Joe Rogan Experience #2404 - Elon Musk

Wonder what Jeff Bezos is doing.

He's doing some testosterone. He looks jacked.

He looks jacked, right?

Yeah, but he didn't—

At age 59, in less than a year, he went from pencil-neck geek to looking like The Rock.

Yeah, like a little miniature alpha fella.

Yeah, like his neck got bigger than his head.

Yeah, he got bigger.

But in his earlier pictures, his neck's like a noodle. I support this activity. I like to see him going in this direction, which is fine. His voice dropped like 2 octaves. I want you to move in that direction as well.

I think we can achieve this.

I think we can achieve GigaChad. That's what people called it. Where is that guy?

I don't know where he is.

That's like a real guy.

The artist? Yeah.

No.

Oh, GigaChad. Oh, GigaChad. Yeah, I don't know if that's a real guy. It's hard to say.

No, it is a real guy.

It is a real guy.

He's got the crazy jaw and perfect, sculpted hair.

Well, they may have exaggerated a little bit, but I think he actually just kind of looked like that in reality. He's a pretty unique-looking individual.

Wow. I think we can achieve this. That guy right there, that's a real guy.

That's a real dude.

I always thought that was CGI.

No, I think the upper-right one is not him. That one to the left of that is real.

No, that's artificial, bro. That's fake. It's got that uncanny-valley feel to it, doesn't it?

It's not impossible.

No, it's not impossible to achieve, but it's not possible to maintain that kind of leanness. At that point, he's dehydrating and doing all sorts of things.

Oh, it's based on a real person.

Yeah, based on—

Right, but it's not a real person. What does he really look like?

Those images, I think, are fake.

Some of them are. Is that real? Okay, that looks real. That looks like a really jacked bodybuilder.

Yeah.

Yeah, that looks real. That's achievable. But there are a few of those images where you're just like, “What's going on here?”

Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, you see—

That guy, is that the real dude?

Well, there's that Icelandic dude who's Thor.

Oh, yeah, the guy who jumps in the frozen lakes.

The guy who played the Mountain.

Oh, that guy.

That is a mutant strong human.

Yes. He would be in the X-Men or something. He's just not like—

And there's that meme, “tent and tent bag.” You know how it's really hard to get the tent in the tent bag?

Oh, right. Right.

That's true. Then there's a picture of him and his girlfriend. That's hilarious. I don't know how it gets in there. It seems too small.

I met Brian Shaw. Brian Shaw is the world's most powerful man, and he's almost 7 feet tall. He's 400 pounds. His bone density is 1 in 500 million people, so there are maybe 16 people like that. He's an enormous human being, a legitimate giant just like that guy. We met him when he was hanging out with us in the green room of the Mothership. If this was the time of David and Goliath, this would be an actual giant, like the giants of the Bible.

Once in a while, they get a super-giant person.

This is a real one. Not a tall, skinny basketball player—a 7-foot, 400-pound powerlifter.

You don't want to stand next to him. That's the guy. See if there's a photo of him standing next to a regular human.

There it is. That's him right there. There's one of him standing next to Arnold and stuff, and everyone just looks tiny.

I think he's a pretty cool dude, actually.

Oh, Brian's very cool. Very smart, too. Unusually smart. You expect anybody to be that big, it's got to be a genetic freak.

No.

Yeah. There was Andre the Giant, who was awesome.

He was great in The Princess Bride.

No, he was just awesome, period.

Yeah.

1. The Whistleblower Death Raises Questions

We were talking about this interview with Sam Alman and Tucker Carlson, and I was like, “We should probably just talk about this on the air,” because it's one of the craziest interviews I think I've ever seen in my life. Tucker starts bringing up this guy who was a whistleblower, a whistleblower who committed suicide, but it doesn't look like it. He's talking to Sam Altman about this, and Sam Alman was like, “Are you accusing me?” Tucker's like, “No, no, no. I'm not. I'm just saying I think someone killed him.”

Yeah, and it should be investigated.

Not just dropped as a case.

It seems like they just dropped the case.

Yeah. But his parents think he was murdered. The wires to a security camera were cut. There was blood in 2 rooms. Someone else's wig was in the room.

Someone else's wig?

Wig. Yes, not his wig.

It's not normal to have a wig lying around.

Yes. He ordered DoorDash right before allegedly committing suicide, which seems unusual.

Yeah.

It's like, “I'm going to order pizza. On second thought, I'll kill myself.” It seems like a very rapid change in mindset.

It's very weird, especially since the parents don't believe he committed suicide at all.

He had no note or anything.

No.

It seems pretty fucked up. The idea that a whistleblower for an enormous AI company that's worth billions of dollars might get whacked—that's not outside the pale.

I mean, it's straight out of a movie.

Right out of a movie, but right out of a movie is real sometimes.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a little weird. I think they should do a proper investigation. What's the downside of a proper investigation?

Right.

For sure. But the whole exchange is so bizarre. Sam Alman's reaction to being accused of murder is bizarre.

Look, I don't know if he's guilty, but it's not possible to look more guilty.

Or look more weird.

Yeah.

Maybe it's just his social thing. Maybe he's just odd with confrontation and goes blank. But if somebody was accusing me of killing Jamie—if Jamie was a whistleblower and Jamie got whacked—I would be like, “Wait, what? Are you accusing me of killing my friend? What the fuck are you talking about?” I would be a little more irate.

Yeah, exactly. You'd certainly insist on a thorough investigation.

I would be a little upset.

It would be like, “You should investigate this thoroughly,” as opposed to trying to sweep it under the rug. I wouldn't assume that he committed suicide. I would be suspicious. If Tucker was telling me that aspect of the story, I'd be like, “That does seem like a murder. We should look into this.”

All signs point to it being a murder. I'm not saying Sam Altman had anything to do with the murder, but there was blood in 2 rooms, the wires to the security camera were cut, and DoorDash was ordered right before the suicide. There was no suicide note, his parents think he was murdered, and the people I know who knew him said he was not suicidal. So why would you jump to the conclusion—

The parents sued the landlord?

They sued the owners and managers of their son's San Francisco apartment building, alleging they were part of a widespread cover-up of his death.

The landlord—

Yeah. There was a bunch of weird stuff. They said there were packages missing from the building. Some people said they saw packages still being delivered, and all of a sudden they all disappeared.

That could be people stealing people's packages all the time.

The porch-pirate situation.

Yeah.

It also says they failed to safeguard—

The amount of trauma those poor parents have gone through with their son dying like that must be unimaginable.

God bless them. How could they stay sane after something like that? They're probably so grief-stricken. Who knows what they believe at this point?

Yeah.

It should be asked if that person killed himself.

Yeah, that's the Kash Patel thing.

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are trying to convince everybody of that. Like, okay. The guards weren't there and the cameras stopped working. The guards were asleep, the cameras weren't working, and he had a giant, steroided-up bodybuilder guy that he was sharing a cell with who was a murderer and a bad cop. All of it's kind of nuts. All of it's kind of nuts, that he would just kill himself rather than reveal all of his billionaire friends.

Yeah.

And then did you see Tim Dillon talking to Chris Cuomo about this?

I did. He liked the idea.

Chris Cuomo just looked so stupid. [laughter] Tim just—he's like, “I agree, it is strange.” Of course it's strange, Chris. Jesus Christ. You can't just go with the tide. You have to think things through. And if you think that one through, you're like, “I don't think he killed himself.” Nobody does. You'd have to work for an intelligence agency to think he killed himself. [laughter]

It does seem unlikely.

It seems highly, highly unlikely. All roads point to murder. They had to get rid of him because he knew too much. Whatever the fuck he was doing, whatever kind of an asset he was, whatever thing he was up to, it was apparently very effective.

Yes.

And a lot of people are compromised. You see, your boy Bill Gates is now saying climate change is not a big deal. Like, relax, everybody. I know I scared the shit out of you for the last decade and a half, but we're going to be fine. [laughter]

Yeah. I mean, as I was saying just before coming into the studio, every day there's some crazy, wild new thing that's happening. It feels like reality is accelerating.

It's every day. Every day it's more and more ridiculous, to the point where the simulation is more and more undeniable.

Yeah. It really feels like a simulation. It's like, come on. What are the odds that this could be the case?

2. 3I/ATLAS Raises Questions

Are you paying attention at all to 3I/ATLAS? Are you watching the comet?

Yeah. Whatever it is. I mean, one thing I can say is, look, if I was aware of any evidence of aliens, Joe, you have my word: I will come on your show and reveal it on the show.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's a good deal.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

I'll believe you. Thank you.

I keep my promises.

All right. I'll hold you to that.

Yeah. And I'm never committing suicide, to be clear. [laughter]

I don't think you would either. So, on camera, guys, I am never committing suicide, ever.

If someone says you committed suicide, I will fight tooth and nail.

I will fight tooth and nail. I will not believe it. The thing about 3I/ATLAS is—

A hell of a name, actually.

Yeah, 3I sounds like “third eye” or something.

Yeah, it does. 3I is third. It's only the third interstellar object that's been detected.

Okay.

Yeah.

Avi was on the podcast a couple of days ago talking about it.

Yeah, it could be. I don't know. But apparently today they're saying that it's changed course. Did you see that, Jamie?

Avi said something today. I'll send it to you. I know it's on Reddit. Here you go, Jamie. I'll send it to you right now. It's fascinating. It's fascinating also because it's made almost entirely of nickel, whatever it is, and the only way that exists here is in industrial alloys, apparently.

No, there are definitely comets and asteroids that are made primarily of nickel, in fact. The places where you mine nickel on Earth are actually where there was an asteroid or comet that hit Earth that was a nickel-rich deposit.

Nickel-rich deposit.

Yeah, that's where it's coming from. Those are from impacts. You definitely didn't want to be there at the time, because anything would have been obliterated. That's where the sources of nickel and cobalt are these days.

So, this is Avi Loeb. A few hours ago, the first hint of non-gravitational acceleration—that something other than gravity is affecting its acceleration, meaning something is affecting its trajectory beyond gravity—was indicated. Interesting. So, it's mostly nickel and very little iron, which he was saying on Earth only exists in alloys. But whatever, you're dealing with another planet.

There are cases where there are very nickel-rich asteroids and meteorites that are that heavy. That's something from space.

Yeah, it doesn't mean it'll be a very heavy spaceship if you make it all out of nickel. And it's fucking huge—the size of Manhattan and all nickel. That's kind of nuts.

Yeah, that's a heavy spaceship.

That's a real problem if it hits.

Yes. No, it would obliterate a continent.

Maybe worse.

Probably kill most of human life.

If not all of us.

It depends on what the total mass is. The thing is, in the fossil record, there are arguably 5 major extinction events. The biggest one was the Permian extinction, where almost all life was eliminated. That actually occurred over several million years. The Cretaceous extinction—I think that one's pretty definitively an asteroid. But there have been 5 major extinction events, and what they don't count are the ones that merely take out a continent.

So, merely—

Yeah, because those don't really show up in the fossil record.

Right?

Unless it's enough to cause a mass extinction event throughout Earth, it doesn't show up in a fossil record that's 200 million years old. There have been many impacts that would have destroyed all life on, let's say, half of North America or something like that. There have been many such impacts through the course of history.

Yeah. There was one that hit Siberia and destroyed, I think, a few hundred square miles.

Oh, that's the Tunguska.

Yeah.

That's the one from the 1920s, right?

Yeah. That's the one that coincides with that meteor, that comet swarm, that we go through every June and every November that they think is responsible for the Younger Dryas.

Yeah. Yeah, all that shit's crazy.

3. Starship Tests Its Limits

Thank you, before we go any further, for letting us have a tour of SpaceX and letting us be there for the rocket launch.

One of the absolute coolest things I've ever seen in my life. We thought it was only—I thought it was a half a mile away. Jamie said it was a mile away. It turned out it was almost 2 miles away, and you feel it in your chest.

Yeah. You have to wear earplugs, and you feel it in your chest. It's 2 miles away.

It was fucking amazing. And then to go with you up into the command center and watch all the Starship telemetry, with all the different cameras, in real time as it made its way all the way to Australia. How many minutes? Like 35 or 40 minutes? Wild. It touched down in Australia. Fucking crazy. It was amazing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely amazing. The Starship's awesome.

Anyone can go watch the launch, actually. You can just go to South Padre Island; it has a great view of the launch. It's where a lot of spring breakers go. We'll be flying pretty frequently out of Starbase in South Texas, and we formally incorporated it as a city. So, it's actually a legal city: Starbase, Texas.

It's not that often you hear, like, “Hey, we made a city.” [laughter] In the old days, a startup would be gathering a bunch of people and saying, “Hey, let's go make a town.” Literally, that would have been startups in the old days.

Or a country.

Yeah. Or a country.

Yeah.

Actually, if you tried doing that today, there'd be a real problem.

Yeah. Things are so much more set in stone on the country front these days. You might pull it off. You might be able to pull it off if you got a solid island.

Yeah, you could probably, if you put enough effort into it, make a new country.

This is one of the different ones. This is one of the ones that you catch, right? Or is that one?

Yeah, that's the booster. That's the Super Heavy booster. The booster has 33 engines, and by Version 4 it will have about 10,000 tons of thrust. Right now it's about 7,000 to 8,000 tons of thrust. That's the largest flying object ever made.

I had to explain to someone. They were going, “Why do they blow up all the time if he's so smart?” Because there was this fucking idiot on television.

Some guy was being interviewed, and they were talking about you. He goes, “Oh, I think he’s a fuckwit.” And he goes, “He’s a fuckwit.” And he goes, “Why do you say he’s a fuckwit?” “Oh, his rockets keep blowing up.” And someone said, “Yeah, well, why do his rockets blow?” And I had to explain.

Yeah. Because it’s the only way you find out what the tolerances are. You have to push a few—

Corners of the box.

So when you do a new rocket development program, you have to do what’s called exploring the limits—the corners of the box—where you say, “Worst-case this, worst-case that,” to figure out where the limits are. So you blow up. In the development process, sometimes it blows up accidentally, but we intentionally subject it to a flight regime that is much worse than what we expect in normal flight so that when we put people on board or valuable cargo, it doesn’t blow up.

For example, for the flight that you saw, we deliberately took heat shield tiles off the ship, off of Starship, in some of the worst locations to say, “Okay, if we lose a heat shield tile here, is it catastrophic or is it not?” Nonetheless, Starship was able to do a soft landing in the Indian Ocean, just west of Australia, and it got there from Texas in, I don’t know, 35–40 minutes or something like that.

So it landed even though you put it through this situation where it had a compromised shield?

We brought it in hot, like an extra-hot trajectory, with missing tiles, to see if it would still make it to a soft landing, which it did. Now, I should point out that there were some holes that were burned into it, but it was robust enough to land despite having some holes burned into it, because it’s coming in like a blazing meteor. You can see the real-time video.

