FULL INTERVIEW: Elon Musk Sits Down With The Babylon Bee

so [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] [Music] these are the guys that run the show this is kyle our editor-in-chief this is creative director ethan nicole okay so i mean uh well i guess before we get started like uh maybe you guys can tell me like what's the you know how did the v get started and yeah and and uh yeah what's your deal and why do why are you in california that's way easier actually i'm much better at being interviewed so no problem yeah the view is just this little like christian humor site that we launched in 2016 and it was just like we spent 50 bucks on the domain name started writing jokes throwing them out there and it started to go big in conservative circles a couple years ago and that's just kind of where we got to where we are seth is our ceo he bought the site a few years ago from the original founder yeah he was original his name is adam ford he's in love with the company anymore uh he owns a piece of it he does not the bee now you you've seen that the you know the yeah that was unaffiliated no yeah yeah yeah okay so they do like real news but crazy it's like a backup plan it's like when satire is impossible because the world's too absurd then we just report on the absurdity over on not to be so you know plan b yeah yeah reality is we're greater than fiction yeah exactly often is so how many people at the be now yeah we've got uh probably a dozen full-timers now it's grown pretty fast a year ago it was three of us we have over we have like 25 people involved just not all full-time staff so you'd be surprised like with satire you don't have to have a writing staff like filling a room churning out articles all day long you can only handle so much satire every day you know like we're not people you don't need to publish an article every three minutes like fox news or daily wire or something like that so um we have a lot of part-time one of our writers here frank fleming is one of our writers um and he's got a full-time job he just writes for us on the side okay we'd love to have him full time yeah he lives in australia you live in austin okay yeah yeah and i'm a florida guy i have my head the headquarters are technically in south florida i'm in southeast florida yeah florida i'd love to get these guys to florida but it's hard to get people out of california it really is uh yeah it's more challenging than you think despite uh like california's the state of california doing everything it can to encourage people to leave yes yeah um i think you had one article about how gavin newsom is your whole salesman of the year yeah yeah yeah actually true that's actually true [Laughter] so you don't miss it then i know i mean there's certainly many aspects of california that i do like um most of my friends are still in california some of my best friends like california so yeah i do i do most many aspects to california especially my friends and it's beautiful and lots of cool things but increasingly difficult to get things done and california used to be the land of opportunity and now it is the has become and it's becoming more so the land of um [Music] sort of over regulation over litigation uh over taxation poop on the sidewalk and and scorn it's just that's what it's like it's not like thanks for the taxes it's like tate thanks for the texan hacksaw kicking the teeth let me flip the question though so that's kind of the story that be the bee started out as you know this little blog it took off it's kind of blown up into something like now we have a following including you like how how do we get on your radar people sharing our articles and you just saw them coming across your feed yeah um i'm not sure i saw it on twitter at one point the thoughts from the articles were quite quite funny um i wrote those okay um yeah i mean i i used to be much bigger fan of the of the onion but then the onion just seems to have gotten really politically correct um you know it's sort of gone a bit but in the sml direction it's somewhat leftist as you know it's it's basically it will it will not really make fun of anything on the left but it used to be much more even-handed than the onion um and um and then they just they just got the work mind virus yeah so uh to the point where the animal just was it used to be very funny and then it was not that funny you know snl i used to be a huge fan of snl but you know i still think they have some some occasional good stuff but it's just become i think you've written some some articles about this um you know snl had many many if not most of the snl episodes are kind of a a moral lecture on why we're bad human beings right uh instead of comedy yeah so and again uh won't make fun of anything on the left really like you know they'll beat up on ted cruz 17 000 times and you're like okay we get it and often because he's made fun of someone on the left he'll make fun of some on the left and then they jump on him for that it's like a defensive thing yeah yeah exactly so it's it's just um there are just a lot of no-fly zones uh with a lot of comedy um and uh and then and then you realize it's like wait a second is is a comedy is is the comedy getting at an essential truth or or trying to or is there is there a propaganda element or is it trying to push you in a particular direction or or getting getting to an essential truth that is humorous and when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that that is that is humorous then you know it's it's just not that funny right now see that's exactly the criticism we get from the left the criticism from the left is that that's what we're doing with our humor is that we're trying to push a narrative neglecting the truth that's literally what the new york times says that we are far right misinformation disguised as satire right right so there's a it's almost where you're standing jealousy yeah it's almost based on where you're standing but how it's based on where you're standing yeah i i mean i'd say the b is probably it's moderately right um it's not it's not but it's not certainly not far right that my my impression is not that uh i would say that the b is not probably it wouldn't be actually the b is fully centrist um but it is certainly not far right um if one is fully left and 10 is fully right the b seems to be at six 6.5 uh towards okay right that ish bernie sanders elizabeth warren babylon b hitler or somewhere on that scale yeah it's it's not but you know it's it's uh i mean the the b is i think less right than than say the onion is is left for example you know so the the i think would be more left than that the b is right right righteous or whatever yeah right no i don't know we'll have to put that on our wikipedia page righteous propaganda you know you talked about the wilk mind virus and i was wondering if you could decipher this tweet of yours for me because i'm not a programmer you wrote trace route woke underscore mind underscore virus what does that mean okay so traceroute is a networking command to so if you want to figure out a path to a particular server or domain you'd say traceroute or in windows trace rt that would show you the path to a particular source server with an ip address or domain name and and it would show basically all the hops that that it goes through um and the latency between each each hop and so i know some of those words yeah um so traceroute be yeah we like where'd it come from yeah where did the virus come from what is its origin so did this work did this command work or not did you find your comments read the comments and see and see all right it is a prevalent mind virus and um arguably one of the biggest threats to wine civilization also not having enough kids right yeah i think most people if you just have to look at the birth rate statistics um you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year um and and then you could say like is this is the birth rate trending down or up and it's been trending down basically almost everywhere so if you look at the birth rate last year you know you know how many adults will be in 20 years because that's how many babies were born the trend is like you don't have to be some master of statistician or something like that um you could just look look at kids one last year trending to well below replacement rate uh and a lot of countries have been a well-veil replacement rate for a long time well the concern is that if you have kids then they'll contribute to climate change and they'll kill the earth right that's the leftist concern is that we're overpopulating the earth and we're going to kill it are you trying to overpopulate the earth so that we can go to mars and take over and take over mars is this a deliberate strategy the earth is far from overpopulated um uh far far from overpopulated um so the you know the the thing that's necessary to minimize the chemical change to the atmosphere and oceans is to move to sustainable energy generation and consumption so the three elements of a sustainable energy future are sustainably energy generation primarily through solar wind some geothermal hydro and nuclear although they're shutting down all the nuclear power stations so yeah you can sort of cross that one of the list which they shouldn't be doing they should just keep they should keep moving um they're really unless a nuclear power plant is in a region of uh major national disasters instability or something yeah yeah you don't want to be like you know subject to massive um natural disasters because obviously that could be a problem but if you're you know like say germany or france or whatever you don't have those so the nuclear power is very safe um but anyway the the long-term um the heavy lifting on energy generation will be solar followed by wind and um and you really don't need a very large land area to generate enough power to power for example united states so it's on the order of you know roughly a little over 100 miles by 100 miles a second of land with solar solar panels would power the entire united states so like a little corner of utah or texas like um it can power the whole country so anyway so uh it's really not that hard the solar incidence is a gigawatt per square kilometer uh if for most neutrons can do some calculations most nuclear power plants yeah that's right it's it's it's a kilowatt per square per square k per square meter and there's a million square