X Spaces: Überfluss, AGI und die Medien (Peter Diamandis) 4. Januar 2024 Peter Diamandis empfing Musk in einem X Space über datenbasierten Optimismus, digitale Superintelligenz, Langlebigkeit, Bildung und Überfluss mit Blick auf 2024.
Peter Diamandis empfing Musk in einem X Space über datenbasierten Optimismus, digitale Superintelligenz, Langlebigkeit, Bildung und Überfluss mit Blick auf 2024.
Transkript Peter Diamandis
Following is a year's 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, Yan.
Elon Musk
Happy New Year 2024. I love to think.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it feels like the future.
Elon Musk
It is the future.
Peter Diamandis
It is the future. It's going to be awesome. You know, I'm hoping we get a little bit of conversation on some hope and good news for folks on this on the spaces. I think Deal could use it.
Elon Musk
You are the most optimistic person that I know of by far and I guess it is refreshing to hear such optimism.
Peter Diamandis
I think people need a positive mindset. I think it's self fulfilling prophecy to a large degree. If you're pessimistic. And we can talk about how the news media just decimates our minds constantly.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The news is so negative. I mean it makes me sad to read the news, frankly.
Peter Diamandis
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 to do that.
Elon Musk
I'll accidentally read the news and I'll just be sad,
Elon Musk
Well, I mean as you, as you know, the, the news, the daily news really, really attempts to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? It is.
Peter Diamandis
And let me, let me show it to you every five minutes in your living room over and over and over again.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And it's a big world. There's 8 billion people on Earth. So you know, somewhere something horrible is happening every single day. But there's also great things happening every single day.
Peter Diamandis
You know what I call cnn, the Crisis News Network or the Constantly Negative News Network.
Elon Musk
And the problem is 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.
Peter Diamandis
We've got more access to food, energy, water, health care, education on the planet than ever before. I mean, people would just start watching horror movies I think instead.
Peter Diamandis
The challenge is, it's, it's our neural nets, the wiring of our brains, you know, evolved in a world of constant danger and so we're sort of just wired for fear and scarcity constantly.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, yeah, I think you made this point. Maybe others have. It sort of makes sense as a. 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.
Peter Diamandis
Your genes are out of the gene pool.
Elon Musk
Yeah, you're. You're out. Whereas, say, like, news that there's a. There's a nice bush with berries over there is. It's nice to have. It's. It's optional, but it's the. In one case you die, in other cases you're hungry, but death is worse than hunger. So. So that's why it's. Basically anyone who did not respond more to negative news than positive news didn't make it.
Peter Diamandis
They were selected. They were selected against for sure that.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, anyone who was complacent about where the lion was eaten by the lion.
Peter Diamandis
And, 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. Yeah, I.
Elon Musk
It's inevitable.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it is. I mean, I do get my news invariably 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.
Peter Diamandis
So, I mean, this, this space is called it the coming age of Abundance. And you know, you were really. When my first book came out, Abundance of the Future Is Better Than youn Think, you were super supportive and I. And I appreciate that was 12 years ago and I think the story.
Elon Musk
Whoa. 12 years ago.
Peter Diamandis
Amazing. Yeah. And it's gotten so much better. So I.
Elon Musk
It's gotten so. It has in so many ways.
Peter Diamandis
Not. Not every way.
Elon Musk
Like, I mean, I mean, obviously we go back a ways. The, The. I remember when we were at a Dana's party in Brazil. Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
How long ago he was. It was his 40th. Or was it his 30th? I don't know.
Elon Musk
No, it was his thirst. Wow. This was. It was just when SpaceX was. Yeah, just when I was pulling space.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it was, it was 2003 thereabouts. It was just before the X prize was won.
Peter Diamandis
I was trying to convince you not
Elon Musk
to build rockets 21 years ago. Could like, like you could have a kid that, that has, could legally drink
Peter Diamandis
or legally have kids. Yeah, yeah.
Elon Musk
So 21 years ago. Yeah, so. And you know, think big things are mostly better.
Peter Diamandis
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 negative 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 a more important metric? You know, here are the numbers. 90% of the world was in global extreme poverty in the 1800s. In 1981 it was 42%. Today it's under 10% of the world.
Elon Musk
Right, yeah. Hunger is actually rare and it used to be common.
Peter Diamandis
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. But what's the rate at which batteries and solar is increasing? It must be massive.