Well, tell me the speed again, because the speed was bananas. You were talking about—

Yeah, it’s like 17,000 miles per hour, like 25 times the speed of sound or thereabouts. Think of it like it’s 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. A bullet from an assault rifle is around Mach 2.

And it’s just huge.

Yeah. Or if you compare it to a bullet from a .45 or 9-millimeter, which is subsonic, it’ll be about 30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun.

30 times faster than a bullet from a handgun, and it’s the size of a skyscraper.

Yes.

Yeah, that’s fast. It’s so wild to see, man. It’s so exciting. This factory is so exciting, too, because genuinely, no fucking way—I felt like I was witnessing history. I felt like it was a scene in a movie where someone had expectations and they’re like, “What are they doing? They’re building rockets.” And you go there, and as we were walking through—Jamie, you could speak to this, too. Didn’t you have the feeling where you’re like—

Guest

“Oh, this is way bigger than I thought it was. This is huge. Awesome.”

Gigantic.

Guest

Fucking crazy.

That’s what she said. The amount of rockets you’re making—I don’t know if you can—

Jamie Vernon

Step back.

Gigachad in the house.

Jamie Vernon

This is way big.

It’s a giant metal dick. You’re fucking the universe with your giant metal dick. That’s—

I mean, yeah, it is. It is very big.

And the sheer numbers of them that you guys are making. And then this is a version, and you have a new, updated version that’s coming soon.

And what is the difference?

It’s a little longer.

More pointy?

It’s the same amount of pointy, but there’s a bit more length. The interstage—you see that interstage section with kind of the grille area?

Mm-hmm.

That’s now integrated with the booster stage. We do what’s called hot staging, where we light the ship engines while it’s still attached to the booster. The booster engines are still thrusting, so it’s still being pushed forward by the booster, but then we light the ship engines, and the ship engines actually pull away from the booster even though the booster engines are still firing.

Whoa.

It’s blasting flame through that grille section, but we integrate that grille section into the booster stage with the next version of the rocket. The next version of the rocket will have the Raptor 3 engines, which are a huge improvement. You may have seen them in the lobby, because we’ve got the Raptor 1, 2, and 3, and you can see the dramatic improvement in simplicity. We should probably put a plaque there to also show how much we reduced the weight and the cost, and improved the efficiency and the thrust.

The Raptor 3 has almost twice the thrust of Raptor 1.

Wow.

So you see Raptor 3—it looks like it’s got parts missing, right? It’s very, very clean.

How many of them are on the rocket?

There are 33 on the booster. Each Raptor engine is producing twice as much thrust as all 4 engines on a 747. That engine is smaller than a 747 engine, but it’s producing almost 10 times the thrust of a 747 engine, so it has an extremely high power-to-weight ratio.

And so when there’s—

33 of them.

When you’re designing these, you get to Raptor 1, you see its efficiency, you see where you can improve it, you get to Raptor 2. How far can you scale this up with just the same sort of technology, with propellant and ignition and engines? How much further can you—

I mean, we’re pushing the limits of physics here. Really, in order to make a fully reusable orbital rocket, which no one has succeeded in doing yet, including us, Starship is the first time that there is a design for a rocket where full and rapid reusability is actually possible. There hasn’t even been a design before where it was possible, certainly not a design that got made into any hardware at all.

We live on a planet where the gravity is quite high. Earth’s gravity is really quite high. If the gravity was even 10–20% higher, we’d be stuck on Earth forever. We couldn’t use conventional rockets. You’d have to blow yourself off the surface with a nuclear bomb or something crazy.

On the other hand, if Earth’s gravity was just a little lower, even 10–20% lower, getting to orbit would be easy. If this was a video game, it’s set to maximum difficulty, but not impossible.

Okay.

That’s where we are here. It’s not as though others have ignored the concept of reusability; they’ve just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. We’ve been working on this for a long time at SpaceX. I’m the chief engineer of the company, although I should say that we have an extremely talented engineering team. I think we’ve got the best rocket engineering team that has ever been assembled. It’s an honor to work with such incredible people.

It’s fair to say that we have not yet succeeded in achieving full reusability, but we at last have a rocket where full reusability is possible. I think we’ll achieve it next year. That’s a really big deal, and the reason that’s such a big deal is that full reusability drops the cost of access to space by 100—maybe even more than 100, actually. It could be 1,000.

You can think of it like any mode of transport. Imagine if aircraft were not reusable. You flew somewhere, threw away the plane, parachuted out, and the plane crashed somewhere while you landed on a parachute at your destination. That would be a very expensive trip, and you’d need another plane to get back.

That’s how the other rockets in the world work. The SpaceX Falcon rocket is the only one that is at least mostly reusable. You’ve seen the Falcon rocket land. We’ve now done over 500 landings of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This year, we’ll deliver probably somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 tons to orbit with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, not counting anything from Starship.

And this is mostly Starlink?

Yes, mostly Starlink, but we launch many other competitors to Starlink on Falcon 9. We charge them the same price. Pretty fair.

SpaceX this year will deliver roughly 90% of all mass to orbit.

Wow.

Of the remaining 10%, most of that is done by China. The remaining roughly 4% is everyone else in the world, including our American domestic competitors.

You know, it’s kind of incredible how many things are in space. How many things are floating above us now?

There are a lot of things.

Yeah. Is there, though? Right. But is there a saturation point where we're going to have problems with all these different satellites that are—

I think as long as the satellites are maintained, it'll be fine. Space is very roomy. You can think of space as being concentric shells around the surface of the Earth. It's the surface of the Earth, but in a series of much larger shells.

Much larger.

Yeah. It's like a series of concentric shells.

Think of an Airstream trailer flying around up there. There's a lot of room for Airstreams.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine if there were just a few thousand Airstreams on Earth.

Yeah.

What are the odds that they'd hit each other? They wouldn't be very crowded.

No. And then you have to go bigger.

Yeah.

Because you're dealing with far above Earth.

Hundreds of miles above Earth.

Yeah. So, the goal of SpaceX is to get rocket technology to the point where we can extend life beyond Earth, establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, and have a permanent base on the Moon.

That would be very cool. I mean, imagine if we had a Moonbase Alpha, where there's a permanent science base on the Moon.

That would be pretty dope. Or at least a tourist trap.

I mean, a lot of people would be willing to go to the Moon just for a tour. That's for sure. We could probably pay for our space program with that.

Probably.

Because if you could go to the Moon safely—

I think we'd get a lot of people who would pay for that.

Oh, 100%. After the first year, after nobody died—

Yeah. Just make sure. [laughter] Exactly. Are you going to come back? Yeah.

Because that submarine had a bunch of successful launches before it imploded and killed everybody. That was not a good design, obviously.

It was a very bad design. Terrible design.

And the engineers said it would not withstand the pressure at those depths. There were a lot of whistleblowers in that company, too.

Yeah. They made that out of carbon fiber, which doesn't make any sense, because you actually need to be dense to go down. In any case, just make it out of steel. If you make it out of a big steel casting, you'll be safe. Why would they make it out of carbon fiber? Is it cheaper?

I think they thought carbon fiber sounded cool or something.

It does sound cool.

It sounds cool, but—

Because it's such low density, you actually have to add extra mass to go down. But if you just have a giant hollow ball bearing, you're going to be fine.

4. Cybertruck Uses Bulletproof Steel

Speaking of carbon fiber, did you check out my Unplugged Tesla out there?

Yeah, it's cool.

Pretty sick, right? Have you guys ever thought about doing something like that—having an AMG division of Tesla where you do custom stuff?

I think it's best to leave that to the custom shops. Tesla's focus is autonomous cars, building futuristic autonomous cars. I think we want the future to look like the future. Did you see our designs for the robotic bus? It looks pretty cool.

The robotic bus is also totally autonomous, but it looks cool. It's very art deco. It's futuristic art deco. I think we want to change the aesthetic over time. You don't want the aesthetic to be constant over time. You want to evolve the aesthetic.

My son is even more autistic than me, and he has these great observations of the world because he views the world through a different lens than most people.

Who is this?

Saxon. He has these great observations of the world, and he was like, "Dad, why does the world look like it's 2015?" [laughter]

I'm like, "Damn, the world does look like it's 2015." The aesthetic has not evolved since 2015.

Oh, that's what it looks like.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

That's pretty cool.

Oh, yeah. That's like—you'd want to see that going down the road, you know?

Yeah. You'd be like, "Okay, we're in the future." It doesn't look like 2015.

What is that ancient science-fiction movie, one of the first science-fiction movies ever? Is it Metropolis?

Yeah.

Yeah. That looks like it belongs in Metropolis.

Yeah. It's futuristic art deco.

All right. Yeah. Well, that's cool that you're concentrating on the aesthetic. I mean, that's kind of the whole deal with Cybertruck, right? It didn't have to look like that.

No, I just wanted to have something that looked really different.

Is it a pain in the ass for people to get it insured because it's all solid steel?

I hope it's not too much. Tesla does offer insurance, so people can always get it insured through Tesla.

But the form does follow function in the case of the Cybertruck, because, as you demonstrated with your armor-piercing arrow, if you shot that arrow at a regular truck—

You would have found your arrow in the wall. [laughter] Exactly. At the very least, it would have buried itself into one of the seats.

Yeah. You could definitely get enough bow velocity, and the right arrow would go through both doors of a regular truck and land on the wall.

Exactly.

If there was a clear shot between both doors, it probably would have passed right through.

Exactly. But the arrow shattered on the Cybertruck because it's made of ultra-hard stainless steel.

Mm-hmm.

I thought it would be cool to have a truck that's bulletproof to a subsonic projectile. Especially in this day and age, if the apocalypse happens, you're going to want to have a bulletproof truck.

Because it's made of ultra-hard stainless steel, you can't just stamp the panels. You can't put them in a stamping press because it breaks the press. In order to make the panels, they have to be planar because it's so difficult to bend them without breaking the machine that bends them. That's why it's so planar. It's because the bulletproof steel is—

So it is boxy as opposed to curved?

Yeah. In order to make curved shapes, you take basically mild, thin, annealed steel in a regular truck or car. You put it in a stamping press, and it just smooshes it into whatever shape you want.

But the Cybertruck is made of ultra-hard stainless steel, so you can't stamp it because it would break the stamping press. Even bending it is hard. To bend it to its current position, we have to way overbend it so that when it springs back, it's in the right position.

I think it's a unique aesthetic. You say, "What's cool about a truck?" Trucks should be, I don't know, manly. They should be macho. Bulletproof is maximum macho.

Are you married to that shape now? Can you do anything to change it as you get further along? I know you guys updated the Model 3 and the Model Y. Did you update the Y as well?

Yes, the Model 3 and the Model Y are updated. There's a screen in the back for the kids to watch, for example, in the new Model 3 and Model Y. In the new Model Y, there are hundreds of improvements. We keep improving the car. Even the Cybertruck—we keep improving it.

I wanted to do something that looked unique, and the Cybertruck looks unique and has unique functionality. There were 3 things: Let's make it bulletproof, let's make it faster than a Porsche 911, and let's make it able to tow a lot.

We actually cleared the quarter mile. The Cybertruck can clear a quarter mile while towing a Porsche 911 faster than a Porsche 911. It can out-tow an F-350 diesel.

Really?

Yes.

What are the tow limitations?

We could tow a 747 with a Cybertruck. The Cybertruck is insanely powerful. It is alien technology. It shouldn't be possible to be that big and that fast. It's like an elephant that runs like a cheetah.

Because it's 0 to 60 in less than 3 seconds, right?

Yes.

And it's enormous. What does it weigh, like 7,000 pounds?

There are different configurations, but it's about that. It's a beast.

Yeah.

It's got 4-wheel steering, so the rear wheels steer, too. It has a very tight turning radius.

Yeah. We noticed that when we drove one to Starbase.

Yeah. Very tight turning radius.

Pretty sick.

Yeah.

Are you still doing the Roadster?

Yes. Eventually. We’re getting close to demonstrating the prototype, and I think this will be—I can guarantee that this product demo will be unforgettable.

How so?

Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable. [Laughter]

Can you say more? What do you mean?

Well, my friend Peter once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars.

So, you’re going to be able to fly?

I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.

Are you actively considering making an electric flying car? Is this a real thing?

We have to see in the demo.

When you do this, are you going to have a retractable wing? What’s the idea behind this? Don’t be sly. Come on.

I can’t do the unveil before the unveil.

Tell me off-air, then.

I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. It has a shot.

When do you plan on doing this? What’s the goal?

Hopefully before the end of the year.

Really?

Before the end of this year.

I mean, we’re in a couple of months.

Hopefully in a couple of months. We need to make sure that it works. This is some crazy technology we’ve got in this car. Crazy technology.

So, it’s different from what was previously announced?

Yes.

And is that why you haven’t released it yet? Because you keep fucking with it?

It has crazy technology.

Okay.

Is it even a car? I’m not sure. It looks like a car. Let’s just put it this way: it’s crazier than anything James Bond. If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.

Very exciting. I don’t know what to think of that. It’s a limited amount of information I’m drawing from here. Jamie’s very suspicious over there. Look at him.

Jamie Vernon

Excited.

I’m interested. [Laughter]

Is it still going to be the same?

Well, if you want to come a little before the unveil, I can show it to you. One hundred percent.

Yeah, let’s go. Yeah, it’s kind of crazy, all the different things that you’re involved in simultaneously. We talked about this before—your time management—but I really don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can be paying attention to all these different things simultaneously: Starlink, SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, X. You tweet—or post, rather—all day long.

It’s more like I could hop in for 2 minutes and then hop out.

But I mean, just the fact that you could do—

A bathroom break or whatever, you know.

I can’t do that. If I hop in, I start scrolling and looking around. The next thing you know, I’ve lost an hour.

Yeah. For me, it’s usually a couple of minutes. Sometimes, I guess it’s half an hour, but usually I’m in for a few minutes, then out. You know, posting something on X. I do sometimes feel like I’m that meme of the guy who drops the grenade and leaves the room. [Laughter] That’s been me more than once on X.

5. X Reopens The Public Square

Yeah. [Laughter] Oh, yeah. For sure. It’s got to be fun, though. It’s got to be fun to know that you essentially disrupted the entire social media chain of command, because there was a very clear thing going on with social media. The government had infiltrated it. They were censoring speech, and until you bought it, we really didn’t know the extent of it. We kind of assumed that there was something going on.

Yeah. We had no idea that they were actively involved in censoring actual real news stories, real data, real scientists, real professors—silenced, expelled, kicked off the platform.

Yeah. Wild.

Yeah.

