Tucker Carlson October 7, 2024 A wide-ranging interview with Tucker Carlson in which Musk explains why he went all in on Donald Trump, warns "if Trump loses, this is the last election", and discusses Starlink, vaccines and crime.
A wide-ranging interview with Tucker Carlson in which Musk explains why he went all in on Donald Trump, warns "if Trump loses, this is the last election", and discusses Starlink, vaccines and crime.
Transcript You're fucked, dude. I'm fucked. If he loses, I'm fucked.
It does seem that way. You can't just be like.
You can't just be like, yo. Yeah, I'm like, how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don't know.
Because it's not like you can say, well, yeah, I maxed out to him, but, you know, I get you were.
I have no plausible deniability. No, no. And I've been trashing Kamala non stop.
Well, that. I mean, the Kamala puppet, I call him, you know, the machine that the Kamala puppet represents.
Yeah. She's irrelevant. I mean, she's not even.
No, no. Like. Like, I made. I made a joke, which I realized I deleted, which is like, nobody's even bothering to try to kill Kamala because it's pointless. What do you achieve? That's quite another puppet.
It's no point in killing.
Nobody's tried to kill Joe Biden. It's pointless. Totally.
You actually put that up? Yeah.
Now, some people interpreted it as though I was calling for people to assassinate her. But I was like. But I was like, no, even. You know, I was like, doesn't it seem strange that no one's even bothered to try?
It's not worth it. I mean, there's an endless supply.
Nobody would. It's absurd.
Yeah, yeah. Nobody's gonna try to. Nobody tries to assassinate a puppet.
Of course not. A marionette.
Yeah, marionette. It's just like, you know, it's hilarious. She's safe. Like, to try to kill Trump twice with actual guns and bullets. Oh, yeah. Shot in the air. Right in fucking butler, where I was. And he doesn't seem rattled.
It's weird. Does he to you?
I mean, he has the constitution of an ox. It seems, you know, it's not like working out and eating healthy and he's.
Okay, we gotta tape this. Yeah, we're good. Oh, good.
He's not like, let me eat another salad. That's not. No. Or work out, you know, fastidiously. That's. He. I felt like hell. He doesn't work out and he eats, you know, cheeseburgers and Diet Coke and stuff, and it just. I think it just inherently has a strong constitution.
So. And you. I mean, you were with him. He didn't seem like a man who'd been the subject of two assassination attempts.
No, he Seemed of, you know, sound mind and body and strong backbone.
I mean, that's what I said in the thing, which. Yeah, the remarks I made there were impromptu. There's no teleprompter or anything. I just, I was just speaking extemporaneously.
Are you the only rich guy who doesn't have, like a media consultant?
Yeah, no, I've noticed, obviously. I mean. No, I just. No, I just thought about what I want to say and I just spoke off the cuff. No teleprompter, nothing.
Yeah, I could talk. Just look like I'm like, now I'm just talking. Look at me. Wow. Amazing. I can't even believe it. I can talk without a teleprompter. That's crazy.
But if, if he loses, it's going to be hard for you to pretend you never supported him.
Yeah. No, you are definitely in the deep end. You cannot touch bottom.
No, no. I'm like, I'm like rolling around. I'm like. You're picking my. I'm like, it's all in, baby.
Yes, we fun. I mean, I mean, there may be some. In the hopefully unlikely event that he loses, there may be some vengeance on me. Are you kidding? I mean, it's possible.
It's possible. You've got to be one of the biggest government contractors.
We do essential work for the government.
Yeah. It's not like, you know, we do useful essential work that we compete for and win contracts on because our product is much better and costs less. That's why we get different contracts. And I mean, if you take, for example, the NASA contract to transport astronauts to and from the space station, Boeing got. NASA awarded two contracts at the start, one to Boeing and one to SpaceX. Boeing was awarded twice as much as SpaceX. SpaceX has done all the astronaut transportation from the space station and Boeing has only done one transport of two astronauts to the space station. And we have to bring them back. Boeing got twice as much as SpaceX. There's this total misunderstanding that my companies have been subsidized and supported by the government and get all these. And it's like, do you really think that a Biden administration is going to subsidize me?
Are you kidding? No. In fact, they take away every contract they possibly can. So, for example, there was the FC, the FCC contract to $42 billion for providing. Providing rural broadband.
Okay. We, we actually first said, look, we don't. We think there shouldn't be Any subsidies. So we recommend that this program just not exist. But since you're insisting that it exists, we will compete and we have better products. So we won, I don't know about a quarter of it, which would have included the devastated areas like North Carolina and stuff. And the FCC took it away illegally. They just voted. Three out of five commissioners voted away and said, even though you want it, we're sending it on what ground? And you know how many people they've connected.
How many? Zero. So you think that was political?
Well, the three Democrats voted against it. The two Republicans voted for it.
So you tried to get Starlink. You tried to get Starlink into North Carolina, into western North Carolina. The area's devastated by the hurricane.
We have. It is. It is in there and it is the primary means of communication in the devastated areas.
You had conflict with Buttigieg over this?
Well, I raised a. I said, look, we're. We had delivered. We've been delivering Starlink terminals there for a while and obviously some people already had them since they're, you know, private individuals that had Starlink there already. We delivered thousands of terminals and got all the way up to the areas where they wouldn't let us go any further. And then we're like, okay, we're going to send helicopters in and find people who are stranded and give them Starlink terminals. So I think it's a nice thing to do. Yeah, okay. They wouldn't let us land because There was an FA notice to M&Notam that said in order to land, you have to know who you're going to meet with to land. Now the problem is we're trying to deliver Internet communications. People don't have Internet communications. We don't know who they are. Then they can't reach us because they don't have communications. Do you see the catch 22?
Insane. So it's obviously impossible for people who don't have Internet communications to let us. To let us know who they are because they don't have the Internet.
Yes. And so did you explain this to the federal government? Yes. What did they say? They fixed it.
How is Buttigieg when you talked to him?
He was actually good. So I want to be just. Yeah, yeah. I want to give Buttigieg some credit here. First A. You know, when I complained about it, he reacted in a very level headed way. He. And he reached out to me and he called me. Yeah. And we discussed the issue, got to the bottom of it and he fixed it.
So credit to the Boyd judge Yeah,
well, and to you for pushing it.
Yeah. I mean, so. But as soon as he was aware of the problem, he fixed it.
Well, you publicized it too, on.
As soon as you shamed him.
Well, but I do want to give credit where it's due.
Yeah, no, amen. I agree completely. So, but back to the original question, you know, about the potential consequences if, you know, having gone all in. This doesn't work.
I mean you had to have thought about this long and hard before you did it. What was your thinking?
I mean, my view is that if Trump doesn't win this election, it's the last election we're going to have that the Democrats, the dumb machine has been importing so many people bringing in so many illegals flying in with this like CBP border app thing that nobody even knew about, like secret program that's illegal. Basically it's illegal. But there's no action by DOJ to actually to stop it from happening. They're transporting large numbers of illegals to swing states. If you look at the numbers, these are the numbers from the government website. So like from the Democrat administered government website, like where do you get this data from the government website that is run by Democrats. And there are triple digit increases in illegals to all the swing states and in some cases it's like 700% over the last three years. Now these swing state margins are sometimes 10, 20,000 votes. So what happens if you put hundreds of thousands of people into each swing state. When somebody is granted asylum bail? Fast track. They, they can get a green card and then five years after the green card they can get citizenship and they can fully legally vote. And when they do so they vote overwhelmingly Democrat. And sometimes I get this rebuttal of like, well, a lot of them, their social values don't align with sort of the far left sort of woke ideology. I said that's true, but that's not their top priority. Their top priority is getting their friends and family also to the United States. And the Dems also issue all these programs, these sort of handouts essentially that make them beholden to the Democratic Party. So they vote Dem. That's what happens. So my prediction is if there's another four years of a Dem administration, they will legalize so many illegals that are there that the next election there won't be any swing states and will be a single party country. Just like California is a single party state. That's a super majority damn state in
California because of immigration.
Yes, California was fairly reliably Republican.
Bill Clinton lost California in 92 and won West Virginia.