you know million square meters in a square kilometer so um it's a pretty simple uh math so and then you get you get like maybe 20 efficiency on that so call it like a net power generation of 200 megawatts per square kilometer now if you take most nuclear power plants there's usually a a pretty clear area around a nuclear power plant because people don't usually want to live right next to a nuclear power plant so um the area of most nuclear power plants that is uninhabited if if covered in solar panels would generate more power than the nuclear power plant and then you also then the second element that's needed are batteries to store solar and wind because uh the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time so the enter the intermittency of uh solar and wind requires battery storage for continuous power uh so that's the second part of the of the sort of second the second pillar of sustainable energy and the third is uh sustainable transport so that means uh electric uh cars boats planes and then ironically the one thing that you can't really make electric is rockets you know the same involved in that but but although you can over time use solar power to generate fuel by pulling co2 out of the atmosphere combining it with h2o creating ch4 which is methane and o2 oxygen and rockets are mostly oxygen by mass so over time you can make everything basically solar power so you're working on some of those problems but the problem of wokeness specifically you mentioned that's like a mind virus and it's destructive uh and why do you think wokeness is so interested in your opinions too um but you know like i mean generally i think we should be aiming for like a positive society and uh you know that it should be okay to you know be humorous uh like you know like we should we should like like workness basically wants to make comedy illegal which is not cool we've experienced that i mean chappelle like what the flower bed i mean try to shut down chappelle come on man that's crazy um so um you know so do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation uh and hate basically uh and no forgiveness right yeah [Music] at its heart awokeness is divisive um exclusionary um and hateful it's it's it basically gives mean people a reason a a a a it gives them a shield to be to be mean and cruel armored and false virtue what do you think i'd agree with that yeah yeah i mean we've obviously seen that from the left you know just ourselves you know the left is almost this religion now where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them you know for them it's like you're making fun of god or salvation you know so they're almost the new religious right in our view yeah he agreed with me [Laughter] well you were pretty mean to uh senator warren though on twitter recently you slammed her man please don't call the manager on me senator karen she struck first yeah obviously right yes she did actually called me a freeloader yeah um anna grifter doesn't pay taxes basically um and i'm literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year ever and she doesn't pay taxes basically at all and her tax and her salary is paid for by the taxpayer like me could you even use could you use turbo attorney would that even work if you could die by irony she would be she would be dead fiery could kill what would happen if you walked into an h r block to file your taxes like could they handle your case my taxes are actually not that complicated um i do not have any offshore accounts i don't have any uh tax shelters uh uh i i have a i have basically a tesla and spacex stock um and um tesla's publicly traded so information is public and spacex is you know ac corp that is audited uh you know it has outside orders so it these it's it'll with that uh outside investors so it is they're also it's everything is extremely transparent um there are there is no uh there are no elaborate sort of tax avoidance schemes or or anything like that so hr block could could easily do my taxes you know i don't need a html block i could do it yeah you know it would like probably take me a few hours to do my taxes it's very basic did you sell that stock in tesla because of the twitter poll uh in part you made up your mind that you're already going to do that before the twitter poll um there i i have some test options that are expiring next year that so i needed to exercise those options no matter what and and i was like okay i'll move forward and exercise those options um so that that's only would be part of it uh no matter what uh but then over and above that i sold incremental stock uh to uh try to get up to the 10 level so just the option exercise loan would not get to 10 so i sold a stock that should be roughly make my total uh tesla share sale roughly 10 is the most annoying thing in the world people asking you questions like this about your personal finances no one ever asks me what stock i'm selling or or why i made so much money last year i mean i'm the third richest man on my street which is which is pretty good pretty good i mean i'm not sure it's it's all that productive or interesting you know essentially all of my net worth is uh it's just in spacex and tesla stock these two companies that that i helped create uh and have run for now almost 20 years um have done a lot of useful things um spacex is the launch is more paleo to orbit than the rest of the world combined and has a global internet system called starlink and and is the primary provider well the only us provider of uh astronaut transport to the space station um we publish six to eight satire articles a day some of them are funny i mean pretty good so so spacex uh yeah it transports us and as well as non-us astronauts to the space station that was previously the u.s was dependent on on russia uh who's doing a good job but charging kind of crazy money proceed so as with spacex the the cost per astronaut dropped dramatically and and the money was you know went to jobs in the us so that's what why people you know think spacex is valuable uh tesla uh i mean the annoyance though of like people uh holding it against you that you've had success holding it against you that you have wealth um you know viewing billionaires as evil and you know you're not doing enough to give back you know you have like the elizabeth warren thing that you haven't paid your fair share i mean that's you know it's that's got to be kind of aggravating yeah i think it's just important to understand like like what is this wealth uh it's not like some it's not like i've got like some some mashup massive cash balance uh i've my cash balances are very very low and at least until i sold stock which is really the first time i've actually sold stock in any meaningful way was this quarter i simply had loans against my my stock so i i i if tesla spacex went bankrupt i would go bankrupt too immediately so um it's not realized this is what you're saying yeah it's not no it's like people it's just like it's like you know i built these two companies and it was extremely difficult to build them like massively painful and difficult rewarding too but also but massively painful difficult um and uh and and i didn't i didn't sell the stock in the companies um you know i i you know my my sort of impression was that you know you you shouldn't take money off the table or you shouldn't you shouldn't take stock off the table and de-risk things that a captain should go down you know with their ship so so it's like okay like you know i don't want to take money off the table and then then if the companies fail then i will be i'll be sort of enriched while investors suffer and that does not seem right so anyway so i that's the reason i didn't sell is is i could easily have diversified and protected myself financially if if spacex would tell them went bankrupt but i did not and spacex and tesla came very close to bankruptcy many times even when bankruptcy was literally weeks away i did not sell stock uh and then the companies became valuable not tesla's value is basically because value is not it's not up to me it's up to investors and they decided it was worth tesla's worth trillion dollars in the public market so and i own twenty percent of the company so so you're not apologizing right now you're not going to look into the camera and say i'm so sorry in the camera right now i'm just trying to explain like i don't think people necessarily understand they don't yeah yeah that uh this this is not you know that some function of sort of hoarding or something it's it's simply that you know i'm 20 company that became very valuable as decided by external investors and so twenty percent of a trillion dollar evaluation is 200 billion dollars um and i i've you know i've said at various times that i think the stock price is too high but the investors just ignored that i'm like okay i literally said it's too high um and they just kept making that price higher so i'm like tell them our value is too high so anyway so just that's uh but like i said this is not like uh my so-called wealth is it's not some it's not some deep mystery it's simply what is my ownership percentage of spacex and tesla multiply that by the valuation that's my worth it's super simple and my taxes are super simple and i have no like i said no offshore accounts no sort of clever tax evasion or anything like that and i don't i don't draw a salary or any cash salary or bonus from the companies at all so um again i thought that was like morally good to not do that um and so there were there were like there was one year i think 2018 where where i i didn't pay any tax uh but but that's because i didn't have any income um and and and i did have a little bit of income but i'd actually overpaid taxes i think in 2017. so i paid too much tax and so i got like i basically netted that out in in 2018 because i paid too much tax in 2017. accidentally unless you sell stock there are no realized gains so uh so then i was like well should i sell like i i like what am i supposed to do why send shares to the government somehow i don't know if you can even do that yeah um so there was like well like unless i sell shares there's not there's no there's no actual mechanism to pay tax so then i was like well should i sell 10 percent you know to in order to pay tax and and i sort of asked twitter and they're like on balance they said yes and so i um so i i sold enough stock to get to around ten percent plus the