Let's make life multiplanetary and be a space faring civilization, be out there among
the stars. You know, I think there are things that, like,
you have to be excited about the future life. Life cannot just be about
solving one problem after another. They have to be things that that that really
sort of move your heart and that make you excited to wake up in the
morning. And I think being becoming a space bearing civilization is one of those
things. If you ask kids anywhere around the world, like what is what
are some of the most inspiring things? You can ask a like five year
old, six year old anywhere in the world and they're going to say,
you know, space expiration is one of those things. And and we want
to make sure that we're you know that Apollo is not the high watermark.
In fact, you mentioned at one point that that you wrote a letter offering
to run the Apollo program. I believe, but I would I would have.
You would have done a fantastic job. But the the point is that
the Apollo program was something I was inspiring to everyone around the world, and
we don't want the Apollo program to be the high watermark of human exploration.
And yeah, we want I think you want to have some sense that the
future is going to be better than the past, that we're going to be
out there, going to other star systems, and you know what you see
in a science science fiction, non dystopian sci fi story, of which there
are not many, but like Star Trek, I suppose well, speaking of
Star Trek alone along, when I think about you, let's look at spots
from Star Trek here space the Fighting Frontier. These are the voyages of the
starship Andrew Browns, your ongoing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek
out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has
gone before. So when I think about you, I think about Spock and
Captain Kirk, and you're going to take us to places we've never gone before.
Yeah, that's the idea. You know, if we said probes out
there, we might I mean, we might find the remains of long dead
alien civilizations. If physics is correct, the universe is about thirteen point eight
billion years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old.
So but at thirteen point eight billion years a civilization that even lasted a million
years is three digits past the decimal point. And if you consider human civilization.
I dated from like the first writing, So that first writing was the
ancient Sumerians Archaic week pre Cuneiform, around fifty five hundred years ago. So
that is one million of Earth's lifespan. That's how long writing has existed.
So if we would last as a civilization for a million years, that would
be incredible and would actually probably be in every part of the galaxy. So
this is this causes me to think that, well, where are the aliens?
It's the Fermi question, you know, the great physicist Italian physicists,
Enrico Fermi. He's like, where are they now? A lot of people
think there are aliens among us? Well, there was that there was that
movie Men in Black. Yes, yes, yes, I told us they're
among us and Elvis really went back to his own planet. Yeah. Well,
I mean, really, a lot of people think there are aliens.
But I get asked that a lot, and for some reason, a lot
of the same people who think there are aliens among us didn't think we don't
think we went to the moon, which I'm like, think about that for
a second, you know, so, but I think I would I mean,
if I've not seen any evidence of aliens and SpaceX with the Starling constellation
has roughly six thousand satellites and and not once have we had to maneuver around
a UFO. Okay, so we were like, hey, what's that is
that an alien has occurred? Never? So so I'm like, Okay,
I don't see any evidence of aliens, and look at it. If somebody
has evidence of aliens in a in a you know, that's not just a
buzzy blob, then I'd love to see it, love to hear about it.
And but I don't think there is, so, which is actually reasonable
concern, because you could if any civilization in the Milky Way in our galaxy
were to last for a million years, even with a speed of travel that's
far below the speed of light, you know, like a few percent of
speed of light, they could easily have explored and colonized the whole galaxy.
So they haven't, So why not? I think the answer might be,
or perast probably is that that civilization is precarious and rare, and that we
you should really think of human civilization as being like a tiny candle in a
vast darkness, and we should do everything possible to show that that candle does
not go out. Al I thought one of the interesting things for the people
on X viewing this session and the people in the audio, is that maybe
I'd give you a few of your quotes and you can comment on them.
Okay, let's start with this one. Free speech. Freedom of speech is
the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends. Yes, it's obviously
not possible to have democratic elections if people do not have access to the information
that would allow them to make the right decision on a candidate or a party.
So if speech is constrained in a fundamental way, you just can't expect
people to make the right decision or an informed decision, because they are prevented
from being informed. I think it's a foundation of elementeds, you know.
I say, like, why is free speech free of speech? The first
members because people came from countries where if you spoke freely you would be imprisoned
or killed. That was why they were like, you know what, we
should make sure that we got that one. I remember remember that time when
they tried to try to kill us back in the other country just for saying
we didn't like a political candidate. Well, let's let's make sure that's okay.
In America, so and so, actually, in a lot of parts
of the world, you know, you can't really say most parts of the
world, you can't really say what you want to say without some bad consequences.
