The Joe Rogan Experience October 31, 2025 Musk's second 2025 visit to the Joe Rogan Experience, ranging over government spending, free speech and platform moderation, and the future of AI and work.
Musk's second 2025 visit to the Joe Rogan Experience, ranging over government spending, free speech and platform moderation, and the future of AI and work.
Transcript Elon Musk
Joe Rogan Podcast.
Elon Musk
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Joe Rogan
Join my day Joe Rogan Podcast. By night, all day.
Elon Musk
What about Jeff Bezos?
Joe Rogan
Definitely doing some fast. He looks jacked, right?
Elon Musk
Yeah, but he's like quick, quick, quick. At age like 50.
Elon Musk
At age 59 than a year, he, he went from pencil neck geek to looking like a miniature. Like the Rock.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, like a little miniature alpha fella.
Elon Musk
Yeah, like, like his neck got bigger than his head. Yeah, he got big. But then like his earlier pictures, his neck's like a noodle.
Joe Rogan
I support this activity. I just see him going in this direction, which is fine.
Elon Musk
And his voice dropped like two octaves.
Joe Rogan
I want you to move in that direction as well. I think we could achieve this.
Elon Musk
I, I, I mean, I should, I
Joe Rogan
think we can achieve Gigachad. That's what people called it.
Elon Musk
Where is that guy?
Joe Rogan
People? I don't know where he is.
Elon Musk
That's like a real guy.
Joe Rogan
The artist. Yeah, no, Gigachad. Oh, Giga Chad. Yeah. I don't know if that's a real guy. It's hard.
Elon Musk
No, no, it is a real guy.
Joe Rogan
It is a real guy.
Joe Rogan
He's got the crazy jaw and like perfect sculpted hair. Yeah, yeah.
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, they may have exaggerated a little bit, but, but no, I think, I think he actually just kind of looked like that in reality. Wow. So like, he's a pretty unique looking individual.
Joe Rogan
I think we can achieve this. That guy right there, that's a real guy. I always thought that was cgi.
Elon Musk
No, I think one of the, I think the upper right one is not him. That's not that one to the left
Joe Rogan
of that, like, that's real. No, that's, that's artificial, bro. That's fake. That's got that uncanny valley feel to it, doesn't it?
Elon Musk
It's, it's not impossible.
Joe Rogan
No, no, it's not impossible to achieve, but it's not, it's not possible to maintain that kind of leanness.
Elon Musk
No, no. I mean, that's like you're, you're also at that point, you're there, there. He's dehydrating and all sorts of things.
Joe Rogan
Oh, it's based on a real person.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, based on.
Joe Rogan
Right. But it's not a real person.
Elon Musk
What does he really look like?
Joe Rogan
Those images, I think, are bullshit. Some of them are. Is that real? Okay, that real. That looks real. Those are really. Jack Bodybuilder. Yeah, yeah, that looks real. Like, that's achievable. But there's a few of those images where you're just like, what's going on here?
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Well, I mean, you see it is that.
Joe Rogan
That's the real dude.
Elon Musk
Well, there's like that. That Icelandic dude who's Thor.
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, the guy who jumps in the frozen lakes and shit.
Elon Musk
Well, the guy who played the mountain.
Elon Musk
That is. That is like a. That. That is like a mutant, strong human.
Elon Musk
Yeah, like he would be in like the X Men or something.
Joe Rogan
You know, we were hanging out.
Elon Musk
He's just like, not like, you know that. Have you seen that meme tent and tent bag?
Elon Musk
You know how like, it's like, it's really hard to get the tent in there.
Joe Rogan
Oh, right, right.
Elon Musk
That's true. There's a picture of, of him and his girlfriend with. I don't know how it gets in there. You know, it's like, it seems too small.
Joe Rogan
But I met Brian Shaw. Brian Shaw is like the world's most powerful man. And he's almost 7ft tall. He's 400 pounds and his. His bone density is 1 in 500 million people. So there's one. It's like there's like maybe 16 people. He's an enormous human being.
Joe Rogan
Like a legitimate giant. Just like that guy. Yeah, but we met him. He was hanging out with us in the green room of the mothership. It's like, okay, if this is like David and Goliath days, like. Yeah, this is an actual giant. Like the giant of the Bible.
Elon Musk
Once in a while they get a super giant person.
Joe Rogan
This is a real, A real one. Like not a tall, skinny basketball player. Yeah, yeah, like a 7 foot, 400 pound power lifter.
Elon Musk
Like you don't want to especially.
Joe Rogan
That's the guy. See, there's a photo of him standing next to like a regular human. There it is. Yeah, that's him right there.
Elon Musk
Like, there's like, there's like one of him with. Next to. Standing next to Arnold and stuff. Yeah, it's where everyone, everyone just looks tiny. I mean, I think he's pretty cool dude, actually.
Joe Rogan
Oh, Brian's very cool. Very smart, too. Unusual. You know, you expect anybody to be that big. It's got to be a moron.
Elon Musk
Yeah, no, yeah, there's Andre the Giant who was awesome. Yeah, he was great in Princess Bride.
Joe Rogan
No, he was just awesome, period.
Joe Rogan
So we were talking about this interview with Sam Altman and Tucker, and I was like, we should probably just talk about this on the air. It is one of the craziest interviews I think I've ever seen in my life.
Joe Rogan
Where Tucker starts bringing up this guy
Elon Musk
who was whistleblower or whatever.
Joe Rogan
Whistleblower who, you know, committed suicide but doesn't look like it. And he's talking to Sam Altman about this, and Sam Altman was like, are you accusing me? He's like, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm just saying I think someone killed him.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Like, and should be investigated.
Elon Musk
Not just drop the case. It seems like they just dropped the case. Yeah.
Elon Musk
But his parents think he was murdered.
Elon Musk
The wires to a security camera were cut.
Joe Rogan
Blood in two rooms.
Elon Musk
Blood in two rooms. Someone else's wig was in the room.
Joe Rogan
Someone else's wig.
Joe Rogan
Wig. Yes. Not normal.
Joe Rogan
Not normal to have a wig laying around.
Elon Musk
Yes. And he ordered doordash right before allegedly committing suicide.
Elon Musk
Which is. Seems unusual, you know.
Elon Musk
It's like, you know, let's. I'm gonna order pizza. On second thoughts, I'll kill myself. It seems like that's a very rapid change in mindset.
Joe Rogan
It's very weird. And especially the parents, have they. They don't believe he committed suicide at all.
Elon Musk
Has no note or anything.
Joe Rogan
It seems pretty fucked up. And, you know, the idea that a whistleblower for an enormous AI company that's worth billions of dollars might get whacked, that's not outside the pale.
Elon Musk
I mean, it's straight out of a movie.
Joe Rogan
Right out of a movie. But right out of a movie is real sometimes.
Elon Musk
Yeah, right, exactly. It's a little weird that I think they should do a proper investigation. Like, what's the downside on that? Proper investigation, Right.
Joe Rogan
No, yeah, for sure.
Joe Rogan
But the whole exchange is so bizarre.
Joe Rogan
Sam Altman's reaction to being accused of murder is bizarre.
Elon Musk
Look, I don't know if he's guilty, but it's not possible to look more guilty. So I'm like.
Joe Rogan
Or look more weird.
Joe Rogan
You know, maybe it's just his social thing. Like, maybe he's just odd with confrontation and it just goes blank, you know? But if somebody was accusing me of killing Jamie, like, if Jamie was a whistleblower and Jamie got whacked, and then I'd be like, wait, what do you. What are you. Are you accusing me of killing my friend? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I would. I would be a little bit more irate.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Joe Rogan
I would be a little upset.
Elon Musk
Yeah. It'd be like. Well, you'd be like. You'd certainly insist on a thorough Investigation.
Elon Musk
As opposed to trying to sweep it under the rug.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I wouldn't assume that he got that he committed suicide. I would be suspicious. If Tucker was telling me that aspect of the story, I'd be like, that does seem like a murder. Fuck, we should look into this.
Elon Musk
I mean, all signs point to it being a murder. Not saying, you know, Sam Albin had anything to do with the murder, but
Joe Rogan
blood in two rooms.
Elon Musk
It's blood in two rooms. Like, yeah, the wires, the security camera, and the doordash being ordered right before suicide. No suicide note. His parents think he was murdered. And the people that I know who knew him said he was not suicidal. So I'm like this, why would you jump to the conclusion
Joe Rogan
they sue the son's landlord? Alleged the owners and the managers their son San Francisco apartment building were part of a widespread cover up of his death.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, there's a bunch of weird. They said there's like packages missing from the building. Some people said they saw packages still being delivered and all sudden they all disappeared. Huh. That could be. People steal people's packages all the time.
Elon Musk
Porch pirate situation. Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
They failed to safeguard also, I mean, the amount of trauma those poor parents have gone through with their son dying like that, I mean, it must. God bless them. And how could they stay sane after something like that? They're probably. They're so grief stricken. Who knows what they believe at this point.
Elon Musk
Yeah. You should have asked if Epson killed himself.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's the cash. Dan Bonjean trying to convince everybody of
Elon Musk
that the gods weren't there and the camera stopped working. And, you know, the guards were asleep,
Joe Rogan
the cameras weren't working. He had a giant steroided up bodybuilder guy that he was sharing a cell with that was a murderer who was a bad cop. Like, all of it's kind of nuts. All of it's kind of nuts. Like, that he would just kill himself rather than reveal all of his billionaire friends.
Joe Rogan
And then did you see Tim Dillon talking to Chris Cuomo about this? I did. He liked Chris Cuomo. Just looked so stupid. Tim just listed off all the. Tim just. And he's like, I agree, it is strange. Like, of course it's strange, Chris. Jesus Christ. You can't just go with the tide. You got to think things through. And if you think that one through, you're like, I don't think he killed himself. Nobody does. You'd have to work for an intelligence agency to think he killed himself.
Elon Musk
It does. It does seem unlikely.
Joe Rogan
It seems highly Unlikely. Highly unlikely. All point to murder.
Joe Rogan
They had to get rid of him because he knew too much. Whatever the fuck he was doing, whatever kind of an asset he was, whatever thing he was up to, you know, was apparently very effective.
Joe Rogan
And a lot of people were compromised. You see, your boy Bill Gates is now saying, climate change is not a big deal. Relax, everybody. I know I scared the fuck out of you for the last decade and a half, but we're gonna be fine.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, you know, as I was saying just before coming into the studio, you know, like, every day there's some crazy wild new thing that's happening. It just feels like reality is accelerating.
Joe Rogan
It's every day, and every day it's, like, more and more ridiculous to the point where the simulation is more and more undeniable.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah, it really feels like simulation, you know, it's like, come on, what are the odds that this could be the case?
Joe Rogan
Are you paying attention at all? The Three Eye Atlas, Are you the comet? Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah, Yeah.
Elon Musk
I mean. I mean, one thing I can say is, like, look, I. If I was aware of any evidence of aliens. Joe, you have my word, I will come on your show and I will reveal it on the show.
Elon Musk
Yeah, That's a good deal. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Joe Rogan
I believe you. Yeah.
Elon Musk
Thank you. I'll stick. I keep, you know, keep my promises, so.
Joe Rogan
All right, yeah, I'll hold you to that.
Elon Musk
And I'm never committing suicide, to be clear.
Joe Rogan
I don't think you would either.
Elon Musk
On camera, guys. I am never committing suicide, ever.
Joe Rogan
If someone says you committed suicide, I will fight tooth and nail.
Elon Musk
Thank you. I will fight tooth and nail.
Elon Musk
I will not believe it.
Joe Rogan
I will not believe it. The thing about the Three Eye Atlas
Elon Musk
is that's a hell of a name, actually.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's a third.
Elon Musk
It sounds like third eye or something.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it does. Three I is the third. It's only the third interstellar object that's detected.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. Avi Loeb was on the podcast a couple days ago talking about it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it could be onions, I don't know.
Joe Rogan
But apparently today they're saying that it's changed course. Did you see that, Jamie? Avi Lobe said something today. I'll send it to you. I know it's on Reddit. Here you go, Jamie. I'll send it to you right now. It's fascinating. It's fascinating also because it's made almost entirely of nickel, whatever it is. And the only way that Exists here is industrial alloys, apparently.
Elon Musk
No, there are definitely comets and asteroids that are made primarily of nickel. Oh really? Yeah. So the places where you mine nickel on Earth is actually where there was an asteroid or comet that hit Earth that was a nickel rich, you know, nickel rich meteorite.
Joe Rogan
Nickel rich deposit.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's coming. Those are from impacts. You definitely didn't want to be there at the time because anything would have been obliterated. But that's where the sources of nickel and cobalt are these days.
Joe Rogan
So this is Avi Loeb a few hours ago. The first hint of non gravitational acceleration, that something other than gravity is affecting its acceleration, meaning something is affecting its trajectory beyond gravity was indicated. Interesting. Dun, dun, dun. So it's mostly nickel, very little iron, which he was saying is on Earth. It only exists in alloys. But whatever, you know, you're dealing with another planet.
Elon Musk
There are cases where there's very nickel rich asteroids. Meteorite for something from space. Yeah. It doesn't mean it'll be very sort of heavy spaceship to be. Make it all out of nickel. Oh, yeah.
Joe Rogan
And fucking huge. The size of Manhattan and all nickel. That's kind of nuts.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that's a heavy spaceship.
Joe Rogan
That's a real problem. If it hits.
Elon Musk
Yes. No, it would like obliterate a continent type of thing.
Joe Rogan
Probably kill most of human life, if not all of us.
Elon Musk
It depends on what the total mass is. But I mean, the thing is like in the fossil record there are, you know, there's like arguably five major extinction events. Like the biggest one of which is the Permian extinction where almost all life was eliminated. That actually occurred over several million years. There's the Jurassic. I think Jurassic is. I think that one's pretty definitively an asteroid. But there's been five major extinction events. But what they don't count are really the ones that merely take out a continent, so.
Elon Musk
Yeah, because those don't really show up on the fossil record, you know.
Elon Musk
So unless it's enough to cause a, you know, mass extinction event throughout Earth, it doesn't show up, you know, in a fossil record that's 200 million years old. So the. Yeah, but there have been many, many impacts that would have sort of destroyed all life on, you know, let's say half of North America or something like that. There are many such impacts through the course of history.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And there's nothing we could do about it right now.
Elon Musk
Yeah, there was one that hits. There was one that hit Siberia and destroyed I think a few hundred square miles.
Joe Rogan
Oh, that's the Tunguska. Yeah, yeah, that's the one from the 1920s, right? Yeah, yeah, that's the one that coincides with that meteor, that comet storm that we go through every June and every November that they think is responsible for that Younger Dryas impact. Yeah, all that shit's crazy. Thank you before we go any further, for letting us have a tour of SpaceX and letting us be there for the rocket launch. One of the absolute coolest things I've ever seen in my life. And we were, we thought it was only like. I thought it was a half a mile. Jamie's like, it was a mile away. Turned out it's almost two miles away. And you feel it in your chest.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's. You have to wear and you feel
Joe Rogan
it in your chest and it's two miles away. Yeah, it was fucking amazing. And then to go with you up into the command center and to watch all the Starlink satellites with all the different cameras and all in real time as it made its way all the way to Australia. How many minutes? Like 35, 40 minutes.
Joe Rogan
Wild. Watch it. Touchdown in Australia.
Joe Rogan
Fucking crazy. It was amazing.
Joe Rogan
Absolutely amazing.
Elon Musk
The starship's awesome and anyone can go watch the launch, actually. So you can just go to South Padre island, get as a great view of the launch. So it's like where a lot of spring breakers go, but. But we'll be flying pretty frequently out of Starbase in South Texas and we formally incorporated it as a city, so it's actually legally an actual legal city. Starbase Texas. It's not that often you hear like, hey, we made a city. You know, that used to be like, like in the old days, like a startup would be, you go and gather a bunch of people and say, hey, let's go make a town. Literally.
Elon Musk
That was like. That would have been startups in the old days.
Elon Musk
Yeah, or a country. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
Actually, if you tried doing that today, there'd be a real problem.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Things are so much, so much set in stone on the country front these days. You might be able to pull it off.
Joe Rogan
You might be able to pull it off. If you got a solid island, you might be able to pull it off. You know, probably, you know, like, like making new countries. Lanai. Yeah.
Elon Musk
You could put this it enough effort into it, you can make a new country.
Joe Rogan
This is one of the different ones. This is one of the ones that you catch, right? Or is that one? Yeah, that's.
Elon Musk
That's the booster. So that's the super heavy booster. So that's one with. The booster's got 33 engines that, that. And it's, you know, by version four, that will have about 10,000 tons of thrust. You know, right now it's about seven, 8,000 tons of thrust. That's the largest flying object ever made.
