Elon Musk: "I don't give a F*CK about your Degree!"

there's no need even to have a college degree okay at all or even high school the um I mean if somebody graduated from a great University that may be an IND that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it's not necessarily the case um you know if you look at um say people like uh bll Gates or Larry Ellison Steve Jobs these guys didn't graduate from college but if you had a chance to hire them of course that would be a good idea yeah so you know just looking just for evidence of exceptional ability um and if there's a track record of exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue into the future how would you educate your five boys actually I created a little school yeah what kind of school could you describe to us sure it's I mean it's small it's only got 14 kids now and it'll have 20 kids in in September um it's called Ad Astra which means to the Stars that's maybe a bit different from from from most other schools is that there aren't any grades there's no there's no like not grade one grade two grade three type of thing and making all the children go in in the same grade at the same time like an assembly line I know um you know cuz some people love English or languages some people love math some people love music and uh and different abilities at different times it makes more sense to to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities so I think that's one principle how I describe myself um well I mean I I seem to have a a high innate Drive um and that's been true even since I was a little kid you know I really had a very strong Drive did all sorts of risky things when I was a kid that I like why did I do those things they crazy it's important to teach uh teach problem solving or teach to the problem not to the tools so this would be like let's say um you're trying to teach people about uh how engines work or you know you could start by a more a more traditional approach would be to say well we're going to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenchers and and you're going to have a course on screwdrivers a course on wrenchers and all these things and it's this is a very difficult way to do it a much better way would be like here's the engine now let's take it apart how are we going to take it apart oh you need a screwdriver that's what the screwdriver is for you need a wrench that's what the wrench is for um and then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of the tools becomes apparent so all your five boys are in that school yes until when this is from so far it's only one-year-old uh they like it they like it yeah and you want to keep them away from regular schools no I just didn't see that uh the regular schools just they weren't doing the things that I thought should be done like you know those two principles they weren't uh adhering to those principles so I thought well let's see what we can do maybe creating a school will be better and um I actually hired a teacher from the school they were at who also agreed with me that there was a better way to do it have they surprised you in a way of their Innovative thinking yeah it seems to be going pretty well um I mean the kids really love going to school I think that's a a good sign you know I mean I hated going to school when I was a kid it was torture um so the fact that they like they actually think vacations are too long like they want to go back to you know between Gates and JS andison all three of those were technologists but with different types of skills you know JVS was obviously very good with Aesthetics um and uh you know understood technology of course um and he really understood what people wanted even when they didn't know themselves um and he was not afraid to you know break boundaries but I say like Gates would probably be better at uh you know sort of raw engineering and Technology than jobs but not as good on Aesthetics um but I mean for all of these guys they're obviously very driven um and they're very talented um and uh yeah and they're able to attract great people to build a company I care a lot about the truth of of things and trying to understand the truth of things I think so I think that's important um you know if you're going to come up with some solution then the truth is really really important I think um I try to think of I mean it's difficult toly come up with like things that are praise for oneself you know or like there's and there's bad and good here but um I think like sometimes they're just like the things that seem quite clear and obvious to me and I I it's I don't understand why they aren't so obvious to everyone the ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company because a company is just that's it's a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service that's the purpose of a company um we all sometimes forget this Elementary truth um and so if uh you know if you're able to get great people to join the company and work together towards a common goal and uh and sort of have a Relentless sense of perfection about that goal then you will end up with a great product and if you have a great product lots of people will buy it and then the company will be successful yeah for really it's pretty straightforward really I mean yeah that's the reason for it I feel fear quite strongly uh but I um if the if what we're doing is what you know what I'm doing is I think is is important enough then I just uh override the fear mhm so but it's not as though I don't feel I feel it like more strongly than I would like if the stakes are high if it's really important then what should then I you know will overcome the fear and just do it anyway um but essentially I mean I just drive overrides fear but I feel the fear it's kind of annoying I wish I didn't I wish I felt it less mhm SpaceX I thought had the lowest chance of success um I mean I thought both Tesla and SpaceX would fail at the beginning you know you you saw yeah sure really of course but nevertheless you put all your money in that in both I expected to lose it well technically what I I thought was well I'll take half the money from PayPal and if I lose half of it that's okay um uh but then of course the companies encounter difficulties and then I have a choice of the either the let the company die um or put you know all the money into the companies and so I really didn't