option exercise stuff and uh i very i try to be extremely literal um so you don't generally need to read between lines you can just read the lines [Music] so that's it as the as the fattest guy here i i want to know what's when are you gonna make the candy company because you said on twitter that you're making a candy company and you're the closest thing to willy wonka that this culture has it could be willy wonka i didn't say it would you say that he said i'm starting a canadian company it's going to be warren buffett um but you did say i am super super serious i think if you put two supers before sirius that makes sense and that's like you're probably not serious you know just uh for satire writers out there yeah um i thought that locked him in is like definitely syria he's explaining jokes to it yeah yeah yeah it's just a guy said let me tell you how jokes accept our words um you know i was just obviously i was just like making fun of warren buffett who's like really he's got this like candy company and stuff so um and um that was my one question now i i i did actually i did actually experiment with um trying to find some compelling candy that would be like i don't know maybe much better than other candy um we tried various candy options but i didn't find any i couldn't figure out a candy that was like just way better than other candy um like a little bit better but not a lot better and so it was like unless it's like really a great product then you looked into this yeah yeah we tried a whole bunch of different candies and uh and it was like there's not anything like that's obviously just way better uh so um i don't want to just have like a pretty good candies if there's like a great candy yeah some aces some candy that's aces um but you know we don't need another sort of like pretty good candy yeah yeah there's plenty of the south yeah yeah what does that look like when you like suddenly get an idea like we should make candy you like you just call somebody like how does what what are the steps that suddenly take place when you're like because you do so many things i'm just fascinated by the what that process looks like rockets tell them you got a guy you call jim i want to make candy make it happen um i think i did ask for you know people on twitter to send me candy that they thought was good it's deployed and i was like well what if some of those candy is like you know it's poisonous or something but whatever like you know candy from strangers on the internet yeah it could go wrong that's just not 100 safe um but uh i did try a whole bunch of candy scent from strangers what's your favorite candy well there was like a a pretty good like peanut like some pretty good peanut brittle ones or like that peanut butter with a bunch of other stuff in it and some pretty good chocolates but but nothing that was like blew me away so um and and then there were people at spacex and tesla that sent me some candy options but not nothing that was it's not like i care about starting companies like if there's like there are if there's a very compelling product or service then that's the thing that is important not the company your company is just an assemblage of people to create a compelling product or service and if a company does not provide great products and services it should not exist there's no point in the company for the sake of being a company that's pointless companies should only exist to provide great products and services a company is just just literally a group of people so do we have to close or stay open i think there's a lot of there's a lot of companies out there that probably should just be disbanded because they don't make uh compelling products and services they're spoilers and those people better that those people do something else i think on that topic i mean the question that i just like really i feel so unqualified to be interviewing you right now i think we all do why are we here like what what are you doing okay i'm not the one who asked for the podcast you guys did just to be clear i'm not pushing the podcast on you you guys came here we just we were like i will stop by you know texas yeah just to be clear who was asking her i'm not i'm not like you know i know i know exactly hold a gun to your head for this podcast you could be on cnn right now yeah you know john a real news organization yeah i'm just throwing it out there i don't know unfortunately i just you know haven't um you know i guess uh you know what what was it you said the the requirement for being a cnn driver cnn is uh are you are you a pervert yeah i'm not perverted enough yeah i guess i don't know not a big pedophile fan you know bad mommy headlines better than i do [Laughter] i think you know a lot of us fantasize about if we had lots and lots and lots of money what we do and you've done a lot of the things that like a lot of us fantasize about build cool robots gonna go to mars we're gonna fix traffic but most of us also think we've become batman have you ever thought about like what would that really look like to become or would you go batman or iron man around what because crime is on the right that's a fruit bat or an insect bat i like the dragon ball big scary you know because most bats are either fruit or they carry a lot of diseases yeah yeah they eat fruit bugs like fruit batman intake batman i need to read that spin-off comic it's a strange choice of uh creature to emulate you know you take a different animal like maybe monkeys that play pong with their brains man [Music] monkey man monkey man yeah exactly just very agile they're the smartest animal right they can just uh swing monkey man that batman is more is more like monkey man really yeah because he's like he's swinging around and very agile um climbing up things and yeah throwing a battering is more likely for batman like why can't he fly if he's batman that's gonna fly yeah that's right he just yeah he glides very effectively though okay so he's really yeah but that's like a frank's more like flying [Laughter] less intimidating i guess yeah oh no squirrel man we're he's going to get us not squirrel man again yeah without making the grappling hook he has that thing's sweet we need those you can make probably make that yeah yeah sure you can make a grappling hood um i i mean like like when you it's like they sort of skip the parts where like batman's always on the top of the building but like once you get to the ground floor how do you get back to the top of the building yeah it's like you're going to huffing and puffing you know yeah yeah you never see how do you get the top of a skyscraper even if you've got a grappling hook i mean how big is your grappling hook like 50 stories like how big is that cable you know it's not really feasible um so you just got to like run up the stairs or take the elevator so it's like how do you get back up to the top of the skyscraper in gotham city it's always like tough with some tall buildings so iron man then he'd be like iron man yeah iron man because you're good at calculating the cost of things and stuff like that so like would it be cheaper to become batman iron man or just pay every criminal that you encounter a salary to just stop being a criminal i think they're trying to have to be um irony man irony man um i just defeat villains using the power of irony it's like oh too much irony i can't stand it please no stop the irony i can't handle it anymore i give up i give up too much irony that'd be rough that'd be awesome that'd be totally awesome that would be awesome yeah don't make me use irony again cheaper too what are your thoughts on the metaverse which takes technology to the next level and puts us in like a virtual world like do you see that as being dangerous hopeful for humanity like what's your view on that maybe we're in the metaverse right now it's just mata versus all the way down um i don't know if i necessarily buy into this metaphor stuff although people talk to me a lot about it web 3. sure you can put a tv on your nose i'm not sure that makes you in the metaverse you know um it's like weird like you know when i grew up it's like don't sit too close to tv it's going to ruin your eyesight right and now we got like tv is like literally right here i'm like uh what is that good for you i mean have you tried these games you know the art oculus stuff yeah they're okay you know but like it gives you motion sickness if you try to walk around like you can do a video game on your sort of computer console or whatever and and you can you can be in a like a first person game and and uh and move rapidly and not get set motion sickness but if you try to do that in a beat with vr goggles you get motion sickness it's like weird so you have to like teleport around with it's okay so that doesn't it doesn't feel like like that's the answer necessarily um into the brain so you don't have to have the glasses there you go yeah a neurolink long-term sophisticated neural link could um put you fully fully in a virtual reality thing um so i guess what i'm getting at is yeah exactly what could go wrong like the the negative implications the kind of dystopian implications that some are drawing out like i think it was i think jack dorsey was really critical of the whole metaverse idea you see problems with people i don't know living in a virtual world and leaving a physical world for for that and i don't see someone strapping a friggin t you know screen to their face all day uh and not wanting to ever leave there seems no way i mean does it feel like that to you it doesn't seem like that to me yeah it's like it gets uncomfortable to have this thing strapped to your head the whole time it definitely needs to be lighter yeah even if the weight i mean if it was like super light it will still be like i don't know it's not so like you won't be there all day so you know i think we're far from disappearing into the metaverse uh this sounds just kind of buzz wordy and you know i don't feel like hit like okay is this you know i've just gotten too old and like am i like one of those people who was like dismissing the internet whatever 95 as being like some fad or something that's never going to amount to anything although i didn't i was like saying like 95 was literally the internet is going to be transform humanity and going to be like you know prior information basically just went by osmosis like unless a person called another person or carried a