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

Elon Musk Talks about aliens, SpaceX and more

Originally published - Published: August 17, 2024 at 4:18 AM

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
But most of all, welcome Elon Musk.
Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the
time to speak to us today. I know you've got many things on
your plate. And Speaking of that,

(00:22):
congratulations on the Starship rocket last week and the first
soft landing in the ocean for the world's most powerful rocket
vehicle. It's a remarkable achievement.
You are taking the fiction out of science fiction.
Can you share with us what your thoughts, what thoughts were
running through your head when you saw that happening and

(00:45):
what's next? Well, I would say I was
incredibly excited that we achieved those milestones.
I, I thought perhaps we had maybe a 20 or 25% chance of
achieving both milestones where the booster and the ship both
did a soft propulsive landing inthe ocean.

(01:07):
And so it really was, we achieved all the objectives,
which I thought was unlikely. And that's thanks to an
incredible team at Space XI. Think we've, we've got the most
talented team of rocket engineers that has ever been
assembled. And that's, that's how we're
able to accomplish these things.So, so it's an honour to work
with great people to accomplish great things.

(01:31):
So what's next in in the final frontier?
What do you see ahead for space?Well, the, the founding purpose
of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to extend
consciousness beyond Earth. So, and, and, and this is sort

(01:52):
of a little cerebral, but perhaps appropriate for the Cato
event. I think they're quite cerebral,
but if you think about the sort of Fermi filters of, you know,
Enrico Fermi was always wonderedwhere are the aliens?
Why do we not see signs of them?And I frequently get asked, are

(02:14):
there aliens on Earth? And I haven't seen any signs of
aliens. And I promise you, the minute I
see any evidence of aliens, I'llimmediately post it on the X
platform. Most popular post of all time.
So but that. But that we haven't actually
seen any evidence, so I'm not aware of any.
It's just that consciousness is extremely rare.

(02:37):
You know, if we believe the archaeological record and the
standard model of physics, Earthis about four and a half billion
years old. Civilization as measured by the
1st writing is only about 5000 years old.
So archaic Preak uniform in roughly 5500, roughly 5500 years
ago was the first writing. I think that's a good date for

(02:59):
the start of civilisation, whichwhich means that civilisation
has only been around for one millionth of Earth's existence,
almost nothing. I think this potentially argues
for civilisation being fleeting and fragile.

(03:22):
And so the thing that we can do to increase the probable
lifespan of civilization is to be a multi planet species, to
extend consciousness to other planets, ultimately to other
star systems. And, and this would massively
improve the probable lifespan of, of, of humanity and

(03:42):
consciousness as we know it. So that's, it's, it's really
trying to get past the single planet from the filter that
that's the goal of SpaceX. That's why we're building such a
big rocket. It's far in excess of anything
that's needed to put satellites into a little bit.
And it's, it's really, it's a planet colonizer.

(04:05):
It's intended to build as quickly as possible a
self-sustaining city on Mars. And I, I think the, you know,
there's, it's somewhat of a racebetween making a self-sustaining
city on Mars and global thermonuclear war or some
calamity, whichever. If we have some civilization

(04:28):
ending calamity before that happens, then, you know, that's,
that's all they wrote. You know, that's, that's some,
perhaps some future aliens will discover our civilization and
say, well, they, they almost gotthere, you know, so, so that,
that's, that's the goal. I think that's kind of an
important thing to convey to people in the, in the audience

(04:51):
who, who think about the future and, you know, you care about
the, you know, the, the not justthe preservation, but the
extension of civilization, the extent, the, the, the growth of,
of the scope and scale of, of consciousness.
So, yeah, so that's, that's that's the goal.

(05:13):
Make life multi planetary is thegoal of SpaceX.
And you know, along the way we'll seek to generate revenue
from any space based activities,such as providing, you know,
building an Internet system in space, anything that's sort of
space related in order to fund the the extension of

(05:33):
consciousness, consciousness beyond Earth.
That makes a lot of sense to me.We shouldn't keep all our eggs
in one basket. We should try to diversify risk.
So thank you for doing mankind'swork.
But that's not the only thing you're doing.
If anyone has missed it, you're also revolutionising electric
cars and it's Neurolink, it's AI, The Boring Company.

