Elon Musk on Abundance, AGI, and The Media in 2024 | EP #79 (X Spaces)

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Conversation I had with Elon Musk, arguably the greatest entrepreneur of our time.

Perhaps the greatest entrepreneur ever. During this conversation, which is called the Coming Age of Abundance, we talk about how technologies including AI and humanoid robotics.

Are creating a world of abundance, uplifting.

Humanity across food, water, energy, healthcare, education.

We'll be talking about longevity. We'll be talking about AI. We'll be talking about the decreasing global population and what are the reasons that.

You should have for being optimistic about the future.

Join Me Happy New Year Elon.

Happy New Year 2024.

I look yeah, it feels like the future.

It is the future.

It is the future. It's going to be awesome. I'm hoping we get a little bit of conversation on some hope and good news for folks on this spaces. I think deal can use it.

Peter, you are the most optimistic person that I know of by far. I guess it is refreshing to to hear such optimism.

I think people need I think people need a positive mindset. I think it's self fulfilling prophecy to a large degree. You know if you're pessimistic and we can talk about how the news media just decimates our minds constantly.

Yeah the news is so negative. I mean it makes me sad to read the News, Frankly, I, I, well.

Let me ask you a question. I don't watch, I don't watch network news and I don't read any newspapers. They couldn't pay me enough money.

Yeah. To do that, I'll accidentally read the news and I'll just be sad.

It's insane.

Well, I mean, as you know, the news, the daily news really attempts to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? It is.

And let me show, let me show it to you every five minutes in your living room over and over and over again.

Yeah. And it's a big world. There's 8 billion people on Earth. So, you know, somewhere on Earth something horrible is happening every single day. But there's also great things happening every single day.

You know what I call cnn, the Crisis News Network or the Constantly Negative News Network. And the problem is if they've got.

To scare you otherwise, you know, if they say, hey, it's been a pretty good day overall, you know, violence is an all time low.

We've gotten more access to food, energy, water, healthcare, education on the planet than ever before. I mean, people would just start watching horror movies I think, instead.

Yeah.

Yeah. The challenge is it's our neural nets, the wiring of our brains evolved in a world of constant danger. And so we're sort of just wired for fear and scarcity constantly.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I think you've made this point. Maybe others have. It sort of makes sense as an evolutionary asymmetry that we would respond more to danger than to reward. In that, like the consequences of danger could be fatal. Like, it could be like, well, if you go over there, there's a lion that's going to eat you or some neighboring tribe that's going to kill you and it's game over.

Yeah. Your genes are out of the gene pool.

Yeah, you're, you're out. Whereas say, like news that there's a nice bush with berries over there, it's nice to have, it's optional. But in one case you die, in other case you're hungry. But death is worse than hunger. So that's why basically anyone who did not respond more to negative news than positive news didn't make it, they were.

Selected against for sure. That side.

Yes. I mean, anyone who was complacent about where the lion was eaten by the.

Lion, and you know, the reality is, you know, the news media has one job, to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And when we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news, that's all we get 24, 7. So, I mean, listen, it's inevitable. Yeah, it is. I mean, I do get my news variably on my feed on X, but I also get all the great things happening in the world because I can selectively choose to watch that. But when you're watching TV or in the newspaper, some editor someplace or some producer is deciding what gets fed into your mind and it can really screw with your mindset.

Yes, exactly.

So, I mean, this space is called it the coming Age of Abundance. And you were really. When my first book came out, came out, Abundance of the future is better than you think. You were super supportive and I, and I appreciate that was 12 years ago, and I think the story.

Whoa. 12 years ago.

Amazing. Yeah. And it's gotten so much better. So I. It has in so many ways. Not. Not every way.

I mean, I mean, obviously we go back a ways, but I remember when we were at a day at his party in Brazil.

Yeah.

How long ago?

I know he was.

It was his 40th. Or was it his 30th? I don't know.

No, it was. It was his 30th. Wow. This. This was. It was just when SpaceX was. Yeah, just when I was filming space.

Yeah, it was, it was 2003, thereabouts. It was just before the X Prize was won.

Right.

I was trying to convince you not to build rockets 21 years ago.

Could like, like you could have a kid that, that has. Could legally drink or legally have kids.

Yeah, yeah.

So 21 years ago. Yeah, so. And, you know, things are mostly better.

You know, I want to give everybody listening a dose of hope and optimism on the abundance side because the world has gotten better in so many ways. All you hear about is the neg constantly. And I think that's going back to our sort of core dystopian mindsets from, you know, evolving 100,000 years ago. But if we just look at some of the, look at some of the areas. Right, so like global extreme poverty. Right. I mean, what's more, what's, what's a more important metric? You know, here are the numbers. 90% of the world was in global extreme poverty in, in the 1800s. In 1981, it was 42%. Today it's under 10% of the world.

Right. Yeah. Hunger. Hunger is actually rare and it used to be common.

Exactly. And another one is obviously one area that you're leading the charge on is energy. You know, we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights, and we ravaged mountainsides and we drilled kilometers into the ground. And what's the figure? It's like 8,000 times more energy hits the surface of the sun, surface of the Earth from the sun than we consume as a species. What's the rate at which batteries and solar is increasing? It must be massive.

