FULL INTERVIEW: Elon Musk Sits Down With The Babylon Bee
RED ALERT: this is not a joke. Elon Musk sat down with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, EIC Kyle Mann, and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle for an in-depth interview on wokeness, Elizabeth Warren, taxing the rich, the Metaverse, which superhero Elon would be, and how the left is killing comedy. Go to http://ADFlegal.org/mandate and make a tax deductible donation to ADF's Freedom Fund to ensure they have the resources necessary to continue their challenges in court, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary! Back The DAVID Movie project by going to http://angel.com/david to help to help bring this incredible movie to life. Go to http://TuttleTwins.com and use coupon "BEE" to get 50% off any of their book bundles. Become a premium subscriber: https://babylonbee.com/plans The Official The Babylon Bee Store: https://shop.babylonbee.com/ Follow The Babylon Bee: Website: https://babylonbee.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebabylonbee Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBabylonBee Instagram: http://instagram.com/thebabylonbee
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
So, these are the guys that run the show.
This is Kyle, our editor-in-chief.
This is creative director Ethan Nicole.
Okay.
So, I mean, well, I guess before we get started, like, maybe you guys could tell me, like, what's the, you know, how did the Bee get started?
Yeah, it's true.
And, yeah.
What's your deal?
And why are you in California?
We're getting interviewed.
We're getting interviews.
That's way easier, actually.
I'm much better at being interviewed.
So, no problem.
Yeah, the Bee was just this little Christian humor site that we launched in 2016.
And it was just like, we spent 50 bucks on the domain name, started writing jokes, throwing them out there.
And it started to go big in conservative circles a couple years ago.
And that's just kind of where we got to where we are.
Seth is our CEO.
He bought the site a few years ago from the original founder.
He was the original founder?
His name is Adam Ford.
He's in love with the company anymore.
He owns a piece of it.
He does not the Bee now.
If you've seen that, you know the, yeah.
They're just unaffiliated?
No, they're kind of affiliated.
You retreat them.
Yeah, yeah.
So they do like real news, but crazy real news.
Real news.
It's like a backup plan.
It's like when satire is impossible because the world's too absurd, then we just report on the absurdity over on not the bee.
So, you know, plan B.
Yeah.
Reality is weird than fiction.
Yeah, exactly.
Often is.
So how many people at the B now?
Yeah, we've got probably a dozen full-timers now.
It's grown pretty fast.
A year ago, it was three of us.
We have like 25 people involved, just not all full-time staff.
So you'd be surprised.
Like with satire, you don't have to have a writing staff like filling a room, churning out articles all day long.
You can only handle so much satire every day.
We don't need to publish an article every three minutes like Fox News or Daily Wire or something like that.
So we have a lot of part-time.
One of our writers here, Frank Fleming, is one of our writers.
And he's got a full-time job.
He just writes for us on the side.
We'd love to have him full-time.
I'm the local guy who lives in the Austin.
Yeah, he lives in Austin.
You live in Austin, okay.
And I'm a Florida guy.
The headquarters are technically in South Florida.
I'm in Southeast Florida.
Florida, man.
I'd love to get these guys to Florida.
It's hard to get people out of California.
It really is.
More challenging than you think.
Despite California is the state of California doing everything it can to encourage people to leave.
Yes, yeah.
I think you had one article about how Cavan Newsom is a U-Hole salesman of the year.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually true.
Actually true.
So you don't miss it then?
No, I mean there's certainly many aspects of California that I do like.
Most of my friends are still in California.
Some of my best friends are California.
So yeah, I do miss many aspects to California, especially my friends.
And it's beautiful and lots of cool things, but increasingly difficult to get things done.
And California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is the, has become and is becoming more so the land of reg sort of over-regulation, over litigation, over taxation.
Poop on the sidewalk.
And scorn.
So it's like, it's not like, thanks for the taxes.
It's like, thanks for the taxes and kick you in the teeth.
Sucks.
Exactly.
You didn't exactly get a thank you note.
Yeah.
So the B.
Okay, let me flip the question, though.
So that's kind of the story of the B the B started out as, you know, this little blog.
It took off.
It's kind of blown up into something like now we have a following, including you.
Like, how do we get on your radar?
People sharing our articles, and you just saw them coming across your feed?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I saw you on Twitter at one point.
I thought some of the articles were quite funny.
I wrote those.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I used to be a much bigger fan of The Onion, but then The Onion just seems to have gotten really politically correct.
You know, it's sort of gone but in the SNL direction.
It's more leftist.
It's basically, it will not really make fun of anything on the left.
And it used to be much more even-handed, The Onion.
And then they just got the woke mind virus.
Yeah.
So to the point where The Onion just was, it used to be very funny, and then it was not that funny.
You know, SNL, I used to be a huge fan of SNL, but I still think they have some occasional good stuff, but it's just become, I think you've written some articles about this.
Many, if not most, of the SNL episodes are kind of a moral lecture on why we're bad human beings instead of comedy.
So, and again, won't make fun of anything on the left, really.
Like, you know, they'll beat up on Ted Cruz 17,000 times.
You're like, okay, we get it.
And often because he's made fun of someone on the left, he'll make fun of someone on the left, and then they jump on him for that.
It's like a defensive thing.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's just, there are just a lot of no-fly zones with a lot of comedy.
And then you realize that's like, wait a second, is the comedy getting at an essential truth or is there a propaganda element or is it trying to push you in a particular direction or getting to an essential truth that is humorous?
And when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that is humorous, then it's just not that funny.
Right.
And see, that's exactly the criticism we get from the left.
The criticism from the left is that that's what we're doing with our humor, is that we're trying to push a narrative, neglecting the truth.
Well, it's literally what the New York Times says, right?
It's that we are far-right misinformation disguised as satire.
Right, right.
So there's a.
It's almost where you're standing.
There's jealousy to it.
Yeah.
It's almost based on where you're standing, how you see it.
It's based on where you're standing.
I mean, I'd say the B is probably moderately right.
But it's not certainly not far right.
My impression is not that.
I would say that the B is not probably.
It wouldn't be accurate to say the B is fully centrist.
But it is certainly not far right.
If one is fully left and 10 is fully right, the B seems to be at 6, 6.5 towards the right.
So Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Ablon B, Hitler.
Somewhere on that scale.
Yeah, it's not, but it's a.
I mean, the B is, I think, less right than, say, The Onion is left, for example.
So the Onion, I think, would be more left than the B is right.
Rightist, or whatever.
Righteous.
We'll have to put that on our Wikipedia page.
Rightist propaganda.
You know, you talked about the woke mind virus, and I was wondering if you could decipher this tweet of yours for me, because I'm not a programmer.
You wrote traceroute woke underscore mind underscore virus.
What does that mean?
Okay, so traceroute is a networking command to so if you want to figure out a path to a particular server or domain, you'd say traceroute or in Windows trace RT.
That would show you the path to a particular source server, either an IP address or domain name, and it would show you basically all the hops that it goes through and the latency between each hop.
I know some of those words.
Yeah.
So traceroute would be, yeah, it would be like, where did it come from?
Yeah.
Where did the virus come from?
What is its origin?
So did this work?
Did this command work?
Did you find the comments?
Read the comments and see.
It is a prevalent mind virus and arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization.
Also, not having enough kids, right?
Yeah, I think most people, if you just simply look at the birth rate statistics, you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year.
And then you can say, like, is the birth rate trending down or up?
And it's been trending down basically almost everywhere.
So if you look at the birth rate last year, you know how many adults there will be in 20 years because that's how many babies were born.
The trend is like you don't have to be some master statistician or something like that.
You could just look at kids born last year trending to well below replacement rate and a lot of countries have been well below replacement rate for a long time.
Well the concern is that if you have kids and they'll contribute to climate change and then they'll kill the Earth, right?
That's the leftist concern is that we're overpopulating the Earth and that we're going to kill it.
Are you trying to overpopulate the Earth so that we can go to Mars and take over Mars?
The Earth is far from overpowering.
Is this a deliberate strategy?
The Earth is far from overpopulated.
Far, far from overpopulated.
So the thing that's necessary to minimize the chemical change to the atmosphere and oceans is to move to sustainable energy generation and consumption.
So the three elements of a sustainable energy future are sustainable energy generation primarily through solar, wind, some geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.
