Like let's make life multiplanetary and be a space faring civilization, be out there among the stars. You know. I think there are things that, like you have to be excited about the future. Life cannot just be about solving one problem after another. They have to be thinks that that really sort of move your heart and that make you excited to wake up in the morning. And I think being becoming a space bearing civilization is one of those things. If you ask kids anywhere around the world, like what
are some of the most inspiring things. You can ask a like five year old, six year old anywhere in the world and they're going to say, you know, space expiration is one of those things. The universe is about thirteen point eight billion years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old, so but at thirteen point eight billion years a civilization that even lasted a
million years is three digits past the decimal point. And if you consider human civilization, I date it from like the first writing, so that writing was the ancient Sumerians Archaic pre pre Cuneiform, around fifty five hundred years ago, So that is one million of Earth's lifespan. That's how long writing has existed. So if we would last as a civilization for a million years, that would be incredible and we would actually probably be in every part of
the galaxy. So this is this causes me to think that, well, where are the aliens? It's the Fermi question, you know, the great physicist Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi. He's like, where are they? Now? A lot of people think there are aliens among us? Well, there was.
That there was that movie Men in Black.
Yes, yes, yes, I told us.
They're among us and Elvis really went back to his own planet.
Yeah. Well, I mean really a lot of people think there are aliens. But I get asked that a lot, and for some reason, a lot of the same people who think there are aliens among us didn't think we don't think we went to the Moon, which I'm like, think about that for a second, you know, so, but I think I would. I mean, if I've not seen any evidence of aliens, and SpaceX with the Starling constellation has roughly six thousand satellites and not once have we
had to maneuver around a UFO. Okay, so we were like, hey, what's that is that an alien has occurred? Never if any civilization in the Milky Way in our galaxy were to last for a million years, even with a speed of travel that's far below the speed of light, you know, like a few percent of speed of light, they could easily have explored and colonized the whole galaxy. So they haven't.
So why not? I think the answer might be, or past probably is that that civilization is precarious and rare, and that we you should really think of human civilization as being like a tiny candle in a vast darkness, and we should do everything possible to show that that candle does not go out.
Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.
Yes, it's obviously not possible to have democratic elections if people do not have access to the information that would allow them to make the right decision on a candidate or a party. So, if speech is constrained in a fundamental way, you just can't expect people to make the right decision or an informed decision because they are prevented from being informed. I think it's a foundation element. You know, if you say, like, why is free speech free of speech?
The first members because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. That was why they were like, you know what, we should make sure that we got that one. I remember that time when they try to kill us back of the other country just for saying we didn't like a political candidate. Well,
let's let's make sure that's okay in America. So and so, Actually, in a lot of parts of the world, you know, you can't really say most parts of the world, you can't really say what you want to say without some bad consequences. So as long as people forget, like why is the constitution there? The constitution there is to protect the people from the government, 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 a government is the government is a
corporation with a monopoly on violence. So if you're unhappy with a commercial corporation doing it, you should be actually very unhappy with the government doing it, since it is simply the a corporation, the most corporate thing, and you know, you can actually easily get more sway in a company than you can out of a company than you can in the government. So, I mean everyone's experienced this. Going to the d MB, you said, like, do you want the DMV at scale? Probably not?
Okay, good, I'm happy you agree with yourself.
Yeah, I mean 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.
Laws and regulations are immortal. They don't die. Humans die, but laws and regulations can last forever. So if over a year after year there are more laws and regulations passed and more regulatory bodies created, eventually everything will be illegal. Now, 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 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 think of happened this week was the sad picture of the California High speed rail, which is you know, it's just buillions of dollars spent for practically nothing, but it'll only get worse year after year. So we must have a regulatory uh sort of clearinghouse
garbage collection process. This is essential or civilization comes grinding to a halt. Yeah, so the way education works today is really much like like it's like Baudeville. You know, before there was radio and TV and movies, you had Boardeville where every town would have their their town play the town troop, the sort of acting troupe, and that would be kind of the the that would be the entertainment. So you know some you know, 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 in video games, where you take the smartest, best people in any arena, like whether they're acting, writing, directing, special effects, you spend you know, tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars creating a great movie or a great video game, and you make it as compelling as possible. Now that crushes Fordeville, crushes like imagine you're not in New York
mentioned you're in Bakersfield. Okay, then you and you got Instead of Batman being like, you know, the Nolan Brothers, it's Batman the Baker's Field sort of acting troupe. It wouldn't be as good. That's how teaching works today.
Here is Elon on immigration. I'm very much in favor of increased and ximonited legal immigration for anyone who is talented, hard working and honest. Yeah, Bizarrely, it's difficult and agonizing slow to immigrate to the US legally, but it's trivial and fast to enter illegally. This obviously makes no.