(05:56):
And if you missed that, he recently bought Twitter and
renamed it X as well, where we're live streaming as right
now. It's yeah.
See, that's popular with the audience.
To to me, it's exhausting just to read the list of these
things. I think what's Alex Ferguson,
the football coach, the soccer coach, who said that hard work

(06:19):
is a talent, but it's also hard and it's actually quite
exhausting. So the question is, what's
what's the big plan? What's the overarching goal?
Is it just that you can't help yourself from getting involved
in every technological field, oris there an overarching goal?
Yeah, the overarching goal is totake the set of actions that are

(06:41):
most likely to improve the probability that the future is
good. And that leads to the, the, the,
the, the expansion of consciousness and our
understanding of the, the universe.
You know, this is somewhat prompted by a, you know, trying

(07:04):
to figure out what's the meaningof life, you know, so, you know,
I had this existential crisis when I was a kid trying to
figure out like, what's the meaning of life?
Is it just pointless? Like, and I read a lot of books
on, on philosophy and religious books and whatnot.
And, and ultimately the thing that I thought was most

(07:26):
enlightening was Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, where, you know, Earth is basically this giant computer
to answer the question of what is the meaning of life and comes
up with the answer 42. But, but it turns out that
actually the answer is the easy part and the hard part is the
question, but we don't actually know the right questions to ask.

(07:46):
So I thought, well, if we expandthe scope of scale
consciousness, then we're betterable to understand what
questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy great book and I advise
everyone to read it and maybe you can become the next Elon
Musk if you do. Thank you also Elon for putting
the role of the moderator and the interviewer and, and on us

(08:08):
in the spotlight coming up with the right questions.
That's that's the most importantthing.
So let me ask you the next question then and try to probe a
little bit deeper into what you're really doing because as I
understand it, you you have six companies that you're running,
but you also have a 7th or did you just come up with another
one? Well, I really the, the the

(08:34):
companies that take up the vast majority of my time are tells
them SpaceX. So yeah.
So that the and then the other companies were smaller and I,
you know, I don't run sort of the X platform day-to-day.
That's Linda Yakarino. I do drive the product
development and the sort of feature improvement, that kind

(08:55):
of thing. And, you know, it's so that's,
that's really it's, it's not like it's these companies are
very different in scale. Like Tesla's, I don't know about
140,000 people and SpaceX is about 15,000 people and all the

(09:16):
other companies are less, a few 100 people or less.
Yeah. So very, very different scales.
Yeah, but but. Apart from that, you also have,
if it's six companies, give or take, we also have a 7th or what
it might be. And that's to navigate
bureaucracy and regulations while you're doing this.
And this has been a conference about innovation and

(09:39):
entrepreneurship. And how do we do that, that when
there's so many obstacles in theway.
And it, I mean, it's difficult enough to get to Mars.
It's, it's rocket science, literally.
But you also have to navigate regulation and precautionary
mindset. So, and I've understood that

(09:59):
your style of management is to question every requirement to
create clarity by never accepting, accepting that it
just came from some department, some place.
Every requirement should come with the name of the person who
made it, because this makes it possible to question whether it
makes sense on the conviction that only nature makes the real

(10:20):
laws. Everything else is a
recommendation. And that sounds great, but I
think many politicians and bureaucrats would beg to differ,
right? Yeah.
Well, with respect to laws and regulation, we do have a
fundamental issue, which is a natural outcome of an extended
period of prosperity where there's there really hasn't been
sort of a global war or, you know, there's when the things

(10:45):
have been prosperous for a long time, you just get, you get an
accumulation of laws and regulations naturally.
And these laws and regulations are immortal, whereas humans are
obviously mortal. So the, the longer you, you have
this generation of this, this creation of rules and
regulations, but you, but you sort of get to this point where,

(11:09):
you know, each law and regulation is not perhaps
crippling in and of itself, But they're, they're all like little
strings that, that, like a million little strings that,
that that tie Gulliver down. So like each little string and
then eventually the giant can't move.
So we've in, in, you know, in, in the West, I think we've

(11:32):
created a, a regulatory gridlockwhere just almost everything is
illegal. This is why they can't build a
high speed rail in California. They spent $7 billion and
there's a 1600 foot section is all they have to show for it and
doesn't have rails on it. It's, it's really, you know, too
absurd for parity because large projects are essentially illegal

(11:57):
in California. So and, and, and much of Europe
and, and, and other countries. So there there has to be some
garbage collection process for removing rules and regulations
in in order for society to function and not to, you know,
get hotening of the arteries just to to the point where you

(12:19):
can't do anything. And this relates to our risk
aversion. I think in the classical liberal
tradition, one important starting point is that we just
don't know everything. We nobody does.
So the world is a game of learning and of discovery and
therefore it takes trial and error and experiments to get to