Although they're shutting down all the nuclear power stations, so you can sort of cross that one off the list, which they shouldn't be doing.
They should just keep they should keep moving.
Unless a nuclear power plant is in a region of major natural disasters.
Instability or something.
You don't want to be subject to massive natural disasters because obviously that could be a problem.
But if you're like say Germany or France or whatever, they don't have those.
So the nuclear power is very safe.
But anyway, the long-term heavy lifting on energy generation will be solar followed by wind.
And you really don't need a very large land area to generate enough power to power, for example, the United States.
So it's on the order of roughly a little over 100 miles by 100 miles section of land with solar panels would power the entire United States.
So like a little corner of Utah or Texas, it can power the whole country.
So anyway, so it's really not that hard.
The solar incidence is a gigawatt per square kilometer.
For most nuclear power.
You have to do some calculations.
Most nuclear power plants can be.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a kilowatt per square per square kilo per square meter, and there's a million square meters in a square kilometer.
So it's a pretty simple math.
So then you'll get like maybe 20% efficiency on that, so call it like net power generation of 200 megawatts per square kilometer.
If you take most nuclear power plants, there's usually a pretty clear area around a nuclear power plant because people don't usually want to live right next to a nuclear power plant.
So the area of most nuclear power plants that is uninhabited, if covered in solar panels, would generate more power than the nuclear power plant.
And then the second element that's needed are batteries to store solar and wind because the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time.
So the intermittency of solar and wind requires battery storage for continuous power.
So that's the second part of the sort of second pillar of sustainable energy.
And the third is sustainable transport.
So that means electric cars, boats, planes.
And then ironically, the one thing that you can't really make electric is rockets.
And I was involved in that.
But although you can, over time, use solar power to generate fuel by pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, combining it with H2O, creating CH4, which is methane and O2 oxygen.
And rockets are mostly oxygen by mass.
So over time, you can make everything basically solar power.
So you're working on some of those problems, but the problem of wokeness specifically.
You mentioned that's like a mind virus and it's destructive.
And why do you think wokeness is so destructive?
I understand your opinions too.
But, you know, like, I mean, generally, I think we should be aiming for a positive society and, you know, it should be okay to be humorous.
Like, you know, like we should, like, like wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool.
We've experienced that.
I mean, Chappelle, like, what the?
Flowerbed.
I mean, try to shut down Chappelle.
Come on, man.
That's crazy.
So, you know, so do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate, basically?
And no forgiveness, right?
Yeah.
At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.
It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.
What do you think?
I'd agree with that.
Yeah, I mean, we've obviously seen that from the left, you know, just ourselves.
You know, the left is almost this religion now where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them, you know, for them it's like you're making fun of God or salvation.
You know, so they're almost the new religious right in our view.
Yeah.
He agreed with me.
Well, you were pretty mean to Senator Warren, though, on Twitter recently.
You slammed her, man.
Please don't call the manager on me, Senator Karen.
She struck first, obviously.
Yeah, she did.
She called me a freeloader and a grifter who doesn't pay taxes, basically.
And I'm literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year, ever.
And she doesn't pay taxes.
Basically at all.
And her salary is paid for by the taxpayer, like me.
Could you even use Turbo Attorney?
Would that even work?
If you could die by irony, she would be dead.
If irony could kill.
What would happen if you walked into an HR block to file your taxes?
Like, could they handle your case?
My taxes are actually not that complicated.
I do not have any offshore accounts.
I don't have any tax shelters.
I have basically Tesla and SpaceX stock.
And Tesla is publicly traded, so all information is public.
And SpaceX is a AC corp that is audited, that has outside orders.
So with outside investors, everything is extremely transparent.
There are no elaborate sort of tax avoidance schemes or anything like that.
So HR Block could easily do my taxes.
I don't need HNR block.
I could do it.
It would probably take me a few hours to do my taxes.
It's very basic.
Did you sell that stock in Tesla because of the Twitter poll?
In part.
Have you made up your mind that you were already going to do that before the Twitter poll?
I have some Tesla options that are expiring next year.
So I needed to exercise those options no matter what.
And I was like, okay, I'll move forward and exercise those options.
So that's only part of it no matter what.
But then over and above that, I sold incremental stock to try to get up to the 10% level.
So just the option exercise alone would not get to 10%.
So I sold stock that should roughly make my total Tesla share sale roughly 10%.
It's the most annoying thing in the world, people asking you questions like this about your personal finances.
I mean, no one ever asks me what stock I'm selling or why I made so much money last year.
I mean, I'm the third richest man on my street, which is pretty good.
Pretty good.
I mean, I'm not sure it's all that productive or interesting.
You know, essentially all of my net worth is just in SpaceX and Tesla stock.
These two companies that I helped create and have run for now almost 20 years have done a lot of useful things.
SpaceX launches more payload to orbit than the rest of the world combined and has a global internet system called Starlink and is the primary provider, well the only U.S. provider of astronaut transport to the space station.
We publish six to eight satire articles a day.
Some of them are funny.
I mean, pretty good.
So SpaceX transports U.S. and as well as non-U.S. astronauts to the space station that was previously, the U.S. was dependent on Russia, who is doing a good job, but charging kind of crazy money per seed.
So with SpaceX, the cost per astronaut dropped dramatically and the money went to jobs in the US.
So that's why people think SpaceX is valuable.
Tesla.
I mean the annoyance though of like people holding it against you that you've had success, holding it against you that you have wealth, viewing billionaires as evil and you're not doing enough to give back.
You have like the Elizabeth Warren thing that you haven't paid your fair share.
I mean that's you know it's that's got to be kind of aggravating.
Yeah I think it's just important to understand like what is this wealth?
It's not like I've got like some massive cash balance.
My cash balances are very, very low.
And at least until I sold stock, which is really the first time I've actually sold stock in any meaningful way, was this quarter.
I simply had loans against my stock.
So if Tesla and SpaceX went bankrupt, I would go bankrupt too immediately.
It's not realized is what you're saying.
It's like I built these two companies and it was extremely difficult to build them.
Like massively painful and difficult.
Rewarding too, but also massively painful and difficult.
And I didn't sell the stock in the companies.
My sort of impression was that you shouldn't take money off the table or you shouldn't take stock off the table and de-risk things that a captain should go down with their ship.
So it's like, okay, I don't want to take money off the table and then if the companies fail, then I'll be sort of enriched while investors suffer and that does not seem right.
So anyway, so that's the reason I didn't sell is I could easily have diversified and protected myself financially if SpaceX or Tesla went bankrupt, but I did not.
And SpaceX and Tesla came very close to bankruptcy many times.
Even when bankruptcy was literally weeks away, I did not sell stock.
And then the companies became valuable.
Tesla's value is, and SpaceX's value is not up to me, it's up to investors.
And they decided it was worth, Tesla was worth a trillion dollars in the public market.
And I own 20% of the company.
So you're not apologizing right now.
You're not going to look in the camera and say, I'm so sorry.
Look at the camera right now.
I'm just trying to explain, like, I don't think people necessarily understand.
They don't, yeah.
Yeah.
That this is not some function of sort of hoarding or something.
It's simply that I own 20% of the company that became very valuable as decided by external investors.
And so 20% of a trillion dollar valuation is $200 billion.
And I've said at various times that I think the stock price is too high, but the investors just ignored that.
I'm like, okay, I literally said it's too high.
And they just kept making the price higher.
Tell them our value is too high.
So anyway, so it's just that's, but like I said, this is not like my so-called wealth is not some deep mystery.
It's simply what is my ownership percentage of SpaceX and Tesla, multiply that by the valuation, that's my net worth.
It's super simple.
And my taxes are super simple.
And I have no, like I said, no offshore accounts, no sort of clever tax evasion or anything like that.
And I don't draw a salary or any cash salary or bonus from the companies at all.
So again, I thought that was like morally good to not do that.
And so there were, like there was one year, I think, 2018, where I didn't pay any tax, but that's because I didn't have any income.
And I did have a little bit of income, but I had actually overpaid taxes, I think, in 2017.
So I paid too much tax.
And so I got like, I basically netted that out in 2018 because I paid too much tax in 2017 accidentally.
Unless you sell stock, there are no realized gains.
So then I was like, well, should I sell, like, what am I supposed to do?
Send shares to the government somehow?
I don't know if you can even do that.
