Elon Musk talks Twitter, Tesla and how his brain works — live at TED2022

hello so in just a few minutes um elon musk will be joining us here live on stage for a conversation uh rumor has it there are a few things to talk about with him um we we we will see but um before that i just want to show you something special i want you to come with me to tesla's huge gigafactory in austin texas so the day before it opened last week the evening before i was allowed to walk around it no one else there and what i saw there was honestly pretty mind-blowing this is elon musk's famous machine that builds the machine and his view the secret to a sustainable future is not just making an electric car it's making a system that churns out huge numbers of electric cars with a margin so that they can fund further growth when i was there um none of us knew whether elon would actually be able to make it here today so i took the chance to sit down with him and record an epic interview and i just want to show you a nine an eight minute excerpt of that interview so here from austin texas elon musk i want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence i i'm curious about your timelines and how you predict and how come some things are so amazingly on the money and some aren't so when it comes to predicting sales of tesla vehicles for example i mean you've kind of been amazing i think in 2014 when tesla had sold that year 60 000 cars you said 2020 i think we will do half a million a year yeah we did almost exactly half a million five years ago last time you came today we um i asked you about for self-driving and um you said yep this very year where i am confident that we will have a car going from la to new york uh without any intervention yeah i i don't want to blow your mind but i'm not always right um so talk what's the difference between those two why why why has full self-driving in particular been so hard to predict i mean the thing that really got me and i think it's going to get a lot of other people is that there are just so many false stones with with self-driving um where you think you think you've got the problem have a handle on the problem and then it nope uh it turns out uh you just hit a ceiling um and and uh uh because what happened if you if you were to plot the progress the progress looks like a log curve so it's like yeah a series of log curves so uh most people don't like cookies i suppose but it shows the show it goes it goes up sort of a you know sort of a fairly straight way and then it starts tailing off right and and and you start there's a kind of ocean getting diminishing returns you know in retrospect they seem obvious but uh in in order to solve uh full self-driving uh properly you actually just you have to solve real-world ai um you you you know because you said what are the road networks designed to to work with they're designed to work with a biological neural net our brains and with uh vision our eyes and so in order to make it work with computers you basically need to solve real world ai and vision because because we we need we need cameras and silicon neural nets uh in order to have to have self-driving work for a system that was designed for eyes and biological neural nets it you know when you i guess when you put it that way it's like quite obvious that the only way to solve full self-driving is to solve real-world ai and sophisticated vision what do you feel about the current architecture do you think you have an architecture now where where there is a chance for the logarithmic curve not to tail off any anytime soon well i mean admittedly these these uh may be an infamous uh last words but i i actually am confident that we will solve it this year uh that we will exceed uh you're like what the probability of an accident at what point should you exceed that of the average person right um i think we will exceed that this year we could be here talking again in a year it's like well yeah another year went by and it didn't happen but i think this i think this is the year is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive people to be ambitious and without that nothing gets done so it's it feels like at some point in the last year seeing the progress on understanding you that you're that the ai the tesla ai understanding the world around it led to a kind of an aha moment in tesla because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at tesla this year is this robot optimus yes is it something that happened in the development of fourself driving that gave you the confidence to say you know what we could do something special here yeah exactly so you know it took me a while to sort of realize that that in order to solve self-driving you really needed to solve real-world ai um at the point of which you solve real-world ai for a car which is really a robot on four wheels uh you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well the thing that the things that are currently missing are uh enough intelligence enough to tell intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed it is so so the missing things are basically real world uh intelligence and uh scaling up manufacturing um those are two things that tesla is very good at and uh so then we basically just need to design the the uh specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a humanoid robot people have no idea this is going to be bigger than the car um but so talk about i mean i think the first applications you you've mentioned are probably going to be manufacturing but eventually the vision is to to have these available for people at home correct if you had a robot that really understood the 3d architecture of your house and knew where every object in that house was or was supposed to be and could recognize all those objects i mean that that's kind of amazing isn't that like like that the kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what like tidy up yeah um absolutely or make make dinner i guess mow the lawn take take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures and exactly take care of my grandmother and make sure yeah exactly and it could recognize obviously recognize everyone in the home yeah could play catch with your kids yes i mean obviously we need to be careful this doesn't