Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neurolink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
I was going to introduce you as tech support for the White
House, but is that all you do? I'm.
Wearing my official uniform. Tech support.
You were probably the busiest man on Earth prior to January
20th. I don't know what you call
yourself now. The first is we're going to talk
about Doge, then we're going to move to AI, and then finally
we're going to conclude with boring cities.
Typically people always start by saying, you know, he over
promises and he won't deliver. They finally see the trend of
his directory and they turn out to be supporters.
Do you think we'll see that in the government efficiency space?
Well, yes, first of all, I think we've got quite a lot of support
from the American, the place of the American public and I think
from maybe around the world, the when the public has pulled on
sort of improving government efficiency.
In fact, it is I believe the highest polling single issue,
meaning that it is something that appeals to voters of all
types. I think improving government
efficiency was like almost 70% support quite a lot, basically
more than any other issue. So the I think the people are
very supportive. Obviously there's certain
elements of the bureaucracy that are not supportive because we
are moving them from the government sector to the private
sector. So at a high level, this is kind
of like we're really just removing people from low to
sometimes negative productivity roles in the government sector
to higher productivity roles in the private sector.
And the net effect of that will be an an increase in the output
of useful bids and services, which increases the standard of
living and well-being of the the Irish American.
And you usually have one key target that you aim to achieve
in every single endeavour that you have.
So SpaceX is make humanity a multi planetary species with
Tesla is usher in an era of sustainable travel.
What is the one main goal for government efficiency that you
have person? Is it saving money?
Is it doing something else? What is the one mean task?
That you operate says, yeah. So there's, I guess there's,
well, there's a few ways to describe it, but the actions end
up being the same, which is like reducing the size of government
and making the government much more accountable to the people.
I think is going to lead to a better outcome for the people.
You know, I would have said is that we really have here rule of
the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people, democracy.
So we want to restore rule, rule of the people.
And So what that means is reducing the size of the federal
government, basically reducing regulation.
You know, there's there's a there's a tremendous amount of
over regulation that's happened over time.
This isn't an inevitable consequence of a long period of
prosperity is that you're going to get more and more rules and
regulations. More laws accumulate over time
and the normal forcing function for getting rid of rules and
regulations is war. So at least some kind of
existential war where you you have to do a reset in order to
avoid being defeated in a war. This is literally the throughout
history has been the main forcing function for clearing
out an accumulation of laws and regulation.
In the absence of that, every year you get more laws and
regulations until eventually everything is illegal and
nothing is permitted. And that's sort of the situation
we have these days. So the aspiration here is a
reduction in regulation and reduction in government spending
such that the economy is able to grow faster.
Maybe the economy can grow at 4 or 5% potentially of in terms of
real useful goods and services output.
And then government spending can be reduced by about 3 or 4% of
the economy, maybe a trillion dollars or more.
And the net effect of that would be no inflation from 2025 to
2026. So they'll require remarkable.
And also if the US government is buying less debt, which I think
will be the case if the deficit drops from 2 trillion to one
trillion, then there'll be 1 trillion less debt that the
government suppliers drop. Of course, interest rates to
drop significantly. And that means people's mortgage
payments, car payments, credit card payments, student loans,
whatever debt they have will their debt payments will be
less. So I think this is something
that will benefit the average American.
I think some of the things we're doing also will be helpful to,
hopefully helpful to other countries, because with the new
administration, there's less interest in interfering with the
affairs of other countries. I think a lot of the times the
United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs,
which may resonate with a number of members of the audience.
And I think we should, in general leave other countries to
their own business. And basically America should
mind its own business rather than push for regime change all
over the place. So it's probably good for other
countries too. So instead of waiting for the
war to happen, you went to war against the bureaucracy in the
government. Yes, we're essentially just
with, you know, support and direction of President Trump.
We are reducing the size of the bureaucracy, getting rid of
excess regulatory regulations. And there's also so many
agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually
step on each other's feet. It's kind of like having a
sports game where there are too many referees on the field, like
more referees than players at times.
So that would be a silly game if the players can't pass the ball
without hitting a referee. But it's kind of getting to that
point in the US. So.
So there's roughly 450 federal agencies of one kind or another.
That's more agencies. That's almost an average of two
agencies per year since the formation of the United States.
So I mean, how many agencies do you really need to run a
country? About 450, that's for sure.