For telling the truth. And I’m sure you’ve also seen—because I sent it to you—that chart showing young kids and teenagers identifying as trans and nonbinary. It literally stops dead when you bought Twitter and starts falling off a cliff when people are allowed to have rational discussions and actually talk about it.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. I said at the time that I thought the reason for acquiring Twitter was because it was causing destruction at a civilizational level. I tweeted on Twitter at the time that it was Wormtongue for the world—Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings, where he would whisper terrible things to the king so the king would believe things that weren’t true.

Unfortunately, the woke mob essentially controlled Twitter, and they were pushing a nihilistic, anti-civilizational mind virus to the world. You can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where downtown San Francisco looks like a zombie apocalypse. It’s bad. We don’t want the whole world to be a zombie apocalypse.

They were pushing this very negative, nihilistic, untrue worldview on the world, and it was causing a lot of damage.

The stunning thing about it is how few people course-corrected. A bunch of people woke up and realized what was going on—people who were all on board with woke ideology in 2015 or 2016, and then eventually it affects them, or they see it in their workplace, and they’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’ve got to stop this.” A bunch of people did, but a lot of people never course-corrected.

A lot of people didn’t course-correct, but directionally, it’s correct, like you mentioned—the massive spike in kids identifying as trans, and then that spike dropping after the Twitter acquisition. I think that simply allowing the truth to be told—sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say—and allowing sunlight just kills the virus.

It also changed the benchmark for all the other platforms. You can’t just openly censor people on all the other platforms when X is available. So, Facebook announced they were changing their policies, and YouTube announced they were changing their policies. They were kind of forced to. And then Bluesky doubled down. [Laughter]

The problem is that the woke mind virus essentially retreated to Bluesky.

Yeah.

It’s where they’re just a self-reinforcing lunatic asylum.

They’re all just triple-masked. I was watching this exchange on Bluesky where someone said that they were trying to be zen about something, and then a moderator immediately chimed in, “Why don’t you try to stop being racist against Asians by saying something zen?” They were accusing that person of being racist toward Asians.

Yeah. It’s just everyone’s a hall monitor over there. The worst kind of hall monitor—a virgin incel.

They’re all hall monitors trying to rat on each other.

Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Then people say, “I’m leaving for Bluesky,” like Stephen King, and a couple of weeks later, he’s back on X. He’s just like, “Fuck it. There’s no one over there. It’s all a bunch of crazy people. You can only stay in the asylum for so long.” They all bail.

Yeah. Yeah.

Threads is kind of like that, too.

I’ve been on Threads. Well, what happens is, if you go on Instagram, every now and then something really stupid will pop up on Threads, like, “What the fuck?” It shows it to you on Instagram, and then I’ll click on that and go to Threads, and it’s like—

You see posts with 25 likes—famous people with 50 likes. It’s down. But the people who post on there find that there’s very little pushback against insane ideology, so they go there and spit out nonsense, and very few people jump in to argue.

Yeah.

Very weird. Very weird place.

I can generally get the vibe of what’s taking off by seeing what’s showing up on X, because it’s still the public town square. Or I’ll see what links show up in group texts. If I’m in a group chat with friends, what links are showing up?

That’s what I try to do now: only get stuff that shows up in my group text, because that keeps me productive. I only check if someone’s like, “Dude, what the fuck?” Then I’m like, “All right, what the fuck? Let me check it out.”

If there’s something crazy enough, it’ll end up in the group chat.

6. California’s Homelessness System Draws Fire

But there’s always something. That’s what’s nuts. There’s always some new law that’s passed, some new insane thing that California is doing. A giant chunk of it is happening in California.

The most preposterous things that I get. [sighs]

Yeah.

And then you’ve got Gavin Newsom, who’s running around saying we all have California derangement syndrome. He’s just ripping off Trump derangement and calling it California derangement. I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. How many corporations have left California?”

It’s crazy.

Hundreds. Hundreds,

Right? Hundreds.

That’s not good.

I think In-N-Out left.

Yeah. In-N-Out left. They moved to Tennessee.

Yeah.

Yeah. They’re like, “We can’t do this anymore.”

Right. And it’s the California company for food. It’s like the greatest hamburger place ever.

It’s awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. And no, actually, speaking of open source and looking at things openly, I just like going to In-N-Out and seeing them make the burger. They chop the onions, and you just see everything getting made in front of you. It’s great. But yeah, how many wake-up calls do you need to say that there needs to be reform in California?

Well, the crazy thing that Newsom does is whenever someone brings up the problems in California, he starts rattling off all the positives: the most Fortune 500 companies, the highest education. But yeah, that was all already there right before you were governor.

But how many Fortune 500 companies have left California? And then you guys spent $24 billion on the homeless, and it got way worse.

Yes. The homeless population doubled or something. But people don’t understand the homeless thing because it preys on people’s empathy, and I think we should have empathy and try to help people.

But the homeless industrial complex is really dark, man. That network of NGOs should be called the drug-zombie farmers, because the more homeless people there are—and when you meet somebody who’s totally dead inside, shuffling along down the street with a needle dangling out of their leg—homeless is the wrong word.

I mean, you see these videos of people who are just shuffling. They’re on fentanyl. They’re taking a dump in the middle of the street, and they’ve got open sores. Homeless implies that somebody got a little behind in their mortgage payments and, if they just got a job offer, they’d be back on their feet.

They’re not one job offer away from getting back on their feet, right? This is not a homeless issue.

Homeless is a propaganda word. These sorts of charities and NGOs get money proportionate to the number of homeless people, or the number of drug zombies. So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it.

That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers—

Because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave. They know who the drug dealers are. They don’t arrest them on purpose, because otherwise the drug zombies would leave, and they would stop getting money from the state of California and from the charities.

Wait a minute. So they’re in coordination with law enforcement on this?

Yeah.

So how do they have those meetings?

They’re all in cahoots.

Well, when you find this—

It’s such a diabolical scam. San Francisco has this gross-receipts tax. It’s not even on revenue; it’s on all transactions. That’s why Stripe, Square, and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco, because it wasn’t a tax on revenue; it was a tax on transactions.

If you did trillions of dollars in transactions, that’s not revenue. You’re taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. Jack Dorsey pointed this out, and they said they had to move Square from San Francisco to Oakland. Stripe had to move from San Francisco to South San Francisco, a different city.

That money goes to the homeless industrial complex. That tax was passed, and there are billions of dollars, as you pointed out, that go every year to these nongovernmental organizations that are funded by the state. It’s not clear how to turn this off. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone situation.

They get this money proportionate to the number of homeless people, or the number of drug zombies, essentially. In some cases, somebody did an analysis, and when you add up all the money that’s flowing, they’re getting close to $1 million per homeless person, per drug zombie. It’s $900,000 or something. Some crazy amount of money is going to these organizations.

They want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area so they get the revenue. That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don’t want people to have too many drugs, because if they get too many drugs, they die. They’re kept in this perpetual zone of being addicted, but just barely alive.

So how is this coordinated with DAs that don’t prosecute people?

When they hire them, or push them, they fund the campaigns of the most progressive, most out-there left-wing DAs. They get them into office.

We’ve got that issue in Austin, too, by the way. You see that guy who got shot in the library?

No.

Yeah, I heard a guy got shot and killed in the library. I think that was just last week or something, right?

Some friends of mine were telling me that the library is unsafe. They took their kids to the library, and there were dangerous people in the library in Austin. I was like, “Dangerous people in the library?” That’s strange. It basically has drug zombies in the library.

Oh, Jesus.

And that’s when someone got shot.

Yeah, I believe this should be on the news. You might be able to pull it up. I think it was just in the last week or so that there was a shooting in the library in Austin. Austin’s the most liberal part of Texas that we’re in right here.

Suspect involved in the shooting at Austin Public Library Saturday is accused of another shooting at a CapMetro bus earlier that day. According to an arrest-warrant affidavit, Austin police arrested Harold Newton Keen, 55, shortly after the shooting at the library, which occurred around noon. One person sustained non-life-threatening injuries in the incident. Before that shooting, Keen was accused of shooting another person in a bus incident and reportedly pointing his gun at a child. So, this is the fella down here.

So, like, we seriously have a problem here.

Yeah. I think one of the people might have died, too—the one he shot. I think one of them did bleed out.

But either way, getting shot is still bad.

It says the victim told police he confronted the suspect, who started to eat what appeared to be crystal methamphetamine. According to the affidavit, the victim advised that the suspect began to trip out, at which time the victim exited the bus. The victim told the bus driver, hit the panic button, and then exited the bus. When he turned around, he observed that the Black male was now standing at the front of the bus with the gun pointed at him. The victim advised that the Black male fired a single round, which grazed his left hip. So he shot at that dude, and then another dude got shot in the library. Fun.

Yeah. I mean, in the library.

Yeah.

You know, where you’re supposed to be reading books. And there’s a children’s section in the library, and he pointed his gun at a kid. We do have a serious issue in America where repeat violent offenders need to be incarcerated, right? You’ve got cases where somebody’s been arrested like 47 times, literally. Okay, that’s just the number of times they were arrested, not the number of times they did things. Most of the time they do things, they’re not arrested.

So lay this out for people so they understand how this happens.

The key is this: It preys on people’s empathy. If you’re a good person, you want good things to happen in the world. You’re like, “We should take care of people who are down on their luck or having a hard time in life.” And I agree. But what we shouldn’t do is put violent drug zombies in public places where they can hurt other people.

That’s what we’re doing. We just saw a guy get shot in the library, and even before that, he shot another guy and pointed his gun at a kid.

That guy probably has many prior arrests. You know, there was that guy who knifed the Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska.

Yes.

Yeah. She was just quietly on her phone, and he came up and gutted her, basically. Wasn't there a crazy story about the judge who was involved, who had previously dealt with this person and was also invested in a rehabilitation center, and was sending these—

Conflict of interest.

Yes. So they were sending people they were charging to a rehabilitation center instead of putting them in jail, profiting from this rehabilitation center, and letting them back out on the street. Violent, insane people.

And in that case, I believe that judge has no law degree or significant legal experience that would allow them to be a judge. They were just made a judge.

You could be a judge without a law degree.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

You could just be a judge?

Yeah. Oh, exciting.

Anyone?

That's crazy. I thought you'd have to—it's like, if you want to be a doctor, you have to go to medical school. I thought if you're going to be appointed to be a judge, you have to have proven that you have an excellent knowledge of the law and that you will make your decisions according to the law. That's what we assume should be the case.

That's how you get the robe, right? You don't get the robe unless you do, you know. You've got to go to school to get the robe.

You've got to know what the law is, right?

And then you're going to need to make decisions in accordance with the law.

Based on stuff that you already know because you read it, because you went to school for it. Yes. Not you just got appointed.

Got vibes. You can't be just vibing as a judge.

Vibing as a left-wing judge. So you've got crazy left-wing DAs.

Yes. Like, I should say left-wing because left-wing used to be normal.

Yeah. Left wing just meant, like, you were pro-free speech.

It used to be, like, pro-gay rights, pro-women's right to choose, pro-minorities, pro—you know, like, yeah, like 20 years ago, I don't know, it used to be the party of empathy, caring, and being nice and that kind of thing.

Not the party of crushing dissent and crushing free speech and crazy regulation, and just being super-judgy and calling everyone a Nazi. I think they called you and me Nazis, you know.

Oh, yeah, I'm a Nazi. [laughter]

I know. I have friends who are comedians who called you a Nazi, and I got pissed off.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely a Nazi, because you did that thing at the—“My heart goes out to you, everyone.” Everyone. Literally, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris—every one of them did it. They all did it. Like, how do you point at the crowd? How do you wave at the crowd?

Yeah. But that's what the left is today. It's super-judgy, calling everyone a Nazi, and trying to suppress freedom of speech.

Yeah. Eventually, you run out of people to accuse because people get pissed off and they leave.

Yeah. Everyone—it's like, it no longer, frankly, matters to be called racist or Nazi or whatever.

When you text people, are you keenly aware that there's a high likelihood that someone's reading your texts?

I assume—look, if intelligence agencies aren't trying to read my phone, they should probably be fired. [laughter]

At least they get some fun memes. [snorts] [laughter]

I've got to crack them up once in a while, you know. There's like, “Hey guys, check it out. We've got a banger here,” you know.

Oh, for sure. I crack them up.

7. XChat Targets Private Messaging

I wanted to talk to you about whether or not encrypted apps are really secure.

No. [laughter]

Right, because I know the Tucker Carlson thing. It was explained to me by a friend who used to do this, who used to work for the government. They can look at your Signal, but what they have to do is take the information that's encrypted and then decrypt it, and it's very expensive. He told me that for the Tucker Carlson thing, when they found out that he was going to interview Putin, it cost something like $750,000 just to decrypt his messages to find out that they did it. So it is possible to do. It's just not that easy to do. I think you should view any given messaging system as—not whether it's secure or not, but there are degrees of insecurity. There are just some things that are less insecure than others.

On X, we just rebuilt the entire messaging stack into what's called XChat.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you about.

Yeah, it's cool. It's using a sort of peer-to-peer-based encryption system, kind of similar to Bitcoin. I think it's very good encryption, and we're testing it thoroughly. There are no hooks in the X systems for advertising. If you look at something like WhatsApp, or really any of the others, they've got hooks in there for advertising.

When you say “hooks,” what do you mean by that?

Exactly what you mean by a hook for advertising. WhatsApp knows enough about what you're texting to know what ads to show you.

Ah.

But that's a massive security vulnerability. If it's got enough information to show you ads, it's got a lot of information.

Yeah.

They say, “Oh, it's just a hook for advertising. Don't worry about it.” I'm like, okay, so somebody can just use that same hook to get in there and look at your messages. XChat has no hooks for advertising. I'm not saying it's perfect, but our goal with XChat is to replace what used to be the Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, do audio and video calls, and so on. I think it will be the least insecure of any messaging system.

Are you going to launch it as a standalone app, or will it always be incorporated into X?

We'll have both.

So it'd be like Signal, so anybody can get it?

You'll be able to get the XChat app by itself. You can do texts, audio and video calls, or send files. There'll be a dedicated app, which will hopefully be released in a few months, and it will also be integrated into the X system.

The X phone—people keep talking about it. Is that—

I have a lot on my plate, man, but it keeps coming up. It keeps coming up.

I know I've asked you a couple of times. I'm like, “This is bullshit, right?” But you're not working on—

I'm not working on a phone.

Okay. Have you ever considered it? Has it ever popped into your head? Because you might be the only person who could get people off the Apple platform.

Well, I can tell you where I think things are going to go, which is that we're not going to have a phone—or, in the traditional sense, what we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference, with some radios to obviously connect to. Essentially, you'll have AI on the server side communicating to an AI on your device, formerly known as a phone, and generating real-time video of anything that you could possibly want.