So then I was like, well, unless I sell shares, there's no actual mechanism to pay tax.
So then I was like, well, should I sell 10% in order to pay tax?
And I sort of asked Twitter, and they're like, on balance, they said yes.
And so I sold enough stock to get to around 10% plus the option to exercise stuff.
And I try to be extremely literal so that you don't generally need to read between the lines.
You can just read the lines.
So that's it.
As the fattest guy here, I want to know what's when you're going to make the candy company.
You said on Twitter that you're making a candy company.
And you're the closest thing to Willy Wonka that this culture has.
It could be Willy Wonka.
I didn't say that.
Did you want to say that?
He said, I'm starting a candy company.
It's going to be a good idea.
I'm not going to Warren Buffett.
But you did say I am super, super serious.
I think if you put two supers before serious.
That makes it nice.
And that's like, you're probably not serious.
Just FY for satire writers out there.
I thought that locked it in.
Definitely say.
He's explaining jokes to it.
Yeah, yeah.
I said, let me tell you how to explain.
Satire works.
No, I was just obviously making fun of Warren Buffett, who's really, he's got this candy company and stuff.
That was my one question.
That's what you got.
I did actually experiment with trying to find some compelling candy that would be, I don't know, maybe much better than other candy.
We tried various candy options, but I didn't find any.
I couldn't figure out a candy that was like just way better than other candy.
Like a little bit better, but not a lot better.
And so I was like, unless it's like really a great product, then you looked into this.
You looked at it.
I really looked into it.
Yeah, yeah, did you look at the lab?
Yeah, we tried a whole bunch of different candies.
Wow.
And it was like, hmm, there's not anything like that's obviously just way better.
So I don't want to just have like a pretty good candy.
There's like a great candy.
Yeah, some aces, some candy that's aces.
But we don't need another sort of like pretty good candy.
Yeah, there's plenty of those out there.
What does that look like when you suddenly get an idea like we should make candy?
You just call somebody and like, how does it, what are the steps that suddenly take place when you're like, because you do so many things.
I'm just fascinated by what that process looks like.
Rockets.
Tell them.
You got a guy you call?
Jim, I want to make candy.
Take it out.
I think I did ask for people on Twitter to send me candy that they thought was good.
Just deployed candy.
And I was like, well, what if some of this candy is like, you know, it's poisonous or something?
But whatever.
Like, you know, candy from strangers on the internet.
It could go wrong.
It's just not 100% safe.
But I did try a whole bunch of candy sent from strangers.
What's your favorite candy?
Well there was like a pretty good like peanut, like some pretty good peanut brittle ones, or like that peanut butter with a bunch of other stuff in it, and some pretty good chocolates, but nothing that was like blew me away.
And then there were people at SpaceX and Tesla that sent me some candy options, but nothing that was, it's not that I care about starting companies.
If there's a very compelling product or service, then that's the thing that is important, not the company.
A company is just an assemblage of people to create a compelling product or service.
And if a company does not provide great products and services, it should not exist.
There's no point in a company for the sake of being a company.
That's pointless.
Companies should only exist to provide great products and services.
A company is just literally a group of people.
So do we have to close or stay open?
I think there's a lot of companies out there that probably should just be disbanded because they don't make compelling products and services.
It's pointless.
And those people, better let those people do something else.
I think on that topic, I mean, the question that I just really, I mean, I feel so unqualified to be interviewing you right now.
I think we all do.
Why are we here?
What for you to like?
You're asked.
I'm not the one to ask for the sound.
I'm not the one who asked for the podcast.
You guys did.
Just to be clear.
I'm not pushing the podcast on you.
You guys came here.
We were like, I will stop by, you know, Texas.
Yeah, just to be clear, who was asking who.
I'm not like, you know, I know I hold a gun to your head for this podcast.
I'm sorry.
You could be on CNN right now.
Yeah.
John Lemon.
The real news organization.
Yeah.
I'm just throwing it out there.
I don't know.
Unfortunately, I just haven't, you know, I guess, you know, what was it you said the requirement for being a CNN job at CNN is over.
Are you a pervert?
I'm not perverted enough, I guess.
I don't know.
Not a big pedophile fan?
You know Babyloni headlines better than I do.
I think a lot of us fantasize about if we had lots and lots and lots of money, what we would do.
And you've done a lot of the things that a lot of us fantasize about.
Build cool robots, going to go to Mars, or fix traffic.
But most of us also think we'd become Batman.
Have you ever thought about what would that really look like to become, or would you go Batman or Iron Man Route?
What kind of a cry is on the bat?
A fruit bat or an insect bat?
I like the dragon.
It's big, scary.
You know, because most bats are either fruit or bugs.
Yeah, they eat fruit and bugs, like fruit Batman, insect Batman.
Fruit bat.
I need to read that spin-off comic.
It's a strange choice of creature to emulate, you know.
Yeah, that's true.
You think a different animal?
Like maybe monkeys that play pong with their brains?
Man?
Man does it?
Monkey Man.
Monkey Man, yeah, exactly.
Just very agile.
They're the smartest animal, right?
They can just swing.
Monkey Man.
Batman is more like Monkey Man, really.
True, because he's like, he's swinging around and very agile, climbing up things.
Yeah, throwing a battering is more like throwing a fruit.
Like, why can't he fly if he's Batman?
Bats can fly.
Yeah, that's true.
He glides very effectively, though.
So he's really fine.
Yeah, but that's like a Frank Squirrel.
It's more like flying squirrel man.
Squirrel Man.
It says less intimidating, I guess.
Yeah.
Oh, no, Squirrel Man.
It's just going to get us.
Not Squirrel Man again.
Have you ever thought of making that grappling hook he has?
That thing's sweet.
We need those.
You can probably make that.
Yeah, sure, you can make a grappling hook.
I mean, the thing is, like when you.
It's like they sort of skip the parts where Batman's always in the top of the building, but once you get to the ground floor, how do you get back to the top of the building?
It's like you're kind of huffing and puffing.
Yeah, you're seeing.
How do you get to the top of a skyscraper?
Even if you've got a grappling hook, how big is your grappling hook?
Like 50 stories?
How big is that cable?
It's not really feasible.
So do you just got to run up the stairs or take the elevator?
How do you get back up to the top of the skyscraper in Gotham City?
It's always tough as some tall building.
So Iron Man then.
Yeah.
Iron Man.
Well, because you're good at calculating the cost of things and stuff like that.
So would it be cheaper to become Batman or Iron Man or just pay every criminal that you encounter a salary to just stop being a criminal?
I think they're trying to get it.
I'd like to be Irony Man.
Irony Man.
I just defeat villains using the power of irony.
It's like, oh, too much irony.
I can't stand it.
Please, no, stop the irony.
I can't handle it anymore.
I give up.
I give up.
Too much irony.
That would be awesome.
That'd be totally awesome.
That would be awesome.
Yeah.
Don't make me use irony again.
Cheaper, too.
What are your thoughts on the metaverse, which takes technology to the next level and puts us in a virtual world?
Do you see that as being dangerous, hopeful for humanity?
What's your view on that?
Maybe we're in the metaverse right now.
It's just metaverse is all the way down.
I don't know if I necessarily buy into this metaverse stuff.
Although people talk to me a lot about it.
Web3.
Sure, you can put a TV on your nose.
I'm not sure that makes you in the metaverse.
It's like weird.
When I grew up, it's like, don't sit too close to TV, it's going to ruin your eyesight.
And now we're like, TV is literally right here.
I'm like, what?
Is that good for you?
I mean, have you tried these games?
The Oculus stuff.
Yeah, they're okay.
But it gives you motion sickness if you try to walk around.
Like you could do a video game on your sort of computer, console, or whatever, and you can be in a first-person game and move rapidly and not get motion sickness.
But if you try to do that with VR goggles, you get motion sickness.
It's like weird.
So you then have to teleport around with.
It's okay.
It doesn't feel that's the answer necessarily.
Do you have a Neuralink into the brain so that you don't have to have the glasses?
There you go.
Yeah.
A Neuralink, long-term, a sophisticated Neuralink, could put you fully in a virtual reality thing.
I guess what I'm getting at is, yeah, exactly what could go wrong, like the negative implications, the kind of dystopian implications that some are drawing out.
I think Jack Dorsey was really critical of the whole metaverse idea.