want the companies to die so I put all the money in the companies yeah and then had to borrow money for friends to pay living expenses coming to North America was my best idea okay cuz I think these things would not have been accomplished um any you know almost anywhere else it's really hard to start a company uh but you know and particularly California silan Valley is very conducive to Startup companies um and uh yeah and so yeah you know whenever I read books in South Africa it would seem like The Cutting Edge of Technology was in silken Valley and so that that's what I wanted to come and I wanted to move move to this mythical place okay I overall I think I'm pretty pretty pretty happy with what you know where things are it's hard not to be honestly he's such a smart guy and he's really the most driven person I think I've ever met when I first got hired by SpaceX we did a interview with 60 minutes and they interviewed Elon and myself and Scott P was the anchor he talked to us and he said to me why did you leave NASA and come work for SpaceX you had like the best gig in the world you know going up on rockets and stuff why would you do that I said well if you can go back in time and you were a young engineer and you had the opportunity to like get in at the ground floor and work with Howard Hughes when he was like doing all the crazy stuff he was doing in his day wouldn't you want to be a part of that but then I realized as soon as I say that like oh my God I just made a terrible strategic error I compared my boss to Howard Hughes you you know things didn't end up that well for Howard he went crazy right he went kind of crazy became washed his hands too much and germaphobe he was peeing in jars we were driving in a rental car Just the Two of Us in Florida we were had a meeting at Nasa and we were driving back to the airport to get on his airplane to come back to LA LA and I'm driving the car he's sitting in the passenger seat and I said hey boss uh remember that time we're on TV and I compared to that Howard Hughes you know I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young dashing Starlit dating Howard Hughes not the old decrepit peing and jars fingernail guy and all I got back was silence and now I'm really scared right I'm sitting there like waiting for him to say something and Elan will do this and and I he did this on your show right he he kind of like if you if you pose to him a serious question he'll consider it and he'll kind of go into this almost like a trance he'll stare off into space as and you can see the wheels turning he's like focusing all of his intellect which is considerable on this one question so I waited and then he turned back to me and he said I don't think it's an apt comparison why I'm curious why do you think that and he said well none of Howard's designs as brilliant as they were ended up really changing the way we live our lives so we don't send like he made the the Spruce Goose which is an incredible airplane was all wood you know trying to solve uh the problem during the war of rationing so that was his objection was not that like I was comparing him to some creep but that it's really important to him to have the legacy of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives so kind of the way Steve Jobs did or or others that that really moov the ball down field for Humanity that's what's driving he's such an unusual human is is he thinking along these lines of charted out progress oh yeah yeah he's uh in fact he he measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars sooner or later that's the prism by which he makes every like every single decision he makes he makes it through that prism Jesus yeah so he's got an idea and he'll keep pushing and and uh you know he gives us aggressive timelines that we have to work to and we work really hard to try to try to meet him it's hard when you're doing stuff that this do this complicated to predict exactly how long it's going to take so you know we end up often fall falling a little bit behind but we do our best that's the the case though with everything that's that crazy right he's doing so many different things at the same time it it's it's almost impossible I mean he does have all the advantages of wealth which helps you know so like he'll have meetings with us and he'll walk out of his last meeting and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne airport hop on his jet and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours and he can be first thing in the morning at Tesla right uh and he's got a staff to helps him and you know he's got those advantages um but he he uh that isn't in any way describe what he or or that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does I don't know how he does it to be honest well he's the next stage of humanity yeah if if people are evolving he's he's like looking at us from the next spot he's like hey guys uh I've got some ideas yeah I mean he's just an idea Factory and and um he his uh uh what What's really remarkable to me is is is the breadth of his knowledge I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top Engineers about the software and you know the most Arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across all the different techn Oles that go into rockets and cars and everything else he does that's what really impresses me well also the lack of burnout cuz he's been doing it at this incredible rate 16 hours a day for how long his whole life I think that's nuts I know and he's still hungry for it and he and he's still taking on these new projects and new ideas and yeah you know at that pace seven seven years was about as like as much as I could take I was like I I need to do something else yeah I just don't I you know I mean I'm very happy he exists you know yeah but he he very confusing to me I just feel so stupid when I'm around him you know the conversations I've had with them like God damn I'm dumb no no you got to do what you got to do with what you got I won't go that far so his uh his ultimate goal is to uh create some sort of a colony on Mars but he believes that this technology will continue continue to expand to the point where we will be leaving our solar system we will be making human trips into other solar systems into actual deep space yeah I mean certainly hopefully that's you know at some point if we're going to survive you take