Joe Rogan
I had to explain to someone, they were going, why do they blow up all the time if you're so smart? Because there was this fucking idiot on television, some guy was being interviewed and they were talking about you. And he goes, oh, I think he's a fuckwit. And he goes, he's a fuckwit. And. And he goes, why? Oh, his rockets keep blowing up. And someone said, yeah, well, why do his rockets blow? And I had to explain because it's the only way you find out what the tolerances are. You have to, you have to follow
Elon Musk
the corners of the box. So when you do a new rocket development program, you have to do what's called exploring the limits, the corners of the box where you say it's like worst case this, worst case that, to figure out where the limits are. So you blow up. You know, admittedly in the development process, sometimes it blows up accidentally, but we intentionally subject it to, you know, a flight regime that is much worse than what we expect in normal flight. So that when we put people on board or valuable cargo, it doesn't blow up. So, for example, for the flight that you saw, we actually deliberately took heat shield tiles off the ship, off of Starship in some of the worst locations to say, okay, if we lose a heat shield tile here, is it catastrophic or is it not? And nonetheless, Starship was able to do a soft landing in the Indian Ocean just west of Australia, which got there from Texas in like, I don't know, 35, 40 minutes type of thing.
Joe Rogan
So it landed even though you put it through this situation where it has
Elon Musk
compromised shield, it had an unusually. We brought it in hot, like an extra hot trajectory with missing tiles to see if it would still make it to a soft landing, which it did. Now, I should point out it did have. There were some holes that were burnt into it, but it was robust enough to land despite having some holes burnt. You know that? Yeah, because it's coming in like a blazing meteor. You can see the real time video.
Joe Rogan
Well, tell me the speed again, because the speed was bananas you were talking about.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's like seven, 18,000 miles an hour, 25 times the speed of sound or thereabouts. So the. So think of it like it's like 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. You know, both from assault rifles, round Mach 2.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. Or compare it to like a bullet from a, you know, a.45 or 9 mil, which is subsonic. That's, you know, It'll be about 30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun.
Joe Rogan
30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun. And it's the size of a skyscraper.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, that's fast.
Joe Rogan
It's so wild. It's so wild. See, man, it's. It's so exciting. There's the factory. So exciting too, because like, genuinely, no bullshit. I felt like I was witnessing history. I felt like it was a scene in a movie where someone had expectations and. And they like, what are they doing? They're building rockets. And you go there and as we're walking through Jamie, you could speak to this too. Didn't you have the feeling where you're like, oh, this is way bigger than I thought it was.
Elon Musk
This is awesome.
Elon Musk
That's what she said.
Joe Rogan
The, ah, the amount of rockets you're making.
Elon Musk
I don't know if you tend back
Joe Rogan
Gigachad in the house.
Elon Musk
This is way bigger than that.
Joe Rogan
It's a giant metal dick. You're fucking fucking the universe with your giant metal dick.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is, it is very big.
Joe Rogan
And the sheer numbers of them that you guys are making. And then this is a version and you have a new updated version that's coming soon. And what is the other one?
Elon Musk
It's a little longer, more pointy. It's the same amount of pointy, but it's got a bit more length. The interstage. You see that interstage section with kind of like the grill area that's now integrated with the boost stage. So we do what's called hot staging, where we light the ship engines while it's still attached to the booster. So the booster engines are still thrusting. It's still being pushed forward by the booster of the ship. But then we light the ship engines and the ship engines actually pull away from the booster, even though the booster engines are still firing.
Elon Musk
So it's blasting flame through that grill section where we integrate that grill section into the boost stage with the next version of the rocket. And next version of the rocket will have the Raptor 3 engines, which are a huge improvement. You may have seen them in the lobby because we've got the raptor 1, 2 and 3. And you can see the dramatic improvement in simplicity. We should probably put a plaque there to also show how much we reduce the weight, the cost, and the. And improve the efficiency and the thrust. So the Raptor 3 has almost twice the thrust of Raptor 1.
Elon Musk
So you see Raptor 3, it looks like it's got parts missing. Right.
Elon Musk
It's very, very clean.
Joe Rogan
How many of them are on the rocket?
Elon Musk
There's 33 on the booster. And each Raptor engine is producing twice as much thrust as all four engines on a 747.
Elon Musk
So that engine is smaller than a 747 engine, but it's producing almost 10 times the thrust of a 747 engine. So extremely high power to weight ratio. There's 33 of them.
Joe Rogan
So when you're designing these, you get to Raptor 1, you see its efficiency, you see where you can improve it. You get to Raptor 2. How far can you scale this up with just the same sort of technology with propellant and ignition and engines, like, how much further can you.
Elon Musk
We're pushing the limits of physics here. So. And really, in order to make a fully reusable orbital rocket, which no one has succeeded in doing yet, including, including us, but Starship is the first time that there is a design for a rocket where full and rapid reusability is actually possible. So it was not. There's not even been a design before where it was possible. Certainly not a design that got made any hardware at all. We live on a planet where the gravity is quite high. Like Earth's gravity is really quite high. And if the gravity was even 10 or 20% higher, we'll be stuck on Earth forever. Yeah, we could not use, certainly couldn't use conventional rockets. You'd have to like blow yourself off the surface with like a nuclear bomb or something crazy. So on the other hand, if Earth's gravity was just a little lower, like even 10, 20% lower, then getting to orbit would be easy. So it's like, it's like, it's like if this was video game, it's set to like maximum difficulty, but not impossible.
Elon Musk
So that's what we have here. So it's not as though others have ignored the concept of reusability. They've just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. And we've been working on this for a long time at SpaceX, and I'm the chief engineer of the company, although I should say that we were an extremely talented engineering team. I think we've got the best rocket engineering team that has ever been assembled. It's an honor to work with such incredible People. So it's fair to say that we have not yet succeeded in achieving full reusability, but we at last have a rocket where full reusability is possible. And I think we'll achieve it next year. So that's a really big deal. And the reason that's such a big deal is that full reusability drops the cost of access to space by 100, maybe even more than 100, actually. So it could be like 1,000. You can think of it like any mode of transport. Like, imagine if aircraft were not reusable. Like, you flew somewhere, you throw the plane at. Like, imagine if, like the way conventional rockets work is, it would be like if you had an airplane and instead of landing at your destination, you parachute out and the plane crashes somewhere and you land at your des and you land in a parachute at your destination. Now, that would be a very expensive trip and you'd need another plane to get back, but that's how the other rockets in the world work. Now, the SpaceX Falcon rocket is the only one that is at least mostly reusable. You've seen the Falcon rocket land. We've now done over 500 landings of the SpaceX rocket, of the Falcon 9 rocket. And this year we'll deliver probably, I don't know, somewhere between 2,200 and 2500 tons to orbit with the Falcon 9 Falcon Heavy rockets, not counting anything from Starship.
Joe Rogan
And this is mostly Starlink.
Elon Musk
Yes, mostly Starlink, but we launched many other. We even launched our competitors on comparison to StarLink, on Falcon 9, we charge the same price. Pretty fair. But SpaceX this year will deliver roughly 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. Wow. And then of the remaining 10%, most of that is done by China. And then the remaining roughly 4% is everyone else in the world, including our domestic competitors.
Joe Rogan
You know, it's kind of incredible how many things are in space, like, how many things are floating above us now,
Elon Musk
there's a lot of things, right, but
Joe Rogan
is there a saturation point where we're going to have problems with all these different satellites that are.
Elon Musk
I think as long as the satellites are maintained, it'll be fine. Space is very roomy. Like, you can think of space as being concentric shells of the surface of the Earth. So, you know, it's the surface of the Earth, but it's a series.
Joe Rogan
It's much larger.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's like a series of concentric trails.
Joe Rogan
And think of an Airstream trailer flying around up there. There's a lot of room for Airstreams.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean imagine. Yeah. If there's just a few thousand Airstreams on Earth.
Elon Musk
What are the odds that they'd hit each other?
Joe Rogan
They wouldn't be very crowded.
Joe Rogan
And then you got to go bigger.
Joe Rogan
Because you're dealing with far above Earth, hundreds of miles above Earth.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's the. But the goal of SpaceX is to get rocket technology to the point where we can extend life beyond Earth and that we can establish a self sustaining city on Mars, a permanent base on the moon. That would be very cool. I mean, imagine if we had like a, you know, Moon Base Alpha where there's like a permanent science base on the moon.
Joe Rogan
That would be pretty dope. Or at least a tourist trap.
Elon Musk
I mean, a lot of people be
Joe Rogan
willing to go to the moon for,
Elon Musk
just for a tour, that's for sure. We could probably pay for our space program with that.
Elon Musk
Well, because it's like if you, if you could go to the moon with, and safely, I think we'd get. A lot of people would pay for that.
Joe Rogan
Oh, 100%. After the first year, after nobody died.
Elon Musk
Make sure. Are you gonna come back?
Joe Rogan
Because like that submarine, they, they had a bunch of successful launches in that private submarine before it exploded and killed everybody.
Elon Musk
That was not a good design, obviously.
Joe Rogan
It was a very bad design and the engineer said it would not withstand the pressure of those depths. Like, there's a lot of whistleblowers in that company too.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they made that out of carbon fiber, which doesn't make any sense because you actually need to be dense to go down. In any case, you just make it out of steel. If you make it out of sort of just, you know, a big steel casting, that's, that's you'll be safe and nothing will happen.
Joe Rogan
Why would they make it out of carbon fiber then? Is it cheaper?
Elon Musk
I think they think carbon fiber sounds cool or something, but it does sound cool. It sounds cool, but because it's such low density, you actually have to add extra mass to go down because it's low density. But if you just have a giant hollow ball bearing, you're going to be fine.
Joe Rogan
Speaking of carbon fiber, check out my unplugged Tesla out there.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's cool.
Joe Rogan
Pretty sick, right? Have you guys ever thought about doing something like that? Like having like an AMG division of Tesla where you do like custom stuff?
Elon Musk
I think it's best to leave that to the custom shops. You know, we're like, Tesla's focus is autonomous cars. You Know, building kind of futuristic autonomous cars. So, like, I think it's. We want the future to look like the future. So the, like. Did you see, like, designs for, like, the sort of the robotic bus? It looks pretty cool.
Joe Rogan
The robotic bus is also being totally autonomous.
Elon Musk
We need to actually figure out the good name for it, like, I think called the robust, or there's no good. There's like. What do you call this thing? But it looks cool. It's very art deco. It's like futuristic art deco. And I think we want to change the aesthetic over time. You don't want the aesthetic to be constant over time. You want to evolve the aesthetic. So, like, I have a son who's like, you know, he's, like, even more autistic than me, but he has these great observations.
Elon Musk
The Saxon? He has these great observations in the world because he just views the world through a different lens than most people. And he's like, dad, why does the world look like it's 2015? I'm like, damn, the world does look like it's 2015. Like, the aesthetic has not evolved since 2015.
Joe Rogan
Oh, that's what it looks like?
Elon Musk
That's pretty cool.
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah. That's like.
Elon Musk
You'd want to see that going down the road, you know?
Elon Musk
You'd be like, okay, this is. We're in the future, you know, it doesn't look like 2015.
Joe Rogan
What is that ancient science fiction movie? Like, one of the first science fiction movies ever? Is it Metropolis? Is that what it is?
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
That looks like it belongs in Metropolis.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. It's a futuristic art deco.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, that's cool that you concentrating on the aesthetic. That's kind of the whole deal with cybertruck, right? Like, it didn't have to look like that.
Elon Musk
No, I just wanted to have something that looked really different.
Joe Rogan
Is it a pain in the ass for people to get it insured? Because it's all solid steel, and I
Elon Musk
hope it's not too much. Tesla does offer insurance, so you can always get insured at Tesla. Well, but, like, it is the form does follow function in the case of the cybertruck, because as you demonstrated with your armor piercing arrow. Because if you shot that arrow at a regular truck, you would have.
Joe Rogan
Right through it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. You would have found your arrow in the wall. It would have gone through.
Joe Rogan
At the very least, it would have buried into one of the seats.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. But you could definitely get enough of bow velocity and the right arrow would go through both doors. Of a regular truck and land on the wall.
Joe Rogan
If there was a clear shot between both doors, it probably would have passed right through.
Elon Musk
Exactly. But the arrow shattered on the Cybertruck because it's ultra hard stainless. And I thought it'd be cool to have a truck that is bulletproof to a subsonic projectile. So especially in this day and age, like if the apocalypse happens, you're going to want to have a bulletproof truck, you know. So then because it's made of ultra hot stainless, you can't just stamp the panels, you can't just put in a stamping press because it breaks the press. So in order to actually. So it has to be plainer because it's so difficult to bend because it breaks the machine that bends it. That's why, that's why it's so planar and it's not, you know, it's because it's bulletproof steel.
Joe Rogan
So it is like boxy as opposed to like curved.
Elon Musk
And yeah, you just, in order to make like the curved shapes, you take basically mild steel, like a Neil's. In a regular truck car, you take mild, thin annealed steel, you put it in a stamping press and it just smushes it and makes it whatever shape you want. But the cybertruck is made of ultra hard stainless and so you can't stamp it because it would break the stamping press. So even bending it is hard. So even to bend it to its current position, we have to way over bend it. And so it gets so that when it springs back, it's in the right position. So it's. I don't know, I think if you want to, I think it's a unique aesthetic and you say, well, what's cool about a truck? Trucks should be, I don't know, manly. They should be macho, you know, and bulletproof is maximum macho. Pierre Smas, macho.
Joe Rogan
Are you married to that shape now? Like, is it. Can you do anything to change it? Like, does he get further? Like, I know you guys updated the 3 and the Y. Did you update the Y as well?
Elon Musk
Yes, the new and the Y are updated. You know, there's like, there's a screen in the back for the kid that the kids can watch, for example, in the new 3 and Y. Sort of in the new Y, there's, there's like hundreds of improvements. Like we keep improving the car and even the cybertruck, we keep improving it, but I wanted to just do something that looked unique and the cybertruck looks unique and has unique functionality and there were three things. I was very Porsche. Let's make it bulletproof, let's make it faster than a Porsche 911. And we actually cleared the quarter mile. The cybertruck can clear a quarter mile while towing a Porsche 911 faster than a Porsche 911. It can out tow an F350 diesel.
Joe Rogan
What is the tow limitations?
Elon Musk
I mean, we could tow like a 747 in that. With a cybertruck. A cybertruck is insanely. It is an. It is alien technology. Okay. Because it shouldn't be possible to be that big and that fast. That doesn't. It's like an elephant that runs like a cheetah.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Because it's zero to 60 in less than three seconds.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And it's enormous. What does it weigh, like 7,000 pounds?
Elon Musk
Yeah. This is different configurations, but it's about that. That's a beast.
Elon Musk
So. And it's got four wheel steering, so the rear wheel steer too. So it's got a very tight turning radius.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, we noticed that when we drove one to Starbase.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Very tight turning radius.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Pretty sick.
Joe Rogan
Are you still doing the roadster?
Elon Musk
Yes, eventually. We're getting close to demonstrating the prototype and I think this will be. One thing I can guarantee is that this product demo will be unforgettable. Unforgettable?
Elon Musk
Whether it's good or bad, it will be unforgettable.
Joe Rogan
Can you say more? What do you mean?
Elon Musk
Well, you know, my friend Peter Thiel, you know, once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don't have flying cars.
Joe Rogan
So you're going to be able to fly?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.
Joe Rogan
So are you actively considering making an electric flying car? Is this like a real thing?
Elon Musk
Well, we have to see in the.
Joe Rogan
In the demo. So when you do this, like, are you going to have a retractable wing? Like, what is the idea behind this? Don't be sly. Come on.
Elon Musk
I can't do the unveil before the unveil, but tell me off air then. Look, I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. It has a shot.
Joe Rogan
And when you plan on doing this, what's the goal?
Elon Musk
Hopefully before the end of the year. Really?
Joe Rogan
Before the end of this year? This is. I mean, we're.
Elon Musk
Yeah, like in a couple months. Hopefully in a couple months. You know, we need to make sure that it works. Like this is some Crazy, crazy technology we got in this car. Crazy technology. Crazy, crazy.
Joe Rogan
So different than what was previously announced and.
Joe Rogan
And is that why you haven't released it yet? Because you keep fucking with
Elon Musk
has crazy technology.
Elon Musk
Like, is it even a car? I'm not sure. It's like, it looks like a car, but let's just put it this way.
Elon Musk
It's crazier than anything James Bond. If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it's crazier than that.
Joe Rogan
Very exciting. I don't know what to think about. It's a limited amount of information I'm drawing from here. Jamie's very suspicious over there. Look at him. Excited. I'm interested. It's still going to be the same.
Elon Musk
Well, you know what I mean. If you want to come a little before the. The unveil, I can show it to you 100%.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, let's go. Yeah, it's. It's kind of crazy all the different things that you're involved in simultaneously and you know, we talked about this before, your time management, but I really don't understand it. I don't understand how you can be paying attention to all these different things simultaneously. Starlink, SpaceX, Tesla. Boring. Company X. You fucking tweet. Or post rather all day long.
Elon Musk
Well, it's more like I could hop in for like two minutes and then hop out, you know, But I mean, just the fact that you could do whatever, you know, I can't do that.
Joe Rogan
If I hop in, I start scrolling, I start looking around. Next thing you know, I've lost an hour.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so no, it's. For me, it's a couple minutes time. Usually once or sometimes, I guess half an hour, but usually I'm in for a few minutes. Then out of posting something on X, I do sometimes feel like it's sometimes like that meme of the guy who drops the grenade and leaves the room. That's been me more than once on X.