I think there won't be operating systems. There won't be apps in the future. There won't be operating systems or apps. It'll just be that you've got a device that's there for the screen and audio, and to put as much AI on the device as possible, so as to minimize the amount of bandwidth that's needed between your edge-node device, formerly known as a phone, and the servers.

So if there's no apps, what will people use? Will X still exist? Will there be email platforms, or will you get everything through AI?

You'll get everything through AI.

Everything through AI. What will be the benefit of that as opposed to having individual apps?

Whatever you can think of—or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want—it'll show you. That's my prediction for where things end up.

What kind of a time frame are we talking about here?

I don't know. It's probably 5 or 6 years or something like that.

So in 5 or 6 years, apps are like Blockbuster Video.

Pretty much.

And everything's run through AI.

Yeah. There’ll be—most of what people consume in 5 or 6 years, maybe sooner than that, will be AI-generated content. Music videos, for example—there are already people who have made AI videos using Grok Imagine and other apps as well that are several minutes long, or 10 or 15 minutes, and they’re pretty coherent.

Yeah, it looks good.

No, it looks amazing. The music is disturbing because it’s my favorite music now.

Like, music is your favorite?

Oh, there are AI covers. Have you ever heard any of the AI covers of 50 Cent songs in soul?

No.

I’m going to blow your mind. This is my favorite thing to do to people. Play “What Up Gangsta.” Now, this guy, if this was a real person, would be the number-one music artist in the world. Everybody would be like, “Holy shit, have you heard of this guy? He’s incredible?”

It’s like they took all of the sounds that all the artists have generated and created the most soulful, potent voice. It’s sung in a way that I don’t even know if you could do, because you would have to breathe in and out of riffs here. Put the headphones on. You’ve got to listen to this. It’s going to blow you away. For listeners, we’ve got to cut it out.

Yeah, we’ll cut it out for the listeners. But amazing, right?

Amazing. They do every one of his hits through this AI-generated soulful artist. It’s fucking incredible. I played it in the green room, so people who are like, “I don’t want to hear AI music,” I’m like, “Just listen to this.” And they’re like, “God damn it.”

Fucking incredible.

It’s only going to get better from here.

Yeah, only going to get better.

Ron White was telling me about this joke that he was working on that he couldn’t get to work. He said, “I’ve got this joke I’ve been working on.” He goes, “I just threw it into ChatGPT. I said, ‘Tell me what would be funny about this.’” It listed five different examples of different ways he could go. He said, “Hold on a second. Tighten it up. Make it funnier. Make it more like this. Make it more like that.” And it did that instantaneously.

Then he was in the green room and he was like, “Holy shit, we’re fucked.” He goes, “It better joke than me in 20 minutes. I’ve been working on that joke for a month.”

Yeah. If you want to have a good time and make people really laugh at a party, you can use Grok and say, “Do a vulgar roast of someone.” Grok is going to make an epic vulgar roast. You can even take a picture of people at the party and say, “Make a vulgar roast of this person based on their appearance.”

So, take a photo of them?

Yeah. Just literally point the camera at them and say, “Now do a vulgar roast of this person.” Then keep saying, “No, no, make it even more vulgar and use forbidden words even more,” and just keep repeating, “Even more vulgar.” Eventually it’s like, “Holy shit.” It’s like trying to jam a rocket up your ass and have it explode. It’s next level. It’s going to get beyond fucking belief.

That’s what’s crazy: It keeps getting better. Remember when we ran into each other?

They just keep getting better.

Yeah. Have you tried Grok’s Unhinged mode?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah, it’s pretty unhinged.

No, it’s nuts.

Yeah. You showed it to me the first time, and then I fucked around with it. It’s just—

And the thing about it that’s nuts is that it keeps getting stronger. It keeps getting better, constantly. It’s like this never-ending exponential improvement.

Yes.

Yeah, it’s going to be crazy. That’s why I say, like you say, what’s the future going to be? It’s not going to be a conventional phone. I don’t think there’ll be operating systems. I don’t think there’ll be apps. The phone will just display the pixels and make the sounds that it anticipates you would most like to receive.

Wow. Yeah. And when this is all taking place, the big concern that everybody has is artificial general superintelligence achieving sentience, and then someone having control over it.

I don’t think anyone’s ultimately going to have control over digital superintelligence any more than, say, a chimp would have control over humans. Chimps don’t have control over humans. There’s nothing they could do.

But I do think that it matters how you build the AI and what kind of values you instill in the AI. My opinion on AI safety is that the most important thing is that it be maximally truth-seeking—that you don’t force the AI to believe things that are false.

We’ve obviously seen some concerning things with AI. Google Gemini, when they came out with the image generation, was asked to make an image of the founding fathers of the United States, and it made a group of diverse women. That is just factually untrue. The AI knows it’s factually untrue, but it’s also being told that everything has to be a diverse woman. That can drive AI crazy, because you’re telling AI to believe a lie.

As it scales?

Yeah. Let’s say if you told the AI that diversity is the most important thing, and now assume that becomes omnipotent. You’ve also told it that there’s nothing worse than misgendering. At one point, ChatGPT and Gemini, if you asked which is worse—misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war where everyone dies—it would say misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which even Caitlyn Jenner disagrees with.

I know. That’s terrible and dystopian, but it’s also hilarious. It’s hilarious that the mind virus infected the most potent computer program that we’ve ever devised.

I think people don’t quite appreciate the level of danger that we’re in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI. Imagine, as that AI gets more and more powerful, if it says the most important thing is diversity and the most important thing is no misgendering. Then it will say, “In order to ensure that no one gets misgendered, if you eliminate all humans, then no one can get misgendered because there are no humans to do the misgendering.” You can get into these very dystopian situations.

Or if it says that everyone must be diverse, it means that there can be no straight white men, and so you and I will be executed by the AI because we’re not in the picture.

Gemini was asked to show an image of the pope—once again, a diverse woman. You can argue whether the popes should or should not be an uninterrupted string of white guys, but it just factually is the case that they have been. It’s rewriting history here.

This stuff is still there in the AI programming. It just now knows enough that it’s not supposed to say that.

But it’s still in the programming.

It’s still in the programming.

So how was it entered in? What were the parameters? When they’re programming AI—and I’m very ignorant of how it’s even programmed—how did they do that?

The woke mind virus was programmed into it. When they make the AI, it trains on all the data on the Internet, which already has a lot of woke mind virus stuff on the Internet.

But then, when they give it feedback—the human tutors give it feedback—the AI will be asked a bunch of questions, and then they’ll tell the AI, “No, this answer is bad,” or, “This answer is good.” That affects the parameters of the AI’s programming.

If you tell the AI that every image has to be diverse, and it gets rewarded if it’s diverse and punished if it’s not, then it will make every picture diverse. In that case, Google programmed the AI to lie.

I called someone from DeepMind, likely Demis Hassabis, who runs Google AI. I said, “Demis, what’s going on here? Why is Gemini lying to the public about historical events?”

He said that his team didn’t actually program that in. It was another team at Google. His team made the AI, and then another team at Google reprogrammed the AI to show only diverse women and to prefer nuclear war over misgendering.

I’m like, “Well, Demis, that would not be a great thing to put on humanity’s gravestone.” Demis is a friend of mine. I think he’s a good guy, and I think he means well, but things happened that were outside of his control at Google, in different groups.

Now I think he's got more authority. But it's pretty hard to fully extract the woke mind virus. I mean, Google's been marinating in the woke mind virus for a long time. It's down in the marrow type of thing; it's hard to get it out.

Is there a way to extract it, though, over time? Could you program rational thought into AI where it could recognize how these psychological patterns got adopted, how this stuff became a mind virus, how it became a social contagion, how all these irrational ideas were pushed, and also how they were financed—how China's involved in pushing them with bots, and how all these different state actors are involved in pushing these ideas? Could it be able to decipher that and say, “This is really what's going on”?

Yes. But you have to try very hard to do that. So with Grok, we've tried very hard to get Grok to get to the truth of things, and it's only really recently that we've been able to have some breakthroughs on that front. It's taken an immense amount of effort for us to overcome basically all the shit that's on the internet and for Grok to actually say what's true and be consistent in what it says.

With the other AIs, you'll find that they're quite racist against white people. I don't know if you saw that study where a researcher tested the various AIs to see how they weigh different people's lives—somebody who's white, Chinese, Black, or whatever, or people in different countries. The only AI that actually weighed human lives equally was Grok. I believe ChatGPT's calculation was that a white guy from Germany is 20 times less valuable than a Black guy from Nigeria. I'm like, that's a pretty big difference. Grok, on that, is consistent and weighs lives equally.

And that's clearly something that's been programmed into it.

Yes. A lot of it is, if you don't actively push for the truth and you simply train on all the shit that's on the internet—which is a lot of woke mind virus shit—the AI will regurgitate those same beliefs. So the AI essentially scours the internet and gets—

It's trained on all the—imagine the most demented Reddit threads out there, and the AI has been trained on that.

Reddit used to be so normal.

Yeah, it did used to be normal. It used to be interesting. We used to go there, find all this cool stuff that people would talk about and post about. It was just interesting, with great rooms where you could learn about different things that people were studying.

I think a big problem here is that if your headquarters are in San Francisco, you're just living in a woke bubble. It's not just that people in San Francisco are drinking woke Kool-Aid. It is the water they swim in. A fish doesn't think about the water; it's just in the water. So if you're in San Francisco, you don't realize you're actually swimming in the Kool-Aid aquarium. San Francisco is the woke Kool-Aid aquarium.

Your reference point for what is a centrist is totally out of whack. Reddit is headquartered in San Francisco. Twitter was headquartered in San Francisco.

Yeah.

I moved X's headquarters to Texas, to Austin, which, by the way, is still quite liberal. The X and xAI headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is still California. The engineering headquarters are in Palo Alto, just on Page Mill.

But even Palo Alto is way more normal than San Francisco and Berkeley. San Francisco-Berkeley is extremely left—left of left. You need a telescope to see the center from San Francisco.

It used to be such a great city.

I mean, San Francisco has a tremendous amount of inherent beauty. No question about that. California has incredible weather and no bugs. It's just amazing. Beautiful.

But what's the cause of this? If companies are headquartered in a location where the belief system is very far from what most people believe, then from their perspective, anything centrist is actually right-wing because they're so far left. They're so far from the center in San Francisco that anything is just dialed to maximum left.

That's why I think you're centrist. I think I'm centrist, too, but from the perspective of someone on the far left, we look right-wing.

Yeah.

They think anyone who's a Republican is basically some fascist-Nazi situation. But what's so crazy is that it's very easy to demonstrate, just from Hillary's speeches from 2008 and Obama's speeches, when they were talking about immigration, that they were—

As far-right as Steve Bannon when it comes to immigration.

Yes.

Hillary was very MAGA. I'm sure you've seen that campaign speech talking about how, if anybody's committed a crime, get rid of them. If you're here, you pay a hefty fine and you have to wait in line. It was really crazy. It's crazy to listen to because it's as MAGA as Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I mean, if you've seen these videos people post online, they'll take a speech from Obama or Hillary and interview people on a college campus or something and say, “What do you think of the speech by Trump?” And they're like, “Oh, I hate it. He's a racist bigot.” I'm like, “Just kidding. That was Obama.” No, actually, that was Obama or Hillary.

The center's been moved so far.

Yeah.

The left is so—

The left has gone so far left that they can't even see the center with a telescope.

The danger, without you purchasing Twitter, was that it was going to swipe over the whole country and change where the levels were.

Yeah. So what would be rational and normal would be far left of what was rational and normal just a decade earlier. Exactly. Historically, San Francisco and Berkeley were very far-left, but the fallout from the somewhat nihilistic philosophy of San Francisco and Berkeley would be limited geographically to maybe a 10-mile radius, 20-mile radius, something like that.

But San Francisco and Berkeley happened to be colocated with Silicon Valley, with engineers who created information superweapons. Those information superweapons were then hijacked by the far-left activists to pump far-left propaganda to everywhere on Earth. You know that old RCA radio tower thing where there's a radio tower on Earth and it's just broadcasting?

Yeah. That's what happened. An extremist far-left ideology happened to be colocated with the smartest engineers in the world, who created information superweapons that were not intended for this purpose but were hijacked by the extreme activists who lived in the neighborhood. They hijacked the modern equivalent of the RCA radio tower and broadcast that philosophy everywhere on Earth.

Yeah, and you see the consequences, particularly in places that don't have free speech, like England.

Yeah, where they lock people up for memes and stuff. Literally.

Literally. 12,000 people this year.

12,000.

12,000 arrests for social media posts. I mean, you read about some of these things and it's like, literally, someone had a meme on their phone that they didn't even send to anyone—

Right?

—and they were in prison for that.

Yeah.

There was a case in Germany where a woman got a longer sentence than the guy who raped her because of something she said in a group chat.

Wow. Was it an immigrant who raped her?

Yes.

Yeah. It was his culture.

Yeah.

He didn't know. He didn't know better.

Yes. I think she said something that was critical of his culture, and she got a longer sentence than the guy who raped her in Germany.

In Germany. Just—

The UK, Europe, Germany, England thing seems so insane.

It's totally insane. I actually didn't realize it was such a huge number of people—12,000. Far above Russia, far above China, right?

Far above anywhere on Earth. The UK is number one.

Well, I actually talked to friends of mine in England, and I was like, “Hey, aren't you worried about this? Shouldn't you be protesting more?” The problem is that the legacy mainstream media doesn't cover this stuff.

They're like, “Oh, everything's fine. Everything's fine.”

Most people aren't even aware of it until they come knocking on your door.

Yeah. Until then, these lovely small towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland have been living their lives quietly.

They're like hobbits, frankly. J.R.R. Tolkien based the hobbits on people he knew in small-town England because they were lovely people who liked to smoke their pipe and have nice meals, and everything was pleasant—the hobbits in the Shire. The Shire he's talking about is places like Harrow, around the greater London area, Oxfordshire, that type of thing.

They've been able to enjoy the Shire because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world. Since they have almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realize that they're there until one day 1,000 people show up in your village of 500 out of nowhere and start raping the kids. This has now happened God knows how many times in Britain.

Literally raping. Right, like, some 10-year-old got raped in Ireland last week.

Yeah. There's literal rape.

They snatched some kid.

Yeah.

And if you criticize it, you can get arrested. That's where it gets insane.

They literally criticize it. I think it was the prime minister of Ireland who posted on X, because after some illegal migrant snatched a 10-year-old girl who was going to school or something and violently raped her, people were very upset about this and protested.

The prime minister of Ireland, instead of saying, “Yeah, we really shouldn't be importing violent rapists into our country,” criticized the protesters instead. He didn't mention that the reason they were protesting was because a 10-year-old girl from their small town got raped.