Yes. I mean, I mean, Tesla, we've made a couple of presentations, one sort of simplistic and then one in extreme detail on how to make Earth completely self sustaining from an energy standpoint and demonstrating that there is no that if you break down all of the raw materials for a lithium ion battery and for solar, you can easily make Earth. Not easy. I mean, there's no shortage of materials. It's easy, it's a lot of work obviously, but, but, but there's not like some critical material that we don't have enough of in order to make Earth fully self sustaining. Even if the only way that you powered all of industry on Earth and all power, including heating and transport electrically, you could do that with solar and lithium ion batteries and not come anywhere close to depleting the resources of Earth.

Yeah, My favorite example there was back in the 1800s, the most precious metal on the planet was aluminum. It was more precious than gold and, and platinum. And even though the Earth's crust is, you know, 8% bauxite, you know, basically aluminum, it was just so energetically difficult. It wasn't that it was scarce, it just wasn't in usable form yet. And that's what technology does. It takes something which is scarce and not usable and makes it usable.

Right, so yeah, yeah, exactly. Aluminum oxide is extremely common, but it is a low energy state. In fact, thermite is just iron oxide, rust and pure aluminum. And the energy difference between iron oxide and aluminum oxide is so great that it generates incredible enough heat to melt through steel. So that's what thermite is. So yeah, you do need a lot of energy to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum. But yeah, In World War II there was a massive scarcity of aluminum for aircraft. Sure. And in fact, in Britain, the Mosquito sort of fighter bomber was made of mostly of wood, but it was done with. It was basically an early form of composites, but using stiff wood on the outside and light wood like balsa as a sandwich structure, it's pretty clever. The whole thing was intended to address the shortage of.

And then we get technology, we get better mechanisms of extracting the aluminum from the lunar oxide from the bauxite. And this happens over and over again. In fact, that's just what we do. I Mean, I think the number was last year in 2023 or maybe in 22, we had more new electricity production from solar than from any other form. And you've done an extraordinary job on battery production.

Yeah. And the battery production is growing actually almost at several times the rate of vehicle production. So, you know, in some cases almost 10x the rate of vehicle production. So yes, there's a massive demand for batteries. And you know, as the world uses more electricity, there's actually a lot more capability that the grid has if you can buffer the energy than without it. Because the vast majority of electrical grid assume no, they assume no buffering. So they have to size the power plants for, for peak output. Peak power output, which is typically a hot summer day and then for at night, you can have anywhere from half, optimistically half power output to sometimes one tenth of the power output. So basically the grid, almost everywhere the grid is sized for excess electrical power output. And if you just buffer it with batteries, you can increase the output of the grid by two or three times.

I mean, to make, to make the point here on the abundance theme, there is no limitation energy. Right. We are increasing the amount of energy per capita and there's a direct correlation between the GDP of a nation and its energy production and the direct correlation between health and education and energy. Everything scales as you increase the energy per capita of a nation.

Yeah.

So another category, communications, another area that you're revolutionizing. I think the number right now, I just was checking it earlier, it's like 6.9 billion smartphone users in 2023. Like 86. 86. And that's what I got when I, when I googled it.

I don't know what it's 6.9. You don't say. Yeah, 6906.

900 million, let's go there that my, my 12 year olds would say the same. It's like 85, 85 of the planet's got a smartphone. And.

Well, I mean if you add up the total number of smartphones ever made, it exceeds. Yeah.

Oh, I think it. So it's amazing. So we've gone from like zero telephony to the majority, vast majority of the planet in under a century. You know, global Internet as well. The same thing. And did your, your next iteration of Starlink spacecraft have gone up the director cell phone.

Okay, yes, that just went up. So, you know, we still have to prove that it works and all, but we're confident that even if the, if these early satellites don't work, we're confident from a physics standpoint that it can work. It is a challenge because we have to emulate a cell self tower on the ground in order for the phones to accept the signal. So we have to do Doppler compensation, for example, and, and, and, and do some sort of. Because, because you've got a speed of light limitations, pal.

If, if it were easy, would have been done already.

Yeah, yeah, there's some speed of light limitations. So, you know, this like light is, is so fast and yet so slow. So, you know, I, yeah. A good way to think about light, at least in the space context or for the low Earth orbit context, is it travels about 300km every millisecond in air or in, in space and then, and then around just over 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber.

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You know, another abundance area is health. I hear some, some kids in the background there. So interestingly enough, you know, child mortality, I mean, probably. I mean, this is the one that hits me the most in terms of increasing abundance, child mortality under the age of five was 42% a couple hundred years ago. It was a coin flip of whether your kids survived. And it's decreased now to under 5% and it's gone down by 50% in the last 30 years. So just childhood mortality and women dying in childbirth. All of these things people don't think about when they're listening to all the news on, and all the issues. And then life expectancy, my favorite subject, has gone up from 30 years old to 75 plus. I still disagree with you on longevity though.

That we should solve it or not. You think we should?

Well, listen, I'm not necessarily saying live forever, but I'd like to make it to 120, 150.

Yeah, I sort of wonder if we should not solve it too soon. Presidential elections, who's going to get the life expectancy first? And, and do you really want them to get that life expectancy first?

Well, you know, you know, I think we, I think being able to have the vitality, the cognition, the physical prowess, you know, that you have when you're in your 40s or 50s through the age of 100, that's my goal. I mean, you don't want to, you don't want to, you know, you want to make it to at least 100, don't you?

Well, I guess it does depend on whether I'm, you know, have dementia. I don't think I'd want to be a burden on society or have dementia and not know what's going on. I prefer to be dead.

Well, yeah, I think that's, that's for sure. But let's assume that you had, you know, all the cognitive power you have today in your physical strength. Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to, you know, have an extended lifespan or health span?