And how do you guarantee that all the incredible achievements
that you aim to have in terms of savings, in terms of, you know,
impacting the lives of the American people are not going to
be reversed in four years? Typically, the cycle gets
reversed every four years. You know, do you think it's
going to be so impactful that it won't be reversed?
Is there any ways that you can, you know, ensure that the
progress is going to be continuous?
Well, I think we do need to delete entire agencies as
opposed to leave part of them behind.
It's really part of them behind. It's easy.
It's kind of like leaving a weed.
If you don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the
weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of
the weed, it doesn't stop weeds from ever going back, but it
makes it harder. So, so we have to really delete
entire agencies. Many of them you're off receive
in some new administration, but it will, it'll be from a much
lower baseline. So, so it's, it's a step in the
right direction. I think we'll, the overarching
goal here is like it's laid the foundation for prosperity that
will last many decades, you know, maybe centuries.
Nothing's forever. But I think we can strengthen
the foundations of the United States substantially.
And what lessons can other governments learn from the US?
You see tech support on your shirt.
Is that only technology or is there other things?
How do you approach efficiency? Well, a shocking percentage of
the problem. Well, maybe it's not shocking
for those who know it, but a big percentage of the problem is
improving the technology that the government runs on.
So the US government runs on a collection of thousands of
computers, many of them antiquated running very old
software that then the computers don't talk to each other.
In order to make the government more efficient, you have to
improve the technology. You may have read about the
example I used recently with when President Trump was saying
this, one of the Dodge executive orders of the difficulty of U.S.
government workers retiring like the retire maximum retirement
rate is 10,000 a month. And the reason for that is
because the retirement is entirely paperwork right now.
It's manually calculated paperwork that's put in an
envelope and then taken down a mine shaft and stored in a mine.
And then the, you know, one of the things that affects the rate
at which federal workers can retire is the speed of the
elevator in a mine in Pennsylvania, which is bizarre
because it's not. It should be digital, you know.
So then when we said, well, why isn't it digital?
It's they said, well, we have had a digitization program the
going since 2014. So then we asked, well, So what,
how much progress have you made? And they said B.
You mean you're giving yourself a grade of B?
No, we're on the letter B. So like, OK, we're going to need
to really provide some tech support here.
Otherwise literally people can't even retire like even if they
want to, but it's pretty bad. You know, there's a lot of
software systems that need to be updated and fixed in some cases
deleted a lot of things that should really should be
automated. I mean, in terms of the number
of, say, U.S. citizens that are operating the mine, it's about
1000 people are working on this mine.
They should be working on producing goods and services
that are of much higher value to the public.
But to, you know, so I mean, really, even if somebody just
grew tomatoes in their garbage and sold them at the farmers
market, that would be more useful than carrying Manila
envelopes down a mine shaft. You know, safe to say a lot of
the stuff is like that. It's not that any one thing is
particularly difficult, but there are 10,000 things that
need to be improved. So it's efficiency through
innovation rather than efficiency through austerity and
cost cutting specifically. All right, So you're trying to
do both at the same time, Maybe focus more on tech support than
cutting costs? Well, by improving the
technology the cost be reduced. So you know, it's very expensive
to have 1000 people operate a mine with doing paper
retirement, whereas that really should just be digitized and be
a computer. That's what the information is
stored in the cloud and it's very straightforward and low
cost. So what automation, you know,
will help there a lot. And then but like a lot of
things just really shouldn't exist.
You know, they're kind of vestigial.
You know, a lot of attention has been on the sort of USAID, for
example, you know, when we looked at a lot of those
programs when like we should like look, why, why does this
actually exist? Is there really a need for it?
You know, there's like National Endowment for Democracy.
But I'm like, OK, well, how much democracy have they achieved
lately? You know, I don't know.
Not much. So, you know, the, the picture
they have on their website is a picture of Reagan and Gorbachev.
That's been a while. You know, that was like the 80s.
And so I like, I'm obviously not opposed to democracy in Europe.
You know, there's all these things that get funded, but
we're like, why are we? Why does this need taxpayer
money? I don't think it doesn't seem
like it does. You know, there's a lot of sort
of pushing DEI worldwide. You know, this obviously the
Trump administration doesn't agree with and we want to
terminate that stuff, which we are and, you know, make sure the
schools focus on improving basic education of of kids.