uh become a dystopian situation um like i think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized rom chip on the robot that cannot be updated over the air uh where if you for example were to say stop stop stop that would if anyone said that then the robot would stop you know type of thing and that's not updatable remotely um i think it's going to be important to have safety features like that yeah that that sounds wise and i do think there should be a regular free agency for ai i've said this for many years i don't love being regulated but i you know i think this is an important thing for public safety do you think there will be basically like in say 2050 or whatever that like a a robot in most homes is what they will be and people will probably count you'll have your own butler basically yeah you'll have your sort of buddy robot probably yeah i mean how much of a buddy do like do you do how many applications you thought is there you know can you have a romantic partner lot of a sex inevitable i mean i did promise the internet that i would make cat girls we'll have we could make a robot cackle how are you because yeah you know so yeah i i guess uh it'll be what whatever people want really you know so what sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first the first models that are actually made and sold you know the the first units that that we tend to make are um for jobs that are dangerous boring repetitive and things that people don't want to do and you know i think we'll have like an interesting prototype uh sometime this year we might have something useful next year but i think quite likely within at least two years and then we'll see rapid growth year over year of the usefulness of the humanoid robots um and decrease in cost and scaling out production help me on the economics of this so what what do you picture the cost of one of these being well i think the cost is actually not going to be uh crazy high um like less than a car yeah but but think about the economics of this if you can replace a thirty thousand dollar forty thousand dollar a year worker which you have to pay every year with a one-time payment of twenty five thousand dollars for a robot that can work longer hours doesn't go on vacation i mean that could it could be a pretty rapid replacement of certain types of jobs how worried should the world be about that i wouldn't worry about the the sort of putting people out of a job thing um i think we're actually going to have and already do have a massive shortage of labor so i i i think we'll we will have um uh not not people out of work but actually still a shortage labor even in the future uh but this really will be a world of abundance any goods and services uh will be available to anyone who wants them that it'll be so cheap to have goods and services it'll be ridiculous so that is part of an epic 80 minute interview which we are releasing to people members of ted 2022 right after this conference um you should be able to look at it on the ted live website um there's public interest in it we're putting that out to the world on sunday afternoon i think sunday evening but uh but if you're into this kind of stuff um definitely a good thing to do over the weekend um now then hearing from elon live there's there's huge public interest in that we have opened up this segment to live stream and so we're joined right now by i think quite a few people around the world um welcome to vancouver welcome to ted 22 you're joining us on the last day of our conference here in a packed theater and we've been hearing all week from people with dreams about what the next era of humanity is going to be and now arguably the biggest visionary of them all elon musk [Music] hey elon welcome so elon um a few hours ago you made an offer to buy twitter why [Laughter] how'd you know little bird tweeted in my ear or something i don't know by the way have you seen the movie ted about the bear i i i have i have a movie so um yeah yeah so was there a question why why make that offer oh so um well i think it's very important for uh there to be an inclusive arena for free speech where all yeah so uh yeah um twitter has become kind of the de facto town square um so uh it's just really important that people have the both the uh the reality and the perception uh that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law um and you know so one of the things that i believe twitter should do is open source the algorithm um and make any changes uh to people's tweets you know if they're emphasized or de-emphasized uh that action should be made apparent so you anyone can see that action has been taken so there's there's no sort of behind the scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually um but last week when we spoke elon um i asked you whether you were thinking of taking over you said no way said i i do not want to own twitter it is a recipe for misery everyone will blame me for everything what on earth changed no i think i think everyone will still blame me for everything yeah if something if if i acquire twitter and something goes wrong it's my fault 100 i i think there will be quite a few arrows uh yes um it will it will be miserable but you still want to do it why i mean i hope it's not too miserable uh but um i i just think it's important to the fun like uh it's important to the function of democracy it's important to the function of uh the united states uh as a free country and many other countries and to help actually to help freedom in the world more broadly than the u.s and so i think it's uh it's a you know i think this there's the risk civilizational risk uh is decreased if twitter the more we can increase the trust of twitter as a public platform and so i do think this will be somewhat painful and i'm not sure that i will actually be able to to acquire it and i should also say the intent is is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company which i think is around 2000 or so so we'll it's not like it it's definitely not not from the standpoint of letting me figure out how to monopolize or maximize my ownership of twitter but we'll try to bring along as many shoulders as we right as we're allowed to you don't necessarily want to pay out 40 or whatever it is billion