Yeah, sure, I guess. I think we are end up. There's such a strong forcing function for life extension or health span extension that I think we will see advancements in that area whether I want them to be there or not. And actually my opinion on the subject is that it's, I think it's actually not that hard to solve because the, if you just consider arguments of symmetry, which are quite helpful, the cells in our body all age at basic almost exactly the same speed. I've not seen anyone who has an old left arm and a young right arm. I've never seen that. Not even once. Yes. So how, how are the cells communicating and how, what is keeping them? What is synchronizing their Behavior, something. There's a very clear mechanism for synchronizing aging among the 30 to 40 trillion cells in your body, like depending on your body mass, you're typically going to have 30 to 40 trillion.

That's, that's correct.

You know, I mean, keep, you know, in sync.

I mean, the other, the other, the other reference proof point is, you know, bowhead whales, one of the largest mammals, can make it to 200 years repeatedly. Greenland sharks can make it to 500 years and have babies at 200 years old. I remember when I was in medical school hearing that. I said, why can they? Why can't we? I said, it's either an engineering problem or software problem, a hardware problem or software problem. And I think this is one of the biggest areas AI is going to give us, is a real understanding. And then to your other point about your left arm and right arm, when you have a baby, woman's 30, 35, you're 40, 45, your baby starts out at zero.

Yeah. I do find it remarkable that we decompress from a single cell to an adult human and then we procreate, compress back down to a single cell.

That is fascinating.

You know, I mean, you look, you sort of look, look at yourself as this sort of, you know, blastocyst and say, like, I haven't changed a bit.

Here we go again. Let's recycle. It's like the Big Bang. It's like, right, the big Crunch. You know, one of the things people argue about on extended health span and, you know, increasing the population, getting to 100, 120, 150. And there's a concept called longevity escape velocity. Right. That there's going to be a point at which for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And that's an interesting idea to think about. In which case, you know, accidents become really a thing to be concerned about. The concern about overpopulation. And you've, you've hit this multiple times. Right. And I saw you tweeting about it, or, sorry, you're xing about it today. Sorry, but it's, you know, overpopulation is one of the biggest myths and biggest.

False population is utter bs.

Yeah.

You know, and you know, it's, it's such nonsense. Earth is underpopulated, not overpopulated. With.

Yeah, look out the window when you're flying across the country. It's empty.

Absolutely. Exactly. It's like if you say, like, if your goal was to like flying from LA to New York to drop a Bowling ball on a human, you would fail.

You know, I think one of, one of my goals, I think the greatest gift we can give people in this abundance world is increased healthspan. I mean when you think about what people want, they want happiness and they want health. Right. No one wants to die in a painful cancer or, or dementia. So yeah, and you know, I have extended to you many times, my friend. Come down to Fountain Health. Let me put you through our, our program. The world needs you around for another 30. 30 years.

Okay, well what do you have any. What should I do? Let's say.

Well, I mean, so there are two.

What actions can be taken?

There are two.

Quite. This could be helpful for listeners. No, there are two on this discussion.

Yeah, so there are two. There are three things you need to know. Number one, is there anything going on inside your body that you don't know about? So the body is amazingly good at hiding disease. So we found in our seemingly healthy adults, 2% have a cancer they don't know about. Two and a half percent. Two percent. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm. 14.4% either have metabolic disease, coronary disease, neurogenerative disease. And so your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Right. So you don't actually feel any cancer until stage three or stage four. 70% of all heart attacks have no precedence. Your body is compensating constantly. And you know, for most of us, we know more about what's going inside our cars or our airplanes than we do our bodies. Yeah, I had a question for you. How many sensors are going up on starship when you're launching? How many sensors are going are on board that vehicle? Rough order of magnitude. Getting back data.

Well, I guess when you count everything up, there's several thousand sensors. And if I were, I mean there are 33 engines, so they count for the bulk of sensors.

Sure, but you also have stress sensors and looking what's going on in the structures and avionics and communications across all the subsystems. And if I ask you how.

39 engines including the alpha stage. So there's several thousand sensors. Way more sensors than our body.

Yeah, I was gonna say if I ask you, how many sensors do you have in your body? And so we don't look, which is insane because we do have the technology now to look to determine is there anything going on I need to know about and when's a good time to find out about like now or what's likely to break, what's likely to undergo failure cycles and Then what's the most extraordinary therapeutics available to extend the human lifespan? So, I mean, for me, that's, that's, that's a, that's a big one. Let me ask you another, another abundance theme, which is education. Do you think any of our schools today, middle schools or high schools, are preparing any of our kids for the future?

Well, none that I know of. I mean, there might probably are a few schools that are doing it, but probably 99% of schools are not. Yeah, schools are very slow to change. And I think that does seem to move away from teaching the fundamentals, you know, of writing well and math and history. You know, I'm concerned about the whole woke agenda and ideology permeating through education. Agreed. And actually being destructive to education.

Agreed. I mean, you know, how do you think, do you have any thoughts? I mean, so at the end of the day, I think our best, our best healthcare and our best teachers are going to be AI's right? That understand everything and they demonetize and they democratize every aspect. I mean, the AI knows your kid's favorite color, sports star, movie star, what they know the languages, they know what they did today. I mean, it's a way of giving every child on the planet the best education. I mean, you, you funded back years ago, if you remember, the Global Learning xprize that we did. We did a, that we, we demoed in Tanzania with AIs on tablets. It was the earliest days of, of AI Imad Mustach, who, you know, was one of the winners of that competition, who went on out to create stability. I mean, the, the challenge is I don't think the educational systems are going to give up that control anytime soon.