(12:41):
the right place. And I've realized that when I'm
looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk
averse type. On the contrary, you shouldn't
avoid problems, but test things fast to find out what the
problem is fast and then fix it fast.
So a rocket blowing up might notbe a mistake.
It might be an important step oflevelling up to the next stage

(13:05):
of knowledge and of discovery. But that's the total opposite of
much of the risk averse culture in many businesses and certainly
in in governments So and many are so conservative that they
wouldn't allow anyone to do anything for the first time.
So the question is, how do you deal with that kind of risk

(13:27):
averse culture? What changes in culture and in
regulation would you make to make the world safe for
experiments? Well, I said at a government
level, I think that there shouldbe a regulation removal

(13:49):
department and, and probably some when we pass new laws, they
should have some kind of sunset perhaps that they they need to
be reaffirmed before they are orthey just they expire.
Now the thing that tends to happen is that once regulations

(14:10):
are passed, an ecosystem of consultants forms around those
regulations that wants to keep them going.
Environmental regulations are particularly bad in this regard.
So, you know, and I, I, I'm verymuch pro environment, but, but
the, the, the environmental regulations are, are in my view,

(14:33):
largely terrible. And they're, they're very much
sort of permission based as opposed to you have to get
permission in advance, as opposed to say paying a penalty
if you do something wrong, whichI think would be much more
effective to say, like, look, we're going to do this project.
If something goes wrong, then we'll be forced to pay a
penalty. But we do not need to go through

(14:55):
a three or four year environmentof our environmental approval
process. So just changing things from,
you know, you have to get a permission in advance to you
have to pay a penalty if you do something bad, I think would be
profoundly effective for the advancement of of large
projects. But just in general, I think

(15:16):
governments around the world should be actively deleting
regulations, questioning where the departments exist.
Obviously, President Blais, I think it seems to be doing a
fantastic job on this front. Just deleting things, deleting,
deleting entire departments. Fantastic.
Yes. You know, I mean here, let's

(15:37):
think about like if you delete departments and regulations, you
can always put them back. It goes out that those were very
important. You can always put them back.
And, and, and really, this is like taking the brakes off of an
economy and, and of a civilization.
It's it's it's we need to snap those strings that are holding

(15:57):
Gulliver down and preventing us from making progress as a
civilization. Yeah.
We've been discussing Argentina here over the past few days in
the new classical liberal reformagenda.
And the next speaker here on stage is President Miley.
And of course, he's up against decades of, of, of not just

(16:21):
obstacles in general, but stagnation.
But he's coming there with his chainsaw.
It was a very famous clip of himon social media was when he's
looking at bureaucracy and spending in government
departments and just removing them one by one, a fuera.
A fuera, which I guess means sort of get just get rid of it.

(16:41):
Sure. Doesn't that remind you of
something your own idea about the value of subtraction when it
comes to innovation and business?
Delete any part of the process you can.
And apparently if you don't end up putting 10% back in, you did
not delete enough. So sorry.
Yeah, there's I sort of, I was, I like to use sort of the tools

(17:06):
of physics like a first principles approach to things.
And so the, the sort of a simplealgorithm that I developed after
making the same mistake over andover again was and I need to
repeat it to myself. So I make hopefully make these
mistakes less, less often is that you start off first by

(17:26):
making the requirements less dumb.
So, so you you delete the requirements as you know, delete
and simplify the requirements because if you don't delete and
simplify the requirements, you are simply going to get in the
best case outcome is the right answer to the wrong question.

(17:49):
And then you also, a lot of thisinvolves like sort of technology
companies, but you want to delete first, then, then once
you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if,
if you're not forced to put backin at least 10% of what you

(18:09):
delete, you're obviously being far too conservative in the
deletion. So, but people often afraid to
delete things And, and I'm like,well, it's just, you just just
go ahead and do it. And, and, and if you're not
putting a little bit back in, you're, you're just not deleting
enough, obviously. So I really would, I think this

(18:31):
is a very big deal if, if it is over over over deletion of
rules, regulations and you'll end up putting a few back and
that's fine. Yeah, I told you it's not risk
averse, right? You follow it's.
Pretty sensible. It's just sensible really.
I I think it stands the test of logical examination.