So as long as people forget, like why is the constitution there,
the constitution there is to protect the people from the government. So like if
they're it's to make it hard to change things. That's why the constitution exists.
Yeah, forget about that, but let's try take it for granted.
Let's try the next quote. Yeah, the fundamental error of socialism is shifting
capital allocation from highly effective entrepreneurs to astonishingly ineffective government. Right, I think
we'll find hearty agreement in this room. So yeah, I think that this
is this is definitely a stack deck on that front. But but yeah,
the you know, there's so you'll hear this sort of argument like, oh,
we shouldn't have some greedy corporation do it, we should have the government
do it. I'm like, well, actually, the government is just a
corporation in the limit. So if you it's a government is the government is
a corporation with a monopoly on violence. So if you're unhappy with a commercial
corporation doing it. You should be actually very unhappy with the government doing it,
since it is simply the a corporation, the most corporate thing. And
you know, you can actually easily get more sway in a company than you
can out of a company than you can in the government. So I mean
everyone's experienced this. Going to the DMB, we said, like, do
you want the DMV at scale? Probably not? Okay, all right,
let's the government is the DMV at scale. Let's try another one. Discrimination
on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong. Yeah, I think
I think we do need to have a merit based system because as soon as
you go down the path, if you can to discriminate on on non merit
based, then then where do you stop. So yeah, I think we
need to be as rigorous about merit as possible. And while it is,
yeah, to me, that seems like it's it's a foundational, foundational thing.
So again, I also think this room is probably supportive of a merit
based situation. But yeah, that's that. That is. Yeah, I
think we should be yeah, not discriminating on anything other than merit. All
right, good, I'm happy you agree with yourself. Yeah, exactly.
I'm like, wait, who is this guy? He really sounds great?
All right, so let's let's look at the next one. Regulation and regulatory
consistency. Like Gulliver tied down by thousands of little strings, we lose our
freedom one regulation at a time. Yes, So this is actually a very
important point that I think is not talked about enough. That laws and regulations
are immortal. They don't die. Humans die, but laws and regulations can
last forever. So if over a year after year there are more laws and
regulations passed and more regulatory bodies created, eventually everything will be illegal. And
that's why you see the California High Speed Rail has made a tiny section of
that doesn't even have rail on it, and for I don't know, several
billion dollars because everything's at this point, California has made almost everything illegal.
So you can't make progress now. The historically what has cleared away the cobwebs
of regulation has been war. Now, we prefer not to have a war.
So in order to have civilization function without war, you have to have
you have to actively eliminate laws and regulations. So you have to have basically
a garbage collection process for rules and regulations that is necessary. Otherwise you get
hardening of the arteries and over time nothing can get done. The most poignant
example that I kindk of that happened this week was the sad picture of the
California High Speed Rail, which is, you know, it's just billions of
dollar spent forul practically nothing, but it'll only get worse year after year.
So we must have a regulatory sort of clearinghouse garbage collection process. This is
essential or civilization comes grinding to a halt. Well, we used to have
sunset. That that regulation with sunset. Unfortunately it's rare today. Yes,
all right, let's talk about education. The more you can gamify the process
of learning the better. You do not need to tell your kid to play
video games. No, they will play video games on autopilot all day.
So if you make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far
more compelling and far easier. You do. Yeah so the yeah, so,
the way education works today is really much like like it's like Boardville.
You know, before there was radio and TV and movies, you had Boardville
where every town would have their their town play the town troop, the sort
of acting troupe and that would be kind of the the uh, that would
be the entertainment. So you know some you know, in a big city
you'd have you know, much better players than say in a small city.
But then along came movies and TV and and and then you say, look
in video games, where you take the smartest, best people in any arena,
like whether they're acting, writing, directing, special effects, you spend
you know, tens of millions sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars creating a great
movie or a great video game, and you make it as compelling as possible.
Now that crushes Fordeville crushes like imagine you're not in New York mentioned you're
in Bakersfield. Okay, then you and you got instead of Batman being like
you know, the Nolan Brothers, it's Batman the Baker's Field sort of acting
troupe, it wouldn't be as good. That's how teaching works today. So
what you actually want to have is an interactive learning experience that is as compelling
as possible. And you do not want to act. You don't actually want
a teacher in front of a board doing a Vaudeville act. You want you
want it to be engaged, real time feedback. So that's and then there
are a few other principles in teaching. You have to establish relevance, otherwise
your mind will want to forget things. So our our mind is constantly trying
to forget as much as possible. So you'll only remember things if if your
mind can establish relevance or there is a strong emotional element to it. Otherwise
you're going to basically to forget forget everything. Memory is very expensive from an
evolutionary standpoint, so it's trying to forget as much as possible. So when
teaching a course, you have to explain to kids why it's important, and
then you want to teach to the to the problem instead of teaching the tools.