dollars in cash you you'd like them to come come with you in in i mean i mean i could technically afford it um what i'm saying is this this is this is uh this is not a way to sort of make money you know i think this is it's just that i think this is um this could my strong intuitive sense is that uh having a public platform that is maximally trusted um and and and and broadly inclusive um is extremely important to the future of civilization but you've described yourself i don't care about the economics at all okay that's that's core to hear you this is not about the economics it's for the the moral good that you think will achieve you you've described yourself elon as a free speech absolutist but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay well i i i think uh obviously uh twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in um so obviously there are some limitations on free speech uh in in the us and and of course uh twitter would have to abide by those uh right rules so so so you can't incite people to violence like that that the like a direct incitement to violence you know you can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a in a movie theater for example no that would be a crime yeah right it should be a crime but here's here's the challenge is is that it's it's such a nuanced difference between different things so there's there's excitement to violence yeah that's a no if it's illegal um there's hate speech which some forms of hate speech are fine you know i hate spinach um i mean if it's a sauteed in a you know cream sauce that would be quite nice but so so but the problem is so so so let's say someone says okay here's one tweet i hate politician x yeah next tweet is i wish polite politician x wasn't alive as we some of us have said about putin right now for example so that's legitimate speech another tweet is i wish politician x wasn't alive with a picture of their head with a gun sight over it or that plus their address i mean at some point someone has to make a decision as to which of those is not okay can an algorithm do that well surely you need human judgment at some point no i think the like i said in my view uh twitter should um match the laws of the of the country of and and and really you know that there's an obligation to to do that um but going beyond going beyond that um and having it be unclear who's making what changes to who to where uh having tweets sort of mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what's going on uh having a black box algorithm uh promote some things and other not not other things i think this can be quite dangerous so so so the idea of opening the algorithm is a huge deal and i think many people would would welcome that of understanding exactly how it's making the decision and critique it and critique like i want to improve what wondering is like like i think like the code should be on github you know so then uh and so people can look through it and say like i see a problem here i don't i don't agree with this um they can highlight issues right um suggest changes in the same way that you sort of update linux or or signal or something like that you know but as i understand it like at some point right now what the algorithm would do is it would look at for example how many people have flagged a tweet as obnoxious and then at some point a human has to look at it and make make a decision as to does this cross the line or not that the algorithm itself can't i don't think yet um tell the difference between legal and okay and and definitely obnoxious and so the question is which humans you know make make that core i mean do you have do you have a picture of that right now twitter and facebook and others you know they've hired thousands of people to try to help make wise decisions and the trouble is that no one can agree on on what is wise how do you solve that well i i i think we would want to er on this if if in doubt uh let let the speech that let it exist uh it would have you know if it's a you know a a gray area i would say let let the tweet exist um but obviously you know in a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy uh that you would not want to necessarily promote that tweet if uh you know so the i'm not i'm not saying this is that i have all the answers here um but i i do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and and have um just just be very cautious with with with permanent bands uh you know timeouts i think are better or uh than sort of permanent bands and um but just just in general like i said uh how how it won't be perfect but i think we wanted to really uh have like so the possession and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible and a good sign as to whether there's free speech is is is someone you don't like allowed to say something you don't like and if that is the case then we have free speech and it's it's damn annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like that is a sign of a healthy functioning uh free speech situation so i think many people would agree with that and look at the reaction online many people are excited by you coming in and the changes you're proposing some others are absolutely horrified here's how they would see it they would say wait a sec we agree that that twitter is an incredibly important town square it is a it is you know where the world exchanges opinion about life and death matters how on earth could it be owned by the world's richest person that can't be right so how how do you i mean what's the response there is there any way that you can distance yourself from the actual decision-making that matters on content at in some very clear way that is convincing to people well like i said i think the it's it's very important that like the the algorithm be open sourced and that any manual uh adjustments be uh identified like so if this tweet if somebody did something to a tweet it's there's information attached to it that this that action was taken and i i i i won't personally be uh you know in their editing tweets um but you'll know if something was done to promote demote or otherwise affect uh a tweet um you know as for media sort of ownership i mean you've got you know um mark zuckerberg owning facebook and instagram and whatsapp um and