True. Well, I mean, if I look at how my kids are educated, they seem to be mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit and X as well, I suppose, but they're constantly on the Internet that, that seems to be. And I guess a lot of kids these days tick tock, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, the education situation is, is problematic. Not sure what to do about it.

I think, I think ultimately, you know, Khan Academy is one step in the right direction, but I think part of it is getting our educational institutions to first realize they're not preparing kids for the world that's coming. I mean, this hits another point. We are such linear thinkers.

Right.

We're projecting what we have and putting it out four or five years. I don't think people, Let me ask you, do you think people are ready for what the world's going to be like? In 2030?

No, I, I don't know what the world's going to be like in 2030. So probably. I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily 30. We definitely live in the most interesting of times. You know, it's like this, allegedly, this Chinese saying, that may you live in interesting times is not a good thing. But, I mean, I think, personally, I would like to live in the most interesting of times, and this is the most interesting of times.

I also think it's the best time to be alive ever. The only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. I mean, you know, by what measure? Yeah, we have environmental issues, but I think we have the best chance of solving those environmental issues with the technology we have now. Reverse the technology we had 10 years ago.

Yeah. Well, I generally think it's, as a. As a general sort of rule of living, it is. It is better to err on the side of being optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. If you're going to make. If you're going to err one side or the other better. It's just a higher quality of life to err on the side of being optimistic and risk being wrong than. And pessimistic, you know, and, you know, and right. I mean, it's. It's better to be. You'll just have a. Just enjoy life, Paul. Yeah, optimism is going to make you happy.

There was a study of 14,000 people. It was 14,000 women and 1500 guys. And it showed that those who had an optimistic mindset lived 14 to 15% longer than those with a pessimistic mindset. I mean, mindset's a powerful thing and I think undervalued by almost everybody. One of my, One of my favorite examples of this was, do you know what the environmental disaster of the 1880s and 1890s was? I'm sure, you know.

Is this back to whales? No, no, no, no.

It's, it's. It's another form of life. It's the horse manure disaster.

Oh, the, the horseshit.

Yes.

Yeah. What is this horseshit? Well, yeah, no, no, you're right. I mean, New York was basically a horse veneer and, and, and urine and carcass.

It was, it was terrible. People brought their motive power.

I mean, basically, if you think, if you think. I think New York subways are stinky right now. Wait, I mean, try.

Everywhere. You know, people. Everywhere people move from. People moved into downtown New York, Detroit, Chicago. They brought their motor power with them. And the articles in the 1880s and 90s and into the 1900s. As you, as you read this, the projection was disaster. It was going to be a disaster because horse, horse manure was like grow. They had like special parking lots for horseshit at the corner of every street.

Well, it seems like there's also a challenge because I think if a horse lives, you know, for on the order of 15 years, that means 1/15 of all horses are kicking the bucket every year. So you just got. And so, so if you've got like 300,000 horses, it means you've got 20,000 horses dropping dead every year. And then you need a horse to move the horse.

Or just cover it with horse mirror, let it decompose.

Yeah, I mean there's going to be like decomposing horse carcasses throughout major cities. But then, and then like it's like, well who's horse, Whose dead horse is this? And people are probably quick to claim a live horse, but they're not rushing to claim a death.

But then innovation came along and here comes the car and solves the problem. And I think that's the problem that we keep on forgetting. We forget that we are incredibly innovative at solving problems. That's what humans are amazing at.

Yeah, yeah, true, true. Actually, on the whale front, I don't know if you know, back to the whales, it's a whale of a tail. Whale tales. Okay, so a lot of people think that the low point on whale population was in the 1800s because you know, whales were being hunted for whale and to way along. Yeah. But actually the low point by far was in fact in the mid 20th century because of a bureaucratic error in the Soviet Union.

Okay, this I have to hear.

So that would always have these five year plans and quotas for whale tonnage. Now they didn't actually have even a whether the whale tonnage was usable tonnage in any way. They just had a quota for whale tonnage and what they would do in the Soviet unit. So just keep increasing the quota of everything every year, every five years. So the whale tonnage just got higher and higher and higher. If you're a captain and you had a high whale ton, you'd get a medal and a raise. And if your whale tonnage was low, you'd be sent to the gulag.

You get what you incentivize, baby.

Yes, incentives matter. And, and so it got to it to, it just got to absurd levels. And you had Soviet whaling ships like going into, you know, US and Australian waters to desperately trying to find whales. And they would, they would catch the whale Weigh the whale and then dump the carcass over. I mean, there's a whole Internet rabbit hole that you can go down on this, which is basically a lesson in the follies of central planning.

And this is the problem of keeping laws on the books way, way after they're useful to society.

Well, we do actually have a fundamental issue with the accumulation of laws and regulations because they are immortal and humans are mortal, as we were just discussing, you know, life extension. So naturally, every year you're going to have this accumulation of laws and regulations until eventually everything is legal.

I mean, everything is illegal.

Everything is illegal, yes. Nothing is allowed because you're overlapping laws and regulations and some of which are in fact contradict each other. Whether you go left or right, they're both. Left and right are.

My God.

