about universal high income, why he thinks work will
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become optional, what AGI actually means, and why his
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predictions keep slipping, and any of this, if any of this
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actually matters. And you know, we're going to
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talk about that right after this short break.
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Now, Musk's comment about universal high income came in
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response to Ray Dalio's announcement on X Daleo, who's
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the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said he and his wife
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Barbara will contribute $250 into savings accounts for
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roughly 300,000 children in Connecticut.
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It's a lot of money for people that don't have a lot of money
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now. The accounts are part of a pilot
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program called Trump Accounts, created by the One Big Beautiful
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Bill Act, and each account starts with a $1000 government
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contribution for children born between January 2025 and
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December 2028. Michael and Susan Dell had
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already applied $6.25 billion towards the same program.
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You know. Musk's response dismissed the
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entire premise he wrote. It is certainly a nice gesture
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of The Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future and so
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no need to save money. There will be universal high
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income. Now, Universal high income is
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not the same as universal basic income.
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Musk has been explicit about the difference At the Viva Tech
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conference in Paris last year. He said the most likely outcome
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of AI development is that none of us will have jobs.
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Not because of mass unemployment, but because AI and
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robotics will handle all productive tasks.
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Said there will be no shortage of goods and services.
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Everyone will have a high income and not just enough to survive.
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Now Musk has added context to this.
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He said that in a future where anyone can have anything, money
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itself becomes unnecessary. If AI and robotics can satisfy
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all human needs, money is no longer required.
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As a system for allocating labor, its relevance declines
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dramatically. He suggested that over the long
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term, work would function like a hobby.
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If you want to do a job, you can, but the robots will provide
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whatever you need regardless. Now, the AGI prediction fits
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into that same framework of Musk.
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AGI stands for Artificial General intelligence.
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AGI would mean AI that can match or exceed human cognitive
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abilities across any task. Not narrow AI that plays chess
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or writes marketing copy for you, but a system that can
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reason, learn, and adapt the way that we do as humans do.
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And some people define it as a form of self-awareness, others
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define it as AI that can perform any intellectual task a human
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can. There's no single really agreed
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upon definition here. What makes these predictions?
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It's very hard to verify these. And in May of 2024, someone
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asked Musk on X how long until AGI arrives.
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He replied next year. So that was 2024.
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He said it's going to happen in 2025.
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We're now in 2025, December AGI isn't here and it's not going to
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happen in the next few days. So next week or this week.
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Musk actually told XAI staff that AGI could be achieved
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within the next couple of years, maybe as soon as 2026.
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So his timeline before slipped by exactly 1 year.
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He said 2025 and 2024 and now 2026 and 2025, possibly same
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thing that he's doing with full self driving.
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You know, it's the Musk marketing machine.
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The three MSI like to call the Musk marketing machine, which is
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Elon Musk saying things will be here in about a year.
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Or sometimes if there is a, a launch for Starship, he'll say
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you know what, it'll be here in two weeks or two months.
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He's just puts out a hypothetical timeline that makes
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him feel good and makes people that are interested in the
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projects that he's working on feel good.
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So if you promise something and you never deliver it, you can
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always say, well, I told you so in the, you know, if you look
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back on the past, like, you know, I was wrong in 2024-2025,
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20262027 about AGI. And when it happens in 20-30,
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you say like, hey, told you so, you know, I might have been
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wrong about the date, but it's also like, you know, those
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people and we've all seen these people, right?
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I'm going to go from a little tangent here.
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And you know where I'm going with this people on the street
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corner that the rapture is coming and Jesus is kind of come
6:48
on the weekend or whatever. And you know, and so be ready
6:51
for the rapture. And these people, they always
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get it wrong. The rapture never came.
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They're not prophets. They're not here because Jesus
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or God told them to come down and tell us all.
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That's what Elon Musk is doing. It's the same playbook.
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I'm not saying anything about Jesus or God or heaven or
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anything like that with Elon Musk.