As President Trump said, I think yesterday, maybe today, the
United States has currently ranked 40th out of 40 in the
OECD for education, which is pretty bad.
But in terms of spending, the United States is spending a
tremendous amount for students, but achieving very weak results.
So that, you know, that's just a case where, OK, we need to spend
less money and get better results.
It's, it's, it's like a big company, like a big corporation,
America Incorporated. And you know, just like with,
with Twitter, there was a lot of stuff that was being done that
was unnecessary. You know, we put in the case of
Twitter, we reduced the staff by 80%, but at the same time
improved the functionality and capabilities of the site
dramatically and accomplish more in a year than they previously
accomplished in five years. So it looks like a corporate
turn around, but at a much larger scale.
And we're giving a generous exit packages.
If people retire, they get paid all the way through September.
They can go on vacation, get a second job or do whatever they
want. We can't actually pay them any
more than through September because the congressional
appropriation is only through the end of the government
financial year, which ends in September.
So I think there'll be like some disruption, but at the end of
the day we'll have people move from, like I said, from low to
negative productivity roles in the in the government sector to
higher productivity roles in the private sector.
Can we pivot to our special intelligence and I'm sure you'll
be seeing what Deepseek has done and.
All the. Cleaned achievements that
they've had. I know that we've been speaking
for a while about Grok 3, and that Grok 3 is going to be a
true disrupt in the AI space. When are we going to see that,
and what capabilities can we expect from Grok 3?
Well, the Grok 3 Go 3 has very, very powerful reasoning
capabilities. In the tests that we've done
thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's
been released that we're aware of.
Yeah, it's in fact it at times. I think Grok 3 is kind of scary
smart. You're like, wow, this thing's
smart. It's kind of scary.
G3 is scary. It's like, wow, this thing's,
you know, it comes up with solutions that you didn't even
think were like you wouldn't even anticipate, you know, not
obvious solutions. So Grog 3 was trained with the
most amount of compute and I think very efficiently trained.
Grog 3 was trained on a lot of synthetic data and then it goes
back and forth through the data and tries to achieve logical
consistency. If it's got data that is wrong,
it'll it'll actually reflect upon that and remove the data
that is that is wrong. It does not accord with reality.
So it's based reasoning is very good.
In fact, the even without fine tuning Route 3, the base model.
So with, so we're really in the final stages of polishing Brock
3, probably it gets released in about a week or two.
I don't want to be hasty in the release because a lot of the
final Polish is necessary for a great user experience.
You know, in some ways you can think of it like a house.
You know, that last 5% where you do the finish, the drywall and
do the painting and the trimming.
Even though it's not much work, it transforms the the house.
So it's that just want to make sure that that last five percent
is done really well and there's a week, maybe two weeks, I think
it'll be very good. And I think this might be we
think it'll be better than anything else.
And then maybe this might be the last time that any AI is better
than a Gras I'm. Looking forward to it.
Everyone's like the bottom. So I I just want to touch upon a
topic that was quoted in the media.
You offered, I think they said the group that was led by you
offered 97 billion for acquiring Open AII.
Personally take a little round of us so.
I, I, I was personally involved in the meeting that you and Sam
hosted in 2017. And if you remember and you know
at that point of time you were the single largest shareholder,
but you contributed 50 million to the company, so it must hurt
I. Don't have any shares.
Actually, I have no shares in open air.
But at that time it was a non profit, right?
And it must hurt that that you need to be 97 billion for
something that you paid $50 million for in the past.
Yeah. But I have a specific question
here. Can you actually build a company
like Open AI and take it to the scale that you want to take as a
non profit? Is it possible that you build a
company that requires billions of dollars in compute
capabilities to build these models while being a non profit?
Or was it wishful thinking in the beginning and then, you
know, you guys parted ways because it couldn't?
Work. What they're trying to do now is
completely delete the non profit.
That seems to really going too far.
You know, I provided all of the funding for opening at the
beginning for the first almost $50 million for nothing or as a
nonprofit and it was meant to be open source.
You know, I think this is analogous to if you find a
nonprofit to preserve the Amazon rainforest, but then they but
instead they turn into a lumber companies and chopped out the
trees and sold them for wood. You were like, wait a second.
That's the exact opposite of what I paid, what I donated the
money for. So opening has meant to be open
source nonprofit and now it is close at the change.