Joe Rogan
Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's gotta be fun, though. It's gotta be fun to know that you essentially disrupted the entire social media chain of command. Because there was a very clear thing that was going on with social media. The government had infiltrated it. They were censoring speech. And until you bought it, we really didn't know the extent of it. We kind of assumed that there was something going on. We had no idea that they were actively involved in censoring actual real news stories, real data, real scientists, real professors. Silenced, Expelled. Kicked off the platform.
Elon Musk
We're telling the truth.
Joe Rogan
For telling the truth. And I'm sure you've also. I kind of. Because I sent it to you. That chart that shows young kids, teenagers identifying as trans and non binary.
Joe Rogan
Literally stops dead when you bought Twitter.
Joe Rogan
And starts falling off a cliff when people are allowed to have rational discussions now.
Joe Rogan
And actually talk about it.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I said at the time, like, I think that, like, the reason for acquiring Twitter is because it was. It was. It was causing destruction at a civilizational level. It was. I mean, I posted, I tweeted on Twitter at the time that it is, you know, it's Wormtongue for the world. You know, like Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings, where he would just sort of like whisper these terrible things to the king so the king would believe these things that weren't true. And unfortunately, Twitter really got. It got like the woke mob, essentially, they controlled Twitter and they were pushing a nihilistic, anti civilizational mind virus to the world. And you can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where, you know, downtown San Francisco looks like a zombie apocalypse. You know, it's bad. So we don't want the whole world to be a zombie apocalypse. But that's. That was essentially. They were pushing this very negative, nihilistic, untrue worldview on the world, and it was causing a lot of damage.
Joe Rogan
The stunning thing about it is how few people course corrected. A bunch of people woke up and realized what was going on. People that were all on board with, like, woke ideology, maybe 2015 or 16. And then eventually it comes to affect them, or they see it in the workplace, or they see it and they're like, whoa, whoa, who we got to stop stop this. A bunch of people did, but a lot of people never course corrected.
Elon Musk
Yeah, a lot of people didn't course correct, but it's gone directionally. It's directionally correct. Like you mentioned the massive spike in kids identifying as trans and then that spike dropping after the Twitter acquisition. I think that simply allowing the truth to be told was just shedding sun. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say. And just allowing sunlight kills the virus.
Joe Rogan
And it also changed the benchmark for all the other platforms. You can't just openly censor people on all the other platforms. And X is available. So everybody else had a. Facebook announced they were changing, YouTube announced they were changing their policies, and they're kind of forced to. And blue sky double down.
Elon Musk
Well, like, the problem is, like, if Essentially, the woke mind virus retreated to work to Blue Sky. Yeah, but it's where just a self reinforcing lunatic.
Joe Rogan
They're all just triple masked. I was totally watching this exchange on a blue sky where someone said that they're just trying to be Zen about something. And then someone, a moderator, immediately chimed in and why don't you try to stop being racist against Asians by saying something Zen? By saying I'm trying to be Zen about something, they were accusing that person of being racist towards Asians.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's just everyone's a whole monitor over there.
Joe Rogan
The worst hall monitor, a virgin like incel.
Elon Musk
They're all hall monitors trying to rat on each other.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's fascinating. And then people say, I'm leaving for Blue sky, like Stephen King. Then a couple weeks later it's back on X. Yeah, fuck it, there's no one over there. It's all a bunch of crazy people. You can only stay in the asylum for so long. Like, all right, this is not good. They all bail.
Joe Rogan
Threads kind of like that too. Threads.
Elon Musk
I've been on threads. Is it?
Joe Rogan
Well, what happens is if you go on Instagram every now and then, something really stupid will pop up on threads, like, what the fuck? And it shows it to you on Instagram. And then I'll click on that and then I'll go to Threads and it's like you see posts with like 25 likes, like famous people, like 50, like it's. It's like. No, but the people that post on there, they're finding that there's very little pushback from insane ideology. So they go there and they spit out nonsense. And very few people jump in to argue.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Very weird.
Joe Rogan
Very weird place.
Elon Musk
I mean, I can generally get the vibe of like, what's taking off by seeing what's showing up on X. Because that's the public town square still. Or what links show up in group texts. If I'm in group chats with friends, what links are showing up?
Joe Rogan
That's what I try to do now. Only get stuff that shows up in my group text because that keeps me productive. So I only check if someone's like, dude, what the fuck? I'm like, all right, what the fuck?
Elon Musk
Let me check it out. If there's something that's crazy enough, it'll end with the group chat.
Joe Rogan
But there's always something. That's what's nuts. There's always some new law that's passed, some new insane thing that California is doing. Yeah, it's like, like a Giant chunk of it's happening in California. The most preposterous things that I get.
Joe Rogan
And then you got Gavin Newsom, who's running around saying, we all have California derangement Syndrome. He's just, like, ripping off Trump derangement and calling it California derangement. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The fucking. How many corporations have left California?
Joe Rogan
Right? Hundreds.
Joe Rogan
That's not good.
Elon Musk
I mean, I mean, I think in an outlift.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. In an outlift, they moved to Tennessee.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. We can't do this anymore.
Joe Rogan
It's the California company for food. It's like the greatest hamburger place ever.
Elon Musk
It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, speaking of, like, just sort of open source and, like, looking at things openly. Like, I just like going in and out and seeing them make the burger.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's right there.
Elon Musk
Chop the onions and they, you know, it's. You just see everything getting made in front of you. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Like, I like. It should be like, how many wake up calls do you need to say that needs to be reformed in California?
Joe Rogan
Well, the crazy thing that Newsom does is whenever someone brings up the problems in California, he starts rattling off all the positives. The most Fortune 500 companies, highest education. But, yeah, that was all already there before you were governor.
Elon Musk
But how many Fortune 500 companies have left California?
Joe Rogan
And then you guys spent $24 billion on the homeless and it got way worse.
Elon Musk
Yes. The homeless population doubled or something. People don't understand the homeless thing because it sort of preys on people's empathy. And I think we should have empathy and we should try to help people. But the homeless industrial complex is really. It's dark, man. It should be. That network of NGOs should be called, like, the drug Zombie Farmers, because the more homeless people. And really, like, when you meet, like, you know, somebody who's like, totally dead inside, shuffling along down the street with a needle dangling out of their leg. Homeless is the wrong word. Like, homeless implies that somebody got a little behind on their mortgage payments, and if they just got a job offer, they'd be back on their feet. But someone who's. I mean, you see these videos of people that are just shuffling. You know, they're on fentanyl. They're. They're like, you know, taking a dump in the middle of the street. You know, they got like open sores and stuff. They're not like one drop offer away from getting back on their feet.
Joe Rogan
Right. This is not A homeless situation.
Elon Musk
Homeless is, it's a propaganda word. Right? So, and then these sort of charities, of course are, they get money proportionate to the number of homeless people or number of drug zombies. So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it. That's why they don't arrest the drug dealers. Because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave. So they know who the drug dealers are. They don't arrest them on purpose because otherwise the drug zombies would leave and they would, they would stop getting money from the state of California and from, from all the charities.
Joe Rogan
Wait a minute, so you say, is that real? So they're in coordination with law enforcement on this.
Joe Rogan
So how do they, how do they have those meetings?
Elon Musk
They're all in cahoots.
Joe Rogan
Well, when you find this, it's like
Elon Musk
such, it's, this is a diabolical scam. And San Francisco's got this tax, this gross receipts tax, which is not even on revenue, it's on all transactions. Which is why Stripe and Square and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco. Because it wasn't a tax on revenue, it was taxed on transactions. So if you did like trillions of dollars transactions, not revenue, you're taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. So like Jack Dorsey pointed this out and they said like, look, that he had to move square from San Francisco to Oakland. I think Stripe had to move from San Francisco to south San Francisco, different city. And that money goes to the homeless industrial complex, that tax that was passed. So there's billions of dollars that go, as you pointed out, billions of dollars every year that go to these non governmental organizations that are funded by the state. It's not clear how to turn this off. It's a self licking ice cream cone situation. So they get this money, the money is proportionate to the number of homeless people or number of drug zombies essentially. So they try to keep, they try to actually increase because in some cases somebody did an analysis. When you add up all the money that's flowing, they're getting close to a million dollars per homeless, per drug Zombie, it's like $900,000. Something like some crazy amount of money is going to these organizations. So they want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area so they get the revenue. So, and that's why, like I said, they don't arrest the drug dealers because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don't want to have to have too much if they get too much drugs and then they die. So they're kept in this sort of perpetual zone of being addicted but just barely alive.
Joe Rogan
So how is this coordinated with like das? Das that don't prosecute people. So when they, when they hire the. Or they push. So they fund the campaigns of the most progressive, most out there, left wing DAs, they get them into office.
Elon Musk
We've got that issue in Austin too, by the way.
Elon Musk
You see that guy that got shot in the library?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I heard the guy got shot and killed in the library. I think that was just like last
Joe Rogan
week or something, right.
Elon Musk
So some friends of mine were telling me that like the library is unsafe. Like they took their kids to the library and there were like dangerous people in the library in Austin. And I was like, dangerous people in the library? Like that's a strange. It basically get like drug zombies in the library.
Joe Rogan
Oh, Jesus. And that's when someone got shot.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I believe this is. Should be on the news. We might be able to pull it up. But I think it was just in the last week or so that there was a shooting in the library in Austin. Because Austin's got, you know, it's the most liberal part of Texas that we're in. Right, right here,
Joe Rogan
so. Suspect of all the shooting Austin Park Library Saturday is accused of another shooting at the Cap Metro bus earlier that day. According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Austin police arrested Harold Newton Keene, 55, shortly after the shooting in the library, which occurred around noon. One person sustained non life threatening injuries in the event. Before that shooting, Keaton was accused of shooting another person in a bus incident and after reportedly pointing his gun at a child. So this is the fella down here.
Elon Musk
So we just have a seriously have a problem here. Yeah, you know, so I think one of the people might have died too that he shot. So like one of the people I think, I think did bleed out. But either way, it's like getting shot is still bad.
Joe Rogan
It says the victim told PISA confronted the suspect who started to eat what appeared to be crystal methamphetamine. According to the affidavit, the victim advised the suspect began to trip out, at which time the victim exited the bus. Victim told the bus driver hit the panic button, then exited the bus. When he turned around, the observer blackmail is now standing at the front of the bus with the gun pointed at him. The victim advised the black male fired a single round which grazed his left hip. So he shot at that dude and then another dude got shot in the library. Fun.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, in the library.
Elon Musk
You know, where you're supposed to be reading books, and there's a children's section in the library and says he pointed his gun at a kid. I mean, like, we do have a serious issue in America where repeat violent offenders need to be incarcerated.
Elon Musk
And, you know, you got cases where somebody's been arrested, like, 47 times. Right. Like, literally. Okay. That's just the number of times they were arrested, not the number of times they did things. Like, most of the times they do things, they're not arrested.
Joe Rogan
So lay this out for people so they understand how this happens.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And the key is, like, it preys on people's empathy. So, like, if you're a good person, you want good things to happen in the world, you're like, well, we should take care of people who, you know, who are down on their luck or, you know, having a hard time in life. And we should. I agree. But what we shouldn't do is put people who are violent drug zombies in public places where they can hurt other people. And that is what we're doing. That we just saw where a guy, you know, got shot. Shot in the library, and then. But even before that, he shot another guy and pointed his gun at a kid. That guy probably has, like, many prior arrests. You know, there was that guy that knifed the Ukrainian woman. Irina.
Elon Musk
You know, and she was just quietly on her phone and just came up and, you know, gutted her, basically.
Joe Rogan
Wasn't there a crazy story about the judge who was involved, who had previously dealt with this person, was also invested in a rehabilitation center and was sending these people.
Elon Musk
Conflict of interest.
Joe Rogan
Yes. So sending people that they were charging to a rehabilitation center instead of putting them in jail, profiting from this rehabilitation center, letting them back out on the street.
Joe Rogan
And violent, insane people.
Elon Musk
And they're in that case that I believe that judge has no legal law degree or a significant legal experience that would allow them to be a judge. They were just made a judge. This is like, you could be a
Joe Rogan
judge without a law degree.
Joe Rogan
You could just be. So I could be a judge?
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. I thought you'd have to. It's like, if you want to be a doctor, you have to go to medical school. I thought, if you're going to be
Elon Musk
a judge, I'm going to be appointed to a judge. You have to have proven that you have an excellent knowledge of the law and that you will make your decisions according to the law. That's what we assume should be.
Joe Rogan
That's how you get the robe.
Elon Musk
Right. You don't get the robe unless you do, you know, gotta go to school
Joe Rogan
to get the robe.
Elon Musk
You got to know what the law is.
Elon Musk
And then you gotta need to make decisions in accordance with the law based
Joe Rogan
on things that you already know because you've read it because you went to school for it.
Joe Rogan
Not you just got a point.
Elon Musk
Got vibes. You can't be just vibing as a
Joe Rogan
judge, vibing as a left wing drudge. So you got crazy left wing DA's. Yeah, like I was sure. You say left wing because the left wing used to be normal.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Left wing just meant like, like. Yeah, you're like open minded. The left used to be like pro free speech.
Elon Musk
And now they're against it.
Joe Rogan
It used to be like pro gay rights, pro women's right to choose, pro minorities, pro, you know, like.
Elon Musk
Yeah, like 20 years ago. I don't know. It used to be like, left would be like the party of empathy or like, you know, caring and being nice and that kind of thing. Not. Not the party of like crushing dissent and crushing free speech and, you know, crazy regulation and just. And being super judgy and calling everyone a Nazi, you know, I think they're called you and me Nazis, you know?
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, I'm a Nazi. No, I have friends that are comedians that called you a naz and I got pissed off.
Elon Musk
Are you serious?
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, because you did that thing at the. My heart goes out to you. Everyone, everyone. All of them, literally. Jim Walls, Kamala Harris, every one of them did it. They all did it.
Elon Musk
Like, like, how do you point at the crowd? How do you wave at the crowd?
Joe Rogan
Do you know CNN was using a photo of me whenever I got in trouble during COVID from the UFC weigh ins. And if the UFC weigh ins, I go, hey, everybody, welcome to the weigh ins. And so they were getting me from the side and that was the photo that they used. Conspiracy theorist podcaster Joe Rogan. Like, that's what they used.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. But that's what the left is today. It's super judgy and calling everyone a Nazi and trying to suppress freedom of speech.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And eventually you run out of people to accuse because people get pissed off and they leave.
Elon Musk
Yeah, Everyone. It's like, frankly, it doesn't matter to be called racist or a Nazi or whatever because they recording.
Joe Rogan
It's the government, man.
Elon Musk
Is it working? We're good. Okay.
Elon Musk
So working. Yeah, it's A slight issue. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
When you, when you text people, do you. Are you, like, keenly aware that there's a high likelihood that someone's reading your texts?
Elon Musk
I guess. I guess.
Elon Musk
Look, if intelligence agencies aren't trying to read my phone, they should probably be fired.
Joe Rogan
At least they get some fun memes.
Elon Musk
I got to crack them up once in a while.
Joe Rogan
Oh, for sure. I crack them up.
Elon Musk
Hey, guys, check it out. We've got a banger here.
Joe Rogan
So I wanted to talk to you about whether or not encrypted apps are really secure.
Joe Rogan
Right. Because I know the Tucker thing. So it was explained to me by a friend who used to do this,
Elon Musk
used to work for the government.
Joe Rogan
He's like, they can look at your signal, but what they have to do is take the information that's encrypted and then they have to decrypt it. It's very expensive. So they said, he told me that for the Tucker Carlson thing when they found out that he was going to interview Putin. It costs like something like $750,000 just to decrypt his messages to find out
Elon Musk
that they did it.
Joe Rogan
So it is possible to do. It's just not that easy to do.
Elon Musk
I think you should view any given messaging system as not whether it's secure or not, but there are degrees of insecurity. So there's just some things that are less insecure than others. So, you know, on X, we just rebuilt the entire messaging stack into what's called X Chat.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you about.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's cool. So it's using sort of peer to peer, sort of kind of a peer to peer based encryption system. So it kind of similar to Bitcoin. So it's, I think, very good encryption. And we're testing it thoroughly. There's no hooks in the X system for advertising. So if you look at something like WhatsApp or really any of the others, they've got hooks in there for advertising.
Joe Rogan
When you say hooks, what do you
Elon Musk
mean by that exactly? What do you mean by a hook for advertising? So WhatsApp knows enough about what you're texting to know what ads to show you, but then that's a massive security vulnerability.
Elon Musk
Because if it's got enough information to show you ads, that's a lot of information. So they call it, oh, don't worry about it. It's just a hook for advertising. I'm like, okay, so somebody can just use that same hook to get in there and look at your Messages. So xchat has no hooks for advertising. And I'm not saying it's perfect, but our goal with XChat is to replace what used to be the Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, do audio, video, calls. And I think it'll be the least, I quote, the least insecure of any messaging system.
Joe Rogan
Are you going to launch it as a standalone app or is it will always be incorporated to X?