Yes. So there was a 986amnesty.
And thereafter California trended very strongly Dem and is at this point, I think 65, 70% down, something like that. It's super majority Dem. Like the California legislature is more than 2/3 Democrat.
Has it improved the state?
No, it's not. And California just passed, which is shocking. It's hard to believe this is even real, but California just passed a law making it illegal to require voter ID in any election at all in California. You know that?
Yeah, Newsom signed it into law last week.
It's illegal to require an ID in
any election, even a town council. And a friend of mine who is this can who lives in Palo Alto was like, is this actually real? And he went to vote in like some city council election. He tried to show them his ID and they said, we're not even allowed to look at your id.
Have they extended this same, actually what's
going on right now, by the way? They're proud of it. They're not hiding it.
But it's only voting. It's not buying a gun or buying liquor or buying power pack cigarettes or flying on an airplane or renting a hotel room. It's only voting that it's illegal to own.
Oh, if you try to buy a gun, I mean, they're going to ID you six ways a Sunday. Yeah, they try. California's trying to make it basically legal to own a gun. And the same people that demanded vaccine IDs if you want to travel or do anything, are the same ones who say no voter ID is required.
Is there any reason to pass a law like that except to abet voter fraud?
It's so that fraud cannot be proven. So it enables large scale fraud and no way to prove it, because how would you prove it? It's literally impossible. No id. You're not even allowed to show your id. It's insane.
Insane. So, yeah, the purpose of no voter ID is obviously to conduct fraud in elections. Obviously.
There can be no other explanation.
I mean, they come up with some nice sounding thing.
People don't have IDs. Could you live in this country without an ID?
Yeah, I mean, their common rebuttal is like, it's racist to require id, which is insane. I think it's actually racist and patronizing to say that people can't figure out how to get id, obviously.
But how could you live here without an id? I don't think it's even possible you can't. Yeah.
You need ID for everything. Like the list of the things you need ID for is basically everything except voting. So.
So you see the rest of the country total.
But that doesn't in any way minimize the aggression or self righteousness they bring to this conversation. Yes, you're a racist if you want that.
Right. In fact, obviously someone is racist if they say that people of particular race cannot get id. That's patronizing and racist.
That's absurd. Yes. Yeah.
You know, it's like when a governor of New York said people in the, you know, don't know how to use computers or something like that. I mean, like, you know, super out of touch.
So it's like. So there's a really clear template.
She doesn't know how to use computers, but they do. Obviously.
I don't think Hochul could use a computer.
She's not qualified intellectually. Yeah, no, probably not.
But not everyone in New York is as dumb as Kathy Hochul. I think that's true.
So you see the other 49 states becoming California if the machine wins.
Well, you don't need all 49 to go that way. You just need, you know, enough to have the election. Have they not be swing states? I mean, there are only six swing states.
So there are only six states out of 50 right now that are in contention. So if those six states that are in contention by narrow margins are no longer in contention, then the only contest will be who wins the Democratic primary. That's how it is in California. That's how it is in New York. There's no party versus party situation. The only contest is who wins the Democratic primary. And as we've seen with the appointment of Kamala, who no one voted for even in a Democratic primary.
Where's the democracy here?
Well, it's just. It's easier though.
I mean, it's just that the Democratic Party elite just decides who is in charge. That's a tiny oligarchy basically comprised of. That's not democracy.
The richest people in the country. That's kind of the interesting part to me is that the richest people in the country are on board with this. I mean, that's what it is. It's a collection of billionaires.
Not me. And not everyone is. I think there's. But it is a shocking number of so called billionaires are in the damn camp more than are in the Republican camp.
Which is wild. So the, in fact the astonishing thing in the swing states is that, that they're even a contest given that the Dems have far more money than the Republicans. So the color camp dramatically outspends the Trump campaign in the swing states. The overwhelming, the media is overwhelmingly pro Democrat. So you've got, the press is a Dem cheering squad and you know, so. Oh, and then you've got almost all the Hollywood and entertainment. The celebrities also, you know, endorsing Kamala and being pro Dem. So you got the celebrities, you got the, they got the money, they got basically everything on the side of the Dems. The problem is the underdog here, Trump's underdog in swing swing states. And still it's a contentious, it's still a 50, 50 after all that.
It tells me that if people actually knew what was going on, they weren't being fed non stop propaganda, it would be a landslide in favor of Republicans.
Yeah, well, how's this for crazy? Has there ever been a more volatile time in American politics? Not in our lifetimes. No one alive has ever seen anything like this. But long before things started to really fall apart, the Heritage foundation saw it coming. Heritage has pulled together a coalition of over 100 right leaning groups to develop a comprehensive plan for day one that would include detailed policy proposals on the most pressing issues. The big ones, securing the border, controlling inflation, cracking down on election fraud, protecting the rights of the individual and saving the nation from being crushed by wolves. Anti human ideology. The team at Heritage has also developed a plan to dismantle the deep state that keeps this nonsense going and reclaim this nation from the small group of technocrats that's broken everything. Heritage is also running a training and vetting program to identify effective conservatives to serve in the next presidential administration. People who will share your values, this country's values, and actually do the job it keeps. It can't just be the same pool of discredited people from Washington populating every administration. Heritage has a long head start and they put in a lot of work already, but they need your support to finish the job and to support the incoming president. You can go to heritage.orgtucker and contribute to this important work today. A lot depends on it. Heritage.orgtucker but why not join the easier side? I mean, you're just, you're creating problems for yourself by getting on stage with Trump and you must have had friends who said that to you.
Yeah, people care about you. Like, why even get involved in this?
Well, because I think we want to remain a democracy. And we don't want to become a one party state. Yes, that's the reason. And the. It's the exact opposite. The people call Trump a threat to democracy. The people who are saying Trump's a threat to democracy are themselves the threat to democracy.
One party rule is not democracy. One party where essentially the party elite pick a candidate, as happened with Kamala, is not democracy. Where did the people vote? Show me where the people voted. No, there were no people voting. It was all just Dem party elite. That disappointed someone. And when the Biden puppet. When the pro Biden puppets ratings sagged, they knocked him in the back immediately and just tossed him out and put a new puppet on. That's exactly what happened. Tell me I'm wrong. Well, not only are you right, I
mean, it's almost not even worth criticizing. Kamala Harris.
What does she have to do with it?
There's no point in criticizing Kamala. She simply the face of a lot, a much larger machine.
And she will say whatever is. Whatever. The teleprompter, whatever's on the teleprompter, she's going to say it.
Now she gets stuck if the teleprompter breaks. That happened recently, I think the teleprompter stolen. She was just like looping for a while. For about a minute. I think that happened yesterday or something. It was pretty funny to watch. But she'll just say whatever words are on the teleprompter. So, you know, it's really whoever controls the teleprompter is the actual sort of. That's who's actually in charge.
And who is that, do you think?
Well, I've tried to put it down. It's not like any one kind of mastermind. It's not like it seems to be like Kamala is sort of a marionette with, you know, a thousand puppet masters type of thing. Like not. It's. It's. It's. Or maybe it's in. It's somewhere north of 100 is what it seems like.
Yes. I bet, you know, 80 of them.
I probably know most of them. Yeah.
You know, so I mean, just by virtue of your job and what you've been doing for the last 30 years, I mean.
And I should say I think you voted for that.
I'd like to see a matchup of of those. Call it the top 100 puppet masters in the FDA client list.
Do you think there's some overlap?
Strong overlap. Strong overlap.
When are we going to see that list? Do you think?
I don't know. It's mind blowing that they've not tried to prosecute even one, not even the worst offender on the Epstein client list. They have not even tried to prosecute even one. That's insane.
Well, because they have a lot of diabetic grandmothers who were outside the Capitol on January 6th. They're kind of occupied.
Yeah. I mean, they've put like, whatever, five or six hundred January 6th protesters in prison, and not one person on the Epstein client list.
Will that ever come out, do you think?
You know, I think part of why Kamala is getting so much support is that if Trump wins, that Epstein client list is going to become public.
And some of those billionaires behind Kamala are terrified of that outcome.
Yeah. Do you think Reid Hoffman's uncomfortable?