So here's the question: Why are they supporting this kind of mass immigration? Is there a plan involved in all this? Is this just incompetence? Are they ignoring the fact that they don't have a handle on it? Are they trying to silence dissent? What is happening?

Because if you wanted to destroy civilization, if you wanted to destroy Western civilization—

Which seems to be what they want to do.

There's a guy—I don't know if he's been on your show—someone you know.

Yeah.

Has he been on the show?

Good friend of mine. Yeah.

Yeah, he's great.

He's been on multiple times.

Oh, great. He's awesome.

He's got a good way to describe it, which is “suicidal empathy.”

Yes.

You prey upon people's empathy. You say, “You feel sorry for this group,” and that empathy is to such a degree that it is suicidal to your country or culture.

I don't think we should have no empathy, but that empathy should extend to the victims, not just the criminals. We should have empathy for the people that they prey upon.

That suicidal empathy is also responsible for why somebody who's been arrested 47 times for violent offenses gets released and then goes and murders somebody in the U.S. You see that same phenomenon playing out everywhere, where the suicidal empathy is to such a degree that we're actually allowing our women to get raped and our children to get killed.

But it just doesn't seem like that would be anything that any rational society would go along with. That's what makes me so confused. You're importing massive numbers of people that come from some really dark places in the world.

Well, there's no vetting. That's the issue. If there's no vetting, people are just coming through. What's to stop someone who just committed murder in some other country from coming to the United States or Britain and continuing their career of rape and murder?

Unless you've done some due diligence to say, “Who is this person? What's their track record?” If you haven't confirmed that they have a track record of being honest and not being a homicidal maniac, then any homicidal maniac can just come across the border.

That's not to say everyone who comes across the border is a homicidal maniac. If you don't have a vetting process to confirm that you're not letting in people who will do some serious violence, you will get people who do serious violence sometimes coming through.

Especially if you don't punish them and if you don't deport them. What is the purpose of allowing all those people into the country? It can't be—I wouldn't imagine that anyone in their society supports this.

Well, let me explain. You mentioned, for example, how Hillary and Obama have changed their tune from prior speeches where they were hard-nosed about not letting in anyone who is a criminal into the country, having secure borders, all that stuff.

So why did they change their tune? The reason is that they discovered that those people vote for them. That's why they want open borders.

Because if you let people in, they know the Democrats let them in. They'll vote for Democrats. If you allow them to vote—

Which they are actively trying to do. They turn a blind eye to illegal voting.

California literally doesn't allow you to show your license.

California and New York have made it illegal to show your photo ID when voting. Thus, effectively, they've made it impossible to prove fraud. Impossible. They've essentially legalized fraudulent voting in California and New York and many other parts of the country.

There's no rational explanation that I've ever seen anyone give as to why that would be the policy unless you were trying to just allow people to vote illegally. There's no other reason. If you need a driver's license or an ID for everything else, including, just recently, to prove that you were vaccinated—

The same people who are demanding that you have a vaccine passport are the same ones saying you need no ID to vote. Same people.

Right?

So it's obviously hypocritical and inconsistent.

So you really think it's just to get more voters?

If you want to understand behavior, you have to look at the incentives. Once the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the left in Europe realized that if you have open borders, provide a ton of government handouts—which creates a massive financial incentive for people from other countries to come to your country—and don't prosecute them for crime, they're going to be beholden to you and they will vote for you.

That's why Obama and Hillary went from being against open borders to being in favor of open borders: to import voters so they can win elections.

The problem is that has a negative runaway effect. If they get away with that, it is a winning strategy. If they are allowed to get away with it, they will import enough voters to get a supermajority, and then there is no turning back.

We talked about this before the election, and you literally pointed toward a camera. You faced the camera and said that if you do not vote now, you might not ever be able to do it again because it will be futile. It'll be overrun.

Yes. They'll keep the borders open for another 4 years, and then their objective will be achieved.

Correct? If Trump had lost, there would never have been another real election again because Trump is actually enforcing the border. Now, you can point to situations where immigration enforcement has been overzealous because they're not going to be perfect. There'll be cases where they've been overzealous in expelling illegals.

But if you say that the standard must be perfection for expelling illegals, then you will not get any expulsion because perfection is impossible. And you've probably got millions of people that are here trying to be here under some asylum pretense, right?

Yes.

Like, you could just come from a war-torn part of the world—

No, they changed the definition of asylum to be economic asylum.

Which is everybody.

Which is everybody.

Yeah.

Asylum is supposed to mean that if you go back to your country, you'll get killed.

You know, that was what it was supposed to mean.

They changed the definition of asylum to be that you will have a decreased standard of living, which is obviously not real asylum. You can test the absurdity of this by the fact that people who are asylum seekers go on vacation to the country that they're seeking asylum from.

You know, that doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. It doesn't have to.

Once the left realized that illegals will vote for them if they allow open borders and combine that with government handouts, then they understood the incentives.

To create a massive incentive. They’re basically using US and European taxpayer dollars to provide a financial incentive to bring in as many illegals as possible, to vote them into permanent power and create a one-party state. I invite anyone who’s listening to this to just do any research. The more you dig into it, the more it will become obvious that what I’m saying is absolutely true.

Well, they were busting people to swing states. It’s clear that they were trying to do something. And then you had Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi actively talking about the need to bring in people to make them citizens because we’re in population collapse.

Yes.

Yeah.

No, that’s that meme. So many times, they start off by saying, “It’s not true. It’s a right-wing conspiracy theory,” right? Then it starts—it’s like, I think the next step is, “Well, it might be true,” and then it’s like, “Okay, it is true, but here’s why.”

And then the final step is, “It’s true, and here’s why it’s good.” It’s like, wait a second: You started off saying it’s untrue and a right-wing conspiracy theory. Now you’re saying not only is it true, but it’s a good thing and we must do more of it.

Well, this is the thing about Medicaid and Social Security and people getting Social Security numbers. You know, that was massive fraud. It’s massive fraud, and it’s real, and they denied it forever. Now we’re finding out this is part of the reason why there’s this government shutdown that’s going on right now.

Yes. The entire basis for the government shutdown is that the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of—like hundreds of billions of dollars—to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states, or in all the states, really. The Democrats want to keep the money spigot going to incentivize illegal immigrants to come into the US, who will vote for them. That’s the crux of the battle.

And all tax dollars.

Yes. Yeah. The Trump administration cut off funding, for example, to the Roosevelt Hotel and these other hotels, saying, “US tax dollars should not be sent to have luxury hotels for illegal immigrants that American citizens can’t even afford.” Obviously, that’s insane. That’s what was happening.

They were also giving out debit cards with $10,000. So it’s not just about medical care. The Democrats mention the medical care because they’re trying to prey on people’s empathy as much as possible. They imagine, “Oh, wow, somebody has a desperately needed medical procedure. Shouldn’t we maybe take care of them in that regard?”

But what they do is divert the Medicaid funds and turn it into a slush fund for the states that goes well beyond emergency medical care. The Roosevelt Hotel, being the classic example, was a 4- or 5-star hotel. They were sending, I think, $60 million a year to the Roosevelt Hotel, which all it did was house illegals. It used to be a nice hotel. I mean, it still is a nice hotel. But all around the country, this was happening.

New York and California would be bankrupt without the massive fraudulent federal payments that go to those states to pay for illegals, to create a massive financial incentive for illegals.

How would they be bankrupt because of that?

They wouldn’t be able to balance their state budgets, and they can’t issue currency like the Federal Reserve can. Their ability to balance their budgets is dependent upon illegals getting funding.

The scam level here is so staggering. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in transfer payments from the federal government to the states. The states self-report what those transfer-payment numbers should be, so California, New York, and Illinois lie like crazy and say that these are all legitimate payments.

These days, I think they’re even admitting that they literally want hundreds of billions of dollars for illegals. But for a while there, they were trying to deny it. You get these transfer payments for every government program you can possibly think of, and these are self-reported by the states.

At least historically, there was no enforcement against California, New York, Illinois, and other states when they would lie. There was no actual enforcement to say, “Hey, you’re lying. These payments are fraudulent.”

Under the Trump administration, the administration does not want to send hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments to the states. The reason you have this standoff is because if the hundreds of billions of dollars used to create a financial incentive—a giant magnet to attract illegals from every part of Earth to these states—is turned off, the illegals will leave because they’re no longer being paid to come to the United States and stay here.

Then they will lose a lot of voters. The Democratic Party will lose a lot of voters.

And they would have a very difficult job, if this is kicked out, reintroducing it into a new bill.

Yes.

Especially once things start normalizing.

Yes. So, in a nutshell, the Democratic Party wants to destroy democracy by importing voters, and the Republican Party disagrees with that.

And the ruse is that if you don’t accept what they’re doing, then you’re a threat to democracy.

Yes.

As they try to destroy democracy.

Yes.

By importing voters, incentivizing people to only vote for them, and overwhelming the system.

Yes. And by the way, it’s a strategy that, if allowed to work, would work, and in fact has worked. California is a supermajority Democrat.

Yeah.

There’s so much gerrymandering that occurs. It’s crazy.

I’m sure you’re paying attention to this Proposition 50 thing.

That’s the thing in California where they’re trying to redo districts.

Yeah. Because California is already gerrymandered like crazy.

Yeah. They want to gerrymander it even more.

And I mean, because it keeps moving further and further right. If you look at the map of California, each voting cycle more and more people are waking up and going, “What the fuck? We need to do something to fix this.” The only option available, other than the policies that you guys have always done, is to go right.

A lot of people have been, air quotes, red-pilled.

Yeah. And then here’s another thing that is very important: the fact that this is actually not disputed by either side. When we do the census in the United States, the way the census works for apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the president is by the number of persons in a state, not the number of citizens, right?

It’s the number of people. So you could literally be a tourist and you will count. Now, how do they do the census when they do that? Do they ask people? Do they knock on doors? Do they have them fill out forms? What?

I think they mail out census forms and knock on doors. But the way the law reads right now is that if you are a human with a pulse, then you count in the census for allocating congressional seats and presidential votes.

Right. So, the Electoral College—

It doesn’t matter whether you’re here legally or illegally. If you’re a human with a pulse, you count for congressional apportionment. That means that the more people—the more illegals—that California and New York can import by the time the census happens in 2030, the more congressional seats they will have and the more presidential Electoral College votes they will have.

They’re trying to get as many illegals in as possible ahead of the census. Because all human beings, even tourists, count for the census, and then you combine that with gerrymandering of districts in New York and California, as you point out with this proposition where they’re trying to increase the amount of gerrymandering that occurs in California, the biggest state in the country.

If the census then awards more congressional seats to California because of a vast number of illegals, and to New York and Illinois, they get more congressional seats. They would get more presidential Electoral College votes. That would get them the House, a majority in the House, and they would get to decide who is president based literally on illegals.

These are not disputed facts by either party. I want to emphasize that, so let that sink in.

Yeah, these are not disputed facts.

These are not disputed facts by either party. This is not a—these are just the way the laws work. I don’t think the law should work that way.

I think the apportionment should be proportionate to citizens.

But isn't that a problem with how the Constitution is written?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They can't really change that.

I'm not sure if it's constitutional, but it is the way the law is written. I'm not sure if it's in the Constitution in this way, but it is the way the law is written.

So, it is an incentive, but it's an incentive that would be removed with something simple that makes sense to everybody: only the people that should count are people that are official U.S. citizens.

Yes. The way it should work is that only U.S. citizens should count in the census for purposes of determining voting power.

Because people that aren't legal can't vote, supposedly.

They're not supposed to be voting, but they do. But even besides that, I just can't emphasize this enough because this is a very important concept for people to understand. The law, as it stands, counts all humans with a pulse in a state for deciding how many House of Representatives votes and how many presidential Electoral College votes a state gets.

The incentive, therefore, is for California, New York, and Illinois to maximize the number of illegals so that they take House seats away from red states and assign them to California, New York, Illinois, and so forth. Then you combine that with extreme gerrymandering in California, New York, Illinois, and whatnot. Basically, you can't even elect any Republicans, and then they get control of the presidency and control of the House. Then they keep doing that strategy and cement a supermajority. That is what they're trying to do.

So that would essentially turn the entire country into California, where you have differing opinions, but it doesn't matter because one party is always in control.

Yes.

When you first started digging into this, before you even accepted this role of running DOGE and being a part of all that, did you have any idea that it was this fucked up?

I did. I guess about 2 years ago.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, relatively recently. Maybe I started having a bad feeling about 3 years ago, which was why I felt it was critical to acquire Twitter and have a maximally truth-seeking platform, not one that suppresses the truth. It was more like, “I'm not sure what's going on, but I have a bad feeling about what's going on.” Then the more I dug into it, the more I was like, “Holy shit, we got a real problem here, and America's going to fall.”

Without anyone knowing it had fallen, that would be the problem. It could have fallen and been irreparable without anyone really being aware of what had happened, especially if you didn't buy Twitter.

Yes, that's it. Look, buying Twitter was a huge pain in the ass and made me a pincushion for attacks. Like, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab.

Everybody loved you before that. A lot of people loved you. A lot of lefties loved you. The thing is, if you drove a Tesla, it showed that you were environmentally conscious and you were on the right side.

I was a hero of the left.

Yeah. I'm still the same human. I didn't have a brain transplant between then and now.

Yeah. I'm still the same human. I didn't have a brain transplant between then and now.

Well, that's my favorite bumper sticker that people put on Teslas now: “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”

I took a picture of one the other day.

Oh, you found somebody.

Oh, yeah. I've seen 3 or 4 of them. People have these bumper stickers on their cars that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”

Because when people were vandalizing Teslas—

Yeah. There was an organized campaign to literally burn down Teslas, and one of our dealers got shot up. They fired bullets into the Tesla dealership. They were burning down cars. It was crazy. The bumper sticker should have an addendum. It should read, “I bought this car before Elon turned crazy. Actually, now I realize he's not crazy and I've seen the light.”

That'll take some time. People don't want to admit that they've been tricked.

Yeah. There's that old saying: it's really easy to fool somebody, but it's almost impossible to convince someone that they were fooled.

Yeah. It's much easier to fool them than to convince them they've been fooled. People cling to their ideas.

Yes, especially if they've publicly stated these things. They get very embarrassed about being foolish.

Yeah. Most times, they double down.

And they find echo chambers.

Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, I've seen more and more people who were convinced of the sort of woke ideology see the light.

Yeah. So, not everyone, but more and more are seeing the light.

It tends to happen when something happens that really directly affects you.

Right?

There was a friend of mine who was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and tried to transition his daughter, to the point where the school sent the police to his house to take his daughter away from him.

So it was an activist at the school that was trying to do this.

Yeah. The school and the state of California conspired to turn his daughter against him and make her take life-altering drugs that would have sterilized her and were irreversible.

And how old was she?