the really Long View you know the solar system is not going to last forever right it's going to last plenty long if and if my kids are listening at home don't worry they're freaking out right now especially 2-year-old oh no daddy said we're going to die no we got plenty of time couple billion years kids relax it's not in our lifetime they're so funny but uh but eventually uh we're going to have to find a new home if we're going to last forever and we all hope that we last forever as a species right so um or at least most of us do so uh yeah eventually we got to get there but we got plenty of time in in the in the short term the important thing is at least getting out so we're not in just one place in the solar system because this you know something bad could happen to this planet sure and we got no backup right particularly if there is a natural situation super volcano asteroid impact or you know we're doing a pretty good job of trashing this place all on our own yes we don't really need an asteroid to hit us uh we're we're kind of going down the road of of making this place and uninhabitable well what we need is someone like Elon who concentrates on the solutions I mean he's obviously got a full plate many full plates but someone like him to concentrate on solutions to some of the envir enironmental problems that we've created for ourselves here well that's really that's that was the thought behind Tesla I mean so so Tesla is kind of like plan a save this planet and SpaceX is kind of plan B uh if you look at it that way it's just so weird to have a guy like that amongst us yeah you know especially have him as your boss it was really weird have you talked to him at all about simulation Theory we never the thing is when every time I talk to him we focused on and this is what he does you know he he focuses on the thing that we are working on MH so he just that's one of the ways he does his time management that's one of the ways he is able to do all these things it's like he doesn't sit around and and and and and Bs with you about like what's going on with um was it noral link the company where he's making the chips that go in your head oh that's right I forgot about that that's the other thing he does changing the way humans interface with data he never said to me like Garrett what do you think about having a chip in your head that like like never he doesn't do that he talks to the people who really know about chips and people and putting chips in people's head he talk talk to them about it so are you going to sign up for that no your face the other day I heard myself say yes why yes you may watch that episode of The Simpsons that they made about your dad because the man in question their father you know my ex-husband or as I sometimes like to think of him my baby daddy is the Visionary Elon Musk of uh Tesla and SpaceX I met him when uh I was 18 he was 19 we were at College he would call me up he always had classical music playing in the background and he would ask me out and I would say no and he would call me up again and he would ask me out and I would say no and and it went on like this until we ended up living together in an apartment in the Bay Area which we shared with uh three roommates and a miniature daxon who was not house train and by the time we divorced we were living in a house in balair with no roommates and a miniature daxon who still was not house trained so it's a really funny Simpsons episode Elon has this uh meaningful relationship with Homer it's very romantic and at one point the Smithers character says to another character that somebody like Elon must have a darkness in his soul this line leaped out at me because I actually think a lot about creativity and darkness and the larger than life nature of these people that we call Visionaries and Geniuses or as my son likes to say Genai and and darkness does not have to mean evil you know it can refer to to anything that has not yet been brought out into the light that lives in the space beyond boundaries beyond our comfort zone where a lot of us do not want to go the writer Lucy H Pierce has a quote that I like a lot she says as creatives our job is to uncover what lies in the darkness and give it new life new identity and I realized that artists and entrepreneurs are a lot alike and that they are both obsessed with creating something out of nothing with pulling value from the dark so when I Was preparing this talk I uh said to Elon you know so do you have any advice that I could maybe give to Bright Young things in the audience who might want to like grow up to be you one day and he did say something which I'll get to at the end but he also said you know I don't know if they would still want that if they really knew what it's like to be me and it made me think that before we call these people Visionaries before they have that kind of success we have other words for them we call them you know geek or Outsider socially awkward weird little different odd one out during my years with Elon I became familiar with a distinct and deeply tribal mental known as engineers and once when my dad came to visit I was taking him to see Elon at elon's first company at zip 2 and we were crossing through the office Park and we saw these lanky dudes and jeans and t-shirts and they were racing these remote controlled Contraptions around the parking lot and banging them into cars and my dad said to me oh are these the children of the engineers and I said no dad these are the engineers and when Ela and I would travel and we had to fill out those um forums of Customs that wanted to know your occupation you know Elon never wrote down CEO or king of the world or Studley International Playboy he wrote engineer and he wore jeans and t-shirts to work and whenever we went shopping for clothes or later consulted with the stylist whose name was Morton he would say no no you don't understand I can't look cool or hip because I have to look like an engineer and one of the things that he told me although I don't know if it's as true now as it was back [Music] then was that Engineers could not quite figure out why it was that the suits made the big money when it was the engineers who actually built the stuff that they were selling and meanwhile the suits would listen to the engineers talk and they would have no idea what they were saying and that's when I realized that Elon was somebody who had