And Gates. Yeah. I only ask that because you can certainly just look at them and you're like that. That's a nervous person right there. I don't know. I mean, I assume you know them.
Yeah. Yes. Reid Hoffman was my vice president, business development at PayPal.
Does he seem nervous to you?
Yeah, I mean, he's terrified of a
Trump victory because of the disclosure that
would follow, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think he's certainly ideologically not aligned with Trump anyway, but I think he is concerned about the Epstein situation. Like something might actually. The DOJ might actually move forward.
There are a lot of videos. Apparently, those rooms on the island and I think out in New Mexico were wired for video.
Right. Where's the video? I mean, between Diddy and Epstein, there's probably several thousand hours of footage here.
It's kind of weird that the people on those videos are lecturing the rest of us about our moral failings, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. Where? What is that? Well, I mean, part of how they deflect attention from themselves is by criticizing the morals of others.
So it's sort of like a preemptive moral strike. I mean, as I said, I think those who are saying Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves actually the threat to democracy.
It feels like we're getting to a place where the rest of us know too much is this. Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's easier to live in a society where you don't really know what the people in charge are doing or why they're doing it. But now, thanks, I would say, largely to X. Yeah, I think that's fair to say that.
We do know a Lot, not everything,
And I wonder where does that, like, what happens next now that we know all this? The kidnapper shown us his face, like, what happens?
Well, I think if, if Trump wins, we can do some house cleaning and shed light on things. Yet all the X platform does is adhere to freedom, freedom of speech within the bounds of the law.
And if people want to change the laws, they can change laws. And so, like X in different countries, X does censor in countries where censorship is. Is the law. We don't try to push American laws in other countries, but we do try to stick to the law in any given country. That's all we're doing. We open source our algorithm. We try to be as transparent as possible. But those who want to push lies obviously hate truth and transparency because shows them to be liars. I mean, you look at that like how outrageous it was that Kamala in the presidential debate kept pushing the fine people hoax. They know the fine people hoax is false. Trump would never support Nazis in Nazi rally. It's absurd. And he explicitly said that in that same speech that you must condemn not anyone who has Nazi tendencies in the strongest possible terms. And yet, despite knowing that to be false, the people who wrote the speech for the Kamala puppet put the fine people hoax in the presidential debate. Deliberately lying again, mess up
if she wins. I mean, how can they let X continue in its current form, in its current role in American society?
They won't. They will try to shut it down by any means possible.
What do you mean by any means possible?
I mean, either by. I mean, they'll try to pass laws, they'll try to prosecute the company, prosecute me. I mean, the amount of lawfare that we've seen taking place is outrageous. I mean, the. I mean, there's many examples, but like the Department of Justice, for example, launched a huge lawsuit against SpaceX for failing to hire asylum seekers. Come on.
Asylum seekers, not asylum. Those who granted asylum, asylum seekers. Now, there's also a law called International Traffic and Arms regulations that because SpaceX develops advanced missile technology that can be used in nuclear ICBMs, that we have to be very careful with who we hire. We can only hire someone if they're a permanent resident or citizen. That's what the ITAR law says. Then there's another law that says that you cannot discriminate against asylum seekers. So we're damned if you do, damned if you don't. The DOJ did a massive lawsuit against SpaceX for failing to hire Asylum seekers, even though we are. It is illegal for us to hire asylum seekers under ITAR law, The actual thing that's going on, and they can only do a fairly small number of lawsuits every year. So why'd they pick this one?
Yeah, Lawfare. I mean, it's like that famous quote from Barrier. You know, Stalin's like chief torturer and head of the secret police. Beria said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. Exactly. I mean, we have so many laws that it is actually impossible to,
know, impossible to do business, but impossible to operate without being violating some law. Because you have laws like the ones I just gave you, where both things are illegal.
Yes. They contradict one another.
They contradict one another. So, you know, it's illegal to discriminate against, like discriminate against asylum seekers in jobs, but it's also legal for us to hire asylum seekers, but it discriminates. So they just. They just chose one. They chose the one law and ignored the other one. And the Department of Justice at federal level, prosecutors base X for that.
Well, it also discredits the idea of law, which some of us want to take seriously.
Absolutely. This affects both the perception of American justice and the reality of it.
So now I'm actually a big fan of the American justice system. And I think on balance, you know, we've got. Still have an excellent judicial system. We still have judges that care about the letter and intent of the law. I mean, not just the letter, but also the intent of the law. But something that people should be concerned about is that there's an increasing movement to place activists as judges. This is, if you look at who. Who did the Biden administration confirm as federal judges and who have been confirmed at the state level in sort of far left states, increasingly, it is not judges who care about justice or they don't care about following the law. They care about social justice, not justice justice. What they call social justice activists as judges. Now you got a real problem.
If that continues, we will not have a real justice system or a real country? Yes. Yeah.
But again, your purchase of X has been, I think it's fair to say, even if I hated it, I would say this because it's true. It's been pivotal in American politics.
In an American society. Do you think they could shut you down if the Democrats continue to hold power?
They'll unequivocally try.
Yeah. And if they, if they, if they Get a majority in the Senate and House and the presidency, then they can simply pass a law and delete section 230. So somebody make us liable for what anyone says on a platform with, you know, like, at this point, almost 600 million monthly active users.
Which is impossible. You know, that's like trying to regulate speech in city of, like a country. Yeah. So a big country. Yeah. Just be instantly bankrupt.
But I bet they wouldn't withdraw legal immunity from the vaccine makers at the same time, would they?
Just, I mean, as long as we're withdrawing legal liability protection. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the whole vaccine debate is a long one. You know, I'm not actually. I'm not anti vaccine in general. I think we want to exercise caution with use of vaccines, but in the absence of vaccines, there'll be a lot more people that have died. You know, like, we want the smallpox vaccine. That was a good one.
Yeah. Yeah. Smallpox will kill you.
It killed a lot of people. It used to be people would, like, a lot of people would die of smallpox and a lot of people would get polio.
Yeah. We had a president of polio.
Oh, yeah. There's still people. You meet people today in their 80s who were limping from childhood polio.
Right. It's good that we don't have that. And vaccines, you know, played a major role in that. So that doesn't mean that vaccines should not have any scrutiny. Of course they should. We should be making sure that the quality control of vaccines is incredibly good. If we're giving them to children and whatnot. And we shouldn't force people to take vaccines.
Vaccines. That itself is a controversial statement that
we shouldn't force people. We shouldn't force people to take vaccines now. Yeah.
So just to react, I believe in
freedom, like, yeah, I've noticed, like, you know, America's supposed to be the land of liberty, you know, freedom and opportunity, so that we try to, as much as possible, maximize people's individual liberty, and that we try to be a country where you succeed based on your talent and hard work. Yes. Those are two fundamental values. That's what's made America great. And if we lose those, our decline will be swift.
What. What do you. If you had to get. If you had to bet. I mean, does freedom reassert itself in America or not?
Well, that's why I think part of why this election is so pivotal. I think if we. With the Trump administration, I think we can improve the Liberty of Americans. We can, I think we need to have sensible deregulation where we keep the regulations that matter. Like we don't want to destroy, you know, important habitats or, you know, encourage oil spills or anything like that. But there are so many regulatory agencies that have overlapping responsibility that we are smothering progress and we can't build a high speed rail in America. You look at the ridiculous high speed rail project in California where they've spent $7 billion and all they've got to show for it is a 1600 foot section of concrete with no rails on it. The picture of it online,
it's not that fast yet. We wouldn't say it's high speed at this point or even rail.
It doesn't even have rail in it. Maybe by now they put some rail in it, but it's this comically small section of rail. $7 billion has been spent, most of it in like environmental consulting. And I don't know where, but clearly not in building high speed rail. So we've got. There are so many different regulatory agencies and so many laws and regulations that prevent progress that if this continues, we simply won't be able to get anything done.
It does seem like the engineers are not getting rich. It's the environmental consultants, the climate consultants, the DEI consultants. A whole consultant class seems to be getting richer by the year, where people with actual skills, the ones that bring
actual progress, useful things, products and services that you can use. That's right.
So this is a true things that.