You see problems with people living in a virtual world and leaving the physical world for that.
I don't see someone strapping a friggin screen to their face all day and not wanting to ever leave.
There seems no way.
Does it feel like that to you?
It doesn't seem like that to me.
It gets uncomfortable to have this thing strapped to your head the whole time.
It definitely needs to be lighter.
Yeah, even if it's weight, I mean, if it was super light, it should still be like, I don't know.
It's not like you want to be there all day.
So I think we're far from disappearing into the metaverse.
This sounds just kind of buzzwordy.
And I don't know if it's like, hey, is this, you know, have it just gotten too old?
And am I one of those people who was dismissing the internet, whatever, 95 as being some fad or something that's never going to amount to anything?
Although I didn't, I was like saying like 95 was literally the internet is going to be transform humanity and it's going to be like, you know, prior information basically just went by osmosis.
Like unless a person called another person or carried a letter physically to another person, like how did you get information around?
The vast majority of information was literally person to person.
Then you had like the fax machine and stuff, but it's just like...
The way the metaverse is being sold right now is so underwhelming.
It's like you're going to be in, it's like Zoom meetings, but there's an avatar for the person next to you.
You maybe always want to get to design your avatar.
Like I said, I don't want to be like, you know, some old Codger sort of dismissing the internet in 95 is not amounting to anything.
So there's some danger that that's the case.
But I currently am unable to see a compelling metaverse situation or Web3 sounds like more marketing than reality.
I don't get it.
You know, and maybe I will.
But I don't get it yet.
Let me put it that way.
It's definitely not monkeys playing pong.
Let's just put it that way.
I just like to advertise for white claw.
Yeah.
White claw, real men, drink white claw.
Can we get our guys on the phone with white claw?
Sponsor after the fact.
If you want us to lead that in, then you won't pay us.
Well, you know, this is the first white claw, the first white claw ever drunk on the Babylon B podcast.
So that's great.
You hit a point in your life where you made plenty of money and you could do whatever.
What drives you to just keep going?
Yeah, it could be slipping my ties on a tropical island.
A robot server like yourself.
You know, windsurfing with naked models.
Some people do that.
So what drives you to, obviously you work in the marketplace.
Wait a second.
Why am I not?
Why am I just realizing everything?
I've been wrong all this time.
Why am I working 90 hours a week?
This is crazy.
Because it always fascinates me with the idea of like, I've made it.
People always want to be able to say, I've made it.
I've arrived.
Yeah.
And like, how do you, you know, you hit those little islands in your life and you actually have to break yourself of that mindset.
And what are ways that you break yourself of that mindset and keep on going?
I didn't put all this effort into bullying SpaceX and Tesla because I thought they were easy ways to make money.
I mean, anyone who starts a car company thinking it's an easy way to make money is a fool.
There are only two car companies that have not gone bankrupt in the history of the United States, and that's Ford and Tesla.
And Tesla came within inches of going bankrupt multiple times, as did SpaceX.
So, right, and like who starts a rocket company think it's going to be successful?
I saw it both, I mean, both those companies, I thought, had less than a 10% chance of success.
And I thought it was overwhelmingly likely that I would lose the money that I made from PayPal.
You know, I came to North America when I was 17, just by myself.
And I had a few thousand dollars in traveler's checks, back when traveler's checks were a thing, you know.
In Canadian dollars.
I landed in Montreal.
I have some family in Canada.
And my mom's uncle lived in Montreal.
But we didn't even know his phone number.
So I land in Montreal and my mom says, oh, I just got a letter back from my uncle.
He's in Minnesota or something.
So I'm like, oh, okay, I don't know what to do now.
It's like just stayed in a youth hostel and bought a bus ticket across Canada and worked in various odd jobs and stuff.
I worked on my mom's cousin's farm, wheat farm in Saskatchewan for six weeks.
That's where I had my 18th birthday, actually.
Worked in the lumber mill, chainsawed logs, and did various odd jobs.
And then went to college in Canada for a couple of years.
I paid my own way through college, by the way.
But in Canada, it's easier because the college is more subsidized.
And I was a Canadian citizen through my mom.
And I got some scholarships and loans and stuff.
And then I applied to the University of Pennsylvania and didn't think I'd be able to go because tuition is really high, but they gave me a scholarship and loans and stuff.
So I was able to go there.
I graduated with about $100,000 in student debt.
And I was going to do grad studies at Stanford and decided to put that on hold to try starting an internet company.
I actually tried to get a job at Netscape, but they didn't, I'd send my resume and didn't get any response.
So I was like, okay, I guess I can't get a job at the, there are only a few internet companies that can get a job at any of them.
So I was like, I guess I want to do something on the internet.
I've got to swap my own company.
But I ended up writing the first maps and directions on the internet.
I wrote it personally.
Maps, directions, yellow pages, white pages, on a puny computer, like with hardly any, so you had to be like, the code had to be super tight.
I even have some patents on like maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and stuff from ages ago.
They're lapsed now, but that company ended up getting bought by Compaq for about $300 million.
I owned 7% of the company, so I got like $20 million from that.
Put most of it into X.com, which merged with Confinity to create PayPal.
And then I got about $180 million from that.
And I put all of that into SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.
I've just basically kept all the chips on the table.
Just like, let's play another round.
And most people take the chips off the table, or at least some of their chips.
And then SpaceX and Tesla ended up being valuable, and that's where I am.
But the reason for SpaceX and Tesla is, you know, Tesla, if you say, how would you assess the historical good of Tesla?
I'd say it's the degree to which Tesla accelerated sustainable energy.
And I've been interested in electric cars for a long time, since maybe high school, certainly early college.
My original interest in electric vehicles was not so much due to environmental concerns, but rather from the concern that we'd run out of oil eventually and or become extremely scarce and expensive, and then civilization would collapse because we couldn't drive cars or run power plants and stuff.
So we needed some form of sustainable energy generation and consumption, or civilization is going to collapse.
So that was my original interest in electric vehicles and solar energy.
And then I do think there's some risk of negatively affecting the climate.
As you increase the CO2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere, you increase the risk of something going wrong.
I'm not in the camp of the super alarmist global warming.
I don't think we're screwed because of the current possible million of CO2 in the ocean's atmosphere.
I think this is actually not a terrible level.
However, there's so much inertia in the direction of mining and burning hydrocarbons that the world is still overwhelmingly dependent on mining and burning hydrocarbons.
So if this continues and you start really driving up the the CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere, then there's this increased risk of accelerating climate change, basically warming up the oceans and raising the sea level.
So I think that's probably just not a wise risk to take.
Since we will, in any case, have to transition to sustainable energy long term because we will eventually run out of oil and coal to minor burn, then why run the experiment to see if something bad will happen with a high CO2 concentration in the ocean's atmosphere.
It's a pointless experiment.
We know we have to get to some sustainable energy economy.
It's totological.
So I think we should try to get there sooner so as not to run the risk of climate change.
Climate change would not be catastrophic to civilization, but it would be very disruptive.
Humans love living right on the ocean.
So it's like, we're almost like a thermometer.
It's like if we're living right on the beach, so even small changes in the sea level, in sea level will put a lot of houses underwater.
Even little changes have to be big.
We've just inherently created civilization that is highly sensitive to changes in temperature.
A lot of politicians who are alarmist about this stuff buy homes right on the water, though, don't they?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sort of into vilifying the oil and gas industry, because I think the reality is if we don't have oil and gas right now, civilization would collapse and everyone would be starving.
So we obviously need oil and gas right now.
It would be absurd to just stop it.
It's not feasible.
But I do think we should be trying to accelerate progress towards a sustainable energy future, not slow it down.
I think it's just a sensible thing to do to try to move faster to a sustainable energy economy rather than slower, because that reduces the risk of the climate experiment.
And like I said, since we know we have to get to a sustainable energy economy anyway, why run this experiment?
It's just not smart.
Anyway, so the fundamental good of Tesla, I think, is by, you know, should we measure by how many years did Tesla accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy?
10 years, 20 years?
You know, that's like the fundamental good of the company.
But to Ethan's point, he's asking, like, why not?
Like, is that your answer for why you keep going?
It's because these things make a difference.
They make a difference ultimately for the flourishing of humanity, for the longevity of humanity.
Is that why you're not on a beach somewhere sipping my tizer white cloths?