with a share ownership structure that will have mark zuckerberg the 14th still controlling those uh entities so literally um what's that need we won't have that on twitter if if you commit to opening up the algorithm that that definitely gives some level of confidence um talk about talk about some of the other changes that you've proposed so you at the edit button that's that's definitely coming if you if you have your way yeah yeah and how do you i mean i i think i mean one frankly um the top priority i have i would have is is eliminating the the spammings and scam bots and the bot armies that are on twitter um you know i think i think these these fun influence that they're not they're they're they they make the product much worse um if i see if you know if i had a dogecoin for every crypto scam i saw [Laughter] more you know 100 billion dollars do you regret sparking the sort of storm of excitement overdose and you know where it's gone or i mean i think deutsche is fun and you know i've always said don't bet the form of dogecoin uh fyi yeah but i i think i think it's it's i like dogs and i like memes and uh it's got both of those and but just on the on the edit button how how do you get around the problem of so someone tweets elon rocks and it's tweeted by two million people um and um and then then after that they edit it so i'm elon sucks and um and then all those retweets they're all embarrassed and how how do you avoid that type of changing of meaning so that retweeters are exploited well i think uh you know you'd only have the edit capability for a short period of time and probably the thing to do at upon the edit would be to zero out all retweets and favorites okay i'm open to ideas though you know so in one way the um algorithm works kind of well for you right now i just i wanted to show you this this is so this is a typical tweet of of mine kind of lame and wordy and whatever and look at and the amazing response it gets is this oh my god 97 likes um and then i tried another one um and uh 29 000 likes so the algorithm at least seems to be at the moment you know if elon musk expanded the world immediately um not bad right yeah i guess so i mean that was cool i mean you but but you've so help us understand how it is you've built this incredible um following on twitter yourself when i mean some of the people who love you the most look at some of what you tweet and they they they think it's somewhere between um embarrassing and crazy some of it's amazing i mean [Laughter] is that actually why it's worked or why why has it worked i mean i don't know i mean i i'm you know tweeting more or less stream of consciousness you know it's not like let me think about some grand plan about my twitter or whatever you know i'm like literally on the toilet or something i'm like oh this is funny and then tweet that out you know that's that's like most of them [Laughter] you know over sharing but um but you are obsessed with getting the most out of every minute of your day and so why not you know um so i don't know i just like try to tweet out like things that are interesting or funny or you know and then people seem to like it so if if you are unsuccessful actually before i ask that let me ask this if i don't yeah so how can i say is uh funding secured [Music] i i have sufficient uh assets to complete the uh it's not a forward-looking statement blah blah but i have to i mean i can do it if possible right um so um and um i mean i should say actually even in the in originally the uh with with tesla back in the day funding was actually secured i want to be clear about that um in fact this may be a good opportunity to to to clarify that um if funding was indeed secured um and uh i should say like why why do i do not have respect for the sec in that situation and i don't mean to blame everyone at the sec but certainly the san francisco office um it's because the sec knew that funding was secured but they pursued the an active public investigation nonetheless at the time tesla was in a precarious financial situation and i was told by the banks that if i did not agree to settle with the sec that they would the banks would cease providing working capital and tesla would go bankrupt immediately so that's like having a gun to your child's head so i was forced to concede to the sec unlawfully those bastards and and and now that they they say it makes it look like i lied when i did not in fact lie i was i was forced to admit that i lied for to save tesla's life and that's the only reason given what's actually happened given what's actually happened to tesla since then though aren't you glad that you didn't take it private yeah i mean it's difficult to put yourself in the position at the time tesla was under the most relentless short seller attack in the history of the stock market uh there's something called short and distort um where the barrage of negativity that tesla was experiencing from short sales wall street was beyond or belief tesla was the most shorted stock in the history of stock markets this is saying something so you know this was affecting our ability to hire people it was affecting our ability to sell cars it was uh they were yeah it was terrible um yeah they wanted tesla to die so bad they could taste it well most of them have paid the price yes where are they now um so so that was a really strong statement i mean obviously a lot of people who who support you i thought would say you have so much to offer the world on the upside on the vision side don't don't waste your time getting getting distracted by these these battles that bring out negativity and and and make people feel that you're being defensive or like people don't like fights especially with with powerful government authorities they'd rather they'd rather buy into your to a dream do do you like aren't you encouraged by people just just to edit that in that you know temptation out and uh go with the bigger story um well i mean i i would say like you know i'm sort of a mixed bag you know i mean well you're a fighter and you you don't you don't you don't you don't you don't like to lose and and you you you are determined that you don't basically i i mean you are sure i don't like to lose i'm not sure many people do um but the truth matters to me a