If you were like traveling on a desert island, you'd want those people.
But you wouldn't want environmental consultants.
They seem underconfident. You're gonna starve though.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's like, who are actual builders that get things done? And every year we're making it harder in America for actual builders to get things done. We're in this weird Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged scenario where there's yet another regulation, yet another rule, and there's sort of that, that phrase in Atlas shark, oh, you'll manage. Oh, you'll manage. Oh, you'll manage. It's like eventually you're like, can't get anything done.
Why the hostility though, toward people with meaningful skills? It's not a neutral posture they have. And they're enriching themselves, obviously by creating fake jobs because they have no skills and they don't have creative power. So I understand that. But why do they hate people who do have creative power and actual skills? I don't understand that.
I'm not sure I understand it either, because it's difficult for me to put myself in a mindset because I'm someone who believes in construction. I build things. That's what I do. I build cars, I build rockets, I build satellite Internet. I've spent thousands of hours, tens of thousands of hours in factories, building up factories. So, you know, I can't really put myself in the mind of, say, someone who would want to do crime. Because I don't want to do crime. You know, I don't want to hurt. You know, there's some people who enjoy hurting other people. I don't enjoy hurting other people. So I have a hard time imagining why would somebody do that.
You know, in an extreme case, you can't put yourself in the mind of like, say, a Jeffrey Dahmer, where you're like a cannibalistic serial killer. Because you're not a cannibalistic serial killer.
Like, I can't. I don't get it.
You know, it's not a fetish you can relate to. It's not.
You know, I do think this is in the sort of well meaning, sort of liberal mindset I know. I have many good friends who have deep empathy for their fellow human beings.
And they care. But the challenge that they have is that they've often grown up in a very sheltered existence where everyone around them is nice and civilized and they just really don't encounter people who have uncontrolled violent tendencies or like, hurting people. You know, they've just always grown up in a sort of Kumbaya, everyone is nice, hippie commune situation.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. But there's a small number of people. It's like a few percent of society that either can have anger management issues that are so severe that they lose their temper and hurt or murder others. And there's a small. It's not a large number that enjoy hurting other people. And if you do not incarcerate them, they will do that. They will hurt other people. And what I see is what I call shallow empathy. Like, people have empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims of the criminals.
And so if you simply have. I believe that one should have deep empathy to say, like, what is the greater good for society? Is it better to incarcerate violent criminals and prevent them from hurting people or to let them loose and allow those people to be hurt? And I think the latter is much worse. You know, my mom is. My mom lives in New York and it's my mom at this point has gone from being Democrat to Republican. And her friends in New York are having the same experience. Because you know what will turn you from a Democrat to a Republican pretty fast is getting punched in the face while you walk down the street.
Yes. And then no action being taken against those who hurt you.
And that happens. Your mom.
Not to my mother, but to three of her friends this year.
Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. I am not in the studio. I'm in the. And you can hear it in the audio probably. I'm in the back of an SUV outside a hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I think it's Tulsa, Oklahoma. Anyway, we're on the road for this month long tour and there's a lot going on in the world. And the question is, how do you understand what's happening? There are deeper trends unfolding. You probably sense that. And it would be helpful to have some grounding in exactly what they are. And if you're like me and you spent four years in college and didn't learn all that much, where do you go to understand what's happening to your world? Well, Hillsdale College, in our opinion, is one of the very few places left in the English speaking world where your kids can get a real education. But not just your kids. You, they have free online classes, completely free. You can get them anywhere, including in the backseat of an SUV outside a hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And you'll know that when you go there. Go to tuckerforhillsdale.com and they have an amazing new course called Marxism, Socialism and Communism. Hillsdale is offering it doesn't cost you a dime. And you can pull it up right on your phone if you want. Go to tuckerforhillsdale.com the Class Marxism, Socialism and Communism and you'll have a much better understanding of what you're watching every day. Why would someone punch them in the face?
I don't know, but that's, I'm not a face puncher.
You know, but if you walk around the streets of San Francisco and many downtowns go to downtown Philadelphia right now, you know, they call people homeless, but homeless is the wrong term. Violent drug zombie.
Okay. It's like, you know, you look at them, you say like homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little behind on their mortgage and if you just offered them a job, they'd be back on their feet.
Now, but if you go and look at downtown Philly or San Francisco or parts of New York and actually most, most downtowns, what you actually have are violent drug Zombies. So they're like shuffling down the street with dead eyes, you know, and with like needles, you know, and human feces on the streets. You've been to downtown sf, right? Have you seen this?
Oh, yeah, I was born there.
Like one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Oh, yes, the greatest. And now you have to step over the drug needles and the feces and the bodies. Like, one couple I met, the final straw for leaving San Francisco was there was a. They came home one night and there was dead body in front of their garage. They couldn't get their car in to park their car because the corpse. And yeah, there's no street park. They're like, because there's a corpse. There's a corpse in front of the garage. And they don't want to move the corpse, you know, because, like, well, you know. You know, like, maybe they need to like, figure out why the guy died or something.
You know, that's the basic. That's liberal compassion.
Though they're in a bit of a quandary because they get a bike's pocket car and they feel that they shouldn't really move the dead body. So they called 911 and said, there's a dead body outside our house. And they said, well, 911 San Francisco says, well, are you in danger right now? It's like, well, no, he's dead. He's pretty sure he's dead. And they're like, okay, we'll send someone tomorrow to pick up the body. Like they were. What do you mean tomorrow?
they're like going in and out of their house while there's a dead body right in front of their house, you know, and like, it's like took them like 24 hours or something like that to eventually pick up the body. And they're like, hell with this, we're leaving.
Yes. That's why there's a million anecdotes like that. Oh, I know, I know.
It's. Well, it's, it's. It's ubiquitous. And so then you wonder, like, how can people still tell themselves they're compassionate?
This is what I'm saying is that. Is that people really just need to think what. Like, I believe in being compassionate about. Of course I. I believe that we should care about our fellow human beings. I think this is a good thing. Of course we should not be selfish and not care about others. We should care about others, but we should just care about others. All things considered. Like, I Said care, not me, just about the criminals. It's just one layer deep. You should also care about the criminal's victims. Yes, yes.
Well, especially the criminal's victims.
Yes. Innocent people who get attacked and killed. So, I mean, I've got so many anecdotes. I mean, you know, like about a year ago, there were three actual Twitter employees who were just leaving the building, walking down Mark street in San Francisco. Mark street used to be a beautiful, wonderful street. Of course, obviously it's called Mark street because that's where the market was now. Sported up shop windows and stuff. And they were chased by a guy with an axe. They outran him and they reported, hey, there's a guy with an axe who tried to kill us with an axe. The police did nothing. And that guy with an axe subsequently murdered two people.
With the axe. Because eventually he's going to find somebody he can outrun, and he did. So what I'm saying is, if you don't stop axe murderers while. While they're attempting to axe murder, eventually they will succeed in axe murdering people
if this goes on. I mean, that's such an obvious observation.
That if you're in any way abetting axe murder, then you're really. You're against civilization. That's the way it looks to me. I mean. Yeah, I don't see. I'm trying to understand motive here. I can't relate like you, but you're against the whole project if you're allowing that, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah.
I think we should. Controversial position, but I think we should arrest axe murderers when they first attempt to axe murder, not after they've succeeded in doing so.
And I think we should assign at least some of the blame for the axe murderers to the people who allowed. Allowed this guy to wander around with an axe on Market street trying to kill people.
Yes, well, you know, this whole movement to decriminalize crime.
Oh, I've noticed, yes. What is that
Like crime legal. Like in California, you can just steal things and nobody does anything. It's like fully legal to steal anything under $1,000 in California. That's why they've got. They don't have to lock up goods behind these glass and plastic walls. So you go to the supermarket and you can't even get toothpaste. And this has actually been particularly difficult on small mom and pop operations. They don't have the resources of a large corporation. So it's put a lot of small Businesses out, just kill them.
So when you're at dinner parties and you make these points, what do people say?