Elon Musk
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. 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, and not, not come anywhere close to depleting the resources of Earth.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, my favorite, 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 platinum. And even though the Earth's crust is 8% bauxite, 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.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Aluminum oxide is extremely common and. But, but it is, it is a low energy state. In fact, thermite. Thermite. Thermite is just iron oxide, rust and pure aluminum. And the, the energy difference between iron oxide and aluminum oxide is so great that it generates an 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 that just. In fact, in Britain, the Mosquito sort of fighter bomber was made of mostly of wood, but it was, it was done with. It was basically an early form of composites, but using stiff wood on the outside and light wood and like balsa as a sandwich structure. It's pretty clever. And the whole thing was intended to address the shortage of.
Peter Diamandis
And that. And then we get technology, we get better, better mechanisms of extracting the aluminum from the, from the aluminum 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.
Elon Musk
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, sure, it's wasted. 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, 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.
Peter Diamandis
I mean, to make the point here on the abundance theme, there Is no limitation. Energy.
Peter Diamandis
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. Right. And the direct correlation between health and education and energy. Everything scales as you increase the energy per capita of a nation.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
I don't know what. 6.9. You know what?
Peter Diamandis
6900 million. This guy there that my, my 12 year olds would. It's like 85, 85% of the planet's got a smartphone. And
Elon Musk
well, I mean if you add up the total number of smartphones ever made, it exceeds.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, 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 direct to cell phone?
Elon Musk
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 self tower on the ground in order for the phones to accept the signal. So we have to do Doppler compensation, for example, and do some sort of. Because you've got a speed of light limitations, pal.
Peter Diamandis
If it were easy, it would have been done already.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, there's some speed of light limitations. So you know, this, this like light is, is so fast and yet so slow. So you know, I, I think, yeah, a good way to think about light, at least in the space context or for the lowest orb context is, is it travels about 300km every millisecond in, in air or in, in space. And then, and then around just over 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber.
Peter Diamandis
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Elon Musk
though, that, that we should solve it or not. Like we should. You think we should?
Peter Diamandis
Well, I, I listen, I'm not necessarily saying live forever, but I'd like to make it to 120. 150.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I sort of wonder if we should not solve it too soon.
Peter Diamandis
Presidential elections, life expectancy first.
Elon Musk
And do you really want them to get that life expectancy first?
Peter Diamandis
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?
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
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 and your physical strength. Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to, you know, have an extended lifespan or health span? Yeah, sure,
Elon Musk
I guess. I think we are end up there's such a strong forcing function for life extension or healthspan 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 if you just consider arguments of symmetry that 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 cells.
Peter Diamandis
That's correct, yeah.
Elon Musk
I mean, you know, in sync.
Peter Diamandis
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, you know, 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, you know, when you have a baby, woman's 30, 35, you're 40, 45, your baby starts out at zero.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I do find it remarkable that we decompress from a single cell to an adult human and then, and then we, you know, to procreate. Compress back down to a single cell.
Peter Diamandis
That is fascinating.
Elon Musk
You know, I mean, you sort of look, look at yourself as a sort of, you know, blastocyst and say like, I haven't changed a bit.
Peter Diamandis
Here we go again. Let's recycle. It's like, 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 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 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.
Elon Musk
Overpopulation is HUD or bs. Yeah, you know, and you know, it's such nonsense. Earth is underpopulated, not overpopulated with.
Peter Diamandis
Look out the window when you're flying across the country. It's empty.
Elon Musk
Absolutely. Exactly. It's like if you say, like if your goal was to like flying from Elliot in New York to drop a bowling ball on a human, you would fail. So
Peter Diamandis
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 health span. 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 dementia.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
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?
Peter Diamandis
There are two.
Elon Musk
Quite. This could be helpful for listeners. There are two on this discussion.
Peter Diamandis
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 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, how many sensors are going up on starship when you're launching? How many sensors are going, are onboard that vehicle? Rough order of magnitude, getting back data?
Elon Musk
Well, I guess when you count everything up, there's several thousand sensors. And if I were, I mean, they're all 33 engines, so they count for the bulk of.
Peter Diamandis
Sure. But you also have stress sensors and looking what's going on and the structures and avionics and communications across all the subsystems. And if I ask you how 39
Elon Musk
engines including the alpha stage. So there's several thousand sensors. Way more sensors than up on.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I was gonna say if you, 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 a big one. Let me ask you 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?