Yeah.
I don't actually drink a lot of white clothes.
This is not about trying to enrich myself.
I do not live a life of conspicuous consumption.
I work very long hours.
But I think what Tesla is doing is important to the future.
And that's why I keep doing it.
And I think it's something that I think is Tesla increases the probability that the future will be good for humanity.
And then for SpaceX, I think it's important that we take the actions, like that we become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species.
This is an exciting, inspiring future.
You need to have things that when you wake up in the morning, you're excited about the future.
Why live if it's all about solving problems or being miserable?
Why live?
So there's got to be things that are inspiring, that get you in the heart.
And I think space is one of those things.
So look at the Apollo program and sending people to the moon in 69.
And wasn't that a great thing for all of humanity?
Great thing.
And if you ask people, what are some of the greatest things that humanity has ever done?
That would be one of them.
And I think around the world people would agree with that.
Do you believe it really happened?
Yes, I do get that question.
This is, yeah.
We went to the moon not just once, but several times.
And I think the Russians would have called us out on that one if it wasn't true, you know.
To say the least.
This is like the, yeah, we went to the moon.
The Russians didn't like us at the time.
Yeah, but Russians, so it's not a huge fan of ours.
They weren't congratulated.
They were looking at us through telescopes and like, is this real or why?
They would have called us if it wasn't, that's for sure.
It was a huge victory, you know, ideological victory for the United States and Western civilization.
But anyway, the point is like we want to have an exciting, inspiring future.
And one where we are a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, I think, is a much more exciting and inspiring future than one where we are forever confined to Earth and never go back to the moon.
And the moon was our high watermark, and that's all we ever did.
That's depressing.
And there's also, from a long-term basis, if we're a multi-planet species, it's like life insurance for life itself, not just for humans, but for all the creatures on Earth.
Because we bring them with us.
And they can't build spaceships.
So we're, in effect, the steward of life.
And we can make Mars like another planet with life on it.
It's probably a dangerous analogy to use, but it's a bit like Noah's Ark.
But we'd bring more than two of every creature, because it's a little incestuous, frankly.
I mean, how does this work?
Second generation.
And did he hate the dinosaurs?
Why is it like F you to the dinosaurs?
Gotta get answers.
It's like pro-incest, bad on dinosaurs.
I don't get it.
Anyway, and it would have to be a very big boat.
But there's, you know, it's a metaphor, perhaps.
I don't know.
So anyway, so there's some risk, especially over a long period of time, that something calamitous would happen to Earth.
And if we're just on one planet, that would be the end of life itself.
And certainly the sun is slowly expanding.
So the Earth's roughly four and a half billion years old.
Some people might disagree with that, but it appears to be that way.
And Roughly half a billion years, the sun will expand to make Earth probably uninhabitable.
In a billion years, definitely uninhabitable.
So basically, if intelligent life had taken 10% longer to evolve on Earth, then we would never have evolved at all because it would be destroyed because the oceans would boil and we wouldn't be able to exist.
I mean, no matter what, the universe will end in heat death, though, right?
Eventually.
So it's all futile to some extent if you go far enough.
Yeah, I mean, I think if heat death is the outcome of the universe, it really is all about the journey.
Like, you know, they said, like, you know, the journey is half the fun as the journey or whatever.
Well, if heat death is the end of the universe, the journey is all the fun.
Can we just evolve heat resistance, become like lava beings?
It's not, it's cold.
It cools eventually with entropy.
I'm not a scientist.
It's the death of heat.
Can we just evolve to that?
Entropy, entropy, no escaping that from me.
Entropy, the ultimate enemy.
You thought the devil was bad?
Try entropy.
Okay.
Try getting away from that.
But yeah, I mean, yes, I mean, technically, being a multi-planet species would increase the probable lifespan of civilization and life as we know it.
So, I mean, humans don't live forever.
But just because we don't live forever does not mean that civilization cannot live much longer than we do.
A civilization lives much longer than any individual human.
So this is not about escaping to Mars.
This is simply, I mean, I will die probably long before Mars is a self-sustaining civilization.
It's just, I think, something we should do in order to have a much longer probable lifespan of civilization.
And it's interesting and exciting.
And Mars is like a is like an essential next step.
There are these filters, they're called the great filters.
Because you have to say, where are the aliens?
It's like the Fermi paradox.
Where are the aliens?
If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, shouldn't they be everywhere by now?
And I'm not aware of any evidence for aliens.
People ask me about that too.
Where are the aliens?
I'm like, man, if anyone would know about evidence of aliens, it would be me.
And I've seen nothing.
So I think it may have been Carl Sagan who said, you know, there's like we're either alone in the galaxy or there are a lot of aliens and each answer is arguably equally terrifying.
It's like, hey, we found aliens are on their way.
Too bad it's the invasion fleet, you know, so I don't know.
It's like, where are the aliens?
Like, maybe there aren't any in this galaxy.
And maybe what we have here is a very, very rare situation.
A brief flickering of consciousness in the dark, like a little candle in a vast darkness.
And we should not let that little candle go out.
So my dad's a rocket scientist at Bowling.
And he had a question.
Rocket engineer.
Well, whatever.
Well, when people say rocket scientists, they really mean rocket engineer.
Okay, yeah.
So he's a rocket engineer.
And he says, at what Mach number does Starship endure max Q, maximum dynamic pressure?
How much pressure is that?
Does that make any sense to you?
Yeah.
So yeah, max Q, maximum dynamic pressure is when you're at a combination of speed and atmospheric density such that the wind force on the rocket is the highest.
And so as you climb higher and higher, the atmospheric density decays exponentially.
And so you hit this point of combination of velocity and air density, which is maximum dynamic pressure or maximum Q.
And this is mostly a function of thrust to weight.
So if you have a low thrust to weight rocket, you will have typically a lower max Q.
And if you have a high thrust to weight rocket, you will have a higher max Q if you do not throttle down.
And so it also kind of depends on what trajectory you're flying.
Are you flying a low earth orbit trajectory, single burn insertion, or a say a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a low perigee, then you'll have a higher max Q because you'll spend more time going sort of horizontal instead of vertical.
Getting to orbit is mostly about your, what getting to orbit is, is about your velocity parallel to the Earth's surface.
So around Mach 23 to Mach 25, roughly 23-ish times the speed of sound is when you reach orbital velocity, roughly 17,000 miles an hour.
And that's what it means to go up and stay up.
You only need height in order to get out of the high density portion of the atmosphere so that you don't slow down.
No no, that was correct.
I disagree.
I disagree.
I give a totally different answer.
I don't have time to get into it.
No, it all checks out.
It all checks out.
Yeah, so I mean, typically a rocket is going to hit max Q somewhere between Mach 1.4 and 1.8 and that Q level is going to be maybe 400 to 800 pounds per square foot.
Now a Starship is intended to have a high-ish thrust to weight because with a fully reusable rocket the cost of propellant starts to become significant whereas if you have an expandable rocket or a partially reusable rocket the cost of propellant is tiny compared to the cost of the rocket.
So you actually want a higher thrust to weight to minimize cost per ton to orbit with a fully reusable rocket than you would for an expendable.
So probably Starship will have at least a 1.3, if not closer to a 1.5 thrust to weight, which would, without throttling down, which aspirationally we would not throttle down, would have quite a high Q, maybe as high as 1,000 or even 1,200 pounds per square foot.
So that's probably at what velocity?
I mean, I'd guess Mach 1.4 to 1.5, something like that.
Okay, well, my dad very much enjoyed that answer, I'm sure.
I think as a male feminist, though, one thing about the rockets is the stallic symbology.
What would it take to get some more vaginal-shaped rockets?
Just for Equality.
Can we make that happen?
Aerodynamics and hydrodynamics is going to give you a serious answer.
Share similar properties, whether biological or mechanical.
Okay.
Good answer.
That's all I got.
I don't know rocket science.
Robots.
Yeah, Tesla bot.
So you're creating robots.
Have you ever seen a sci-fi movie in your life?
Never.
Okay.
Maybe not.
You know, like things terminating.
What's the worst that could happen?
The robots are not the scary part.
The scary part is AGI or artificial general intelligence, digital superintelligence that far exceeds human intelligence.
And if there's a digital superintelligence that is just vastly smarter than the smartest human, we could lose control of it.