Well, actually, I think I've been able to persuade people that. Yeah, we need to reverse course here. I think I have actually been able to persuade a number of people and I think there actually is now a ballot on a California ballot initiative to recriminalize theft. Theft. All right, guys, guys, there's a reason why we criminalized theft in the first place, so. And then, amazingly, Gavin Newsom came out against that proposition. Yeah, no, honestly, he's the goddamn Joker. Gavin Newsom is like from the, like Batman, Dark Knight. The Joker is in charge of Gotham. You remember, like when he took over New York, basically, and the criminals roam free and the citizens are arrested. That's how. That's California. But, but I mean, at least there's a ballot initiative which I think will probably pass to say, no, actually it is a crime to steal things.
So you know Gavin, you've got to know Gavin Newsom. He knows I know Gavin Newsom. You know, everyone knows I've known Gavin for a long time. Exactly. So what is that? And he doesn't seem crazy when you talk to him in person. He's a perfectly nice guy. Like, what. Why would he. And he's not stupid. Why would he come out in favor of crime?
Well, his stated reason was that it would disproportionately affect people of color. Yeah, well, again, that was his public statement.
Right? Well, that is one of those patronizing racist positions you described at the outset, obviously. Yeah.
I mean, he's literally saying black people and Hispanics are criminals.
No, that's what he's saying.
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, it is true that crime like that does increase distrust between races. It actually gives rise to racism. It's totally destructive of the social fabric, I think. But I'm, but I'm asking, like, what do you think his real motive is? Like, who's pushing him in favor of crime?
Well, I mean, there's always the Soros boogeyman.
It's real. I don't think one can ascribe everything to Soros. And George himself is. I mean, he's senile at this point. He's not compos mentis, so his son Alex is in charge. But there is this whole system that SARS built up over many decades. So I guess Soros and like minded people or whatever, you know, they believe in open borders. They Believe we shouldn't prosecute crime. This is insane.
Those seem like expressions of hatred toward the United States. Like I don't. If I was pushing that on a country, I would only do that if I hated the country and wanted to destroy it.
Well, it's anti civilizational. I mean, and Soros and similar and organizations have been pushing this in Europe and other countries too.
Anyone who. Everywhere they can.
What's going on in Europe? Would you say Europe suddenly seems like a different place?
Well, my biggest concern for Europe is that the birth rate is half replacement rate.
So Europe is rapidly becoming, with each passing year, older and older with fewer and fewer young people. So I think at a most fundamental level, unless Europe has birth rate at least roughly equal to replacement rate, it is in population freefall. Population collapse is what's going on in Europe. So there's also like a shocking amount of censorship. You may have seen like in Britain there. I kid you not, how can this be real? They are releasing convicted pedophiles from prison in order to put people in prison for Facebook posts.
But to be fair, those are posts that criticize the government. So they have a good reason.
Well, they would. Actually some of these posts that I've, at least ones I've seen didn't actually criticize the government or they were seen as sort of as hate speech. Right.
Because they noticed the society getting crappier and crappier with every year and they said so.
Yeah, I mean there were and this is sort of stating fact, there were migrant rape gangs in England that were gangs that would run around and prey on young girls, gang rape them. And some people found that objectionable, which help us say it should be objectionable. And they were upset about that and so they complained about it online and were sent to prison. That sounds crazy.
It is crazy. And that's like.
Well, it is. So it kind of gets to the. I mean you're an engineer, so you're so mind blowing. It is mind boggling. But it's the same. You use the phrase mind virus, but it's behaving like a virus. It's infecting people and making it impossible apparently for them to make rational. Yeah. What is that virus?
You know, someone I think you should interview is Godside.
Oh, I should watch that. Actually. He's great.
And he, he wrote a great book called the Parasitic Mind.
A very good book. Highly recommended.
Which. Where he tries to understand how do you get to this Parasitic mind situation. And he's writing a book now which hopefully will publish soon, which is about suicidal empathy where you have so much empathy you're actually suiciding society or so much perceived empathy. It's not actually shallow empathy, not deep empathy. Deep empathy would be. You'd want the society to continue. Shallow empathy is. You have like empathy that's essentially skin deep and then you, and you don't. But it's ultimately bad for civilization and results in the destruction of civilization. And Gutside's got a good term for this, suicidal empathy. So it's going to sort of deconstruct. Where does this come from? And yeah, I mean, part of it I suppose is sort of the decline of religion. So you know, as the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. So when you have essentially a decline in religion, an increase in the secular nature of society, for most people, they need something to fill that void and so they adopt a religion. It's not called a religion but like, but effectively like woke. The woke mind virus. It's, it's a, it takes the place of religion.
And they, they, they internalize it and they feel it with religious fervor.
Yes, yes. And, and they, you know, they essentially conduct like a holy war effectively. It's just not called a religion, but it is a religion, sort of a work holy war. And they're highly resistant to change, as is normal for religions. So now for myself, I sort of see myself as a sort of engineer, physicist. For me, I'm culturally Christian. I grew up Christian. I mean, I'm Anglican, was baptized, you know, I went to Sunday school.
Actually, oddly enough I was sent to Hebrew preschool and Anglican Sunday school at the same time. So it was Havana Gila one day, Jesus Elo the next, which is, you know, if you're five years old it's fine. But I'm not Jewish. It's just that my father's two partners in his engineering firm were. Went to the same Hebrew preschool and it was near our house. So I just got sent there and so. But you know, Maybe this will make me even more amnesty, but
trouble sort of believing all these stories, these religious stories. But obviously a lot of people do and I respect people who want to have religious views. I'm not trying to dissuade them from their religious views, but anyway, I'm just saying, I guess the operating system I have is sort of a physics engineering operating system where I try to understand as much as possible about reality in physics, you're you're not supposed to believe everything, anything. Absolutely. You're supposed to question things. That's how you discover new physics, you know, in engineering. That's how you discover if your machine will work or not work. Will the rocket get to orbit? Will, you know. Yeah, you know, if your rocket is designed with, you know, physics in mind, correctly, it will get to orbit. And if it is not, it will not get to orbit. No matter what your belief system is, you can believe, you know. Yeah. You know, it's like I meet a lot of people, speaking of L. A. I meet a lot of people in LA who believe witchcraft is real and you can do spells and that spells and witchcraft, magic is real. I'm like, can you magic us to the moon? And no one has yet been able to magic us to the moon. Moon spells can't be that good. Okay, if you can't, I want to go to the moon. Let's go. How about Mars?
And we got to the moon the first time.
We definitely went to the moon, I swear. Yes, we went to the moon. We didn't go to the moon. We went to the moon several times. Right? All right.
Yeah. I just want to check your view on that.
100% went to the moon. I mean, I know in depth the technical designs of the rockets, the spacecraft, everything, what went right, what went wrong. And it was a remarkable piece of technology, like an incredible piece of technology to go to the moon in 69. That was like reaching into the future and pulling the future forward dramatically. And it was an important ideological battle with communism at. Because they couldn't put a person on the moon and capitalism could.
We did an interview a couple of weeks ago with a woman called Casey Means. She's a Stanford educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. In the interview she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, big food in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick diet country. The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief. What kcmeans, who we've not stopped thought, thinking about ever since, is the co founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels. And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels. And by proud, I mean sincerely proud. Levels is a really interesting company and a great product. It gives you insight into what's going on inside your body, your metabolic health. It helps you understand how the food that you're eating, the things that you're doing every single day are affecting your body in real time. You Put stuff in your mouth. Speaking for myself anyway. And you don't think about it. You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth, and you have no idea what it's doing to your body. But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey. And over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick. So it's worth knowing that what the food you eat is doing to you. The Levels app works with something called a continuous glucose monitor, a cgm. You can get one as part of the plan, or you can bring your own. It doesn't matter. But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma, and big food combined together to form an incredibly malevolent force, pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars and hurting you and hurting the entire country. So with Levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all this is doing to you. You get access to real time personalized data, and that's a critical step to changing your behavior. Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand, this isn't talking to your doctor in an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past. This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, etc. Etc. It's easy to use. It gives you powerful personalized health data, and you can make much better choices about how you feel. And over time, it'll have a huge effect. Right now, you can get an additional two free months when you go to Levels link Tucker. That's Levels link Tucker. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with levels. And Dr. Casey means, do you believe there's a power higher than people?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I think there's. There's a lot we don't know. We don't. We don't know, like, why does reality exist? Why? Where did it come from? Where are the aliens? What questions should we ask that we don't even know to ask? So
when you say, what are the aliens?