You know, like SpaceX is. I mean, shame on the, you know, the DOJ in this respect. In this particular case, where DOJ, as you may know, is suing SpaceX for hiring only permanent residents and citizens of the U.S. the reason that we did this was because we were told very clearly that if we did not hire permanent residents of the United States, that that would constitute a violation of international trade, traffic and arms regulations. Itar and the entire executive team of SpaceX and the board would go to prison.

Sounds like a good motivation.

Yes. And so we, we were literally told this by the government in very clear terms. And you're well aware of Ito.

I am well aware of it, yes.

Yes, it's a nightmare. And we would like.

Which by the way, puts us in a non competitive world against other nations.

Yes, it's pretty bad. So, but then the DOJ, you know, is suing SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers. Now an important point here, not asylum, those who have been granted asylum, those who are seeking asylum.

There's a lot of those. There's a lot of people seeking asylum.

Yes. So we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. So if we hire someone who's not a permanent resident, we're breaking the law. And if we don't hire someone who's not a permanent resident, we're breaking the law. So this is an example of the madness that we're facing.

Buddy, I want to compliment you on something which, and I've known you for long enough to have seen you gone through this, where you have bet everything over and over again, you've bet your entire fortune, gone into debt to do the things that you believe in. And I have a question to ask you, which I've been dying to ask and I'm going to start making this known. There are so many billionaires on the planet who have tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars who are effectively sitting on it and not changing the world, not putting it other than for increasing its return, which is not a bad thing. I think the more wealth and free energy there is out there to do things. But can you speak to that? I don't know if you're willing to, but there are a few people like Mark Benioff and, and Eric Schmidt and yourself, yourself top of the list, who invest on making the world a better place, solving global grand challenges. Thoughts on that?

I'm gonna open some line to the. Sorry, I just have some, some kids and stuff around. No problem. Sort of family noises in the background. So let's see. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean I do think that smart people with resources should care about the good of civilization, the future of civilization. Even if there is not, even if they're not particularly altruistic because you can't really, you cannot exist in absent civilization. You know, if civilization collapses, it's all over. You know, there's like people who've got like these sort of bunkers, other countries or Hawaii or whatever. I'm like, listen, do you really think that you're gonna make it in, in an apocalyptic situation? They'll come and find you in that bunker and they'll probably pry you out and get your stuff and it's gonna suck anyway. So really smart people with resources, any smart person with resources, they just have some long term perspective.

I mean, listen, it's, it's you and it's you and Jeff Bezos right now who've got the biggest long term perspective. And I see, I, you know, I'm just curious about how do you incentivize other people to really help the world accelerate, you know, and, and make the world a more productive place. Right. The best way to become a billionaire is help a billion people. The world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities.

Do you believe that?

Well, I guess maybe we should talk to people more. I guess just talking to them and you know, I think it was perhaps just raising to conscious awareness the fact that there is no living without civilization. One doesn't actually have to make an altruistic argument. You can actually make a. Even if it's a purely self seeking argument, say life would be miserable without civilization. And if you want to know what life is like without civilization, just go try living in the forest naked for a day. And you will be naked and afraid and quickly realize civilization is awesome. You have to eat bugs and get eaten by bugs.

And we're so interdependent upon each other to enable the state of technology and capability we have today. You know, I'm curious, is there anything that you think that isn't becoming more abundant out there or anything that we have an abundance constraint on?

I'll just mention.

Answer that. First, I want to come and talk about the carbon removal xprize that you funded. One second. You know, we're. We're creating abundance of food, energy, water, health care, education. Are we constrained in any way?

No, not really. I mean, no, I think I agree with you that the future most likely has abundant. We shouldn't be complacent about the future. Complacency and entitlement are not a recipe for success. But the most likely outcome is one of abundance of goods and services. That is certainly where we're headed.

When I saw you last.

Mighty likely where we're headed.

Very likely.

Yeah.

When I saw you last, you said definitely abundance after AGI and I saw when you were talking about Optimus, which is awesome, by the way. Let's just start with that. Congratulations.

Well, thanks. I need to make sure the optimist is, you know, doesn't. Cause it doesn't add to civilizational risk, you know, because you don't want like a billion of these things or with centralized control.

Unless. Unless what could go wrong?

Has anyone made a movie about that?

Unless they obey you?

Well, I don't think they should obey any, any one person. Yeah, like I think you have to have local control, but it has to be decentralized because any central control is going to be problematic because you just can't be like, it could be the. A rogue AI takes. I mean, let's literally a movie. A rogue AI, you know, Terminator takes over, somehow gains control of the mothership of that controls all the, you know, the Optimus robots or something like that. That is basically, it needs to be. It needs to be impossible for that to occur.

Let me ask you. I always love combining your companies because it's like, you know, it's like Reese's Peanut Butter cup, you know, Starlink and Starship together. How about Optimus Neuralink? When can I plug into an Optimus with my neuralink connection?

Well, hopefully the first neuralinks will. The first neuralink in a human will hopefully be soon, within the next, maybe this month or next. Now this is really just at first just trying to give your quadriplegic quadriplegics and tetraplegics. The ability to control their phone and computer. It's basically like the first, the first product is telepathy essentially, or telekinesis. And then the second product, so tentatively called Blindsight, where we can restore sight even if somebody has lost both eyes and their optic nerves.

Amazing. Go straight to the visual cortex.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now these things already work in monkeys and I'd just like to reemphasize no monkey has ever died because of a neural link. And we treat our monkeys extremely well.

Last time I spoke to you about this, you were playing pong against pager.