And then it could do something bad potentially.
These things are just probabilities, they're not certainties.
So it's not the robot, like I said, it's not the robots, it's the digital superintelligence to be concerned about.
I think this is definitely one of the issues that we need to be concerned about as an existential risk.
I think we should have a regulatory agency that oversees advanced AI.
Because, you know, generally, I do think there are important roles for the government, and one of those roles is in regulation of industry to make sure that the companies are not making shortcuts that endanger the public.
So the FAA has done generally a great job of ensuring that aircraft are safe.
It's literally safer to fly on an American airline or any sort of airline overseen by the FAA than it is to live in your house.
Just to give people a sense of, well, you're more likely to die.
Your probable lifespan is less if you lived your entire life in your house than if you lived on a plane.
Because in your house, you can get murdered by a spouse, get bitten by a louse.
But if you live in a plane in Afghanistan, that's not maybe the case.
Well, if it's not overseen by a regulator like the FAA, then it's not necessarily going to meet the same safety standards.
What if your spouse is on the plane?
Well, I think the planes have, you know, they have means of stuffing, like you can't, it's hard to bring a gun on a plane and even a knife or even a bottle of lotion at this point.
If your spouse couldn't bring any of those things, that's fine.
I mean, they don't just punch you with a or stab you with a spork or something like that.
Plastic spork.
It's hard to kill someone with a spork.
And then planes also have, like, the flight attendants are trained in first aid.
They've got like, they can do CPR.
They've got defibrillators.
If somebody's having medical issues, they'll immediately land the plane and an ambulance will meet you at the airport.
So you're not going to drown the bathtub or get electrocuted by a toaster or have your house burned down because of the toaster.
By the way, toasters cause a lot of houses to burn down.
So one of the main causes of house burning down are toasters and dryers.
There's also a decent chance there's a doctor on the plane at any given time, right?
That happens all the time.
Like a doctor is like treating somebody on the plane in your house, you know.
Yeah, so planes are very safe.
And I mean, generally speaking, the FDA does a good job of overseeing food and drugs.
This might be a bit of a conservative bias on, you know, where at times there's an asymmetry with the FDA where something that could help a lot of people is not approved because it might hurt a small number of people.
So there's a sort of like a bit of an asymmetry.
So regulators in general can have a bit of an asymmetry where they're punished a lot for something going wrong, but not rewarded enough for something going right.
So that's just a general challenge with the punishment and reward of regulators.
They can be a little conservative.
But I think there should be a regulatory agency to oversee anything that is a danger to the public.
And I think AGI could be a danger to the public, so therefore should have some oversight.
And normally regulatory agencies are very reactive.
So like for seatbelts, for example, which lack of seatbelts caused, I don't know, 10 million deaths worldwide.
I mean, a massive number.
And the car industry fought seatbelts for a very long time.
And eventually, after many deaths, the Department of Transport, NHTSA, which oversees the regulatory body for cars, said all cars have to have seatbelts.
You can't just not have a seatbelt.
But that, I don't know, took 15 years or something, or maybe longer, maybe 20 years before seatbelts were mandated.
And then baby seats are a lot of kids and babies died because they're just sitting on the seat with nothing.
I mean, I kind of grew up sitting on a seat with nothing.
We'd ride in the bed of the truck.
Yeah.
Seriously, I ride in the bed of the pickup truck for hours.
Survivor bias or something.
I was fine.
I was fine, but if there was an accident, it was game over.
So you do see some good in government when it comes to regulation and stuff like that.
But you don't generally think the government can spend your money more effectively than you can.
Yeah, I mean, I would say generally I'm like, I think pretty moderate.
I'm not an extreme libertarian.
I think there are roles for the government that make sense.
I don't think we necessarily want a private army or private police force or private...
I think there's certain things that are probably the right role for the government.
But anything done by the government is going to be inefficient because the government is a monopoly.
People that don't like corporations should not somehow think that the government is much better because the government is a corporation in the limit.
It is the ultimate corporation with a monopoly on violence.
So I think the right role for the government is to act in a regulatory capacity.
But we should aspire to have the government be a limited actor in the economy.
So you could say what percentage of economic output should be governed?
And maybe a third or something like that.
Once you start getting above 50% government, I think that's problematic.
So You can look at countries like East and West Germany, North and South Korea, and there was essentially an arbitrary line drawn out to divide the countries.
And East Germany was 100% government.
West Germany was, I don't know, probably at least 40% government.
They're relatively socialist.
And yet the GDP per capita of West Germany was, I think, five times higher than East Germany.
So that just shows you just how big of a difference it is if you have something that's close to half government versus 100% government.
Private sector is probably a factor of 10 more efficient than the government.
And this is also true of just generally.
If you have a monopolistic private corporation, then the forcing function for serving the customer is weak.
But at least private corporations can go bankrupt, and the government cannot go bankrupt unless the people go bankrupt.
Basically, unless it exhausts extracting money from the population.
Well, they're trying their best.
Yeah.
It's just, you know, so it's just, you want to just, knowing that the government is inefficient as any large monopolistic corporation would be, and it is the ultimate large monopolistic corporation, we should minimize how much the government does.
Keep it to what is essential and not go beyond that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, the conservative concern with that is you start to give them, you know, you give them a foothold and then they're just going to keep going.
Like you give them a regulatory capacity over something like AGI and then they're just going to start to overreach more and more.
Because that's what we've seen in the past.
You give them an inch and they take a mile.
Yeah, but I mean, does anyone realistically want to delete the FAA or the FDA?
Probably somebody.
We've got an anarchist in the corner.
I mean, usually if you take, like, you go to the store, like, you buy some whatever steak or something from the store, and it's like, it's like poisonous, you know, or like we take for granted that the food we buy at the store is not going to kill us, you know, because some company cut costs and decided that having E. coli and salmonella is, you know, who cares?
Type of thing.
So I think, you know, like we take for granted that the food we buy at the stores is not poisonous and that the drugs we buy is extremely unlikely.
Like the drugs will be consistent and they will do what they say they're going to do.
Except for the sort of vitamin supplements industry, which can basically is unregulated.
And so they can say things that are not true and people still buy it.
Anyway, so it's like, I think, you know, you really want, like, you can think of like the you want some kind of referee on the field.
So like, you know, for, you know, like it's like a, if you're watching, say, a football game or something like basketball, there's referees.
Okay, so would the games be better or worse without a referee?
They'd be worse.
You know?
So I think like the role of a referee in games is important.
And so the government's role as a referee, I think, is also important.
You just don't want to have the government be kind of on the field as a player.
It would be weird if the referees just suddenly started playing ball.
Probably not, the game would not be as good.
Well, and other things that make me think you've never seen a sci-fi movie before, you have Neuralink.
So you can like put things in people's brain or something.
What's that like?
What's that like?
Is it cool?
Do you like it?
Do you like it?
Well, try it.
You might like it.
Not really found in brains.
Yeah, with Neuralink, Neuralink is in part, well, in fact, the reason I created Neuralink was long term as a risk mitigation for digital superintelligence in that if we are able to effectively achieve symbiosis with digital intelligence,
then we're sort of, the collective human will is better able to steer things in a direction that we'd like.
Or even with benign AI, at least go along for the ride.
So because even with a benign superintelligence, if it's so much smarter than us that it really can't even communicate effectively because it's so fast, and then talking to us is like talking to a tree.
Because if you do a stop motion on a tree, a tree is communicating with its environment just very slowly.
It's looking for water.
We're just looking for water.
The ranch is looking for sun.
And the tree has movement.
It's just very slow.
And we're already at this point partially a cyborg.
We're de facto sort of a cyborg in that our phones and computers and applications are a digital extension of ourselves.
At this point, if somebody leaves their phone behind, it's like missing limb syndrome.
The phone is almost like a part of you.
But the issue with that symbiosis is that the data rate is extremely slow.
So how fast can you communicate with your phone using two thumbs?
10 bits per second?
It's very low, the data rate.
And if computers can, which they can, communicate at a billion bits per second or more, and we're communicating with them at 10 bits per second, then that's just an extremely slow communication link.
And it inhibits symbiosis with our sort of tertiary digital layer.
So we've got sort of basically like a primal layer, which is like our limbic system.
Basically, it's our instincts and a lot of our emotions.
And it's kind of like the reptile brain situation.