lot really like sort of pathologically it matters to me okay so so you don't like to lose if in this case you are not successful in you know the board does not accept your offer you've said you won't go higher is there a plan b there is i i think we i think we would like to hear a little bit about plan b for it for another time i think another time yeah all right [Applause] i that that's a nice tease all right so um i i would love to try to understand this brain of yours more ilan i i if with your permission i'd like to just play this this is the oh actually before we do that um here was one of the of the thousands of questions that people asked i thought this was actually quite a good one um if you could go back in time and change one decision you made along the way do your own edit button which one would it be and why do you mean like a career decision or something just any decision over the last few years like your decision to invest in twitter in the first place or your anything um i mean the the worst business decision i ever made was um not starting tesla with just jb straval by far the worst decision i've ever made is not just starting tesla with jb that that that's the number one by far all right so jb strabo was was the visionary co-founder who who who was obsessed with and knew so much about batteries and your your decision to go with tesla the company as it was meant that you got locked into what you concluded it was a weird architecture now this this there's a lot of confusion tesla tesla did not exist in any tesla was a shell company with no employees uh no intellectual property when i invested but the a false narrative has been created by um one of the other co-founders uh martin everhard and i don't want to get into the nastiness here but uh i didn't invest in an existing company we created a company yeah and ultimately the creation that company uh was was done by uh jv and me um and unfortunately there's a someone else and another co-founder who has made it his life's mission uh to make it sound like he he created the company which is false wasn't there another issue right at the heart of the development of the tesla model 3 where tesla almost went bankrupt and i i think you have said that part of the reason for that was that you overestimated the extent to which it was possible at that time to automate a a factory a huge amount was spent kind of over automating and it didn't work and it nearly took the company down is that fair uh i mean first of all it's important to understand like what what has tesla actually accomplished that is that is most noteworthy um it is not the creation of an electric vehicle or creating electrical vehicle prototype or low volume production of a of a car that they've been uh hundreds of cars startups over the years hundreds and uh in fact at one point um bloomberg counted up the number of electric vehicle startups and they i think they got to almost 500. yeah so the hard part is not creating a prototype or going into limited production the the the absolutely difficult thing which has not been accomplished by an american car company in 100 years is reaching volume production without going bankrupt is the actual hard thing um the last company american company to reach volume production without going bankrupt was chrysler in the 20s right and and and it nearly happened to tesla yes it but it's not like oh geez i guess if we just done more manual stuff things would have been fine of course not uh that is definitely not the case uh so we basically messed up almost every aspect of the model 3 production line from from cells to packs to driving voters motors body line the paint shop uh final assembly um everything everything was messed up um and i lived in that fa i lived in the fremont and and nevada factories for three years fixing the that production line running around like a maniac through every part of that factory living with the team i slept on the floor so that the the team who was going through a hard time could see me on the floor uh that they knew that i was not in some ivory tower whatever pain they experienced i was i had it more and some people who knew you well actually thought you were making a terrible mistake that you were driving yourself you were you were driving yourself to the edge of sanity almost and yeah and and that you were in danger of making bad choices and in fact i heard you say last week elon that that you because of tesla's huge value now and and you know the the significance of every minute that you spend that you are in danger of sort of obsessing over spending all this time to the point of to the edge of sanity um that doesn't that doesn't sound super wise isn't that like your your your time your your completely sane centered rested time and decision making is more powerful and compelling than that sort of i can barely hold my eyes open so surely it should be an absolute strategic priority to look after yourself i mean there wasn't any other way to make it work there were three years of hell 17 8 2017 18 and 19 with three years this longest period of excruciating pain in my life uh there wasn't any other way and we barely made it and we're on the ragged edge of bankruptcy the entire time so so when you felt like i want pain i don't like it um those were three or three so so much pain but it had to be done or tesla would be dead when you looked around the gigafactory that we saw images of earlier um last week and just see where the companies come i mean do you feel that that this this challenge of figuring out the the new way of manufacturing um that you that you actually have an edge now that it's different that you've figured out how to do this and and um from those three years what won't be repeated you've actually figured out a new way of manufacturing at this point i think i know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth between that yeah i'll tell you i can tell you how every damn part part in that car is made which basically if you just live on the factory live in the factory for three years and that was nice that was a poignant note or something someone wants to compose a symphony to that uh expression of confidence uh something like that i have no idea what that is anyway yeah every aspect of a car six weeks