(18:54):
And to me, that seems to be whatPresident Millet is trying to do
in Argentina as well, to delete what's not absolutely essential,
to leave space for creativity and and entrepreneurship.
You've met him repeatedly. You've seen what's going on in
Argentina. Do you have any thoughts about
that, his ambitions, how important it is for Argentina

(19:16):
and possibly for the rest of theworld, with the case right here,
right now? Well, I think it is very
important that Argentina succeedand that we give President Malay
awful support. And I think this and my

(19:38):
prediction is that unless President Malay is stopped in
some way from taking the actionsthat he wants to take, that that
Argentina will have a massive growth in the economy and there
will be far more prosperity and and optimism about the future
than there ever there has been perhaps in 100 years.

(20:09):
And in in just 10 minutes, Malaywill we'll talk about those
things from this stage. Would you be able to give him
some advice if he wants to turn Argentina into an innovation and
entrepreneurship nation again? What?
How should he go about it? Well, from everything I've read,

(20:30):
he's he's making all the right moves.
I would just encourage the people of Argentina to give him
their full support, run this experiment because clearly the
thing the policies of the past have have not succeeded.
We know that for a fact. So let us, let us, I think, go
boldly into the future. You know, I hope people have
originally given them their fullsupport.

(20:53):
And I think it'll be a very exciting adventure.
And I think it's going to work out really well.
Could I just then broaden that question about innovation and
the future of economies? Because right now it seems like

(21:15):
active industrial policy is all the rage, not just in the old
left, but sometimes in the populist right as well.
The idea that governments shouldget heavily involved and pick
certain winners in business and in technology.
They all often talk about tryingto come up with government moon
shots to create the the future, which I find a little bit ironic

(21:37):
because the landing a man on themoon was great, but it didn't
give us any kind of industry. We didn't see Internet from the
space, no moon base, no asteroidmining, no solar power in space.
Because it was political and notcommercial.
So and because it was political it was OK to spend tons of

(21:57):
money, but it also made it unsustainable in the future.
It only became a commercially viable final frontier when
SpaceX got into the race. So it it it.
Could you tell us about how you see governments role in
innovation generally? I mean you were the guy who had
to sue NASA to get them to open up space to to private providers

(22:21):
as well. What is the government's role in
building the future of technology?
I, I think the government's roleis, is, is really the, it, it's
to ensure that the playing fieldis a good playing field.
That the rules that, that there are good rules.
The, the government is essentially the, you know, the

(22:41):
Football League and it like the,the, the, the referee, the, you
know, making sure that, that there's fair play that like I
said, that the rules are sensible and allowing the
players on the field to play thegame.
And what happens over time, though, is government keeps
growing and, and, and a certain point, you have more referees
than players on the field and, and then the game is not good.

(23:06):
Yeah, you do need referees. I'm not saying you don't need
referees, but you don't want thereferees to outnumber the that
would be silly, but that's oftenwhat happens.
So it's just make sure that the that that, that the player that,
that fair games are being played, that the that are
sensible rules and I think and don't get in the way of the

(23:28):
players and the results will be excellent.
When we met in Austin recently, you talked about socialism as a
concept and the problem that when the government gets too
heavily involved, you lose the feedback mechanisms that really
force them to continue to learn,improve, and do things better

(23:49):
all over again. Would you be willing to share
those thoughts with the audience?
Yeah. You know, like another way you
think the government is like a corporation in the limit.
It is the most, it is the biggest corporation and it is a
monopoly and, and one that can really kind of only go bankrupt

(24:10):
if the country goes bankrupt. So it doesn't have the the sort
of, you know, commercial corporations, if the cup, if
they make bad products fail to compete, then they will go
bankrupt and and they should if they make bad products.
So a government is essentially acorporation in the limit.
And, and since it is monopoly and, and there's, there's no,

(24:32):
there's just, it's you can thinkof like, like, I think one way
to think of the economy is just in terms of feedback loops.
And the feedback loop for government provided services to
be excellent is weak. Because if, like if you have, if
you have a government monopoly or anything, what do your, you
as a consumer have no alternatives?
You have no means of like, you know, I would sort of say, like

(24:58):
you said, think of the Department of motor vehicles,
like the DMV, you know, and, and, and it's very inefficient.
You, you wouldn't want the DMV to make cars, you know, and, and
if, if you don't get good service from the government,
what do you do? Who do you complain to what?
And you just, you know, competition breeds excellence

(25:19):
because two organizations and more organizations are fighting
to make the end consumer happy and one will gain market share
if they do a better job than theother.
So that's why we really want government to do the least
because it because it's just gotthe broken feedback loop for
improvement, right? Afuera so we only have 4 minutes

(25:46):
left so, but I'd like to pick your brains on a couple of
topics, one of them being free speech.
You bought Twitter partly to, asyou've said, described it, to
save an open platform, to save free speech, and that's very
laudable. But of course there are also
trade-offs. The old saying goes, if you keep