And then you've got the cortex, which is like the thinking part of the brain, the planning and whatnot.
And so that's like the second layer.
And then our phones and computers are our tertiary layer.
But there's just a bandwidth limitation.
We're very slow to communicate.
But with a neural link, you can increase the communication bandwidth by many orders of magnitude, maybe by a thousand or more.
So you're talking about output from the brain to other devices.
Yeah, primarily.
Yeah.
Not input to the brain.
And it would be both ways.
Our input is much less constrained than our output because of vision.
So, you know, rough approximation is like our input because of vision is like maybe a million times roughly.
Some people are online are going to argue with this, but the input is many orders of magnitude higher than output because of vision.
A picture says a thousand words and a video says, I don't know, a hundred thousand words.
This is why a meme can communicate so much more than a few words.
Now, this is obviously very esoteric, and I'm not sure this will resonate with a lot of people.
Oh, we need to increase the bandwidth between our cortex and our digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude in order to not lose symbiosis with digital intelligence.
So, this is quite esoteric, but that's the long-term existential risk mitigation of Neuralink, which we may or may not achieve.
I'm not saying we will achieve this, but it's at least an attempt to solve that.
Then, along the way, Neuralink can solve a lot of brain issues.
Like, if you've got like a severed spine or something, so like one of the first application we're looking to solve is implanting Neuralink in someone who has a quadriplegic or tetraplegic.
So, like they have no, they can't move their arms and legs or maybe not even really move most of their face.
They can like maybe blink or something like that, you know, like Stephen Walking.
Or he didn't have to have severed spine, but he's like, there are various mechanical and other mechanical breakages or diseases that break the link between your brain and body.
And Neuralink can solve that.
It can certainly, we're confident Neuralink can enable someone who is a tetraplegic to operate a phone or a computer faster than someone who has hands, working hands.
And we've shown this, for example, with the monkey being able to play video games.
So you can play a bunch of games, not just Pong.
Pong is currently its favorite game.
I didn't even know monkeys could play Pong in the first place.
Yeah, monkeys can play Pong with their hand.
Yeah, monkeys have good reflexes.
So, and then that's how it starts off.
Train a monkey to play Pong with a joystick.
And then we look at the signals that the monkey's brain is sending.
And then we read those signals and then we transfer the signals directly to the game.
And then we take the joystick away.
And the monkey's just playing basically telepathic mind pong.
Wow.
That's wild.
Yeah, so we recently got what we think is a world record in bits per second from any neural device.
We're starting to approach 10 bits per second, which is not actually, but it's more than anyone else has achieved in a useful way.
Close to 10 useful bits per second is where we are.
And we'll increase that dramatically over time.
So anyway, we obviously want to make sure the device is extremely safe and extremely well tested.
Our standards go far beyond what is required from a regulatory standpoint.
But we're hoping to do our first Neuralink into a human next year.
And like I said, enable someone who has almost no movement capability to operate a phone As fast or we think faster over time than someone who has working hands.
So I think that that would be quite a significant thing and would help a lot of people.
And there are many such applications.
And I'm increasingly confident that we can implant a second neural nice.
So one that accesses the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex and then a second one that is past where the injury is.
So if you've got a separate, you know, basically where are the neurons still functional and implant a second neural link device and have the two devices talk to each other and just transfer the signals across the wherever broke.
Yeah, because it's like a broken circuit.
So if you get a broken circuit, you basically just do a signal transfer between the two.
And you don't necessarily even need to know what all those signals are.
You just need to transfer the signals.
So just like if you have an Ethernet cable, you don't need to know what's on the Ethernet cable for the cable to work.
Or a wireless ETH from one wireless Ethernet Wi-Fi box to another wireless Ethernet Wi-Fi box.
You don't need to know what the contents of the signal are in order to transfer the signal.
So I'm confident that that such thing is possible.
I'm not saying we will do it.
I don't know if that set unreasonable expectations, but I would say I'm certain that it is possible.
And we will try to make it happen, which would then enable people to walk again and use their hands.
And I think long-term probably restore full body functionality to somebody who has none.
Did you know that we created an Elon Musk subscription tier at one point on the B?
Did you ever see that?
No.
You didn't know that we did that?
Yeah, you had interacted with us a couple of times, and so we were like, wooing you as a subscriber, come subscribe.
But we created our own tier for you.
What was the fee on the tier?
I don't remember what it was.
I think it was like, it was the highest our payment.
It was like $9,999 a month or something.
But people were signing up for it.
People were actually signing up for it, though.
Every time I would check, I'd be like, is it him?
Is it him?
It was random people who picked it thinking it was a joke and it was actually charging their credit cards.
We had all these angry people who are like, my wife is going to kill me if you don't refund this charge.
So we had to take the Elon Musk tier down.
So we took it down, I guess, before you could find it.
But it was there.
We had it there for you.
Well, thanks.
I guess that's a compliment to you, I think.
All right.
Very eloquently put.
Well, shall we land the plane here with the 10 questions?
So we.
This is a podcast started in Kyle's garage.
We ask every guest the same 10 questions at the end of the interview.
We never anticipated we would be asking Elon Musk these 10 questions.
These are rapid fire, so you can answer them as quick as you want.
Yeah.
Or you can go on forever.
Here, call.
Have you ever met Christian rap artist, Carmen?
I mean, the only common musician I'm aware of is Carmen Miranda.
She would dance with a fruit ball on her head.
Yeah, fruit head.
Yeah.
And you never met her?
No, she died a while ago.
All right.
Cool.
Look them up.
Are you more of a Calvinist or an Armenian?
Or Armenian?
Yeah.
Like predestination or a free one.
Or you could say the two of you.
No, no, no.
I mean, I'm like, that's an interesting dichotomy.
Are those the only two choices?
Or you're a Calvinist?
The only people that know what an Argentina are Calvinists, right?
So free will or predestination is the verb.
No, determinism.
It's kind of the more secular version of that.
I guess my mind would say determinism and my heart says very well.
Yeah, I mean when I grew up I was funny enough I went to Anglican Sunday school, you know, Church of England basically and but I was also sent to Hebrew preschool although I'm not Jewish, but nonetheless I was seeing Haba Nigila one day and Jesus Aloha the next.
And, you know, it's fine if you're a kid, you know, and Santa Claus and like, you know, so, yeah.
Yeah, that answers the question.
Yeah.
So you get to add one book to the Bible.
What is it?
You guys have never updated these questions to apply more broadly at any point.
They're unchangeable.
Yeah.
They're like the Ten Commandments at this point.
I mean a little bit lower.
Maybe we can have a chapter past Revelations.
But is there a happy ending here?
Like the Revelations Part 2, the happy ending?
Well, you know if there's like a really good book you think everyone should read because it would be in the back of the Bible.
Everyone should read this book.
How many people have actually read the Bible?
Fewer than probably say they have.
Oh yeah.
I mean at one point I, you know, when I was a kid I was like, I had this existential crisis and I was trying to figure out what's the meaning of life.
And I was like, oh, it all means nothing.
It's all I read like a whole bunch of religious books, including the Bible.
And I'm like, there's a bunch of things now they didn't teach you in Sunday school.
Son of Gomorrah, dark.
Yikes.
God sure changes his mind from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
I'm like, whoa.
That's pretty vengeful in the Old Testament.
What was the question?
You get to pick a book to add to the Bible.
A book.
At the Hitchhiker's Edge of the Galaxy.
Great book.
Yeah.
Great book.
Cigars or pipes?
You know, I'm not sure I've ever really smoked a pipe my grandfather did.
It kind of looks cool, but I have smoked cigars.
And I think, you know, for a celebratory occasion, like cigars and whiskey, it's a pretty good combo.
You get to hang out with any three people, living or dead.
Who are they?
It's always hard to think of like three people.
Ethan, Kyle, Seth.
You're hanging.
Yeah, three right here.
That's true.
Jeff Bezos.
I wouldn't rather say that as necessarily like I think there's a lot of people that would be interesting to talk to.
You know, I don't know.
Is it living or dead, he said?
Yeah.
Living or dead?
This is just, you know, stream of consciousness, not like a carefully thought out answer, but it would be like, I don't know, like Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, maybe Newton or Einstein.
Okay.
It's a good group.
Bunch of white men.
Yeah.
I was drinking white clonks.
