Speaker 1: Like 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 cannot just be about solving one
problem after another. They have to be thinks 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
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. 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 date it from like
the first writing, so that writing was the ancient Sumerians
Archaic pre 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 we 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 physicist, Enrico Fermi. He's like, where
are they? Now? A lot of people think there are
aliens among us? Well, there was.
Speaker 2: That there was that movie Men in Black.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, I told us.
Speaker 2: They're among us and Elvis really went back to his
own planet.
Speaker 1: 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 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 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
past 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.
Speaker 2: Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it,
America ends.
Speaker 1: 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 element. You know,
if you 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 that
time when they try to kill us back of 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, 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 d MB, you said, like, do you want
the DMV at scale? Probably not?
Speaker 2: Okay, good, I'm happy you agree with yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean exactly. I'm like, wait, who is this guy?
He really sounds great?
Speaker 2: All right, so let's let's look at the next one.
Regulation and regulatory consistency.
Speaker 1: 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. 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 think of happened this
week was the sad picture of the California High speed rail,
which is you know, it's just buillions of dollars spent
for practically nothing, but it'll only get worse year after year.
So we must have a regulatory uh sort of clearinghouse
garbage collection process. This is essential or civilization comes grinding
to a halt. Yeah, so the way education works today
is really much like like it's like Baudeville. You know,
before there was radio and TV and movies, you had
Boardeville 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 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.
Speaker 2: Here is Elon on immigration. I'm very much in favor
of increased and ximonited legal immigration for anyone who is talented,
hard working and honest. Yeah, Bizarrely, it's difficult and agonizing
slow to immigrate to the US legally, but it's trivial
and fast to enter illegally. This obviously makes no.
Speaker 1: 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. And with COVID
it's it's it's a sort of Kuffka esque, very long,
bizarre process to 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 cart. 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. You know, We've got situations where people are
pouring across the water like it's World War Z, and
I'm like, this doesn't seem healthy. So I'm like, are
we checking anyone here, 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.
Speaker 2: Civilization is fragile.
Speaker 1: I think it is.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Yes, I suspect most people in this room have actually
read history. But if you haven't, I just strongly recommended
it sounds obvious, but you know, 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 their 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.
Speaker 2: Here's some questions from the audience, salon which one would
you like to pick? Here? How does AI affect and
how will it affect our daily lives?
Speaker 1: Yea, I mean a I might be the most important
questionab 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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,
it 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 electric
chemist and so far the AI has been terrible at
all of those questions. So there's still a long way
to go.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm trying to say a bit.
Speaker 2: Birth rate is down in the US. What needs to change,
so people start having more children.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this this question is troublably for a long
time because you can look at you can look at
the demogra 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 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. Multply that,
muliply 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
remains constant. Now, birth rate is not constantly, it is dropping.
So you look at the second road of a birth rate,
and actually we see an acceleration in the dropping dropping
in the dropping. The fertality rate. Second river of the
fertality rate is very bad. So where does this lead?
This does not lead to a greater civilization. This leads
to a civilization that potentially dies not with a bag,
but with a whimper in adult diapers.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 1: 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 weas of driving 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.
Speaker 2: We couldn't be more excited that you agree with some
of your own quotes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great, Thank you very much. All Right, cool,
all right,