to sunday i know i mean you you you talk about scale right now you're in the middle of writing your new master plan and you've said that scale is at the heart of it why does scale matter why are you obsessed with that what are you thinking yeah well see in order in order to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy uh there must be scale because we've got a transition um a vast economy that is currently uh overly dependent on fossil fuels to a sustainable energy economy one where the energy is uh yeah i mean we got to do it so so the energy's got to be sustainably generated with wind solar uh hydro geothermal i i'm a believer in nuclear as uh as well i think ever talk about and uh and then you you since solar and wind is intermittent you have to have stationary storage batteries and and then we're going to transition all transport um to to electric uh if we do those things we have a sustainable energy future the faster we do those things the less risk we the less risk we put to the environment uh so sooner is better uh and and so scale is very important um you know it's not about it's not about press releases it's about tonnage what was the tonnage of of batteries produced and obviously done in a sustainable way and and our estimate is that approximately 300 terawatt hours of battery storage is needed to transition uh transport uh electricity and and heating and cooling uh to a fully electric situation others may there's there may be some different estimates out out there but uh our estimate is 300 terawatt hours yeah so we dug into this a lot in the interview that we recorded last week and so people can go in and hear that more but i mean the context is that is i think about a thousand times the current install battery capacity i mean the scale up needed is breathtaking basically yeah and and and um yeah so so your vision is to commit tesla to try to deliver on a meaningful percentage of what is needed yeah and what and call on others to do the rest that this is what this is a task for humanity to massively scale up our response to change change the energy grade yes it it's it's like basically how fast can we can we scale um and encourage others to scale to get to that 300 terawatt hour installed uh base of batteries right and then of course uh there'll be a tremendous need to recycle those batteries which is i and it makes sense to recycle them because the raw materials are like high grade ore um so people shouldn't think well they'd be this big pile of batteries now they're going to get recycled because the even a dead battery pack is worth about a thousand dollars so um but but this is what's needed for a sustainable energy future so we're going to try to take the set of actions that accelerate the day of and bring the day of a sustainable energy future sooner okay there's going to be a huge interest in your master plan when you when you publish that um meanwhile i just i would love to understand more what goes on in this brain of yours because it is it is a pretty unique one i want to play with your permission this very funny opening from snl saturday night live can we have the volume there actually please sorry it's an honor to be hosting saturday night live i mean that sometimes after i say something i have to say i mean that [Music] so people really know that i mean that's because i don't always have a lot of international variation in how i speak which i'm told makes for great comedy i'm actually making history tonight as the first person with asperger's to host snl [Applause] and i think you followed that up with at least the first person to admit it the first person to admit it but i mean so this was a great thing to say but i i would love to understand whether you know how you think of of asperger's like whether you can give us any sense of even you as a boy how what what the experience was or as you now understand with the benefit of hindsight can you talk about that a bit well i think i think everyone's experience is going to be somewhat different but i guess for me the social cues were not uh intuitive so i was just very bookish and i didn't understand this i guess others could sort of intuitively understand uh what watches meant by something i would just tend to take things very literally as just like the words as spoken word exactly what they meant but but then that didn't turn out to be wrong you can't they do not they're not simply saying exactly what they mean there's all sorts of other things that are meant it took me a while to figure that out um so i was you know bullied quite a lot um so i didn't i did not have a sort of happy childhood to be frank was quite quite rough um and um but i read a lot of books i read lots and lots of books and so that you know sort of gradually i sort of understood more from the books that i was reading and watched a lot of movies and you know just but it took it took me it took me a while to understand things that most people intuitively understand so i've wondered whether it's possible that that was in a strange way an incredible gift to you and and indirectly to many other people in as much as brains you know are plastic and they they they go where the action is and if in for some reason the external world and social cues which so many people spend so much time and energy and mental energy obsessing over if that is partly cut off isn't it possible that that is partly what gave you the ability to understand inwardly the world at a much deeper level than than most people do i suppose that's certainly possible um i think this may be some value also from a technology standpoint because i found it uh rewarding to spend all night programming computers um just by myself and i think most people most people don't enjoy typing strange symbols into a computer by themselves all night they think that's not fun but i thought it was i really liked it um so so i just programmed all night by myself and um i found that to be quite enjoyable um but but i think that is not uh normal [Music] so i mean it does you know i've thought a lot about it's a riddle to a lot of people of of how you've done this how you've repeatedly innovated in these different industries and it it does you know every entrepreneur sees possibility in the future and then acts to