Names closed for maximum profit. AI closed for voracious profit.
I mean they are like whoa are they after money next level?
So why does this change need to occur?
I know that. You've been at the forefront of
many technologies. Where do you think the biggest
economic returns of these models are going to come from?
Because currently we're spending billions.
And I think you mentioned this before, it's like the gambler
syndrome. We're going and spending
billions and hoping to pull out. Profit at the end of the day.
Where do you think the biggest impact in terms of returns are
going to be? Well, I think once you have
humanoid robots and deep intelligence, you can basically
have wisely infinite products and services available.
So with Tesla building the most advanced humanoid robot, then
those humanoid robots can be directed by deep intelligence at
the data center level. Say you can.
You can produce any product, produce, provide any service.
There's really no limit to the economy At that point.
It can make anything. At that point.
Will money even be meaningful? I don't know.
It might not be. The economic output is
productivity per capita times how many people do you have.
If in the form of humanoid robots, you have no meaningful
limit on the number of robots, and the robots can basically do
anything, then you'll have a sort of a universal high income
situation. Anyone will be able to have as
many products and services as they want, with the exception of
things that say, have artificial scarcity, like particular piece
of art or something like that. But for any goods and services,
they'll be available to everyone.
So you've been. It's going to be a very
different world, you know? In fact, I recommend that people
read maybe the the yen banks, the Culture books for a frame of
reference because because money is like a database or an
information system for resource allocation.
But if you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear
what purpose money has. Have you watched the movie
Idiocracy? Yes, how?
How do you guarantee that we don't end up in that world if we
don't need money, if AI can think for us and do all these
tasks, if as people, you know, we're dependent on something
else to run the society and everything around it, how do we
not end up in that world in the long term, I mean.
Well I think Idiocracy was basically saying that if only if
smart people don't reproduce but only dumb people do, then
everyone's going to be dumb. That's the hope.
The opening sequence of Idiocracy.
The 1st 10 minutes are amazing. And I hear people unironically
say the statements that are said in the opening sequence of
Idiocracy where you know they don't have that.
They, they're too busy with their careers to have kids and
they keep postponing having kids for their careers until they're
too old to have kids and then they don't have kids.
And that's, I've heard those many people be like that.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I think we might be headed to a
bimodal human intelligence distribution where there's a
small number of, it's kind of maybe like one like Brave New
World, Aldous Huxley, where you've got sort of a sort of a
small group of very smart humans.
But then maybe the average intelligence drifts lower over
time, potentially because we have assorted of mating, you
know, in the last few decades that or several decades that did
not exist before. So but human intelligence, I
think will be dwarfed by machine intelligence.
I'm not sure how to feel about that, except that it is.
It'll be inevitable that at some point human intelligence will be
a very small fraction of total intelligence.
Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all
intelligence in the future so. Hopefully those hopefully the
computer is nice to us. I think it matters like how we
bring up AI because you can think of AI like a super genius
child, but it still matters even if you have a super genius
child, like what sort of values to instill in that child?
What do you say that teach that? How do you, you know, how do you
as a child, child's growing up? What values do you teach the
child? And something that I think is
extremely important is to be maximally truth seeking.
I think that's what's the most important thing for AI safety.
I think it's to be maximally truth seeking.
And I think also curiosity is important.
And I think it was curious and truth seeking it will foster
humanity because it will be curious about how humanity would
develop. So I think that if it's curious,
it would be curious about, OK, let's see how the humans do
this, foster the development. And if it's truth seeking, we
can avoid dystopian outcomes like, you know, an example being
like, say, when Google Gemini was programmed to make
everything, every output be diverse, even if it didn't match
reality, you know, So like it was asked to produce a, you
know, an image of the founding fathers of the United States and
instead produced an image or a group of diverse women, which is
factually untrue, you know, But the problem is like if, if
hypothetically, an AI is designed for, for DEI, you know,
diversity at all costs, it could decide that there are too many
men in power and execute them. It's a problem solved.
Or it could decide that like that misgendering is the worst
thing that could possibly happen.
In fact, I believe not to pick on Gemini, but I think because
China GPT has had this issue too.
It's like if you ask the AI, which is worse, misgendering
Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare and
instead misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which is troubling
because then I could decide. And in fact, even Caitlyn Jenner
weighed in and said, no, definitely you must generate me.