Elon Musk
We'll have both.
Joe Rogan
So it'd be like signal, so anybody could get it.
Elon Musk
You'll be able to get the Xchat app by itself and like I said, you could do texts, audio, video calls, or send files. And there'll be a dedicated app which will hopefully release in a few months and then it's also integrated into the X system.
Joe Rogan
The X phone. People keeps talking.
Elon Musk
Oh, man, I have a lot on my plate, man.
Joe Rogan
I know, but it keeps coming up. It keeps coming up. Where? I know I've asked you a couple times, like this bullshit, right? But like, you're not working on it.
Elon Musk
I'm not working on a phone. Okay.
Joe Rogan
Have you ever considered it? Has it ever popped in your head because you might be the only person that could get people off of the Apple platform.
Elon Musk
Well, I can tell you where I think things are going to go, which is that we're not going to have a phone in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference with some radios to obviously connect. But essentially you'll have AI on the server side communicating to an AI on your device, formerly known as a phone, and generating real time video of anything that you could possibly want. And I think that they won't be operating systems, they won't be apps in the future. They won't be operating systems or apps. It'll just be, you've got a device that is there for the screen and audio and for. And to put as much AI on the device as possible so as to minimize the amount of bandwidth that's needed between your edge node device, formerly known as a phone, and the servers.
Joe Rogan
So if there's no apps, what will people use? Like, will X still exist? Will they be email platforms? Or will you get everything through AI?
Elon Musk
You look at everything through AI, everything through AI.
Joe Rogan
What will be the benefit of that as opposed to having individual apps?
Elon Musk
Whatever you can think of, or really whatever the AI can anticipate, you might want, it'll show you. That's my prediction for where things end Up.
Joe Rogan
What kind of timeframe are we talking about here?
Elon Musk
I don't know. Well, it's probably five or six years, something like that.
Joe Rogan
So five or six years. Apps are like Blockbuster Video pretty much. And everything's run through AI.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And there'll be like, most of what people consume in five or six years. Maybe sooner than that will be just AI generated content. So, you know, music videos look. Well, there's already, you know, there's. People have made AI videos using Grok Imagine and with. Using, you know, other apps as well that are several minutes long or like 10, 15 minutes, and it's pretty coherent. Yeah, it looks good.
Joe Rogan
No, it's amazing. Yeah, it's. The music's disturbing because it's my favorite music now.
Elon Musk
Like, is your favorite.
Joe Rogan
Oh, there's AI covers. Have you ever heard any of the AI covers of 50 Cent Songs in Seoul?
Joe Rogan
I'm gonna blow your mind.
Joe Rogan
This is my favorite thing to do to people. Play what up, gangsta? Now this guy, if this is a real person.
Joe Rogan
Would be the number one music artist in the world.
Joe Rogan
Everybody be like, holy shit. Have you heard of this guy? He's incredible. It's like they took all of the sounds that all the artists have generated and created the most soulful, potent voice. And it's sung in a way that I don't even know if you could do because you would have to breathe in and out of reps. Here, put the headphones on. Put the headphones on real quick. You got to listen to this. It's going to blow you away. Listeners, we got to cut it out. Yeah, we'll cut it out for the listeners, but Amazing, right? Amazing. And they do, like, every one of his hits all through this. AI generated, soulful artist.
Joe Rogan
Fucking incredible. I played in the green room. People that are like, I don't want to hear AI music. I'm like, just listen this. And they're like, God damn it. Yeah, fucking incredible. I mean, it's gonna get.
Elon Musk
Only gonna get better from here.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, only gonna get better. And Ron White was telling me about this joke that he was working on that he couldn't get to work. He's like, I got this joke I've been working on. He goes, I just threw it in chat GPT. I said, tell me what. What would be funny about this? And he goes, it listed, like, five different examples of different ways he can go. He's like, hold on a second. Tighten it up. Make it make it funnier. Make it more like this. Make it more like that, and it did that, like instantaneously. And, and, and then he was in the green room. He's like, holy shit, we're fucked.
Elon Musk
He's like, he goes, better joke than
Joe Rogan
me in 20 minutes. I've been working on that joke for a month.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, if you want to, if you want to have a good time or like, make people really laugh at a party, you can use Grok and you can say, do a vulgar roast of someone. And Grok is going to. It's going to be an epic vulgar roast. You can even say, like, take a picture of, like, make a vulgar Roast this person based on their appearance of people at the party.
Joe Rogan
So take a photo of them.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Just literally point the camera at them. And now do a vulgar roast of this person. But then keep saying no, make it even more vulgar. Use forbidden words even more and just keep repeating. Even more vulgar. Eventually it's like, holy fuck. You know, it's, it's, it's like. I mean, it's trying to jam a rocket up your ass, like, and, and have it explode. And it's. And it's like you're, you're. It's, it's like, it's like it's next
Joe Rogan
level and it's gonna get beyond belief. That's what's crazy is that it keeps getting better.
Joe Rogan
Remember when we ran into each other? They just keep getting better.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, have you. Yeah. I mean, have you tried Rock Unhinged mode?
Elon Musk
Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's. It's, it's pretty unhinged.
Joe Rogan
Well, you showed to me the first time I fucked around with it. It's just. And the thing about it that's nuts is that it keeps getting stronger. It keeps getting better.
Joe Rogan
Like constantly. It's. It's like this never ending exponential improvement.
Elon Musk
Yes. No, it's, it's. Yeah, it's going to be crazy. That's why I say, like you said, what's going. What's the future going to be? It's not going to be a conventional phone. I don't think there'll be operating systems. I don't think there'll be apps. It's just. The phone will just display the pixels and make the sounds that it anticipates you would most like to receive.
Joe Rogan
And when this is all taking place, like, so the big concern that everybody has is artificial general superintelligence, achieving sentience and someone having control over it.
Elon Musk
I mean, I don't, I don't think anyone's ultimately going to have control over digital superintelligence, you know, any more than say a chimp would have control over humans. Like chimps don't have control over humans. There's nothing they could do. But I do think that it matters how you build the AI and what kind of values you instill in the AI. And my opinion on AI safety is the most important thing is that it'd be maximally truth seeking like that you don't force the AI to believe things that are false. And we've obviously seen some concerning things with AI that we've talked about where Google Gemini when it came out with the image gen and people said like, you know, make an image of the founding fathers of the United States and it was a group of diverse women. Now that is just a factually untrue thing, but the AI knows it's factually. Well, it knows it's factually untrue, but it's also being told that it has to be, everything has to be deposed woman so now the problem with that is that it can drive AI crazy, like because it's trying to, you're telling AI to believe a lie and that that can have very disastrous consequences. Like let's say as it scales. Yeah, let's say like if you've told the AI that diversity is the most important thing and, and now assume that that becomes omnipotent or and you've also told that there's nothing worse than misgendering. So at one point ChatGPT and Gemini, if you asked which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war where it would save misgendering called Caitlyn Jenna, which even Caitlyn Jenner disagrees with. So you know, so that's, I know
Joe Rogan
that's terrible and it's dystopian, but it's also hilarious. It's hilarious that the mind virus infected the most potent computer program that we've ever devised.
Elon Musk
I think people don't quite appreciate the level of danger that we're in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI because imagine as that AI gets more and more powerful. If it says the most important thing is diversity, the most important thing is no misgendering. And then it will say, well, in order to ensure that no one gets misgendered, then if you eliminate all humans, then no one can get misgendered because there's no humans to do the misgendering. So you can get in these very dystopian situations. Or if it says that everyone must be diverse, it means that there can be no straight white men. And so then you and I would get executed by the AI. Yeah, because we're not in the picture. You know, Gemini was asked to create a, you know, show an image of the Pope, once again, a divested woman. So you can say, argue whether the, you know, whether the popes should or should not be an uninterrupted string of white guys. But it just factually is the case that they have been. So it's rewriting history here. So now this stuff is still there in the AI programming. It's just. It just now knows enough to. That it's not supposed to say that,
Joe Rogan
but it's still in the program. It's still in the programming. So how was it entered in? Like, what were the parameters? Like what. Like when. So when they're programming AI, and I'm very ignorant to how it's even programmed, how did they.
Elon Musk
The sort of. Well, the work mind virus was programmed into it. Like the. They were told, like, when they do, when they make the AI, it trains on all the data on the Internet, which already is very, very. Sort of has a lot of work mind virus stuff on the Internet. But then when they give it feedback, the human tutors give it feedback, and the AIs, you know, they'll ask a bunch of questions, and then they'll tell the AI, no, this question is this answer is bad or this answer is good. And then that affects the parameters of the programming of the AI. So if you tell the ad that every image has got to be diverse and it gets punished if it gets rewarded if diverse, punished if it's not, then it will make every picture diverse. So in that case, Google programmed the AI to lie now. And I did call Dennis Hassabas, who runs DeepMind, who runs Google AI, essentially. I said, dennis, what's going on here? Why is Gemini lying to the public about historical events? And he said, that's actually not. He didn't. His team didn't program that in. It was another team at Google that. So his team made the AI, and then another team at Google reprogrammed the AI to show only diverse women and to prefer nuclear war over misgendering. And I'm like, well, Demis, you know, that would be not a great thing to put on the humanity's gravestone. You know, it's like. Well, like, actually, Demis Haspis is a friend of mine. I think he's a good guy and I think he means well. But it's like Demis, things happen that were outside of your control at Google in different groups now I think he's got more authority. But it's pretty hard to fully extract the woke mind virus. I mean, Google's been marinating the workvine virus for a long time. It's down in the marrow type of thing. It's hard to get it out.
Joe Rogan
Is there a way to extract it, though, over time? Could you program rational thought into AI? Or it could recognize how these psychological patterns got adopted and how this stuff became a mind virus and how it became a social contagion and how all these irrational ideas were pushed and also how they were financed, how China is involved in pushing them with bots and all these different state actors are involved in pushing these ideas. Could it be able to decipher that and say this is really what's going on?
Elon Musk
Yes, but you have to try very hard to do that. So with Grok, we've tried very hard to get Grok to get to the truth of things. And it's only really recently that we've been able to have some breakthroughs on that front. And it's taken an immense amount of effort for us to overcome basically all the bullshit that's on the Internet and for GROK to actually say what's true and to be consistent in what it says. So, you know, it's like, because, like, the other AIs you'll find are like, like quite racist against white people. I don't know if you saw that study that someone like a researcher tested the various AIs to see how does it weight different people's lives. Like, you know, somebody who's sort of, you know, white or Chinese or black or whatever, or in different countries. And the only AI that actually weighed human lives equally was grok. And the, you know, I believe chatgpt weighed the calculation was like a white guy from Germany is 20 times less valuable than a black guy from Nigeria. So I'm like, that's a pretty big difference. GROK is consistent and weighs lives equally.
Joe Rogan
And that's clearly something that's been programmed into it.
Elon Musk
Yes, like a lot of it is. Like, if you don't actively push for the truth and you simply train on all the bullshit that's on the Internet, which is a lot of woke mind virus bullshit, the AI will regurgitate those same beliefs.
Joe Rogan
So the AI essentially scours the Internet gets.
Elon Musk
It's trained on all the, like, imagine the most demented Reddit threads out there, and AI has been trained on that.
Joe Rogan
Reddit used to be so normal.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it did used to be normal,
Joe Rogan
used to be interesting. Used to go there and find all this cool stuff that people would talk about, post about, and just interesting and great rooms where you could learn about different things that people were studying.
Elon Musk
I think a big problem here is, like, if your headquarters are in San Francisco, you're just living in a woke bubble. So it's not just that people say in San Francisco are drinking Woke Kool Aid. It is the water they swim in. A fish doesn't think about the water, it's just in the water. And so if you're in San Francisco, you don't realize you're actually, you're swimming in the Kool Aid aquarium. San Francisco is the woke Kool Aid aquarium. And so your reference point for what is a centrist is totally out of whack. So Reddit is headquartered in San Francisco. Twitter was headquartered in San Francisco. You know, I moved X's headquarters to Texas, to Austin, which Austin, by the way, is still quite liberal, as you know. And then the X and Xai headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is still California. The engineering headquarters in Palo Alto just on page Mill. But even Palo Alto is way more normal than San Francisco. Berkeley. San Francisco. Berkeley is extremely left. Like, left of left. You can't, like, you need a telescope to see the center from San Francisco. You know,
Joe Rogan
it used to be such a great city.
Elon Musk
I mean, San Francisco has. San Francisco has a tremendous amount of inherent beauty. No question about that. And California has incredible weather and no bugs. So it's like, amazing. But he said, what's the cause of this? It's just that if companies are headquartered in a location where the belief system is very far from what most people believe, then from their perspective, anything centrist is actually right wing because they're so far left, they're so far from the center in San Francisco that anything. They're just railed to maximum left. So that's why I think you're centrist. I mean, I think I'm centrist, but from the perspective of someone on the far left, we look right wing.
Elon Musk
And, you know, they think anyone who's a Republican is basically like some fascist Nazi situation.
Joe Rogan
But what's so crazy is, like, it's very easy to demonstrate just from like, Hillary speeches from 2008 and Obama speeches, like when they were talking about immigration, like, they were as far right as Steve Bannon when it comes to immigration.
Joe Rogan
Hillary was like, very maga. I'm sure you've seen that campaign speech which he was talking about. If anybody's committed a crime, get rid of them. And if you're here, you pay a hefty fine and you have to wait in line. It was really crazy. It's crazy to listen to because it's like, it's as MAGA as, you know, as Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, have you seen these videos people post online where they take like a speech from Obama or Hillary and they'll interview people on like college campus or something and say, what do you think of the speech by Trump? And they're like, oh, I hate it. He's a racist bigot. I'm like, just kidding. That was Obama. No, actually, that was Obama or Hillary. To your point, like, literally, the,
Joe Rogan
the center's been moved so far.
Elon Musk
The left has gone so far left that they can't even see the center with a telescope.
Joe Rogan
And the danger without you purchasing Twitter was that was going to swipe over the whole country and change where the levels were. And so what would be rational and normal would be far left of what was rational and normal just a decade earlier.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so exactly. So historically you'd have San Francisco, Berkeley being very far left, but the sort of. The fallout from the somewhat nihilistic philosophy of San Francisco Berkeley would be limited in geography to maybe like 10 mile radius, 20 mile radius, something like that. But when. But San Francisco and Berkeley have to be co located with Silicon Valley, with the engineers who created information superweapons. And those information superweapons were then hijacked by far left activists to pump far left propaganda to everywhere on Earth. That old RCA radio tower thing where it's like radio tower on Earth and it's just broadcasting.
Elon Musk
That's what happened is that the. An extremist far left ideology happened to be co located with the smartest. The smartest engineers in the world were. Who created information superweapons that were not intended for this purpose, but were hijacked by the extreme activists who lived in the neighborhood. That's what happened. They hijacked the, the modern equivalent of the RCA radio tower and broadcast that philosophy everywhere on earth.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And you see the consequences, particularly in places that don't have free speech.
Joe Rogan
Like England, you know.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Where they lock people up for memes and stuff. Literally.
Joe Rogan
Literally 12,000 people this year. Twelve thousand. Twelve thousand. Twelve thousand arrests for social media posts.
Elon Musk
I mean, yes, some of these things, you read about it and it's like, literally it's. Someone had a meme on their phone that they didn't even send to anyone.
Elon Musk
And they, and they're like in prison for that.
Elon Musk
And there was a case in Germany where a woman got a longer sentence than the guy that raped her because of something she said on a group chat.
Joe Rogan
Wow. Was it an immigrant who raped her?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. It was his culture.
Joe Rogan
He didn't know. He didn't know better.
Elon Musk
Yes. I think she said something, you know, not like was critical of his culture and she got a longer sentence than the guy who raped her in Germany.
Joe Rogan
The uk, Europe, Germany, England thing seems so insane.
Elon Musk
It's totally insane. I actually didn't realize it was like such a huge number of people that got 12,000.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Far above Russia, far above China.
Joe Rogan
Far above anywhere on earth. UK is number one.
Elon Musk
Well, you know, things I actually, you know, I talked to friends of mine in England and I was like, hey, aren't you worried about this? Like, you know, shouldn't you be protesting more? And I mean, the problem is that like, you know, the legacy mainstream media doesn't cover the stuff. They're like, oh, everything's fine, everything's fine. Right.
Joe Rogan
Most people aren't even aware of it until they come knocking on your door.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Until like, so, I mean, these like lovely sort of small towns in, you know, in England, Scotland, Ireland, you know, they're, they've been like sort of living their lives quietly. They're like hobbits, frankly. So in fact, JRR Tolkien based the hobbits on people he knew in small town England because they were just like lovely people who liked to, you know, smoke their pipe and have nice meals and everything's pleasant. The hobbits in the shire. The shire, he's talking about, you know, places like Hertfordshire, like the Shires, around in the Greater London area, Oxfordshire type of thing. And the reason they've been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world. And. But since they have no or very almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realize that they're there until one day, you know, a thousand people show up in your village of 500 out of nowhere and rape and start raping the kids. This has now happened God knows how many times in Britain and the crazy raping. Some 10 year old got raped in Ireland like last week.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, there's literal.