I think that's right. Actually, it turns out monkeys love playing video games. They're really just like us. I mean, they love eating snacks and playing video games.

I'll tell my 12 year old boys about that.

Yeah, I mean, you see the video of Pedro playing, you know, monkey mind pong. You know, just a telepathic. Playing pong telepathically. He's not restrained in any way. He's just sitting on, on the sort of tree branch drinking smoothies and drinking smoothies. Drinking a smoothie and playing pong.

Yeah.

He's not held down, you know, in fact, he gets upset when we take his video game away.

Just like human, just like our kids.

That's awesome.

And I mean, giving sight to the blind, I mean it's biblical stuff. And this is again coming back to the original, you know, kicking off the new year with a positive mindset, with an abundance mindset, with an exponential mindset, with a moonshot mindset.

Right.

Which I, and I think, I hope you agree, like I think for entrepreneurs and people listening, like the single most important thing we have is our mindset, how we see the world. I mean, would you agree with that?

Yeah, I mean you can choose to be. I mean happiness is, I think is a decision. I mean largely. I mean there's obviously people that have chemical imbalances. But for most people the difference between being happy and unhappy is deciding to be happy.

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I want to take a second for everybody listening to point something out. You know ilan, it was 2021, I was texting with you and I said you should fund another X Prize. You funded an X Prize years ago on teaching kids in the middle of Tanzania reading, writing and arithmetic without any adults, no schools around, just on a tablet they were handed and the software had to teach them. And it was an amazing success. And then in 21 I asked you if you'd do an X prize on carbon removal and you said yes almost instantly. And we launched it three months later. It was like the fastest yes to an X Prize launch ever. So thank you for that. I want to give you a quick update on it if I could.

You're welcome. Absolutely. Well, I hope the education X prize and the carbon removal X Prize are resulting.

I'm sure we had 6000 teams enter the carbon removal prize. We have 1300 active teams in the competition right now as we down select about 36%. 460 are focused on carbon capture. 430 are land related capture. 240 are ocean related capture. And we've given away 20 million of your money already. 5 million to students and 15 million to a million to the top 15 teams. And the finals are coming up in two years and Earth Day of 2025. And interestingly enough, the winning team needs to demonstrate megaton level capture that can scale to gigaton level capture. And so just the final competition is going to capture 4 megatons of carbon, which is twice what's being done on an annual basis today. So good progress so far.

Great, that's good to hear, pal.

As we begin to wrap up, what other thoughts for people on abundance? What other mindset thoughts do you have for folks here is.

Well, I, I do think that the birth rate is too low for humans as I, I'm always going on about that.

Just longevity, baby. I'm solving it with longevity going to keep people alive longer.

Okay, well and robots and AI, sure. But I mean it just the current.

Situation is, is grim.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of countries are, you know, if you look at, say, say Korea, Italy. Yeah, yeah. They're losing roughly half their population per generation.

Yeah.

That means three generations, they're one tenth of their current size. And with the 1/10 that remains being very old.

Yeah. The numbers for folks, the replacement number is 2.1 children per family on average. And Europe is at 1.5. Asia dropped from 5.7 in the 1950s to 1.9 today, which is crazy. North America dropped from about 3 to 1.6. We're below the replacement level in the United States, and it is an issue. I mean, we need smart people on the planet.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if we don't make new humans, we won't have humanity. And even with longevity, we'll live longer, but we're not live forever. So I think we just need. It's, it's, you know, I'm concerned that, like, a lot of people think that the planet is overpopulated and that's one of the things contributing to a low birth rate. In fact, some people I've encountered think they're basically being martyrs for not having kids. And that's just. It's just not true. I think we should take the position that we actually have a civic responsibility to have kids, to at least keep the human population constant. Ideally, we should grow it, but we should at least not have population collapse, which is what we currently have.

I think people fear the future. And I mean, the conversations I've heard is, I don't want to bring children into this world. It's too dangerous. AI is going to destroy humanity, the environment, we're destroying the environment, and so forth. So I think part of it is getting people to be optimistic about the future versus pessimistic, which is one of, as you said in the beginning of this space is one of my missions. If people think the world is getting better and they have a hand in making it a better place, you most definitely do.

Yeah, I think people should be optimistic about the future. Earth can handle far more humans than currently exist, and the danger is not a population explosion, but population collapse. So I would just encourage as many people as possible to have kids and ideally have a lot of kids, because we're going to make up for those who, whatever reason, don't buy an extra.

Bottle of wine tonight, folks.

Yeah, it's a big deal.

So would you, would you. Let's, let's close out on the conversation of AI and AGI, which I know a lot of people are always interested in. And, and, and there's a real fear about AI. What would you say to dissuade people. I mean, it's you, you've, you've, I've heard you say 80% probability we make it through and we need to protect the downside. Can you speak to that? How can people walk away more optimistic than pessimistic on this front? And how do you think about, is it containment? Is it shaping how we train our AI systems? How do you think we navigate digital superintelligence?

Well, the rate at which AI is growing really boggles the mind. So it currently seems as though the amount of compute dedicated to artificial intelligence is increasing by a factor of 10 roughly every six months. It's faster than annual, that's for sure. So, I mean, I recently heard today about a gigawatt class AI compute cluster. Wow, that's, I think it's being built in Kuwait or something to that effect. And it's like 700,000 v1 hundreds, which is a couple generations above two generations that's currently in production. So this is a staggering amount of compute and there are many such things. That's just the biggest one I've heard of so far. But there's a 500 megawatt installation happening and there's multiple hundred 100 megawatt installations in the works. It's not even clear to me what you do with that much compute, because when you actually add up all human data ever created, you really just run out of things to train on quite quickly. Like if you've got maybe, I don't know, 20 or 30,000 H1 hundreds, you can train on synthetic data almost every. Yeah, basically you have to have synthetic data because for certainly well under a hundred thousand H1 hundreds, you can train on all human data ever created, including video.