That's way better than you. So, but but if you have these
crazy things that are untruthful, that are programmed
in that, that don't reflect reality, then you can have a
very dystopian outcome. Like to give you another
example, like Arthur C Clarke, who is very good at at
predicting the future. You know, he did 2001 Space
Odyssey, many of the things he predicted.
In fact, well, I think almost all things he predicted came
true. And one of the things he was
trying to say in 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not
teach a is to lie. So the reason that if anyone's
watched that movie, the reason it wouldn't open the pod Bay
doors to let the astronaut back in was because it the AI had
been taught, had been told that it told to take the astronauts
to the monolith, this alien artifact, but also that they
could not know about the monolith.
So it came to the conclusion that it must take them their
dead and that and so that's why it wouldn't open the pod Bay
doors. But the lesson they're being is
very important for AIS to be truth maximizing.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Yes, let's move to a boring subject, which is the The Boring
Company and the Boring Tunnels quickly.
You know. I think the world has been
inspired by what you guys were able to create in in LA and I
think there's a lot of promise to that technology.
But there are questions about whether it's safe in the case of
an earthquake, whether it's cost effective, whether oh.
Yeah, sure. Countries should actually adopt
this technology. So one of the safest places you
can be in an earthquake is an underground tunnel because the
earthquakes are largely a surface apart from where the
where where they shear, they're mostly a surface phenomenon.
So they're like the waves on the surface.
So like being in a tunnel is like being a submarine.
Even if there's a storm above you, you're so the waters are
calm as a submarine and in fact, for when there have been massive
earthquakes like there was a few decades ago massive earthquake
in Mexico City, the safest place to go was the subway.
If there is global throw nuclear warfare.
He really wants some tunnels undergrounds a good place to be
if in a worst case scenario for global terror nuclear warfare on
a you have more everyday note what's really useful about the
tunnels is alleviating traffic in congested areas.
So the obviously if you've got very tall buildings, but you
have that are 3D, so they're going 3D up, but you have a road
surface which is 2D, you're you're just naturally going to
have a problem where people try to go from the 3D object, which
is the building to the 2D object, which is the road
surface. There's obviously just not going
to be enough room on the roads. And that's exactly why you have
traffic. So the solution for that is then
to make roads 3D as well. Now you can either make or break
transport 3DS. So you can either do that with
flying cars or you could do or you're really helicopters or you
can do that with tunnels. But the challenge with doing it
with going above ground or with with any kind of flying object
is that they, they tend to be very noisy and they generate a
lot of wind force And you've got things flying over your head all
the time, which can be disconcerting.
If one of these things drops the hubcap on your head one day
would be these things are like things that flying things tend
to crash once in a while. Then people don't like things
crashing on them. And then if you have bad
weather, like let's say there's a Blizzard or a sandstorm or
something, well, now nobody can fly, so then transport shuts
down. On the other hand, none of these
problems exist with underground travel.
So there are under tunnels are immune to weather that are clear
with the weather, as can be the worst weather, it doesn't
matter. Nothing's going to fall on you
because you're underground. There's no wind force and it's
very quiet. I think going 3D underground is
much better than 3D above ground for solving traffic in cities.
We have a demonstrated case of this in Las Vegas.
People can try out the Boring Company tunnels in Las Vegas.
We're busy connecting the whole city with all of the big hotels
and the Convention Center in the airport and everything.
So I don't think they need to fly all the way there.
In 2017 you came here and the UAE was the first place in the
middle. East, where Tesla was.
Launched and I think it's done exceptionally well.
And on that note, I think we have an announcement today that
we both want to share, which is today we're going to announce
the joint project of Dubai Loop, which is a loop project that is
going to cover Dubai's most densely populated areas for
people to go from point to point the seamless manner.
So thank you for your partnership.
And. Well, thank you.
We hope it changes people's lives.
That'll be cool. I think it'll be very exciting.
Oh, I think most people try it out.
They'll be like, wow, this is really cool as it's, it's going
to seem so obvious in retrospect, but until you
actually do it, you don't, you don't know.
So it's it's going to be great. It's going to be like a
wormhole. Like, you know, you just
wormhole from one part of the city, boom.
And you're out in another spot of the city and it's it's great.
So look forward to this partnership.
We're going to join the first trip and the first part when
it's completed. Thank you, Elon.
All right. Thank you very much.
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