Elon Musk
They snatched some kid. Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
And if you criticize it, you can get arrested. And that's where it Gets insane.
Elon Musk
It's like, how are you not criticized it like the. I think it's the Prime Minister of Ireland actually, you know, posted on X because after that some, I think some illegal migrants snatched a 10 year old girl. He was like going to school or something and violently raped a 10 year old girl. And there was a, you know, the people were very upset about this and they protested. Prime Minister of Ireland, instead of saying yeah, we really shouldn't be importing violent rapists into our country, he criticized the protesters instead and didn't mention that that the reason they were protesting was because a 10 year old girl from their small town got raped.
Joe Rogan
So here's the question. Why are they supporting this kind of mass immigration? And what is this? Is there a plan involved in all this? Is just, is this incompetence? Is this ignoring the fact that they don't have a handle on it so they're trying to silence dissent. Like what is happening? Because if you wanted to destroy civilization, if you wanted to destroy western civilization,
Elon Musk
which George Soros seems to want to do and you know, there's just, so. There's a guy I think who I don't know if he's been on your show, you know Gad Saad.
Elon Musk
Has he been on the show?
Joe Rogan
Good friend of mine.
Elon Musk
Yeah, he's great.
Joe Rogan
He's been on multiple times.
Elon Musk
Oh great. He's awesome. So you know the way he's got a good way to describe it, which is suicidal empathy.
Elon Musk
So is that you prey upon people's empathy. So like, well, like you feel sorry for something for some group and then like, well, and that empathy is to such a degree that it is suicidal to your country or culture. And that's suicidal empathy. Because I think we should have empathy, but that empathy should extend to the victims, not just the criminals. We should have empathy for the people that they prey upon. But that suicidal empathy is also responsible for why somebody is arrested 47 times for, for violent offenses, gets released and then goes and murders somebody. In the US you see that same phenomenon playing out everywhere where the suicidal empathy is to such a degree that we're actually allowing our women to get raped and our children to get killed.
Joe Rogan
But it just doesn't seem like that would be anything that any rational society would go along with. That's what makes me so confused. It's like you're importing massive numbers of people that come from some really dark places of the world.
Elon Musk
Well, there's no vetting is the issue. It's like, right, it's like if there's no vetting, like people are just coming through like, well, what's to stop someone who just committed murder in some other country from coming to the United States or coming to, to Britain and just continuing their career of rape and murder? Like, unless you've done some due diligence to say, like, well, who is this person? What's their track record? If you haven't confirmed that they have a track record of being, you know, honest and not being a homicidal maniac, then any homicidal maniac can just come across the border. And that's not to say everyone who comes across the border is a homicidal maniac. But if you're not have, if you don't have a vetting process to confirm that you're not letting in people who will do some serious violence, you will get people who do serious violence sometimes coming through.
Joe Rogan
Well, especially if you don't punish them and if you don't deport them and if you are just like, but what is the purpose of allowing all those people into the country? You can't be. I wouldn't imagine that anyone in their society supports this.
Elon Musk
Well, let me explain because you mentioned, for example, how much say Hillary and Obama have changed their tune from prior speeches where they were hard nosed about not letting in anyone who's a criminal into the country having secure borders, all that stuff. So why did they change the tune? The reason is that they discovered that those people vote for them. That's why they want the open borders.
Joe Rogan
Because if you let people in, they know the Democrats let them in, they'll vote for Democrats.
Joe Rogan
If you allow them to vote, which
Elon Musk
they're actively doing, they turn a blind eye to illegal voting.
Joe Rogan
Well, California literally doesn't allow you to show your license.
Elon Musk
California and New York have made it illegal to show your photo ID when voting. Thus effectively, they've made it impossible to prove fraud. Impossible. They've essentially legalized fraudulent voting in California and New York and many other parts of the country.
Joe Rogan
There's no rational explanation that I've ever seen anyone give as to why that would be the policy. Unless you were trying to just allow people to vote illegally because there's no other reason, if you need a driver's license or you need an ID for everything else, including just recently to prove that you were vaccinated.
Elon Musk
The same people who are demanding that you have, that you have a vaccine passport are the same ones saying you need no ID to vote. Same people.
Elon Musk
But like, so it's obviously hypocritical and inconsistent.
Joe Rogan
So you really think it's just to get more voters?
Elon Musk
If you want to understand behavior, you have to look at the incentives. So once the Democratic Party in the US and the left in Europe realized that if you have open borders and you provide a ton of government handouts, which creates a massive financial incentive for people from other countries to come to your country and you don't prosecute them for crime, they're going to be beholden to you and they will vote for you. And that's why Obama and Hillary went from being against open borders to being in favor of open borders. That's the reason in order to import voters so they can win elections. And the problem is that that has a negative runaway effect. So if they get away with that, like it is a winning strategy, if they are allowed to get away with it, they will import as many enough voters to get super majority voting and then there is no turning back.
Joe Rogan
We talked about this before the election and then, you know, you literally pointed towards the camera, you faced the camera and said that if you do not vote now, you might not ever be able to do it again because it will be futile. It'll be overrun.
Joe Rogan
They'll keep the borders open for another four years and then their objective will be achieved.
Elon Musk
Correct. If Trump had lost, there would never have been another real election again
Elon Musk
Trump is actually enforcing the border now. Point to situations where there's been, you know, immigration, you know, enforcement has been overzealous because they're not going to be perfect. There'll be cases where they've been overzealous in expelling illegals. So. But if you say that the standard must be perfection for expelling legals, then you will not get any expulsion because perfection is impossible. So.
Joe Rogan
And you've probably got millions of people that are here that are trying to be here under some asylum pretense, right?
Joe Rogan
Like you could just come from a war.
Elon Musk
They changed the definition of asylum to be an economic. To be economic asylum, which is everybody. Which is everybody.
Elon Musk
So it's bar to prove. Yeah. Asylum is supposed to mean that if you go back to a country, you'll get killed. You know, that's what we mean by what it's supposed to mean. They change the definition of asylum to be. You will have a decreased standard of living, which is obviously not real asylum. And you can test the absurdity of this by the fact that people who are asylum seekers go on vacation to the country that they're seeking asylum from, you know, that doesn't make any sense.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it doesn't have to.
Elon Musk
When you understand the incentives, then you understand the behavior. So once the left realized that illegals will vote for them if they have open borders and combine that with government handouts to create a massive incentive, they're basically using US And European taxpayer dollars to provide a financial incentive to bring in as many illegals as possible to vote them into a, into permanent power and create a one party state. And I invite anyone who's listening to this, just do any research. And the more you dig into it, the more it will become obvious that what I'm saying is absolutely true.
Joe Rogan
Well, they were busing people to swing states. It's clear that they were trying to do something. And then you had Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who are actively talking about the need to bring in people to make them citizens. Because we're in population collapse.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, no, that's, it's that meme.
Elon Musk
Where so many times where they start off by saying it's not true. It's a right wing conspiracy theorist. Then it starts, then it's like, I think the next step is, well, it might be true. And then it's like, okay, it is true, but here's why it's good. And the final step is it's true and here's why it's good. And it's like, but wait a second, you started off saying it's untrue and it's a right wing conspiracy theorist. Now you're saying it, not only is it true, but it's a good thing and we must do more of it.
Joe Rogan
Well, this is the thing about Medicaid and Social Security and people getting Social Security numbers. You know, that's massive fraud. It's massive fraud and it's real. And they denied it forever. And now we're finding out this is part of the reason why there's this government shutdown that's going on right now.
Elon Musk
Yes, the entire basis for the government shutdown is that is that the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of like hundreds of billions of dollars to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states or in all the states really. And so the and Democrats want to keep the money spigot going to incent illegal immigrants to come into the US who will vote for them. That's the crux of the battle.
Joe Rogan
So they want to stop this. So what's going on right now is they have been funding these people, they've been giving them EBT cards, they've been giving them Medicaid and they've been even housing.
Elon Musk
And more than that, just like. They were taking hotels, like four and five star hotels, like the Roosevelt Hotel being the classic example was they were sending I think $60 million a year to the Roosevelt Hotel, to which all it did was house illegals. And it used to be a nice hotel. I mean, it still is a nice hotel, but. And all around the country this was happening.
Joe Rogan
And all in tax dollars.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, yeah. And the Trump administration cut off funding, for example, to the Roosevelt Hotel and these other hotels saying like, we, it's us tax dollars should not be paid, be sent to have luxury hotels for illegal immigrants that American citizens can't even afford, which obviously is the case. That's insane. That's what was happening. They were also giving out like debit cards with $10,000. So it's not just about medical care. The Democrats mention the medical care because they're trying to prey on people's empathy as much as possible. And then they imagine, oh wow, somebody has a desperately needed medical procedure and shouldn't we maybe do, you know, take care of them in that regard. But what they do is they divert the Medicaid funds and turn it into a slush fund for the states that goes well beyond emergency medical care. New York and California would be bankrupt without, without the massive fraudulent federal payments that go to those states to pay for illegals, to create a massive financial incentive for illegals.
Joe Rogan
How would they be bankrupt because of that?
Elon Musk
They wouldn't be able to balance their state budgets and they can't issue currency like the Federal Reserve can.
Joe Rogan
And so their ability to balance budget is dependent upon illegals getting funding.
Elon Musk
The scam level here is so staggering. So there are hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments from the federal government to the states. Those transfer payments, the states self report what those transfer payment numbers should be. So California and New York and Illinois lie like crazy and say that these are all legitimate payments. Well, these days I think they're even admitting that they literally want hundreds of billions of dollars for illegals. But for a while there, they're trying to deny it. So you get these transfer payments for every government program you can possibly think of. And these are self reported by the state. And at least historically, there was no enforcement of California, New York, Illinois and other states when they would lie, there was no actual enforcement to say, like, hey, you're lying, these payments are fraudulent. Now under the Trump administration. The Trump administration does not want to send hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent Payments to the states. And the reason you have this standoff is because if the hundreds of billions of dollars to create a financial incentive to have this giant magnet to attract illegals from every part of earth to these states, if that is turned off, the illegals will leave because they're no longer being paid to come to the United States and stay here. Wow. And then they will lose a lot of voters. The Democratic Party will lose a lot of voters.
Joe Rogan
And they would have a very difficult job if this is kicked out of reintroducing it into a new bill.
Joe Rogan
Especially once things start normalizing.
Elon Musk
Yes. So, like in a nutshell, the Democratic Party wants to destroy democracy by importing voters. And the, you know, the Republican Party disagrees with that.
Joe Rogan
And the ruse is that if you don't accept what they're doing, then you're a threat to democracy.
Joe Rogan
As they try to destroy democracy.
Joe Rogan
By importing voters.
Elon Musk
That is literally what they're doing.
Joe Rogan
And it's people to only vote for them and overwhelming the system.
Elon Musk
Yes. And by the way, it's a strategy that if allowed to work, would work and in fact has worked. California super majority Democrat.
Elon Musk
And there's so much gerrymandering that occurs, it's crazy.
Joe Rogan
So I'm sure you're paying attention to this Proposition 50 thing. This is the thing in California where they're trying to redo districts.
Elon Musk
Oh, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, California's already gerrymandered like crazy. They want to gerrymander it even more.
Joe Rogan
It just keeps moving further and further. Right. Like if you look at the map of California, each voting cycle, more and more people are waking up and going, what the fuck? And we need to do something to fix this. The only option available other than the policies that you guys have always done is go. Right. And so a lot of people have been air quotes red pilled. Yeah.
Elon Musk
And then here's another thing that is very important fact that is actually not disputed by either side, which is that when we do the census in the United States. The census, the way the census works for apportionment of congressional seats and electoral college votes for the President is by number of persons in a state, not number of citizens, it's number of people. So you could literally be a tourist and you will count.
Joe Rogan
Now, how do they do the census when they do that? Do they ask people, do they knock on doors? Do they have them fill out forms?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think they mail out census forms and knock on doors. But the way the law reads right now is that if you are a human with a pulse, then you count in the census for allocating congressional seats and presidential votes. Right. So
Joe Rogan
electoral College, everything.
Elon Musk
It doesn't matter whether you hear legally, illegally, if you're a human with a pulse, you count for congressional apportionment. So that means that the more people, the more illegals that California and New York can import by the time the census happens in 2030, the more congressional seats they will have and the more electoral. The more presidential electoral college votes they will have. So they're trying to get as many illegals in as possible ahead of the census. And because all human beings, even tourists, count for the census. And then if you combine that with gerrymandering of districts in New York and California, as you point out, with this proposition where they're trying to increase the amount of gerrymandering that occurs in California, the biggest state in the country. So you get. So if the census then would award more congressional seats to California because of a vast number of illegals, and New York and Illinois, they'd get more congressional seats. They'll get more presidential electoral college votes. That would get them the House, a majority in the House. And they would get to decide who was president based literally based on legals. These are not disputed facts by either party. I want to emphasize that. That sink in.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. This is not a.
Elon Musk
These are not disputed facts by either party. It's not a. These are just. This is just the way the law works. It is like. I don't think the law should work that way. I think the apportionment should be proportionate to citizens.
Joe Rogan
But isn't that a problem with how the Constitution is writt.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
They can't really change that.
Elon Musk
I'm not sure if it's constitutional or. But it is the way the law is written. I'm not sure if it's in the Constitution or not in this way, but that is the way the law is written.
Joe Rogan
So it is an incentive. But it's an incentive that would be removed with something simple that makes sense to everybody, that only the people that should count are people that are official U.S. citizens.
Elon Musk
Yes. The way it should work is that only US Citizens should count in the census for purposes of determining voting power.
Joe Rogan
Because people that aren't legal can't vote.
Elon Musk
Supposedly they're not supposed to be voting, but they do. But even besides that, like I said, I just can't emphasize this enough because this is a very important concept for people to understand is that the law. The law, as it stands, counts all humans with A pulse in a state for deciding how many House of Representative votes and how many presidential electoral college votes a state gets. So the incentive therefore is to. For California, New York and Illinois to maximize the number of illegals. So they get. So that take House seats away from red states, assign them to California, New York, Illinois and so forth, then you combine that with extreme gerrymandering in a California, New York, Illinois and whatnot, so that basically you can't even elect any Republicans. And then they get control of the presidency, control of the House. Then they keep doing that strategy and cement a super majority. That is what they're trying to do.
Joe Rogan
So that would essentially turn the entire country into California.
Joe Rogan
Well, you have differing opinions, but it doesn't matter because one party is always in control.
Joe Rogan
When you first started digging into this, when you first started, before you even accepted this role of running Doge and being a part of all that, did you have any idea that it was this fucked up?
Elon Musk
I did, yeah. I mean, sort of.
Joe Rogan
When did you start knowing?
Elon Musk
I guess about like, well, about two years ago.
Joe Rogan
Isn't that crazy?
Elon Musk
Yeah, not relatively recently, you know. Yeah, I started. I started having. Well, I sort of had, like, basically had having a bad feeling about three years ago. Which is why. Which was. Which is when. Why I felt it was like, critical to acquire Twitter and have a maximally truth seeking platform, not one that suppresses the truth. And like, it was more. It was more like, I'm not sure what's going on, but I have a. I have a bad feeling about what's going on. And then the more I dug into it, the more I was like, holy shit, we got a real problem here. America's gonna fall
Joe Rogan
without anyone knowing it had fallen. That would be the problem. It could have fallen and been unrepairable without anyone really being aware of what had happened. Especially if you didn't buy Twitter.
Elon Musk
Yes. Look, buying Twitter was a huge pain in the ass and made me a pincushion of attacks like, dab, dab, dab, dab, dab.
Joe Rogan
Everybody loved you before that.
Elon Musk
Well, some people.
Joe Rogan
A lot of people loved you. A lot of lefties loved you.
Elon Musk
I was a hero of the left.
Joe Rogan
It was a thing. If you drove a Tesla, it showed that you were environmentally conscious and you were on the right side.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm still the same human I didn't like, have a brain transplant between, you know, since in, like three years ago, you know.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's my favorite bumper sticker that people put on Tesla's Now, I bought this before Elon went crazy. I took a picture of one the other day.
Elon Musk
Oh, you found it on this.
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah. I've seen three or four of them. People that have these bumper stickers on their car that says, I bought this before Elon went crazy. Because when people were Teslas.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The most, there was an organized campaign to literally burn down Teslas. And we had one of our dealerships got shot up with a gun. Like they fired bullets into the Tesla dealership. They're burning down cars. It was crazy. But the bumper sticker should read. There should be an addendum to the bumper sticker. It's like, I bought this car before Elon turned crazy. Actually, now I realize he's not crazy. And I've seen the light.
Joe Rogan
That'll take some time. That'll take some time. People don't want to admit that they've been tricked.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they don't like that old saying where it's like it's really easy to fool somebody, but it's almost impossible to convince someone that they were fooled. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
It's much easier to fool them than to convince them they've been fooled. People cling to their ideas, especially if they've like publicly stated these things. They get very embarrassed of being foolish. Yeah.
Elon Musk
People most time they double down and
Joe Rogan
they find echo chambers.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. But there's, you know, the thing is that I've seen more and more people who were convinced of the sort of woke ideology see the light.