letter physically to another person like how did you get information around the vast majority of information was literally person to person then they had like the fax machine and stuff but it's just like the way the metaverse is being sold right now is so underwhelming it's like you're going to be in it's like zoom meetings but there's an avatar for the person next to you you know and you maybe maybe get to design your avatar like i said i don't i don't feel like you know someone some old codger sort of dismissing the internet in 95 is not amounting to anything so there's some danger of that that's the case but uh i i currently am unable to see a compelling metaverse situation or web 3 sounds like more marketing than reality i don't get it you know and maybe i will so but i don't get it yet let me put that away it's definitely not monkeys playing pong let's just put it that way yeah i just like to advertise for white chloe yeah quite quote real men drink white clothes can we get our guys on the phone with white club sponsor after the fact if you want us to leave that in yeah then you won't pay us was it you know this is the first white call the first white claw ever drunk on the babylon v podcast so that's great you hit a point in your life where you you know you made plenty of money and you could do whatever what drives you to this campaign yeah it could be slipping my ties on right on a tropical island uh i've been wrong all this time why am i working 90 hours a week this is crazy because i'm always passing me the idea of like i've made it people always want to say be able to say i've made it i've arrived yeah and like how do you you know you hit those little islands in your life and you actually have to break yourself up that mindset and what are ways that you break yourself of that mindset and keep on going i didn't put all this effort into building spacex and tesla because i thought there were easy ways to make money i mean anyone who starts a car company thinking it's easy way to make money as a fool there are only two car companies that have not gone bankrupt in the history of the united states and that's ford and tesla and tesla came within inches of going bankrupt multiple times as does spacex so right and like who starts rocket company think it's going to be successful um i thought about i mean both both those companies i i thought had less than a 10 chance of success and i thought it was overwhelmingly likely that i would lose the money that i made from paypal you know i came to north america when i was 17 just by myself um and i had like like a few thousand dollars in in traveller's checks back when travelers tracks were a thing you know um in canadian dollars i landed in montreal um i have some family in canada uh and my mom's uncle lived in montreal but like we did we didn't know his phone number so i landed montreal and my mom says i just got a letter back from my uncle he's in minnesota or something so i'm like okay i don't know what to do now so i just stayed in youth hostel and like bought a bus take it across canada and i worked in various like odd jobs and stuff worked on my on my mom's cousin's farm wheat farm in saskatchewan for six weeks that's where i had my 18th birthday actually i worked in the lumber mall chainsawed logs and did various on jobs and and then went to college in canada for a couple years i paid my own way through college by the way so but in canada it's like easier because the college is more subsidized and i was a canadian citizen through my mom so and i got some scholarships and loans and stuff and and then i applied to the university of pennsylvania and uh didn't think i'd be able to go because tuition is really high but they gave me a scholarship and loans and stuff so i was able to go there i graduated with about a hundred thousand dollars in student debt and um i was going to do grad studies at stanford and decided to put that on hold to try starting an internet company um i actually i tried to get a job at netscape but they didn't i'd send my resume and i get a response so i was like okay i guess i should i can't get a job at the there are only a few internet companies and that can get a job at any of them so i was like i guess i want to do something internet got to start my own company but i ended up writing the first maps and directions on the internet i wrote personally the maps directions yellow pages white pages on a puny computer like with hardly any so you had to be like the code had to be super tight i even have some patents on like maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and stuff from from ages ago they're lapsed now but that that company ended up getting bought by by compact for about 300 million dollars i own seven percent of the company so i got like 20 million from that put most of it into uh x.com which merged with confinity to create paypal and then i got about 180 million dollars from that and i put all of that into spacex tesla and solarcity i just basically kept you know kept all the chips on the table and just like let's play another round but most people take the trips off the table or at least some of their chips and uh and then spacex and tesla ended up being valuable and that's where i am but the the reason for spacex and tesla is you know tesla if you say like what is what is the how would you assess the historical good of tesla i'd say it's the degree to which tesla accelerated sustainable energy and i've been interested in electric cars for a long time um since maybe high school or certainly early college my original interest in electric vehicles was not so much due to environmental concerns but rather from the uh concern that we'd run out of oil eventually and or become extremely scarce and expensive and then a civilization would collapse because we can drive cars or you know run power plants and stuff so so we needed some form of sustainable energy generation and consumption or where civilization is going to collapse so that was my original interest in electric vehicles and solar energy and and then i do think there's um some risk of uh negatively affecting the climate uh you know as you increase the co2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere this you increase the risk of something uh going wrong um i i i'm not like in the camp of of the super alarmist uh global warming i like you know like i think like i don't think we're like um screwed because of like the the current parts per million of co2 in the ocean's atmosphere i think like this is actually not not a terrible level however the there's so much inertia in the direction of mining and burning hydrocarbons that you know the the world is still over overwhelmingly dependent on mining and burning hydrocarbons um so you know if this continues and you start really driving up the co2 in the oceans and atmosphere then there's this increased risk of accelerating climate change basically warming up the oceans and um and raising the sea level so so i think that's like it's just i think that's probably just not a wise risk to take since we will in any case uh have to transition to sustainable energy long term because we will eventually run out of oil and coal to minor burn uh then why run the experiment to see if you know to see if something bad will happen with a high co2 concentration in the ocean's atmosphere like it's a pointless experiment like we know we have to get to some uh sustainable energy economy it's total logical like so i think there's we should try to get there sooner so as not to run the risk of climate change it would not climate change would not be catastrophic for civilization but it would be very disruptive humans love living right on the ocean so it's like we're almost like a like a thermometer it's like it's like if we were living right on the beach okay so uh this is like so even small changes in the sea level in sea level will put a lot of houses underwater against little little changes not enough to be vague we just we've just inherently created civilization as highly sensitive to changes in temperature a lot of politicians who are alarmist about this stuff buy homes right on the water though don't they that's true yeah i mean i i'm not sort of into like vilifying the oil and gas industry because i think i think the the reality is like if uh if we don't have oil and gas right now civilization would collapse and everyone will be starving so we obviously need oil and gas right now it'd be absurd to just stop it like it's not not feasible um but but i do think we should be trying to accelerate progress towards a sustainable energy future uh not slow it down you know i think it's just a sensible thing to do to to try to move faster to a sustainable energy economy uh rather than slower um because that reduces the risk of the climate experiment and like i said since we know we have to get to a sustainable energy economy anyway why run this experiment it's it's just not smart anyway so so the fundamental good of tesla i think is by you know should be measured by how by how many years did tesla accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy um 10 years 20 years you know that's like the fundamental good of the company but to ethan's point he's asking like why not like is that is that your is that your answer for why you keep going is because these are these things make a difference they make a difference ultimately for the flourishing of humanity for the longevity of humanity is that why you're not on a beach somewhere sipping my ties or white claws yeah i don't actually drink a lot of white qualifier this is not about like trying to enrich myself um i do not live a life of conspicuous consumption i work you know very long hours and but i think i think what tells us is doing is important to the future and that's that's why i keep doing it and i think you know it's it's something i think is uh tesla increases the probability that the future will be good for humanity and and then for spacex um i think i think uh it's important that we take the actions like that we become a space bearing civilization and a multi-planet species this is an exciting inspiring future you know you need to have things that when you wake up in the morning you're like you're excited about the future why live if it's all about solving problems of being miserable like why live um so they've got to be things that are that are inspiring that like you know get you in the