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What I'm saying is he keeps postponing his dates because he
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keeps getting it wrong. I have the most popular Elon
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Musk podcast in the world and I'm the person that can tell you
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how many times Elon Musk has said something about Starship.
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Because I spent about a year on the ground to Starship on the
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side, Hwy. 4 and 104° heat covering Starship development.
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And every time Elon would make an announcement, it would be,
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we're going to get this thing out by September, right?
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I moved my whole life because I believed in Elon Musk.
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And I'm not a hater of Elon. I think he does great work.
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I think he's a little delusional sometimes and he thinks a little
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wonky. But I'm here to be critical of
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the men as well. So if he says 2026, take it with
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a grain of salt. That's all I'm saying.
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September of whatever it was whenever I was at star base.
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He did not launch Starship for another year at least.
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So just saying that it doesn't have enough timelines are worth
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digging into that deep. He just says some things.
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Hey, it'll happen in a couple years or maybe it'll happen in a
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year. He's optimistic, you know, So,
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you know, he told Joe Rogan also in October that he would
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demonstrate a flying car by the end of this year.
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That full self driving software has been promised as truly
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autonomous for years. He said in 2019, the Tesla would
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have 1,000,000 robo taxis on the road by 2020, and that was in
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2019. And we're just getting them a
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little bit now. We don't have a million robo
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taxis. We have like 20 robo taxis,
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maybe 100, you know. So the predictions are
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generating an attention for him and it's also a good way for him
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to get investors. So anybody that wants to invest
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in XAI, if he keeps saying a year from now we're going to get
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AGI. And if he's the one saying it,
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XAI seems like the plan that you want to go with, right?
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2026 AG is come in and you know who's going to get it?
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XAI and Elon. So you want to invest in his
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companies and you want to invest in Tesla because it's part of
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XAI. You want to invest in the IPO of
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SpaceX. When it happens at the end of
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next year, possibly, we're going to see what happens there.
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Google's going to make a bunch of money from that, by the way,
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and it's going to be a game changer for a lot of people.
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If I were a betting man and don't take my advice for this
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because I don't want you to take any financial advice for me.
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This is just hypothetical. If I were you, the a good way to
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make a little bit of money off this potential SpaceX sell is to
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buy Google stocks now by Alphabet now, because when
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SpaceX goes public, any part of it goes public, the Alphabet
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stock is going to rise. So not that's not advice for you
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to invest with. That's just what I'm going to be
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doing. So that's my own personal thing
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that I'm going to be doing. So this is a, there's a business
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reason for what Elon Musk says to XAI is raising 20 to $30
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billion per year in funding. And we've asked them for it,
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asked them for a comment about that and why they're trying to
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get that much money. Basically server farms, XAI, we
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contacted them as well. They didn't say anything.
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So the perpetual promise of AGI continues to drive investment in
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X AI, Perpetual AGI just talk about it.
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Sam Allman does it. All of them do it.
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Hey, guess what, man? AGI is right around the corner.
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It is not. It's not.
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It's not right around the corner.
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I wish it were. That would be great.
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But our robot overlords are not going to be part of our system
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anytime soon. The robots can barely walk.
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You can push them over. Their hands don't work yet.
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Elon says Tesla is working on the hands.
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And I cannot wait to see that, to be honest with you.
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It's going to be amazing if it actually works.
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I think that'll be crazy cool. So the investment is propping up
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a significant portion of the US economy right now too.
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So anything Elon can say will prop up the US economy, will
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prop up those multi billion dollar AI companies.
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So also, what do we know right now about this?
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Musk's predictions about the end of poverty?
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Guess what? Henry Ford also said this too,
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way back in the day when he started building Ford Motor
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Company. He said once robotics and
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autonomous building happens, none of us will work.
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It's happened throughout time. People have said this so many
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times, like, hey, guess what? If we build this invention, if
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we do XYZ, no one will have any worries ever again.
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But guess what? We're people.
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Everybody wants to do something, right?
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And if somebody makes a robot that can do a chore, there's
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somebody out there that thinks they can make a better robot
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than that first person, Henry Ford.