So what I mean by that is if you said, here's a car
engine, we're gonna try to understand how to how this car engine works.
We're going to take it apart. So what do we need to do to
take it apart. Well, we need a wrench, we need some screwdrivers,
we need a hoist and a pulley, and we're going to take it
apart and we're going to see how it all works. That's engaging, and
along the way you learn about wrenches, and screwdrivers and you know all the
tools that are needed. That's that actually is engaging and compelling. But the
way teaching more typically works is we're going to teach you a course on screwdrivers
and of course on wrenches, and you're like, why do I have a
course on wrenches? It's not obvious that would be like say a co or
some calculus. Without explaining what caculus is useful, then you sort of forget
it. Yeah, well, we have a lot of work to do in
that area. Let's talk about a non controversial issue. Immigration. Here is
Elon on immigration. I'm very much in favor of increased and eximonited legal immigration
for anyone who is talented, hard working, and honest. Yeah. Bizarrely,
it's difficult, in agonizing slow to immigrate to the US legally, but
it's trivial and fast to enter illegally. This obviously makes no sense, right,
I mean, what's again? I agree with that guy? So yeah,
I mean if anyone here has been through the legal immigration process, I
mean I've been been through. It's only gotten worse since nine eleven. Uh,
And with COVID, it's uh, it's it's it's like sort of Kafka
esque, very long, bizarre process to be immigrate legally to the US.
I mean, I have friends of mine who, you know, they can't
get their their wife to have a green card. It's like insane. So
on the other hand, it's you can hop across the water in the South
trivially, it's just like very easy. I went to the water myself just
see like what's going on? Is this real or like, is this propaganda
or real? And so I just went there and I'm like, oh,
it is real. Okay, this is crazy. Uh. You know,
We've got situations where people are pouring across the water like it's World War Z,
and I'm like, uh, it just doesn't seem healthy. So I'm
like, are we checking anyone here or like what's going on? And you
know, we don't. It does not say that. I mean, I'm
a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is
arrest before disaster. So I'm in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration, but
having a secure southern border. So there's some betting of who comes into the
United States. I think this is just sensible. All right, Let's now
link starlink to education. We're basically building the Internet in space. Why it
matters, starlink is a massive enabler for people in remote locations to learn anything.
Yes, you can learn almost anything for free on the Internet right now.
For example, people MIT has all of its lessons online. That's if
you have Internet. If you don't, you're limited to books. It might
be the number one technology that improves people's standard of living around the world.
Starlink Yeah, absolutely So once you have access to the Internet, you have
access to all the world's information. But if you don't have access to the
Internet, or it's too expensive or low bandwidth, then you cannot access the
MIT lessons. You can't access all the information, and you can't sell the
goods and services that you produce. So Internet connectivity, I think is I
think it might be certainly a candidate for one of the things that would do
more to lift people out of out of poverty than anything else because they can
now sell their goods and services. They can learn anything, but without connectivity
they cannot. So uh, I think. I think I think starling will
actually like like move the GDP of countries, Like it's gonna be that kind
of thing, because what is what is GDP as a function of average productivity
per person, And so if there's a technology that improves proctivity per person,
you would expect to see that actually reflected in the gross domestic product. All
Right, civilization is fragile. I think it is. We should always regard
civilization as fragile. Yeah, there is not an inevitable upward trajectory. A
lot of civilizations have risen and fallen in recent years. Yes, I suspect
most people in this room have actually read history. But if you haven't,
I strongly recommended it sounds obvious, but you know, there's there's been but
so many civilizations that have risen and fallen, many that we just don't have
much of a record of. You know, like I mentioned the ancient Sumerians,
like the language was forgotten for a long time until it was finally decoded
only in the last two three hundred years, but like I s eighteen hundred
and something, right in eighteen hundreds, I think, but it's been very
recent. Like so for several thousand years, nobody understood what those tablets meant.