Elon Musk
Well, none that I know of. Well, they might. I mean, there might, there probably are a few schools that are doing it, but probably 99% of schools are not. Yeah, schools are very slow, 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.
Peter Diamandis
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. The AI knows your, 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 educated. I mean, you, you funded back years ago, if you remember, the Global Learning X prize that we did.
Peter Diamandis
We, we demoed in Tanzania with AIs on tablets. It was the earliest days of AI Imad with stock, who, you know, was one of the winners of that competition, who went on out to create stability. I mean, the challenge is I don't think the educational systems are going to give up that control anytime soon.
Elon Musk
Sure. 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. So, yeah, so I think, yeah, the education situation is problematic. Not sure what to do about it.
Peter Diamandis
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?
Elon Musk
No, 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, 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.
Peter Diamandis
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 versus technology we had 10 years ago.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I generally think it's as a general sort of rule of living, 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 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.
Elon Musk
Optimism is, Is gonna make you happy.
Peter Diamandis
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 favorite examples of this was, do you know what the environmental disaster of the 1880s and 1890s was? I'm sure, you know,
Elon Musk
Is this back to whales? No, no, no, no.
Peter Diamandis
It's another form of life. It's the horse manure disaster.
Elon Musk
Oh, the horseshit problem.
Elon Musk
Yeah. What is this horseshit? Well, yeah, no, no, you're right. I mean, New York was basically a horse manure and urine and carcass.
Peter Diamandis
It was terrible. People brought their motive power.
Elon Musk
Basically. New York felt like. If you think New York subways are stinky right now, I mean, try.
Peter Diamandis
Everywhere. Yeah, people everywhere. People move from. People moved into downtown New York, Detroit, Chicago. They brought their motive power with them. And, 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 manure was like, grow. They had like special parking lots for horseshit at the corner of every street.
Elon Musk
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. So if you've got like 300,000 horses, that means you've got 20,000 horses dropping dead every year. And then you need a horse to move the horse
Peter Diamandis
or just. Or just cover it with horse mirror, let it decompose.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, it's going to be like decomposing horse carcasses throughout major cities.
Peter Diamandis
But. But then.
Elon Musk
And then. And then like, it's like, well, who's horse dead? Who's dead horse is this. People are probably quick to claim a live horse, but they're not rushing to claim a death.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
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 tails. 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 oil and whale oil. 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.
Peter Diamandis
Okay, this I have to hear.
Elon Musk
So they 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, and you, and you had a high whale tonnage, you'd get a medal and a raise. And if your whale tonnage was low, you'd be sent to the gulag.
Peter Diamandis
You get what you incentivize, baby.
Elon Musk
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'd catch the whale, weigh the whale and then dump the carcass over.
Peter Diamandis
Oh my God.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
And this is the problem of keeping laws on the books way after they're useful to society.
Elon Musk
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, so naturally every year you're going to have this accumulation of laws and regulations until eventually everything is legal.
Peter Diamandis
You mean everything is illegal?
Elon Musk
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, both left and right are. My God, you know, like SpaceX. I mean, shame on the, you know, the DOJ in this respect. In this particular case, where the 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.
Peter Diamandis
Sounds like a good motivation.
Elon Musk
Yes. And so we, we were literally told by the government in very clear terms. And you're well aware of it? I am well aware of, yes. It's a nightmare. And we would like.
Peter Diamandis
Which by the way puts us in a non competitive world against other nations.
Elon Musk
Yes, it's, it's pretty bad. So, but then, then the DOJ, you know, is suing SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers. An important point here. Not asylum. Those have been granted asylum. Those who are seeking aside.
Peter Diamandis
There's a lot of those. There's a lot of people seeking asylum.
Elon Musk
Yes. So we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. So if we hire someone who's not a permanent residence, 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.
Peter Diamandis
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 in, 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 Eric Schmidt and yourself, top of the list, who invest on making the world a better place, solving global grand challenges. Thoughts on that?
Elon Musk
I'm going to 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 absent civilization. If civilization collapses, it's all over. You know, there's like, people have got like these sort of bunkers, other countries or Hawaii or whatever. And 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.
Peter Diamandis
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 make the world a more productive place? Right. The best way to become a billionaire, to help a billion people, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities. Do you believe that?