Cleopatra sounds fun.
Whiskey or beer, or I guess.
100%.
You went right for the whiskey.
Nice.
What would be the first thing you would do as president?
Well, the presidency in the U.S. is designed to be a weak position, or relatively weak position.
Because obviously the founders of the country did not want to create a monarch.
They wanted to avoid a king situation.
So the presidency in the U.S. is meant to be weaker than say in a parliamentary system where the majority, essentially the Speaker of the House would be the prime minister or president.
So you have to say what can you do as the president?
In the US, there's a lot of limitations.
And unless you have the support of Congress, you obviously cannot change the laws.
But I probably aspire to reduce the size of government and take a look at the regulatory situation and just make sure there's good garbage collection of regulations.
So if they're outdated, as there are many outdated and unnecessary regulations, but there's a strong forcing function for creating new laws and regulations, but a weak forcing function for getting rid of bad laws and regulations.
And I think this is just generally a problem as civilization ages without war, where there are new laws and regulations created every year.
And so there's more and more constraints on what you can do.
But there's very little effort put to remove laws and regulations.
And so this is like hardening of the arteries of civilization.
And eventually it'll be like Gullovis Travels where you're just tied down by thousands of little strings.
And it's not like any one string is the issue, but there's so many strings that you can't get anything done.
That's a big part of why I moved to Texas.
It's just like there's just fewer strings tying you down.
So yeah.
I think the value of someone just being a very competent executive officer is undervalued in a president.
Just like how good are you at running things and getting things done?
Because if you're the president, you're kind of like the CEO of the country.
And so are you good at doing things?
Are you effective and productive?
You recently said a CEO is a meaningless title.
I'm just curious how that likely.
Well, the CEO is not like a legal title.
I was just saying that there are all these titles or corporations that are kind of made up.
And you can see what is actually required for a corporation when you fill out the form to create one.
And so you need a president, a secretary, and a treasurer.
Same thing as if you're forming a chess club or a glee club or something like that.
Same thing.
And actually technically all three can be the same person.
So that's what's legally required.
If you don't have those three things, you cannot function as a corporation.
Everything else, like a general counsel, CFO, CEO, these are all made up.
They have no legal, no meaningful legal bearing.
So you only need those president, secretary, and treasurer.
So there's all these like CXO titles, which just are somewhat like resume inflators.
I was just making the point that people think CO is a real title, but it's not.
It's not a legally meaningful title.
You need someone who is defined as the president.
That's it.
For now, you have chief marketing officer, chief information officer, chief everything officer.
I sort of think we should have a chief sorcery officer.
This is our SVP of sorcery.
Grace titles.
Yeah, yeah.
Question number eight, the Master General.
Oh yeah, have you ever punched anyone or have you ever been punched?
You got any cool punching stories?
If you don't have an answer for that, we have a follow-up.
It's even worse.
I don't know about cool punching stories, but where I grew up was extremely violent.
I never started a fight.
Except with my brother, actually.
One exception.
I did beat my brother up, which I don't know.
That's how it goes.
We all did that.
South Africa when I was growing up was just an inherently very violent place.
I got punched in the face many times.
I almost got beaten to death once.
So many times.
And I think if you have not been punched in the face with a fist, you don't know what you have no idea what it's like.
Shocking sensation.
Shocking sensation.
Have you been punched, Ethan?
Yeah, just by like high school kids.
Yeah.
Not really.
It's just like your face never touches anything and then suddenly.
Yeah, punched in the nose.
Like, you can't even see straight.
So, yeah.
It's funny that people think words are so sensitive to words.
It's like, man, if you've ever been punched in the face, words don't mean nothing.
All right, question number nine.
You get to go to one concert, any band in history.
Who do you go see?
Any band in history?
I don't know.
Take your pick.
Maybe the Rolling Stones are there, you know, when the peak Rolling Stones seems like...
And Hay Day, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good pick.
All right, final question to close our time out here.
Yeah, I mean, we're here.
You know, the Babylon B is a Christian organization, you know, and we're a ministry.
Well, how come we're doing the show on a Sunday?
Why are you churches?
Why aren't you heathens in church?
Exactly.
So we have to make a church.
This is supposed to be a day of rest.
We did Zoom church.
To justify.
Like God said, don't work on Sundays.
Okay.
Liz, you guys are going to straighten it off for this one.
Get into the whole Jesus rest thing.
Straight hell.
This is true.
This is true.
So, okay, so to make this church, we have to do, we have to make sure.
We're wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
On the show.
Personal Lords and Savior.
it's a quick prayer I mean let's just say like I agree with the principles that Jesus advocated and And that There's great wisdom in what in the teachings of Jesus, and I agree with those teachings.
And things like tone the other cheek are very important because, as opposed to an eye for an eye, an eye for an eye leads everyone blind.
So forgiveness, you know, is important and treating people as you would wish to be treated.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
Very important.
So it's like a 60-70% as Einstein would say, I believe in the God of Spinoza.
So, but hey, if you know, if Jesus is saving people, I mean, I wouldn't stand in his way.
You know, like, I'll be sure, I'll be saved.
Why not?
Sweet, we did it.
Yeah.
I think he just said yes.
We got him.
We got him.
We got the water to be saved.
Sounds good.
Do I get baptized or anything with that?
I was baptized.
Oh, okay.
Anglican.
Yeah, he's done.
They got you in the water.
Just a baby.
Cool.
This is like.
Second?
Yeah.
I even had a blood and body of Christ, which was kind of weird, you know, if you're a kid, like, you get to give you some weird-tasting, you know, biscuit and wine.
And I'm like, what the hell is this?
And I'm like, isn't this kind of weird?
Just cut it off when he said yes.
Yeah.
I'm like, isn't this some like fingering?
Weird metaphor for cannibalism or something?
I don't get it.
Like, what?
What the hell?
I remember thinking that was just crazy when I was a kid.
And I'm like, this is like, whoa, you know.
I mean, even as a metaphor, it's kind of odd, you know?
So it's like, and should we be giving alcohol to minors?
I was like.
We do grape juice.
We're baptized.
Okay.
I think it's unusual to even be thinking about that as a kid.
Like, as a kid, you just go through the motions.
And then it's later on that you think, wait a minute, what does this actually represent?
What am I doing?
You know, when I was a kid, I was like, is this actually blood and body?
What?
What?
You know, I don't know if I want to eat somebody.
And then I was like, what is this?
I did it anyway.
I'm like, this seems like, okay, man, I don't know if this is just pretty odd.
I remember thinking that even at age five.
So I was like, you know.
And I know I was definitely like, you know, at Sunday school there, like, when they were telling me all the stories and I was like asking questions and like, they really were upset that I was asking questions.
And I was like, you know, Jesus fed the crowd with like five loaves of bread and three fish.
You know, like, how big was the crowd?
And like, where did the fish and bread come from?
Did it like from his cloak or something?
Like, because I was like reading books and I was like, is this like materialized?
I don't know.
Where did it come from?
You know, like, how did it.
Would you like take a bite of the bread and would just come back to being a full bread?
Yeah, you look away and it's a mechanic back up.
They left out the details.
Where did the universe come from?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I'm not saying I know all the answers here.
I'm just, you know, it's just Jesus was obviously very pro-alcohol, you know, because one of his miracles was turning water into wine.
And that was like, they were having a party.
They ran out of wine.
Okay.
And they're like, let's keep this banner going.
Good stuff.
Who can solve this problem?
We're out of white clothes.
Friggin' stores closed.
Jesus is like, I got you.
Okay.
Water, now wine.
And they're like, party on.
So, you know, accurate.
Pearl partying with alcohol is literally more than a miracle.
Bible story time.
You are the savior.
You kept the party going with lots of wine.
That's great.
So, yeah.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate you coming here and talking to us very much.
Very welcome.
It's a pleasure to meet you in person.
And, you know, we'll continue to throw out the satire that we hope you'll respond to and, you know, keep that going a little bit.
Oh, we didn't ask Onion or the B, but I guess that was kind of answered earlier.
Wasn't that earlier?
Yeah, yes, we already covered that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the Onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time.
It just seems to have been, you know, in recent years, somewhat infected by the Woke Mind virus, so that just makes everything less funny.
Woke mind virus is a world without humor.
I'm hoping Neuralink can solve that woke mind virus.