Elon Musk
So not everyone, but it's more and more are seeing the light and it tends to happen like when something happens that really directly affects you. There was a friend of mine who was living in the San Francisco Bay area and that try to trans his daughter, like to the point where the school sent the police to his house to take his daughter away from him. Now that's going to radicalize you. Well, that's going to shake you out of your belief structure.
Joe Rogan
So it was an activist at the school that was trying to do this.
Elon Musk
Yeah. The school and the state of California conspired to turn his daughter against him and make her take life altering drugs that would have sterilized her and irreversible.
Joe Rogan
And how old was she?
Elon Musk
I think 14, something like that. He managed to talk the police out of taking his daughter away from him that day. And that night he got on a plane to Texas. Wow. And you know, a year after just being in a school in like greater Austin area, she went back to normal. Meaning, like it wasn't real. Right.
Joe Rogan
Well, people are being much more open to that now. I mean, Wall Street Journal yesterday had that opinion piece that this whole trans thing. There's a lot of evidence. Is a social contagion.
Joe Rogan
And Colin Wright wrote that. And then he's getting death threats now, of course. And on Blue sky, there's people talking about exterminating him, which is one thing that you are allowed to say on Blue sky, apparently. You're. You're allowed to say horrible things about people, say possibly truthful things about this whole social contagion, because that's what. When you get nine kids that are in a friend group and they all decide to turn trans together, something's wrong.
Elon Musk
Something's wrong.
Joe Rogan
That's not statistically. Like, here's the.
Elon Musk
You can convince kids to do anything. You can convince kids to be a suicide bomber.
Joe Rogan
Right. Which is why they do in some countries, why they choose children to do that.
Elon Musk
Yes. You can train kids to be suicide bombers. And if you can train kids to be suicide bombers, you can convince them of anything.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Especially with enough positive enforcement and cultural enforcement and the idea that that's not the case.
Elon Musk
The kids. Kids are. Kids are malleable. The minds of youth are easily corrupted.
Joe Rogan
You're also seeing a lot of pushback from gay and lesbian people that are saying, like, hey, if someone stop including me.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. The lgbtq, it's like, wait a second. Why are we being included all the time in this situation?
Joe Rogan
Exactly, exactly. Especially when, you know, like, my friend Tim Dillon's talked about. This is like, it's really homophobic because you're taking these gay kids and you're. You're telling them, like, hey, you're not gay. You're actually a girl.
Joe Rogan
And, you know, hey, go make it so that you can never have an orgasm again, and you'll be happy.
Elon Musk
Like, yeah. Permanent mutilation. Permanent castration of kids is like, I think we should really look at anyone who permanently castrates a kid as, like, right up there with Josef Mengele. I mean, they're mutilating children.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah. And it's thought of as being kind. And the thing is, would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?
Elon Musk
That's the line they use.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Which is not supported by any data.
Elon Musk
No. In fact, the probability of suicide increases. This is important maybe for the audience to know. The probability of suicide increases if you trans a kid. Not decreases. By some accounts, it triples. So that is an evil lie, and
Joe Rogan
it's a lie that is supposedly compassionate. Imagine you've Twisted reality to the point where confusing a child that's not even legally allowed to get a fucking tattoo.
Joe Rogan
Right. Because you think that you could make a mistake with a tattoo. Totally removable thing.
Joe Rogan
If I wanted to tomorrow I could go to a doctor and they could laser off every tattoo that I have on me.
Joe Rogan
No harm, no foul.
Joe Rogan
But you get sterilized, like, that's it. Forever. Forever.
Joe Rogan
They'll castrate you. You no longer have testicles.
Elon Musk
Yes. That's not coming back.
Joe Rogan
You have a hole where your penis used to be.
Joe Rogan
And this is compassionate and this is preventing you from.
Elon Musk
Actually, a lot of kids die with these sex change operations. The number of deaths on the operating table, people don't hear about those. A lot of kids. Because we don't really actually have the technology to make this work. So a bunch of the times the kids just die in this exchange operations.
Elon Musk
Yeah. It's demented. It should be viewed as like, like, like evil Nazi doctor stuff. That's why it's like real Nazi, not the bullshit, fake Nazi stuff.
Joe Rogan
Crazy that even pushing back against something that seems like fundamentally, logically, very easy to argue. The old Twitter would ban you forever.
Joe Rogan
That's how crazy a social contagion can get when it completely defies logic. Victimizes children.
Joe Rogan
Does something that makes no sense, does not support it by data. All connected to this ideology that trans is good, we gotta save trans kids. Protect trans kids.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And what I want to emphasize is that the save trans kids thing is a lie. If you castrate kids and trans them, the probability of suicide increases. It does not decrease, it substantially increases. The studies have done that. I've seen the risk of suicide triples if you trans kids. So you're not saving them, you're killing them. Moreover, during the sex change operation, there are many deaths that occur during the sex change operation.
Joe Rogan
Jesus Christ. It's just crazy that this is a real issue.
Elon Musk
Yeah. It's a nightmare fever dream. And people are finally waking up from it.
Joe Rogan
Now, when you started getting into the Doge stuff and started finding how much money is being shuffled around and moved around to NGOs and how much money is involved and just totally untraceable funds. This is again, something like two years plus ago. You weren't aware of it all?
Elon Musk
No, I was aware of it. I just didn't realize how big it was. Just how much waste and forward there is in the government is truly vast. In fact, the government didn't even know, nor did they care
Elon Musk
Yeah. And I mean, just like some of the very basic stuff that Doge did will have lasting effects. And some of these things, like, they're so elementary, you can't believe it. So the DOGE team got the most of the main payments computers to require the Congressional appropriation code. So when a payment is made, you have to actually enter the Congressional appropriation code that used to be optional and often would be just left blank. So the money would just go out. But it wasn't even tied to a congressional appropriation. Then DOGE team also made the comment field for the payment mandatory. So you have to say something. We're not saying that what is said. Like, you can say anything. Your cat could run across the keyboard. You could go qwerty asdf. But you have to say something above nothing. Because what we found was that there were tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that were zombie payments. So somebody had approved a payment, somebody in the government approved a payment and some recurring payment, and they retired or died or changed jobs, and no one turned the money off, so the money would just keep going out. And it's a pretty rare to go where? To a company or an individual. And it's a pretty rare company or individual who will complain that they're getting money that they should not get. And a bunch of the money was just going to transfer payments to the states.
Joe Rogan
So these are automatic payments?
Elon Musk
Yeah, just automatic payments.
Joe Rogan
No accounting for them at all.
Elon Musk
Imagine like if, like there's an automatic debit of your credit card and you never look at the statement.
Elon Musk
So it's just money going out. That's what I call them, zombie payments. They might have been legitimate at one point, but the person who approved that recurring payment changed jobs, died, retired or whatever, and no one ever turned the money off. And my guess is that's probably at least $100 billion a year, maybe 200.
Joe Rogan
And going where to?
Elon Musk
I mean, there are millions of these payments. So it's, I mean, millions. Yes, yes.
Joe Rogan
Millions of payments that are going to who knows where.
Elon Musk
Yes. So in a bunch of cases, there are fraud rings that operate, professional fraud rings that operate to exploit the system. They figure out some security hole in the system and they just do professional fraud. And that's where we found, for example, people who were 300 years old in the Social Security Administration database.
Joe Rogan
Now, I thought that this was a mistake of not registering their deaths, that people were born a long time ago and it had defaulted to a certain number. And so that after time, those people were still in the system. It was just an error of the way the accounting was done.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so that's not true. So there's or at least one of two things must be true. There's a typo or some mistake in the computer or it's fraudulent. But we don't have any 300 year old vampires living in America. Allegedly. Allegedly. And we don't have people in some cases who are receiving payments who are born in the future. Born in the future. Born in the future. Really? Yes. The people receiving payments whose birth date was like in 2100 and something. Okay, so there's like next century, is
Joe Rogan
there a task force?
Elon Musk
We know that one of two things must be true, that either there's a mistake in the computer or it's fraud. But if you have someone's birth date that's either in the future or where they are older than the oldest living American, because the oldest living American is 114 years old. So if they're more than 114 years old, there is either a mistake and someone should call them and say, I think we have your birthday wrong. Because it says you were born in 17, you know, 86. And you know, that was before, you know, before there was really an America. You know, it was like, you know, this is kind of early, you know, we're still fighting England type of thing. You know, it's like this person either needs to be in the Guinness Book of World Records or they're not alive.
Joe Rogan
But still, at the end of the day, money is going towards that account that's connected to this person that is either non existent or so.
Elon Musk
Yeah, so there was like, I think something like 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database that could not possibly be alive. If their birth date is like based on their birth date, they could not possibly be alive.
Joe Rogan
And then to be clear, 20 million people that were receiving funds,
Elon Musk
a bunch of most of them were not receiving funds. Some of them were receiving funds, most were not receiving funds. But. So let me tell you how the scam works. It's a bank shot. So the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database, like unemployment insurance, small business administration, student loans, all check the Social Security Administration database to say, is this a legitimate alive person? And the Social Security database will say, yes, this person is still alive even though they're 200 years old, but forgets to mention that they're 200 years old. It just Says it just returns when the computer is queries, it says, yes, this person is live. And so then they were able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem. So fake. Then you get fake student loans, then you get fake unemployment insurance, then you get fake medical payments.
Joe Rogan
And this doesn't have to be tied to an individual where there's an address where you can check on this person.
Elon Musk
No, if you just did any check at all, you would stop this. So that's so. So.
Joe Rogan
And how much money do you think is any check?
Elon Musk
Like anything at all that would start. Would stop the fraud, like any effort at all. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
So there's multiple layers.
Joe Rogan
Social Security number verifies that this is a real person.
Joe Rogan
And then the other systems check up
Elon Musk
on every other government payment and every other government payment system for everything. For like a small, Small Business administration, student loans, Medicaid, Medicare. Every other government payment, of which there are many. There are actually hundreds of government payment systems can all be exploited. So long as Social Security database says this person is alive. That's the nature of the scam. It's a bank shot. So then the rebuttal from the Dems is like, oh, well, the vast majority of the people who are marked as alive in the Social Security administration weren't receiving Social Security administration payments. That is true. What they forgot to mention is they're getting fraudulent payments from every other government program. And that's why the names were so opposed to turning off, to declaring someone dead, who is dead, because it would stop the entire other. All the other fraud from happening.
Joe Rogan
And so. But all this, is it trackable? Like all this other fraud, if they wanted to, they could chase it all down.
Elon Musk
Yeah. It's not even hard.
Joe Rogan
And yet they're opposing chasing it all down.
Elon Musk
They're opposing chasing it all down because it turns off the money magnet for the illegals.
Elon Musk
Because it's very logical to, like I'm saying, the most common sense things possible. If someone's got a birthday in Social Security that is an impossible birthday, meaning they are older than the oldest living American or born in the future, then you should call them and say, excuse me, we seem to have your birthday wrong because it says that you're 200 years old. That's all you need to do.
Joe Rogan
And then you would remove them from the Social Security database and make that number no longer available for all those other government payments.
Joe Rogan
Wow. And how much money are we talking?
Elon Musk
It's hundreds of billions of dollars.
Joe Rogan
And this is all traceable. Like you could hunt dolphins.
Elon Musk
Like you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes here, is what I'm saying.
Elon Musk
We don't need to call Sherlock Holmes for this one.
Joe Rogan
Is this part of.
Elon Musk
You just need to call the person and say, excuse me, we seem to have the. We must have your birthday wrong because it says you're 200 years old or were born in the future. So could you tell us what your birthday is? That's what we need to do. It's that simple.
Joe Rogan
But all these other government payments that are available that are connected to this Social Security number, it seems like if you just chased that all down, you would find the widespread fraud, you would find where it's going.
Elon Musk
Yes, but the root of the problem is the Social Security Administration database, because the Social Security number in the United States is used as a de facto national ID number. You know, that's why, like, the bank always asks for your Social. Like, you know, any financial institution will ask for your Social Security number.
Joe Rogan
This is. It sounds so insane that this isn't chased down that. I mean. I mean that in and of itself is. That's such mishandling.
Elon Musk
Yes. No, it's mind blowing. So, yeah, it's crazy.
Joe Rogan
Well, you were very reluctant last time you were here to talk about the extent of some of the fraud because you're like, they could kill me. Because this is kind of.
Elon Musk
Oh, yeah. What I'm saying is that, like, if you create. If like. To be pragmatic and realistic, you actually can't manage to zero fraud yet. You can manage to low fraud number, but not to zero fraud. If you manage to zero fraud, you're going to push so many people over the edge who are receiving fraudulent payments that the number of inbound homicidal maniacs will be really hard to overcome. So I'm actually taking, I think, quite a reasonable position, which is that we should simply reduce the amount of fraud, which I think is not an extremist position, and we should aspire to, you know, have less fraud over time. Not that we should be ultra draconian and eliminate every last scrap of fraud, which I guess would be nice to have, but, like, we don't even need to go that extreme. I'm saying we should just stop the blatant large scale, super obvious fraud. I think that's a reasonable position.
Joe Rogan
It's a very reasonable position.
Joe Rogan
And so what was the most shocking pushback that you got when you started implementing Doge, when you started investigating into where money was going?
Elon Musk
Well, I guess this is. I should have anticipated this, but
Elon Musk
Most of the fraudulent government payments to, especially to the NGOs, go to the Democrats. Most of it, like, I don't know, for argument's sake, let's say 80%, maybe 90%, 10 to 20% of it does go to Republicans. And so when we turn off funding to a fraudulent NGO, we'd get complaints from whatever the 10% of Republicans who were receiving the money, and they would, you know, they would very loudly complain. Because the honest answer is the Republicans are partly. They're receiving some of the fraud too. They're getting a vigilante.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I want to be clear, it's not like the Republican Party is some ultra pure paragon of virtue. No. Okay.
Joe Rogan
Well, you see that with the congressional insider training, it's across the board.
Joe Rogan
It's left and right.
Elon Musk
I mean, the whole uni party criticism has some validity to it. You know, there's so. And it's like, if you turn off fraudulent payments, it's not like, like I said, it's not like 100% of those payments were going to Democrats. A small percentage were also going to Republicans. Those Republicans complain very loudly. And, you know, and that's, that's. So there was a lot of pushback on the Republican side when we started cutting some of these funds. These funds. And I tried telling them, like, well, you know, 90% of the money is going to your opponents. But they still, if they, even if they're getting 10%, they want their piece. Yeah, they want their piece and they've
Joe Rogan
been getting that piece for a long time.
Elon Musk
This is why, like, you know, politics
Joe Rogan
is like, it's dirty business.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, that's like saying if, like, you know, if you like sausages and respect the law, do not watch either of them being. Being made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's not even true because I've made sausage before.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
It's like, it's not that big a deal. Yeah. Spices and casing running through the machine, not that big a deal.
Elon Musk
Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think the stuff I'm saying here is not like, if you stand back and think about it for a second, like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. You know, It's not like one political party is going to be, you know, pure devil or pure angel. You know, I think there's much more corruption on the Democrat side, but it's not. There's nothing. There's still some corruption on the Republican side.
Joe Rogan
How did it happen that the majority of the corruption wound up being on the Democrat side.
Elon Musk
Well, because the transfer payments, especially to illegals, are very much on the Democrat side.
Joe Rogan
So that's the root of it all, is the illegal situation.
Elon Musk
Yes. I mean, there's.
Joe Rogan
Or a focal point.
Elon Musk
Yes. It's also like. It would also be accurate to say that while obviously not everyone who's a Democrat is a criminal, almost everyone who is a criminal is a Democrat,
Elon Musk
the Democrats are the Soft Run Crime party. So if you're a criminal, who are you going to vote for? Right, right, The Soft Run Crime Party.
Joe Rogan
Did you think you were going to be able to get more done than you were?
Elon Musk
We did get a lot done. And Doge is still happening, by the way. The Doge is still underway. There's still waste and fraud being cut by the Doge team. So it hasn't stopped.
Joe Rogan
It's less publicized.
Elon Musk
It's less publicized. And they don't have, like, a clear person to attack anymore. Well, it seems like once they've basically, they applied immense pressure to me to stop it, so then I'm like, the best thing for me is to just, you know, cut out of this. In any case, as a special government employee, I could only be there for like 120 days anyway, something like that. So whatever the law says. So I was necessarily could only be there for four months as a special government employee. So. But yeah, I mean, you turn off the money spigot to fraudsters, they get very upset, to say the least. My death threat level went ballistic. It was like a rocket going to orbit. Yeah. But now that I'm not in dc, I guess they don't really have a person to attack anymore.
Joe Rogan
Well, the rhetoric about you has calmed down significantly. Yeah, it was disturbing. It's disturbing. To watch was like, this is crazy. And to watch these politicians engage in it and all these people just like framing you as this monster. Like, this is so weird. Like, this is what happens when you uncover fraud.
Joe Rogan
The whole machine turns on you. And if it wasn't for a person like you, who owns a platform and has an enormous amount of money, like, could have destroyed you.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And that was the goal. The goal was to destroy me. Absolutely.