And it's not, and it's not just the compute, which is the major scarce resource, but it's also the number of entrepreneurs focusing in this area, the amount of capital that's going into this area, the amount of data available. I mean, it's all increasing and it's all feeding on itself. And so it's just, you know, hitting your point about the speed at which it's progressing is. I think the word awesome comes to mind, or staggering?

Yeah, it's really staggering and for sure. So I'm just trying to give a sense of scale. I've never seen anything move this fast any of any technology. This is the fastest moving thing. So in terms of aiming for AI safety, my, my best guess of my sort of primitive biological neural net is, is that we should aim for maximum Truth seeking and, and curiosity. That's my gut feel for how to make AI as safe as possible. The danger with programming morality with an explicit morality program is what is sometimes referred to as the Waluigi problem. If you create Luigi, you automatically create Waluigi by inverting Luigi. Sure. So. So I think we have to be careful about programming in sort of an arbitrary morality. But if we focus on maximizing truth with acknowledged error, that's probably. I think that's the way to maximize safety and also to have the AI be curious, because I think that Earth is much more interesting to an advanced AI with humans on it than without humans.

I agree with you. Now, an interesting question of, do you think with vast intelligence comes significant empathy and respect for life?

Yeah, I think so, because that's the.

That'S the hope at the end of the rainbow here that I don't want to use the word AGI. I'll use a super. Digital superintelligence as a. As a term with a digital superintelligence that is able to be more benevolent and support us, because sometimes I'm not sure us squishy meat sacks can make it through our own horseshit problems that we put together. So maybe there's a value there. I think on the whole, AI is the single most important technology we ever invented, and it is going to uplift all of humanity. I think it's what you said post AGI comes abundance. I think it's the interim issues in the next one to four years. Right. It's. It's not artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity.

Yeah, Well, I mean, one way that AI could go wrong is if the extinctionist philosophy is programmed into the AI with whether implicitly or explicitly. I mean, probably not explicitly, but there's a strong danger of it, of an implicit extinctionist philosophy being programmed into AI, you know? And what would that look like?

What would that look like?

Well, like there's this guy on the front page of the New York Times about a year ago. He's head of the Extinctionist Society, and he was literally quoted as, there are 8 billion people on. On Earth. It'd be better if there were none.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. So. And if you, if you take the extreme environmentalist argument, especially like the implicit extreme environmentalist argument, they, they. There's an implicit, implicit conclusion that humans are a plague on the surface of the Earth. So we, I think we have to be quite careful about an. An implicit. Like, like if the extinctionist movement was somehow programmed into AI as, as the optimization that would be extremely dangerous, you.

Know, to say the least.

Yeah. But you know, there are people, quite a few people actually, who view humanity as a blight on the surface of the earth.

And we are coming down to. There is the, you know, accelerationist movement, the decelerationist movement, the boomers and the doomers. But I think people forget to realize or don't realize and forget the fact that, you know, we romanticize the past and the past life was short, brutish and you were dead by 40. You know, the life that we enjoy today is a result of the extraordinary technology that we brought to bear.

Yeah. So the like, you know, Hobbes life is nasty, brutish and short. I, I actually, I had a little Yorkshire terrier once who was nasty, brutish and short and kept, kept biting people. So I called him Hobbes.

Perfect.

And I would tell friends that that came over, watch out for the dog. And they'd look at this miniature Yorkshire terrier and laugh and then bite them on the ankle. And I said watch, I said watch out for the.

You know, that extinctionist meme is the same sort of, you know, you discount it until it starts being a mind virus in part as you've called it, and it starts disrupting us.

Yeah. If you convince people that, you know, we're running out of resources on Earth, that there are too many people in the world and the only way to survive is to have far fewer people, which a lot of people are believed to be the case. And like I said, if that, if that somehow gets programmed into AI and that AI becomes the most powerful AI then we're in deep trouble.

Yeah. We need a counter force to the population bomb. I mean, what an extraordinary disservice to humanity.

Yeah. Ehrlich's book was terrible. Nightmare. Maybe the most anti human book ever written.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. But give people hope. On the flip side here, those who are saying again, going back to I don't want to bring up my children because I hear this all the time and I'm sure you do to in an age where AI is going to destroy us.

So.

Short term problems, long term problems, short term solutions, long term solutions. You said make it curious, make it maximum truth seeking 100%. Is it okay to say that we're going to have issues in the short term and we're going to have to deal with them?

Or do you think there won't be? There will be. There'll be some issues. I mean it's actually at this point no way to stop AI, it, it is accelerating whether people like it or not. I mean that's, that's, that's why together with a number of really smart people, we created xai and you know, hopefully, you know, some really small humans will continue to join XAI and build what is intended to be a maximally truth seeking and maximally curious AI. Anyway, I think that's, that's really important.