(26:07):
your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of
rubbish into it. So obviously when we have free
speech, we'll get some ugly stuff as well, even toxic.
Can you talk about why to you it's so important to save
freedom of speech for to you andfor society and the progress of
society? Yeah, well, for a platform like

(26:30):
the X platform only known as Twitter, there will be things
that are said that are that are incorrect, but it provides an
immediate feedback loop for correcting that things that are
wrong. So somebody says something, well
then another person can reply and and rebut what that person
saying. And there can be just an ongoing

(26:50):
sort of dialogue or argument to and and someone can read the
whole thread and see, okay, thisperson said something, but
somebody counteracted that. There was further rebuttals.
There was more context added andand that will give them the best
understanding of the situation as compared to say a legacy news
media article where it's you just have the opinion of the
reporter, no rebuttal, no comments, no no, no counter

(27:14):
argument. And very often what's, what
printed in the press is completely false and people
don't know. But on a, on a real time
interactive platform like X, like they can see the, like I
said, they can see the not just what somebody said, but what are
the rebuttals? What are the counter arguments?
And we've got things like community notes, which I think
is very helpful, where if something, if somebody says

(27:35):
something false or, or sort of get inaccurate or misleading,
then the, the, the, the sort of the core secret to community
notes is that for a note to be attached to a post, people who
normally disagree about a subject must agree on that, on
that community note for it to beshown.

(27:56):
So the probability of it being accurate is is very high because
people who historically disagreeare are only going to agree on
something that is quite accurate.
So it's all down to feedback loops basically.
I think you, yes. You've been remarkably generous
with your time, so I'll just give you a last question
possibility for some last thoughts.

(28:18):
It seems to me that your take onthe world is that progress
doesn't happen by itself. It's not automatic.
After the moon landing, we went back from the final frontier for
half a century and Argentina hasbeen stagnating for almost a a
century by now. It takes human agency.
Someone's got to do it. And in the light of that, are

(28:39):
you optimistic about human progress?
And if So, what are you optimistic about and what do you
think that people are listening today and and think tanks like
the Cato Institute can do to speed progress up?
Well, it, it does seem as thoughlike civilization is reaching

(29:02):
new heights in technology and, and, and I think we've got quite
a bit of momentum. I, I do worry about certain
existential risks, like the low birth rate, which is
accelerating in, in most countries, you know, and really
this is one of those things thatI think is underrated as an
issue is that if there are no, no, no humans, there's no

(29:25):
humanity. Would they, you have to make
them somehow. And I think we should be very
concerned about the, the accelerating implosion of, of,
of the birth rate. This is a super big deal.
Like basically nothing else matters if there are no humans.

(29:46):
Like as a first, as a initial premise, you must have humans
forced with that piece of listen, unless we're going to
leave it all to the robots. So this I think is is massively,
massively underweighted and I don't have a great solution to
it, but it must be solved somehow or human humanity will
dwindle to nothing. Perhaps if we give people hope

(30:09):
and a belief in the future and that it'll get better, that they
want more people to see it, yeah.
I, I agree, I think we should, we should have an optimistic
view of the future. And, but like, I do think that
one sort of bad, like bad thing about the environmentalist

(30:29):
movement is that the in the in, in the sort of extreme form of
the environmentalist movement, it's, it's people start to view
humans as a plague on the surface of the Earth, as a
fundamentally bad thing. And with the implication that if
all humans disappeared somehow it would be, would be better
off. This is the extinctionist
movement. And I think you can, you can

(30:50):
really, I think at a fundamentallevel, you, you can think of
things as as a, a fight between expansionist and extinctionist
philosophies and the, that that's what really matters.
Like everything else is like if,if, if humans, if humans go
extinct or, or civilization collapses, whatever policies we

(31:13):
may have are irrelevant. So first, first and foremost, we
must have an expansionist philosophy for, for civilization
and for consciousness. We must seek to, you know, go
beyond what we've done in the past to increase the, I think
increase the number of humans. And this is, this is incredibly

(31:38):
fundamental. So one way or another, this,
this must happen. Yeah.
So the final message is go forthand procreate yes.
Go forth and multiply. You know, free civilization,
Yeah. Yes.
Well, you know, time flies and opportunity cost is a concept

(32:01):
that's very viable when you're talking to Elon Musk.
So thank you so much for your time here today, and I'm sure
you've got other important things to attend to now.
Good luck. All right.
Thanks for holding.