Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
The fundamental error of socialism is shifting capital
allocation from highly effective entrepreneurs to astonishly
ineffective government. Right.
I think we'll find Hardy agreement in this room.
So yeah, I think that this is this is definitely a stacked
deck on that front. But but yeah, the, you know,
there's you'll, you'll hear this sort of argument like, oh, we
shouldn't have some greedy corporation do it.
We should have the government do it.
I'm like, well, actually the government is just a corporation
in the limit. So if you it's, it's a
government is the government is a corporation with a monopoly on
violence. So if if you're unhappy with a
commercial corporation doing it, you should be actually very
unhappy with the the government doing it since it is simply the
a corporation, the most corporate thing.
And you know, you can actually easily get get more sway in a
company than you can the outcome of a company than you can in the
government. So I mean, everyone's
experienced this going to the DMV ever said like, do you want
the DMV at scale? Probably not OK.
All right, let. The government is the DMV at
scale. Let's try another one.
Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is
wrong. Yeah, I think, I think we do
need to have a merit based system because as soon as you
you go down the path that you're going to discriminate on on non
Barrett based, then then where do you stop?
So, yeah, I think we need to be as rigorous about merit as
possible. And while it is, yeah, I, I to
to me that seems like it's, it's a foundational, foundational
thing. So again, I also think this room
is probably supportive of of a merit based situation.
But But yeah, that's that that is, yeah, I think we should be,
yeah. Not not discriminated on
anything other than merit. I I.
All right, good. I'm happy you agree with
yourself. Yeah.
Exactly. I'm like, wait, who is this guy?
He really sounds great. All right, so let's let's look
at the next one. Regulation and regulatory
consistency. Like Gulliver, tied down by
thousands of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation
at a time. Yes.
So this is actually a very important point that I think is
is not talked about enough that laws and regulations are
immortal. They don't die, humans die, but
but laws and regulations can last forever.
So if over if year after year there are more laws and
regulations passed and more regulatory bodies created,
eventually everything will be illegal.
And that's why you see the the California high speed rail has
made a, a tiny section of that doesn't even have rail on it.
And for, I don't know, several billion dollars because
everything's in at this point, California is made almost
everything illegal. So you can't make progress now
the the the historically, what has cleared away the cobwebs of
regulation has been war. Now we prefer not to have a war.
So in order to have civilization function without war, you have
to have a you have to actively eliminate laws and regulations.
So you have to have basically a garbage collection process for
rules and regulations that is necessary.
Otherwise you get hardening of the arteries and over time
nothing can get done. The most poignant example that I
can think of that happened this week was this the sad picture of
the California high speed rail, which is, yeah, it's just
billions of dollars spent for practically nothing, but it'll
it'll only get worse year after year.
So we must have a regulatory sort of clearing house garbage
collection process. This is essential or
civilization comes grinding to a halt.
Well, we used to have sunset that that regulation with
sunset. Unfortunately, it's rare today.
Yes. All right, let's talk about
education. The more you can gamify the
process of learning, the better. You do not need to tell your kid
to play video games. They will play video games on
autopilot all day. So if you make it interactive
and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling
and far easier to do. Yeah.
So the. Yeah.
So the way education works today is really much like, like, it's
like vaudeville. You know, before there was radio
and TV and movies, you had Boardville where every town
would have their, their town play the town troupe, the sort
of acting troupe. And that would be kind of the,
the, that would be the entertainment.
So you know, some in a, in a, in a big city, you'd have, you
know, much better players than say in a small city.
But then along came movies and TV and, and, and then you say,
look at video games where you take the the smartest, best
people in any arena, like whether they're acting, writing,
directing, special effects. You spend, you know, 10s of
millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars creating a
great movie or a great video game.
And, and you make it as compelling as possible.
Now that crushes, vaudeville crushes.
Like imagine you're not in New York, mention you're in
Bakersfield. OK, then you and you got instead
of Batman being like, you know, the Nolan brothers, it's Batman,
the Bakersfield sort of acting troupe.
It wouldn't be as good. That's how teaching works today.
So what you actually want to have is an interactive learning
experience that is as compelling as possible.
And you do not want to act. You don't actually want a
teacher in front of a board doing a voidable act.
You want and you want it to be engaged real time feedback.
So that's and and then you, you, there are a few other principles
in, in in teaching you, you have to establish relevance.
Otherwise your mind will will want to forget things.
So our, our, our, our mind is constantly trying to forget as
much as possible. So you'll only remember things
if, if, if your mind can establish relevance or there is
a strong emotional element to it.
Otherwise you're going to basically forget, forget
everything. Memory is, is very expensive
from an evolutionary standpoint. So it's trying to forget as much
as possible. So, so when teaching a course,
you, you, you have to explain to kids why it's important.
And then you want to teach to the, to the problem instead of
teaching the tools. So what I mean by that is if you
said, here's a car engine, we're, we're, we're going to try
to understand how to, how this car engine works.
We're going to take it apart. So what do we need to do to take
it apart? Well, we need a wrench, we need
some screwdrivers, we need a hoist and a pulley.
And we're going to take it apart and we're going to see how it
all works. That's engaging.
And along the way you learn about wrenches and screwdrivers
and you know all the tools that are needed.
That's that actually is engaging and compelling.
But the way teaching more typically works is we're going
to teach you a course on screwdrivers and a course on
wrenches and you're like, why do I have a course on wrenches?
It's not obvious. That would be like, say, a
course on calculus without explaining what calculus
calculus is used for. Hey, thank you so much for
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