So Elon, listen, on behalf of, of those of us, and I think everybody here listening who are pro humanity and pro. Uplifting humanity and making us a multi planetary species and living a longer, healthier life and I, the one place I've disagreed with you on, on, on X is on, you know, having people live longer. You don't, people don't need to die for there to be new ideas. You know that the CEO of Ford and GM didn't have to die for Tesla to come into existence. So we're, yeah. You know, I want to just say thank you for all that you're doing and setting a model for other, other industrialists and entrepreneurs out there to take on and solve big, huge problems.

Well, thank you. I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future, like err on the side of optimism. You will be happier for it and as you pointed out, probably live longer. So, and I'm not totally against life extension. I think we, you know, we want to be, I don't think we wouldn't necessarily have people live forever. That's, or live for a very long like thousands of years. That I think that would potentially lead to ossification of society. It would, I think, lead to ossification of society. But, but I mean, solving dementia and you know, curing cancer I think are good things obviously. So I'm not sure we're actually that far apart on the life extension thing. I think we're part probably mostly in agreement. Yeah, we just don't want to have like, you know, can you live for it? Like, do you want Kim Jong Un living for a thousand years?

No, but I'd like, I'd like Elon Musk and Peter D. Man just living for 150 years and a few other thousand amazing entrepreneurs out there.

Sure. So it's, it's, you know, there is a, a challenge that like a lot of people, they really never change their mind. They just die. And this, this is actually, I'm not sure who originally said this, but even in physics. Yes. Where, which is extremely rigorous that the, you know, that, you know, physics in a lot of cases has advanced one death at a time.

Yeah, my, my friend Brian Keating, who's a astrophysicist, reminded me of that. And maybe it was true, but in this world of entrepreneurship, I think we do live with a meritocracy to a large degree, and the best ideas can bubble up to the top faster than ever before, especially with AI now where you can build companies, extraordinary companies with a couple of people and a lot of tech.

So, yeah.

I have one last question and then I know it's dinner time there. The future of xai. What's your vision there, pal?

Well, as I was saying, I think the path to AI safety is to build an AI that is maximally truth seeking with acknowledged error. That's maximally curious. And I think that, I think that that is most likely to lead to a good outcome for humanity because we are much more interesting than not humanity. Obviously I'm a big fan of Mars, but Mars is much less interesting because there is no human civilization there. And you take humans for example. We could hunt down all of the chimpanzees and kill them, but we don't. In fact, we make efforts to preserve their habitats. Anyway, I think that is the path to a great future. And a maximally positive AI is to be rigorously truth seeking, always acknowledging some amount of error and maximally curious. That's the goal of xai's. And you know, the company motto is understand the universe.

And that's a, that's a, that's a good mission and one that's going to take a bit of time. I can't wait till the first AI is able to come up with new theories of physics and new innovations. That's going to be, I mean, I don't think that's far away and I think that's going to be one of the most awesome times ever to be alive.

True. Like we, we definitely live in the most interesting times. And I actually, for a while I was kind of depressed about AI, but then I, I kind of got fatalistic about it and said like, well, even if, even if AI was going to, you know, end all humanity, would I prefer to be around to see it or not? I guess I would prefer to be around to see it just out of curiosity, but obviously, hopefully AI is extremely beneficial to humanity. But, but the thing that sort of reconciled me to be less anxious about it was to say, well, I guess even if it was apocalyptic, I'd still be curious to see the. It's like, you know, I'll be curious to see it.

I remember I was at your birthday party at One of your homes here in LA before you sold them. And Larry Page was there and Sergey was there and we were having a conversation about living in a simulation. And the notion was this is, we're in the 99th level of the gameplay and this has got to be a simulation because you couldn't. Why would be, why would it be alive right now in this single most interesting time? And then the only comment was, don't poke the simulation or it will end.

Well, if we are in a simulation, the way to keep the simulation going is to keep being interesting. So like humans run lots of computer simulations because we don't know what the outcome is going to be and we're curious to see. We'll run lots of simulations like in Tesla we'll run crash simulations and SpaceX will run rocket flight simulations. And we only stop doing the simulations when the outcome is extremely predictable and boring. Yes. So if we're in some alien.

That's a great argument. That is perfect.

Right.

When there's absolutely no. If we're not entertaining enough to the digital gods or the universe gods, they'll end the sim.

Yeah. We just need to make sure we keep the ratings up. But this is also why I think one of the ways to predict the future is that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. As seen by a third party. As seen by. As though we were in an alien soap opera. I love that. Yeah. Like so it's not necessarily good for those in the soap opera. Like you could be watching a World War I movie and seeing, you know, people get blown up and you're just eating popcorn and drinking a soda. But we're in the movie.

Yeah, well, let's not get, let's not get dystopian here because I think we can have a, we can have a, we can have a really positive outcome of a lot of other cool stuff. Yeah, for sure.

I think most likely outcome is positive.

And, and I think if, you know, and I think that's partly a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe so if you believe it's going to be a dystopian outcome, then you're going to be back on your heels protecting yourself, not investing in the future and it unravels. And so I think the message of this entire space is this is the most extraordinary time to be alive, the most exciting time to be alive. A time where a lot of individuals listening on the spaces has more power than kings or queens or heads of nations had just a few decades ago. And it doesn't take a government or a large corporation to solve a problem anymore. You know, an entrepreneur with a few H1 hundreds can do a good job.

Yeah. I think we should err on the side of optimism. We should err on the side of optimism. And we should have kids. Like, you know, to err is human.

H E I R and to reproduce as human. All right, buddy, listen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing.

You're welcome. All right. Thanks, Peter. Take care, buddy. Bye.