heart and i think space is one of those things so you know look at the apollo program and you know sending people to the moon in 69 and wasn't that a great thing for all of humanity great thing and if you ask people like one of what are some of the greatest things that humanity's ever done that would be one of them i think er you know around the world people would agree with that you know if you believe it really happened yes i do get that question this is um yeah we we went to the moon not just once but but several times and um i think the russians would have called us out on that one if it wasn't true you know uh to say the least among among this is like the yeah it's we went to the we went to the moon the russians didn't like us at the time yeah but so you know it's not a huge fan of it they wouldn't have like they were looking at us through telescopes like is this real or why you know uh they would have a bubblegum if it wasn't that's for sure there's a huge you know victory you know ideological victory for the united states and western civilization so but anyway the the point is like we we want to have an exciting inspiring future and and one where we are space spring civilization and multi-planet species i think is a much more exciting and inspiring future than one where we are forever confined to earth and never go back to the moon and and the moon was our high water mark and that's all we ever did that's depressing and and there's also from a long-term basis if we're a multi-planet species it's like life insurance for life itself not just for humans but for for all the creatures on earth um because we bring them with us and and they can't build spaceships so you know we are we're in effect the steward of life um and you know we can make a we can make mars like a you know another planet with life on it um you know it is you know uh it's probably a dangerous analogy to use but it it's a bit like noah's ark but you know we bring more than two of every creature because it's a little incestuous frankly um yeah i mean like how's this work you know second generation and did he hate the dinosaurs like what's uh [Laughter] why why was it like after the dinosaurs it's like pro-incest battle dinosaurs i don't get it and it would have to be a very big vote so but there's you know it's a metaphor perhaps i don't know um yeah but so anyway so like there's there's some some risk especially over a long period of time that so many calamities would happen to earth and if we're just in one planet that would be the end of life itself and certainly the the sun the sun is slowly expanding so uh you know the earth are roughly four and a half billion years old some people might disagree with that but it appears to be that way um uh and um in roughly half a billion years the sun will expand to big make earth probably uninhabitable in a billion years definitely uninhabitable so basically if intelligent life had take taken 10 percent longer to evolve on earth then it would never evolved at all because it would be destroyed because the oceans would boil and and they would we wouldn't be able to exist so i mean no matter what the universal end in heat death though right eventually so it's all futile to some extent if you go far enough um yeah i mean i think the if if heat death is the outcome of the universe it really all is all about the journey like you know they said like you know the journey is is is uh half the fun is the journey or whatever well if he death is the end of the universe the journey is all the fun you know can we just evolve heat resistance become like lava beings it's not it's not it's cold it cools eventually with entropy and i'm not a scientist entropy the ultimate he thought the devil was bad try entropy yeah okay try getting away from that but yeah i mean the yes i mean technically the being a multi-planet species would increase the probable lifespan of of civilization and and life as we know it um so i mean we humans don't live forever so but just because we don't live forever does not mean that civilization cannot live much longer than we do a civilization lives much longer than any individual human so this is not about like escaping to mars this is simply i mean i i will die probably long before moz is a self-sustaining civilization it's just i think something we should we should do in order to have a much longer probable lifespan of civilization and it's interesting and exciting and and mars is like us it's like an essential next step to like there are these like you know uh filters they're called like the great filters and because you have to say like where are the aliens you know it's like the fermi paradox where are the aliens if the universe is 13.8 billion years old shouldn't they be everywhere by now and i'm not aware of any evidence for aliens people ask me about that too uh we're the aliens i'm like man if anyone would know about evidence of aliens it would be me and i i've seen nothing so i think it may have been called sagan who said you know there's like we're either alone in in the galaxy or there are a lot of aliens and and each answer is arguably equally terrifying um it's like it's like hey we found it aliens are on their way uh too bad it's the invasion fleet um you know um so i i don't know it's like where are they where are the aliens like maybe there aren't any endless galaxy um and maybe the what we have here is a very very rare situation um you know a belief a brief flickering of consciousness in the die like a little candle in a vast darkness and we should not let that little candle go out so my dad's a rocket scientist at bowling and he had a question engineer well whatever when people say rocket scientists they really mean rocket engineer okay yeah so he's a rocket engineer and he says at what mach number does starship endure max q maximum dynamic pressure how much pressure is that does that make any sense to you uh yeah so uh yeah max q maximum dynamics pressure is is when you're at um a combination of speed and atmospheric density such that the uh the wind force on the rocket is is the highest and so as you climb higher and higher the atmospheric density decays exponentially um and so you hit this point of the combination of velocity and air density which is maximum dynamic pressure maximum q um and uh this this is mostly a function of thrust to weight so if you have a low thrust weight rocket you will have a typically a lower max q um and if you have a high thrust weight rocket you'll have a higher max q if you do not throttle down and so uh and it also kind of depends on on what trajectory you're flying are you flying a low with over trajectory uh single burn insertion or or eight eight uh say a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a lower perigee then you'll have a higher a higher max q because you will spend you'll spend more time going uh sort of horizontal instead of vertical um getting to orbit is mostly about you what getting to what it is is about your your velocity parallel to the other surface so around mark 23 to mark 25 uh you're you know so roughly 23 ish times the speed of sound is when you reach uh orbit orbital velocity roughly 17 000 miles an hour so um and and that's that's what it means to go up and stay up you only need height in order to get out of the high density portion of the atmosphere so that you don't slow down um none of that was correct i disagree yeah i disagree i agree i give a totally different answer i don't have time to get into it [Laughter] yeah so i mean typically um a rocket is going to hit max q uh somewhere between mach 1.4 and 1.8 and um and and that q level is going to be maybe 400 to 800 pounds per square foot um uh now a starship is intended to have a higher a higher thrust weight because with a fully reusable rocket the the cost of propellant starts to become significant whereas if you have an expandable rocket or a partially reusable rocket the cost of propellant is is tiny compared to the cost of the rocket so you actually want a higher thrust to weight to minimize cost per ton to orbit with a fully reusable rocket than you would for an expendable so probably starship will have at least a 1.3 if not closer to a 1.5 thrust to weight which would uh if without throttling down which aspirationally we would not throw down uh would would have a quite a high q um maybe as high as uh a thousand uh or even 1200 pounds per square foot um so that's uh and probably probably you know uh at work velocity i mean i guess uh mach 1.4 to 1.5 something like that okay well my dad very much enjoyed that answer i'm sure i think as a male feminist though one thing about the rockets is the phallic symbology what would it take to get some more vaginal shaped rockets just you know for well equality um can we make that happen aerodynamics dynamics is going to give you a serious answer share similar properties whether biological or mechanical okay good answer that's all i got on a rocket science uh robots yeah teslabot so you're creating robots have you ever seen a sci-fi movie in your life never okay i thought maybe not you know like because things came out what's the worst that could happen yeah um the robots are not the the scary part the scary part is uh agi or artificial general intelligence digital super intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence um and um you know if if if there's a digital super intelligence that is just vastly smarter than the smartest human um we could lose control of it and then it it could it could just it could do something bad potentially um these things are just probabilities they're not certainties um so it's not the road like it's not the robots it's the digital super intelligence to be concerned about i think this is definitely one of the issues that we need to be concerned about as an existential risk i think we should have a regulatory agency that oversees uh advanced ai um because you know generally like i do think there are important roles for the government and and one of those roles is in regulation of industry to make sure that any any that the company is not making short cuts that endanger the public so you know the faa does has done done generally a great great job of ensuring that aircraft are safe you know it's literally safer to fly on an american airline or any any sort of airline overseen by the faa uh than it is to live in your house just to give people a sense of well you're more