Where are the aliens? Like, why don't we see them? A lot of people think we see aliens, but I've not seen any evidence of aliens. We've got 6,000 satellites in orbit, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spacecraft.
But on this Earth, the US Military has had to do a lot of maneuvering around objects they can't explain.
Well, unidentified flying objects is one thing, but I mean, there's always. There's always a bunch of classified programs that are underway, that of new aircraft and new missiles and things so that are classified even within the military. So it's, you know, only if you have the top secret compartmented clearance would you know about this new program. So then some pilot sees something fast, moving fast and says, hey, I saw a ufo. I'm like, yeah, that was actually a new weapons program. But we can tell you that. But you can guarantee that the split second I see any evidence of aliens, I will immediately post that on the X platform and it'll probably be our number one post of all time.
That'll be your biggest day.
I mean, but to the question of a power beyond people, beyond our consciousness, a creator. Where are you on that?
Well, we must. We must have come from somewhere. So I guess there must be some creator or creative force or something that caused our existence to come into being. What is the nature of that creator? That, I think, is unknown. At least I think there's. I don't know of a definitive answer to that,
But it sounds like you're open.
Yes, I'm very open to, you know, I'm driven by curiosity.
And trying to understand more about the nature of the universe. So my driving philosophy is to understand the meaning of life or really what questions to ask if the meaning of a life, that meaning of life is not the right question. Like as Douglas Adams made the point in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that what is the meaning of life? Is probably not even the right question. So famously in that book, the Earth was actually a computer to figure out the answer to the question what is the meaning of life? And then it came up with the answer 42. But then they're like, what does that mean? And it's like, oh, that's the answer. But the question is the really hard part. And you'll need a much bigger computer than Earth to figure that one out. So my philosophy is that we should try to expand the scope and scale of consciousness. We should try to have more humans, more thinking. And. And perhaps there's an argument even for machine consciousness.
So let me just address those in order. So the first is you say we need more people and not commit civilizational suicide. It does seem like the US Government, if you take three steps back, is pretty committed to making fewer Americans. Yeah, there's a lot of anti fertility propaganda. A lot, actually. That seems like their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids. Why? What is that?
I mean, that's Certainly part of civilizational suicide. The environmental movement in the extreme is fundamentally misanthropic and anti human. Yes, they start seeing humans as a plague, a blight on the surface of the earth. That earth would be this paradise if only the humans weren't here. And some people actually say this explicitly. There's the Extinctionist Society that is literally this guy who's the head of the Extinctionist Society, who's on the front page of the New York Times quoted as saying there are 8 billion people in the world, it would be better if there were none. So there's some people who actually say that explicitly, which is completely insane. He's advocating a holocaust wall of humanity to utter madness. He should be condemned for such a statement, but he wasn't for some reason. Now most people on the sort of environmental movement have that implicitly. They don't realize that they have that as their optimization, but that is their actions take us towards extinction. So a lot of people believe that the Earth can't sustain this level of human population, which is utterly untrue. It may seem in a crowded city that there are a lot of people, but actually if you look down on an airplane and you say, look down, Am I over a person? At any given point in time, when you're an airplane, the answer is 99.9% of the time, no. Like if you flew from LA to New York and say your, your job is to drop a ball on someone and hit them, you would fail.
You have to drop a lot of balls.
You have to drop a lot of balls. It'd be insane. So all of the humans on Earth can fit on one floor in the city of New York?
The cross sectional area of all humans, 8 billion humans, is small. So we have this totally wrong idea that the Earth is overpopulated, where in fact it is underpopulated. How?
I mean, have you ever heard a politician say anything like that? Are there how many? There's maybe a few pro human politicians out there.
Yeah, I mean, like, like Victor Orban, Georgia Maloney. Yes, we're starting to see pro natalist politicians and hopefully more as time goes by. I think there's a guy that just got elected in the Czech Republic who's also pronatalist. Now these have to translate into actual actions that change the birth rate or it doesn't matter. And so far I've not seen any country make a meaningful dent in the birth rate.
What would you do if you were in charge of natalist policy?
First of all, I changed the education system so that people understand that. Stop being taught that we're overpopulated. This is completely false. A lot of it comes from this insane misanthropic book that Paul Ehrlich wrote the population bomb, like 60 years ago. Yeah, I hope you bones and hell that guy, seriously sorrowful human being, absolute misanthrope and say, just look, the earth can absolutely sustain this population. We could double or triple its population. There's a professor I was talking to at Oxford, his math says we could 10x the population without destroying the Amazon rank bars or anything terrible. So I think we should expand the human population and increase the scope and scale of consciousness so we can better understand the nature of this universe, this wonderful universe and all the amazing things that exist. So that's one of the things I'd like. We need to stop teaching people false propaganda that the earth is overpopulated. I think we need to, you know, especially with the education of women and men, we need to stop scaring women, that having a kid destroys your life. This is false. You know, we terrify girls into saying that if you get pregnant, your life's over. This is what schools teach. Now, I agree we should not have teenage pregnancies, but actually having a child is one of the most delightful, happiness inducing things you possibly do. Of course, of course. So there's, there's also, you know, with hormonal birth control, I think maybe a lot of women are unaware that hormonal birth control causes depression and dramatically increases risk of suicide and changes their preferences on who they want to marry or have kids with. It changes their personality. And that does say this on the box, by the way.
Caution may change your personality.
Yes. The warnings are, has significant cause, significant risk of depression, significant increase in suicide and will make you want to go out with people that you don't actually like. That's actually true, by the way. I know. I'm not saying that people shouldn't use birth control. I think we should just be. We shouldn't use. I think hormonal birth control is, is making, it's making a lot of women sad and depressed.
And they don't realize it and they don't realize that's the cause. And, and that, you know, the other forms of contraception that could be used and that we should. They should just read the, just read the label on the box is what I'm saying.
That was what she just said. Read the warning label. That was like the most taboo thing you could ever say for most of my life was to offer any criticism at all of hormonal birth control.
Look, all I'm saying is read the warning label.
Yeah, fair, but why the pressure not to read the warning label? And just why are we giving it to 12 year olds? To regulate their acne?
Right. I think we should give it to 12 year olds. Like kids, they don't know what's going on. So it's like now, I think there are other forms of birth control I think have fewer negative effects than hormonal. But we should just be aware that this is not a riskless thing and it does cause severe mood changes. It does dramatically increase risk of suicide and depression.
So just FYI, just make sure that there's full disclosure here and that you
Just read the warning label is all I'm saying, and consider maybe other options for birth control. To any woman listening. Just read the warning label and consider other options. Because the reason you're sad might be the. The. The birth control, the hormonal birth control that is fundamentally changing the hormones in your body in ways that probably are not good for you. And you. I know women where, where they stop taking birth control and their depression immediately disappeared. So that's maybe worth a try. But then you're feeling that opportunity, then you don't.
You don't get to go on SSRIs. Yeah.
Yeah. I think the SSRIs are the devil. What?
You don't think I so vehemently agree with you? I guess. I guess once you endorse Trump, you can just say it all now, right?
No, I think selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are zombify people and change their personality and make them not who they are. Terrible.
Yes. I think we should revisit whether this is. This is actually good. I disagree with that. SSRIs are like. I'm not saying we should. No one should ever be subscribed SSRIs. But giving them out like candy is crazy. You look at like sort of antidepressant prescriptions in the United States versus other countries, and we're like way above everyone else.
I have seen many, many times in my life in the news business after a mass shooting. My school, for example.
Someone will say, well, what meds was the shooter on?
Immediately be shouted down as a crazy person. As a, you know, Bobby Kennedy level wacko.
Who should himself be institutionalized for even raising the question. I was wondering, why wouldn't we want to know what meds.