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But you know, he, he popularized the automobile.
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Guess where we are now, right? Wright Brothers flight, sending
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things to Mars. Now we're sending things in the
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outer solar system worth sending things far, far away from Earth.
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Because people were more competitive.
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They knew that they can make a builder or build a better plane.
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So now they built a better rocket.
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And now SpaceX is also building a better rocket.
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So kudos to everybody is SpaceX, by the way, for all the hard
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work they put into that. And Starship very close to my
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heart, Starship and star based down there.
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So everybody down there, kudos to you.
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Good job everybody at SpaceX too.
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So, so you would be vulnerable to automation once this all
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happens, right? If AGI happens and if Tesla
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robots take over, you're going to be vulnerable to automation
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because if you work in any of these factories or if you work
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in a physical environment where you have to use your body
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repeatedly, it's a repeated thing.
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If you do basically the same thing all day long.
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I know my industry was turned upside down.
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I was a front end coder for about 6 years and my industry
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was taken over by AI, automated vibe coding, basically.
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I do it now, it's fun, I think it's great.
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But the plan for full automation, full AGI, because
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once AGI hits, they're just going to be as smart as us.
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They're going to be able to make the same decisions as us.
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And then eventually they'll get better than us at certain
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things, but it's going to take a while.
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Things don't happen overnight, things don't happen in two or
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three years. Sure, the pace is crazy right
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now and we're seeing a lot of chat bots.
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We're not really seeing a ton of movement in the AGI space
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because there's no world view to the large language models as of
14:20
right now, other than in robotics.
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I think robotics is going to be the next big thing too, by the
14:24
way, so just take my word for that one.
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There's skepticism. Worth noting though, when the
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richest person on the planet is worth over $600 billion.
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Tells everyone else not to bother about saving money, to
14:39
think about this. There's a gap between his
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position and there's, if he has 600, if he's worth $600 billion,
14:47
and if he leverages some of his stock and goes like, you know
14:51
what, I'm worth 600 billion. Let me take 10 billion of this
14:54
money and then I'm just going to give it to everybody.
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And most people would be really happy with what they got, right?
15:01
They'd be very happy with the amount of money they got.
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What if he took out $100 billion out of his, out of his earnings,
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out of his stock leverage that $100 billion.
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Give that to everybody. Give that to everybody in the
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United States. We don't have to work anymore.
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We're high value people. Maybe in my math's a little bit
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off there. Maybe we won't have to work as
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much. But why doesn't he just do that
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instead of building robots? But also, I've been watching
15:26
Foundation and I understand where he's coming from.
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He's not hairy. He thinks he, I think what he
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thinks. He's building a foundation where
15:34
he's going to keep the light of consciousness on, on Mars.
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It's just like Harry Selden did, keep the light of consciousness,
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stop the, you know, stop the downfall of humanity, etcetera,
15:48
by doing great things. And instead of just giving
15:51
people money, which would just save everybody a lot of
15:55
heartache, right? People that don't actually have
15:58
the money to pay the rent or pay their car payment, their car
16:01
gets repossessed by their kids food.
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Elon, you got more money than everybody else.
16:07
It would be nice if you took some of that money and gave it
16:11
to people because if you would just want people to be high
16:15
earners, then let them be high earners.
16:17
There you go. I don't know, it makes, it's a
16:19
moral conundrum for a lot of people.
16:21
But then you could say, well, that $100 billion that he spends
16:24
on all those people, he needs that to run his company.
16:27
So eventually we all never have to work again.
16:29
That could be 30 years from now, 40 years from now.
16:32
And if you're 30 years old right now and it's 40 years away,
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you're 70 years old, you're not going to be working anyway.
16:39
If you're 4550 years old and it's 20 years old from now,
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you're going to be 60 or 70 years old anyway.
16:45
So think about that. I don't know, There's a, there's
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a fine line between the things that Elon says and the things
16:53
that make sense. You know, like, I, I understand
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what he's doing. It's like for the very long
16:58
term, right? The very, very long term of
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humanity. He wants to make sure that
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everybody has whatever they need forever.