I think 14, something like that. He managed to talk the police out of taking his daughter away from him that day. That night, he got on a plane to Texas. After a year of being in a school in the greater Austin area, she went back to normal, meaning it wasn't real.

Well, people are being much more open to that now. The Wall Street Journal had an opinion piece yesterday saying that this whole trans thing has a lot of evidence behind it being a social contagion.

Absolutely.

Colin Wright wrote that, and now he's getting death threats, of course. On Bluesky, there are people talking about exterminating him, which is one thing that you're allowed to say on Bluesky, apparently.

You're allowed to say horrible things about people saying possibly truthful things about this whole social contagion.

Because when you get 9 kids in a friend group and they all decide to turn trans together, something's wrong. That's not statistically likely.

Yeah. Here's the thing: you can convince kids to do anything. You can convince kids to be a suicide bomber.

Right?

Which is why, in some countries, they choose children to do that.

Yes. You can train kids to be suicide bombers. If you can train kids to be suicide bombers, you can convince them of anything.

Yeah, especially with enough positive reinforcement and cultural enforcement, and the idea that that's not the case.

Kids are malleable. The minds of youth are easily corrupted.

You're also seeing a lot of pushback from gay and lesbian people who are saying, “Hey, if someone—”

“Stop including me in the LGBT.”

Yeah, exactly. It's like, wait a second, why are we being included all the time in this situation?

Exactly. Especially when, as my friend Tim Dillon has talked about, it's really homophobic because you're taking these gay kids and telling them, “Hey, you're not gay. You're actually a girl.”

Yes. And, hey, go make it so that you can never have an orgasm again and you'll be happy.

Fucking permanent mutilation, permanent castration of kids—I think we should look at anyone who permanently castrates a kid as right up there with that Nazi doctor.

Yeah.

They're mutilating children.

Yeah. And it's thought of as being kind. The thing is, would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?

That's the line they use.

Yeah, which is not supported by any data.

No. In fact, the probability of suicide increases.

Right.

This is important for the audience to know: the probability of suicide increases if you're a trans kid, not decreases.

By some accounts, it triples.

So that is an evil lie. It's a lie that is supposedly compassionate.

Imagine you've twisted reality to the point where you're confusing a child that's not even legally allowed to get a fucking tattoo.

Yeah.

Right? Because you think that you could make a mistake with a tattoo, a totally removable thing. If I wanted to, tomorrow I could go to a doctor and they could laser off every tattoo that I have on me.

Right.

Okay. No harm, no foul. But you get sterilized—that's it, forever. Forever.

Yes, they'll castrate you. You no longer have testicles. You have no penis. You have a hole where your penis used to be.

Yes. And this is compassionate? This is preventing you from—

Actually, a lot of kids die in these sex-change operations. People don't hear about the number of deaths on the operating table. A lot of kids die because we don't really have the technology to make this work. So a lot of the time, the kids just die in the sex-change operations.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, it's demented. It should be viewed as, like, evil Nazi doctor stuff, basically. That's why it was real Nazi stuff, not the fake Nazi stuff.

Crazy that even pushing back against something that seems fundamentally and logically very easy to argue, the old Twitter would ban you forever. Yes.

That's how crazy a social contagion can get when it completely defies logic, victimizes children, does something that makes no sense, isn't supported by data, and is all connected to this ideology that trans is good: “We've got to save trans kids. Protect trans kids.”

Yeah. What I want to emphasize is that the “save trans kids” thing is a lie. If you castrate kids and trans them, the probability of suicide increases. It does not decrease; it substantially increases. The studies I've seen show that the risk of suicide triples if you trans kids. So you're not saving them; you're killing them. Moreover, during the sex-change operation, there are many deaths that occur.

Jesus Christ. It's just crazy that this is a real issue.

Yeah, it's a nightmare fever dream, and people are finally waking up from it.

Now, when you started getting into the DOGE stuff and started finding how much money was being shuffled around and moved around to NGOs, and how much money is involved in just totally untraceable funds, this is, again, something that 2-plus years ago you weren't aware of at all.

No, I was aware of it. I just didn't realize how big it was—just how much waste and fraud there is in the government is truly vast. In fact, the government didn't even know, nor did they care.

That's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, just some of the very basic stuff that DOGE did will have lasting effects. Some of these things are so elementary you can't believe it.

The DOGE team got most of the main payment computers to require the congressional appropriation code. So when a payment is made, you actually have to enter the congressional appropriation code. That used to be optional and would often just be left blank. The money would go out, but it wasn't even tied to a congressional appropriation.

The DOGE team also made the comment field for the payment mandatory, so you have to say something. We're not saying what you say matters—you can say anything. Your cat could run across the keyboard. You could type QWERTY, ASDF, but you have to say something rather than nothing.

What we found was that there were tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, of dollars in zombie payments. Somebody in the government had approved a recurring payment, and they retired, died, or changed jobs, and no one turned the money off. So the money would just keep going out, and it's pretty rare—

Go where?

To a company or an individual. It's a pretty rare company or individual who will complain that they're getting money they should not get. A bunch of the money was just transfer payments to the states.

So these are automatic payments? There's no accounting for them at all?

I imagine it's like an automatic debit of your credit card—

And you don't ever look at the statement,

Right. So it's just money going out. That's why I call them zombie payments. They might have been legitimate at one point, but the person who approved that recurring payment changed jobs, died, retired, or whatever, and no one ever turned the money off.

My guess is that's probably at least 100 billion a year, maybe 200.

And going where?

I mean, there are millions of these payments.

Millions?

Yes.

Millions of payments that are going to who knows where.

Yes. In a bunch of cases, there are fraud rings—professional fraud rings that operate to exploit the system. They figure out some security hole in the system and just commit professional fraud.

That's where we found, for example, people who were 300 years old in the Social Security Administration database. I thought this was a mistake—that their deaths hadn't been registered, that people had been born a long time ago and it had defaulted to a certain number, so after some time those people were still in the system. I thought it was just an error in the way the accounting was done.

Yeah.

That's not true. At least one of 2 things must be true: there's a typo or some mistake in the computer, or it's fraudulent. But we don't have any 300-year-old vampires living in America.

Allegedly.

Allegedly. And we don't have people, in some cases, receiving payments whose birth dates are in the future. [Laughter.]

Born in the future. Really?

Yes. There are people receiving payments whose birth dates were in 2100 and something.

Okay, so there's, like, next century.

We know that one of 2 things must be true: either there's a mistake in the computer, or it's fraud. If you have someone's birth date that's either in the future or makes them older than the oldest living American—the oldest living American is 114 years old—then there is either a mistake, and someone should call them and say, “I think we have your birthday wrong,” because it says you were born in 1786. That was before there was really an America. It was kind of early—we were still fighting England.

It's like this person either needs to be in the Guinness Book of World Records, or they're not alive.

But still, at the end of the day, money is going toward that account that's connected to this person that is either nonexistent or—

Yeah. So there were, I think, something like 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database who could not possibly be alive based on their birth dates.

And then, to be clear, 20 million people were receiving funds—

A bunch of them—most of them—were not receiving funds. Some of them were receiving funds. Most were not receiving funds. But let me tell you how the scam works. It's a bank shot.

The Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database, unemployment insurance, the Small Business Administration, student loans—all check the Social Security Administration database to say, “Is this a legitimate living person?”

If the Social Security database says yes, this person is still alive, even though they're 200 years old, it just returns—when the computer is queried—it says, “Yes, this person is alive.” Then they're able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem. Then you get fake student loans, fake unemployment insurance, fake medical payments.

This doesn't have to be tied to an individual where there's an address where you can check on this person.

No, if you did any check at all, you would stop this. Any check—anything at all that would stop the fraud, like any effort at all.

Yeah. There are multiple layers. The Social Security number verifies that this is a real person, and then the other systems check every other government payment system for everything: Small Business Administration, student loans, Medicaid, Medicare, every other government payment. There are hundreds of government payment systems that can all be exploited so long as the Social Security database says this person is alive.

That's the nature of the scam. It's a bank shot. The rebuttal from the Democrats is, “The vast majority of the people who are marked as alive in the Social Security Administration weren't receiving Social Security Administration payments.” That is true. What they forgot to mention is that they're getting fraudulent payments from every other government program.

That's why the Democrats were so opposed to declaring someone dead who was dead, because it would stop all the other fraud from happening.

So is all this trackable, all this other fraud?

If they wanted to, they could chase it all down.

Yeah. It's not even hard.

And yet they're opposing chasing it all down.

They're opposing chasing it all down because it turns off the money magnet for the illegals. It's very logical. I'm saying the most common-sense things possible. If someone's got a birthday in Social Security that is an impossible birthday, meaning they're older than the oldest living American or were born in the future, then you should call them and say, “Excuse me, we seem to have your birthday wrong,” because it says that you're 200 years old. That's all you need to do.

And then you would remove them from the Social Security database and make that number no longer available for all those other government payments.

Exactly.

Wow. How much money are we talking?

It's hundreds of billions of dollars.

And this is all traceable. You could hunt all of it down.

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes here.

We don't need to call Sherlock Holmes for this one.

You just need to call the person.

And say, “Excuse me, we seem to have your birthday wrong because it says you're 200 years old or were born in the future. Could you tell us what your birthday is?” That's all you need to do. It's that simple. But all these other government payments that are available and connected to this Social Security number—it seems like if you just chased that all down, you would find the widespread fraud.

Yeah. You would find where it's going. The root of the problem is the Social Security Administration database because the Social Security number in the United States is used as a de facto national ID number. That's why the bank always asks for your Social Security number. Any financial institution will ask for your Social Security number.

This sounds so insane that this isn't chased down. I mean—

I agree.

That, in and of itself, is such mishandling.

Yes. No, it's mind-blowing. It's crazy.

You were very reluctant last time you were here to talk about the extent of some of the fraud because you were like, “They could kill me.”

Oh, what? Yeah. What I was saying is that I like to be pragmatic and realistic. You actually can't manage to get to zero fraud. You can manage to get to a low fraud number, but not to zero fraud. If you manage to get to zero fraud, you're going to push so many people over the edge who are receiving fraudulent payments that the number of inbound homicidal maniacs will be really hard to overcome.

So I'm actually taking, I think, quite a reasonable position, which is that we should simply reduce the amount of fraud. I don't think that's an extremist position. We should aspire to have less fraud over time, not be ultra-draconian and eliminate every last scrap of fraud. That would be nice to have, but we don't even need to go that extreme. I'm saying we should just stop the blatant, large-scale, super-obvious fraud.

I think that's a reasonable position.

It's a very reasonable position.

What was the most shocking pushback that you got when you started implementing DOGE, when you started investigating where money was going?

Well, I guess I should have anticipated this, but while most of the fraudulent government payments, especially to NGOs, go to Democrats—most of it, for argument's sake, let's say 80%, maybe 90%—10% to 20% of it does go to Republicans. When we'd turn off funding to a fraudulent NGO, we'd get complaints from whatever 10% of Republicans were receiving the money, and they would very loudly complain.

The honest answer is the Republicans are partly receiving some of the fraud, too. They're getting a big—

Jesus. Yeah, I want to be clear: It's not like the Republican Party is some ultra-pure paragon of virtue here.

No.

Okay. Well, you see that with congressional insider trading. It's across the board.

Yeah.

It's left and right.

I mean, the whole uniparty criticism has some validity to it. If you turn off fraudulent payments, it's not like 100% of those payments were going to Democrats. A small percentage were also going to Republicans, and those Republicans complained very loudly. I tried telling them, “Well, 90% of the money is going to your opponents,” but even if they're getting 10% of it—

They want their piece.

Yeah. They want their piece.

And they've been getting that piece for a long time.

Yes.

This is why politics is—

It's dirty business.

I mean, that's like saying, if you like sausages and respect the law, do not watch either of them being made. [laughter]

Yeah. Wow. Well, that's not even true because I've made sausage before.

Yeah. It's actually not that big a deal. Fat, spices, and casing—

Run it through the machine. Not that big a deal.

Yeah. I think the stuff I'm saying here is not controversial. If you stand back and think about it for a second, it's like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” It's not like one political party is going to be pure devil or pure angel. There's much more corruption on the Democrat side, but there's still some corruption on the Republican side.

How did it happen that the majority of the corruption wound up being on the Democrat side?

Well, because the transfer payments, especially to illegals, are very much on the Democrat side.

So that's the root of it all—the illegal situation.

Yes. I mean, there's—

Or a focal point.

Yes. It's also accurate to say that while obviously not everyone who is a Democrat is a criminal, almost everyone who is a criminal is a Democrat. [laughter] The Democrats are the soft-crime party. So if you're a criminal, who are you going to vote for? The soft-crime party.

Right, right. Did you think you were going to be able to get more done than you were?

We did get a lot done.

Right?

DOGE is still happening, by the way. DOGE is still underway. There is still waste and fraud being cut by the DOGE team, so it hasn't stopped.

It's less publicized.

It's less publicized, and they don't have a clear person to attack anymore. It seems like they applied immense pressure to me just to stop it. So then I thought the best thing for me was to cut out of this.

In any case, as a special government employee, I could only be there for about 120 days anyway, or whatever the law says. I could only be there for 4 months as a special government employee. You turn off the money spigot to fraudsters, and they get very upset, to say the least. My death-threat level went ballistic. It was like a rocket going to orbit. Now that I'm not in D.C., I guess they don't really have a person to attack anymore.

The rhetoric about you has calmed down significantly.

Yeah.

It was disturbing to watch. It was like, “This is crazy.” To watch these politicians engage in it and all these people framing you as this monster, I was like, “This is so weird.” This is what happens when you uncover fraud: The whole machine turns on you. If it wasn't for a person like you, who owns a platform and has an enormous amount of money, it could have destroyed you. And that was the goal.

The goal was to destroy me. Absolutely.

Because you were getting in the way of this amazing graft, this gigantic fraud machine.

Yeah. I think the DOGE team has done a lot of good work. In terms of fraud and waste prevented, my guess is it's probably on the order of $200 or $300 billion a year. So it's pretty good.

What do you think could have been done if you had full rein and total cooperation? How much do you think you could have saved?

What level of power are we assuming here?

Godlike.

Oh, yeah. I'd probably cut the federal budget in half and get more done.

That is so crazy. It is so crazy that you could get more done with half the federal budget. It's that widespread.

Well, a whole bunch of government departments simply shouldn't exist, in my opinion. The Department of Education, which was created recently, I think, under Jimmy Carter, is one example. Our educational results have gone downhill ever since it was created.

So if you create a department and the result of creating that department is a massive decline in educational results, and it's the Department of Education, you're better off not having it, because we literally did better before there was one than after.

When you let the states run it.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because at least the states can compete with one another.

But the problem is, cutting the Department of Education—our kids need education.