make that real it it feels to me like you see possibility just more broadly than almost anyone and can connect with so you see scientific possibility based on a deep understanding of physics and knowing what the fundamental equations are what the technologies are that are based on that science and where they could go you see technological possibility and then really unusually you combine that with economic possibility of like what it actually would cost is there a system you can imagine where you could affordably make that thing and that that sometimes you then get conviction that there is an opportunity here put those pieces together and you could do something amazing yeah i think one aspect of whatever condition i had um was i was just absolutely obsessed with truth just obsessed with truth and and so the obsession with truth is why i studied physics because physics attempts to understand the the truth the truth of the universe physics just it's just what are the provable truths of the universe um and and true and truths that have predictive power um so for me physics was sort of a very natural thing to study nobody made me study it it was intrinsically interesting to understand the nature of the universe and then computer science or information theory also to just i understand uh logic and and uh you know there's an also there's an argument that you know that you the that information theory is actually operating at a more fundamental level more fundamental level than than even physics um so uh just yeah um the physics and information theory uh were really interesting to me so when you say truth i mean it's it's not like some people so it's what you're talking about is the truth of the universe like the fundamental truths that drive the universe it's like a deep curiosity about what this universe is why we're here simulation why not you know we don't have time to go into that but i mean it's you're just deeply curious about what this is for what this is this whole thing yes i mean i think the why the why of things is very important um i i actually uh when i was a i don't know so young teens uh i i got quite depressed about the meaning of life um and i was trying to sort of understand the meaning of life looking at reading religious texts and and reading books on philosophy and i got into the german philosophers which is definitely not wise if you're a young teenager i have to say can be ripped out but dark so [Music] much better at as an adult i um and and then actually i ended up reading um the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is actually a book on philosophy just sort of disguised as a silly humor book but but actually the book it's actually a philosophy book and uh adams uh makes the point that it's actually the the question that is harder than the answer um you know this sort of makes a joke that the answer was 42. um that number does pop up a lot um and 420 is just 10 14 10 10 times 10 times more significant than 42. okay you know there's um you can make a triangle with 42 or 42 degrees and two 69s um so there's no such thing as a perfect triangle or is there but even more important than the answer is the questions that was the whole theme of that book i mean is that yeah basically how you see meaning then it's the pursuit of questions yeah so i have a sort of you know a proposal for a world view or a motivate a motivating philosophy which is to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe and the to agree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness uh biological and digital uh we will be better able to to uh ask these these questions to frame these questions and to understand why we're here how we got here what what the heck is going on and so that that is my driving philosophy is to expand the scope and scale of consciousness that we may better understand the nature of the universe elon one of the things that was most touching last week was uh was seeing you hang out with your kids um here's if i may um it looks vaguely like a ventriloquist dummy there [Laughter] i mean how do you know that's real um so that's x and and you know you're it was just a delight seeing seeing you hang out with him and what what what what's his future going to be i mean i don't mean him personally but the world he's going to grow up in what future do you believe he will grow up in well i mean a very digital future um a very a different world than i grew up in that's for sure um but i think we want to obviously do our absolute best to ensure that the future is good uh for everyone's children um and and that you know that the future is something that that you can look forward to and not feel sad about um you know you want to get up in the morning and be be excited about the future and we should fight for the things that make us excited about the future you know the future cannot it cannot just be that one miserable thing after another solving one sad problem after another there got to be things that get you excited like you're like you want to live these things are very important you should have more of it and it's not as if it's a done deal like it's all it's all to play for like the future may be horrible still there are scenarios where it is horrible but you you see a pathway to an exciting future both on earth and on mars and in our minds through artificial intelligence and so forth i mean in your in your heart of hearts do you really believe that you are helping deliver that exciting future for ex and for others i'm trying my hardest to do so i you know i love humanity and i think that we should fight for a good future for humanity and i think we should be optimistic about the future and fight to make that optimistic optimistic future happen [Music] i think that's that's the perfect place to close this thank you so much for spending time coming here and for the work that you're doing and good luck with finding a wise course through on twitter and everything else all right thank you hey guys [Music]

Channel: TED

Views: 11,180,598

Keywords: TEDTalk, TEDTalks, TED Talk, TED Talks, TED, Elon Musk, Twitter, Tesla, TED2022

Id: cdZZpaB2kDM

Length: 54min 45sec (3285 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022

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