likely to die your probable lifespan is less if you lived your entire life in your house or than if you lived on a plane because in your house you can get murdered by a spouse get bitten by a laos but if you live in a plane in afghanistan that's not maybe that's the case well if it's not if if it's not overseen by um a a uh regulator that like the faa then then then it's not necessarily gonna meet the same safety standards what if your spouse is on the plane well i think so the planes have you know they have means of stuffing like you can't it's hard to bring a gun on a plane yeah um and uh even a knife or even a bottle of lotion at this point you know so your spouse couldn't bring any of those things let me just punch you with it or stab you with a sport you know plastic spoke you know it's like hard to kill someone with a spork um so yeah and then planes also have like the flight attendants are trained in first aid they've got like uh they can do cpr they've got defibrillators uh if if somebody's having medical issues they'll immediately land the plane and the ambulance will meet you at the airport so uh and you're not gonna like you know drown the bathtub or get electrocuted by a toaster or you know have your house burned down or because of the toaster by the way toasters cause a lot of houses to burn down yeah it's one of the one of the main causes of house burning down are like toasters and dryers there's also a decent chance there's a doctor on the plane at any given time right that happens all the time like a doctor is like treating somebody on a plane in your house you know yeah so planes are very safe and and i mean generally speaking the fda does a good job of overseeing uh food and drugs you know this might be a bit of a conservative bias on you know where uh at times there's an asymmetry with the fda where um something that that could help a lot of people is not approved because it it might hurt a small number of people so that there's a sort of like a a bit of a a bit of an asymmetry uh like so regulators the in general can have a bit of an asymmetry uh where they are they're punished a lot for something going wrong but not rewarded enough for going something going right um so that's just a general uh challenge with the the punishment and reward of regulators they can be a little conservative so but i think there should be a regulatory agency to oversee um you know anything that is a danger to the public um so and i think agi could be an interest in public so therefore should should have some oversight um and normally regulatory agencies are very reactive um so like for seat belts for example which lack of seatbelts caused i don't know 10 million deaths worldwide i mean a massive number and the car industry fought seat belts for a very long time and uh and eventually after many deaths the defender department of transport nitsa which oversees his regulatory body for cars said all cars have to have seat belts but you can't just not have a seat belt but that i know it took 15 years or something or maybe longer uh maybe 20 years before seat belts were mandated so and then you know baby seats are a lot a lot of kids and babies died because they're just like sitting on this you know on a seat with nothing i mean i i kind of grew up sitting on a seat with nothing yeah we'd ride in the bed of the truck yeah seriously running the better build pickup truck survivor bias or something i was fine but yeah i was fine but if there was an accident it was game over you know yeah um so so you do see some good in government with when it comes to regulation and stuff like that but you don't generally think the government can spend your money more effectively than you can yeah i mean i would say like generally i'm like i think pretty moderate i'm not like sort of an extreme libertarian um i think there are roles for the government uh that makes sense like i don't think we necessarily want like a private army uh or private police force or private yeah i think there's you know uh certain things that that are probably the the right role for the government but anything done by the government is going to be inefficient um because the government is a monopoly like people that don't like corporations should not somehow think that the government is much is much better because the government is a corporation in the limit it is the ultimate corporation with a monopoly on violence so um it's like i think you know the right role for the government is is like to be uh acting a regulatory capacity um and but we should aspire to have the government be be a a limited actor in the economy um so you know you could say like what percentage of economic output should be uh governed you know um and maybe maybe a third or something like that you know once you start getting above 50 government i think that's problematic so um you can look at countries like east eastern west germany north and south korea and there's you know there was essentially an arbitrary line drawn out to divide the countries and east germany was like kind of 100 government west germany was i don't know probably at least 40 government they're like you know relatively socialist and yet the gdp per capita of that you know of west germany was i think five times higher than east germany so that just shows you just how big of a difference it is if if you have like something that's close to half government versus 100 government uh private sector is probably a factor of 10 more efficient than the government um and this like this is sort of this is also true of just just generally if you have like a monopolistic private corporation then the forcing function for serving the customer is weak but at least private corporations can go bankrupt and the government cannot go bankrupt unless the people go bankrupt like basically unless it exhausts extracting money from the population so well they're trying their best so yeah it's just you know so just you want to just knowing that the government is as inefficient as any large monopolistic corporation would be and it is the ultimate large monopolistic corporation we should minimize how much the government does um keep it to what is essential um and and not go beyond that yeah i mean i guess you know the conservative concern with that is you start to give them you know you give them a foothold and then they're just going to keep going like you give them a regulatory capacity over something like agi and then they're just gonna start to you know overreach more and more because that's what we've seen in the past you you know you give them an inch and they take a mile yeah but i i mean does anyone realistically want to delete the faa or the fda probably somebody okay [Music] like we've got an anarchist in the corner i mean usually if you go to the store like you you buy some whatever steak or or some something from the store and ask like it's like poisonous you know and or or you know the like we take for granted that with the food we buy is is uh at the stores it is not going to kill us you know actually you know uh because some company cut costs and decided that you know having e coli and salmonella is you know who cares type of thing um so so i think you know like like we take ground that the food we buy at the stores is is um is not poisonous um and that uh the drugs we buy like that is extremely unlikely like the drugs will be consistent and they will do what they say they're going to do which except for by the the sort of vitamin supplements industry which can basically is unregulated and so they can say things that are not true and feel so still by it um anyway so it's like i think you know you really want like you can think of like the you want some kind of referee on the field so like you know for um you know like it's like a if you're watching say a football game or something like basketball there's referees okay so would the games be better or worse without a referee that'd be worse you know um so i think like the role of referee and and games is important um and so the government's role as a referee i think is also important um you just don't have the government be kind of on the field as a player it would be weird if the referees just suddenly started playing ball you know probably not the game would not be as good well and other things that make me think you've never seen a sci-fi movie before you have a neural link so you can like put things in people's brain or something and what's that like what's that like is it what is it cool do you like it well try it you might like it okay yeah with neural link uh neural link is in part um well but in fact the the the sort of the reason i created neural link was um long term as a risk mitigation for digital super intelligence in that if we are able to effectively achieve symbiosis with digital intelligence then we're sort of the collective human well is better able to steer things in the direction that we'd like or even with benign ai at least go along for the ride so because even with the benign super intelligence if it's so much smarter than us that you know that it really can't even communicate effectively because it's so fast um and and then like talking to us is like turning to a tree you know because if you look if you do a stop motion on like a tree a tree is communicating with its environment just very slowly it looks right now it's looking for water the tree is looking forward to the the ranch is looking for sun and and the tree has movement it's just very slow um and so um and we're already at this point uh partially a cyborg uh we're de facto uh sort of a sidewalk in in that our phones and computers and applications are a digital extension of ourselves at this point like if somebody leaves their phone behind it's like missing limb syndrome you know like uh the phone is almost like a part of you um and uh but the the issue with that symbiosis is that the the data rate is extremely slow so like how fast can you can you communicate with your phone using uh two thumbs you know 10 bits per second it's very low at the data rate and if if computers can and which they can communicate at you know a billion bits per second or more and and we're communicating with them at 10 bits per second then that's just an extremely slow communication link and it inhibits symbiosis without sort of tertiary digital layer like so we've got sort of basically like a a primal layer which is like a limbic system