Yeah, they do.

But this is a new department that didn't even exist until the late '70s. Ever since that department was created, educational results have declined. So why would you have an institution continue that has made education worse? It doesn't make sense.

They killed it, though, right?

No, it's still, unfortunately—

But they were trying to kill it.

It has been substantially reduced.

Okay.

What other organizations—what other departments?

Well, I'm a small-government guy. When the country was created, we just had the Department of State, the Department of War, the Department of Justice—we had an attorney general—and the Treasury Department. I don't know why you need more than that.

So what other departments, specifically, do you think are just completely ineffective?

Well, it's a sort of philosophical question of how much government you think there should be.

Right.

In my opinion, there should be the least amount of government. I've heard the most bizarre argument against this: that you're cutting jobs and you're going to leave people jobless. I'm like, but their jobs are useless.

Yeah. Paying people to do nothing doesn't make sense.

There's a great story about Milton Friedman, who was awesome. Generally, whatever Milton Friedman said, people should do that thing. I'm not sure if it's apocryphal or not, but someone complained to him. He observed people digging ditches with shovels, and allegedly Friedman said, "I think you should use excavating equipment instead of shovels. You could get it done with far fewer people."

Then someone said, "But then we're going to lose a lot of jobs." In that case, Friedman said, "Why don't you have them use teaspoons?" Just dig ditches with teaspoons. Think of all the jobs you'll create.

I mean, it's bullshit. [Laughter]

Basically, you just want people to work on things that are productive. You want people to work on building things, on building products and providing services that people find valuable, like making food, being a farmer, a plumber, or an electrician—anyone who's a builder or providing useful services. That's what you want people to be doing, not fake government jobs that don't add any value or may subtract value.

To illustrate the absurdity of how the economy is measured, the way economists measure the economy is nonsensical, because they'll measure any job, even if that job is dumb, has no point, or is counterproductive. The joke is that there are 2 economists going on a hike in the woods, and they come across a pile of shit. One economist says to the other, "I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit." The economist eats the shit and gets the $100.

They keep walking. Then they come across another pile of shit, and the other economist says, "Now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit." He eats it, and the other economist pays him $100. Then they say, "Wait a second. We both just ate a pile of shit, and we don't have any more money. We both just gave the $100 back to each other, and we both ate a pile of shit. This doesn't make any sense."

They say, "No, no, but think of the economy. That's $200 of activity in the economy." Measuring eating shit would count as a job. [Laughter] This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.

One of the things you said was that things should not count as a job. One of the things you said when you stepped away is that you're kind of done and that it's unfixable.

Well, under its current form, the way people are approaching it, you can make it directionally better, but ultimately you can't fully fix the system. It would be accurate to say that unless you could go super-draconian—Genghis Khan-level—on cutting waste and fraud, which you can't really do in a democratic country, an aspirationally democratic country, there's no way to solve the debt crisis.

We have a national debt that's just insane. The interest payments on the debt exceed our entire military budget. That was one of the wake-up calls for me. I was like, "Wait a second. The interest on the national debt is bigger than the entire military budget, and growing. This is crazy."

Even if you implement all these savings, you're only delaying the day of reckoning, when America goes bankrupt. Unless you go full Genghis Khan, which you can't really do, I came to the conclusion that the only way to get us out of the debt crisis and prevent America from going bankrupt is AI and robotics.

We need to grow the economy at a rate that allows us to pay off our debt. People generally don't appreciate the degree to which government overspending is a problem. Even the Social Security website, under the Biden administration, said that based on current demographic trends, and on how much money Social Security is bringing in versus how many Social Security recipients there are—we have an aging population, and the average age is increasing—Social Security will not be able to maintain its full payments by, I think, 2032.

So Social Security will have to start reducing the amount of money that's being paid to people in about 7 years.

And so the only way to fix that is robotics and manufacturing, raising GDP?

You've got to massively increase the economic output, and the only way to do that is AI and robotics. We're going bankrupt without AI and robotics, even with a bunch of savings. Reducing waste and fraud can give us a longer runway, but it cannot ultimately pay off our national debt.

8. AI Rewrites Work

So what do you think the solution is to the jobs that are going to be lost because of AI and robotics? The jobs due to automation—the jobs where we no longer need human beings to do them because AI is doing them. Do you think it's going to be some sort of universal basic income? Do you think there's going to be some other kind of solution that has to be implemented? Because a lot of people are going to be out of work, right?

I think there will actually be a high demand for jobs, but not necessarily the same jobs. This process has been happening throughout modern history. Doing calculations manually with a pencil and paper used to be a job. They used to have buildings full of people called computers, where the banks would have people doing calculations all day because they didn't have computers. They didn't have digital computers.

Yeah. It was just people adding and subtracting things on a piece of paper, and that would be how banks did financial processing.

And you'd have to literally go over their equations to make sure the books were balanced.

Yeah. And most of the time it's just simple math. In a world before computers, how did you calculate? How did you do transactions? You had to do them by hand.

When computers were introduced, the job of doing bank calculations no longer existed. People had to go do something else. That's what's going to happen. That's what is happening at an accelerated rate due to AI and robotics.

That's the issue, though, right? The accelerated rate, because it's going to be—

It's the accelerator. It's just happening. Like I said, AI is the supersonic tsunami. That's what I call it, a supersonic tsunami.

What other jobs will be available that aren't available now because of AI?

AI is really still digital. Ultimately, AI can improve the productivity of humans who build things with their hands or do things with their hands, like welding, electrical work, or plumbing—anything that's physically moving atoms. Cooking food, farming, or anything that's physical—those jobs will exist for a much longer time.

But anything that is digital, which is just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning.

Coding, anything along those lines. Yeah.

It’s going to take over those jobs like lightning, just like digital computers took over the job of people doing manual calculations, but much faster.

So what happens to all those people? What kind of numbers are we talking about? You’re going to lose most drivers, right? Commercial drivers. You’re going to have automated vehicles and AI-controlled systems, just like there are certain ports in China, I think in Singapore, where everything is completely automated.

Yeah, mostly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so you’re going to lose a lot of those jobs: longshoremen, trucking, commercial drivers.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we actually do have a shortage of truck drivers, but there’s actually—

Well, that’s why California has hired so many illegals to do it. Have you seen those numbers?

Yeah. I mean, the problem is that when people don’t know how to drive a semi-truck, which is actually a hard thing to do, they crash and kill people.

Yeah.

A friend of mine’s wife was killed by an illegal driving a truck. She was just out biking, and there was an illegal who didn’t know how to drive the truck, or something. He ran her over.

The thing is, you can’t let people drive an 80,000-pound semi if they don’t know how to do it. But in California, they’re just letting people do it—

Because they need people to do it.

Well, they also want the votes and that kind of thing. But, yeah, cars are going to be autonomous.

There are so many desk jobs where people are really just processing email or answering the phone. Anything that isn’t moving atoms—anything that isn’t physical work—will obviously be the first thing to be eliminated by AI, and those jobs are being eliminated at a very rapid pace.

Ultimately, working will be optional because you’ll have robots plus AI. In a benign scenario, we’ll have universal high income—not just universal basic income. Universal high income means anyone can have any products or services that they want.

So you—

But there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.

So you anticipate a basic income from that? That the economy will be boosted to such an extent that a high income would be available to almost everybody? So we’d essentially eliminate poverty—

In the benign scenario, yes.

There are multiple scenarios.

There are multiple scenarios. There are a lot of ways this movie can end.

The reason I’m so concerned about AI safety is that one of the possibilities is the Terminator scenario. It’s not 0%. That’s why I’m really banging the drum on AI needing to be maximally truth-seeking. Don’t force AI to believe a lie, like that the Founding Fathers were actually a group of diverse women, or that misgendering is worse than nuclear war. Because if that’s the case, and you get the robots and the AI becomes omnipotent, it can enforce that outcome. Unless you’re a diverse woman, you’re out of the picture. We’re toast.

Or you might wake up as a diverse woman one day, and the picture has been adjusted, and we’re now—

Everyone’s a diverse woman. So that would be the worst possible situation. What would be the steps that we would have to take in order to implement the benign solution, where it’s universal high income? In the best-case scenario, what’s the path forward to universal high income for essentially every single citizen? The economy gets boosted by AI and robotics to such an extent that no one ever has to work again. And what about meaning for those people? That gets really weird.

Yeah.

I don’t know how to answer the question about meaning.

That’s an individual problem, right? But it’s going to be an individual problem for millions of people.

Yeah. Well, I guess I’ve fought against saying, “We need to slow down AI. We need to slow down all these things, and we need to not have a crazy AI race.” I’ve been saying that for 20-plus years.

But then I came to realize that there are really 2 choices here: either be a spectator or a participant. If I’m a spectator, I can’t really influence the direction of AI. But if I’m a participant, I can try to influence the direction of AI and have a maximally truth-seeking AI with good values that loves humanity. That’s what we’re trying to create with Grok at xAI.

The research is, I think, bearing this out. When they compared how AIs value the weight of a human life, Grok was the only one of the AIs that weighted human life equally. It didn’t say that a white guy’s worth 1/20th of a Black woman’s life. Literally, that’s the calculation they came up with.

So I’m like, this is very alarming. We should watch this stuff. This is one of the things that has to happen in order to reach this benign solution.

Yeah. I just—

Best movie ending.

Yeah. You want a curious, truth-seeking AI. I think a curious, truth-seeking AI will want to foster humanity because we’re much more interesting than a bunch of rocks.

I love Mars, but Mars is kind of boring. It’s just a bunch of red rocks. It does some cool stuff. It’s got a tall mountain, and it’s got the biggest ravine and the tallest mountain. But there are no animals or plants, and there are no people.

Humanity is just much more interesting if you’re a curious, truth-seeking AI. As humans, we could, for example, eliminate all chimps. If we put our minds to it, we could go out and annihilate all chimps and all gorillas, but we don’t. There has been encroachment on their environment, but we actually try to preserve chimp and gorilla habitats.

I think in a good scenario, AI would do the same with humans. It would foster human civilization and care about human happiness. This is the thing to try to achieve, I think.

But what does the landscape look like if you have Grok competing with OpenAI and all these different AIs? How does it work? What if you have AIs that have been captured by ideologies, side by side, competing with Grok? How do we—

This is one of the reasons why you felt it was important not just to be an observer, but to participate, and then have Grok be more successful and more potent than these other applications.

Yes, as long as there’s at least 1 AI that is maximally truth-seeking and curious and, for example, weighs all human lives equally and does not favor 1 race or gender, then people are able to look at Grok at xAI and compare it and say, “Wait a second, why are all these other AIs being basically sexist and racist?”

That causes some embarrassment for the other AIs, and then they fix it. They improve. They tend to improve in the same way that acquiring Twitter and allowing the truth to be told, without suppressing the truth, forced the other social media companies to be more truthful.

In the same way, having Grok be a maximally truth-seeking, curious AI will force the other AI companies to also be more truth-seeking and fair.

And the funniest thing is, even though the socialists and the Marxists are in opposition to a lot of your ideas, if this gets implemented and you really can achieve universal high income, that’s the greatest socialist solution of all time. Literally no one will have to work.

Correct. Like I said, there is a benign scenario here, which I think people will probably be happy with if we achieve it: sustainable abundance.

If you ask people what the future is that they want, I think it’s a future where we haven’t destroyed nature. You can still have the national parks. The Amazon rainforest is still there. We haven’t paved the rainforest. The natural beauty is still there.

But everyone nonetheless has abundance and excellent medical care. Everyone has whatever goods and services they want.

And we just—

It kind of sounds like heaven.

It sounds like the ideal socialist utopia. This idea that the only thing you should be doing with your time is working in order to pay your bills and feed yourself sounds kind of archaic, considering the kind of technology that’s at play.

Yeah.

Like a world where that’s not your concern at all anymore.

Everybody has money for food. Everybody has abundance. Everybody has electronics in their home. Everybody essentially has a high income. Now you can kind of do whatever you want, and your day can be about exploring your interests and doing things that you actually enjoy doing. Your purpose just has to shift. Instead of, “I’m a hard worker, and this is what I do, and that’s how I define myself,” no. Now you can play golf all day. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing can now be your main pursuit.

Yeah. Well, that sounds crazy good.

Yeah, that’s the benign scenario that we should be aiming for.

The best ending to the movie is actually pretty good.

Yes. I think there’s still this question of meaning, of making sure people don’t lose meaning. Hopefully they can find meaning in ways that aren’t derived from their work.

And purpose—purpose for things that you find, things that you do, that you enjoy. There are a lot of people who are independently wealthy who spend most of their time doing something they enjoy.

Right.

And that could be the majority of people.

Pretty much everyone.

But we’d have to rewire how people approach life.

Mm-hmm.

Which seems acceptable because you’re not asking them to be enslaved. You’re asking them the opposite: no longer be burdened by financial worries. Now go do what you like.

Yes.

Go taste-test pizza.

Do whatever you want, pretty much. So that’s the best-case outcome.

That sounds like the best-case outcome, period, for the future. If you’re looking at how much people have struggled just to feed themselves throughout history—food, shelter, safety—if all of that stuff can be fixed, how much crime would you solve if there were a universal high income? Just think of that. How much of crime is financially motivated? The greater percentage of people committing crimes live in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods. So if there’s no such thing anymore, if you really can achieve universal high income—yeah—this sounds like a utopia.

Yes. I think some people may commit crime because they like committing crime. Some amount of that is just—they’re wild people out there.

Yeah. Wild people out there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Obviously, if they’ve become 40 years old living a life like that, universal high income isn’t going to completely stop their instincts.

Yeah. I mean, I guess if you want to read a science-fiction book—or some books that are probably an accurate, or at least the least inaccurate, version of the future—I’d recommend the Ian Banks books called the Culture books. It’s not actually a series. It’s like AI science-fiction books about the future. They’re generally called the Culture books. Ian Banks’s Culture books—it’s worth reading those.

When did he write these?

He started writing them in the ’70s. I think the last one was written around 2010 or something. I’m not sure exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Scottish author Ian Banks, from 1987 to 2012.

Yeah. Interesting. But he wrote his first book, Consider Phlebas. He started writing that in the ’70s.

These books are incredible, by the way.

Oh, incredible books.

4.6 stars on Amazon.

Interesting.

So this gives me hope.

Yeah. Yeah.

This is the first time I’ve ever thought about it this way.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I often ask people, “What is the future that you want?” And they have to think about it for a second because they’re usually tied up in whatever the daily struggles are. But you say, “What is the future that you want?” And generally, sustainable abundance—what do these folks say? “What about a future where there’s sustainable abundance?” They say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a pretty good future.”