learned to speak both languages and he could move between the tribes because he was an engineer in a suit and he brought together worlds and this is what an engineer does I mean this is what a Visionary does they not only creat something new but they become the living embodiment of it they don't just tell us a new story they are that story and soon they don't even have to open up their mouths they just walk into the [Music] room I recently read a profile in Elon and he's quoted as saying something to a friend and this happened during the uh time we were still married together and he says something to this friend that he never said to me and he was saying that he was prepared to sacrifice everything his entire Fortune to get a rocket into orbit and he said I don't care if Justine and the kids and I end up living in Justine's parents' basement I'm going to make this happen and so I read this and I kind of wanted to go back in time and go up to him and take him by the shoulders and look him very seriously in the eyes and say have you seen my parents' basement so I'd like to wrap up by um getting to elon's advice which is to always go beyond memorizing formulas passing tests to always go deep into the underlying principles of a subject to track any problem down to the root cause Buri it in the dirt in the dark and I would add to that and say be brave enough be bold enough and be insane enough to see things more completely more vividly more fully than everybody else around you and refuse to look away from what you see and what you know even if people want to burn you at the stake because Visionaries they take all that passion and their badass personalities and their Mad Skills and the Mastery of their chosen subject matter and they use it to put themselves on the line unlike anybody else you'll ever meet and it's this that allows them to open up Windows into another deeper reality in which transformation is possible and things of a happen on a regular basis because in the beginning we don't trust them because we think they're crazy but by the end we trust them because we know they're crazy they're crazy enough to accomplish anything and risk it all in order to bring us something new to believe in they might make lousy husbands and terrible wives they might be the friend who never sends you a birthday present and forgets to show up for coffee but they bring light to the dark and they show us the universe keep the channel open thank you given enough time humanity will go extinct because the cter point will be Humanity will live forever and I think that's just unlikely so whether there will be some other form of Consciousness that evolves after Humanity I I hope so but we don't know for sure it would be wise not to just assume that oh if we're gone I thought there'll in the future be some other form of Consciousness maybe maybe not earth 1 half billion years old um the sun is slowly expanding as the sun expands over millions of years the temperature Earth will rise and eventually the sun will engulf Earth and and gr everything everything will be incinerated there there's different different schools of thought here but things may get hot enough on Earth within maybe 500 million years where Earth may be uninhabitable that's sort of a combination of the various cycles of Earth because on a very geological time scale Earth actually has has gone through snowball phases and and and and sort of very hot phases and if you have a very hot phase of both combined with the sun expanding that that that could really be a mass extinction event and one of things like for for an earth timing standpoint 500 million years would only be 10% longer than Earth has existed thus far therefore if Consciousness or civilization had taken 10% longer to evolve it wouldn't have evolved at all a lot of time scale we're kind of making it just just in time and like the thing that tends to happen is like once the birth Way start going down it seems to accelerate in it downward trajectory like Japan is leading IND here say they're about to collapse population collap they lost 600,000 people last year like negative 600,000 last year and Japan is like pretty close to being the long most like their life expectancy is like 85 so like that's the only thing not that was what was keeping the population priting before now despite having like the world's longest lifespan they're still losing population oh wow saying something yeah it was saying something so uh seems to me the rate of that decline I mean is is such one that's going to be not really able to be turned around we kind of got a plan for what we do in spite of it happening yeah like well if that Trend continues Japan's just going to flat out disappear as as will most countries in the world I'm just saying if that Trend continues hopefully it doesn't but if it does this is going to be I don't know what China's going to do like China's going to have like a period of time of great Prosperity over like the next 10 years uh and then but Transit like roughly half replacement rate you know they they got rid of the one child policy several years ago then made it a two child policy now it's a three child policy okay growth rate unchanged and Japan never had a one child policy and they still went that path so the current trend is is not good from a bir way standpoint I'm try to set a good example M another the reason why we need another civilization on another planet yeah the number number of humans is it's not training well I think a lot of people are under the impression that like you know the current number of humans is unsustainable on planet and this is totally untrue yeah uh we could double number humans and be okay and still keep the rain forest the population density is actually very low and most parts of the world have no people in them so if you like fly over the country you know from like LA to New York or something and you look down and say like what percentage of the time if you dropped a bowling Bowl would you hit someone even in La like you think LA's got a lot of people but you look at the actual if if you like just looked at say what cross-sectional area is human like like the cross-section of like you know you take like several blocks in LA and and and make make the houses and cars translucent and and and look at okay from looking at from above what percentage of the cross-section of the area is is humans there