basically it's our instincts and a lot of our emotions and it's kind of like the reptile brain the situation and then you've got the cortex which is like the the thinking part of the brain planning and whatnot uh and um so it's like the second layer and then then our phones and computers are our tertiary layer but there's a just a bound with limitation i would we're very slow to communicate so but with uh with a neural link you can increase the communication bandwidth by many orders of magnitude maybe by a thousand or more so you're talking about output from the brain to other devices yeah primarily yeah not input to the brain uh it would be both ways uh our input is much less constrained than our output because of vision so you know like rough approximation is like our input because of vision is like maybe a million times uh roughly some people are online not going to argue with this but it's the input to input is many orders of magnitude uh higher than output because of vision um you know picture a picture says a thousand words and a video says i don't know hundred thousand words like there's just you know there's um this is why like a meme can communicate so much more than a few words now this is obviously very esoteric and like i'm not sure this will resonate you know with a lot of people like oh we need to increase the the bandwidth between our cortex and our digital tertiary layer uh by many orders of magnitude in order to not lose symbiosis with digital intelligence so this is quite esoteric but um but that's the long-term existential risk mitigation of neurolink which we may or may not achieve i'm not saying we will achieve this but it's least an attempt to solve that then um along the way neural link uh can solve a lot of uh brain issues like if you got uh and you know if you've got like a a severed spine or something so like one of the first application we're looking to solve is uh implanting neural link in someone who has a quadriplegic tetraplegic um so like they have no they can't move their arms and legs or maybe not even really uh move most of their face like like maybe blink or something like that you know like stephen hawking or they didn't have to have several spine but like there are various diverse mechanical and other like mechanical breakages or diseases that break the link between your brain and body um and neurolink um can solve that it can certainly we're confident neural link can can enable someone who uh is a tetraplegic um to operate a phone uh or a computer faster than someone who has hands working hands and uh we're showing this for example with the monkey being able to play video games so you can play a bunch of games not just pong pong is currently its favorite game i don't even know monkeys can play pong but yeah in the first place yeah monkeys can play pong uh with their hand good um yeah they're good monkeys have good reflexes uh so um and that's how that starts off you the monkey we try and then we look at the signals that the monkey's brain is sending and then we read those signals and and then we uh try we transfer the signals directly to the game and uh you know so and then then we take the joystick away and the monkey's just playing basically to let telepathic wow that's wild yeah so um and we recently got uh what we think is a world record in bits per second from uh from any uh neural neural device like we're starting to approach 10 bits per second which is not actually well not that big but it's more than anyone else has achieved in a useful way 10 10 like close to 10 useful bits per second is where we are and we'll we'll increase that dramatically over time so um so anyway so we're we also want to make sure the device is extremely safe um and and extremely well tested um our standards go far beyond what is required from a regulatory stand standpoint and uh but we're hoping to do our first neurolink into a human uh next year and um and likes to enable someone who um you know has has almost no no movement capability to um operate a phone um as fast or or we think faster over time than someone who has has working hands so i think that that would be quite a significant thing and help a lot of people and and there are many such applications um and i'm increasingly confident that um we can implant a second neurolink device so one one that accesses the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex and then a a second one that is uh past where the injury is uh so if you've got a service you know we're basically where where are the neurons still functional um and implant a second uh neural link device uh and uh act have the two devices talk to each other and just transfer the signals across that where wherever it broke yeah because it's like a broken circuit right so you've got a broken circuit you just you basically just do a signal transfer between the two and you don't necessarily even need to to know what all those signals are um you just need to transfer the signals um so just like if you have like a an ethernet cable you don't need to know what's on the ethernet cable for the cable to work or a wireless ethernet from one wireless ethernet you know wi-fi box to another wireless ethernet wi-fi box you don't need to know what the contents of the signal are in order to transfer the signal so i am confident that that such thing is possible um i'm not saying we will do it i don't know i set unreasonable expectations but i'm i'd say i'm certain that it is possible and we will try to make it happen which would then enable people to walk again and use their hands and i think long term probably restore full body functionality to somebody who um has none did you know that we created an elon musk subscription tier at one point on the b did you ever see that no you didn't know that we did that we were because you were gonna pay a lot of money or something yeah you had interacted with us a couple of times and so we were like wooing you as a subscriber come subscribe but we created our own tear for you what was the uh fee on the tier i don't remember what it was i think it was like it was the highest payments it was like 99999 dollars a month or something but people were signing up for it people were actually signing up for it though every time i would check i'd be like is it him is it him it was random people who picked it thinking it was a joke and it was actually charging their credit cards we had like we had all these angry people like my wife is gonna kill me if you don't refund this charge so we had to take the elon musk tear down so we took it down i guess before you could before you could find it but it was there we had it there for you so well thanks i guess that's a compliment i think all right very eloquently put well shall we land the plane here with the 10 question so we uh this is podcast started in kyle's garage we asked every guest the same 10 questions at the end of the interview we never anticipated we would be asking elon musk these 10 questions these are rapid fire so you can answer them as quick as you want yeah or you can go on forever yeah your call uh have you ever met christian rap artist carmen um i i mean the only common musician i'm aware of is um common miranda uh you know she would like dance with like a like a fruit ball on her head yeah yeah um and you never met her no she she died okay a while ago all right cool look him up are you more of a calvinist or an armenian or an armenian yeah like a predestination [Music] i i guess my my mind would say um determinism and my heart says very well yeah i mean when i grew up i was funnily enough um i went to anglican sunday school uh you know church of england basically um and uh but i was also sent to hebrew preschool although i'm not jewish but nonetheless i was singing having to gillard one day and jesus along the next and you know it's fine if you're a kid you know and and santa claus and like uh you know um so um [Music] yeah yeah that answers the question uh yeah so uh you get to add one book to the bible what is it you guys have never people have never updated these questions to like apply more broadly nope at any point they're unchangeable yeah they're like the ten commandments at this point um i mean a little bit lower i remember we could have a chapter past revelations like is there a happy ending here like um the revelations part two the happy ending well you know if there's like a really good book you think everyone should read because it would be in the back of the bible everyone should read this book you know okay how many people have actually read the bible fewer than probably say they have but oh yeah i mean do you have a reason i mean at one point i you know when i was a kid i was like i had this existential crisis and i was trying to figure out what's the meaning of life and i was like oh it all means nothing it's all and i and i you know read like a whole bunch of religious books including the bible and i'm like there's a bunch of things in there they didn't teach you in sunday school uh sonoma gomorrah dark um yikes um you know god sure changes his mind from the old testament to the new testament i'm like whoa that's pretty vengeful in the old testament what was the question you get to pick a book to add to the bible yeah a book uh the attraction to the galaxy oh god yeah it's a great book yeah cigars are pipes um you know i'm not sure i've ever really smoked a pipe um my grandfather did it kind of looks cool but i have smoked cigars and i think like you know for a celebratory occasion like cigars and whiskey that's a pretty good combo you get to hang out with any three people living or dead who are they it's always hard to think of like three yeah people ethan kyle seth you're hanging you got three right here that's true jeff bezos uh necessarily like uh i think there's a lot of people that would be interesting to talk to but um you know i don't know uh is it living or dead you said yeah living or dead this is this is just you know a stream of consciousness not like a carefully thought out yeah uh answer but it would be like uh i don't like shakespeare ben franklin maybe newton or einstein okay it's a good group bunch of white men yeah i was drinking white clothes cleopatra sounds fun [Laughter] whiskier beer or i guess he went right for the whiskey so nice all right uh what would be the first thing you would do as president well the presidency in the u.s is designed to be a weak position