Elon Musk
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 the 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. Just eat bugs and get eaten by bugs.
Peter Diamandis
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. Well, answer that first. And 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, healthcare, education. Are we constrained in any way?
Elon Musk
No, not really. I mean, no, I think I agree with you that the future most likely has abundance. 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.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, when I saw you last, that
Elon Musk
is mighty likely where we're headed.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
Well, thanks. I need to make sure the optimist is it doesn't cause it doesn't add to civilizational risk because you don't want like a billion of these things or with centralized control.
Peter Diamandis
Unless what could go wrong?
Elon Musk
Has anyone made a movie about that?
Peter Diamandis
Unless they obey you.
Elon Musk
Well, I don't think they should obey any, any one person.
Elon Musk
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 a rogue AI takes, I mean let's literally a movie a rogue, you know, Terminator takes over some, gains control of the mothership, of that controls all the, you know, the optimist robots or something like that. That is basically. It needs to be, it needs to be impossible for that to occur.
Peter Diamandis
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?
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
Go straight to the visual cortex.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
Last time I spoke to you about this, you were playing Pong against Pager.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
I'll tell my 12 year old boys about that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, you see the video of Pedro playing, you know, monkey mind Pong, you know, just telepathic. Playing Pong telepathically. He's not restrained in any way. He's just sitting on the sort of tree branch drinking smoothies and drinking smoothies, drinking a smoothie and playing Pong. He's not held down, you know, in fact, he gets upset when we take his video game away.
Peter Diamandis
Just like humans, 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.
Peter Diamandis
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?
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
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Elon Musk
You're welcome. Absolutely. Well, I hope the education X prize and the carbon removal X prize are resulting.
Peter Diamandis
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 the. 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 in Earth Day of 2025. And interestingly enough, you know, 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.
Elon Musk
Great, that's good to hear, pal.
Peter Diamandis
As we begin to wrap up, what other thoughts for people on abundance? What other mindset thoughts do you have for folks here?
Elon Musk
Well, I do think that the birth rate is too low for humans as I'm always going on about that.
Peter Diamandis
Just longevity, baby. I'm solving it with longevity going to keep people alive longer.
Elon Musk
Okay, well, and robots and AI, sure. But I mean it just. The current situation is grim. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of countries are, you know, if you look at say Korea, Italy.
Elon Musk
They're losing roughly half their population per generation. That means three generations, they're one tenth of their current size. And with the 1/10 that remains being very old.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
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, 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.
Peter Diamandis
I think people. 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, you know, 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. If people think the world is getting better and they have a hand in making it a better place, you most definitely do.
Elon Musk
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 they've got to make up for those who, whatever reason, don't buy an extra
Peter Diamandis
bottle of wine tonight, folks.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's a big deal. So
Peter Diamandis
let's close out on the conversation of AI and AGI, which I know a lot of people are always interested in. And, and there's a real fear about AI. What would you say to dissuade people? I mean, it's you. 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, how do you think about, you know, is, is it containment? Is it shaping how we train our AI systems? How do you think we navigate super. In digital superintelligence?
Elon Musk
Well, the rate at which AI is growing is. It really boggles the mind.
Elon Musk
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
Elon Musk
compute cluster. Wow. That's. I think it's being 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. 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 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, you know, 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.
Peter Diamandis
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 it's 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.
Elon Musk
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 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 that we should aim for maximum truth seeking and curiosity. That's my gut feel for how to make AI as safe as possible. The danger with programming morality and explicit, 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 I think we have to be careful about programming in sort of an arbitrary morality. But, but if we focus on maximizing truth with acknowledged error, that's, that's probably. I think that's the way to maximize safety and also to have the AI be curious because I think that, you know, Earth is much more interesting to an advanced AI with humans on it than without humans. I have a. I agree with you.
Peter Diamandis
Now a interesting question of do you think vast intelligent, with vast intelligence comes significant empathy and respect for life?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think so.
Peter Diamandis
Because that's the hope at the end of the rainbow here that I don't want to use the word AGI. I'll use the super. Digital superintelligence 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, 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, you know, post AGI comes abundance. I think it's the interim issues in the next one to four years.
Peter Diamandis
It's not artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, I mean, one way that AI could go wrong is if the extinctionist philosophy is programmed into the AI, 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?
Peter Diamandis
What would that look like?