almost nothing it's below 1% in La interesting have you ever seen that giant ball of Flesh they did that if you combined every human into it New York City You' seen it right the big ball of Goo of like all of humans push into one thing it would like sit in central par that's it and like it's a little bit taller than the tallest skyscraper it's not very big at all you like a cuboid of humans on a single floor you could fit all humans uh in New York City without on on one floor without any even having what do you mean on one floor I mean like surface area yeah how thick would that human pie be no it's just one human toll I'm going say there's no human no without stacking if people like live in in some bustling City they think humans must be everywhere but actually uh there are very few cities like like no place in America has the density of Manhattan and then even if you got like a sort of what seems like a den City like La the actual cross-sectional area that's human is small like less than 1% of the of the area is human so that means that if you if you dropped a cannibal excl that doesn't bounce too much the probability of hitting a human is extremely low wow that's interesting we've had pieces from rockets and multiple Nations reenter the tanks and crash uncontrolled and not at anybody many times when we had the space tragedy like the on Entry it it it it ra debris across the entire United States and and I don't think there were any enturies at all like the entire yeah a lot of debris like they recovered most of the material from the shuttle um wow but and zero people were it were hit I believe and here's an interesting part of that is it was going not vertical it was going around the earth which increases the probability no it's it's it's it's coming in from over going par more or less parallel to the Earth surface and and and and and start start breaking up uh I believe over the US like a crop dust or or at least certainly like like none of the parts fell in the ocean when when you're going orbital you're going parallel to the surface you know roughly 25 times the speed of sound so um the shells decelerating and breaking apart uh as it and and the debris is raining down on the US and no people were hit the population decline problem I think is possibly the biggest risk to civilization it's certainly one of the biggest risks um I first of all I think people really need to a lot of people think that there's too many humans on the planet and Planet can't sustain this number of humans this is absolutely not true we could double the population without any uh uh meaningful damage to the environment uh so you can put all the humans on Earth in this on in the city of New York um that that's that's the cross-sectional area of humans think fit they literally fit the city of New York with on on one floor you don't need high rises mhm um and if you if you're on a plane flight and you look down and you say what percentage of the time uh am I if I were to drop a a a ball that that where that ball would hit a person basically zero even in a city like like La uh which you think oh that's a crowded City but um so looking at from above what's the cross-sectional area of humans relative to the rest of the ground and it's much less than 1% in even in LA if you're in a big city environment and you you see a lot of people you sort of oh that's there must be sort of extrapolate that you everywhere but it's it's actually very rare to see a concentration of humans so uh humans is very SP Earth is very sparsely populated with humans uh there's not enough humans far from being too many and I think people people are still sort of um operating on the assumption that the population just growing like crazy when in fact the opposite is occurring um and and these numbers are easy to look up I mean they're just on the internet so yeah um and uh weigh the lowest both weight um in recorded history uh last year I'm always banging the baby drum uh cuz I'm like man civilization's going to you know collapse and no big deal yeah yeah I'm like where do you think people come from like some magical people Factory they got to come from somewhere and they take ages to grow at some point there's going to be a third world war after World War III who knows what's left after World War II let's race between do we become a multiplet species or World War III which one is first and if World War III is first and maybe we never get to another planet one of the reasons for World War III would be if one country has advanced AI technology and other powers want it or they're worried about some country gaining Advanced AI that would give them a strong advantage in war then they may be tempted to attack before the country that is developing the strong AI has that for use in in weapons technology certainly hope that SpaceX and Tesla are not forced to develop any kind of weapons technology obviously we would only do such a thing if it was the last resort I think that can be helpful in Conflict I try to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the probability that the future will be good there are certainly some big risks that Humanity faces population collapse is a really big deal that I wish more people would think about the birth rate is far below what needed to sustain civilization it's current at its current level we need to take action on climate sustainability which is being done and we need to secure the future of Consciousness by being a multiplet species we need to address the essentially we it's important to take whatever actions we can think of to address the existential risks that affect the the future of of Consciousness most people in the world are operating under the false impression that uh that there are too many people um this is not true Earth could maintain a population many times at the current level and the birth rate has been dropping like crazy unfortunately like we have these like ridiculous population estimates from the UN that need to be updated cuz they just don't make any sense really you can just look at say what was the birth rate last year how many kids were born multiply that by the life expectancy and say okay that's how many people will be alive in the future and then say is the trend for both rat positive or negative it's negative that's the best case unless something changes with the both R giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change