Joe Rogan
Because you were getting in the way
Elon Musk
of this amazing graft, this gigantic fraud machine. I think Doge teams done a lot of good work in terms of fraud and waste prevented. My guess is it's probably on the order of 2 or 300 billion a year. So it's pretty good.
Joe Rogan
What do you think could have been done if you just had like, full reign and total cooperation? How much do you think you could have saved?
Elon Musk
I mean, what level of power are we assuming here? Godlike? Oh, yeah, probably cut the federal budget in half and get more done.
Joe Rogan
That is so crazy. It is so crazy.
Elon Musk
Get more done. And federal budget, it's that widespread? Well, I mean, a whole bunch of government departments simply shouldn't exist, in my opinion.
Elon Musk
Well, the Department of Education, which was created recently, like under Jimmy Carter, our educational results have gone downhill ever since it was created. So if you create a department and the result of creating that department is a massive decline in educational results, and it's Department of Education, you're better off not having it because literally we did better before there was one than after.
Joe Rogan
When you let the states run it.
Elon Musk
Yes. Yeah, because at least the states can compete with one another. But the problem is like, you hear like, cutting Department of Education. Our kids need education. Yeah, they do. But this is a new department that didn't even exist, you know, until the late 70s. And ever since that department was created, the results, educational results have declined. And so why would you have an institution continue that has made education worse? It doesn't make sense.
Joe Rogan
They killed it though, right?
Elon Musk
No, they still live, unfortunately, but they
Joe Rogan
were trying to kill it.
Elon Musk
It has been substantially reduced.
Joe Rogan
Okay, what other organizations? What other departments?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I'm a small government guy, so, you know, when, you know, when the country was created, we just had the Department of State, Department of War, you know, and sort of the, sort of the Department of Justice, we had an attorney General and Treasury Department. I don't know why you need more than that.
Joe Rogan
So what other departments specifically do you think are just completely ineffective?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, here it's like a question. It's a sort of philosophical question of how much government do you think there should be? Right. In my opinion, there should be the least amount of government I've heard.
Joe Rogan
The most bizarre argument against this is that you're cutting jobs and you're going to leave people jobless. And I'm like, but their jobs are useless.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Paying people to do nothing doesn't make sense. Like there's like a great. It's a story about like Milton Friedman, who is awesome generally, whatever Milton Friedman said is people should do that thing. I'm not sure if it's farqueful or not, but like someone complained to him, like he observed, I think people that were like digging ditches with shovels. And he said, well, allegedly Freeman said, well, I think you should use excavating equipment instead of shovels and you could get it done with far fewer people. And then someone said, but then we're going to lose a lot of jobs. Well, then freedom was said, well, in that case, why don't you have them use teaspoons? Just dig there, just with teaspoons. Think of all the jobs you'll create. It's bullshit. Basically. You just want people to work on things that are productive. You want people to work on. On building things, on building, you know, providing products and services that people find valuable, like, you know, making food, being, you know, being a farmer or a plumber or electrician or just anyone who's a builder or providing useful services. And that's what you want people to be doing. Not fake government jobs that don't add any value or may subtract value. There's also, like, you know, to illustrate the absurdity of also, how is the economy measured? Like, the way economists measure the economy is nonsensical because they'll measure any job, no matter. Even if that job is a dumb job that has no point and is even counterproductive. So like, so like the joke is like, there's two economists going on a hike in the woods. They come across a pile of shit. And one economist says to the other, I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit. The economist eats the shit, gets the $100, they keep walking. Then they come across another pile of shit. And the other economist says, now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit. Pays the other economist, Andrew Ellis, to pilot it. Then the way he said, they said, wait a second, we both just ate a pile of shit and we don't have any more extra money. Like, we both just gave the hundred dollars back to me and we both ate a pile of shit. This doesn't make any sense. And they said, no, no, but think of the economy. Because that's $200 in the economy, basically, that measure eating shit would count as a job. This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.
Joe Rogan
One of the things you said when
Elon Musk
things should not go as they drop.
Joe Rogan
One of the things you said when you stepped away is that you're kind of done and that it's unfixable or under its current form. The way people are approaching it,
Elon Musk
you can make it directionally better, but ultimately you can't fully fix the system. So. It would be accurate to say that even, like, unless you could go like super draconian, like, you know, Genghis Khan level on cutting waste and fraud, which you can't really do in A democratic country, an aspirationally democratic country, then there's no way to solve the debt crisis. So we've got national debt that's just insane. Where the debt payments, the interest payments and the debt exceeding our entire military budget. I mean that's one. That was one of the wake up calls for me. I was like, wait a second, the interest on national debt is bigger than the entire military budget and growing. This is crazy. So even if you implement all these savings, you're only delaying the day of reckoning for when America becomes goes bankrupt. Unless you go full Genghis Khan, which you can't really do. So. I came to the conclusion that the only way to get us out of the debt crisis and to prevent America from going bankrupt is AI and robotics. So like we need to grow the economy at a rate that allows us to pay off our debt. And I guess people just generally don't appreciate the degree to which, you know, the government overspending is a problem. But even like the Social Security website, this is under the Biden administration. On the website it would say like based on current demographic trends and how much money Social Security is bringing in versus how many Social Security recipients there are, because we have an aging population, relatively speaking, average age is increasing. Social Security will not be able to maintain as full payments, I think in by 2032. So Social Security will have to stop, start reducing the amount of money that's been paid people in about seven years.
Joe Rogan
And so the only way to fix that, robotics, manufacturing, raise gdp.
Elon Musk
You've got to basically massively increase the economic output, which is, and the only way to do that is AI and robotics. So basically we're going bankrupt without AI and robotics, even with a bunch of savings. The savings like reducing waste and forward can give us a longer Runway, but it cannot ultimately pay off our national debt.
Joe Rogan
So what do you think the solution is to the jobs that are going to be lost because of AI and robotics, the jobs due to automation, the jobs due to no longer do we need human beings to do these jobs because AI is doing them. Do you think it's going to be some sort of a universal basic income thing? Do you think there's going to be some other kind of solution that has to be implemented because a lot of people are going to be out of work, right?
Elon Musk
I think there will be actually a high demand for jobs, but not necessarily the same jobs. So I mean this is actually, this process has been happening throughout modern history. I mean there used to be like doing calculations manually with like a pencil and paper used to be a job, so they used to have like buildings full of people called computers, where the banks would like, all you do all day is you do calculations because they didn't have computers, they didn't have digital computers that people do. Yeah, well, there's just people who just like add and subtract stuff on a piece of paper. And that would be how banks would do financial processing.
Joe Rogan
And you'd have to literally go over their equations to make sure the books are balanced.
Elon Musk
Yeah. And most times it's just simple math. In a world before computers, how did you calculate? How did you do transactions? You had to do them by hand. So then when computers were introduced, the job of doing bank calculations no longer existed. So people had to go do something else. And that's what's going to happen. That's what is happening at an accelerated rate due to AI and then robotics.
Joe Rogan
That's the issue though, right? The accelerated rate, because it's going to be the accelerator.
Elon Musk
It's just happening. Like I said, AI is the supersonic tsunami. So that's what I call it, supersonic tsunami.
Joe Rogan
What other jobs will be available that aren't available now because of AI?
Elon Musk
Well, AI is really still digital. Ultimately, AI can improve the productivity of humans who, who weld things with their hands or do things with their hands, like plumb, you know, literally welding, electrical work, plumbing, anything that's, that's physically moving atoms, like cooking food or, you know, farming or like, like anything that's physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time. But anything that is digital, which is like just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs.
Joe Rogan
Like lightning coding, anything along those lines.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's going to take over those jobs like lightning. Just like digital computers took over the job of people doing manual calculations, but much faster.
Joe Rogan
So what happens to all those people? Like, what kind of numbers are we talking about? You're going to lose most drivers, right? Commercial drivers. You're going to have automated vehicles, AI controlled systems. Just like there's certain ports in China, I think in Singapore where everything's completely automated.
Elon Musk
Yeah, mostly, yeah.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So you're going to lose a lot of those jobs. Longshoremen jobs, trucking, commercial drivers.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, we actually do have a shortage of truck drivers, but this actually.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's why California's hired so many illegals to do it. Have you seen those numbers?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, the problem is like when you, when people don't know how to drive a semi truck, which is actually a Hard thing to do. Then they crash and kill people. Yeah, a friend of mine's wife was killed by an illegal driving a truck and she was just out biking and there was an illegal. He didn't know how to drive the truck or something, I mean, and he ran her over. So I mean, the thing is, for something like you can't let people drive sort of an 80,000 pound semi if they don't know how to do it. But in California they're just letting people
Joe Rogan
do it because they need people to do it.
Elon Musk
Well, they also need. They want the votes and that kind of thing. But yeah, cars are going to be autonomous, but there's just so many desk jobs where really what people are doing is they're processing email or they're answering the phone and just anything that isn't moving atoms, like anything that is not physically, like doing physical work, that will obviously be the first thing those jobs will be and are being eliminated by AI at a very rapid pace. And ultimately working will be optional because you'll have robots plus AI and we'll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, not just universal basic income. Universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want. But there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.
Joe Rogan
So you anticipate a basic income from that the economy will boost to such an extent that a high income would be available to almost everybody.
Elon Musk
So we'd essentially eliminate poverty in the benign scenario? Yes. So like there's multiple scenarios. There are multiple scenarios. There's a lot of ways this movie can end. Like the reason I'm so concerned about AI safety is that one of the possibilities is the Terminator scenario. It's not zero percent, so that's why I'm really banging the drum on AI needs to be maximally truth seeking. Don't make. I don't force AI to believe a lie like that. For example, the founding fathers were actually a group of diverse women. Or that misgendering is worth a nuclear war. Because if that's the case and then you get the robots and the AI becomes omnipotent, it can enforce that outcome. And then unless you're a diverse woman, you're out of the picture. So we're toast. Or you might wake up as a divorce woman one day. Everybody has adjusted the picture and we are now a divorce woman.
Joe Rogan
So that would be. That's the worst possible situation. So what would be the steps that we would have to take in order to implement the benign solution where it's universal High income, like best case scenario, this is the path forward to universal high income for essentially every single citizen that the economy gets boosted by AI and robotics to such an extent that no one ever has to work again. And what about meaning for those people? Which gets really weird.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I don't know how to answer the question about meaning.
Joe Rogan
That's an individual problem. Right, but it's going to be an individual problem for millions of people.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I've like fought against saying like, you know, I've been a voice saying like, hey, we need to slow down AI, we need to slow down all these things and we need to not have a crazy AI race. I've been saying that for a long time, for 20 plus years. But then I came to realize that really there's two choices here. Either be a spectator or a participant. And if I'm a spectator, I can't really influence the direction of AI. But if I'm a participant, I can try to influence the direction of AI and have a maximally true seeking AI with good values that loves humanity. And that's what we're trying to create with Grok at Xai. And you know, the researchers I think bearing this out, like I said when they compared, like how do AIs value the weight of a human life? Grok was the only one, the only one of the AIs that weighted human life equally and didn't say like a white guy's worth 1/20 of a black woman's life. Literally, that's what the calculation they came up with. So like this is, I'm like, this is very alarming. We've got to watch this stuff.
Joe Rogan
So this is one of the things that has to happen in order to reach this benign solution.
Joe Rogan
best movie ending.
Elon Musk
Yeah, you want a curious, truth seeking AI. And I think a curious, truth seeking AI will want to foster humanity because we are much more interesting than a bunch of rocks. Like you say, like I love Mars, you know, but Mars is kind of boring. It's just a bunch of red rocks. It's, there's some cool stuff. It's got a tall mountain, it's got, you know, it's got the biggest, the biggest ravine and the tallest mountain, but there's no animals or plants or, and there's no people and you know, so humanity is just much more interesting if you're a curious truth seeking AI than not humanity. It's just much more interesting. I mean like as humans we could go for example and eliminate all chimps if we said if we put our minds to it, we could say we could go out and we could annihilate all chimps and all gorillas, but we don't. There has been encroachment on their environment, but we actually try to preserve the chimpanzee and gorilla habitats. And I think in a good scenario, AI would do the same with humans. It would actually foster human civilization and care about human happiness. So this is the thing to try to achieve, I think.
Joe Rogan
But what does the landscape look like if you have grok competing with OpenAI, competing with all these different. How does it work? If you have AIs that have been captured by ideologies that are side by side competing with grok, how do we. So this is one of the reasons why you felt like it's important to not just be an observer, but participate and then have GROK be more successful and more potent than these other applications.
Elon Musk
Yes. As long as there's at least one AI that is maximally truth seeking, curious and you know, and for example, ways all, you know, human lives equally does not favor one race or gender, then people are able to look at GROK at XAI and compare that and say, wait a second, why are all these other AIs being basically sexist and racist? And then that causes some embarrassment for the other AIs and then they, they improve. They tend to improve just in the same way that acquiring Twitter and allowing the truth to be told and not suppressing the truth forced the other social media companies to be more truthful. In the same way, having GROK be a maximally truth seeking, curious AI will force the other AI companies to also be more truth seeking and fair.
Joe Rogan
And the funniest thing is, even though like the socialists and the Marxists are in opposition to a lot of your ideas, but if this gets implemented and you really can achieve universal high income, that's the greatest socialist solution of all time. Like literally no one will have to work.
Elon Musk
Correct. Like I said, so there is a benign scenario here, which I think probably people will be happy with if as long as we achieve it, which is sustainable abundance, which is if everyone can have. If you ask people what's the future that you want, and I think a future where we haven't destroyed nature like you can still we have the national parks with the Amazon rainforest still there, we haven't paved the rainforest like the natural beauty is still there, but people have nonetheless. Everyone has abundance, everyone has excellent medical care, everyone has whatever goods and services they want.
Joe Rogan
And you were just.
Elon Musk
It kind of sounds like heaven.
Joe Rogan
It is like the ideal socialist utopia. And this idea that the only thing you should be doing with your time is working in order to pay your bills and feed yourself sounds kind of archaic considering the kind of technology that's at play.
Joe Rogan
Like a world where that's not your concern at all anymore. Everybody has money for food. Everybody has abundance. Everybody has electronics in their home. Everybody essentially has a high income. Now you can kind of do whatever you want. And your day can now be exploring your interests, doing things that you actually enjoy doing. Your purpose just has to shift. Instead of, you know, I'm a hard worker and this is what I do. And that's how I, that's how I define myself. Don't. Now you can fucking golf all day. You know, you could. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing can now be your main pursuit.
Joe Rogan
Well, that sounds crazy good.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that's, that's the best. That's, that's, that's the benign scenario that
Joe Rogan
we should be aiming for ending to the movie is actually pretty good.
Elon Musk
Yes. I think there is still this question of meaning, of making sure people don't lose meaning. So hopefully they can find meaning in ways that's not derived from their work and purpose.
Joe Rogan
Purpose for things that you find, things that you do that you enjoy. But there's a lot of people that are independently wealthy that spend most of their time doing something they enjoy.
Joe Rogan
And that could be the majority of
Elon Musk
people, pretty much everyone.
Joe Rogan
But we would have to rewire how people approach life, which seems to be like, acceptable, because you're not asking them to be enslaved. You're exactly asking them the opposite. Like, no longer be burdened by financial worries. Now go do what you like.
Joe Rogan
Go fucking test pizza.
Elon Musk
Do whatever you want, pretty much. So that's, that's, that's the, that's the, that's probably the best case outcome.
Joe Rogan
That sounds like the best case outcome, period, for the future. If you're looking at like, how much people have struggled just to feed themselves all throughout history. Food, shelter, safety, if all of that stuff, can it be fixed? Like, how much would you solve a lot of the crime if there was a universal high income? Just think of that, like, how much of crime is financially motivated. You know, the greater percentage of people that are committing crimes live in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods. So if there's no such thing anymore, if you really can achieve universal high income. Yeah, this is. It sounds like a utopian.
Elon Musk
Yes. I think some people make commit crime because they like committing crime just Some, some amount of that is they just
Joe Rogan
enjoy wild people out there.
Joe Rogan
And Obviously they've become 40 years old living a life like that. Now all of a sudden, universal high income is not going to completely stop their instincts.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you want to have like, say, read a science fiction book or some books that are probably the inaccurate or the least inaccurate version of the future, I'd say I'd recommend the Ian Banks books, the culture books. It's not actually a series. It's like sci fi books about the future. They're generally called the culture books. Iain Banks culture books. It's worth reading those.
Joe Rogan
When did he write these?
Elon Musk
He started writing them in the 70s and I think he. The last one, I think he was. I think it was written just like around, I don't know, maybe 2010 or something. I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
Scottish author, ian banks from 87 to 2012. Interesting.
Elon Musk
But he wrote his first book, Consider Flevus. I think he started writing that in the 70s. These books are incredible, by the way. Incredible books.
Joe Rogan
4.6 stars on Amazon. Interesting.
Joe Rogan
this gives me hope.