a relatively weak position um because you know obviously the founders of the of the country did not want to create a monarch you don't want to avoid like a king situation um so the the sort of the presidency in the u.s is is meant to be weak weaker than saying a parliamentary system where the majority essentially the speaker that the house would be the the prime minister or president um so you say like what what can you do as the president um in the in the u.s there's a lot of limitations um unless you have the support of congress you obviously cannot change the laws but i would i probably aspire to reduce the size of government and you know and take a look at the regulatory situation and just make sure there's there's a good garbage collection of regulations so if they're outdated as there are many outdated unnecessary regulations uh but but you know there's a there's a strong forcing function for creating new laws and regulations but a weak forcing function for getting rid of of of bad laws and regulations um and and and i think this is just generally a problem as civilization ages without war where there are new laws and regulations created every year and so there's like more and more constraints on what you can do but there's there's very little effort put to remove laws and regulations and so this is like hardening of the arteries of civilization and eventually it'll be like oh look elvis travels where you're just tied down by you know thousands of little strings and it's not like any one string is the issue but there's so many strings that you can't get anything done um you know that's one part part big part of why i moved to texas it's just like there's just fewer strings tying you down um so yeah um i i think like the the uh the value of of someone just being a a very competent executive officer is um is under undervalued in a president uh just like how good are you at running things and getting things done um because if you're the president you're kind of like the ceo of the country um and uh and so are you good at doing things are you effective and pretty productive yeah you said a ceo is a meaningless title would that mean i'm just curious how that like well ceo is not not like a legal title okay um i was just saying that that there are all these titles and cooperations that are kind of made up um and you can see what is actually uh required for a corporation when you fill out the form to create one and so you need a a president a secretary and a treasurer same thing as like if you're performing a chess club or a glee club or something like that same same thing um and and actually technically all three can be the same person so that's what's legally required if you don't have those three things you cannot function as a corporation uh everything else like a general counsel cfo ceo these are all made up like that they're no legal no no meaningful legal bearing so uh you only need those the president's secretary treasurer um so there's all these like cxo titles which you know just are somewhat like resume inflators um i was just making a point that like people think ceo is a real title but it's not it's not it's not a legally meaningful title you need someone who is defined as the as the president but that's that's um that's it so um for now you have like chief marketing officer chief information officer chief everything officer you know i i sort of think like you should have like this is our svp of sorcery all right question number eight the master general um oh yeah have you ever punched anyone or have you ever been punched you got any cool punching stories if you don't have an answer for that we have a follow-up it's even worse i don't know about cool punching stories but i um where i grew up was extremely violent um i never i never started a fight except with my brother actually one exception yeah i did i'd be my brother up which i'm either just i don't know if that's how it goes but uh [Music] south africa when i was growing up was just an inherently very violent place i punched the face many times i always got beaten to death once so many times i think if you have not been punched in the face with a fist you don't know what you have no idea what it's like shocking sensation shocking sensation have you been punished ethan yeah just by like high school kids yeah not right still it's just like your face never touches anything and then suddenly yeah they punch their nose like you can't even see straight um so yeah um it's funny that people think words are they're so sensitive to words it's like man you're even punched in the face words don't mean nothing all right question number nine uh you get to go to one concert any band in history who do you go see anybody i don't know maybe the rolling stones are there you know when they're only peak rolling stones seems like and hey day yeah yeah nitpick all right final question to close our time out here yeah i mean we're here we're you know the babylon b is a christian organization you know and uh we're a ministry well how come we're doing this show on a sunday night why wasn't your church gathered why aren't you heathens and church exactly so we have to make a church supposed to be a day of rest we did zoom church like god said don't work on sundays okay let's go ahead guys are going to straight down for this one get into the whole jesus that's rest thing okay straight to hell this is true this is true i it's okay so to make this church we have to do we have to make sure just we're wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept jesus as your lord and savior on the show um personal awards you know it's a quick prayer [Music] i mean let's just say like i agree with the principles that jesus advocated um and that the you know there's some some there's great wisdom in what in the teachings of of jesus uh and i agree with those teachings um and things like tone the other cheek are very important because as opposed to an eye for an eye an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind so forgiveness you know is important and treating people as you would wish to be treated love that neighbor as myself very important so it's like a 60 70 yes yes as einstein would say [Music] i believe in the god of spinoza [Music] um so um but hey if um you know if if jesus is uh saving people i mean i i wouldn't stand in his way you know like i'll be sure i'll be safe why not sweet we did it yeah i think he just said yes we got it all right we got them to be exciting sounds good the whatever blood and water christ it was kind of weird you know if you're a kid like you get to give you some weird tasting you know just getting a wine yeah i'm like what the hell is this i'm like isn't this kind of just cut it off when he said yes i'm like is this some like fading metaphor for cannibalism or something i don't get it like what uh what the hell i remember thinking that was just crazy uh when i was a kid um and i like this to like whoa you know i mean even as a metaphor it's kind of odd but you know yeah so it's like should i be doing alcohol to minors i was like we do grape juice okay yes i think it's unusual to even be thinking about that as a kid like as a kid you just go through the motions and then later on that you think wait a minute what does this actually represent what am i doing when i was a kid i was like like is this actually blood and body what you know i don't i don't know if i want to eat somebody and then i was like why this is i mean i did it anyway i'm like this seems like okay man i don't know if this is just pretty odd you know i remember thinking that even at age five so i was like you know and i was definitely like you know sunday school there like when they were telling me all the stories and i was like asking questions and like and i really were upset that i was asking questions and i was like you know jesus like fed the crowd with like five loaves of bread and three fish and i'm like how big was the crowd and and like where did the fish and bread come from did like from his cloak or something like because i was like reading books and i was like this is like they'd materialize like am i like i don't know where'd it come from you know like how did would you like take a bite of the bread and it would just the bread would just come back to being a full brand yeah you look away it's kind of a mechanic background they left out the details where did the universe come from um [Music] well yeah i'm not saying i know all the answers here i'm just you know it's just uh and like jesus was obviously very pro-alcohol you know because one of his miracles was turning water into wine yeah and that was like they were having a party they ran out of wine and they're like let's keep this banner going good stuff who can who can solve this problem we're at a white cloth the friggin store's closed and jesus is like i gotcha okay water now i like party on you know so you know accurate pro partying without all eyes literally it was one of the miracles bible story time you are the it's like you're definitely you're the savior you're scared you kept the party going with lots of wine that's great um so um yeah well thank you i appreciate you coming here talking to us very much very welcome pleasure to meet you in person and uh you know we'll uh we'll continue to throw out the satire that we hope you'll respond to and you know keep that going a little bit oh we didn't ask onion or the bee but i guess that was kind of answered earlier you mentioned earlier yeah yes we already covered that yeah i mean i i think the onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time um it's just it just seems to have been you know in recent years somewhat infected by the world my virus so that just makes everything less funny yeah that's true workman virus is a world without humor yeah i'm hoping neurolink can solve that move thank you thank you appreciate it thank you thanks so much thanks so much

Channel: The Babylon Bee

Views: 2,742,269

Keywords:

Id: jvGnw1sHh9M

Length: 99min 47sec (5987 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Castlefree43]

This guy's the modern Christopher Columbus without the stuff your retarded history teacher will tell you.

[u/Castlefree43]

Elon is the less toxic Chris Columbus of our era.

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Watch him go to Mars.

[u/[deleted]]

He got on the BabylonBee? I thought the Bee was still really small