Yes, absolutely. Want to know what meds are on now sometimes. Perhaps they were on because like some people do, you know, I don't say it's like all one way or all the other. There are people that have fundamental chemical imbalances in their brain and if they don't take medication to control, for example, paranoid schizophrenia, they will have paranoid schizophrenia for sure. And, and I know many cases where people stop taking their, you know, meds and, and lost their mind. Oh yeah. And, and then try to try to kill people and stuff like that. So it's or themselves.
Well, the guy with the ax on Market street probably should be on meds.
That guy should. We should try it. Yeah, it make, you know, does he want to axe murder more or less on a given med? You know, so there are psychiatric medications that where the good outweighs bad. I'm not saying that that doesn't exist, but we over prescribe psychiatric medication in the United States, obviously far in excess of any other country. Like you know, way more than Canada or Britain or Japan or anywhere. Like we're off the charts on psychiatric medication prescriptions in the US Why don't
people raise that point more often, I wonder, in public?
That is true. I'm raising it. Yeah, you are.
You said that artificial intelligence, machine intelligence might be a good thing. Where are we on AI right now, AGI right now? And what are your views?
Well, I think at this point it's obvious to everyone that AI is advancing at a very rapid pace. Yes, you can see it with the new capabilities that come out every month or every week. Every week sometimes. You know, you AI at this point can write a better essay than probably 90%, maybe 95% of all humans, say, write an essay on any given subject. AI right now can beat the vast majority of humans. If you say draw an image, draw a picture, it can draw like if you try say mid journey, which is the aesthetics in the journey are incredible. It will draw, it will create incredible images that are better than again like 90% of artists. It's just objectively the case. And it'll do it immediately, like 30 seconds later. We're also starting to see AI movies. So you start seeing short films with AI AI music creation. And the rate at which we're increasing AI Compute is exponential, hyper exponential. So there's dramatically more AI Compute coming on online every month. You know, there seems to be roughly, I don't know, the amount of AI compute coming online is increasing at like roughly 500% a year. And like it's like that's likely to continue for Several years. And then the sophistication of the AI algorithms is also improving. So we're bringing online a massive amount of AI compute and also improving the efficiency of the compute. And. And what. And like what, what the AI software can do. So it's quantitative and qualitative improvement. So the, you know, I might, I think next year will. You'll be able to ask AI certainly by the end of next year, make a short movie about something or, you know, probably can do at least a 15 minute show or something like that. So, yeah, it's advancing very rapidly. My top concern for AI safety is that we need to have a maximally truth seeking AI. So the. This is the most important thing for AI safety, in my opinion. The central lesson that Arthur C. Clarke was trying to convey in 2001 a space odyssey was that you shouldn't force AI to lie. So in that book, the. The AI was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but they also could not know about the monolith. It resolved that quandary by killing them and taking them to the monolith. Or didn't kill all of them, killed most of them. That's why hell would not open the pod bay doors. Right. So very important to have truth seeking AIs. And what I actually see with the AIs that have been developed is that they're being programmed with the woke mind virus.
So the lying is baked in.
Yes. And we saw this on display very clearly with the release of Google Gemini.
Where you would ask for a picture of the founding fathers of the United States and it would show a group of diverse women, you know, dressed with sort of 18th century gar powdered wigs,
Yeah, I mean, like, look, I understand if you say like, show me a group of people for sure, and it shows a group of divorced women, that's totally fine. But if you say this, if you say very specifically the founding fathers of the United States, which were, you know, group of white dudes, then you should show them and what they actually look like because you've asked for something which is a fact from history, but it didn't. It was programmed with the work mind virus so much that it actually, even though it knew the truth, it produced a lie. Now, of course, then people really started playing with it and said, okay, now show me a group of Waffen SS officers in World War II. Turns out they were also a group of divorce women, according to Gemini.
All the black Nazi ladies.
Yeah. It's like, wow, I didn't Realize that, you know, it's not what I expected. So, you know.
Well, it's also not what happened.
It's not what happened. So it's just the AI is producing a lie. And. One of the questions that people asked was, which is worse, Global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner and said, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner is worse. Now Caitlyn Jenner kills fewer people. Yeah, Caitlyn Jenner, to her credit, said, no, please misgender me. That is far more preferable than World War II global thermonuclear war. We all die. But to have a production release AI say stuff like that is concerning because let's say this becomes all powerful and it still has this programming where misgendering is worse than nuclear war. Well, it could conclude that the way to ensure that there can never be any misgendering is to eliminate all humans. Now if, like optimization is probability of misgendering is 0, no humans, no misgendering. Problem solved.
Now we're back to Arthur C. Clarke, who's pretty prescient.
Yes. So that's why I think the most important thing is to have a maximally truth seeking AI. That's why I started xai, and that's our goal with grok. People will point out cases where GROK gets it wrong, but we try to correct it as quickly as possible.
But maybe even a bigger problem is that when you make decisions that affect people, you want those decisions to be informed by love of people. And machines are incapable of love.
Yeah, I mean, they certainly. Okay, they're capable of. You can program a machine to be philanthropic rather than misanthropic.
Yes, but don't instincts shape decisions? Particularly decisions you can't plan for? I mean, if I ask you a question about one of your children, every answer you give is going to be shaped by your love for that child. And that's why, that's what makes us decent parents in the end, is that instinct, which is love. And if a machine has any power over us without that animating instinct, won't it by definition hurt us? Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't know. We should certainly aspire to program the AI philanthropically, not misanthropically. Yes. And to have, like I said, we want it to be truthful and curious and to foster humanity into the future and. Yeah, that's where we want, obviously.
Is there any way, I guess, to set limits on the decisions that machines can make that affect human lives and make certain that there's some trigger in the system that inserts a human being into the decision making process.
Well, the reality of what's happening, whether one likes it or not, is that we're building super intelligent AIs. Like hyper intelligent, like intelligent, more intelligent than we can comprehend.
So I'd liken this to like, let's say you have a child that is a super genius child that you know it's going to be much smarter than you. Then, well, what can you do? You can instill good values in how you raise that child. Even though you know it's going to be far smarter than you. You can make sure it's got good values, philanthropic values, good morals, you know, honest, you know, productive, that kind of thing. Controlling. At the end of the day, I don't know if I don't think we'll be able to control it. So I think the best we can do is make sure it grows up.
Well, you've been saying that for a long time.
Yes, I'm saying a long time, yes.
Are you still as worried about it as you seem to be two years ago when I asked you about it?
Well, I think that my guess is like, look, it's 80% likely to be good, maybe 90. So you can think of the glass as 80% full. It's probably going to be great. There's some chance of annihilation.
And you say the chance of annihilation is 20%?
10 to 20%, something like that.
How concerned is Sam Altman about annihilation, do you think?
I think in reality he's not concerned about it. I don't trust OpenAI. I mean, you know, I started that company as a nonprofit. Open source. Yes, the open in OpenAI. I named a company, I named the company. Yeah, OpenAI as an open source. And it is now extremely closed source and maximizing profit. So there's risk. I don't understand how you actually go from being an open source nonprofit to a closed source for maximum profit organization. I'm missing.
Well, but Sam Altman got rich, didn't he?
At various points he's claimed not to be getting rich, but he's claimed many things that were false. And now apparently he's going to get $10 billion of stock or something like that. So I don't trust Sam Altman. And I don't think we want to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy. And sorry, I just don't.
I mean, that seems like a fair concern.
But you don't think, as someone who knows him and has dealt with him, that he is worried about the possibility this could get out of control and hurt people?
if AI did, if it became clear to the rest of us that it was out of control and posed a threat to humanity, would there be any way to stop it?
I hope so. I mean, if you have multiple AIs. And ones that are. Hopefully you have the AIs that are pro. Human, be stronger than the AIs that are not battle the AIs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that is how it is with, say, chess these days. The. The, like, the AI chess program is also vastly better than any human and incomprehensibly better. Meaning, like, we can't even understand why
it made that move, why they're so good, right?
Yeah, we don't even know why it made it. It'll make a move. We don't know why it made the move. So. And in fact, some of the moves will seem like blunders, but then turn out to checkmate. So, you know, for a while there was some. The best human chess players with the best computers could be just a computer. And then it got to the point where if you added a human, it just made everything worse. And then it was just AI. It's just computer programs versus computer programs. That's. That's where things are headed in general.