Elon Musk
Well, like, there's this guy on the front page of 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 Earth. It would be better if there were none.
Peter Diamandis
Oh, my God.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So. And if you take the extreme environmentalist argument, especially like the implicit extreme environmentalist argument, there's an implicit conclusion that. That humans are a plague on the surface of the Earth. So I think we have to be quite careful about an implicit, like. Like if the extinctionist movement was somehow programmed into AI as. As the optimization, that would be obviously extremely dangerous. Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
To say the least.
Elon Musk
Yeah, It's. And. But, you know, there are people, quite a few people actually, who view humanity as. As a blight on the surface of the Earth.
Peter Diamandis
And we're. 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.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So the, like, you know, Hobbes life is nasty, brutish and short. I. I actually had a little Yorkshire terrier once who was nasty, brutish and short and kept biting people. So I called him Hob. Perfect. I would tell friends that came over, watch out for the dog. And they'd look at this miniature Yorkshire terrier and laugh. And then he would bite them on the ankle. And I said, watch out for the dog.
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, we need a counter force to the population bomb. I mean, what an extraordinary disservice to humanity.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Ehrlich's book was terrible. Nightmare. Maybe the most anti human book ever written.
Peter Diamandis
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 too in an age where AI is going to destroy us.
Peter Diamandis
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,
Elon Musk
or do you want to be. There will be some issues. I mean, essentially at this point, no way to stop AI. It's, 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 really important.
Peter Diamandis
So Elon, listen, on behalf of those of us, and I think everybody here listening who, who are pro humanity and pro uplifting humanity and making us a multi planetary species and living a longer, healthier life. And the one place I've disagreed with you on X is on having people live longer. People don't need to die for there to be new ideas. The CEO of Ford and GM didn't have to die for Tesla to come into existence. So we're, you know, I want to just say thank you for all that you're doing and setting a model for other industrialists and entrepreneurs out there to take on and solve big, huge problems.
Elon Musk
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 I'm not totally against life extension. I think we, you know, we want to be, I don't think we want to 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 society. 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 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?
Peter Diamandis
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.
Elon Musk
Sure. So it's, it's, you know, there is 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 where, which is extremely rigorous, that, you know, physics in a lot of cases has advanced one death at a time.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, my friend Brian Keating, who's a astrophysicist, reminded me of that. And, and maybe it was true. But in this world of entrepreneurship, I think we do live a meritocracy to a large degree, and the best ideas can bubble up to the top faster than ever before. Especially with, with AI now, where you can build companies, you know, extraordinary companies with a couple of people and a lot of tech.
Peter Diamandis
I have one last question, and then I know it's dinner time there. The future of X Xai, what's your vision there, pal?
Elon Musk
Well, as I was saying, I think the path to AI safety is the bold AI that is maximally truth seeking with acknowledged error. That's maximally curious. And I think 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's no human civilization there. And if 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. So anyway, I think that 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. And that's the goal of Xai's and you know, the company motto is understand the universe. And that's a, that's a.
Peter Diamandis
It'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.
Elon Musk
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 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 I'd be curious to see it.
Peter Diamandis
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 end.
Elon Musk
Yeah, 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's 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, you know, rocket flight simulations. And we only stop doing the simulations when the, when the outcome is extremely predictable and boring. Yes. So if we're in some alien.
Peter Diamandis
That's a great argument. That is perfect.
Peter Diamandis
When it's absolutely known, if we're not entertaining enough to the digital gods or the universe gods, they'll end the sim.
Elon Musk
Yeah, we just need to make sure we keep the ratings up. But this is also why I think, like, 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 though we were in an Alien soap opera. I love that. Yeah. 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
Peter Diamandis
get dystopian here because I think we can have a really positive outcome of a lot. Lot of other cool stuff. Yeah, for sure.
Elon Musk
I think most likely outcome is positive.
Peter Diamandis
And, and I think if you. 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 this. Yeah, and, and so, you know, I think the, the message of this entire space is, is this is the most extraordinary time to be alive, the most exciting time to be alive. A time where, you know, a lot, a lot of individuals listening on the spaces as 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, you know, a few H1 hundreds can do a good job.
Elon Musk
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.
Peter Diamandis
H E I R and to reproduce is human. All right, buddy, listen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing.
Elon Musk
Welcome. All right, thanks, Peter. Take care, buddy. Bye.