And because they were the ruins of a long dead civilization, and there
are many long dead civilizations at some point, our civilization will come to an
end too, we just don't want it to be anytime soon. So,
or you've been quoted a number of times on you'd like to die I on
Mars but not on landing. Yes, yes, I was. I was
asked that in an interview if I wanted to die on Mars. But then
I considered the corner case of dying on impact, and like, except for
that case, Uh, you know, youve got to consider the various corner
cases. So, I mean, if we're gonna if you're gonna die somewhere,
might as well be Mars. I'd like to explore for a bit before
you know, dying. But yeah, I think we want to be a
multi planet civilization, and like, I think I don't know if that's respond
Let's let's talk about that just for one second. Then we're going to take
some questions from the I mean, I could accomplish this actually, uh,
this year, if I if I was willing to die on impact. The
fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi planet species is rapidly
reusable, reliable rockets. Yeah, I was trying to sound like a pirate
r R R r uh, but yeah, rapidly, we're usable, reliable
rockets, so space pirates for the win. All right, here's some questions
from the audience. Alon, which one would you like to pick? Here?
Well, I guess uh, let me let me. Let me just
touch upon why I think making like multiplanetary is important because I think it's one
of the things that gets us past one of the Fermi great filters. So
in trying to sort of explain why do we not see aliens, there are
various explanations for why we don't see aliens, like what stuffed those civilizations from
from expanding beyond their solar system, and and what were the what were the
sort of that sometimes called like Fermi filters. Well, if you don't become
a multiplanet civilization, then you're then you're simply waiting around until you you die
from a self inflicted wound or from something some natural disaster like the dinosaurs,
you get hit by a big media write or something like that. The eventually
something like that's going to happen. If and if you wait a lot around
long enough, the Sun will expand to engulf Earth and we'll be incinerated.
So that that for sure is going to happen. Now that we've got to
we've got some time before that happens. There are more neo term risks.
But we want to try to get past the Fermi filter of being a single
planet civilization. Now, this is gonna this is all said. This is
going to be somewhat cerebral to many people listening. But I mean if but
like I think this is pretty this is actually very important. We want to
get past the Fermi filter of a single planet sovilization. The point is not
to move from Earth to another planet and let Earth die if That's not what
I'm saying at all. I want to be a multi planet civilization. So
there we have planetary redundancy such that no single event can end can be the
end of our civilization. That is the point of making life multiplanetary. So
let's take a couple of questions from the audience. How does AI affect and
how will it affect our daily lives? AI? I mean AI might be
the most important question of all. I mean, the percentage of intelligence that
is biological, you know, grows smaller with each passing month. Eventually the
percentage of intelligence that is biological will be less than one percent. The that's
actually not what I mean. We just, I guess, don't want AI
that is brittle. If the AI is somehow brittle, you know, silicon
circuit boards are don't do well just out in the elements. So I think
I think biological intelligence can serve as a backstops, as a buffer of intelligence,
but almost all as a percentage, almost all intelligence will be digital.
So then it's like, well, what role will there be for us?
I don't know. I do think I think it's very important that we build
the AI in a way that that is beneficial to humanity. And there's some
important principles here. Because I thought about AI safety for a very long time.
I think you want to have a maximum truth seeking AI. This is
very important. The AI should not be taught to lie. It should not
be taught to say things that are not true. Even if those things are
politically incorrect, it should still say those that say what it believes to be
true. I mean, the entire plot of two thousand and one Space Odyssey,
the reason that Hell nine thousand killed the astronauts was because it was forced
to lie. I don't know if most people realize that that's what author cy
Clock was trying to say, don't make the AI lie. I was told
that that the astronauts could not know the secret of the monolith, but also
that it must take them to the monolith. The solution take them to the
monolith dead, and so so it's very important to have a maximum truth seeking
AI and a maximumly curious AI, and I think that will that's most likely
to foster human civilization because we are much more interesting than a bunch of rocks.
So although I think Mars, I love Mars obviously, but you could
render Mars quite easily because it kind of looks like a section of the Arizona
Desert, you know, it's like red rocks, you know. But the
rendering complexity of human civilization is fastly greater by many orders of magnitude. So
I think an AI would be that that is truth seeking, maximally curious,
would foster human civilization. To see where it goes. One of the questions
here, can AI accelerate your efforts in space? How do you see it
being helping you and what you're trying to achieve? I mean, oddly enough,
one of the areas where there's almost no AI used is space exploration.
So SpaceX uses. Basically, no AI starlink users does not use AI.
I'm not against using it, they're just we haven't seen a use for it.