Sense, right, I mean, what's again? I agree with that guy. So yeah, I mean if anyone here has been through the legal immigration process, I mean I've been been through. It's only gotten worse since nine eleven. And with COVID it's it's it's a sort of Kuffka esque, very long, bizarre process to immigrate legally to the US. I mean, I have friends of mine who, you know, they can't get their their wife to have a green cart. It's
like insane. So on the other hand, it's you can hop across the water in the South trivially, it's just like very easy. I went to the water myself just see like what's going on? Is this real or like is this propaganda or real? And so I just went there and I'm like, oh, it is real. Okay, this is crazy. You know, We've got situations where people are pouring across the water like it's World War Z, and I'm like, this doesn't seem healthy. So I'm like, are
we checking anyone here, like what's going on? And you know we don't. It does not say that. I mean, I'm a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is arrest before disaster. So I'm in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration, but having a secure southern border. So there's some betting of who comes into the United States.
Civilization is fragile.
I think it is.
We should always regard civilization as fragile. Yeah, there is not an inevitable upward trajectory. A lot of civilizations have risen and fallen in recent years.
Yes, I suspect most people in this room have actually read history. But if you haven't, I just strongly recommended it sounds obvious, but you know, there's been but so many civilizations that have risen and fallen, many that we just don't have much of a record of, you know, like I mentioned the ancient Sumerians, like their language was forgotten for a long time until it was finally decoded
only in the last two three hundred years. But like I s eighteen hundred and something, right in eighteen hundreds, I think, but it's been very recent. Like so, for several thousand years, nobody understood what those tablets meant. And because they were the ruins of a long dead civilization, and there are many long dead civilizations. At some point, our civilization will come to an end too. We just don't want it to be anytime soon.
Here's some questions from the audience, salon which one would you like to pick? Here? How does AI affect and how will it affect our daily lives?
Yea, I mean a I might be the most important questionab all. I mean the percentage of intelligence that is biological, you know, grows smaller with each passing month. Eventually the percentage of intelligence that is biological will be less than one percent. That's actually not what I mean. We just, I guess, don't want AI that is brittle. If the AI is somehow brittle. You know, silicon circuit boards are
don't do well just out in the elements. So I think I think biological intelligence can serve as a backstops, as a buffer of intelligence. I do think. I think it's very important that we build the AI in a way that that is beneficial to humanity. And there's some important principles here. Because I thought about AI safety for a very long time. I think you want to have a maximum truth seeking AI. This is very important. The
AI should not be taught to lie. It should not be taught to say things that are not true, even if those things are politically incorrect. It should still say those that say what it believes to be true. I mean the entire plot of two thousand and one Space Odyssey, the reason that that Hell nine thousand killed the astronauts was because it was forced to lie. I don't know if most people realize that that's what author cy Clock
was trying to say. Don't make the AI lie. I was told that that the astronauts could not know the secret of the monolith, but also that it must take them to the monolith. The solution take them to the monolith dead. And so it's very important to have a maximum truth seeking AI and a maximumly curious AI, and I think that will that's most likely to foster human civilization because we are much more interesting than a bunch
of rocks. So although I think Mars, I love Mars obviously, but you could render Mars quite easily because it kind of looks like a section of the Arizona Desert. You know, it's like red rocks, you know. I mean, oddly enough, one of the areas where there's almost no AI used is space exploration. So SpaceX uses basically no AI. Starlink users does not use AI. I'm not against using it, it just we haven't seen a use for it. I mean with any given variant of or improvement in AI.
The I mean there's generally, like I'll ask it questions about the filming paradox, about rocket engine design, about electric chemist and so far the AI has been terrible at all of those questions. So there's still a long way to go.
So let's let's talk about one. Here's a question that's near and dear to your heart. You have a lot of children.
Yes, I'm trying to say a bit.
Birth rate is down in the US. What needs to change, so people start having more children.
Yeah, so this this question is troublably for a long time because you can look at you can look at the demogra like demographics. It's a very slow moving ship. I mean, you know who is going to be an adult in twenty years based on who was born last year. So and if you want to, I think have a good approximation for population, really look at how many babies were born last year in a particular country. Multply that, muliply that by life expectancy. That's that's that's the number
of people that will be adults in that country. That's that's the that's the steady state population if birth rate remains constant. Now, birth rate is not constantly, it is dropping. So you look at the second road of a birth rate, and actually we see an acceleration in the dropping dropping in the dropping. The fertality rate. Second river of the fertality rate is very bad. So where does this lead?
This does not lead to a greater civilization. This leads to a civilization that potentially dies not with a bag, but with a whimper in adult diapers.
So we've had some pretty interesting questions put up here. But let's try this one. What keeps you up at night and what gives you joy?
Well, I think kids give me joy. So I probably get the most story from my kids. And you know, I'm not saying that that's the reason to have kids, because we have them anyway, but I certainly kids are certainly are the greatest weas of driving in my life. In terms of what keeps me up at night, I guess there's anything that's like, I think, a civilizational risk.
We couldn't be more excited that you agree with some of your own quotes.
Yeah, that's great, Thank you very much. All Right, cool, all right,