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Or since he's worth $600 billion, he could be worth a
17:11
trillion dollars in the future. If all the Tesla stuff works, if
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AGI happens, if his robots work, if he can get enough customers
17:19
for Starship and etcetera, etcetera, he could be worth a
17:22
trillion dollars. One person, one person over a
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trillion dollars. Just give everybody else some
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money, buddy. That's all I need to pay.
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Pay a lot of taxes. I know he pays the most taxes
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anyone's ever paid, but you know, is he doing, is he doing
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enough? I want you to think about that
17:36
too. Be a skeptic for a little bit.
17:37
Don't just, you know, hug the guy and kiss the guy, you know,
17:40
be like, hey, dude, you have a lot of money and if you're well
17:44
off, that's great. You don't need it, right?
17:46
If you're if you're a high earner, just don't listen to me.
17:49
You don't need it with all those other people that are listening
17:52
that barely scraped by, the ones that barely have any money right
17:55
now and the people they have no resources because of a where
18:00
they grew up. And that's a thing you have to
18:03
think about that too. If you're skeptic about that.
18:06
I grew up with nothing. Literally.
18:08
There's no way out. There's no way.
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Once you turn and you're a kid, there's zero way out if your
18:15
parents can't get out, right? So you rely on your parents
18:17
until you're 18. You can make your way out when
18:19
you're 18, but when you're a kid, you can't do anything about
18:22
it, right? So my dad was working his ass
18:24
off and making just enough money for all of us three kids to get
18:28
by. We couldn't get out of there.
18:30
He's making OK money, you know, wasn't making a lot of money,
18:34
but he's making enough so we could all survive.
18:37
But there's no way out. He's living paycheck to
18:39
paycheck. We all were.
18:41
So there's in there, you know, there's millions of other people
18:45
that are well, well, worse than what we were, like way worse.
18:49
They're start literally starving.
18:51
Give them the money. So something about that, like be
18:55
really like, really look into yourself.
18:58
Like, man, is he being selfish with this or is he actually is
19:03
his mindset? I'm going to help everybody on
19:08
the planet Earth by building robots and getting AGI to a
19:12
place that can help everybody. Is that what he's really doing?
19:16
So you know, Musk's advice might be easier to follow if you
19:20
already have generational wealth.
19:22
The theory of universal high income sounds different coming
19:25
from someone who will be fine. He's going to be fine forever.
19:28
His kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids
19:32
will be fine. Everyone's going to be fine in
19:35
his family line forever in. So this is funny to hear too.
19:41
Elon Musk says the transition will be painful.
19:43
Not for him, he said there will be much trauma and disruption
19:46
along the way. Right.
19:48
Rapid automation can send millions of people into
19:50
unemployment before the promised abundance arrives.
19:54
So if robots take over all these jobs, people have nothing else
19:57
to do. Learn a different skill, of
19:58
course, do something else. Of course, people have always
20:01
done that. We've always found other ways to
20:03
make money and other ways to find resources.
20:06
Now the question he keeps returning to is an economic It's
20:10
existential. If computers and robots can do
20:13
everything better than you, does your life actually have meaning?
20:18
You know it it is that going to be important?
20:21
You know what, If I just had money, I would probably find
20:26
something to do. You know, there's there's got to
20:29
be something for me to do. I can't just sit on the beach
20:31
and sip a cocktail all day. That's boring.
20:34
So Elon's timeline for AGI keeps moving.
20:37
The timeline for universal high income is undefined.
20:40
It used to be universal basic income, but he switched over to
20:42
universal high income instead. And Elon keeps making
20:46
predictions that generate more and more headlines and more and
20:51
more money for his companies, And when the deadline passes, he
20:54
sets another one. Now, whether any of this
20:56
reflects genuine confidence in the tech or serves a different
21:01
purpose is something everyone has to decide for yourselves.
21:05
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