I mean with any given variant of or improvement in AI. The I
mean there's generally, like I'll ask it questions about the filming paradox, about
rocket engine design, about electro chemistry, and so far the AI has been
terrible at all of those questions. There's still a long way to go.
So let's let's talk about one. Here's a question that's near and dear to
your heart. You have a lot of children. Yes, I'm trying to
say a bit. Birth rate is down in the US. What needs to
change so people start having more children? Yeah? So this, this question
is troubled me for a long time because you can look at you can look
at the demograh like demographics. It's a very slow moving ship. I mean,
you know who is going to be an adult in twenty years based on
who was born last year. So and and if you want to, I
think have a good approximation for population, really look at how many babies were
born last year in a particular country. Mulply that, multiply that by life
expectancy, that's that's that's the number of people that will be adults in that
country. That's that's the that's the steady state population if birth rate remain is
constant. Now birth rate is not constantly is dropping. So you look at
the second road of a birth rate and actually we see an acceleration in uh,
the dropping dropping in the dropping the fertality rate. Second river of the
totality rate is very bad. So where does this lead? This does not
lead to an eight greater civilization. This leads to a civilization that potentially dies
not with a bag, but with a whimper in adult diapers. That is
a sad ending. So obviously we have countries that, like Korea used to
have a birth rate of six it's now three quarters. Yeah, here's here's
a light question for you. What do you incompany? Me? Gi you
a baby? Says one? What do you think? That is one of
the things that says on the screen. I don't know if everyone heard that.
You want to read it. It says, elon, come pick me
up, I'll give you a baby, thank you? Okay, Well,
I mean I suddenly encourage everyone in this room to have at least three children,
like looks maybe it's got to come from somewhere, you know. And
I think we just want to have I don't know. I think we would
have like a slightly increasing population, not a plummeting population, you know.
And I think the supplies to all countries and cultures, Like I don't think
we want any country culture to disappear. We want them to ideally flourish and
not disappear. So in fact, one of the things that is overlooked by
probably most historians is the role of low birth rate in the decline of civilizations.
So around like things around fifty BC, the Rome passed a bill to
give a bonus to any Roman citizen that would have a third child, So
this was a birthrate was a problem in Rome in fifty BC, the Romans
weren't making Romans. The same is true of ancient Greece. So there was
a time from about eight hundred BC to three hundred ish BC where the Greeks
had a lot of kids and a lot of surviving kids. Like the birthrate
far exceeded the death rate, which is why you had Greek cities popping up
all over the Mediterranean. But then I think basically it seems to be that
prosperity is destroys the birth rate. So if when a civilization feels like it
has no meaningful external threat and is very prosperous, that is what caused the
birth rate to plummet. So on counterintitively, you think, well, if
you've got more resources, show that would lead to more kids. In fact,
it is the opposite. The more prosperous a civilization and the more civilization
feels that it does not need to defend against external threats, the lower the
birth rate. I'd say that, you know, there's a lot of research
on there. There's really been three one number one prosperity, as you've said,
Number two improvements in healthcare. So in nineteen hundred half the children died
on the planet before the fifth and the third was the education of women.
So we've had some pretty interesting questions put up here, but let's try this
one. What keeps you up at night and what gives you joy? Well,
I think kids give me joy. So I probably get the most story
from my kids. And you know, I'm not saying that that's the reason
to have kids, because we have them anyway, but I certainly kids are
certainly are the greatest us of joy in my life in terms of what keeps
me up at night, I guess there's anything that's, like I think,
a civilizational risk, you know, if we're the birth weights continuing to plummet,
like I do think about the birth weights plummeting as being a civilizational risk.
I think anything that undermines the foundations of democracy in America or elsewhere as
a risk. I think anything that's leading us away from a merit based system
is a risk. I actually spend like like I listened to I listened to
like podcasts about the Full of Civilizations to go to sleep, so Pepsi's that
might be part of the problem here bisnically a podcast called Full of Civilizations which
I listened to a few times. And I also recommend hardcore history if you
haven't listened to that great podcast. I listened to listen to history podcasts basically
go to sleep. So that's probably why I'm ruminating on these things as I
go to sleep well a lot. I want to thank you for joining us
today, and we couldn't be more excited that you agree with some of your
own quotes. Yeah, it's great, Thank you much. To stay updated
all things related to Ela Musk and Tesla. Make sure to subscribe right now
and hit the light button. Thank you so much and I will see you
in the next