or World War III any one of a number of reasons but the probable lifespan of civilizational Consciousness as we know it which we should really view as this very delicate thing like a small candle in a vast darkness that is what appears to be the case we're in this vast darkness of space and there's this little candle of Consciousness that's only really come about after 4 and A2 billion years I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or Consciousness the birth rate on Earth is so low that we're facing civilizational collapse unless the birth rate returns to a sustain level population collapse is uh one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization and that is what is going on right now take Japan for example I think population is roughly 110 million but last year if you take the number of children born times the life expectancy which is 85 years it's very impressive life expectancy then Japan would have I think around 68 million people roughly half of the current population that does not tell the full story because you would have an upside down demographic permit you already have an upside down demographic permit where you know a lot of old people very few young people and that upside down demographic permit is unstable that's also here why we need Alternatives you have recently presented Optimus human Robert uh and you shared Great Expectations what that could do for the world yeah could you explain a little bit your motivation I assume it's not only about the first visit to Mars that could be done by Optimus it is more than that a game changer in AI could you share a little bit your your vision yeah I mean with respect to Ai and Robotics so I always approach these things with some trepidation because I certainly do not want to play a hand in uh anything that could potentially be harmful to humanity humanoid robots they're clearly happening I mean you look at like Boston Dynamics they the demonstrations are better every year so there will be humanoid robots I mean the rate of advancement of AI is very rapid even if Tesla stopped doing AI that would I I think we're still on a track to develop artificial general intelligence many intelligence smarter than the smartest human I guess when I was kind of growing up I did have this like existential crisis where I was like what's the meaning of life is this old pointless is there any point in existing at all I read the varish religious texts and uh I read a bunch of the philosophers just couldn't really seem to find any any good answers and then I read hitra as Guide to the Galaxy uh which is um really a book on philosophy but it's disguise as a book on humor and and the point Douglas Adams was making is that the that the purpose of life is to learn more to ultimately know what questions to to to learn what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe like that's the actual point is is to figure out the point at least that was my interpretation and so therefore we should take the set of actions that are likely to expand Consciousness and our understanding of the universe so that we can know what the meaning of life is or why we're here and how the universe came to be whatever is most likely to andure that the future is good for you know all of humanity it's not like there's no good that comes out of even a terrible situation there's some good that comes out of it but it's overwhelmingly bad it's just it's just really interesting to learn the lessons of History such that we do not uh repeat the the mistakes of the past generally I'm trying to take the actions that most likely lead to a better future for civilization I think that's like frankly the only like logical thing to do cuz like there's no there's no point in having like a good future without civilization if if civilization crumbles nobody's going to have a good future so I think we want to take the set of actions that maximize the probability the future is going to be good and then we understand more about the nature of reality in the universe I mean I don't I don't think we should try to have people live for a very long time for a very long time it would cause artification of society um because the truth is uh most people don't change their mind they just die and so if they don't die they we'll be we'll be stuck with old ideas and they won't Society won't advance um I think we already have quite a serious issue with theocracy uh where the the leaders of so many countries are extremely old look I mean in the US it's you know very very ancient uh leadership and it's just impossible to stay in touch with the the people if you're um you know at the you know if you're if you're like many generations older than them um and the founders in the US they put minimum ages for uh political office but they did not put maximum ages cuz they did not expect that people will be living so long but they should have um cuz you really want in order for a democracy to function well the leaders must be reasonably in touch with the bulk of the population and if you're too young or too old it's you can't say that you would be in touch I mean I certainly would like to maintain uh health for a longer Peri period of time um but I'm not afraid of dying I think it will come as a relief like what are the existential threats that Humanity faces um I we spent a lot of time talking about the birth rate thing um that that might be the biggest single threat to the future of human civilization then there's um you know artificial intelligence gone wrong is a big concern um I think religious extremism is a concern so there's you know obviously uh environmental causes there are this education especially um science and engineering education um Pediatric Health Care um you know uh hunger these days is is more of a political and Logistics problem than it is not having enough food there's a lot of food uh in fact you know in the US uh and many many countries the the issue is more obesity than it is hunger

Channel: Fine Trends

Views: 11,730

Keywords: elon musk, elon, musk, elon musk interview, elon musk podcast, elon musk college, elon musk degree, tesla, spacex, neuralink, elon musk warning, elon musk ai, elon musk artificial intelligence, elon musk mad, elon musk china, elon musk motivation, elon musk motivational

Id: vDCD2ggXisA

Length: 40min 15sec (2415 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023