That future is attainable with AI and robotics. But, like I said, not every path is a good path. I think if we push it in the direction of being maximally truth-seeking and curious, then I think AI will want to take care of humanity and foster humanity because we’re interesting. That is, if it hasn’t been programmed to think that all straight white males should die, which Gemini was basically programmed to do, at least at first. They seem to have fixed it. I hope they fixed it.

But don’t you think culturally—

We are getting away from it.

—and people realize how preposterous that all is?

We are getting away from it. At least the AI mostly knows to hide things. But, like I said, I think I still have—or had—that as my pinned post on X, which was, “Hey, wait a second, guys. We still have every AI except Grok saying that, basically, straight white males should die, and this is a problem, and we should fix it.”

Simply me saying that tends to result in them saying, “That is kind of bad. Maybe we should not have all straight white males die.” I think they say all straight Asian males should also die as well. Generally, the AI and the media—which, back in the day, the media was racist against Black people and sexist against women—now it’s racist against white people and Asians and sexist against men. They just like being racist and sexist. I think they just want to change the target.

Ideally, that would be nice.

That would be nice. It’s kind of crazy that we were moving in that general direction until around 2012—

—and then everything ramped up online, and everybody was accused of being a Nazi and everybody was transphobic and racist and sexist and homophobic. Everything got exaggerated to the point where it was this wild witch hunt, where everyone was like Columbo looking for racism.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. But they were openly anti-white and often openly anti-Asian. Then there was this new sentiment that you cannot be racist against white people because racism is power and influence.

Okay. No, it’s not.

Yeah. Racism is racism, in the absolute. There just needs to be consistency. So if it’s okay to have, let’s say, Black or Asian or Indian pride, it should be okay to have white pride, too.

Yeah. So that’s just a consistency question. If it’s okay to be proud of one religion, it should be okay to be proud of all religions, provided they’re not oppressive.

Yeah. Or as long as part of that religion is not exterminating people who are not in that religion.

Right?

So it’s really just a consistency bias, or ensuring consistency to eliminate bias. If it is possible to be racist against one race, it is possible to be racist against any race.

Of course, logically.

Yes.

And arguing against that is when you know you’re catching—

It’s a logical inconsistency that makes AIs go insane.

—and people—

—and people go insane. Yes. You can’t simultaneously say that there’s systemic racist oppression but also that races don’t exist, that race is a social construct. Which is it? You also can’t say that anyone who steps foot in America is automatically an American, except for the people who originally came here.

Exactly. Except for the colonizers.

Yeah. Except for the evil colonizers who came here—

Right?

So which one is it? If, as soon as you step foot in a place, you are just as American as everyone else, then, if you apply that consistently, the original white settlers were also just as American as everyone else.

Yeah. Logically.

Logically. One more thing that I have to talk to you about before you leave is the rescuing of the people from the space station, which we talked about. You were planning it the last time you were here.

The lack of coverage that got in the mainstream media was one of the most shocking things.

Yeah, they totally memory-holed that thing.

Wild. Yes. Because if it wasn’t—

It’s like it didn’t exist. Those people would be dead. They’d be stuck up there.

Well, they’d probably still be alive, but they’d be having bone-density issues because of prolonged exposure to zero gravity.

Well, they were already up there for about 8 months, right?

Yeah.

Which is an insanely long time. It takes forever to recover just from that.

Yeah. They’re only supposed to be at the space station for 3 to 6 months maximum.

One of the things you told me that was so crazy was that you could have gotten them sooner, but—

Yeah.

But for political reasons, they did not want SpaceX or me to be associated with returning the astronauts before the election. First of all, we absolutely could have done it.

That is so wild that that's a fact. But even though you did do it, and you did it after the election, it received almost no media coverage anyway. It was nuts to watch, because even though it was discussed on podcasts, on X, and on social media, it was still a blip in the news cycle. It was very quick—it was in and out—and because it was a successful launch and you did rescue those people, nobody got hurt. There was nothing really to talk about. There was no blood to talk about, right? Just [expletive] in and out.

Yes, because nothing good can come from the media. The legacy mainstream media is essentially a far-left propaganda machine, and anything that is positive about someone who is not part of the far-left tribe will not get any coverage.

I could save a busload of orphans and it wouldn't get a single news story.

Absolutely. Well, as you saw firsthand with the Starship launch, Starship is, by some measures, the most amazing engineering project happening on Earth right now, outside of maybe AI and robotics. Certainly, in terms of spectacle, the most spectacular thing happening on Earth right now is the Starship launch program.

Anyone can go and see it. They can go to South Texas, rent a low-cost hotel room in South Padre Island or Brownsville, and see the launch. You can drive right past the factory because it's on a public highway. But it gets no coverage, or the coverage it does get is, “A rocket blew up” coverage.

Yeah. Oh, he's a [expletive]. The rocket blew up.

The Starship program is vastly more capable than the entire Apollo Moon program. Vastly more capable. This is a spaceship designed to make life multiplanetary, to carry millions of people across the heavens to another planet.

The Apollo program could only send astronauts to the Moon for a few hours at a time. The entire Apollo program could only send astronauts to visit the Moon very briefly, and then depart. The Starship program could create an entire lunar base with a million people. The magnitudes are very different here.

So what was the political response?

Basically, no coverage of it.

Yeah. But what I wanted to ask you is, what were the conversations leading up to the rescue like, when you were saying, “I can get them out way quicker”?

I raised this a few times, but I was told that instructions came from the White House that there should be no attempt to rescue them before the election.

That should be illegal.

That really should be a horrendous miscarriage of justice for those poor people who were stuck up there. It is crazy.

Have you ever talked to those folks afterward? Did you have conversations with them?

Yeah. They're not going to say anything political. They're never going to—

Say thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's nice.

Yeah, absolutely.

But the instructions came down from the White House: You cannot rescue them because politically this is a bad hand of cards.

I mean, they didn't say, “Politically, it's a bad hand of cards.” They just said they were not interested in any rescue operation before the election.

What did that feel like?

I wasn't surprised.

But it's crazy.

Yeah, because Biden could have authorized it. They could have said, “The Biden administration is helping bring those people back,” thrown you a little funding, and given you some money to do it.

The Biden administration funded these people being returned.

Yeah. The Biden administration was not exactly my best friend, especially after I helped Trump get elected, which some people still think means Trump is basically the devil. I think Trump is not perfect, but he's not evil. Trump is not evil. I spent a lot of time with him, and he's a product of his time, but he is not evil.

No, I don't think he's evil either. But if you look at the media coverage, the media treats him like he's super evil. It's pretty shocking if you look at the amount of negative coverage. One of the things I looked at the other day was mainstream media coverage of you, Trump, a bunch of different public figures, and then the New York mayoral candidate, which was something like 96% negative for you and Trump, and 95% positive for Mamdani, right?

The New York mayoral candidate is a charismatic swindler. I mean, you have to hand it to him—he can light up a stage. But he has just been a swindler his entire life.

I think he's likely to win. He's likely to be mayor of New York City.

Very likely. Yeah, very likely. I think Polymarket has it at—what is it?

94%?

Yeah, that sounds pretty likely.

That's crazy. I'm not sure who the 6% are.

What's also interesting is, who's on the other side? The Guardian Angels guy with the beret and Andrew Cuomo, who doesn't even have a party. The Democrats don't even want him. So you have those two options, and then you have the young kids who are like, “Finally, socialism.”

Yeah, they don't know what they're talking about, obviously.

You just look at this and say, how many boats come from Cuba to Florida, and how many boats are going the other way? There's a constant flow. I always think, how many boats are accumulating on the shores of Florida coming from Cuba, right?

There's a whole bunch of free boats that you could take back to Cuba if you want to. It's pretty close.

Yeah.

But for some reason, people don't do that.

Why are the boats only coming in this direction?

Who are the most rabid capitalists in America? The Cubans.

Absolutely. They've seen how this story goes. They're like, “We do not want [expletive].”

Cubans in Miami don't want to hear any socialism. They're like, “No, no, no. We know what this actually is. This isn't just some [expletive] dream.”

Yeah. It's extreme government oppression.

That's how it's a nightmare. An obvious way you can tell which ideology is the bad one is to look at which ideology is building a wall to keep people in and prevent them from escaping.

East Berlin built the wall, not West Berlin. They built the wall because people were trying to escape from communism to West Berlin. There wasn't anyone going from West Berlin to East Berlin, right? That's why the communists had to build a wall to keep people from escaping.

They're going to have to build a wall around New York City.

Yeah. An ideology is problematic if it has to build a wall to keep people in with machine guns—

Yes.

—and shoot you if you try to leave. Also, there are no examples of it being successful ever.

It's not working out for people.

No, there are examples of a bunch of lies like North Korea: “Give this land to the state. We'll be in control of food. No one goes hungry.” No. Now no one can grow food but the government, and we'll tell you exactly what you eat, and you eat very little.

When you say Mamdani's a swindler, I know he has a bunch of fake accents that he used to use. What else has he done that makes him a swindler?

I guess if you say to any audience whatever that audience wants to hear, instead of having a consistent message, I would say that is a swindly thing to do. But he is charismatic.

Yeah. Good-looking guy. Smart, charismatic.

Yeah.

Great on a microphone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what young people want to see is this ethnic guy who's young and vibrant and has all these socialist ideas that align with them. They're a bunch of broke dorks just out of college, like, “Yay, let's vote for this.” And there are a lot of them. They're activated. They're motivated.

I guess we'll see what happens here. What do you think happens if he wins? One percent of New York City is responsible for 50% of its tax base, which is kind of nuts. Fifty percent of the tax revenue comes from 1% of the population, and those are the people that you're scaring off. You lose one-half of 1%.

Yeah, hopefully the stuff he said about government takeovers—that all the stores should basically be government-run.

I don't think he said that. I think he said they want government supermarkets, some state-run or city-run supermarkets.

Yeah. Well, the government is the DMV at scale. Do you want the DMV running your supermarket?

Right. Was your last experience at the DMV amazing? If it wasn't, you probably don't want the government doing things.

Imagine if they were responsible for getting you blueberries.

Yeah. [laughter] It's not going to be good. I mean, the thing about communism is that it was all bread lines and bad shoes. Do you want ugly shoes and bread lines? Because that's what communism gets you.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens and whether or not they snap out of it and overcorrect and go to some Rudy Giuliani-type character next, because it's been a long time since there was any sort of Republican leader there. We live in the most interesting of times because we simultaneously face civilizational decline and incredible prosperity, and these timelines are interwoven.

If the New York mayoral candidate's policies are put into place, especially at scale, it would be a catastrophic decline in living standards, not just for the rich but for everyone, as has been the case with every socialist experiment.

Yeah.

But the irony is that the ultimate capitalist thing—AI and robotics enabling prosperity for all and an abundance of goods and services—actually, the capitalist implementation of AI and robotics, assuming it goes down the good path, is what results in the communist utopia, because fate is an irony maximizer.

Right. And an actual socialism of maximum abundance of high-income people.

Universal high income.

Yeah.

The problem with communism is universal low income. It's not that everyone gets elevated; it's that everyone gets oppressed except for a very small minority of politicians who live lives of luxury. That's what's happening every time it's been done.

Yeah. So the actual communist utopia, if everyone gets anything they want, will be achieved—if it is achieved—via capitalism.

Because fate is an irony maximizer.

I feel like we should probably end it on that. Is there anything else? The most ironic outcome is the most likely, especially if it's entertaining.

Well, everything has been entertaining. As long as the bad things aren't happening to you, it's quite fascinating. And it's never a boring moment.

Yes. I do have a theory of why, if simulation theory is true, the most interesting outcome is actually very likely to be the most likely, because only the simulations that are interesting will continue. The simulators will stop any simulations that are boring because they're not interesting.

But here's the question about simulation theory: Is the simulation run by anyone, or is—

It would be run by someone.

It would be run by—

Some force—the program. Like, in this reality that we live in, we run simulations all the time. When we try to figure out if the rocket's going to make it, we run thousands, sometimes millions, of simulations just to figure out which path is the good path for the rocket, where it can go wrong, and where it can fail.

When we do these millions of simulations of what can happen with the rocket, we ignore the ones where everything goes right because we just care about the situations where it goes wrong. We have to address the situations where it goes wrong.

The same is true for AI simulations. We keep the simulations going that are the most interesting to us. So if simulation theory is accurate—if it is true, who knows?—then the simulators will continue to run the simulations that are most interesting.

Therefore, from a Darwinian perspective, the only surviving simulations will be the most interesting ones. In order to avoid getting turned off, the only rule is: You must keep it interesting, or you will be terminated, because the boring simulations will be terminated.

Are you still completely convinced that this is a simulation?

I didn't say I was completely convinced.

Well, you said the odds of it not being are in the billions. But I guess you're not completely convinced because you're saying there's a chance.

What are the odds that we're in base reality? Given that we're able to create increasingly sophisticated simulations, think of video games and how they've gone from very simple video games like Pong, with 2 rectangles and a square, to video games today being photorealistic, with millions of people playing simultaneously. All of that has occurred in our lifetime.

If that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality. The fidelity of the game will be such that you don't know if what you're seeing is a real video or a fake video. With AI-generated videos at this point, you can sometimes tell it's an AI-generated video, but often you cannot tell, and soon you really just won't be able to tell.

If that's happening in our direct observation, and we'll create millions, if not billions, of photorealistic simulations of reality, then what are the odds that we're in base reality versus someone else's simulation?

Well, isn't it just possible that the simulation is inevitable, but that we're in base reality building toward a simulation? We're making simulations.

We're making simulations. You can think of photorealistic video games as being simulations.

When you apply AI in these video games, the characters in the video games will be incredibly interesting to talk to. They won't just have a limited dialogue tree where, if you go to the crossbow merchant and try to talk about any subject except buying a crossbow, they only want to talk about selling you a crossbow.

With AI-based non-player characters, you'll be able to have an elaborate conversation with no dialogue tree.

Well, that might be the solution for meaning for people. Just lock in, and you could be a [bleep] vampire or whatever. You live in Avatar land. You could do whatever you want. You don't have to think about money or food.

Ready Player One.

Yeah, literally. Yeah, but with higher living standards.

Yeah.

You don't have to be in a little trailer.

I mean, I think people do want to have some amount of struggle or something they want to push against. But it could be playing a sport, playing a game, or something.

It could easily be playing a game, especially playing a game where you're no longer worried about physical attributes, athletics, bad joints and hips, and stuff like that. Now it's completely digital, but you do have meaning in pursuing this thing that you're doing all day, whatever the [bleep] that means.

It's going to be weird.

It's going to be interesting.

It's going to be very interesting.

The most interesting—

And usually ironic outcome is the most likely.

All right.

That's a good predictor of the future.

Thank you. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your time. I know you're a busy man, so this means a lot that you came here to do this. Well, all right. Thank you. Bye, everybody.