What. I mean, sweet dreams. At what point?
So, I don't know. I think we just got to make sure. Like I said, make sure we instill good values in the AI.
What's everyone going to do for a living?
I mean, in a benign AI scenario, that is probably the biggest challenge is how do you find meaning if AI is better than you at everything? Yeah, that's the benign scenario.
Well, yeah, but I guess, you know, a lot of people like the idea of retiring and, you know,
really, Are you looking forward to it?
No, not me. I. I'd like to hope. I'd like to think that I'd like to be. Do useful things.
Don't you think it's a universal desire?
It's not universal in that there are certainly, I know many people who prefer to be retired, that they prefer to sort of not have responsibilities and engage in leisure activities. So. And we're on the cusp of this. It's really a remarkable time to exist. Well, I'll tell you one of the ways I sort of was able to sort of sleep and reconcile myself to this is that I thought, well, would I prefer to be alive and see the advent of digital superintelligence, or would I prefer to be alive at a different time and not see it? I guess I'm like, well, I guess I'd prefer to be alive to see if it's going to happen. I prefer to be alive to see it happen. Out of curiosity. And then I was like, well, let's say you knew for sure it would kill everyone. Would you now you could shift back in time. I guess I'd want to be near the end of my life or something before that happened. But at the end of the day, it's like, if it's going to happen and there's nothing you do about it, hypothetically, would you prefer to see it or not see it? I guess if it's going to happen, I would prefer to see it rather than not see it.
But as a man of action, why not convince Trump to make you Secretary of Defense and then just nuke AI?
I think I would certainly push for a having some kind of regulatory body that at least has insight into what these companies are doing and can ring the alarm bell even if we don't have a regulation or rule. So I'm not someone who wants to get rid of all regulatory agencies or anything. I think we've, there's the right number of regulations, right number of regulators, and we've gone, we've gone too far. Just like if you, in a football game, if you had too many referees on the field, it would be weird. Like you can't throw the pass because you hit a referee, then there's too many referees. So, but, but no, but if you, like you say, look at any pro sports game, they all have referees. Like the teams could decide, we're going to have, we're going to not have referees. That could be a thing. But, but every sports game they have refs to make sure that the rules are followed. And it's a better game if you have.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cops are the referees. So I think for something that is a danger to the public or potential danger to the public, we have referees, we have regulators, you know, so like the FDA and the FAA and various regulatory agencies, they were established because aircraft were falling out of the sky and some manufacturers were not building high quality aircraft. They're cutting corners and then people die. And you know, for food and drugs, so manufacturers were making low quality drugs and so they were lying to people. So saying that something cured them when it killed them so FDA took regulators to referees to try to make sure that those drug manufacturers are truthful. Now, I do think it mostly works. I mean, I think it doesn't mean we don't need regulatory reform. We do reform. We do. But I don't think we should have no regulators and AI, given that it's potential existential risk.
Weird that everything is regulated.
I mean, you said you're being sued by the Department of Justice for not hiring more asylum seekers for your high tech company.
Yeah. Even though it's illegal for us to hire asylum seekers.
Right, so. So they're watching everything, regulating everything, controlling everything, including our thoughts. Right. That's why they're opposed to free speech. But they're not meaningfully regulating AI, which will eliminate like the purpose for most people's lives and could kill us all. It's a little weird.
Yeah. I think we should have some.
Something above nothing in that range. Yeah, but why don't we? I don't know. You know, all the way back during the Obama presidency, you know, I met with Obama many times, but usually in like group settings. The one one on one meeting I had with Obama in the Oval Office, I said, look, the one thing that we really need to do is set up at the beginnings of an AI regulatory agency. And it can start with insight where you don't just come shooting from the hip throwing out regulations, you just start with insight where the AI regulatory committee simply goes in to understand what all the companies are doing. Insight. And then proposes rules that all the AI companies agree to follow. Just like sports teams and NFL. You have proposed rules for football that everyone agrees to follow that make the game better. So that's the way to do it. But nothing came of it.
What did he say when he said that to him?
I mean, he seemed to kind of agree. But also people didn't realize where AI was headed at that time. So AI seemed like some super futuristic for sure. Sci fi basically. So like I'm telling you, this is going to be smarter than the smartest human. And my predictions are coming absolutely true. And so we need to have some insight here just to make sure that the companies aren't cutting corners, doing dangerous things. But Google kind of controlled the White House at that time and they did not want any regulatory.
Well, that's it. I mean you never see politicians turn down opportunities to become more powerful, which is the point of regulation. It makes them more powerful.
So it sounds like regulatory capture then.
Well, yeah. I mean the CIO of the YS at the time was ex Google person. So they put the brakes on any AI regulation, and we still don't have any AI regulation at the federal level.
So I think we should have something above. Nothing. Like I said, at least insight. Even if there's no rule that's being broken and they can at least say, hey, we. We have insight into what this company doing or that company is doing and we're concerned, that would be helpful to know.
Yeah. Instead, politically motivated liars are in charge of the future. It seems a little.
Sketchy. Last question. You really kind of pulled out a lot of stops to help Trump. You're on stage yesterday. If he gets elected, will you continue to help him?
Absolutely. So we've talked about kind of a Government Efficiency Commission or the Department of Government Efficiency, which is funny. Sorry, I was laughing. I love it.
You managed to make it sound a little sinister. Government. What percentage of Google employees did. You can. When you got there?
Rather. Sorry, you just been talking about Google Twitter? Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we're about 80%, and we've actually improved the features and functionality of the site more in the past year and a half than the last. I don't know, eight years with 20% of the staff. So just for.
I just want to throw that for context. So you've talked to Trump about.
Yeah, yeah. Which is. He's mentioned publicly several times and he's very supportive of having some kind of, you know, government Efficiency Commission. Can call it Department of Government Efficiency. Doge. I kind of like doge. It's more fun. Yeah. And where we just take a look at all the federal agencies and say, do we really need. Whatever it is, 428 federal agencies, there's so many that people have never even heard of and that have overlapping areas of responsibility. We should. I don't know, probably we should get. I mean, there are more federal agencies than there are years since the establishment of the United States, which means that we've created more than one federal agency per year on average. That seems a lot.
That's a lot. So we should have. That seems crazy. I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies. I don't know. That seems like a lot of agencies.
Two per state. That's a lot.
Yeah, exactly. We should have fewer agencies, and they certainly shouldn't have overlapping responsibilities. And then we need some kind of. We just need a review of regulations to say which ones are sensible and which Ones are not because if you've got regulators, every year they're going to add more regulations, just automatic, they just output regulations and there's more laws and regulations every year until basically everything's legal. So we can't get anything done. So we need some kind of garbage collection for regulations that don't make sense. I think I'm saying very obvious things.
You are saying obvious things.
Which will be very unpopular things.
Yeah, I'll probably, if this happens, quite a significant security team because someone might literally go postal on me from the post office.
But in the meantime, you've got America pac.
That is encouraging voting for the next month. Am I summarizing correctly?
Yeah. I mean I formed America PAC really to support core values that I believe in which are I think again very obvious centrist positions. Which is like we in America, I think we want safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending. Tell me where I'm going far right here. You know, we want to have the right to self protection. We should respect the Constitution and not try to break the Constitution. It's there for reason. And you know, we should stop lawfare. I kind of listed these out. These are all listed on the AmericaPac website. People can go look at the AmericaPac website, it's theamericapac.org and see if there's anything they disagree with or perhaps we should modify these goals. But I think these are good goals to have. They were certainly part of the. Oh, and right to free speech, you know, First Amendment. If we don't have free speech, we don't have democracy because people cannot make an informed vote. So those are my controversial views. And you know, look, I don't think either party, I don't think the Republicans are perfect. I don't think obviously right now I more Republican than Democrat. But it's not like I think the Republican Party is perfect or without issues. But we've got a choice between two candidates and I think on balance it's a no brainer to vote for Trump. And if we don't vote for Trump, I think we're at serious risk of losing our democracy and becoming a one party state where there isn't an election anymore, there's only a Democratic primary like there is in California.
Elon Musk, thank you very much.