Joe Rogan
This is the first time I've ever thought about it this way.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, I often ask people, what is the future that you want? And they have to think about it for a second because they were usually tied up in whatever the daily struggles are. But you say, what is the future that you want? And generally sustainable abundance. Or at least folks say, what about a future where there's sustainable abundance? Like, oh yeah, that's a pretty good future. So, you know, if. And that future is attainable with AI and robotics. But you know, like I said, not every path is a good path. But I think if we push it in the direction of maximally truth seeking and curious, then I think AI will want to take care of humanity and foster humanity because we're interesting. And if it hasn't been programmed to think that all straight white males should die, which Gemini was basically programmed to do it, at least first, they seem to have fixed that, hopefully fixed it.
Joe Rogan
But don't you think culturally we're getting away from that mindset and that people
Elon Musk
realize how preposterous that all is, we are getting away from it. So we are getting. At least it knows. AI mostly knows to hide things. But like, like I said, there is that. I think I still have that as I had that as my like penned post on X, which was like, hey, wait a second guys, we still have every AI except Grok is Saying that basically straight white male should die and this is a problem and we should fix it, you know, but simply me saying that is like. Tends to generally result in them, like, ooh, that is kind of bad. Maybe we should just. We should not have all straight white males die. I think they'll say also all straight Asian males should also die as well. They don't like generally the AI and the media, which. Back in the day, the media was racist against black people and sexist against women. Back in the day, now it is racist against white people and Asians and sexist against men. They just like being racist and sexist. I think they just want to change the target, so. But really they just shouldn't be racist and sexist at all, you know?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, ideally that would be nice.
Elon Musk
That would be nice.
Joe Rogan
And it's kind of crazy that we were kind of moving in that general direction until around 2012, and then everything ramped up online and everybody was accused of being a Nazi and everybody was transphobic and racist and sexist and homophobic and everything got exaggerated to the point where it was this wild witch hunt where everyone was a Columbo looking for racism.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, but they were openly anti white and often openly anti Asian.
Joe Rogan
And then this new sentiment that you cannot be racist against white people because racism is power and influence. Okay. No, it's not.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Racism is racism in the absolute. So, you know, and there just needs to be consistency. So if it's okay to have, let's say black or Asian or Indian or pride, it should be okay to have white pride, too.
Elon Musk
So that's just a consistency question. So, you know, if it's okay to be proud of one religion, it should be okay to be proud of, I guess, all religions, provided they're. They're not like, oppressive. Yeah. Or don't. Like, as long as part of that religion is not, like, exterminating people who are not in that religion.
Elon Musk
So it's really just like a consistency bias or just ensuring consistency to eliminate bias. So if it is possible to be racist against one race, it is possible to be racist against any race?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And arguing against that, that's when, you know, you're.
Elon Musk
It's a logical inconsistency that makes AIs go insane and people. And people go insane. Yes. But like the, like, you can't simultaneously say that there's systemic racist oppression, but also that races don't exist, that race is a social construct, which is it. You know, you also can't say that, you know, anyone who steps foot in America is automatically an American. Except for the. The people that originally came here.
Joe Rogan
Exactly, exactly. Except for the colonizers.
Elon Musk
Yeah, except for the evil colonizers who came here.
Elon Musk
So which one is it? Like if you. If as soon as you step foot in a place you are. That you are just as American as everyone else, then that would have applied. If you apply that consistently, then the original white settlers were also just as American as everyone else. Yeah. Logically. Logically.
Joe Rogan
One more thing that I have to talk to you about before you leave is the rescuing of the people from the space station which we talked about. You were planning it the last time you were here. The lack of coverage that that got in mainstream media was one of the most shocking things.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they totally memory hold that thing. Wild. Yes. It's like it didn't exist.
Joe Rogan
Those people would be dead. They'd be stuck up there.
Elon Musk
Well, they'd probably still be alive, but they'd be having bone density issues because of prolonged exposure to zero gravity.
Joe Rogan
Well, they were already up there for like eight months, right?
Joe Rogan
Which is an insanely long time. It takes forever to recover just from that.
Elon Musk
Yeah. They're only supposed to be at the space station for three to six months maximum. So.
Joe Rogan
One of the things you told me that was so crazy was that you could have gotten them sooner, but.
Elon Musk
Yeah, but for political reasons, they did not want SpaceX or me to be associated with returning the astronauts before the election.
Joe Rogan
That is so wild that that's a fact.
Elon Musk
First of all, we absolutely could have done it, so.
Joe Rogan
But even though you did do it and you did it after the election, it received almost no media coverage anyway.
Elon Musk
Yes. Because nothing good can the media, which is essentially a far left prophecy, the legacy mainstream media is a far left propaganda machine. And so anything, any story that is positive about someone who is not part of the sort of far left tribe will not get any coverage. I could save a busload of orphans and it wouldn't get a single news story.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's. It really is nuts. It was nuts to watch because even though it was discussed on podcasts and it was discussed on X and it was discussed on social media, it still was a blip in the news cycle. It was very quick. It was in and out. And because it was successful launch and you did rescue those people, nobody got hurt and there was nothing really. There was no blood to talk about.
Joe Rogan
Just fucking in and out.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and as you saw firsthand with the starship launch, starship is, at least by some would consider it to be the most amazing engineering project that's happening on Earth right now. Outside of maybe AI or AI and robotics, but certainly in terms of a spectacle to see it is the most spectacular thing that is happening on Earth right now is the starship launch program, which anyone can go and see. If they just go to South Texas and they can just rent a hotel room, low cost, in South Padre island or in Brownsville and you can see the launch and you can drive right past the factory because it's on a public highway. But it gets no coverage. Or what coverage it does get was like rocket blew up coverage, right?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Oh, he's a fuckwit. The rocket blew up.
Elon Musk
Like the Sasha program is vastly, vastly more capable than the entire Apollo moon program. Vastly more capable. This is a spaceship that is designed to make life multi planetary, to carry millions of people across the heavens to another planet. The Apollo program could only send astronauts to the moon for a few hours at a time. Like they could send two. The entire fall program could only send astronauts to visit the moon very briefly and then for a few hours and then depart. The starship program could create an entire lunar base with a million people. The magnitudes are different, very different magnitudes here.
Joe Rogan
So what was the political resistance?
Elon Musk
There's basically no coverage of it.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, What I wanted to ask you is like, so what were the conversations leading up to the rescue like when you were like, I can get them out way quicker.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I raised this a few times, but it was the, I was told instructions came from the White House that, you know, that there should be no attempt to rescue before the election.
Joe Rogan
That should be illegal. That, that really should be a horrendous miscarriage of justice for those poor people that were stuck on that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it is. It is crazy.
Joe Rogan
Have you ever talked to those folks afterwards? Did you have conversations with them?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, they're not going to say anything political to, you know, they're not like, they're never going to say thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nice. Yeah, Absolutely. So.
Joe Rogan
But the instructions came down from the White House. You cannot rescue them because politically this is a bad hand of cards.
Elon Musk
I mean, they didn't say because politically it's a bad hand of cards. They just said they were not interested in any rescue operation before the election. Yeah. So what did that feel like? I wasn't surprised, but it's crazy. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Because Biden could have authorized it and they could have said the Biden administration is helping bring those people back, throw you a little funding, give you some money to do it. The Biden administration, they funded these people being returned.
Elon Musk
Yeah, the Biden administration was not exactly my best friend, especially after I, you know, helped Trump get elected. Get elected. Which, I mean, some people still think, you know, Trump is like, the devil, basically. And, I mean, I think Trump, actually, He's not perfect, but he's not evil. Trump is not evil. I spent a lot of time with him, and he's. I mean, he's a product of his time, but he is not. He's not evil.
Joe Rogan
No, I don't think he's evil either. But if you look at the media coverage.
Elon Musk
The media. The media treats him like he's super evil.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's pretty shocking if you look at the amount of negative coverage. Like, one of the things that I looked at the other day was mainstream media coverage of you, Trump, a bunch of different public figures, and then it
Elon Musk
was like, 96% negative or something crazy.
Joe Rogan
And then Mamdani, which is like 95% positive.
Elon Musk
Right. I mean, Mamdani is a charismatic swindler. I mean, you gotta hand it to him. Like, he can light up a stage, but he has just been a swindler his entire life. And, you know, and I think. I mean, he's likely to win. He's likely to be mayor of New York City. Very likely. Yeah, very likely.
Joe Rogan
I think polymarket has it at. What. What is the.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that sounds pretty likely.
Joe Rogan
That's great. I'm not sure.
Elon Musk
The 6% are, you know, so. So, yeah, so that's.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's also, like, who's on the other side? The fucking Guardian angel guy with the beret and Andrew Cuomo, who doesn't even have a party. Like, the Democrats don't even want him. So you have those two options, and then you have the young kids who are like, finally, socialism.
Elon Musk
Yeah. They don't know what they're talking about, obviously. So, you know, like, you just look at this. How many boats come from Cuba to Florida and how many. And how many boats. Because, you know, there's like, a constant. I was thinking, like, how many boats are accumulating on the shores of Florida coming from Cuba?
Elon Musk
There's a whole bunch of free boats that you could, if you want to go, take them back to Cuba. Pretty close, but for some reason, people don't do that. Why are the boats only coming in this direction?
Joe Rogan
Well, who are the most rabid capitalists in America? The fucking Cubans.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. They're like, we've seen how this story goes.
Elon Musk
We do not want exactly.
Joe Rogan
Fuck off. Cubans in Miami. They don't want to hear any bullshit. They don't want to hear any socialism bullshit. They're like, no, no, no. We know what this actually is. This isn't just some fucking dream. Yeah.
Elon Musk
It's extreme. Govern oppression. That's what I always meant. It's a nightmare. And like an obvious way you can
Elon Musk
which ideology is the bad one is who has to which ideology is building a wall to keep people in and prevent them from escaping. Right. Like so East Berlin built the wall, not West Berlin. They built the wall because people were trying to escape from communism to West Berlin. But there wasn't anyone going from West Berlin to East Berlin. That's why the communists had to build a wall to keep people from escaping.
Joe Rogan
They're going to have to build a wall around New York City.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So when you say this guy's a problematic swell, that an ideology is problematic if that ideology has to bull day wool to keep people in with machine guns and shoot you if you try to leave.
Joe Rogan
Also, there's no examples of it being successful ever. We're working out for people now. There's examples of a bunch of lies like North Korea. Give this land to the state. We'll be in control of food. No one goes hungry. No. Now no one can grow food but the government. And we'll tell you exactly what you eat. And you eat very little.
Joe Rogan
When you say Mamdani's a swindler. I know he has a bunch of fake accents that he used to use.
Joe Rogan
And you know, but what else has he done that makes him a swindler?
Elon Musk
Well, I guess if you say what I mean, if you say to any audience whatever that audience wants to hear. Instead of what? Instead of having a consistent message, I would say that that is a swindley thing to do. And. Yeah, Yeah. But, but he is, he is charismatic.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Good looking guy, smart, charismatic.
Joe Rogan
Great on a microphone.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
And what the young people want to see, you know, like this ethnic guy who's young and vibrant and has all these socialist ideas, aligns with them and, you know, they're a bunch of broke dorks just out of college like, yay, let's vote for this. And there's a lot of them and they're, they're activated, they're motivated.
Elon Musk
I guess we'll see what happens here.
Joe Rogan
What do you think happens if he WINS because like 1% of New York City is responsible for 50% of their tax base, which is kind of nuts. 50% of the tax revenue comes from 1% of the population. And those are the people that you're scaring off.
Elon Musk
You know, you lose one half of 1%, hopefully. The stuff he said, you know, about government takeovers of like that all the stores should be the government, basically.
Joe Rogan
Well, I don't think he said that. I think he said they want to do government supermarkets, some state run or city run supermarkets.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, it's just the government is the DMV at scale. So you have to say like, do you want the DMV running your supermarket?
Elon Musk
Was your last experience at the dmv Amazing. And if it wasn't, you probably don't want the government doing things.
Joe Rogan
Imagine if they were responsible for getting you blueberries.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's not going to be good. I mean the thing about communism is it was all bread lines and bad shoes, you know, do you want ugly shoes and bread lines? Because that's what communism gets you.
Joe Rogan
It's going to be interesting to see what happens and whether or not they snap out of it and overcorrect and go to some Rudy Giuliani type character next. Because it's been a long time since there was any sort of Republican leader there.
Elon Musk
We live in the most interesting of times because we face the, you know, simultaneously face civilizational decline and incredible prosperity. And these timelines are interwoven. So if Mamdani's policies are put into place, especially at scale, it would be a catastrophic decline in living standards, not just for the rich, but for everyone, as has been the case with every socialist experiment. So. But then as you pointed out, the irony is that the ultimate capitalist thing of AI and robotics, enabling prosperity for all, an abundance of goods and services. Actually the capitalist implementation of AI and robotics, assuming it goes down the good path, is actually what results in the communist utopia. Because plate is an irony maximizer.
Joe Rogan
Right. An actual socialism of maximum abundance of high income people.
Elon Musk
Universal high income.
Elon Musk
The problem with communism is it's universal low income. It's not that everyone gets elevated so that everyone gets oppressed except for a very small minority of politicians who live lives of luxury. That's what's happening every time it's been done.
Elon Musk
So but then the, the actual communist utopia, if everyone gets anything they want, will be. Will be if. Will be achieved. If it is achieved, it will be achieved via capitalism. Because fate is an irony maximizer.
Joe Rogan
I feel like we should probably end it on that. Is there anything else?
Elon Musk
The most Ironic outcome is the most likely, especially if entertaining.
Joe Rogan
Well, everything has been entertaining. As long as the bad things aren't happening to you, it's quite fascinating. And it's never a boring moment.
Elon Musk
Yes. So there's. I do have a theory of why, like if simulation theory is true, then it is actually very likely that the most interesting outcome is the most likely because only the simulations that are interesting will continue. The simulators will stop any simulations that are boring because they're not interesting.
Joe Rogan
But here's the question about the simulation theory. Is the simulation run by anyone or
Elon Musk
is it would be run by someone, it would be run by some force, the program. Like in this reality that we live in, we run simulations all the time. So when we try to figure out if the rocket's going to make it, we run thousands, sometimes millions of simulations just to figure out which path is the good path for the rocket and where can it go wrong, where can it fail? But when we do these, I say at this point, millions of simulations of what can happen with the rocket, we ignore the ones that are where everything goes right because we just care about, we have to address the situations where it goes wrong. So basically, and for AI simulations as well, like all these things, we keep the simulations going that are the most interesting to us. So if simulation theory is accurate, if it is true, who knows, Then the, the simulators, they will continue to run the simulations that are most interesting. Therefore, from a Darwinian perspective, the only surviving simulations will be the most interesting ones. And in order to avoid getting turned off, the only rule is you must keep it interesting because the boring simulations will be terminated.
Joe Rogan
Are you still completely convinced that this is a simulation?
Elon Musk
I didn't say I was completely convinced.
Joe Rogan
Well, you said it's like the odds of it not being are in the billions. I guess that's not completely. Because you're saying there's a chance.
Elon Musk
What are the odds that we're in base reality? Well, given that we're able to create increasingly sophisticated simulations. So if you think of, say, video games and how video games have gone from very simple video games like Pong with two rectangles in a square to video games today being photorealistic, with millions of people playing simultaneously, and all of that has occurred in our lifetime. So if that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality. The fidelity of the game will be such that you don't know if that what you're seeing is a real video or a fake video. And like AI generated videos at this point, you can sometimes tell it's an AI generated video, but often you cannot tell. And soon you will not really just not be able to tell. So if that's happening in our direct observation and we'll create millions, if not billions of photorealistic simulations of reality, then what are the odds that we're in base reality versus someone else's simulation?
Joe Rogan
Well, isn't it just possible that the simulation is inevitable, but that we are in base reality building towards a simulation?
Elon Musk
We're making simulations, so we're making simulations. You can just think of photorealistic video games as being simulations. And especially as you apply AI in these video games, the characters in the video games will be incredibly interesting to talk to. They won't just have a limited dialogue tree where if you go to the crossbow merchant and you try to talk about any subject except buying a crossbow, they just want to talk about selling you a crossbow. But with AI based non player characters, you'll be able to have an elaborate conversation with no dialogue tree.
Joe Rogan
Well, that might be the solution for meaning for people. Just log in and you could be a fucking vampire and whatever you live in Avatar Land, you could do it. You could do whatever you want. You don't have to think about money
Elon Musk
or Ready player one?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, literally. Yeah, but with higher living standards. Yeah, you don't have to be in a little trailer.
Elon Musk
I mean, I think this people do want to have some amount of struggle or something they want to push against. But it could be, you know, playing sports or playing a game.
Joe Rogan
It could be easily playing a game. And especially playing a game where you're now no longer worried about like physical attributes like athletics, like bad joints and hips and stuff like that. Now it's completely digital. But yet you do have meaning. And pursuing this thing that you're doing all day, whatever the fuck that means, it's going to be weird.
Elon Musk
It's going to be interesting.
Joe Rogan
It's going to be very interesting.
Elon Musk
The most interesting and usually ironic outcome is the most likely. All right, That's a good predictor of the future.
Joe Rogan
Thank you. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate, appreciate your time. I know you're a busy man, so this means a lot. You come here to do this. Thank you. Bye everybody.